by Sara Holland
Brekken’s mom climbs into the driver’s seat up front, and Graylin hops into the middle row, making it look as easy as climbing a single stair. The treads of the sleigh go up to my thighs; the railing is three feet above the top of my head. I catch my reflection in the polished black wood, looking around in vain for a ladder or steps.
“Uh …” I look pleadingly at Brekken.
He grins, steps forward, and grabs my waist, lifting me until Graylin can grasp my forearms. Graylin pulls me up, and I clamber awkwardly over the railing, claiming a seat in the back row. Brekken jumps up last and joins me in back.
Leaning down from the side of the sleigh, Ilya closes the gate to the doorway and locks it with a key pulled from within her long green wool coat. Then she snaps the reins, and just like that, we’re off, the sound of the sleigh’s treads slicing across the snow louder than the wolves’ paws.
I wonder what time it is here, and then realize I don’t even know what time system Fiordens use. I know their days are longer than ours, about thirty hours if I’m remembering Graylin’s lessons rightly. But there’s no moon by which to measure the night, and the aurora stays where it is, a quiet, bright presence at the edge of the sky. I know that over the course of the year it advances, until their warmest month—which still isn’t warm enough to melt the permafrost. And then the aurora covers the whole sky for one bright day and night.
“It’s beautiful,” I whisper to Brekken.
I had always figured that the doorway between Haven and Fiordenkill was located within Myr’s capital city, but it doesn’t seem like it; beyond the elegant row of trees lining the road, all I see are more trees, quickly growing wild and deep. Trees and ice gleam through the thin dusting of snow on the road. Maybe that’s why we seem to be going so fast. The trees whip by us on either side. But the wind isn’t as bad as I expected; the sleigh is cleverly designed to ward it off. I’m able to look at the sky, the trees, and at Brekken, who is watching not the landscape go by, but me. When our eyes meet, he smiles.
“What are you thinking?” he asks me.
I feel dizzy by the onslaught on my senses, too awed by the beauty of Fiordenkill to think much of anything at all. But I try to come up with something smart to say.
“I’m thinking how weird it is that after wanting to see your world my whole life and never thinking I’d be able to, now I’m here. And it’s for such a dark reason. But I’m still happy to be here.”
“I’m happy you’re here too,” Brekken says simply. The starlight plays over his face, disappearing into darkness occasionally when we pass under tree branches, then washing him with light again. “Is the gauntlet working? Are you feeling any pain?”
I consider it. If I focus, I can feel a slight pain, an ache deep in my bones, a feeling of needles like when my foot falls asleep, but deeper. Yet it’s faint, easily ignorable. It might even be my imagination. I smile. “Yeah, it seems to be working.”
Here, tonight, with the landscape zooming by us, the stars burning in their sphere and the aurora flickering at the edge of the horizon, it’s easy to ignore whatever small discomfort I feel. Brekken is holding my hand, and we’re pressed together, from our shoulders down to our thighs. The sleigh protects us from the wind, and he looks so very lovely in the starlight.
10
At some point, I fall asleep on Brekken’s shoulder, warmed by his proximity. His skin always felt cool to me in Havenfall, but here it seems warm. He still has his arm around me when I wake up, blearily, to a silver sun rising ahead of us, lighting the ice road up in a blue blaze. I look ahead at Graylin, suddenly nervous. I haven’t told anyone that Brekken and I are—whatever we are. Dating? Together? Kissing, my brain helpfully supplies, and I blush and shrug away from Brekken. No way am I telling anyone that Brekken and I are kissing. Especially Graylin or Marcus. But I’m kidding myself. They probably already know.
I shake away the embarrassing thoughts. No one is worried about who you’re kissing, idiot. Not with the daunting task ahead of us.
We’re most of the way to Winterkill, Ilya tells us, but we don’t want to approach it by day. Lord Cadius is hosting one of his feasts tonight. We’ll hide out today, rest up, go over our plan, and get our disguises in order. Tonight seems almost too soon—there’s not time to stake out the place and consider our attack from all angles. But the longer we stick around Fiordenkill, the greater the chance of being caught. Not to mention that even though I’m wearing the gauntlet, I can feel the ache in my bones getting stronger, more insistent. It’s still not painful if I don’t think about it, but it’s a reminder that we need to get in and out quickly.
