by Bree Barton
Mia stared up at the ceiling, furious at the tears pooling in her eyes.
“I don’t know how to use my magic,” she said, “because you weren’t there when I bloomed. I listened to the wrong people. I killed Princess Karri. I will always have her blood on my hands, all because I trusted Zaga when I shouldn’t have. How am I supposed to forgive you if I can’t even forgive myself?”
Her mother laid a palm over her own heart, as if the words caused her physical pain.
“I know I failed you and your sister. I failed all my Dujia sisters.”
“I don’t give a shit about them! I needed my mother. You told me to trust my heart, even if it killed me. It did kill me. Even now, sitting here with you, feeling nothing, I’m not sure I’m entirely alive.”
Mia clenched her jaw. “But I’ve come to set things right. Angelyne was hungrier than I was. She swallowed more fear, more hatred. We have to stop her. The only way to do that is to balance the elements in your moonstone so she can’t use magic to hurt any more people. We have to save Quin. We have to save them all.”
She turned from the looking glass to look into her mother’s eyes. “We’ll work through every knot. Untangle every snarl, together.”
Her mother’s gaze was steady. “I admire you, my raven girl. You ask questions, and you demand the truth.” Slowly she exhaled. “For a long time, I fought. But I am tired of fighting. Tired of the fear and the lying. I have other things calling for my attention. Quieter places to put my heart.”
She took a step back. “I’m not going back to the river kingdom, Mia. My life is here now.”
If her mother had speared her through the heart with a dagger, it would have hurt less.
“Since your life is here now,” Mia spat, her voice like poison in her throat, “I take it you’re quite cozy with the Snow Queen?”
“Her name is Freyja.”
The way her mother said the word—the gentleness buried in the letters—told Mia everything.
“You’re in love with her. That’s why you chose to stay.”
Wynna knit her hands together. “There was something between us from the moment we met. A spark I hadn’t felt in many years.”
The knowledge shook Mia to the core. Three years of grief withering her own heart while new love bloomed in her mother’s.
“How wonderful for you. You flee a wicked land, leave your husband and sad little daughters, and find love in the land of frost. No wonder you don’t want to come with me to the river kingdom. You’re living in your very own fairy tale.”
Her mother inhaled deeply. “Not a fairy tale. Just a new beginning.”
She tugged open a smaller drawer at the top of the vanity.
“I do have something for you. Newly arrived from the glass kingdom.” She pulled out a small vial of sand-colored liquid. “A brilliant Pembuka innovation. It doesn’t make all the sensations come back—I still can’t feel hot or cold—but last week I tasted the licorice in a chocolate snowdrop. Yesterday I caught the scent of wood burning in the hearth. And I can feel joy, too, in tiny, precious slivers.”
Mia stared at the vial. Despair slashed at her throat, puncturing the words.
“Did you feel a sliver of joy when you saw me?”
Wynna’s eyes fell. “I was relieved to see you, yes. And I felt happy. But I’m not sure happiness will ever be what it was. Not for me. I hope it will be different for you.”
She held out the vial.
“One drop before anything you want to savor and enjoy, like a pleasant conversation or a fine meal. You may be able to taste food again, if only for a moment.”
Mia stared at the vial. Wasn’t this what she’d wanted? Relief from the cloak—and a way out of the box.
Only it didn’t bring back joy. Not really. The “magical elixir” teased an occasional taste of licorice and left you dead inside.
What pitiful recompense for everything she’d lost.
Mia didn’t take the bottle. She stood.
“Children eat what they are given, Mother. And I am not a child.”
Chapter 40
Tinkering and Toiling
MIA MARCHED DOWN THE palace corridors, determined to erase the memory of her mother’s blank face. She passed spacious drawing rooms, vaulted galleries with books and paintings, even a garden with a grove of snow plum trees.
Her mother wasn’t going to help her save Quin. She wasn’t going to do anything but sit in her pretty chambers, mooning over the queen. She couldn’t fix Mia. She couldn’t even fix herself.
