Frost twins's Arc

Chapter 5 of 7

The door of the pale spired house sat flush with the drift. We knocked once. Nothing answered. She knocked again, harder, and the sound went flat against the wood like a stone dropped in snow. I pressed an ear to the door. No footsteps. No voice. A row of small frozen shapes watched us from a shelf carved into the wall beside the frame — bunnies of clear ice, ears up, eyes bright. They did not move, but they were listening. She said Glacienne Frostwhisper was inside. I said Glacienne Frostwhisper did not care that we were. "We need to give her a reason," she said. "Then cast something," I said. "Small. Enough that she feels it through the wall." We drew the twin knives from our belt and set the points against the door. She wanted a frost sigil. I wanted a cold pull, the kind that draws breath out of a room. The body stalled the way it always stalled. Then heat came up behind us on the ice, wrong and sudden, and we turned. A fire fairy stood on the frozen creek at the foot of the steps. Not the one who had walked us across. This one was smaller, angrier, hair burning white at the tips. He said we did not belong at this door. He said the ice court had claims here, and he had been paid to keep the door shut. He threw fire. It came in a low sheet across the drift, and the bunnies on the shelf cracked from the heat, one ear falling, then another. We stepped back against the wood. Our gloves smoked. Then the sky above the spires split open with a beat of wings, and a hound came down onto the step between us and the fire — the same shape that had left us at the shore, or its brother, ice grown along its ribs and white feathers wide as a door. Behind the hound walked a man in white and gold, no older than a boy, his crown of ice sharp enough to draw blood. Angel Frostborne. He did not look at us. "Cast," he said. "I will hold him." He stepped past us onto the creek. The hound followed. Fire met ice on the seam of running water, and steam went up in a wall we could not see through. We turned back to the door. Two wills. One body. She said frost sigil. I said cold pull. Then we looked at each other and did not argue. We set both knife points to the wood and cast together — her sigil traced in my pull — and the cold went through the door like a hand. The door opened. A woman stood in the gap, small and gray-eyed, a cup of something steaming in her hand. She looked at the steam behind us, then at our knives, then at our two faces. "You cast that together," she said. "Come in. Quickly." We stepped inside. The door shut on the noise of the fight. Somewhere behind us, on the ice, the ice king was still holding the line.