Ice

  Every fiber in her wanted to run out of the banquet hall. Stay calm, she told herself. “I fulfilled my end of the bargain,” she said. “I married you. Now I want a divorce.”

  “I frightened you,” he said. “I am sorry. It was not my intent. Please, give me another chance. I will be charming.”

  She looked at him with blood matted in his fur and seal pieces clinging to his muzzle. “You can be the Casanova of polar bears,” she said. “I’m not staying.”

  “Do not judge me so quickly,” he said. “You have only just arrived.”

  Cassie looked down at the seal carcass. It was a mangled mess. He ate like a polar bear and spoke like a man. She couldn’t judge him. He was too far outside the realm of possible for her brain to know how to judge.

  “You are like nothing I have ever known,” he said. “You are brightness. You are light. You are fire. I come from a world of ice.”

  She shivered. He sounded like he really meant that. No one had ever said anything like that to her before. She felt unbalanced. “Oh?” she said. “You know what fire and ice make?”

  He looked at her with his inscrutable bear eyes. “Tell me.”

  “Lukewarm water,” Cassie said. “I want to go home.”

  “I need you,” he said. “I need you for my wife.”

  No one had ever said that to her either. She swallowed.

  “Why?” She said. “Why me? Why a human wife at all? Why not a bear?”

  “Because I do not wish my children to be cubs,” he said.

  For a second, Cassie could not breathe. Children.

  “Only the children of munaqsri can choose to accept the power and responsibility, and we need more munaqsri with human intelligence. We are spread too thin; our regions are too large. We lose too many souls, and species dwindle.”

  She didn’t know what he meant by regions or losing souls, and she didn’t care. “You married me to breed me?”

  “Of course it is not the sole reason—I meant what I said about your brightness and light—but our children were a prime consideration.” He sounded so calm. She couldn’t believe how calm he sounded. Our children?

  “You want a human incubator.” Cassie felt nauseous again. She clutched the edge of the banquet table. “Count me out. Absolutely not.”

  “You agreed,” he said.

  “Not to kids.” She wasn’t ready to be a mother. Especially to furry children. “You’re a bear. You aren’t even bipedal.”

  “I can be,” he reminded her.

  “Kids were not part of the bargain,” she said. “Deal is off.” Turning sharply, she walked out of the banquet hall.

  She made it to the corridor before her nerve broke and she ran.

  * * * * *

  Crossing through the crystal lattice archway, Cassie slowed. She couldn’t run all the way home. She was thirteen hundred miles from home—thirteen hundred plus one if the bear was to be believed. She couldn’t reach home on her own. She needed the bear to take her there.

  Cassie looked back at the castle. Its soaring spires and elegant arches glowed as golden as dawn. A sculptor had carved delicate lines of icy leaves on the ice walls. More roses, carved to petal precision, curled around the window arches. It was so beautiful that it made her feel an ache inside that she couldn’t describe.

  Why did such a place have to come with a bear husband?

  She walked farther, rounding the corner of the castle, and halted in her tracks. “Oh, wow,” she breathed. Spread before her was a topiary garden of ice. Hundreds of sculptures sparkled in the liquid light of the low sun. Hedges, flowers, apple trees, figures of dragons and mermaids and unicorns. With her breath caught in her throat, Cassie touched a leaf on an ice rosebush. She could see veins traced on the thin folds of ice petals.

  She walked down paths between ice griffins, frozen fountains, and trees with glittering glasslike fruit. She ducked under a trellis of grape leaves. She’d never seen anything like this. It was the Garden of Eden in ice. Who had created this? She turned to look back at the castle—

  —and saw the Bear King standing two feet away from her, silent between the roses. She jumped backward. “Don’t do that,” she said.

  He said nothing, and she was aware of sweat forming in her armpits. She lifted her chin and met his stare.

  “I did not think you were the kind to give up without trying,” the Bear King said.

