Chapter 170: Ice Crown

Only now, it wanted a bigger one.

By the time Austin Veyron’s group was ready to leave Frostmarket, food queues were still forming in the market square.

Orin was directing the lines with a white scarf wrapped around his beard. As each line was marked off by a volunteer, runners set out for the districts with a winter food count on a slate in hand. At the north gate, the first aid convoy was packing warm sacks of grain and coal to take to the neighboring snow settlements. Steam drifted up from the sacks in thin white ribbons. For the first time since the group had arrived, the smell of bread was coming from Frostmarket instead of the smell of fear.

The children who had hidden behind the storehouses for the past three nights were now running between the carts, helping carry slates for the count. The young woman who had grabbed the grain sack was helping with the convoy, and the man she had pushed away was working the cart right beside her. They both seemed to have forgotten what had happened. Austin Veyron looked at them for too long. It was nothing, really, just two people lifting the same sack, but it was exactly what the splinter had been trying to stop.

"You don’t have to hold the north by yourself," Austin Veyron said to the elder.

Orin shook his head. "Frostmarket will need me here. The convoy has drivers and count keepers who can be relied on. We pick what we can control."

Tessa handed him a clean copy of the route. "If the Ice Crown decides to make a hunger claim down a glacier route, close the route with knowledge. What food was taken, where it’s going, and who you saw take it. Don’t allow any secret hunger debt."

Orin folded the route map and tucked it into his coat the way another man might tuck away a weapon. "What about you?"

"We’ll be following the splinter," Austin Veyron answered.

Orin looked at each of them as if he were counting them off his list, from Veyra’s armor to Rin’s bow to the records Ceryn was holding. Then he went back to his counting, and Austin Veyron’s group left Frostmarket through the north gate with the sound of the count following them out.

The road to the Ice Crown started at Frostmarket’s north gate.

It ran through fields of blue ice beneath a white sky that was blinding to look at. As they walked, the wind blew snow and ice over their footprints, making it look as if they had never passed through at all. The pale splinter shone below the ice, leading them toward mountains that looked like jagged teeth.

The group walked single file, with Orena leading and Rin bringing up the rear to watch the ridges. Every hour, Tessa stopped to check their position against the route line, and with each hour the mountains were a little closer. The cold began to work its way through their clothes. Their hands and feet ached every time they stopped to rest, and no one stayed sitting for too long, because the wind would freeze anyone who stopped moving. Out here, the cold didn’t need claws or teeth. It only needed patience.

Austin Veyron felt the mark on his wrist throbbing with each step he took.

The Maw trace wanted the pale route to lead him to the cold source. It wanted to end the journey by devouring the splinter before they ever reached the Ice Crown. The hunger wasn’t roaring at Austin Veyron anymore. It was thinking like him, using his own reasons and his own voice, and that made it harder to ignore.

Veyra walked next to him, wearing a black cloak over her armor, with ice clinging to her hair.

"Tell me what you want."

"I want the splinter."

"What do you think it will become?"

"A source within myself."

Sable wrapped the white cloth tighter around the damaged piece of the crown. "Then you’ll be giving the Ice Crown one more competitor."

Austin Veyron nodded. He knew that was true.

"You’re starting to tell yourself that," Veyra said.

"I know. I’m just not feeling it yet."

Veyra didn’t respond, but she kept walking next to Austin Veyron, close enough that their cloaks brushed, and that made him happier than he wanted to admit.

Nyra took out the heart shard and held it over the ice. Its blue-black glow pointed north, following the same pale route as the splinter.

"The winter sovereign has started connecting it to her crown," Nyra told them. "Once it becomes a part of her crown, the splinter will no longer be free."

Tessa took out her old glacier map and compared it to the route they were traveling. There was one road through the bottom ice shelf that used to supply the Ice Crown with resources. "The glacier road is too well watched."

"Then the bottom shelf," Orena said.

As they traveled down into the ice, the walls grew higher until they blocked out most of the sky. The group fell silent as their voices echoed off the ice. Cracks ran through the walls like the lines on an old person’s face. Somewhere inside the glacier, water dripped with a slow, steady sound that echoed like a clock ticking. Halfway through, they came across a woman pinned to the wall by an ice-tag net.

The woman was fully grown, with white horns curving back from her head. She wore a thick coat dusted with snow, and black-and-blue tags were wrapped around her wrists and ankles. Three collectors in pale masks stood near her with ice hooks, looking at her like she was worth money.

"She has incurred a survival debt by traveling an unclaimed route during winter," one collector told the group. "No fee was paid."

"The road was blocked," the woman replied. "I was traveling to deliver medicine."

"Medicine is cargo, and cargo must pay for travel."

Orena stepped forward with her spear in hand. "Who are you?"