Mia ground to a halt, the soles of her boots squeaking on the polished marble floors. A giant birdcage hung suspended by four iron cables at the corridor’s end. It was boxy at the bottom and domed up top, wrought iron plated in bronze. At the top of the dome a hinged door functioned as a hatch; at the bottom, the gridded iron base housed a complex system of cranks and shafts.
“Care for a ride?”
Mia spun around to find a white-bearded gentleman in a long plum cloak, his hands clasped behind his back.
“Lord Dove,” she said, remembering. Before she’d known him as the queen’s uncle, he was simply her drinking chum at Zai’s alehouse: jovial, pink-cheeked, impish.
“I thought I told you to call me Kristoffin,” he said, the same paternal twinkle in his silvery-blue eyes.
“And I thought I was coming here to the queen’s palace of my own accord,” she countered. “It would seem our midnight dram of silver death was not quite so coincidental.”
He smiled. “Sharp as an arrow, and just as quick.” He gestured toward the cage. “I see you’ve found my prized invention. I call it ‘The Descending Room.’”
Kristoffin stooped to fiddle with one of the cranks, then stood, grimaced, and muttered something about his creaky back. He flourished a hand.
“Care to join me?”
She hadn’t yet decided how she felt about Kristoffin Dove. The droll lord before her seemed at odds with the legend of the Grand Fyremaster, hallowed savior of Luumia.
But he was a welcome distraction.
Mia cast a skeptical eye at the birdcage.
“Where does it go, exactly?”
“Ah. Well.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “The Descending Room goes only one way.”
“Let me guess,” Mia said. “Down.”
As Kristoffin scuppered them beneath the palace, the cage emitted a series of shrieks and moans. With every twist of the crank, the carriage descended another five or six feet, swaying gently on its strings.
Cables, Mia reminded herself. Not strings. That made her feel slightly safer about the whole arrangement.
“A polly’s farthing renders sin!” Kristoffin shouted. “Would you lie to sea?”
She strained to hear him. “What?”
“Apologies for the horrendous din! Would you like to see?”
He lifted the hatch overhead, and Mia peered through it. One large crank grated against a series of smaller cranks, teeth grinding together as a large tube puffed violet steam.
“Fyre ice!” Kristoffin shouted, though she’d guessed that already.
Seconds later, the box came to a jolting stop. He heaved the iron doors open with an echoing screech, then offered a hand to help her descend.
“This way,” he said, ushering her down a long corridor. Buried in the silver walls were thousands of tiny lights, lustrous specks of ivory and lilac no bigger than pinpricks. Despite being dozens of feet underground, the hall was as bright as a moonlit night in Ilwysion, the skies lanced with opalescent stars.
“You’ll excuse an old man his dabblings,” Kristoffin said, gesturing toward the walls. “But I do so enjoy decorating for Jyöl.”
“What are they?” Mia asked.
“I call them shimmers.”
Up close they were shaped like tears. But they couldn’t be prisms: the light they reflected wasn’t from torches or candles. They glimmered from an unseen source.
“You can touch them,” Kristoffin said. “I
assure you they are perfectly safe.”
Mia touched one lightly. It came loose, a daub of violet shimmer on her fingertip.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Take as many as you like. I can always make more. Ah, here we are.”
Kristoffin pulled a white velvet rope and a pair of metal doors clanged open. “Welcome to my little shop of tinkering and toiling.”
Mia sucked in her breath.
She was staring at a monster.
Chapter 41
Kindred Spirits
THE bowels OF A monster, to be more accurate.
Kristoffin’s shop was a gaping maw, snaked with pipes of brass and copper. They reached across the walls and floors, looping and coiling like the intestines of a giant.
And that wasn’t all. Half a dozen laboratory assistants—five men, one woman—bent over tabletops alive with movement: boiling liquids in thin glass tubes; elements mingling together on silver observation plates. This place was a scientist’s dream.
“Forgive me,” Dove said. “We’ve been working such long hours to prepare for the Illuminations. It’s a bit of a mess.”
“It’s incredible,” Mia murmured.
