The Book of Snow & Silence

by Zoe Marriott

  We reached my door at last. I thrust it open, pushed her inside, and quickly scanned the rooms to make sure Osia had not decided to come back from her bed in the servants’ quarters to check on me. With a heaving sigh of exasperation I turned back to Katja.

  “What you must do is keep completely quiet about this. You can never tell anyone what you heard. Not while the Queen is alive, and probably not even after that. She didn’t see you, she has no idea. Just don’t say a word.”

  She gaped at me, eyelashes fluttering as her expression transformed slowly from horror and shock to bewilderment and finally firmed into determination. “I didn’t mean what can I do to protect myself,” she said slowly, with great decision. “I meant, what can I do to help you? To help Uldar, and that poor girl in the dungeons?”

  It was my turn to stare like a fool. Thoughts flitted through my mind, protests that this was my responsibility, not hers, attempts to convince her that I didn’t need any help, appeals about the risk to her father and lost lover.

  This was Katja’s country. Her home. Her little cousin Uldar, whom she loved. And she had heard everything. Everything Miramand had confessed and all she had revealed. And despite knowing about that hidden crack that ran all through me, despite the dangers she was quite sensible enough to imagine, she wanted to ally herself on my side, against the Queen.

  I was going to need to do this myself.

  That didn’t mean I must do it alone.

  “I think...” I stopped, swallowed. Then nodded. “Yes. I think you should help me to get changed.”

  *

  In her desire to exert absolute control over me, Miramand had approved every item in my closet – save one.

  The gown was cut high at the throat. The sleeves were long and diaphanous and from the waist down it was a luxuriant, heavy sweep of intricately worked silver lace over white silk. I could see now why the seamstress had been so put out when I rejected it. Her lace-makers must have worked on this for weeks in anticipation of my arrival: the lace featured birds of paradise, jaguars, merrel lilies, the curling, berry-thick vines of the vees plant – and the blazing sun with waving rays clustering around its face, symbol of Yamarr and the Herim line. Everything from my home. It was a dress that I, and I alone, could wear.

  But that deceptively modest, high-cut bodice was almost entirely translucent. Chest, stomach, shoulders and back were veiled by nothing more than a thin layer of glittering silver gauze. Two white birds of paradise with long, curling tails perched, one at each breast, to preserve a single shred of modesty and no more.

  Mistress Kirgin had been right that the patterns of silver and white lace made a startling contrast against the deep brown of my skin. I acknowledged it to myself as Katja pinned my hair up into a tightly braided coronet on the top of my head, twisting Miramand’s pearls round and round through the braid as my only other decoration.

  I had thought that I would feel exposed, mortified and shamed in such a gown. Instead, staring at the hard, strong muscles now displayed in my arms and shoulders, and at the generous, soft roundness of my stomach, I felt I had shed some kind of false skin of my own, just as Miramand had during our confrontation. No more softly-spoken, sweet Princess Snow. No more desperation to prove myself good enough. No more craving for approval and affection that would never come.

  It was time to show them that Princess Snow had a spine of ice stronger than their glaciers. That I had been born of warrior queens.

  “Stay behind me,” I warned Katja, as we approached the heavily-guarded entrance to the dungeon wing. “Don’t involve yourself too much where there are witnesses. I don’t want your family to face consequences from this.”

  “I think it’s too late to limit my involvement,” she muttered dryly as the well-armed guardsmen – two posted at the door itself, and two seated on a bench nearby cleaning their kit – spotted us.

  I cursed mentally. That was two opponents more than I had hoped to face.

  But the dress did its work. The young men’s eyes nearly popped out, and they scrambled to attention, saluting hastily.

  “Good morning. I wish to descend and address the prisoner,” I said, not imperiously, but with all the calm assurance I was capable of.

  “Which – ” one guard began, his gaze drifting helplessly over my midriff.

  Another guard – more senior – elbowed the first sharply and took over, his gaze pinned scrupulously to the top of my head. “Ah, Highness, with every respect, do you have the Queen’s permission?”