  “I don’t give up,” Cassie said automatically. She thought about it for an instant and then repeated, “I don’t give up.” He’d seen her stubbornness firsthand. She had tracked him until she was nearly out of fuel, despite knowing she was disobeying station rules. That chase felt like it had happened a lifetime ago.

  “It is not an easy thing to have your world turned upside down,” he said. “I do not blame you for not being strong enough to accept what you have seen here, or not being brave enough to want to see more.”

  She winced—two insults in one breath. She was not leaving because she was weak or cowardly. Was she?

  He added, “I had thought that you would have the strength for this. It is not your fault that I was wrong.”

  That was not . . . Wait. “Are you daring me?”

  He considered it. “Yes,” he said.

  “You think it’s a joke?”

  “I think you are frightened,” he said.

  “Like hell I am,” she said.

  He lumbered toward her between the crystalline shrubbery. His fur brushed ice leaves, and they tinkled like crystal. She retreated, bumping into a statue of a mermaid. “I can show you a new world,” the Bear King said. “I can give you wonders that you cannot imagine, that you do not know exist, that you cannot yet comprehend.”

  “I comprehend enough,” Cassie said, inching around the statue, away from the bear. “You want me to mother your children. Your cubs.” She heard the pitch of her voice rising, and she stopped. I’m not afraid, she repeated like a mantra. I’m not.

  “I will wait until you are ready,” he said.

  “I’ll never be ready.”

  “I can wait beyond never.”

  Cassie shivered and hugged her arms, even though she wasn’t cold. Her breath was condensing into miniature clouds, but she felt just as warm as she’d felt inside the castle. How long did he intend to keep her here? How long was “beyond never”?

  “You have nothing to fear from me,” he said gently.

  “Then take me home.” Home. Home to a mother she’d never met and a father who had lied to her.

  “You have stepped into a larger world, Cassie,” he said. “Why do you wish to throw it away so quickly? You have barely glimpsed it.”

  Involuntarily, she glanced again at the castle with its soaring ice turrets and crystalline ivy. If he was real, then all she knew of the world—all she knew of science and the rules of the universe—was false. Half of her wanted to explore every inch of this place. The other half wanted to turn back the clock and redo the day before.

  He padded closer to her, and this time she didn’t retreat. “You can return to your ‘research’ station and pretend all is the same as before. But it is not the same, and it will never be the same. You cannot erase what you now know. Your world has changed.”

  He was right. She couldn’t go back to pretending none of this existed, especially with her mother there to prove that it did. His gaze burned, and she had to look away. She watched the sun dance in the topiary garden. Lemon and pink, the sculptures winked in the light.

  “Do you like it?” he asked. He sounded oddly hesitant.

  “It’s beautiful,” she admitted. “Impressive sculptor.”

  “The castle itself was complete before my tenure here,” he said. “I have concentrated on the gardens.”

  A polar bear artist? Staring at his massive paws, she could not imagine him creating anything as beautiful and delicate as the ice topiaries. His paws were designed for killing seals, not shaping roses.

  “I sculpt every day except in polar bear b
irth season,” he said. “During the heart of winter, I must patrol the ice near the denning sites. My munaqsri skills—the speed, the ability to sense an impending birth or death, the ability to transform the physical world—make my work possible, but they do not ensure success. I cannot risk being late for a birth for the sake of my gardens.” He hesitated, and then added, “Or even for spending time with you.”

  “I won’t still be here then,” she said as firmly as she could.

  “We shall see,” said the Bear King.

  SEVEN

  Latitude 91° 00’ 00” N

  Longitude indeterminate

  Altitude 15 ft.

  WITH ICE LEAVES TINKLING IN HIS WAKE, the Bear King walked back toward the castle. “You have questions,” he said over his shoulder. “I have answers. Shall we bargain? For every question I answer, you remain one day in my castle.”

  “You like bargains, don’t you?” she called after him. “How do I know you keep them? How do I know my mother is home?” He rounded the corner. “Hey, come back!” She hurried after him.