"My name is Kaelith. I help direct the northern shelters. These collectors work for the Ice Crown’s Debt Court."

The lead collector pulled out a tag and showed it to them.

ROAD TRAVELED IS PROPERTY OF THE CROWN.

Austin Veyron could feel the hunger inside the debt clause. It wasn’t trying to make anyone hungry. It was commanding everyone who traveled that road to fall into debt to the Crown, so that every step a desperate person took became something they owed.

Veyra looked at him and waited. "Target?"

"The road-traveled clause on the tag," Austin Veyron answered. "Not the ice. Not Kaelith. Not the collectors."

"Witnessed," Veyra and Sable said together.

Austin Veyron attached the white root chain to the tag net surrounding Kaelith.

DEVOUR opened. The clause tasted like a locked mountain pass and frostbitten feet.

ROAD TRAVELED IS PROPERTY OF THE CROWN.

He consumed property.

The tags broke apart, and Kaelith tore free of the net.

The collectors stood there, confused about why they were holding their hooks out. Now that the debt clause was gone, they were just three people standing in a snowy canyon, far from home.

Rin’s arrow struck one collector’s mask, and Veyra hit the second with the flat of her sword, knocking the ice hook from his hand. Orena planted her spear between the last collector and Kaelith.

"You will be marked by the Debt Court," the lead collector said as they backed away.

"Tell them we know how to read," Kaelith said.

The collectors left them behind in the canyon and scrambled up the ice cliff, their broken tags scattered in the snow.

Kaelith rubbed warmth back into her hands, wincing at the bruises the tags had left on her skin. "You’re not from the north, are you?"

"No. We’re here to find a pale splinter," Austin Veyron told her.

Kaelith looked at the ground and told them she was sorry, but they were too late. The Ice Crown had captured the splinter the morning before they left Frostmarket. Tomorrow, the winter sovereign would begin the Winter Share ceremony, and all the northern shelters would be invited to accept the Crown’s protection.

"They’ll all be under a road debt," Tessa said.

"Even worse." Kaelith looked at the white line of the splinter glowing beneath them. "The Ice Crown will use it to make hunger feel the same as freezing cold."

Orena asked if she could take them to the Ice Crown.

Kaelith knew a road that would get them there, but it was dangerous to travel, and she wasn’t obligated to show them the way.

"You don’t owe us that," Austin Veyron said.

"I want to help my people fight this crown with knowledge," Kaelith answered.

The hidden road ran behind the main glacier road. It wound through tunnels coated in ice, past old heating pipes that had once warmed the glacier and were now frozen over. Kaelith led them through with her wounds still aching from the tags, and the group followed her every step as she made sure they were walking on stable ice. More than once, Austin Veyron heard pieces of ice break away beneath them and fall into the dark, and he tried not to think about how far down they went.

The Ice Crown came into view once they reached the top of the ridge.

It looked like a castle built into a mountain of ice, with towers jutting from its peak. A pale shape that resembled a throne hovered above the castle inside a storm cloud. It was where the route of Austin Veyron’s Maw trace ended, the source the Ice Crown was building. His wrist ached more the longer they stood on the ridge.

Below them, the northern shelters had gathered to be fed at the Winter Share ceremony. People sat around fires, waiting for the Crown to send them food. Sleds of food were lined up around the camp, and no one was allowed to touch them yet. Children looked up at the Ice Crown, hoping for a miracle to end their cold winter.

A figure stepped onto the balcony of the Ice Crown and spoke to the crowd of shelters below her.

The winter sovereign wore ice armor and a crown of ice on her head. She looked like a woman in her prime, and she gazed down at the shelters with an expression that seemed almost benevolent.

"The Winter Share will begin at sunrise tomorrow," she said, her voice carrying across the valley. "All of you will be fed, and your roads will be open once again, if you accept our protection."

The pale splinter above the throne shone brighter as she spoke.

"This is Queen Ysara. She has been keeping the northern routes open for the past ten years," Kaelith told them.

"Then why would she do this now?" Nyra asked.

"Because she wants all the roads to be hers."

Austin Veyron looked down at the Ice Crown and all the shelters gathered below it. Everyone there was cold and hungry, and the queen was making it seem like she was the only one who could help them.

As the sun began to set over the valley, winter riders moved through the camp handing out ration tokens to the shelters that had come for the Crown’s protection. They weren’t forcing anyone to take a token. They only told people it would guarantee them food at sunrise and keep their roads open for the winter season. They handed tokens to families with children sleeping in their tents, and to elders who could see the food being carried up to the Ice Crown.

Once they ate at the Winter Share, every road they traveled afterward would carry a hunger debt.

Austin Veyron looked up at the Ice Crown and the pale throne floating above it in the storm cloud.

They had until sunrise to stop her.