The seventh suitor of the season reached the gate of Glaciana Frostcall's ice castle before her song broke him. He carried a bundle of frost crystal flowers and a written vow. Glaciana watched him from a spiral tower, her breath fogging the pane. She wanted this one to stay. She had practiced silence for a week. She was a siren, and sirens sang whether they meant to or not. The ice-song lived in her throat like a second pulse. When mortals came close, it woke on its own and told them the truth of what she was: a voice that pulls ships onto rocks. Every suitor heard it. Every suitor ran. Her heart had frozen a little more with each retreat. She wanted, badly, to thaw it. She wanted one mortal brave enough to stand in front of her while she spoke a plain word. Glaciana descended the twisting stair with her hands pressed to her collarbone, holding the song down. The suitor waited in the entry hall. He was young, dressed in wool, sweat on his lip despite the cold. She opened her mouth to say welcome. A thin note slipped out instead. It rang off the ice walls and doubled back, sharper. The suitor's face went white. He dropped the flowers. He turned and ran across the frozen shallows, and a sleek dolphin with a crystal sheen surfaced beside his path and dove again, startled by his splashing. Glaciana pressed her hand to the door and did not follow. The note kept ringing in the walls after he was gone. She sank to the floor. Seven suitors. Seven failures. Her chest felt colder than the tile under her palm. She understood, finally, that silence would never be her tool. The song was not a habit she could break. It was part of her, and any mortal who wanted her would have to hear it first and stay anyway. A sound came from the far end of the hall. Not an echo. Footsteps on ice, steady, unhurried. Glaciana lifted her head. A man stood in the open doorway she had not heard open. His hair was pale as her towers. A thin crown of ice sat on his brow, and frost patterned his coat like her own walls. He had walked in during her song. He had not flinched. "You sing louder than the stories," said Kristian Frostborne. His voice did not shake. "I heard you from three valleys off. I came to see if you were as cold as they claim." Glaciana stood slowly. The song was still humming in her throat, and he was still there, watching her mouth as if it were an ordinary mouth. "I am," she said. The word came out clear, without the note. "Good," he said. "So am I." He stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

The door shut behind Kristian Frostborne, and Glaciana Frostcall stood alone with him in her hall. He wore a thin crown of ice and a coat patterned in frost. He had walked through her song without a stumble. He said he was as cold as she was. She did not know if that was true, or a line rehearsed to get inside her walls. She had lost seven suitors to her voice. She would not lose her judgment to a clever tongue. "Prove it," she said. Kristian's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "How." "Come with me." She led him out a side arch, past pillars shaped like standing waves. The cold in the hall thickened as they walked. A mortal would have shivered by the third turn. Kristian's breath did not fog. That was one mark in his favor. It was not enough. She took him to the courtyard where her dragon slept curled against the outer wall. Its scales were pale glass. Frost hung from its horns in beads. It opened one eye at her step and did not lift its head. "Touch it," Glaciana said. Kristian looked at the dragon. "Where." "The mouth. Between the teeth." Any mortal she had ever known would have refused. The dragon's breath alone had killed a suitor's horse two winters back. Kristian walked to the great head and set his bare hand flat against the dragon's lower jaw. The dragon exhaled. White vapor rolled over his wrist and up his sleeve. He did not pull back. When he lifted his hand, the skin was unmarked. No red. No blister. No tremor. Glaciana's chest did something she had not felt in a year. It loosened. She stepped closer. She meant to speak plainly. The song rose in her throat instead, low, one held note, escaping before she could catch it. It rang off the courtyard ice and came back doubled. Kristian did not flinch. He turned his face toward the sound the way a man turns toward a fire he means to warm at. "You keep waiting for me to run," he said. "Yes." "I won't." She believed him. That was the thing that frightened her. She had wanted a mortal brave enough to stand in her song. He was not a mortal. His hand had taken dragon-breath without a mark. His breath made no cloud. Whatever he was, he was not the answer she had asked for. "You're not a man," she said. "No," Kristian said. "I never said I was." He watched her, waiting. The dragon closed its eye again. The song still hummed in the walls between them. Glaciana had her proof. He was honest, and he would stay. Her arc had shifted under her feet. She had opened the door to a suitor who could not be burned by her, and now she had to decide if a cold thing could thaw her at all.

