Crossing the Black Ice Bridge

by Alex Bell

  “Well, let’s get moving before they do,” Stella said. “It looks like the bridge is fairly flat up ahead. If we just shift some of these submarines to clear a path, then we can get back in the snow-boat and put some distance between us.”

  They grouped together to roll some of the subs out of the way; then Stella beckoned the gargoyles, who were still keeping back. They came straight over, the explorers got back into the boat, and soon they were speeding along the bridge once again, keeping a lookout for gremlins following behind them.

  “Any sign?” Shay asked, joining Stella at the back of the boat after about half an hour.

  She lowered her telescope and shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “They must have stayed behind. Let’s head back inside.”

  “What do you suppose that gremlin meant about telling the boss?” Shay asked as they went belowdecks. Beanie was poring over a book in one corner of the galley, while Ethan sat at the table with Melville, playing dominoes.

  Stella shrugged. “Perhaps she meant the snow queen? Or the Collector, I suppose. She seemed to know of him.”

  “Stella, this doesn’t make sense,” Beanie said, looking up from his book with a frown. “This is one of the books I took from Queen Portia’s library. There’s a lot of information in it about snow queens. Look.”

  He stood up and handed her the open book. One page depicted a painting of a snow queen, while the other contained facts. Stella ran her eye down them with a shudder. She didn’t particularly want to be reminded of frozen hearts and evil spells right now.

  “We already know all this,” she said, trying to hand the book back.

  But Beanie shook his head and said, “Look there.” He pointed at a box in the top corner of the page. “It’s got some facts and figures about snow queens,” he said. “Including their life span.”

  “Seventy years,” Stella read.

  “So what?” Ethan said, glancing up from his dominoes game. “That sounds about normal.”

  “But when we saw Queen Portia in those fairy photos, she looked exactly the same as she did in her portrait,” Beanie said. “And even eight years ago, she would have been in her hundreds.”

  “You’re right,” Stella said. “I wondered about that myself.”

  “The book must be wrong,” Shay said, frowning. “I mean, we all saw her in that photo, so what other explanation is there? Books are wrong sometimes.”

  “I suppose that must be it,” Stella said, handing the book back to Beanie. “It seems strange, though.”

  “Aha!” Melville cried, laying down a domino. “I win!” He extended his wing out to Ethan, who shook it, albeit with a bit of a grumpy expression.

  “Better luck next time, old crumpet,” Melville said.

  “Best out of three?” Ethan said.

  “Hang on,” Shay said, walking over to them. “Where did those dominoes come from?”

  “Melville found them somewhere,” Ethan said. He glanced at the flamingo and asked, “Where did they come from?”

  “I took them from one of those little submarines,” Melville said. Then he looked up with an alarmed expression. “Gosh, you don’t think anyone will mind, do you? It’s just that no one seemed to be using them, but that was before we found the gremlins. Perhaps they might be peeved?”

  “Who cares about the gremlins?” Ethan replied, flipping the dominoes facedown to shuffle them up.

  Stella saw that they were marked with something on the back and leaned down to pick one up.

  “It’s the Phantom Atlas Society again,” she said, frowning. It was quite a handsome set—all the dominoes were made from glossy wood with what looked like mother-of-pearl dots. She handed the domino back to Ethan. “It’s so strange that no one’s ever heard of them,” she said.

  “Perhaps it’s a dead society that existed hundreds of years ago,” Shay suggested.

  “Or it could be a secret one,” Beanie said. “That’s another theory about the bridge, you know—that it leads to some ancient secret society.”

  “And what’s this society supposed to do?” Stella asked.

  “No one knows,” Beanie said. “It’s a secret.”

  After they’d put some distance between themselves and the gremlins, they stopped to put up the magic blanket fort and have a late lunch on the bridge before carrying on with their journey. They didn’t come across anything else of any interest for the rest of the afternoon, except for a few more signs warning them of the Land End Giant. The needle of Stella’s compass was still spinning around uselessly, but it didn’t really matter because they knew they simply had to keep on going across the bridge.

