Chapter 643: A Place at the Table

The Glacial Palace stood at the top of the world, and it did not look built. It looked grown.

It rose out of the ice field on the far side of a range of white mountains, a cluster of spires and halls and terraces all made of the same clear, faceted, blue-lit ice as the ships, so that the whole Palace glowed from within like a lantern left out in the snow. The air around it was so thin and so cold that it hurt to breathe, and tasted faintly, strangely, of something Vane could only describe as light.

The Lark came down on a landing terrace beside the three Glacial ships. Isaac was off the lead ship and across the ice before the gangplank had finished folding out.

He stopped at the bottom of it.

For a moment he simply stood there in his white fur coat, with frost in his hair and his gloved hands at his sides, looking up at the six of them on the deck with an expression of enormous, barely controlled feeling, and Vane watched him visibly decide how to behave and fail to decide.

"You came," Isaac said.

"You asked," said Vane.

"My mother said not to."

"You said she didn’t mean it."

"She didn’t." Isaac swallowed. "She doesn’t. She’s been setting a place at the table every night since I sent the falcon. Seven places. The staff think she’s gone mad." He drew a breath, and squared his shoulders, and said in a careful, formal voice, "Welcome to the Glacial Palace of Boreas. I’m very glad you’re..."

Ashe came down the gangplank, walked straight up to him, and punched him in the shoulder hard enough to knock him back a step.

"A year," she said. "One falcon. In a year."

"Eleven letters," Isaac protested, rubbing his shoulder. "She burned them."

"Then you should have bribed the falcon sooner."

"I didn’t know you could bribe a falcon. Nobody tells you these things." He looked past her, and his face changed. "Mara."

Mara had come down the gangplank behind Ashe, holding her ledger. Isaac, who had once been beaten by a commoner in front of the whole Academy and had then made friends with him on his mother’s orders, went down on one knee in the snow so that his eyes were level with hers.

"You’ve grown," he said gravely.

"A hand’s width," Mara agreed. "You haven’t."

"No," Isaac said. "I’ve been told I peaked early."

Then Valerica was there, and Isole, and Nyx, and for a minute or two nobody said anything coherent at all, and the Glacial staff waiting at the edge of the terrace pretended with great professionalism not to see their young lord being hugged by four people at once in the snow.

Isadora Glacium met them in the Great Hall.

It was vast and quiet, and its roof was the ribcage of a dragon. Vane had heard of it. Hearing was not the same. The ribs rose from the floor on either side in great white arches, curved and pitted and older than anything else he had ever seen, and met high overhead, and the blue light of the ice came through the gaps between them in long, slow bars. Beneath them stood a single long table, set for seven.

The Queen of the Glacial Palace stood at its head.

She was as he remembered her, and not. She had the same cool composure she had worn at the Winter Gala, and the same Domain hanging around her like the air before snow. But there was frost in her hair. It was fine and white and clung there in the warmth of the hall without melting, and there were shadows under her eyes that had not been there a year ago.

She looked at them all for a long time.

"I wrote," she said, "do not come."

"Yes, Your Majesty," said Valerica.

"In my own hand. On my son’s letter. Which I was not supposed to know he had sent." Isadora’s gaze moved to Isaac, who looked at the floor. "With a falcon I made. That he bribed. With my own sugar."

"It was very good sugar," Isaac muttered.

Isadora closed her eyes briefly. Then she opened them, came down the length of the table, and put her arms around Vane.

He was so surprised he did not move. She held him for a moment, very lightly, the way she had held Isaac in the wrecked hall at graduation, and then let him go and did the same to Valerica, and Ashe, and Isole, and Nyx, who went rigid with alarm, and finally knelt and did it to Mara, who allowed it with the same polite bewilderment she had shown Edda.

"I told you to go somewhere far," Isadora said, straightening. "And you went west, and then you walked onto a public road and told an entire valley your name." Her mouth moved. "I have never been so angry with a person I wasn’t related to."

"Sorry," said Vane.

"No you’re not." She turned back toward the head of the table. "Sit down. All of you. You’ll eat, and you’ll sleep in rooms I’ve had heated for a week, and nobody is going to say anything important until I’ve had at least one glass of wine." She paused. "I did once promise the whole of your year a sleepover. Isaac fled to his rooms for a day."

"Half of us would have died of hypothermia," said Valerica, before she could stop herself.

Isadora looked at her.

"Only half," she agreed. "I’d have had the rest."

The dinner went on for a long time.

Isadora was a startlingly good host when she chose to be. She asked about Korreth, and about Ryuken, whom she called "that impossible man" with real affection. She asked about Holloway and listened to the whole of it without once interrupting, and when Isole described the silver floor going black, she set down her glass and looked at Isole for a long moment with an expression Vane could not read.

But she did not eat much. Isole noticed it too. Twice Vane saw her glance at the Queen’s hands, and once, when Isadora reached for the wine, Isole’s own fingers moved very slightly on the tablecloth, the way they did when she was reading someone from across a room.

"She’s spending herself," Isole said under her breath. "A great deal. Every day."

When the plates had been cleared, Vane took Thessaly’s letter from inside his coat and laid it on the table in front of the Queen.

Isadora looked at the seal, a small knot of moving air pressed into pale wax and still faintly turning, and the warmth went out of her face all at once.

"Thessaly," she said.

"She asked me to bring it."

"Of course she did." Isadora picked it up and broke the seal and read it, once, standing. Then she folded it and put it down very precisely beside her glass. "That woman has been trying to get me to sit at her table for forty years. And now she sends it with the one person in the world I can’t throw out into the snow." She rose. "Excuse me."

She walked out of the Great Hall without another word. The long doors closed behind her.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

"She does that," Isaac said quietly. He was looking at the doors. "When it’s about the ice."

"Where’s she gone?" asked Vane.

Isaac did not answer at once. He turned his wine glass slowly by the stem, and frost spread across it from his fingers, very faintly.

"Down," he said at last. "She goes down every night. To the crack. Alone." He looked up. "She thinks I don’t know."