  The Bear King waited for her by the grand entrance, flanked by shimmering pillars. “A munaqsri cannot break a promise,” he said. “It is the way that nature ensures we fulfill our roles. It is the price of our power.” He walked inside. She followed him and was again surrounded by iridescent sculptures. “The winds brought your mother to the ice while you slept,” he said. “I carried her to your research station before you woke.”

  She halted. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe. The ice frescoes blurred, and she blinked rapidly. Her mother was in the station, walking through the rooms Cassie had walked through, sitting in the kitchen, brushing her teeth in the bathroom, doing all the little things that Cassie couldn’t imagine her mother, mythical person that she was, doing. Just thinking about it made Cassie feel as if the ice had cracked open under her feet. “Was she . . . Was she all right?”

  “She was well,” he said.

  Cassie wanted to ask more: what he’d said and what she’d said, what she looked like, what she sounded like. But Cassie’s throat clogged, and the bear was still walking away from her. “Where . . . Where are you going?” Her voice cracked.

  He looked over his shoulder at her. “I wish to show you what you will leave behind if you return home. Come.”

  Cassie followed him. He led her up spiral blue staircases and into rooms that looked as if they were carved of diamond. She saw a music room with a translucent grand piano and an orchestra-worth of violins and cellos. The strings of the violins were impossibly delicate strands of ice. She wandered down a hall lit by iridescent chandeliers and lined with mirror-smooth ice. In a sitting room with frost-edged sofas, she marveled at a chessboard with carved ice pieces the size of her hand, each sculpted into the shape of an Arctic animal.

  He was right. She had never seen a place like this. She had never imagined any of this existed. What else had she not imagined?

  Her mother, home.

  Maybe if I take a little time, she thought, a couple of days maybe . . . just look at this place. Think of the secrets here, the knowledge. A bear who turns into a man, ice that doesn’t melt, a hidden castle—She could study any one of these mysteries for years. Plus, think of the progress in polar bear research she could make, the questions she could ask and he could answer.

  “Your mother,” she said, asking the first question that popped into her head, “is she a munaqsri like you?”

  “No,” he said.

  Cassie turned to face him. He was sitting by a frozen fountain, images of fish midleap carved into the frozen streams of water.

  “My father is a munaqsri,” he said. “He is a . . . The simplest term is ‘overseer.’ There is a hierarchy of munaqsri. There are munaqsri who care for the souls of a particular species, as I do, and then there are senior munaqsri who care for all the munaqsri of a particular region, such as the wind munaqsri. My father is responsible for the munaqsri of a mountain range in Scandinavia. I have not seen him since I became the caretaker of the polar bears.”

  His face was turned away from her, as if he studied the frozen tumbling water. She tried to imagine what he’d been before he’d become the Bear King. “You weren’t always a bear?”

  “A child of a munaqsri must choose to accept the power and the responsibilities,” he said. “He or she is then assigned to a species by an overseer.”

  “So you chose to become a munaqsri? You had a choice?” She didn’t know why that question was important to her, but it was.

  “I was needed,” he said. “Everything in the world—bears, birds, insects, rivers, seas—requires its own munaqsri to facilitate its existence. Most species require several. Humans, for instance, have hundreds. Beetles, even more. Polar bears need only one, due to the small population size. But still, there is a shortage of munaqsri. Children of munaqsri are rare, and the world desperately needs all of us.”

  That didn’t sound like much of a choice.

  In a quiet voice, the Bear King said, “I did resent my father for my non-choice. Being a munaqsri . . . We keep the world functioning, but we are not truly a part of it.”

  Life at the station wasn’t exactly ordinary either. Cassie shook her head. She couldn’t believe she was empathizing with him. Could they actually have things in common?

  “You must be hungry,” he said abruptly, as if he’d said too much.