  Indeed, the gargoyles seemed very eager to get there. The morning after the gremlin episode, the explorers were still eating the breakfast Ruprekt had prepared for them when one of the gargoyles lifted the canvas and stuck his stone head through the gap, grumbling away at them in his own gravelly language. When Stella went out to see what he wanted, the gargoyles were already buckled into their harnesses, gesturing at the snow-boat and eager to be away.

  “Why are they so excited?” Ethan wondered.

  “Who knows?” Shay replied. “Perhaps they’re a bit like wolves and just need to run sometimes.”

  They traveled on for the next two days, seeing nothing of any note except for another conspicuous giant footprint. There was the sound of some sea monster splashing unseen in the mist beneath the bridge on the second day, and also a huge, dark, unidentifiable bird that flapped over their heads, creating such a wind rush with its wingspan that it blew their hoods back from their heads.

  And then, early that afternoon, Stella was on the deck of the snow-boat, training her telescope on the bridge, when she saw something that made her breath catch in her throat. “Stop!” she cried out to the gargoyles.

  “What’s up?” Shay asked, straining his eyes through the mist.

  She looked at her friend. “I can’t be sure, now that the fog is coming back,” she said. “But it looks like the bridge runs out up ahead.”

  “Runs out?” Shay repeated. “You mean, there’s no other side?”

  He looked dismayed, and Stella couldn’t blame him. After everything they’d faced and all the effort they’d made to get here, it would be terrible to find there was no other side to the bridge—and no Collector, no Book of Frost. It would mean they’d come all this way for nothing and had no way of saving Shay and Koa or releasing Felix and Joss from their ice cave.

  “Let’s walk the rest of the way on foot and see,” Stella said. “If it does run out, we don’t want to go hurtling over the side in the boat.”

  The gargoyles had slowed to a stop, so the explorers made their way out into the snow. The sea fog was rolling in fast, and before long they could barely see more than a few feet in front of them. The bridge itself was utterly silent. There was no splashing of sea monsters below, or flapping of monstrous birds above. It was like the five of them were the only living things there.

  They went slowly forward, with the gargoyles trudging through the snow pulling the boat behind them, everyone straining their eyes through the swirling mist.

  “Just remember,” Shay whispered. “If we come across one of the Land End Giants holding up one of the four corners of the world, then we just back away as silently as we can. No one can even so much as sneeze. There could be disastrous consequences if we were to—”

  He broke off then because Koa had appeared at his side and started to growl. Almost half of her fur was now white, and Stella could tell that she had a physical substance again from the way she brushed against Shay’s leg. Her ears were pressed flat against her head as she stared into the looming fog, and the growl rumbled too loudly in the back of her throat. Usually snow muffled noise, but the bridge seemed to echo the sound back at them.

  “Shhh, Koa!”

  Shay tried to quiet her, but this only made her growl more urgently, and the next second she lunged forward. Shay tried to grab her, his hand closing on the scruff of he
r neck, but Koa twisted free and bolted into the mist, barking ferociously.

  “Well, that’s really ruined things,” Ethan exclaimed. “We’d better hope it’s not a Land End Giant out there, for all our sakes. If a tadpole burping is enough to distract them, then a shadow-wolf/witch-wolf hybrid is definitely going to do the trick, isn’t it? The giant will drop its corner of the world, we’ll all roll off into space, and it will be our fault for single-handedly destroying the whole entire—”

  “It’s not a Land End Giant,” Shay said. The whisperer’s wolf pendant at his throat had opened its eyes, which gleamed red in the dimness and meant that he was talking to the shadow wolf inside his head. “Koa says it’s the snow queen.”

  “Use the Pegasus charm again, Stella,” Beanie urged. “At least then we’ll be able to see.”