Kristian did not leave that night. Glaciana gave him a room in the far wing and shut her own door with both hands. She stood against it until her palms ached. He was cold. He was honest. He would stay. None of that answered the question she needed answered: whether anything in her could warm toward him, or whether she was ice all the way through. She went to the dragon before dawn. It lay in the courtyard where she had left it, breath fogging the wall in a slow rhythm. She sat against its foreleg and pressed her cheek to a scale. The scale was colder than her skin. That was the test she wanted. If she felt the cold, some part of her was still warm enough to notice. She felt nothing. She pressed harder. Still nothing. The scale and her face were the same temperature. Her throat closed. She made herself think of Kristian. His bare hand under the dragon's breath. His face turning toward her song the way a man turns toward a fire. She waited for the loosening in her chest she had felt in the hall the day before. She waited a long time. It came, small, a half-beat under her ribs. Not warmth. But movement. Something in her had shifted a fraction toward him and stayed there. A voice spoke from the arch behind her. "You're wasting the hour, cousin." She stood before she turned. Vladislas Nocturne leaned in the archway, black coat, red at the collar, gold at the cuffs. He was not her cousin. He called every cold thing cousin. He had come to her castle twice before, uninvited, and left each time with a piece of information he had not been offered. She had never liked how quietly he moved on ice. "You weren't asked," she said. "I heard you had a guest." Vladislas smiled without showing teeth. "A cold one. I came to see if he was one of mine." "He isn't." "No." His red eyes moved past her to the dragon and back. "He's something else. Which is a problem for you, Glaciana. A woman shopping for a mortal doesn't get to keep what walks in wearing frost." "I'm not shopping." "You were." He pushed off the arch. "I'll come back when you've decided what he is to you. Take your time. I have centuries." He was gone before she drew breath to answer. Glaciana stayed where she stood. The half-beat under her ribs was still there. She had her answer, the small one. Her heart could move. It had moved, once, this morning, toward Kristian. That was enough to let him closer. It was not enough to trust what Vladislas had just planted: that keeping Kristian would cost her something she had not yet counted. She went inside to find Kristian and open the next door herself.

Glaciana found Kristian in the hall, standing where the morning light fell through the high ice. He turned when she came in. The half-beat under her ribs moved again. She stopped walking because she did not trust it. Here was the trouble. Her song had touched him on the day he arrived. He had walked through it without flinching, but he had still walked through it. She could not tell if what stirred in her now was her own feeling or the backwash of her own spell, caught in him and thrown back at her. If she guessed wrong and said the wrong word, she would bind him to her by enchantment and call it love. "Kristian," she said. "I need you to leave the castle for a day." His blue eyes did not change. "Why." "Because my song reached you once. I don't know if what I feel is mine. If you go past the ice shelf, past where my voice can carry, and I still feel it when you're gone, then it's mine. If it fades, it was never mine to give." He considered her. He wore the white coat and the crown of pale points he had arrived in. He looked like something carved to stand in her hall. "And if it's yours?" "Then I'll say so when you come back." He nodded once and went. She watched from the tower until his figure crossed the shelf and dropped out of sight beyond it. Then she sat on the cold floor and waited. The half-beat stayed. It did not fade at noon. It did not fade when the sun dropped. By dusk it had grown into a full ache under her collarbone, steady, patient, hers. She was smiling at the empty floor when the doors opened behind her. It was not Kristian. The woman who walked in wore a black gown scaled like a fish and set with pink hearts that pulsed as she moved. A crown of black branches sat on pink hair. Her eyes were pink and level. Glaciana had never met her, but every siren knew the face. Coraline Heartsong, who sang men into loving her and kept them until their hearts gave out. "Sister," Coraline said. Her voice was warm as bathwater. "I heard you were learning to feel. I came to congratulate you." Glaciana stood. "I didn't call you." "No. Vladislas did." Coraline smiled. "He thinks your ice prince is worth a great deal to someone. He wanted a second opinion. I give excellent second opinions." Glaciana's ache did not waver. That was the answer she had waited all day to have. Her heart was hers. Kristian was hers to want. And now two of the oldest predators she knew wanted him too. "Get out of my hall," Glaciana said. Coraline sat down instead.

