Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(49)

“We’ll follow it.”

And so they do, Isbe constantly keeping her left gloved hand to the wall, letting it graze along the icy surface, scuffing off snow dust. She doesn’t let go, even as they follow the wall into several more dead ends and back out of them again. She doesn’t let go until Byrne gasps.

“The palace, Your Highness.”

“Byrne.”

He clears his throat. “Miss Isabelle, I mean.”

“Thank you.”

The interior of the palace is warmer than Isbe expected; she is able to lower her hood after several minutes and allow her ears to thaw. They are led by a butler into a cozy parlor room. The massive hides of fanged white bears line the floors and walls, muffling the sounds of their steps and muting the echo of their voices.

Byrne has become a faithful narrator of the visual world, but there are times when Isabelle is glad she cannot see, and this is one of them—though she is curious about the castle, she imagines a whole forest of polar bears must have been massacred for the sake of such insulation. There is an unnerving roar trapped in the walls, the reverberation of ice melting, shifting and refreezing in tiny increments, though she can’t help but think it is the roar of the slaughtered animals.

The palace staff is surprisingly animated. Servants bustle in and out of the room, making Isbe and Byrne comfortable, guiding them into ice chairs that are covered too in bushy pelts of soft fur, offering them thick, lined robes to wear over their clothes and formal slippers and insulated jugs of a syrupy drink that tastes both bitter and saccharine, like candied orange skins. Isbe’s knees and toes are still throbbing from the cold, but she’s heartened by the way the servants seem thrilled to have guests, and yet they are practiced and well trained for their arrival. Isbe wonders if they somehow knew in advance that she was coming.

As if in answer to her thought, a new maid enters, pauses to curtsy, then tells her, “The king has been expecting you.”

A little rush of apprehension zips up Isbe’s spine as she stands to follow her. How could the king possibly have known she was coming? Then again, who could guess what powers a faerie as ancient as he might possess?

“He’ll see you in the library,” the maid says.

The library is full of sleepy afternoon light; Isbe can feel it on her cheeks and dancing against the ice walls around her.

“Your Majesty,” she says, bowing her head and listening for movement.

The king clears his throat, and she moves toward the sound. “It is a blessing, child, that you cannot see the wrinkled and overdressed pile of flesh to which you just bowed.” His voice is ancient and dryly humorous. “What brings you to this icy realm?” he asks.

Isbe readies herself for an argument even as she takes a seat across from him. “You must know,” she launches in, “that your daughter Malfleur is going to win the war against Deluce. The tides have turned in her favor. Evil will come for all of us—even you, eventually. Your precious neutrality will inevitably come under threat.”

He is silent.

“So I’ve traveled all this way to ask for your help.”

“My help?”

“I need a special kind of armor. Something strong enough to resist a deadly magic fire Malfleur’s army has wielded against us.”

He lets out a dry laugh. “I’m quite old, you know. Many people believe that I’m already dead, and sometimes I’m inclined to believe that too.”

“Surely not too old to be of use.” She opens the bag at her hip and holds out the magic slipper. “This is winter glass, is it not?”

He pauses. “It is.”

“And do you know how it was made?”

“Of course. I made it myself.”

Excitement leaps up inside her like a hungry flame. Isbe wants to whoop and cheer and throw her arms around the grizzled old king who, though she can’t see him, must be like a bear himself, she imagines, covered in a white beard and gnarled white hair.

“And can you make more? I need a ship’s worth of winter-glass shields.”

He is quiet for a moment, and Isbe twitches nervously. Finally he says, “Do you know why winter glass is so resistant to destruction in the first place?” He waits a beat, then goes on. “Precisely because it is meant to preserve.”

“Preserve what?” She fidgets. Despite the robe, she feels chilled. Even the air in this room is harsh with cold.

“Stories. Secrets. All ice is a transmutation of actual history, a physical record of what has happened. I simply use my tithe of knowledge to translate specific facts and events into frozen objects. It all started because I couldn’t possibly carry all of the knowledge I had accrued on my own. The mind is a prison, you see. And it is limited in what it can contain. I had to find another way to store what I knew.”

“You’re saying that winter glass is made of . . . information?”

“Exactly. Only when it is melted will its story be known again. But it can only be melted when its true meaning is revealed. It’s a paradox, you see. That is why it’s such a safe method of storage.”

“A paradox.” She pauses, thinking for a minute. “So you wouldn’t be able to tell me what information is stored in this slipper, then, without melting it first?”

“Exactly. But I can’t melt it.”