  Stella thought this was a good idea and was just reaching for her bracelet when Koa’s bark was suddenly cut off short. It was a strange, unnatural, abrupt end to the noise, as if the shadow wolf had suddenly ceased to exist altogether.

  And Stella could sense something else, too—a presence that was surely very close to them in the mist. Her fingers closed around the cold silver Pegasus charm, and the magical creature immediately exploded into life in flashes of starlight, the light from its horn cutting through the fog and illuminating the bridge up ahead.

  And there, right before them, was Queen Portia herself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE MIST DRIFTED APART in ribbons to expose the snow queen, standing just a few paces ahead of them in the middle of the bridge, which did indeed come to an abrupt end. It just… stopped, with nothing but fog and a great drop swirling beyond it.

  The snow queen looked exactly as she had in the paintings back in her castle, and in the fairy’s photographs. Her lustrous velvet dress was royal purple, edged in soft white fur. Her black hair was pulled back into intricate plaits, and her skin seemed even paler and whiter in comparison.

  There was no sign of Koa, but Stella’s eyes went straight to the snow queen’s gloved hands, and she saw that they held a snow globe. It had a beautiful silver base encrusted with snowflakes and whirls of pale blue ice. And trapped within the snow globe was a wolf. Not a wolf made from glass, as Stella had seen inside the snow globes at Coldgate, but a real miniature wolf that moved around inside, pacing back and forth as it tried to find a way out. Even from this distance, Stella could see that the wolf was half white and half black.

  “It’s Koa!” Shay gasped. “She’s captured her!” He turned his furious gaze on the snow queen. “What have you done to my wolf?”

  “Saved her life, probably,” Queen Portia replied in a smooth, cool voice. “She was going to turn into a witch wolf at any second, but time is frozen inside the globe. Do not worry. It won’t hurt her.”

  The snow queen reached into the pocket of her cloak and pulled out another snow globe. This one was empty, but Stella realized that Queen Portia meant to trap them in it. This surely was how she had attacked the other explorers on the bridge, and the reason why so many explorers had gone missing over the years. Their hope that Koa might be able to stop her had failed, and Stella knew she had to act immediately or else they could all be done for too. Certainly boomerangs and magic arrows and jelly beans would be no use against a snow queen. It was all up to her.

  Felix and Jezzybella had both warned her against using the dragon charm, saying it was too dangerous and that she’d be just as likely to summon a dragon that would immediately gobble her up, but what choice did she have? If she didn’t act now, the snow queen would definitely take them.

  Stella reached for her charm bracelet just as the gargoyles pushed past the explorers and gathered together in front of the snow queen. Queen Portia paused in the act of unscrewing the glass dome from the base of the snow globe. The gargoyles were all jumping up and down and waving their arms, as if trying to tell Stella something. She got the sense they didn’t want her to attack Queen Portia, but what choice did she have? It was her or them, and Stella was determined to protect her friends if she possibly could.

  So she took a deep breath and closed her fingers around the dragon charm, concentrating with all her might. She fully expected an ice dragon to burst into life, just as the Pegasus had done. She thought it would be huge and spectacular, rather like the ice dragon they had encountered in the caves beneath Queen Portia’s castle. But instead there was a flash of silver light and then… nothing.

  Stella thought the spell hadn’t worked at first. That perhaps she hadn’t been strong enough to create the dragon, or maybe she could use only one charm at a time and needed to send the Pegasus away. But then something tickled over her wrist, and she looked down to see the world’s tiniest dragon clinging there. Silver from snout to tail, it was no bigger than her little finger and pattered back and forth over her hand, its tiny scales sparkling in the light that blazed from the Pegasus. It was flesh-and-blood rather than ice, but its small body was still cool to the touch.

  Suddenly it looked up at Stella, and its bright eyes were like little beads in its face. Then it spread out its spindly wings and flapped up into the air, snorting icy breath in little puffs. Normally, Stella would have been utterly delighted by the cutest, smallest dragon she had ever seen, but now she felt only despair. It was no wonder the gargoyles were clapping—for this tiny dragon was not going to be any help to them whatsoever.