Coraline sat in the chair by the cold hearth like she had been invited. The pink hearts on her gown pulsed slow, in time with something Glaciana could not hear. Glaciana stayed standing. Her ache for Kristian held steady under her collarbone. That was the fact she had to protect now. "You look well," Coraline said. "Feeling suits you. Though I wonder if you know yet whose feeling it is." "Mine," Glaciana said. "Are you sure?" Coraline tilted her pink head. "He walked through your song. A siren's song leaves a thread. Pull the thread and the doll walks toward you. You have been pulling all day, sister. That is why you ache." Glaciana's hand closed at her side. That was the exact fear she had sent Kristian past the ice shelf to answer. She had answered it. The ache had held while he was gone from her voice. She knew this. Coraline was reaching for the one soft place and pressing. "You came from Vladislas," Glaciana said. "You came to measure him. Not to counsel me." "Both," Coraline said. "I am efficient. If your prince is only your spell talking to itself, he is free for the taking. If he is truly yours, he is worth more. Either way I go home with an answer." Glaciana understood then. Coraline wanted her to doubt. A doubting siren would test again, and again, and each test would push Kristian farther from the castle. Far enough for a woman in a heart-covered gown to meet him on the shelf and sing. "Get up," Glaciana said. Coraline smiled and did not move. Glaciana opened her mouth and sang one clean note. Not the pulling song. The clearing song, the one that scoured her own hall of anything that did not belong. Frost cracked along the floor from her feet to the chair. The pink hearts on Coraline's gown dimmed. Coraline stood, slow, still smiling. "You will send him away again," Coraline said. "You cannot help it. And when you do, I will be waiting past your voice. Give my regards to Vladislas's rival when you learn who that is." She walked out. The doors shut behind her. Glaciana stayed in the cold hall. The ache under her collarbone had not moved. She had chosen. She would not test Kristian again. She would tell him the truth when he came back, and she would keep him inside the reach of her voice, where Coraline could not stand between them. At the high window she saw the small dark figure crossing the shelf toward the castle. Kristian, returning. She went down to meet him at the door, and for the first time in her long life she did not rehearse what she would say.

Glaciana opened the door before Kristian could knock. He stood on the step with frost on his white coat and his crown catching the low sun. The pink woman's warning still sat in the hall behind her. Glaciana had promised herself she would tell him the truth. Now his blue eyes were on her face and every word she had planned sounded like a shove toward the door. "Come in," she said. "Sit by the hearth. I have something to say and I do not know how to say it well." He followed her in. He did not sit. He watched her the way he had watched the dragon's breath — steady, waiting for the thing to arrive. "When you first came," Glaciana said, "my song was in the air. You walked through it. I told myself you chose me. But a siren's song leaves a thread on whoever hears it. I do not know how much of what you feel is you and how much is the thread." His jaw set. "You are telling me to leave." "No." The word came out too fast. She made herself slow down. "I am telling you what I fear. There is a difference. If I sent you away to prove it, I would be doing what she wants." "She," Kristian said. "A woman came here in a gown of pink hearts. She serves the one who warned me about keeping you. She said our bond is only my spell, and she waits past my voice for you to walk into her reach. I will not push you into her hands to settle my own doubt." She watched him take it. He did not flinch. He had not flinched at the dragon either. "So I am staying," he said, "and you are not sure of me." "I am sure of me," Glaciana said. "I ached for you past the shelf, where my song could not reach. That part I know. The part I do not know is you. I am asking you to stay inside the reach of my voice while we find out. Not as a test. As the truth." He stepped closer. The frost on his coat did not melt in the hall's cold air. He took her hand. His fingers were as cold as hers. "I heard your song," he said. "I chose to walk through it. I will keep choosing. If a thread pulls, we will see it together." Glaciana's chest loosened. She had not pushed him out. She had told him and he had stayed. Then a shadow crossed the high window. Wings, pink, wide, heart-marked. A wyrm circled her castle once and dropped toward the shelf. On its back rode a small figure in a heart-covered gown. "She did not go far," Kristian said. "No," Glaciana said. "And now she knows you are still here."

