Annie Philaxis counted her stolen souls again, and the number had not grown. Twelve small lights hung in the frozen hall of her buried orphanage, each one a lost child she had lured from the snow. She needed them for the throne. Far north, at the heart of the world's oldest glacier, an empty seat of ice waited for a witch strong enough to claim it. Annie meant to be its queen. But twelve souls could not fuel deep ice magic. Twelve would leave her frozen dead before she reached the coldest reaches. She pressed her palm to the stained glass. Colored light fell across her hands. Outside, snow buried the orphanage doors to the second step. She had drained this valley of its lost children. There were no more to take here. So Annie remembered the willows. Days' walk south, past the frost line, grew a cluster of tall willow trees. Their branches still ran green. Beehives hung at their roots, warm with living bees. Warmth meant life. Life meant souls she had never touched. She wrapped herself in furs and walked until the snow thinned and grass returned. Under the willows she found two children. Twins, a boy and a girl, huddled against a trunk. They wore pale pink and blue coats gone gray with cold. Between them they shared a dented thermos, tipping the last warmth into each other's mouths. "Our family was in the car," the girl said. "The blizzard came. We walked and walked." The boy did not speak. He only watched Annie with steady eyes, and did not let go of his sister's sleeve. Lost children. Two more souls. Annie knelt and opened her cold hands to take them. But the twins were not dying. The willows kept them. The grass fed the bees, the bees warmed the air, and the children breathed easy in it. Annie's magic could only harvest a soul as it slipped free. These two clung to life too hard. So she made a choice. She lied. "I know the way home," she said. "Follow me north." They rose at once. They trusted her, because she was warm-voiced and sure. She led them out of the green and back onto the ice, where the wind would do the work the willows had prevented. Two more lights for her throne. Two more, and perhaps enough. But the boy walked strangely. Halfway across the first white slope he stopped. He held out the thermos to Annie, still offering warmth to a stranger who meant to end him. Annie took it. Her hand did not turn his soul loose. Instead something in her chest cracked, small and unwanted, like ice under a boot. She had her plan. She had two children on the ice and a throne close enough to taste. She had never before wanted to give a soul back. Annie kept walking north. The twins followed. She did not look at the thermos in her hands again.

Six of them slept by the fire now. Annie kept watch. She could not sit still. The throne to the north still waited, and she still did not know how to fill her count without stealing. She turned to the young woman in the corner, the blind one who had helped her break the witches. Cassandra Vale saw the future. For days her visions of Annie had grown darker, and she would not say why. Annie crossed the room and knelt in front of her. "You have watched me all night," Annie said. "You flinch when you look at me. Tell me what you see." Cassandra's blank eyes stayed still. "You do not want it." "I want the truth more than I want comfort. Say it." The blind woman drew a slow breath. "You reach the throne with a full count. You touch it. It finds the crack in you and makes a copy. The copy walks back down the glacier wearing your face." She paused. "The copy is kind. That is how no one knows." Across the fire, Marigold woke. She sat up with a hand on her belly and listened without a word. "Which crack," Annie said. "Name it." "These people." Cassandra tilted her head toward the sleepers. "The children. The pregnant one. The broken father. You love them now. The throne will use that door." Annie went cold in a way the storm had never made her. The three witches before her had failed because they loved something more than power. She had thought she'd escaped that trap by choosing love. Cassandra told her love was still the trap. Every soul she gathered by kindness bound her tighter to people the throne could copy through. "Then I cannot win," Annie said. "If I stay cruel, the count stays at twelve. If I grow kind, the throne breaks me at the door." "That is what I have seen. Again and again." Cassandra reached into her robe and drew out a scrap of paper covered in her own scrawl. "But the vision changed tonight. Once. You did not touch the throne with your hand." "With what, then?" "I could not see. It went dark there. That is new." Cassandra folded the paper away. "The dark means you have not decided yet. The copy is not certain. You can still make it a lie." Marigold spoke from across the fire, plain and quiet. "So don't reach for it the way they did." Annie looked at the woman, then at the sleeping twins, then at her own bare hands. The seer had named the blade at her throat. She was no longer walking blind. She knew now that the old path and the new path both ended in a copy on the throne. There had to be a third way to touch it, one that used no crack the throne could find. "Then I stop counting souls," Annie said. "I have to find a way to claim it that costs me no one."

