I nodded and we moved on.
“I know this is going to sound odd. When I first got to Algid by the River, I was attacked by giant wolves. Only, they weren’t made of flesh and bone…”
“Oh, the Snow Wolves.” Gerde raised an eyebrow, her interest piquing even further. “Most people who meet the Snow Beasts don’t live to tell the tale.”
“What do you mean? What about you? I saw what you did with the birds just now … but does that mean … Can you control the Snow Beasts, too? And wait, SNOW BEASTS? There are more than just the wolves?”
Gerde nodded.
“There are Snow Lions, Tigers, and Bears … even insects. Snow Bees can sting a person to death in minutes…”
I shuddered at the thought as Gerde continued, clearly marveling at the Snow Beasts’ prowess.
“Basically anything and everything King Lazar can dream up. They are not alive—not in the way my animals are. I don’t know exactly how he does it, but they still move and breathe and obey.”
“Could you survive them? Can you control them with your gift?” I asked again.
Gerde explained, “I can touch something in animals that reaches back to me. But in the Snow Beasts, that part is missing in each and every one of them. But maybe you can fight them with yours.”
She still believed in my gift and in the prophecy. I didn’t have any interest in going there again.
“I don’t know about that. What about people? Can you reach people the same way?”
“To be honest, I don’t always connect to people.”
“That makes two of us.” I reached down to pet a lamb. The soft wool gave me comfort. Bale was my best friend before he was more. I remembered a time when Bale caught me drawing him. We were twelve years old. I didn’t let him see the drawing at first. Because it didn’t do him justice. Somehow I’d captured the lines of him, but not the spirit.
“This is how you see me?” he’d asked.
“It’s terrible. It doesn’t capture you. It doesn’t have your humor. Your heart … Your…”
He leaned in as if waiting for more compliments.
“You little …” I chose my favorite expletives and jumped on top of him, pummeling him.
He put up his hands. “I give up.”
I relaxed my grip.
A second later, he flipped me over and pinned me down. We were suddenly out of breath and suddenly aware of how close we were. His eyes broke with mine and looked at my lips and back again. He didn’t move, though. Like he was waiting for permission. And I didn’t move because I didn’t want to be asked. I wanted to be kissed like Kayla Blue on The End of Almost. She was never asked.
“You’re getting a little old for wrestling …,” Vern’s voice had cut through, breaking the moment.
Bale rolled off me. “Vern, you could stop clocks with that timing of yours,” he said, hopping to his feet.
The memory stung a little.
“Now we have each other!” Gerde singsonged, bringing me back to the present.
I smiled but didn’t agree or disagree with her. Instead I pointed to something pink through the ice walls and asked, “What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s the best part,” she said excitedly. I quickly kept within a step of her as we made our way through the animals and back outside through the menagerie.
I gasped when I saw rows upon rows of pink wheat growing in snow.
“Is it magic?”
She shrugged. “It’s botany. It’s taken me months, but finally it took root.”
As we wound our way through the pink wheat plants back to the house, I realized that this was the thing that Gerde wanted me to keep secret.
If the King found out about her magic with plants, his iron-clad grip on Algid’s frozen, barren land would lessen forever.
On the way out, Gerde touched one of the flowers’ buds. It responded like she was the sun. And maybe she was.
“You showed her the Keep? Unbelievable.” Kai stepped in line with us a bit later, looking less than thrilled to see me. I was guessing that he hoped I’d run away in the night.
“She found it. And who is she going to tell, anyway?” Gerde countered, using my words against Kai.
I shrugged and smiled at Kai, knowing that it would annoy him. I pretended that it didn’t bother me when he behaved exactly as I now expected. Rude. Possibly a little cruel. The single moment in the house when he held my hand was the exception.
He scowled. This was who he chose to be. I could do the same.
“She’s only here because I stopped her from escaping,” Kai said.
Gerde looked struck. She had not known after all. Or if she had, she did not want confirmation.
“He’s right. I’m only staying for the moment. I need to go out there and find my friend,” I said, bracing myself for whatever was out there in the snow that stood between me and Bale.
“Well, I’m glad you decided to stay for now. And if anyone can help you figure it out, it’s the River Witch,” Gerde responded, looping an arm through mine. “Kai, let’s not quarrel. She likes the cube. She thinks it’s genius,” Gerde said, apparently trying to bridge the gap between us even though clearly he did not want it to close.
Kai’s blue eyes flickered briefly at the compliment before darkening again. He was proud of what he’d created. And it made me think of the last sixteen years that I had wasted. He had a true gift, and I was barely educated. My collection of knowledge was a hodgepodge at best from television and the set of encyclopedias that I’d read from A to Z in the Whittaker library.
“What’s really genius is that map of Algid on your arm.” Kai motioned to my left forearm.
“What?” I pulled my sleeve down self-consciously. He was pointing to my scars.
“You have a map of Algid on your body? How did I not notice?” Gerde clapped her hands excitedly.
“I don’t,” I said. “It’s scar tissue.”
Kai shook his head. “That’s Algid. But if you don’t want to believe me, take a look yourself.” He walked out of the room and returned a few seconds later with a map.