The wyrm dropped below the shelf and out of sight. Glaciana closed the door. Kristian still held her hand. She had told him the truth about her song, and he had stayed. But she had never spoken love to him without her voice carrying its old pull. If she could not say it plain now, he would never know which part was her and which part was the thread. "Come with me," she said. "To the hall. I need my voice small." She led him through the ice corridors. Her castle sang around them without her — wind through the wave-shaped towers, drip and creak in the frozen spires. In the great hall she stopped under the tallest arch. The crystal walls would catch any note she let slip and throw it back doubled. "Sit," she said. He sat on the low ice bench. She stayed standing, three steps back, hands folded so they would not reach for him. "I am going to say something," she said. "I want you to listen for my song under it. If you hear it, tell me. Do not spare me." He nodded once. She drew a breath and held it until the pull in her throat went quiet. Sirens breathed to sing. She breathed to speak. The difference was small and it hurt. "I love you," she said. The words came out flat. No lift. No shimmer in the ice. The walls did not ring. She waited. Her chest ached with the effort of holding the song down. A single high note tried to climb her throat. She swallowed it. "Again," Kristian said. His voice was steady. "Please." "I love you." Plainer this time. Her hands shook. "I do not want you for the castle. I do not want you to prove anything. I want you." The hall stayed silent. No echo. No pull. Kristian sat very still. Then he put his face in his hands. When he lifted his head his eyes were wet, and the tears froze on his cheeks before they fell. "There was no song under it," he said. "I heard you. Only you." Glaciana's knees nearly gave. She stepped forward and he caught her hands. "Then you know," she said. "I know what you feel," he said. "I still do not know what I feel is mine." He said it gently. "You spoke clean. I cannot yet." She had won her half and lost the other in the same breath. He believed her. He did not yet believe himself. A thin pink light bled through the high window. Not sunset. Something closer. The wyrm had not left the shelf. Its rider was waiting for him to walk out and test his own heart against hers. "Then we find your answer next," Glaciana said. "Without giving you to her."

The pink light through the window did not fade. Glaciana went to the arched pane and looked out. The wyrm circled low over the ice shelf, wings cutting slow arcs. Its rider sat straight in the saddle — the woman in the heart-covered gown who had come once already to pry Kristian loose. She would not land. She wanted him to walk out. Any step Kristian took past the castle wall put him inside her reach, and Glaciana's voice would not carry that far. Kristian came to stand behind her. "She is still there." "She will wait as long as it takes," Glaciana said. "She knows you want an answer. She knows the answer is out there, past me." "Then I have to go." "No." She turned. "If you cross the wall to test yourself, she takes you before you finish the test. That is her plan. It has been her plan since she arrived." Kristian looked at his hands. "Then I have no way to know." Glaciana thought. The rider needed him outside. The rider could not enter — the clearing song had closed the castle to her. So the ground between the walls and the shelf belonged to the rider. Glaciana could not fight her there. She could only take that ground away. She led Kristian back to the hall. She stopped at the tallest arch, where the crystal walls threw sound back doubled. "Stay here," she said. "Do not follow me to the door." "What are you going to do?" "Send her off. For good, if I can." She walked alone to the outer step. The wyrm banked when it saw her. The rider smiled down, pink gown bright against the grey sky, one gloved hand resting on the saddle horn as if she owned the air. Glaciana did not speak. She sang. The clearing song came up clean this time, no tremor. The crystal spires caught it and lifted it. It rolled out across the shelf, past the wyrm, past the water. It was not a song to charm. It was a song to push. The wyrm shrieked and pitched sideways. The rider fought the reins. Her mouth opened — Glaciana saw it, not heard it. The song drowned the sound. The wyrm turned and beat hard for open sky. It shrank to a pink smear and then to nothing. Glaciana held the note until her throat burned, then let it fall. She went back inside. Kristian was standing under the arch where she had left him. "Gone," she said. "She cannot circle a castle she cannot hear over." "And my answer?" "You still need it." She took his hand. "But you will find it here. Not in her saddle. I bought us the room to look." He closed his fingers around hers. Outside, the sky was empty for the first time in days.