Amber had been gone three days. Annie stayed bound to the throne, unable to chase her heir into the safe garden below. So she sent word to her sister. Zev knew the earth. Zev could track a girl by the warmth of her footprints in cold ground. Zev came dirt-handed to the throne room. "She's past the seam," Zev said. "In the low garden. She isn't alone." Annie's chest tightened. "Who's with her?" Zev pressed her palm to the ice floor and shut her eyes. "A small one. Frozen half through. Alive, but barely." Marigold rose from the hearth, still weak. "A lost child," she said. "Amber found a lost child." She looked at Annie. The same road Annie once walked, luring the lost into the cold. But Amber was not Annie. Annie unbound herself from the seat only in her mind, sending the one person who could go. "Zev. Bring them both back. Please." Zev found them by the old boundary stones. Young Amber knelt over a girl no bigger than a lamb, chafing her blue hands. "She wandered in," Amber said flatly. "I couldn't leave her. I'm not the book. But I'm not that either." The frozen child's eyes fluttered. She had touched true death and it had not taken her. Amber had held her back from it. Zev knelt and read the child through the soil beneath her. "Her name is not in any ledger," Zev said. "She belongs to no one up here. If she dies now, she dies unnamed." Amber's jaw set. "Then she won't die." She wrapped her cloak around the small body and lifted her. They carried the child up past the seam, into the warmth of the sheltered haven at the glacier's foot. Marigold met them at the door. She built a fire while Zev pressed the earth-heat back into the girl's chest. Slowly the blue left the child's lips. She breathed. She lived. Amber stood apart, watching the small chest rise and fall. "I ran because I didn't want to be spent," she said. "Then I found her freezing and I spent myself anyway. Nobody made me." Annie's voice reached her from the throne through the bond they shared. Amber felt it, warm, not cold. "That's the difference," Annie's thought pressed. "You chose it. That's not the book taking you. That's you." Amber looked at the child she had saved. "I know who I am now," she said. "I'm the one who doesn't let them freeze." She did not come home to the peak. Not yet. But she stayed at the haven with the rescued girl, no longer running, choosing her own place. Annie sat the throne with a steadier heart. Her heir had walked her mother's old road and turned it warm. The crown held. But now an unnamed child breathed below, one more soul the ledger did not hold, one more weight pulling at the wall.

The four smallest Frost Sinklings stood in the warm soil, newly named. The throne had bound them, but Annie knew names were not enough. A child could freeze from ignorance as fast as from cold. The new heirs had to be taught what the throne would do to them. She sent for Zev. Zev came with the four small ones trailing her like shoots after rain. She knelt in the greenhouse dirt and gathered them close. "The seat pulls at you," she said. "You will feel it in your roots. A hook under the ground." She pressed each small hand flat to the soil. "When it pulls, you push back into the earth. Not toward the ice. Down." Veruca, the youngest, pushed her palm hard against the dirt and grinned when the ground held her. Verdant watched from the doorway, counting under her breath. Zev did not soften it. "It wants you because you are new weight. It always wants new weight." Flora watched from her root-woven body. Her neon leaves had grown into limbs now, and she moved without her pot. She listened to Zev teach her seed to bend toward the earth, and her leaves stiffened. "You teach them to kneel," Flora said. "I teach them to survive," Zev said. Flora reached a vine toward Veruca. "There is another lesson. The throne is not the only one who names you. She names you." Flora's voice went flat as she pointed at Annie. "The witch. She wrote you in a book you never read. She calls that a gift." Veruca's leaf-hair began to curl and pale. "You do not have to obey her. Roots break stone. You could break her ledger." Annie felt the throne shiver up her spine. Flora was seeding rebellion in children too young to weigh it, and the frost climbed the glass in answer. Zev stood between Flora and the four small ones. "No." She did not raise her voice. "You want them to fight so you are not alone in fighting. That is not love. That is hunger wearing your face." Flora's vine stopped mid-air. Named, it had no more pull. Veruca's leaves uncurled. She looked from Flora to Zev and put both hands back in the dirt. "Whose weight are you?" Zev asked her. "The ground's," Veruca said. "And yours." The frost slid back down the glass. The throne quieted, its heirs anchored by choice instead of fear. Flora drew her vine in. "They will learn," she said. "Later. When you are not looking." She turned her root-body toward the far wall and went still. Zev pressed her forehead to Veruca's. "I count them every morning now," she told Annie. "Same as Verdant. Flora will try again." Annie looked at the four small ones, taught and held, and at the plant who had bred them to break her. The heirs were safe today. But Flora lived inside the court now, patient as a root, and Annie would have to watch her own children for the crack she meant to grow.

