Chapter 644: The Lid

Isaac had followed his mother down to the ice four times that autumn, and every time he had turned back before she reached the bottom.

Tonight he did not. Tonight there were two people behind him on the stair, and one of them was Vane, and Isaac had discovered in his first year at Zenith that it was very difficult to be a coward in front of Vane. Not because Vane would ever say anything. Because he wouldn’t.

The stair went down through the ice beneath the Palace, cut by some Queen of Boreas so long ago that its edges had worn smooth as glass. There were no lamps. The ice itself gave off a faint blue light, and the deeper they went, the fainter it became. Nyx walked behind Vane with her hand on his shoulder and her eyes half closed, reading the dark. Nobody spoke.

At the bottom, the stair opened onto the sea-ice, under the stars.

It was very cold. Even for Isaac, who had been born into cold and did not usually feel it, the air at the bottom of the stair had an edge that went straight through his furs and into his teeth. A mile away across the white, the crack lay in the starlight like a long black river. Steam rose off it in slow, pale columns.

His mother was standing at the edge of it.

She stood alone on the broken ice with her hands held out in front of her, palms down, the way a person holds their hands over a fire. But nothing about it was warm. Cold poured off her. Isaac could see it, a shimmer in the air spreading out from her across the black water, and where it touched, the water stopped moving. It went grey, and then white, and then hard. And the white went on spreading, away from her in both directions along the crack, faster than a horse could gallop, until the black river began to close from its edges inward like a wound knitting shut.

Absolute Zero. He had seen her use it a hundred times. He had never seen her use it like this: not as a weapon, not as a wall, but steadily, patiently, for mile after mile, the way someone might bail water out of a sinking boat.

"She’s closing all of it," Vane said quietly.

"Every night," said Isaac. "And every morning it’s open again."

"Isaac," said his mother, without turning round. "You’ve brought friends. Of course you have."

Her voice was perfectly calm. Her hands did not move.

He walked out across the ice toward her, and after a moment Vane and Nyx came with him. When they reached her side, Isadora glanced at them once, and then back at the crack, and Isaac saw that the frost in her hair had spread since dinner, and that her lips were faintly blue.

"How long?" Vane asked.

"Since the end of summer." She did not pretend to misunderstand. "It was ten miles then. Then twenty. Now it’s forty-four." The white went on spreading across the black. "I close it at night. It opens by morning. The ice won’t hold on its own anymore. It’s being melted from underneath."

"By what?"

His mother was quiet for a long moment.

"I’ll tell you what the books say," she said. "The oldest ones. The ones in the vault under the Great Hall, that nobody has opened since my grandmother’s grandmother. They say that when the first Queen of Boreas came north, there was no Palace here. Only the ice, and something under it that was warm. And she built the Palace on top of it, and sat on the throne, and kept it cold." Her hands were very steady. "Every Queen since. Four hundred years. We thought it was a story about duty. A metaphor. It isn’t."

Isaac stared at her.

"The Palace," he said. "It’s a..."

"A lid," said his mother. "Yes."

Out on the black water, very far away, something moved.

Isaac felt it before he saw it. A slow lift, under his boots, as though the whole ice field had drawn a breath. Then the sea in the crack rose. Not a wave. A swell, long and smooth and silent, coming up out of the depths along the whole length of the channel at once, lifting the half-frozen water and the new grey ice on top of it, higher, and higher, until it stood a man’s height above the edges of the crack.

His mother’s hands came up. The cold coming off her doubled, then doubled again, so fast that the air between her palms and the water cracked like a whip. The swell froze at its crest, white and glittering, and hung there.

For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then, slowly, from far below, the swell sank. The frozen crest settled back onto the water with a long, low groan that went on and on through the ice, and was still.

Isadora let out a breath. It came out as a cloud of crystals that fell glittering onto the ice at her feet.

Beside Isaac, Nyx had gone very pale. Her eyes were opal, wide open, fixed on the water.

"It isn’t awake," she whispered.

Vane put his hand on her shoulder. "Nyx."

"It isn’t awake. It’s dreaming." Her voice was thin and strange. "I can feel it. It’s so big. It’s so slow. It isn’t thinking about us. It doesn’t know there’s an us." She swallowed. "It’s dreaming about being warm. About the light, up here. About coming up into it." Her eyes found Vane’s. "It’s dreaming about the shore."

Nobody said anything.

Isaac looked at his mother. She was standing very straight on the ice with her hands lowered, and in the starlight he could see what she had been hiding from him at dinner every night since the end of summer, behind the wine and the jokes and the seventh place at the table. She was so tired she was shaking.

"You do this alone," he said. "Every night."

"Someone has to."

"Why didn’t you tell me?"

"Because you’d have come down." She did not look at him. "And then you’d have tried to help. And you’re not strong enough yet, darling, and I couldn’t bear to watch you try." Her voice was very gentle. "I sent your friends away from Zenith because I wanted them somewhere safe. I’ve kept you here for a year for the same reason. I wanted one person in my life who didn’t have to stand on the ice."

Isaac looked at the crack. Two-thirds of it was white now, closed for the night. The far end was still black, still steaming, a long dark finger pointing north into nothing.

He thought about Vane on a road in the west, telling a whole valley his name.

"There isn’t anywhere safe," he said. "Is there. Not anymore."

His mother did not answer. After a long moment, she put out her hands toward the black water again, and the cold began to pour out of her once more.

Isaac stepped up beside her, and raised his own hands, and let the frost come.