Dusty Spellwood had one hour of daylight left, a silk gown down to his boots, and no coat. He stood on the porch of his family's crooked mansion and read the tracker's note again. The frost stallion had been sighted at the edge of the northern glacier, and it would move on by dawn. Everyone in three counties knew the story. Ride the spell-branded stallion and it carries you straight to the person you're meant to love. Dusty had spent two years reading every scroll in the study wing about it. He was twenty-four, unmarried, and tired of eating supper alone under a chandelier built for twelve. He shoved the note in his sleeve and went to the paddock. His own horse, a gentle bay, watched him with a bored eye. Dusty pulled on his cowboy hat, the one thing his father left him that fit. The hat was oiled leather. The gown was thin embroidered silk. Neither would keep a man alive one night on the glacier. He knew this. He had known it since the note arrived. The problem was that his winter cloak had burned in a spell mishap last week, and the tailor in town needed six days. He had one afternoon. The calico cat wound around his ankles, chirping. Dusty crouched. "I know," he said. "I'll freeze solid before I see him." The cat trotted off toward the garden wall and sat under the small flowering tree there. Then she looked back at him. Waited. Trotted three more steps. Looked back again. Dusty followed. Behind the chamomile tree, tucked against the willow's cascading branches, grew a plant he had walked past a hundred times. Layered leaves. Pale blossoms giving off a steady, low heat he could feel on his cheeks from two paces away. A warmnight bloom. His mother had planted it before she died. He had forgotten what it was for. He pressed a palm against the largest blossom. Warm as a banked stove. He counted the flowers. Seven open, four in bud. He went to work. He cut the blooms at the stem, careful of the roots. He stitched them into the gown's hem and the hatband, one at every point where wind would find him. The silk began to glow faintly from inside. When he pulled the gown back on, warmth moved up his legs like bathwater. He saddled the bay and rode out with the cat watching from the porch rail. By the time he reached the tree line the temperature had dropped past bearable, and he was still warm. The gown held. The hat held. Three miles on, he saw hoofprints in the crust, each one ringed with faint colored light where the brands had touched down. The stallion was close. And now Dusty had no excuse to turn back.

The bay carried Dusty deeper into the glacier's shadow. The colored hoofprints held for another mile. Then the wind came off the ice wall in a hard, flat sheet, and the snow under him lifted and moved like a river. When it settled, the crust was smooth again. No prints. No brand-light. Nothing. Dusty pulled the bay up. He turned in the saddle. Behind him, his own tracks were already filling. Ahead, only white. The warmnight blooms on his hem still gave off heat, but the sun sat low, and the cold pressing on his face had teeth now. An hour, maybe less, before dark. He climbed down and walked a slow circle, hunting any dent in the crust. He found nothing. He tried a wider circle. Still nothing. The stallion's trail was gone, and with it his reason to be alive out here. He was about to swing back up when he saw the petal. It lay on the snow ten paces off, pink, curled at the edge, out of place as a coin in a river. He walked to it. Past it, another. Then a scatter of blue and red petals, running in a soft, winding line across the crust, away from where the wind had scoured the trail bare. He knew warmnight blooms when he saw them. These were the same petals stitched into his hem. Someone had laid a path. Dusty led the bay along it. The petals curved between two pressure ridges and dropped into a small hollow. There, tucked against the ice like it had grown out of the glacier itself, stood a cabin. Stacked ice blocks. Weathered timber beams. A crooked stovepipe. Warm light bled from a small square window. He was thirty feet off when the door opened and a puppy tumbled out into the snow. Brown and white, ears too big, tail going. It planted itself in front of the bay and barked once, pleased with itself. Dusty crouched. The puppy shoved its cold nose into his palm. Behind it, the doorway stayed open, but no one stepped out. He looked past the puppy at the dark inside the cabin and felt his stomach tighten. Someone lived here. Someone had strung petals across a glacier for a lost rider to follow. He looked back the way he had come. His tracks were gone. The stallion's trail was gone. The sun was a red line on the ice. He tied the bay to the timber post beside the door. He unstitched one warmnight bloom from his hatband and tucked it behind the puppy's ear, so he'd know it again. Then he picked the puppy up, stepped over the threshold, and shut the door behind him. He had lost the stallion. He had found something else, and he did not yet know whose house he was standing in.