The sleigh finally stops when the sun has just climbed over the horizon, at a complex of low stone buildings surrounded by a high wall of ice. There are a few cabin-like structures clustered in one area, with five long, low buildings spaced out in a circle around it. The snow here isn’t pristine like in the doorway courtyard. It’s trampled and gray, and there’s a sharp, musky smell in the air of roasted meat and sweat.
As Graylin helps everyone out of the sleigh and into the cabins, I tug at Brekken’s sleeve. “What is this place?”
Brekken grins. “My grandparents raise ice wolves for the army. They’re touring the southlands right now for the warm season, and Mother is looking after the pups. It all worked out perfectly. Here, look.”
He grabs my hand—casual, unassuming—and leads me across the snow toward one of the outer buildings. I glance back over my shoulder, looking at the wolves that pulled the sleigh as Ilya unharnesses them. They’re beautiful, but I’m not sure I want to meet more. But Brekken is already unlatching the heavy wood door and swinging it open.
I gasp, and this time it’s out of delight, not fear. Because—puppies. Half a dozen wolves tumble out of the barn door all at once and overtake Brekken in a storm of happy barking and whining. They jump on him, and he falls back on his ass into the snow, laughing as the wolves swarm him. They’re massive, already the size of German shepherds, but visibly puppies. They’re pudgy, and their paws are too big for their bodies. Their movements are clumsy and overenthusiastic.
I let out a laugh and fall on my knees next to Brekken, and the baby ice wolves notice me and fall on me with just as much joy. One gray wolf jumps at me and licks my face before I can lift my hands to block it. Six tails wag furiously, and the gray one grabs my mitten in its relatively small teeth and tugs it off. I laugh and grab out for it, but the pup bounces away and crouches, its butt wiggling high in the air, daring me to give chase.
“Thunder!” Brekken scolds. His hand darts out, quicker than mine, and snags my mitten from Thunder’s teeth. “Be polite.”
He hands it back to me with an apologetic look on his face. I take my other mitten off and tuck them inside my coat, holding my hand out to a smaller, black pup who is cautiously sniffing my leg. She bumps my hand with a warm, wet nose, and then lets me scratch her between the ears, leaning into the touch. Happiness fills me. I know we still have a great challenge ahead of us, but right now I don’t want to be anywhere else in all the worlds than here in this land of ice, kneeling in dirty snow, with wolves all around us and Brekken at my side. For a moment I can almost forget that anything is wrong. Forget the task looming ahead of us and the lives that hang in the balance.
Inside the cabin feels similar to a cozy mountain home you might find back on Earth, but everything looks just slightly different, more organic somehow. The angles are softer, the edges of things rounded as if we were inside a giant hollow tree, like in a fairy tale. Every surface is covered either in books or intricate, naturalistic carvings of flowers and trees and animals. Dust motes float serenely in the wintery sun flooding through the windows.
Graylin is sitting at a carved table in the corner, along with a Fiorden woman I don’t recognize. She’s older, with very pale skin and black hair and eyes, and is dressed in a kind of robe or kaftan that’s forest green and belted at the waist. She looks up when we come in, her eyes fixing immed
iately on the bit of the gauntlet that shows between my mitten and sleeve. I go still, Brekken bumping into my back. This must be the old scholar friend that Graylin mentioned back in Havenfall.
They both stand to greet us, dropping their conversation in Myr’s language and switching to English.
“Kae, this is Maddie,” Graylin says, looking from the woman to me. “Maddie is Marcus’s niece, the one I told you about. Maddie, this is my very good friend Kae.”
I shove down my nerves. After so many years, I’ve gotten used to Graylin and Brekken, and Ilya has such a warm presence. But now, meeting a new Fiorden, an automatic reaction goes off in my body, a tightening of my skin and speeding of my heart. Like a reminder that Kae’s not human, or that I am very, very far from home.