  I blinked, allowing my face to display mild puzzlement, and then astonishment. The senior guard swallowed audibly. The others shuffled, uneasy. But they did not withdraw their objection. Only after the silence had thickened to something truly excruciating did I speak, my voice gentle.

  “I am her Royal Highness Princess Theoai Herim of Yamarr, betrothed of his Royal Highness Crown Prince Uldarana of Silinga. Do you imagine I need anyone’s permission to act as I wish?”

  The senior guard cleared his throat. “I – um...”

  “Yes?”

  He reached for the keys at his belt. “Of course, Princess. If you would – er – step this way?”

  I reined in my triumph. One thing at a time. The guard unlocked the iron-braced door set into the unadorned icy wall, and gestured for the silent Katja and me to follow him.

  The passage beyond was wide, well-lit, and had a threadbare but serviceable carpet. I must have looked surprised again, for the guard rushed to explain: “This is not the jail, Ma’am – Highness. It is the mage-quarters. We must go through their dormitories and workrooms to reach the prisoner.”

  “You keep them locked up?” Katja demanded, suddenly right beside me.

  “Only to protect them,” the guard said. “They’re our most precious asset. If they were to be attacked or taken, the Silingana would fall.”

  Segregation in the name of safety. How cunningly those in power had designed this system, cloaking imprisonment with the appearance of common sense kindness. Katja had hold of my hand and was squeezing it desperately, but she said no more as we passed by dozens of small doors, firmly closed.

  Then, on the right, an open one. Beyond it was a large room filled with strange equipment that steamed, smoked or bubbled. Half a dozen men and two women bustled around long, scrubbed workbenches in plain, hard-wearing clothes. They mixed coloured liquids, wrote notes, adjusted measurements and, in one or two cases, sat very still while icy globes – new Ninguid globes – formed slowly on the benches before them. One of the women was the knitting lady I had met in Skalluskar. She blanched when she saw us.

  Katja was breathing hard, jaw clenched. Her eyes searched the room, but no one there seemed to spark any recognition.

  “Do you wish to stay and talk with them?” I asked, aware of the guard fidgeting at our delay. Ask after your lover?

  A look almost like fear flickered through her eyes, and she shook her head. “No. Not now. I will come with you.”

  There was no time to argue. If things worked as I prayed they would, we could return to the topic, and this strange prison, later.

  We began to descend, moving deeper and deeper into the lower levels of the palace via a series of narrow, twisting staircases. The walls around us changed: ice to rough, unpolished granite that breathed dank chill. My barely covered skin tingled with gooseflesh.

  Finally we entered a low ceilinged stone chamber, with barred openings hacked into the walls. It smelled clean, but it was bitterly cold, and the only light came from a single oil lamp near the entrance where we stood.

  I saw a flash of a pale face, grey in the gloom, at the cell on the farthest wall. Shell. She retreated before I could make out her expression.

  “Wait here, please – I would like privacy,” I instructed. Katja nodded at me, knowing that her job now was to keep the man as occupied as she could.

  I marched toward the cell and seized the bars as if readying myself to deliver a mighty tirade at the wicked temptress who had po
isoned my husband-to-be.

  “Shell?” I whispered, no longer able to make out her form in the cave-like space. “Shell, it’s me. Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”

  A blotch of shadows stirred to life. Something dark fell away and I realised she had huddled up in a corner on the floor, under a blanket. Her expression as she came toward me was tentative and disbelieving. It took an effort for me to hold back tears.

  “You thought we had abandoned you.” I wanted to shout and rail, and my voice came out fierce and shaking. “Never, never. Oh Shell, you couldn’t have hurt Uldar. I know that better than anyone. The only reason you’re even in here is that you didn’t dare fight off the guards for fear you’d accidentally harm one of them.”

  And oh, the woeful look on her face as they had closed in on her, and she had resigned herself to being dragged away in chains... I closed my eyes, resting my face on the bars with a gentle thunk. “I should have come before. I was just so shocked and upset, it took me a while to pull myself together. I’m sorry.”

