Princess Phillipi's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

They rode through the night and into a gray dawn. Phillipi felt the wind pull at her cloak and knew the trouble in the cloth. Her gown was stitched with silver thread and blue silk, cut in the council's court style. Any farmer on the coast road would know her at one glance. Alaric said as much when they stopped to water the horse. He said the port gates would have watchers, and watchers had eyes for silk. Phillipi looked at her sleeves and understood that reaching the coast in these clothes meant reaching a cell. She made her choice on the spot. She turned the horse east, away from the port road, into the deep woods that climbed toward the old frost line. Alaric asked her why. She said the council would search every road south. They would not search a forest with no village in it. She rode until the trees closed over them and the air went cold enough to sting. In a clearing ringed by black pines she dismounted and pressed both palms flat to the ground. Frost ran out from her fingers in a wide white ring. She lifted her hands and shaped the air. Walls rose out of the earth in pale blue blocks. A roof pitched itself above them, scaled with ice tiles that caught the morning light. Two narrow windows opened in the upper floor. A door set itself in the front wall with a pink stone at its crown. She stepped back and looked at what she had built. It was a house. It was hers. No council seal was on the door. Alaric walked to the threshold and put his bare hand against the ice. He did not flinch. He turned and held the hand out to her, and she took it, and his fingers stayed warm in her cold grip. She pulled off the silk gown at the door and burned it in a small fire he built from pine. She wore a rough wool dress from his pack after. The council could search every road to the coast now and find nothing of her on any of them. They lived in the ice house through that first winter and the winters after. Children came, four of them across the years, each one able to hold their mother's hand without harm. Phillipi taught them to shape frost the way she had shaped the walls. Alaric taught them the sword. The council never found the clearing. But Phillipi knew, every time she looked south through the pines, that the elders had not stopped signing contracts, and that one day someone would come who could read the trees. For now the door held. For now the hand in hers stayed warm.