As he unrolled the paper, familiar lines stared up at me. But instead of being etched onto my skin, they were right there on a map marked “Algid.” I lifted my sleeve and put them side by side. How was this possible? Unless … unless the story about me walking through a mirror wasn’t true, either? But I remembered it … I remembered all the blood. It was one of the few things that had stuck with me from my childhood. That mirror was the dividing line of my life. Between pre-Whittaker and Whittaker. Not-crazy and crazy. And Kai and his geography lesson had just called it into question.
“Incredible!” Gerde leaned over the map and my arm, her eyes wide with amazement.
I noted a mountain range in the top right corner of the map. Below it was a castle of some kind, and beneath it the words “Snow Palace” on Kai’s map. On my arm the palace wasn’t there, but the mountain range was.
“Where are we on this map?” I asked.
Gerde started to point to an area on the bottom left when Kai snapped the map shut again.
“Why’d you do that?” I said angrily.
It was the second time he’d done that. Kai had stopped Gerde from telling me something I wanted to know. He may have been protecting her, but he was pissing me off.
Kai said nothing. His face was a mask again, closing off me and Gerde. He walked back into the other room.
Gerde rolled her eyes. “Just ignore him. He’s always so grumpy.”
I nodded, even though I thought there was more to his attitude. And it likely had something to do with me.
“Do you believe what the River Witch said about me?” I asked as I traced a finger along the mountain ridge of my scar.
“The witch is tough, but fair. And I have learned much from her. She’s changed my life. But if you let her teach you, you will change all of Algid.”
“So you believe in the prophecy. Or prophecies. I heard there were two.”
> “I only know of one,” she said, biting her lip. “But I think when the Eclipse of the Lights comes, the whole world will change. Or at least I hope so.”
I looked around. I dropped my voice to a whisper. “I don’t want to change all of Algid. I just want to bring my friend home.”
Gerde blinked hard. “The boy from the water? You were calling his name and another when the River Witch brought you to the boat,” she said, remembering.
I nodded.
“The boy from where I came from. His name is Bale.”
Maybe it was because Gerde had shown me her top secret snow-growing crop, or maybe it was because I could see how much hope she had in me for the future of her land. I just couldn’t let her continue to pin those on me, when I was not here to help her or Algid. I needed to be honest with her. And I needed to recite the story of Bale and Snow again out loud to keep it real for me. To keep me going. I left out the part about Bale being dragged into Algid through a mirror. And I left out the part about Jagger, too. “I need to find Bale.”
Gerde was quiet, but her look was thoughtful. I was expecting her to be disappointed that I hadn’t come here to save the world. But there was understanding in her gray eyes instead.
“You love him. You’ll find him. If you let the River Witch train you, you’ll be able to.”
I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but it did make sense. I needed to survive this world, and if I really possessed the powers everyone said I did, knowing how to use them might help. Gerde said there was a virtual army of beasts out there in the forest. I could not outrun them. But maybe I could defend myself. And if I was being honest, without Jagger I didn’t have the first clue where to find Bale. Maybe I needed the River Witch after all.
“If I ask the River Witch for help, it has to be on my terms,” I said hesitantly. “And there’s no way I’m going back to her boat.”
Gerde laughed heartily. “I think that can be arranged. Kai will bring her here. In the meantime, would you like some clothes that are a little bit more … a little less…”
“Less me?” I joked, pulling at my Whittaker pajamas.
Kai grunted disapprovingly. He had drifted back into the room. Kai didn’t like me. But I wanted to dissect his dislike instead of punching him like I did Jagger. There was something about his attitude that was maddeningly interesting to me. Maybe it was because he wore his thoughts on his face, like I did, with no effort to hide them. Like right now, I couldn’t help but notice the flash of his blue eyes even as his lips scowled.
“Don’t mind him,” Gerde said, turned on her heel, and returned with a green dress. “I made this. I promise that it will feel like you,” she said with a small smile.
“To be honest, I don’t know what me feels like,” I said, taking the dress.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into Kai,” Gerde said matter-of-factly. “When he gets his mind set on something, he doesn’t budge easily. He’ll warm to you in time.”
“Why would he?” I blurted, and headed upstairs to change. I had a limited history meeting new people, but Kai’s feelings about me seemed pretty intractable. It was dislike at first sight.
The dress Gerde had made was simple and pale green. She had used the wool that I’d seen on the loom in that strange room last night. I slipped it on. The material was soft to the touch. It clung to my torso before gently sloping out into a full skirt. Delicate buttons shaped like tiny sparrows and made out of what almost felt like bone dotted down the center of the dress. I twirled around, liking the way the fabric swirled around me.
When I got downstairs, Gerde was humming and there were literally birds in the kitchen chirping along with her. They’d flown inside and were perched along the top of the cabinets. My nose filled with the smell of her buttery batter frying up on the stovetop.
I felt jealousy well up in me. I had never had anything like this and would never be anything like Gerde. She hummed and sang, not to keep her anger down. She did it because she felt like it—because that happy noise needed to get out.
“The dress looks perfect on you,” Gerde said brightly, complimenting herself and me in one breath.
