Frost Sage's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The blizzard had never left Frost Sage. It clung to her like a second robe, thickening the air, walling her in with white. She sat where the girl had left her, the ice kitten curled at her feet. When she tried to rise, the wind shoved her down. The storm she rode was the storm that trapped her. She could not see the road. She could not see the shelter. And somewhere in the ice, she felt a new danger stir, sharp and cold, forming faster than she could reach it. "You feed the storm and then it eats you," she said aloud. "Old fool." She struck her staff on the frozen ground. The cracked glacier shard at its top hummed. She had always let the blizzard carry her where it willed. Tonight she would bend it instead. She pressed both hands to the shard and pushed her sight outward, past the white, hunting for the shape of what was coming. A figure stepped through the snow. Tall. Unbending. A black fur crown sat on pale hair, and white robes moved without a single flake settling on them. Frost Sage knew the face. Every wanderer knew it. The queen who had not aged in forty years. "Mira Pale," Frost Sage said. "You should not be out here." "Neither should you." Mira's voice was flat and certain. She looked at the trapped old woman without pity. "I felt the ice change. I have felt it change for forty years. I came to see who else could feel it." Frost Sage understood then. The queen's stillness, her frozen youth, were tied to the same power. "You hold the cold," Frost Sage said. "It holds you. That is why you don't age." Mira's cold eyes did not blink. "Show me what you see." Frost Sage set the ice kitten before the queen. The small creature breathed across a slab of ice. The blurred vision she had chased sharpened under Mira's shadow. In the clear surface a river of ice showed, a village below it, and a great crack racing down the frozen slope. "An ice fall," Frost Sage said. "It buries the low houses by dawn." She gripped her staff. "But I am boxed in. The storm won't let me out." Mira raised one hand. The wind around them stopped. The wall of white peeled back, opening a clear path down the slope. "The storm answers me," Mira said. "I will send my riders. But I want what you have. Eyes that see before the ice breaks." Frost Sage rose, her legs steady now. She had wanted pupils spread across the land. She had found one who could command the very storm that once caged her. Yet the queen's price hung unspoken, and her ageless calm chilled worse than the wind. "Then we begin," Frost Sage said, and stepped onto the open road.