Glaciana Frostcall sang from the edge of the ice shelf, and the wind swallowed every note before it reached the sea. She had sung for three nights now. Three nights, and no sail had turned toward her. The fabled captain she meant to claim was somewhere past the black water, and her voice could not cross the wall of ice at her back. She was the Ice Siren Queen. Her crown had never failed her before. Tonight it felt like glass. She stopped singing and listened. Only the crack of shifting floes answered. Beyond the shelf, the open ocean lay flat and empty under a bruised sky. Somewhere out there, a man steered a ship she had heard sailors whisper about in every port her ice had ever crushed. She wanted him. She wanted his hands cold in hers, his breath frosting against her mouth, forever. But want was not reach. The shelf broke her song. The song was how sirens took men. Without the song crossing water, she was only a woman in a frozen dress, watching the horizon. She turned inland. A cluster of crystal plants grew from the snow near her feet, their petals thin as knife glass. She had passed them a hundred times. Tonight she looked at them properly. When the wind moved through the sharp clusters, they rang. A small, pure sound. Not loud enough to matter. But the shape of the sound was hers. She knelt and pressed her palm to the largest stem. Frost bloomed under her hand. The plant answered — every petal caught her breath and held it, humming her note back to her, sharper and farther than her own throat could throw it. Not enough. One plant could not carry a song to a ship. She stood and walked the ridge until she reached the cave where her dragon slept. He filled the hollow, scales pale as milk, horns bound in worked gold. He opened one eye when her boots touched the ice. She did not need to speak. He had carried her before. "Take me above the shelf," she said. "High. I need the wind under me." He rose. She climbed between the ridged plates of his neck, and he pushed off the cliff. The shelf dropped away. The open sea spread beneath them, wide and grey and finally within reach of her voice. She sang. The note left her mouth and did not die. It rode the wind her dragon made. It carried past the ice, past the first mile of black water, past the second. Far below, on the dark line where sky met sea, a single lantern turned. A ship's lantern. It swung, hesitated, and came about. Glaciana smiled. She had her road to him now. But a lantern turning meant a man was already listening — and a listening man was a man who would arrive.

The lantern was turning, but the ship was still a speck. Glaciana held her note above the shelf while her dragon beat slow circles in the cold air. The sky at her back had begun to thin. Grey was creeping into the black. Dawn was coming, and dawn would strip her song of its hold on any man who heard it. She judged the distance. The ship crawled. The wind that carried her voice did not carry the hull. At this pace the sun would break the horizon before the captain crossed half the open water. He would blink, shake off the pull, and steer away with a story about strange singing in the north. She stopped singing to think. Her dragon dipped a wing, waiting. Below them the shelf glittered — miles of frost, and every ridge studded with the sharp crystal plants that had first taught her how to throw a note. One plant had hummed her breath back sharper than her throat. A field of them, struck by the right voice at the right height, might do more than carry sound. It might pull. "Down," she said. "Low over the shelf. Skim it." The dragon dropped. His belly scales grazed the crystal beds. Glaciana drew a full breath and sang a single, low note straight into the field beneath her. The plants caught it. Every cluster along the dragon's path rang. The note doubled, then tripled, then ran ahead of her like a wave through glass. It rolled off the edge of the shelf and out across the water in a sheet of sound she could feel in her teeth. Far out, the lantern jerked. The ship heeled. It came about hard and drove toward her, faster than wind alone could push it. The sea itself seemed to lean. She held the note until her chest burned. The dragon banked. The ship closed a mile, then another. The grey behind her deepened toward pink. The hull struck the ice at the shelf's outer lip just as the first true light touched the horizon. Wood cracked. Men shouted. The lantern tipped and went out. Glaciana let the note die. Silence rushed back. Her dragon carried her down to the shelf, and she stepped onto the ice on legs that shook. She had him. The ship was hers, grounded on her frost, its crew stumbling out onto the shelf in the raw new light. She scanned the figures for the one she wanted — the captain, the fabled one, the reason for three nights of failed song. She found him at the rail. He was not looking at her. He was staring past her, inland, at the pale spires of her castle rising from the ice. His hand was on his pistol. Dawn had come. Her song was done. And the man she meant to keep had seen her home before he had seen her face.