  The Bear King led her down another spiral staircase, back into the banquet hall. At his command, the table sprouted another feast. It opened like a flower, bowls of fruit unfolding like petals. A stalk shot into the air and bloomed into a tray of breads. It detached and floated toward Cassie. Staring at it, she retreated.

  “Do not be alarmed,” he said. He sounded amused.

  The tray shook as if impatient, jostling rolls. She stiffened and took a croissant. She wasn’t “alarmed.” She just had never eaten levitating food before. He took a muffin with his massive paw.

  Gingerly, Cassie sat on the ice throne. The throne dwarfed her. Her toes brushed the floor. She was suddenly aware of how small and powerless she was inside this pristine perfection.

  Steam rose from the dishes, and her stomach rumbled. She licked her lips, her mouth watering. She’d never seen so much food before. And it all looked good. She shook her head at herself. The impossible had happened, was currently happening, and her reaction was hunger. Maybe she was adjusting to all the strangeness. Or at least her stomach was. She reached for a steaming dish of carrots in a white sauce.

  The silence stretched, broken only by the tinkle and clink of the serving dishes as they jostled across the table. Cassie tried to picture her mother at the station, sitting down to a meal. She imagined her with Cassie’s favorite mug, as Owen flipped pancakes, and she pictured herself at age four at the table beside her. Again, Cassie’s eyes felt hot.

  She tried to think of a question, an innocuous question, that would let her get some modicum of control back. Making her voice as cheerful as she could manage, she said, “So . . . what were you like as a young cub?”

  “Very humanoid,” he said dryly.

  She almost smiled. He really did have a sense of humor.

  “My childhood . . .” He paused and regarded her as if weighing how he should answer. “My childhood was many years ago,” he said finally. “I am older than I appear, several centuries older.”

  Several centuries? She tried to digest it. “You don’t seem so old.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Several centuries?

  “I had a good childhood, a human one,” he continued. As Cassie filled her plate, he told her about growing up straddled between his father’s mountains and his mother’s Norway. His mother, he said, had been an ordinary human, and she had raised him as a human. He had played with the other village children and had gone to lessons with a tutor. His mother had had hopes he would pursue law. Weekends he’d spent with his father learning about all the things not in his tutor’s books—learning a
bout magic and the responsibilities of the munaqsri, learning how a munaqsri used his power to fulfill his responsibilities.

  “Your turn,” he said when he’d finished.

  “What?” she said, startled.

  “You tell me about your childhood,” he said.

  She hesitated, but she couldn’t think of any excuse why not to. Besides, for some reason that she didn’t explore too closely, she wanted to talk about it.

  She told him about Max and his planes, Gram and her story, and Owen and his gadgets. She told him about how different things were for her compared to, say, Owen’s niece in Fairbanks, whose life consisted of makeup and movies. “First time I ever saw a movie,” Cassie said, “I was four—my first trip to Fairbanks. I was terrified.”

  “I find nothing so strange about that.”

  “It wasn’t a horror movie. It was Mary Poppins.” When she had first seen Julie Andrews float through the air with her umbrella, she had screamed, and Dad had shoved popcorn at her to quiet her. “I managed to calm myself until the scene where the children jump into a chalk painting.” She had thought the sidewalk had swallowed them, and she had proceeded to scream herself hoarse.

  They swapped stories as Cassie devoured honeyed breads, delicately spiced fish, a raspberry tart. Eventually, they fell silent.

  She shifted on the ice throne. She hadn’t meant to talk so much. He was just so easy to talk to. She didn’t like how . . . comfortable she’d felt. He was supposed to be the Polar Bear King, and now when she looked at him, he looked like an overgrown stuffed animal or the Coca-Cola polar bear. Abruptly, she stood up. “Is there more to the castle?” she asked.

  “You do not need to rush,” he said. “You have a full week.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “You asked at least seven questions; you owe me at least seven days,” he said. “It is not a lifetime, but it is a beginning.”

  “I never agreed to your bargain,” she objected.

  He blinked at her. “You are correct,” he said, surprise in his voice. “You did not.”