The Altar of Fossil Rime

They left the horses at the last sheepfold and went on foot up the gorge of the Black Wind, along ledges of slate where one wrong step meant a thousand varas of fall. Uxía went ahead, leaping from stone to stone as if the mountain were her own back yard, and now and then she turned to shush them when they made noise. Kieran brought up the rear with his mountain axe, cutting steps in the ice so the queen could set her felt boots.

The cold changed its nature as they climbed. Down below it was the damp cold of Oakhaven's streams, the kind that gets into the bones and stays. Up there it was something else: dry, clean, so deep it seemed to freeze thoughts before they reached the mouth. Elenora stopped feeling her face in the second hour and stopped complaining in the third.

"My grandmother climbed up to the split slab once," Uxía said during a rest, her mouth full of hard bread. "For a goat. She says you could hear something under the snow from there, like a drum very far away. She came down without the goat."

"And what was it?" asked Kieran.

"My grandmother says it was the heart of the mountain. My mother says my grandmother drank."

"I'm not going any higher than this," Uxía said when they reached a split slab, in the fourth watch. "My grandmother used to say whoever passes this stone without being called doesn't come down."

"No one is asking you to pass it," said Elenora. "Wait for us here. If we haven't come back by dawn, go down to Oakhaven and find the seneschal."

"And what do I tell him?"

"What you see."

Uxía sat down on the slab hugging her knees and said nothing more, which was the closest thing to a yes she knew how to give a queen.

The slope eased and opened into an amphitheater carved into the living rock. Seven monoliths of black basalt, polished like mirrors by centuries of blizzard, surrounded a well of blue ice that gave off a cold, shadowless light, like that of a buried moon. No wind blew. Not a flake fell. It was a silence from before the world's first spring.

As she passed between the monoliths, Elenora saw herself reflected in all seven at once: seven small queens with mud-stained green mantles and wind-burned faces, each looking at her from a different angle. None of them wore a crown. She had left it in the chapel, beside the letter, and until that moment she hadn't noticed.

Elenora took off her right glove and went to the edge. The ice of the well was so clear you could see the bottom: far below, a pale mass that beat with the slowness of a sleeping heart. She drew the silver dagger of her line.

"I am Elenora, queen of Oakhaven," she said, and her voice rebounded off the seven black mirrors. "I have come to ask the winter to guard my house."

The ice cracked with a report that shook the whole mountain. From the bottom rose a whirl of blue mist that took shape: a figure as tall as two men, made of frost and crystal needles, with two eyes of pale, lidless light. When it spoke, the voice came from nowhere; it vibrated directly in the teeth.

Winter gives nothing away. Whoever asks for its shield gives up their warmth. Their heart will be the key of the frost until someone comes to pledge the thaw with a true oath and no chains.

Kieran sprang in front of her, sword on guard.

"Take mine. I bring it warm. It's what you ask for."

Elenora laid her bare hand on his forearm and lowered it with a gentleness he didn't know how to fight.

"No, Kieran. I know what the shepherd girl told you. I knew it as soon as I saw the wolf cloak." She held his gaze. "A commander's blood belongs to the walls that have to hold. A crown's debt is paid by whoever wears it. I told you so on the wall walk and I didn't say it lightly."

She turned toward the well and opened her palm with the dagger. Her blood fell onto the ice and each drop hissed like molten lead, opening a web of glowing cracks that ran across the crater to the foot of the monoliths.

"Let a winter fall on Oakhaven that no army can cross," said the queen. "Let the windows be covered with a frost no stone can break. And let it last until someone comes to undo it with truth."

The figure bowed its head, crowned with icicles.

So it is sealed.

From the well burst a white tide that spilled over the rim of the crater and began to flow down the slope toward the valley.