“Nice to meet you,” I say, and extend a hand.
Kae casts a curious glance, making me realize too late that they probably don’t shake hands here. But she’s reaching out, grasping my fingers briefly with her own icy cold ones.
“Likewise, Maddie Morrow,” she says, her voice faintly accented and ethereal. “What a wonder to see a Haven-dweller here. I often wished to attend the summit at Havenfall, but my work has kept me here.” Her fingers drift to my wrist, pushing up the hem of my sleeve. “Have you experienced any sickness or pain from being in our world?”
I shake my head. “Not that I’ve noticed.” I can hear the nervousness in my own voice.
Will she ask me to take the gauntlet off?
But she doesn’t, just dropping my hand and retreating to the table.
Graylin joins us while Brekken busies himself in the kitchen, and soon I’m drinking something steaming that tastes like a mix of tea and cider while Kae looks at the gauntlet, my arm stretched over the table, palm up.
She pries one tiny gold-carved leaf from the armor and holds it with iron tongs above a candle flame. She and Graylin converse in low Myr voices, while Brekken chats with his mother in the kitchen. Left out of the conversation, I can’t help but feel antsy and impatient. Every second spent here is a second we’re not at Winterkill. Not rooting out the traders.
Kae’s black eyes stay fixed on the leaf as it starts to soften in the flame, the tong tips sinking into the metal, the curled shape drooping. The leaf’s gold starts to change colors. But instead of turning a bright pinkish orange like I expect normal metal would, it darkens, changing from gold to rust to dark green and then black. Smoke lifts off it, getting thicker and thicker, and when Kae pulls the tongs away, the leaf has disappeared.
I stare. “What happened?”
From the doorway, I see Brekken is staring too, eyes wide.
“Phoenix flame,” Graylin whispers.
“What is that?” I look from face to face. “What are you talking about?”
“Never have I seen anything like this,” Kae says in a hushed tone. “I thought it only a myth.”
Graylin glances at me, eyes uneasy. “We have a story here,” he explains, “about a god who cried tears of metal. Metal that looked like this.”
“Okay …” I look back at my arm, uneasy. “What else?”
“It’s said to be magical,” Graylin goes on. “But that was only ever a story …”
“I feel like we can start assuming all the stories have a grain of truth,” I say wearily.
“Do you remember the story I told you?” Brekken says from across the room, his eyes meeting mine. “In the story, the gods cried for the knight and his lady, and he forged his armor out of their tears.”
He paces over to us in the silent room—silent except for the soft hiss of the candle flame.
“Do you think … did he really exist? Him and his armor?” I’d waved the story away as wishful thinking, no more relevant to real life than the storybooks Mom used to read to me.
Another stretch of silence.
Then Graylin speaks. “Fiordenkill is different from your world in many ways. Our gods are closer to earth here.”
“And our past is not so far from our present. We know that our stories are shaped around a heart of truth,” Kae adds.
I glance at Brekken, confused. “What does that mean?”
Kae’s eyes are fixed on the gauntlet, a mixture in her expression of wonder, of avarice, and of fear. “The armor was said to carry the knight to the world of the gods.”
“A world,” Graylin says, “that is now believed to be another Realm, like Haven and Byrn and Solaria. Now closed off, but another Realm. Which implies …”
I let my eyes fall to the gauntlet. What they’re telling me—it implies that it’s true what the pictures of Mom and the Fiorden lord seemed to suggest. That this gauntlet, and the suit of armor it’s part of, could carry me—not just here to Fiordenkill—but wherever I wish.
“But there’s something else,” Kae says, an eerie and ominous quality in her voice. “The story says that where the knight went, harm followed.”
My heart sinks. Isn’t that always the way? Nothing good can exist, it seems, without some bad thing as a counterweight. “What do you mean?”
“Where he trod, the fabric of the world seemed to grow thin and weak.” Kae’s voice has taken on a lyrical cadence like a storyteller’s, but the tone beneath is deadly serious. “A warm breeze came from nowhere. The smell of metal. Plants and animals began to die, and wanderers and hunters went missing.”