The throne still had no queen, but its patience gave Annie one clear task. If the frost stalked children beyond the seam, she needed a place lower down where humans and Sinklings could meet safely. Her sister Zev knew the road below. So Annie went to find her at the old roadside inn, its dark timbers frosted white, its windows warm with lamplight. Zev met her on the porch, mud on her hands from the frozen ground. Zev was Annie's twin, her lost blood, an earth witch who read old magic through soil. They did not embrace. They rarely did. "A bus went off the road," Zev said. "Into the snowbank past the bend. Full of people. They're still inside." Annie followed the glowing slime trail an insect had left along the road, its colors bubbling faint in the dark. It led straight to the buried bus. The engine ticked. Inside, a dozen strangers pressed against fogged glass, too cold to dig themselves free. They saw Annie's white face and shrank back. They knew the stories of the ice queen. "They think I've come to freeze them," Annie said. "Then don't," Zev said. Annie knelt and pressed her bare hand to the snowbank. She did not steal warmth. She gave it. The snow softened. The door groaned open. But the cold in the bus had already reached the bone, and the strangers were too stiff to move on their own. That was when the Sinklings came. The four Sprouts and Lumina Frostcrawler had trailed Zev down the road. Lumina was a frost snail, her shell glowing neon in the dark, green vines curling from her body. She crawled into the bus without fear. The strangers stared at the leaf-fingered children climbing in after her. "Warm the ground," Annie told the Sprouts. "Root them like you root yourselves." The children pressed their leaf hands to the floor. Warmth rose. Lumina's vines reached out on their own and wrapped a shivering woman's wrists, steadying her. Annie held a spark of light in her palm to guide them, its glow crisp and bright. One by one, the strangers stepped out into the softened snow. They gripped children's hands. They let plant-fingers pull them upright. Nobody flinched now. Inside the inn, Zev poured hot water. The rescued strangers sat with Sinklings at their feet, and no one screamed. A child leaned against Verdant's shoulder. Annie watched, and something loosened in her chest. Marigold arrived at the door as the last stranger warmed. She looked at the room, humans and Sprouts together, unafraid. "This is what I wanted," she said quietly. Annie took her wife's hand. The inn was full and no one had frozen. The Sinklings had learned to work close beside humans, and humans had learned to let them. But the throne above still waited empty, and its cold would not hold off forever.

The morning after the feast, the inn still smelled of woodsmoke and stew. Annie thought the danger had passed. Then Zev came down the stairs holding a bowl, her face gray. "The families ate the greens I picked by the river," she said. "I chopped the wrong caps into the pot. The bright ones." Annie looked at the cluster on the counter—neon pink and orange, dotted like wet glass. The hallucinogenic mushrooms. Zev's hands shook. "I served it to everyone last night. And I gave the recipe to two others to make for their own tables today." Upstairs, a woman laughed at a wall. A rescued father wept over a chair he swore was his drowned brother. A boy screamed that the frost was crawling up his legs, though the room was warm. Tobi ran to Annie, wide-eyed. "They think the walls are melting. Veruca won't stop spinning." Even the Sprouts had eaten. Their leaf-hair had flushed a sick, glowing purple. Annie made herself think. "The spores are water-proof," Zev said. "I can't wash them out. They're already in the blood." Annie remembered how her sister read earth and bone. "Then you don't wash the spore. You draw it. Like drawing frost from a name." Zev's eyes cleared. "Root magic. I pull it into the soil, not the water." But they needed the whole inn awake and still, all at once, or the panic would spread the dosing further. Annie's gaze fell on the crackling orb Zev had built for the children's games—a ball of neon light wrapped in sparks. She lifted it. "They followed the snail's glow before. They'll follow this." She carried the orb to the center of the room and set it spinning. Its light snapped and hummed, bright as a small sun. "Look at the orb," Annie called. "Only the orb." The staring faces turned. The weeping father stopped mid-sob. The spinning girl slowed. Lumina Frostcrawler crawled to the orb's base, her shell blazing, and the Sprouts crept toward her cold light out of habit. With everyone gathered and fixed, Zev knelt and pressed both palms to the floorboards. "Down," she whispered. "Give it to the ground." The warmth of the wood answered her. One by one, the neon flush drained from the Sprouts' leaves. The father blinked and knew the chair was a chair. The boy touched his own legs and found them whole. The room came back. Zev sagged, spent, the sickness pulled through her and into the earth below. Annie caught the mushroom cluster and threw it in the fire, where it hissed and shriveled. But the families were awake now, and they knew what had happened. "You dosed us," the father said, not cruel, only afraid. "Every one of us. Our children." He looked at Zev, then at Annie. "How do we ever eat at your table again?" Annie had no answer. The frost above them had not moved—but the trust below had cracked, and a queendom could not stand on a table no one would sit at.