Frost twins's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

The door stood open behind us. The portrait held us where we stood. A boy and a girl in cool blue, framed in ice, hung above a bed made for two. Our body would not move. She stared at the girl. I stared at the boy. Neither of us knew who they were, but we both knew what they had been: a student the older fairy had taught, and someone she had loved enough to hang on her wall. "She said one student died," I said. "There are two faces." "Then one of them watched," she said. We crossed the room together for the first time all day. On a low shelf below the portrait lay a pair of throwing knives, twin blades cut with matching snowflakes, the handles cold enough to sting through our glove. We picked one up. A dog-shaped shadow rose from the corner where it had been sleeping, its wings folding down against crystal-tipped fur. It watched us with pale blue eyes and did not growl. It had known these knives. It had known the hands that carried them. The older fairy spoke from the hall. We had not heard her come back. "Put it down." We did. She stepped between us and the shelf. "Two students," she said. "A brother and a sister. They tried the spell together, thinking two wills could share the weight. The spell does not split. It picks one caster and burns the other out. She cast. He watched her freeze. He walked into the lake a week later." She looked up at the portrait, then at each of our faces. "You are not the first pair to think you are the answer. You are the second." She pointed at the door. "In the morning I send you to the lake tribe. They will refuse you too. Then you will go home." She left us. The hound settled at our feet. She and I did not argue. We understood, both of us at once, what the picture had been trying to say. Two wills did not make the spell safer. Two wills made a caster and a witness. One of us would burn. The other would carry it. We sat on the edge of the bed and looked at our shared hands, and for a long time we could not decide which of us was which in that story. Our body did not move, but this time the stillness was not a fight. It was the first thing we had agreed on since the snow: we could not attempt the spell the way the twins in the portrait had. We would have to find another way, or not cast it at all.