I look at Graylin but can’t tell anything from his face except that he’s troubled.
“What does that mean?” I ask, my voice small. The gauntlet on my arm, which had started to feel like a source of comfort, suddenly feels heavy and cold.
“It’s another story,” he murmurs. “One that I always thought was just a story. It’s called the Wound in the World.”
The words themselves have a fairy-tale quality, and I can see the effect on all three Fiordens; he, Brekken, and Kae all stiffen. I look from Kae to Graylin to Brekken.
“Like another doorway?”
“Not a doorway,” Graylin says. “Nothing so orderly. More like a wall in a house that, having been battered by the wind for many years, begins to show cracks.”
“So …” I clear my throat, tracing over some of the dark whorls carved into fantastical shapes on the table. “What’s the wind in this situation?”
Silence falls for a moment, until Brekken offers, “The knight?”
“Not the knight.” Kae shakes her head. “His armor. More specifically, what it’s made of.”
“Phoenix flame,” I say, echoing the strange word from earlier, turning my wrist back and forth so the gauntlet catches the light.
I think of the hole in the ozone layer back on Earth, an invisible tear in the sky that humans, out of ignorance or uncaring, ripped further just by going about our lives. A sense of foreboding fills me. “Is it … am I doing damage just being here?”
Is it just me, or does Kae’s expression get cooler? “If our conjecturing here is correct, yes, the mere presence of phoenix flame does damage to the barrier.”
“Not much,” Graylin interjects quickly. “Clearly. We haven’t seen any effects of it as we traveled.”
Guilt seeps into me as I look between them. It’s not like I can do anything, I can’t take the gauntlet off, but I hate the idea that I’m doing damage to Fiordenkill just by being here.
“But if there was more of it … more of the phoenix flame … then the cracks will start to show?”
“For instance, a whole suit of armor?” Graylin adds in.
Kae nods wordlessly.
“So if Cadius Winterkill has the armor …” Brekken puts it together. “He has a way between the worlds. That’s how he’s running the soul trade.”
“If we can get our hands on the armor, will the wound close?” I ask.
But before Kae can answer, Graylin cuts in.
“This trip is for reconnaissance only, remember?” He addresses me, dark eyes drilling into mine with serious intensity. “That’s what we promised Marcus. We don’t have the resources for a confronta
tion.”
“I know that,” I reply. “But just humor me for a second. Would it close?”
Kae holds my gaze. “Maybe,” she says quietly. “I do not know for sure. But it is possible.”
“I know we can’t confront Cadius,” I press on. “But if all it takes to stop him is stealing one suit of armor—”
“Winterkill won’t make it that easy,” Brekken says. His voice is thoughtful, distracted, fingers drumming against the pitted tabletop. “But if we see the opportunity …”
“We won’t take any stupid chances,” I promise Graylin. A renewed sense of urgency and hope gathers beneath my breastbone. “But if we get lucky, we don’t have to wait for a chance to come back. We could bring the soul trade down tonight.”
The rest of the day passes in a blur of preparations. It seems to me that time is moving faster, now that our goal is clearer. What awaits us at Winterkill is still murky, but now there’s a focus point. The phoenix flame armor. A single object, corroding the barrier between the worlds like water seeping through floorboards. Water or, more appropriately, acid, creating a gap through which the traders can carry their silver and souls.
It turns out that in addition to being a scholar, Kae is also a gifted practitioner of healing magic. As evening falls across the stretch of snow outside, she and Graylin work together to alter my appearance to look more Fiorden. I sit as still as I can at the table, feeling awkward and antsy, like I always do when I get a haircut. But instead of scissors in my hair, it’s hands on my face, a gentle magic playing over my skin, sinking beneath the surface.
There’s no mirror and I keep my eyes closed, so I can’t see what they’re doing to me. It feels strange, but not unpleasant. My skin stretches slightly, heating and tingling. It’s almost like feeling myself get sunburned, but somehow pleasant.