The sky stayed empty. Glaciana let herself believe it for one breath, then turned back to the problem she still had. The wyrm and its rider were gone, but Kristian's question was not. He needed to know if his feelings were his own or hers. Inside the castle, he could not know. Her song lived in every wall. She walked the hall and listened to it. The crystal spires hummed under her step. The frost crystal plants along the arches gave off the same low ring. Every stone had drunk her voice for years. Even her silence sounded like her here. Kristian could stand across the room and still be inside her song's reach. "I cannot test you in this house," she said. "The walls remember me. If you feel anything for me here, we will not know whose feeling it is." "Then we are back where we started." "No." She pointed past the outer arch, to the ice shelf and the water beyond. "There is one place my song does not carry. The shelf blocks it. Past the shelf, the sea takes the sound down." "You said I could not cross the wall." "You cannot walk out. She may come back. But you do not have to walk." She led him down to the low door that opened onto the water stair. The sea lay flat and grey against the ice. She knelt at the edge and set her palm on the water. She did not sing. She only called, the way she called her own. A shape rose under the surface. The sea dolphin broke through, back sheened with crystal, eye bright and steady. It waited. "It will carry you out past the shelf," Glaciana said. "Far enough that no note of mine can reach you. Stay there until you know. Then come back and tell me." Kristian looked at the dolphin, then at her. "If my feeling dies past the shelf, I will not lie to you when I return." "I know. That is why I am sending you." He stepped down onto the dolphin's back. It slid away without a sound. She watched him shrink against the grey until the shelf hid him. She did not sing after him. She sat on the stair and waited. The cold of the step went through her gown and she did not move. The light shifted twice before the dolphin came back. Kristian slid off onto the stair. His face was wet and set. "Well?" she said. "It did not die." He knelt in front of her. "Out there, past your voice, I still wanted to come back. I chose it with my own mouth, in my own quiet. It is mine." She closed her hand around his. The ache in her chest moved, and this time she let it. For the first time she believed him without needing to.

Kristian's hand was still in hers on the water stair. Glaciana felt his fingers warm against her palm, and something in her chest pulled back. She had wanted this answer for weeks. Now she had it, and her body was already flinching from it. She let go of his hand before she meant to. He noticed. He always noticed. "You believed me a moment ago," he said. "I did." "And now?" "Now I am afraid of it." She stood and moved up two steps, away from him. "I have kept every suitor out with my song or my silence. You walked through both. There is nothing left between us. That is what I asked for. That is what frightens me." She walked back into the hall and did not look to see if he followed. She heard his boots on the ice behind her. She went to the outer arch and called her dragon down from the high ledge. It landed on the terrace and folded its wings. She put her hand on its scaled shoulder. The cold of it steadied her. "I could send you off on it," she said. "I could tell you to go home. You would go, because you love me and I asked. That would be easier than this." "Easier for who." "Me." She kept her hand on the dragon. "Every time I have been loved before, I froze it or it froze me. I do not know how to stand still and let it stay." Kristian stepped up beside the dragon. He did not touch her. He put his own palm on the scale next to hers, close enough that his little finger met hers along the ridge. "Then do not stand still," he said. "Flinch. Step back. I will still be here when you step forward again. I already crossed the sea to prove it." She looked at their two hands on the dragon. His was not warmer than hers. It was the same cold. She had spent so long expecting love to arrive as heat that she had not planned for this. She turned her hand over. He set his into it. She did not pull away this time, though the pull was there. She let it move through her and stay. "I am going to do that again," she said. "Flinch. Tomorrow. The day after." "I know." "You will not go." "No." She sent the dragon back up to its ledge with a nod. It lifted off and the wind of its wings pushed her hair across her face. She did not let go of Kristian's hand to fix it. The frozen thing behind her ribs had not melted. She felt it clearly, a hard shape she would carry for a while yet. But she had held his hand through one flinch. That was new. Tomorrow she would try to hold it through another.