  She thought it was going to fly off into the fog, but to her surprise it flapped up to her shoulder and from there flew right to her left ear, where it attached itself like an extremely beautiful ear cuff. Its small feet curled gently around her lobe and its spiny tail trailed down her neck as it rested its small snout against her ear and whispered to her in a peculiar voice that was as soft and smooth as smoke.

  “It is an honor to serve you, Majesty,” it said. “Who would you like me to translate?”

  “Translate?” Stella repeated, frowning. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m a translator, Majesty,” the dragon said, its small tongue tickling Stella’s skin. Her ear tingled with cold as well as something else—a fizz of magic. “Just tell me which language you wish to speak and then when they speak you will understand them through me.”

  “Oh. I… I’m sorry, it’s just that I thought you’d be a magnificent fighting dragon, you see.”

  “No, I’m definitely not a fighting dragon,” it replied. “Translations only.”

  “What’s going on?” Ethan demanded. “Who are you talking to?”

  Stella realized the others couldn’t hear anything the dragon was saying. Her mind was racing as she tried to work out what was happening. Queen Portia looked just as perplexed and was still frozen in the act of whatever she’d been about to do with the snow globe. In fact, she was no longer looking at Stella and the others, but at the gargoyles, who were still jabbering fiercely at Stella. There was a strange expression in the snow queen’s emerald-green eyes—not the murderous rage Stella had expected, but a sad, sorrowful look.

  “The gargoyles seem rather keen to communicate with you,” the little dragon hinted. “Perhaps you might like to understand what they have to say?”

  “Yes,” Stella replied, mostly because she didn’t know what else to do. “Yes, please translate them for me.”

  The moment the words were out of her mouth, her left ear tingled more than ever and suddenly it was as if she could hear two different versions of the gargoyles. Through her right ear, their voices had the same incomprehensible gravelly chatter that they always had. But through her left, where the dragon clung, she could suddenly make out words. She had to concentrate on them, especially since her right ear was still hearing them as she had before, but there were definitely words there now. Unfortunately, though, it was even more difficult to follow because of the fact that all seven gargoyles were talking at once, and Stella could only catch snatches of their sentences, which were all muddled up.

  “Queen Portia is not who you think.”


  “The magic spilled out everywhere—”

  “The Collector took it—”

  “—wasn’t her fault.”

  “All right, all right!” Stella said, waving her hands at them. “I can understand you.”

  “You can?” Shay asked, staring at her.

  “Yes, just about.” She looked at the gargoyles. “But not if you all talk together like that. One at a time.”

  The gargoyles fell silent, and then one stepped forward, heaving a great sigh. “About time,” he grumbled, his voice like a bunch of stones being jumbled together. “We kept telling you to use the dragon charm.”

  “I thought it would create a wild, dangerous monster,” Stella said. “I had no idea it was a translator charm.”

  “Well, why didn’t you study your Book of Frost?” the gargoyle asked testily.

  “That’s kind of a long story—” she began.

  The gargoyle cut her off. “Never mind. Listen, you may not have been able to understand us, but we could understand you, and you’ve got it all muddled up about Queen Portia. She isn’t evil and she didn’t freeze the village. Or at least she didn’t mean to. It was Jared—or the Collector, as you seem to call him. There was a magical protection on the Book of Frost. He managed to break through the spell and steal it, but it caused broken magic to leak from the castle, and that’s how the village was frozen.”

  Stella looked at Queen Portia, who had knelt down in the snow and set the snow globes to one side in order to gather some of the gargoyles into her arms, like they were long-lost pets, her eyes sparkling with tears.

  “I don’t understand,” Stella said.

  The gargoyle went over to Queen Portia and whispered something to her. The snow queen nodded and reached behind her neck to unclasp her dragon locket. She passed it to the gargoyle, who returned to Stella’s side.