From our position on the steps, we could see that the ice walls filled with darkness snaked through Trianon to the castle, but that was not the limit of the city’s transformation. It was now a fantasyland of glittering towers and spires that defied logic and the laws of nature in their height and design. It was beautiful, but utterly horrifying, because it was entirely devoid of life.
“Everyone in the castle was alive when we left.” As always, Tristan was present in my mind, but as I concentrated on him, I noticed a strangeness to his emotions. They seemed static… Frozen.
“If he was frozen, he’d be dead and you’d know it,” I muttered at myself, and then to Sabine, “If we’re alive, then there’s no reason to believe others aren’t, too.” I shook my head. “Either way, we’ve come this far…” I didn’t finish the statement, because if everyone on the Isle was dead, hadn’t we already lost?
Hand in hand, we made our way down the steps and over to those leading up to the open door of my home. “Hello?” My breath made little misty clouds as I stepped inside. “Is anyone here?”
Brushing snow off the lamp that mysteriously still burned on the front table, I tried to turn up the flame, but my efforts were ineffective. It remained static. Unchanged. Strange. “Hello?”
We inched our way into the great room, both of us instinctively going to the fireplace where the banked coals glowed cherry red. Sabine held her hands out to them, then jerked her fingers back. “No heat,” she said, bending and blowing on the charred wood in a failed attempt to draw up the flames. “Something about this isn’t right.” She reached a gloved hand for an iron poker, seeming intent on rectifying this one trivial thing in the face of all the many things that weren’t right. I turned my back on the process and called out again. “Hello?”
No response. Nothing but silence.
I shouted, “Well? We’re here. And given you owe your freedom to me, perhaps you might show somewhat more courtesy.”
An unearthly chuckle filled the room, and I stumbled into Sabine as the air in front of me tore like a panel of silk. The opening spread wide, revealing a throne carved of solid ice, which would’ve been unremarkable if not for countless eyes of all shapes and colors frozen into its depths. Eyes, which judging from the bloody veins and tissue tangling from them, had been torn from their owners’ heads by force. To either side of the throne sat two immense lupine creatures, fangs as long as my hand protruding from black lips. But it was the creature sitting on the throne that stole my attention.
I’d seen her before.
“Owe?” The sound of her voice made my head ache, and I pressed a gloved hand to my temple, trying and failing to relieve the pressure. “I recall making no deals with you, human. Nor do I recall you doing me any favors.”
“Maybe not,” I conceded, dropping my hand from my head. “But you’ve benefited from my actions.” She was the woman – fairy – that I’d seen in my dream. The one the Summer King had called wife; and sure enough, there were bonding marks across one of her hands. Only in my dream, in that land of endless summer, she’d seemed… passive. And what sat before me was anything but. This was the Winter Queen.
“Have I? Are you so sure about that?”
I hesitated. “You’re here, aren’t you? A day ago, that wasn’t possible.”
She shrugged one elegant shoulder, long black hair brushing against a gown made of mist and stars that shifted and moved in a way that made it dizzying to look upon. “Do not look for gratitude from me, mortal. I’ve walked through worlds beyond number; what does the loss or gain of one filthy bit of earth matter to me?”
I opened my mouth to retort that it mattered enough for her to turn it into her own winter palace, but then clamped my lips shut. Not listening had caught me more times than I cared to count with the trolls and, immortal or not, she was of the same ilk. There was a reason why she was bothering with this “filthy bit of earth”, and it would be something worth knowing. “You tell me.”
She smiled, pale pink lips pulling back to reveal a mouthful of fangs. My heart skipped and I blinked. The fangs were gone, replaced by pearly white human teeth. “You wished to ask a favor of me, Cécile de Troyes.” She tapped a long fingernail against her throne, and I swallowed hard as the eye beneath twitched, rolling to look up at her.
I remembered her words to the Summer King. A favor given is a favor owed… “No,” I said. “But I do wish to bargain.”
Her verdelite eyes narrowed. “What makes you believe you have anything I want?”
I thought about the massive ice walls that had formed for the express purpose of herding us toward this meeting; the grandstanding and showmanship that was obviously intended to intimidate and impress. “I do not think,” I murmured, dropping into a deep curtsey, “that the Queen of all of Winter would condescend to meet with a mortal such as I if there were nothing I could do for her.”