Zella's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Zella pressed her back to the ice wall and counted three corridors she could not read. Green shoots pushed up from the stone where her bare feet had rested. She scuffed them flat with her heel. The frost lord's guards followed trails, and hers grew faster than she could hide it. She had been underground for one full turn of seasons. The frost lord called her his garden. He kept her in halls where nothing else grew, and he set patrols at every stair. Tonight she meant to reach the surface. Above her, in a purple house at the edge of a warm field, someone waited who had promised to hold the door open until dawn. Zella meant to walk through that door as a free woman and name him hers out loud. The problem was the map. She had memorized four turns from the kitchen drain. After that, the halls forked and forked again. One wrong choice would drop her into the guard corridor below the west stair. She had heard the boots down there an hour ago. A flower opened in her hair. She crushed it against her palm. She needed eyes that were not her own. She knelt by the seep at the base of the wall and whispered to the water. Something moved under the surface. A salamander climbed out onto her wrist, its skin dark and marked with pale glowing lines. It blinked at her once. Small creatures still answered spring, even down here. "Ahead," she said. "Find the cold air. Not the boots." The salamander slipped from her wrist and moved along the floor. Its glow pulsed once at the first fork, twice at the second. She followed. At the third fork it stopped. It backed up. Then it turned into the left passage and pulsed twice. She heard the guards then, faint, from the right. She had been about to take the right. She would have walked straight into them. She went left. The salamander led her through two more turns, past a grate that breathed cold surface air, and up a narrow shaft cut for meltwater. Green shoots sprang up every place she touched. She did not stop to hide them now. Speed mattered more than the trail. She climbed until her hands met loose snow. She pushed through and lay in open dark. Wind moved over her face. Above the field she saw the shape of a tall purple house with a lamp burning in the front window. She stood. The salamander was gone. Her footprints behind her bloomed into a bright green line pointing straight at the hole she had climbed from. The frost lord would see that trail at first light. He would know exactly where she had gone, and he would know exactly whose door she had chosen.