Elaria Silverstan's Arc

Chapter 34 of 39

Lia woke fully an hour past the archive. The curse was gone, but her strength had not returned. She lifted her head from the cooler's edge and could not hold it up. Her wings twitched and stilled. When Elaria tried to close the lid for travel, the girl's frost dulled at once. Elaria opened her palm above the cooler. Her own heat rolled off it like steam off a kettle. That heat was the problem now. Within hours it would cook the small space again, curse or no curse. Elaria could not carry Lia against her chest. She could not leave her. She needed distance between her body and the girl, and a way to move that did not press them together. She walked the tree line looking for anything she could rig into a drag sled. Behind a stand of pines she found something already made. A sled sat in the snow, shaped from clear ice, its runners curved and thin. Someone had trimmed it with insulated cloth and worked fine fairy patterns into the frame. Snow lay undisturbed around it, as if it had waited. Elaria understood the gift. A sled kept the cooler at arm's length. She could pull it by a line and never touch the girl. Her heat would trail behind, not pool over Lia's face. She set the cooler in the padded seat and packed fresh snow around it. She tied her chain to the front rail and tested the pull. The runners slid clean over the crust. Lia's frost held steady. No heat reached her. Then Elaria found more. Folded in the seat lay a robe of pale, frost-patterned cloth. She shook it out and pulled it over her uniform. The fabric drank her warmth and held it close to her skin, so less of it bled into the air around the sled. A locket rested in the robe's pocket, silver, kissed with frost, a blue stone at its heart. She opened it. Inside sat a small pale stone that pulled faintly downhill, the same direction her crystal called. A guide for the road home. Elaria stood and gripped the chain. The plan was simple and it worked. The girl rode cold behind her. Her body heat drained into the robe and off the back of the sled, not into the cooler. She could move for hours now, not minutes. She started down the slope, the runners hissing behind her. Lia watched from the seat, awake, breathing steady. For the first time since the glacier, Elaria was not racing her own warmth. But the locket's pull was clear, and the paired stone waited somewhere on the road below. She had solved how to move. She had not solved what she was moving toward.