Glacielle Frostweave's Arc

Chapter 15 of 15

The four pens floated done, but the veil was dying. Aflred had cast it two weeks past. Glacielle counted the days on her cold fingers. Tomorrow the cold layer would thin, then fade. When it did, sunlight would strike her frozen walls and set them shining. Patrols would see the glow from above and follow it down to the door. She swam to Aflred at the reef's edge, where he leaned on his icicle-tipped staff and watched dead water. "Cast it again," she said. "Buy me two more weeks." Aflred did not turn. "I can. But every casting kills more fish. The reef is already bare. Two weeks more and nothing swims back. You'll owe three more families, not three." He tapped the staff on the stone. "The veil hides you. It cannot save you." Glacielle stared at the glowing walls behind the coral door. Hiding had a floor, and she had reached it. She could not keep trading dead water for time. She needed the walls to stop shining, not stay covered. A broad shadow slid over her. Thaldrin, the scarred merman Lysander had brought without asking. His body was inked with old battles, and he carried a war trident he never set down. He had sworn no love for her city, only for a person the tide law took from him. He looked at the shining walls, then at her. "You freeze in the open," Thaldrin said. "That's your fault. In the deep, we build in caves. No light reaches. Nothing shines." "Caves collapse," Glacielle said. "I chose the canyon so I wouldn't be buried." "Not all of them." He turned and swam. She followed, because she had nothing else left to try. He led her past the dead coral to a place she had never gone, a low mouth in the canyon wall. Inside, sea glass and rock and coral caught the water's dim light and threw it back soft. A frozen pond gleamed at the cave's lip. The stone roof was solid. No sunlight could reach the walls within. "Freeze here," Thaldrin said. "Out there you glow. In here you don't." Glacielle pressed her palm to the cave wall. Stone, thick and sound. She could move the city inward, wall by wall, into the dark where light died before it touched her ice. No veil. No dead reef. No shining. "It doubles my work," she said. "It ends the running," he said. She let the veil die. The next day it faded, and sunlight fell through the open water and lit her old walls bright as glass. But the door and the true rooms had gone inward, into the cave's dark throat, where no patrol could ever see them shine. The families would still come for their pens. The path was still open. And now six knew the deep way in, not five.