He took a dramatic bow. “Aboveground, I am Kristoffin Dove, the Snow Queen’s senile uncle. Down here, I am the Grand Fyremaster.”
A boom sounded from across the room, so loud Mia jumped.
“Good Græÿa!” Kristoffin swore. “It appears we haven’t quite—”
Another deafening boom. He threw his hands into the air.
“My apologies. We still have some wrinkles to iron out, apparently! Can’t have the Illuminations scaring the little ones.”
He pointed toward the culprit: a giant glass box. Mia moved closer for a better look.
Two copper pipes leaked colored vapor into the cube: one blue, one red. Where the vapors collided, they formed a sphere of purple fire. The ball hovered a few inches in the air, hissing, crackling, spewing indigo sparks.
Mia traced the copper pipes, trying to source the origin of the vapor. But they diverged sharply once they reached the floor; she lost track of them in the nest of twining cables.
The flaming orb expanded in a sudden paroxysm—and this time, Mia covered her ears. She watched as long lavender tendrils broke off from the sphere, fluttering like hair ribbons against the glass.
“These are the Illuminations?” she called over her shoulder.
“Yes,” Kristoffin said, a few inches behind her. He was closer than she’d thought. “A small-scale version, anyway. I’ve been testing them elsewhere in Luumia, but it’s nice to have a controlled indoor space. Stunning, isn’t she?” He beamed at the orb. “I’ve always thought of fire as a woman. Elegant and all-powerful, beautiful but deadly. As the old mystics once said: When you strike a woman, you strike a match.”
“You like these sayings.”
“I collect them. We Luumi have a rich tradition of proverbs from men far wiser than I. Wisdom itself becomes a kind of fuel. It grows stronger the more you use it.”
“Not many fuels do that.”
He winked. The wink looked wrong on the Grand Fyremaster’s face, yet somehow eerily familiar.
“This is precisely what makes fyre ice so unique,” he said. “A natural resource, it can never be depleted.”
Mia wanted to ask Dove the same question she’d asked Ville at the White Lagoon. Didn’t all natural resources deplete?
“I know you think me a doddering fool,” he said. “But I speak the truth. The fyre ice of twenty years ago is no more. We have found a new strand that’s far more powerful—one that burns clean.”
“I thought the new fyre ice was purple?” Mia scrutinized the blue and red vapors feeding separately into the box.
“Different varieties, of course. You wouldn’t believe what we’ve been able to accomplish in such a short span of time! We’ve found ways to grow food even in the dead of winter. To cook food to kill off the animalcules that make people sick. We’ve discovered not only cures for the pox, but inoculations to prevent it. And look at this.”
He waved her over to a different tableau, shooing two assistants away. A giant map of Luumia unfurled across the wall.
Mia inhaled sharply.
The map was alive.
In Kom’Addi, miniature brown reinsdyr grazed on the tundra, munching mushrooms with tiny caps. To the east, Fojuen volqanoes loomed, bubbling quietly at the mouth. To the west, orange sands whipped over the glimmering glass cities of Pembuk. To the north Mia saw her own kingdom: majestic forests and jagged cliffs, the black Natha River winding through the trees.
And stretching between all four kingdoms: a network of roads.
“Imagine the potential,” Kristoffin said excitedly, “of expanded transportation. A way to bolster trade and cultural exchange. To connect instead of isolate. Our discoveries will no longer be ours alone. They will belong to all four kingdoms.”
He pointed to a tiny wheeled carriage chugging along with no horses or reinsdyr, its rear pipe expelling clouds of empurpled steam. A shrunken version of the one Mia had seen in White Lagoon.
Kristoffin gestured around the laboratory. “This is only the beginning. We are on the cusp of transformation—and I am in dire need of assistance to usher it forth. From what I’ve seen, you possess a thirsty and inquisitive mind. I could put it to good use.”
Mia frowned. “You speak as if I’ll be staying indefinitely.”
“You could stay with your mother. Make the palace your home. In fact I have something that might help ease your transition.”
He pulled a small vial of sandy liquid from a nearby drawer. “There are some wonderful new elixirs coming out of Pembuk.”