  Hands found mine where they had closed, knuckles yellow and red with tension, on the bars. Her fingers laced with mine, still furnace-warm despite the chill of the dungeon. I opened my eyes to see a look of such dawning relief and happiness on her face that despite all my efforts, a single tear slipped free. She smiled at me, reaching out of her cell to wipe the moisture away. She shook her head. Don’t cry.

  Then she gestured with the tear-stained hand, touching her throat in an expressive clutching gesture, and pulling a pained face. How is Uldar? I drew in a shuddering breath.

  “He is dying,” I told her, blunt because it was the only way I could force the words out in spite of her crumpling face. “I think perhaps you are the only one who can save him – if you can use your gift, the way you did for me.”

  She nodded in quick agreement, then turned a look of burning resentment on the bars that separated us.

  “They won’t let you out. I’ve tried. So in a minute,” I said, lowering my voice still further, “I’m going to sneak up behind the guard and, while Katja distracts him, try to knock him unconscious, or at least stun him. We’ll get his keys.”

  She pressed her lips together as if considering, then shook her head, squeezing my hand when I began to protest. She flicked one of the bars with her finger, and twisted her hand into a fist, making a wrenching gesture.

  “You want to try bending one of the bars?”

  In answer she released me, waved me back a step and made a hand movement like flapping lips beside her face. Then she pointed at me.

  “Make a lot of noise?”

  She nodded.

  I cleared my throat, stepped back again – and then called up the booming bellow I had learned for commanding troops on horseback. “And I don’t even believe you really are mute, you horrible – er – little hussy!”

  Shell’s face creased with momentary, helpless amusement. Then she put both hands on the last bar at the left of the cell, which was sheltered from view by my position, and – turned it. It moved with a rumbling, grating sound and I hurriedly yelled: “You probably learned to dance from – from monkeys – and – also – your hair is definitely dyed, too! For shame! And another thing – ”

  I had no idea what nonsense was babbling out of my lips now. The guard probably thought I had taken leave of my senses, but the bar was wriggling back and forth in Shell’s grasp like a loose tooth. The granite around it was crumbling away, cracking and falling, a shower of blue dust. The iron popped out with a shriek and a grating sound that I tried to block with my loudest yelp of feigned outrage yet.

  Shell slid sideways through the gap like a fish slipping through water – and was free.

  33

  It was too much to hope that the guard would not notice his prisoner actually leaving her cell. But before he could do more than voice a horrified, “What – no! Stop!” Shell had darted across the room, wrapping one arm around his upper body to keep his arms still, and clapping her other hand over his mouth. She controlled his struggles with no apparent effort.

  “Ooh! Er – oh dear!” Katja pantomimed unconvincingly, mindful of her instructions, as I yanked the keys from the loop of the man’s belt. Shell muscled him into one of the other cells, and I swiftly locked him in.

  He started yelling as soon as Shell’s palm left his lips, but with the thick door to the dungeon closed and barred behind us, the noise only followed us a few steps back up the winding stairs.

  “What about the other guards, at the top?” Katja panted anxiously as we pelted upwards. “There were too many to fight, surely?”

  “I only counted on one extra guard in my original plan. There’s no help for it now, though. I’ll try to order them to let us pass,” I said grimly. “And take them by surprise, if not. They won’t expect either Shell or myself to be as strong as we are.”

  We stopped briefly at the top of the last flight of stairs leading into the mages’ quarters to smooth down our dishevelled hair, and for Shell to scrub smudges of rust and dirt from her hands and face with my handkerchief. The more ladylike and harmless we appeared, the better our chances would be.

  As I took the soiled silk back, I looked Shell in the eye. “You know where the Prince’s chambers are?”

  She nodded with no betraying look of self-consciousness. A tiny part of me hugged itself at this proof of the innocence of their relationship. The rest squashed it down, firmly. “If we can’t disable the guards, you must leave us, and run to Uldar’s chambers as fast as you can. No, Shell. This is Uldar’s life; he needs you. Promise me.”

