The Three Hundred Panes of Winter

It took Uxía two days to get down. She wrapped the piece of ice in her kerchief and tucked it under her shirt, against her skin, and the cold it gave off left a blue mark on her chest that would stay with her all her life. On the way down she met no one. The tercios had fled so fast they left behind pots over fires long gone out, boots, a cart with its mule still yoked and frozen standing up. The whole valley was white and silent, as if it had been wrapped in cotton wool.

She slept the first night in the sheepfold where they had left the horses. The horses were gone; only their tracks remained, filled with frost, heading down to the valley.

Oakhaven was not asleep. That was the first thing that surprised her. She had expected to find a castle of statues, like in her grandmother's tales, and instead found sentries stamping their feet on the wall walk to keep from freezing, smoke from every chimney and a line of women with pitchers in front of the only well that hadn't frozen. Winter had fallen on them all at once, with no autumn to herald it, and the people had done what mountain people do: curse, light a fire and carry on.

They brought her before the seneschal Mauricio in the chapel, where the old man had spent the night reading and rereading the letter from the altar. Beside him, wrapped in a blanket too big for him, sat Bermudo, the queen's brother, who was six and looked at Uxía the way one looks at someone who has come from very far away.

"Tell me what you saw," said the seneschal.

Uxía told him. All of it, without embellishment, as the queen had asked: what you see. The well, the figure of frost, the blood on the ice. The wolf cloak. The two figures who did not let go. When she had finished, she took the kerchief from under her shirt and opened it on the altar. The piece of ice was beating slowly, once every few seconds, and in the frozen chapel it was the only thing that moved.

Mauricio didn't touch it. He looked at it for a long time.

"The queen's heart is the key of the frost," he murmured, repeating Uxía's words. "Until someone comes to undo it with a true oath."

"And what do we do with it?" asked Bermudo.

"Keep it." The old man passed a hand over his face. "If it breaks, the winter breaks, and with it the wall that saved us. We'll take it down to the cave of the Blind Glacier, beneath the stronghold, where the sun never reaches. And every heir of Oakhaven will carry it, as she did, so they never forget what it cost."

"And the queen?" asked Bermudo.

"Up there," said Uxía. "With him."

The boy thought about it, the blanket up to his ears.

"Is she cold?"

Uxía didn't know what to answer. She remembered the kiss, the arms that didn't let go, the wolf cloak. "Less than we are," she said at last, and didn't know whether she was lying.

Uxía thought that was a great weight for a six-year-old. She didn't say so. She also thought that the queen hadn't asked for that; she had asked for someone to come and undo the winter, not for it to be kept like a relic. She didn't say that either. She was fourteen and standing before a seneschal.

That night, before going back to her village, she climbed to the great hall. The three hundred windows were frosted inside and out, and the moonlight came through them turned into a blue glow that cast no shadow. She stood looking at them for a while. On one, the highest, the ice had drawn, without anyone touching it, two figures in an embrace.

The winter lasted three hundred years.

The shepherds of the Gorge of Souls kept telling the story by the fire, and each generation told it a little differently. In the south, the court chroniclers wrote that Oakhaven had fallen under a demonic curse, because they couldn't understand a queen preferring ice to servitude. In Oakhaven, every heir went down into the cave of the Blind Glacier at the age of seven and came out with the cold inside, and some grew cruel from it and others grew sad, and nearly all of them forgot that the queen had not asked for a relic, but for a thaw.

Until one night, three centuries later, a girl from the south crossed the viaduct of the Seven Eyes with a forged safe-conduct in her doublet and a lie to tell at the prince's court. She knew nothing of Elenora. She knew nothing of Kieran. She only knew that, to save her brother, she had to pretend an oath.

The frost on the highest window, the one with the two embracing figures, cracked once as she passed beneath it. No one heard.