Freya Valdis's Arc

Chapter 2 of 11

Elsa's father drove them off before dark. He would not have a frozen woman near his flock. So Freya and the girl walked north, into open country, where the wind cut harder and the snow reached their knees. Elsa's teeth chattered inside her thin vest. Freya carried the cold lantern, and the ground behind her steps never softened. The field had a name now, and a direction, but no shelter. If they stopped here, the cold would kill the child before the hunt began. "You're shaking," Freya said. "I can't warm you. I only freeze things." She looked at her own hands, pale and useless. Everything she touched died. Elsa dug in her leather bag. She pulled out a small carved figure, dark wood traced with pale lines like stars. "My father found this in a fallen branch," she said. "He said it was a servant of the gods. He said it hated the cold." The figure twitched in her palm. Thin wings unfolded. It was no carving. It was a pixie, alive, shaped from cosmic wood, and it shivered like the girl. Freya knelt. "A servant of the gods knows the road home." She held the lantern close. The pixie flinched from the blue light. Then it flew, low and fast, toward a black shape hunched in the snow ahead. Freya followed. Elsa stumbled after her. The shape was not a rock. It was a giant, half metal and half water, sunk to his waist in a drift. His chest churned with trapped current, slow and freezing. Guns hung heavy at the ends of his arms. Ice locked his joints. He turned glowing eyes on them. "The water in me is turning to ice," the giant said. His voice ground like gears. "Move me or watch me crack." Freya understood. His body held heat she could not make. If the water froze, he died. If it flowed, it warmed. "You're a furnace," she said. "And I'm the frost that's killing you." She looked at the lantern, then at the pixie hovering near the giant's steaming chest. "Keep the cold in me, and I keep the cold out of you." She pressed her free hand flat to the drift and pulled. Frost raced up her arm and into the snow, hardening it into a shelf. She dragged the ice under the giant's weight. He heaved. The pixie beat its wings against his chest, and the current there quickened. Metal groaned. Then he rose, water flowing warm again inside him. He built them a windbreak from packed snow and stood inside it, radiating heat. Elsa slept against his warm chest. Freya sat apart, her cold held in her own body now, kept from the child at last. "I go north," the giant said. "Same as your hunt." Freya nodded. She had shelter. She had two more lives bound to hers, and a longer road than she'd known.