“Thank you. I really … it’s lovely,” I said, an inexplicable lump forming in my throat as I got the words out. The gesture meant more apparently than I knew.
She turned mercifully back to the stovetop and said, “You’re welcome. By the way, we eat a lot of greens and breakfast-for-lunch here. Sometimes we even eat it for dinner. I hope that’s okay.”
There was a pink porridge next to a leafy salad already on the table. A griddle full of bright-green pancakes sat on the tiny stovetop.
“On Tuesdays we have plain egg-white omelets. On Wednesdays we have cereal,” I blurted, surprising myself. I was reciting the Whittaker menu. Days ran together there. However bland, sometimes the only way I knew the day of the week was by the food that Vern handed me on a plastic platter.
Gerde blinked at me, unsure what I was talking about, but played along. “Well, that sounds delicious, but I hope you don’t mind trying something a little different.”
“Everything’s different here,” I said, deflecting, as she plated a pancake for me and I took my first bite.
All of what Gerde had shown me back in the greenhouse was pretty mind-blowing, but I didn’t know that food could actually make me feel things. As the green pancake melted in my mouth, I saw colors. I tasted colors. Technicolor ones. It was sweet and sour and spicy all at once. The flavors chased one another. It was a first, middle, and last course in one single bite. Maybe every surprise in Algid wasn’t Snow Wolves coming out of the ground. Maybe there were good things for all the scary ones.
“How did you do that?”
Gerde shrugged and placed one of her tiny hands over my heart. “May I? I don’t know how to explain. But I can feel that there’s something … not right in there.”
She took her hand away. “Never mind. I’m sorry. I’m still learning. Maybe I should stick to the animals in the menagerie.”
I put a hand over my own heart. Gerde was still a novice, but maybe she sensed something that I knew for sure. My heart was still broken.
The next day I woke to find my arm hanging over the side of the bed, submerged in water. I was still reaching for Bale. The water lapped at my fingertips, and my eyes opened. This was not a dream. My bed was floating, and the ceiling was coming closer; the water was raising the bed farther and farther up.
I could still sit up. But if I didn’t get out of the room soon, I was going to drown. Panic seized me, but I felt paralyzed, all while the water inched up. Faster and faster.
I didn’t have much time. I tried to paddle toward the door. If I didn’t do something, then I was going to drown for the second time in the same week.
“Help me, please!” I screamed.
“What is it now?” a disdainful voice said through the door.
It was Kai. A part of me wished that I didn’t need his help right now so I could tell him where he could shove his “what is it now.” But my life depended on his opening the door.
“The room is flooding. Open the door—please!”
I could hear him trying to throw his weight against the door.
“It’s stuck—”
“No shit, Sherlock,” I blurted, realizing that Kai would not get the reference from my world.
“Kai, there’s so much water …” I heard my voice change from its normal tone to the high-pitched range of fear.
“Use your snow! Save yourself. It’s the only way!” he yelled.
This was not a fairy tale. No one was coming to save me. That’s what he was saying. And I finally heard him.
Despite what he’d instructed, he hadn’t given up trying. I could hear him making contact with the door again and again.
“I’ll get the River Witch or Gerde.”
“Don’t leave me,” I begged.
“Okay,” he said, calling out for them instead of leaving the door.
I rocked back on the bed I might die in. I felt anger come again in waves. I did not want to end like this. But the fear and the panic that I’d felt in the River was back again, too.
“Think,” I told myself as the bed rose higher and the ceiling grew even closer.
I started to hum like I used to back at Whittaker.
“Don’t think. Freeze it—use your power and freeze it!” Kai yelled to me, his voice forceful and commanding.
“I don’t know how.”
“You do. You just haven’t done it yet. The River Witch always says take what you are feeling and put it in the magic. You’re angry and scared. Just take that and put it all in your snow.”
He was trying to save me, but all I could think of was how easy it was for him to say that from the other side of the door.
I closed my eyes and tried to focus. This time something actually happened. I felt a flash of cold go all over my body like a shiver. Colder than cold. Like I’d reached my cold saturation point. Another shiver and the cold began to drain from me through my fingertips. A crystal formed on the surface of the water. It wasn’t like the paper cutouts of snowflakes I remember making as a little kid when I was still allowed to use scissors. It was something like the graffitied Tree that let me into Algid, a strange language that I couldn’t understand clustering on top of itself in a solid icy pattern on the surface of the water. Then one crystal split into two. And that crystal split again, multiplying over and over.
Suddenly my fingernails extended and resealed around metallically hard ice. The shards of ice were a few inches long and came to razor-sharp points. Like icicles. Like claws. My ice claws were out.
Somehow, within seconds, the entire room beneath me was frozen. My bed no longer moved. My head was an inch from the ceiling. I began to laugh, looking at the skating rink I’d made of Kai and Gerde’s guest room. I looked at my hands that were now weapons.
What had been hidden from me in the other world my whole life, what was always there just beneath my skin, waiting for me to let it out all along, was proof that I was not crazy and that everyone in the world but Bale and maybe Vern had been completely and utterly wrong about me. My claws cut both ways.