Mia stiffened. “My mother already tried to give me this. She didn’t exactly give it a ringing endorsement.”
Kristoffin held the vial between his thumb and forefinger. “Forgive me, but I believe we are kindred spirits, you and I. But a scientist stripped of sensory perceptions is like a hollow wooden box. How can one investigate life when she can’t feel it herself?”
Mia froze. Had her mother told him?
Nell’s words circled through her mind once again. This whole trip has been one grand experiment, a way for you to feel something again, and you don’t care who gets hurt along the way.
She stared at the vial, gripped by shame.
Mia had been lying to herself since the moment she woke from the box. She hadn’t really come to Luumia to save Quin. The truth was far simpler.
She wanted to be alive. To feel alive.
She took the vial and dropped it in her pocket.
“Wonderful!” Kristoffin said, clearly pleased. “I hope this means you’ll consider being my assistant. Of course we’ll need to train you first. We can’t have you breaking any bones, not in my lab!”
Mia gaped at him. How did he know she’d broken someone’s bones?
She was being paranoid. Kristoffin was Zai’s uncle, or uncle once removed—whatever that relationship was called. Zai probably gave him a full report.
By the laboratory doors, a brass bell swung to and fro at the end of a long rope, the chime clanging through the room.
“A ship has arrived in the harbor.” Kristoffin smiled. “Just in time for Jyöl! Remember when we met in White Lagoon, I told you I was carting foreign goods for the queen? One of those goods is a Glasddiran you know quite well.”
Mia’s heart seized in her chest. Angelyne.
“My sister is here?”
“No, no, no.” His laugh was jolly. “I mean your sister’s husband. Quin has returned.”
Chapter 42
Duet
QUIN WAS BEAUTIFUL.
Mia had always thought so. Even in the beginning, when he played the part of the ice prince so well, she’d feasted her eyes on the sharp cut of his cheekbones, his tousled golden curls. He was beautiful when he lay dying in the underground tunnels, an arrow lodged in his chest. Beautiful in the snow-smothered moun
tains, the steamy hot spring, and in the Natha River the night they pressed their bodies close. Beautiful the day she left him in the castle, helpless against her sister’s enthrall.
Now, as he walked from the port to the palace, it had never been more true. The other passengers piled off the ship, but Mia hardly noticed. All she saw was Quin. In a land of limited sunlight, his hair caught every ray.
Quin was beautiful. He was safe.
And he was not alone.
From her hiding nook on a window seat, perched high in the palace, Mia watched Quin climb the stairs with a dark-haired girl by his side. Not her sister, which came as a relief. The girl was short, lithe on her feet, slick black hair chopped close to the chin. There was something proud in her carriage, familiar. Try as she might, Mia couldn’t distinguish her facial features. But then she couldn’t distinguish Quin’s, either.
She didn’t need to. She remembered everything. Seeing him stirred something deep inside her. Feelings she thought she wouldn’t feel again.
When he reached for the girl’s hand, she wove her fingers effortlessly into his. The gesture stung. For a moment Mia almost wished he were being enthralled—an awful thing to wish on anyone, let alone someone she cared about.
But somehow she knew this wasn’t enthrallment. Quin’s posture was easy, natural. More comfortable in his own skin than she had ever seen him.
She stopped watching after that.
Mia sank into the ivory cushions of the window seat, arms wrapped around her knees. The Grand Fyremaster—or the queen’s uncle, she supposed, now that they were back aboveground—had scurried off to prepare for their visitors. She was glad Kristoffin had left her alone.
Quin was safe. That was the important thing. Angelyne hadn’t hurt him—at least not visibly. Of course Mia knew all too well that some wounds cut deep into the heart. She could only imagine the torments he had been subjected to in the castle. All those months.
All those months she hadn’t gone back.
Quin was happy. That was the important thing. He’d found a way out of Kaer Killian, met someone else along the journey. A Luumi girl, perhaps. Could Mia blame him? For all he knew, she had died that night in the crypt. Dead was a permanent state of being—for most people, anyway.
