The Kiss Beneath the Eternal Gale

From the summit they saw it all. The tide of frost flowed down the slopes like a sheet being spread over a bed, without a sound, and wherever it touched, time seemed to stop. The duke's siege towers were covered with icicles as thick as an arm; the arquebusiers' powder was soaked under a snow fine as flour; the horses broke their tethers and fled south dragging the tents behind them. Before the moon rose, the hundred fires had gone out and the tercios were running in rout down the ravines, throwing away pikes and banners to reach the warm lands sooner.

And the frost kept coming down until it reached Oakhaven. It covered the moat, the battlements, the slate roofs. It covered the three hundred windows of the great hall with a layer of ice so thick and so clear that from above the stronghold seemed carved from a single diamond. Elenora knew what it meant. Her people were safe, and her people were going to live in winter. For a long time. Longer than she could imagine.

She thought of the women in the line at the well, of the baker who argued every morning over half a loaf, of the boy with no leg in the infirmary, who would wake tomorrow with frost on his blanket and not a single tercio at the foot of the wall. She thought of Bermudo, who was six and hated the cold. He was going to grow up in winter. He was going to reign in winter. She hoped someone would teach him to ride.

In the crater, the cold began to fall toward something that no longer had a name.

It was no longer winter cold. It was the cold from before the seasons existed, the cold that had slept at the bottom of the well waiting for someone to call it by name.

Elenora felt it first in her fingertips and then in her chest, just above her heart, as if someone had laid a frozen coin there that was slowly sinking. Small hexagons of blue ice clung to the green velvet of her mantle and climbed, slowly, with the patience of a forest turning to stone. She looked down. In her open palm, the wound no longer bled. It shone.

Kieran threw his sword into the snow and wrapped her in the wolf-fur cloak, the one he had chosen for her without knowing it.

"Go," said Elenora. "Uxía is waiting at the slab. Go down with her. Oakhaven needs its commander more than ever: these are going to be very long winters."

"Oakhaven has Mauricio, and your brother, and a letter of yours on the altar that says it all better than I could." Kieran brushed the crystals that were forming from her copper hair. "It has no one to keep you company up here."

"You'll freeze."

"I know that." He smiled, and it was the smile of the boy who had taught her to ride. "I swore no cold would touch you while I had breath left. Let me keep it my own way. If I can't take the cold from you, at least you won't have to swallow it alone."

Elenora wanted to argue and had no strength left for it. Her eyes filled with tears that froze as they ran down her cheekbones. All her life they had told her that a queen has no right to what shepherd girls have, and all her life she had believed it.

"For ten years," she said, "every time you climbed the tower to change the guard, I counted your steps on the stairs."

"Thirty-nine."

"Thirty-nine."

Kieran bowed his head and kissed her. It was a clumsy kiss, with lips cracked by the cold, and it lasted a long time, and there was room in it for ten years of corridors and watches on the battlements and things that had not been said because it wasn't their place to say them.

The ice kept climbing. It covered their shoulders, their tangled hair, the hands that did not let go. Kieran kept his arms closed around her with a stubbornness that had nothing to do with physics, as if he could argue with the glacier.

From the split slab, a hundred paces below, Uxía saw it all with her hands stuffed in her mouth so as not to scream: the blue light of the well, the two figures embraced in the middle of the crater, the gleam that covered them like varnish. She saw the queen, at the last moment, raise her wounded hand toward the sky. And she saw something small, the size of a walnut, come loose from that palm and roll across the snow until it stopped at her feet.

It was a piece of ice that was beating.

Uxía picked it up with both hands, the way one picks up a bird fallen from the nest. It burned with cold. When she looked back toward the crater, the light of the well had gone out and in the middle there was only a shining shape under the moon, motionless, that from a distance looked like a single person.