  She wavered unhappily, then made an agreeing sort of shrug. I thought that was the best I could expect.

  “Good. And you, Katja – remember, you have no idea what is really going on, and you’ve been too shocked and confused to know what to do. Don’t try to help us fight. Just get in their way and distract them – ”

  “Ahem.”

  The sound made all of us jump. Shell whirled gracefully, flinging her arm across my body as if to shield me from attack. But I recognised the small, bent form of the man loitering in the passage before us.

  “Master Ralkin?”

  He bowed. “Princess, I could not help but overhear. I know a route through the palace that will allow you to avoid any unpleasantness with the guards.”

  I thought rapidly. “Does this route, by chance, lead beneath the foundations of the Silingana?” A place, it seemed, that he had been urging me to investigate since that first day on the rescue ship.

  Shell gave me a questioning look at my tone, while Katja shook her head. “There is nothing beneath the foundations. Only rock.”

  “I would that were so, Lady,” Ralkin said, then turned his gaze from Katja to me.

  I blew out a resigned breath, touching Katja’s arm to silence her. “We accept your help gratefully, Sir.”

  We followed the old man through the mages’ quarters and down, down again, through even narrower and danker passages this time, by staircases so steep they seemed like mere cracks in the ice and then in the rock of the cliff. We climbed down until I imagined I could feel the weight of all those tons of rock and ice above us, pressing in upon us, and only the golden glow of Ralkin’s oil lamp and the warmth of Shell pressing close at my back kept me from panicking. And still we descended. I could feel the ache of Katja’s clenched fists in my own hands, and the nervy tension that twitched through Shell made my teeth grind. I wondered if they could feel the phantom throb of my deeply bitten lip.

  “Where are we even going?” Katja muttered, bent nearly double as we squeezed sideways through a tiny opening into a slightly larger corridor. She sighed with relief as she was able to straighten up. Shell stretched with an audible pop from her shoulders.

  “We are going his way.” Ralkin laid his hand on an iron door. “Those above have lately taken to calling this the Boiler Room. Their little joke.”

  He opened the door.

  I had expected – steam. Noise.
Heat. Why call it a ‘boiler room’ unless it contained one of those expensive new steam-powered inventions? But what rolled out of that doorway, what enveloped us as we walked inside, was silence. The same eerie quiet that had so disturbed me when I first woke in my room in the towers so many floors above. The particular, dead silence of a grave.

  Yet it was not a grave. No ghastly bones or shrines or burned remains lay within. It was simply a room – a large room – hollowed carefully from the granite of the cliff. It probably had roughly the same floor space as the ballroom which I suspected was directly above, although not the towering height. It was dry. Dimly lit. Rather chilly.

  And filled with people. Rank upon rank of people. Over a hundred people at least, perhaps as many as one hundred and fifty, stretching off to a distance I could not make out. They were unmoving. Eyes either closed or staring vacantly. They didn’t speak. They barely seemed to breathe. Not one so much as twitched or blinked at our arrival. They didn’t see us. Or each other. They just – stood. Or sat. Or leaned against the walls. All around the walls. Touching the walls, or touching another silent person who was touching them, sometimes making a chain of silent people five or six long.

  With a clutch of horror in my chest, I understood.

  “They are the Ice Breakers,” Ralkin confirmed softly. “They are holding the palace up.”

  I knew we had a task to complete, and time was slipping away, yet I could not help but stare. The vast majority of these silent people were women. Here were those female Ice Breakers I had wondered about once. Not sailing on ships in the open air, but packed away below, out of sight. And even more confusing, many of them did not have the appearance of Silingans – or at least, not to my eyes. Their skin was a pale, coppery brown, and their hair a blue-black darker than mine, darker than that of any Silingan I had ever seen.

  Who were they?

  “The mage masters do not think that most females can be trusted to keep their composure on board ships, or that they have the wit or temperament to do research, or create complex works. So they are usually assigned here,” Ralkin said, again without prompting. It was as if he had been anticipating each question I might ask for a long time.