The Bargain at the Frozen Gate

There were three things every village child along the southern marches knew about the Frostbound Court.

The first was that you did not cross the frozen river. Not at the bridge, not in the shallows, not where the ice looked thick and held a child's weight in winter — not ever, not for any reason, not even for the gold that sometimes washed up on the southern bank from the courts on the other side.

The second was that if a sister, or a brother, or a mother, or a husband, was taken across the river by the King of Winter's wolves, you did not go after them. They were gone. You lit a candle, you said the Mourning Prayer, and you let them be gone. To follow them was to be lost.

The third was that the King of Winter had not been seen by a mortal eye in eight hundred years, and that you should pray, every night before you slept, that he never would be again.

Linnea Vaer had been told these three things since she could remember.

She crossed the frozen river anyway.

—

The river was four hundred paces wide and it sang under her boots. The ice was thick enough — Linnea had checked at the southern bank, with the iron-tipped staff she had taken from her father's shed — but it was not steady. It hummed. It muttered. Every fifty paces, somewhere far beneath her, the ice cracked with a sound like a hand clap in a great empty hall, and the crack ran away from her under the surface, and Linnea did not stop walking.

She was wearing her sister's winter coat. Her sister was thirteen years old, and her sister was a quarter Linnea's size, and the coat fit her shoulders only because Linnea had hacked the back seam open and tied the sides shut with the leather laces from a pair of her father's boots. The coat did not match her trousers. The coat did not match anything. The coat smelled, faintly, of the soap Linnea's mother had made when their mother was still alive, the one with rosemary and bee balm in it, the soap their mother had used to wash both of them in the wooden tub by the fire when they were small.

Linnea had brought the coat because her sister had not been wearing one when the wolves came.

That was the part Linnea could not stop thinking about. Not the wolves. Not the screaming. Not even the fact that she had been in the back garden when it happened and had run to the gate and watched her sister be carried, very calmly, across the frozen river by an enormous white wolf with eyes the colour of a winter sky.

It was the coat. Her sister had not had the time to put a coat on.

Linnea had brought the coat now. Linnea was going to put the coat on her sister herself, in the throne room of the King of Winter, before she walked her sister back across the river, and if the King of Winter wished to take something in exchange, he could take Linnea, and Linnea would not look back.

She was twenty-two years old.

She had not told her father where she was going.

She had left a note, instead, on the kitchen table, weighted down with the salt pot.

The note had said:

Da. I have gone to bring Astrid home. Do not follow. I love you.

She had not signed it.

Some things her father would know without signing.

—

The northern bank rose out of the mist like something dreaming.

Linnea had not expected the gate.

She had expected — she did not know what she had expected. A wood. A wall of frost. Perhaps a road. She had not expected a gate, taller than any building in her village, taller than the bell tower at Marrow's Cross, made entirely of pale wood the colour of bleached bone, carved into the shape of two enormous interlocking hands holding the world between them.

The gate was open.

The gate had been open, Linnea realised, since the moment she had set foot on the ice.

She walked through it.

—

The wolf was waiting on the other side.

It was the wolf. The same wolf. White as new snow, blue-eyed, the size of a small horse. It was sitting — sitting, like a dog at a hearth — on the path beyond the gate, and it was watching her, and it did not move.

Linnea stopped.

She raised the iron-tipped staff. The staff felt, very suddenly, like a stick.

The wolf looked at the staff. The wolf looked at her. The wolf, Linnea would have sworn on her mother's grave, smiled.

A voice — male, low, infinitely amused, coming from somewhere behind the wolf and somewhere inside Linnea's own skull at the same time — said:

'Put that down, child. You'll embarrass us both.'

—

The King of Winter was sitting on a chair of black ice.

Linnea did not remember walking to the throne room. She did not remember the wolf turning. She did not remember the gate closing behind her, although she knew it had, because she could no longer hear the river singing.

What she remembered was this.

The King of Winter was sitting on a chair of black ice at the end of a long hall, and the hall was carved from a single piece of pale stone the colour of frost-on-glass, and the King of Winter was holding her sister on his lap.

Her sister was asleep.

Her sister was sleeping with her head against the King of Winter's shoulder, and she was wrapped in a fur the colour of the sky after snow, and she was — Linnea could see, in the great quiet of the hall, in the soft rise and fall of the fur over her sister's small ribs — entirely, completely, unharmed.

The King of Winter was looking down at her sister.

He was holding her, Linnea realised, the way her father had held them both when they were small.

He looked up.

—

He was not what she had expected.

He was not, in fact, anything she had been told.

He was old, in the way the mountains were old — not bent, not white, not failing — old in the bones. He had dark hair and skin the colour of pale wood and eyes the colour of the river under the ice she had just walked across, and he was looking at her with an expression that, on any mortal face, Linnea would have called curious.

He said, in the voice that had spoken inside her head at the gate, 'Linnea Vaer.'

She did not ask how he knew her name.

She had walked across the frozen river to bargain with the King of Winter. She had assumed he would know her name.

She said, 'I have come for my sister.'

He said, 'I know.'

He said it gently.

He said it the way her father said I know when one of them was crying.

—

He did not give her sister back.

He stood up, slowly, with her sister in his arms, and he carried her to a small alcove off the side of the throne room where a bed had been made — Linnea had not seen the bed before, although it had certainly been there — and he laid her sister down on the furs, and he tucked the furs around her sister's small shoulders, and he stood looking down at her for a long moment.

Then he turned to Linnea.

He said, 'Sit down, Linnea Vaer. I would like to offer you a bargain.'

Linnea did not sit down.

She said, 'You can keep me. Send her home.'

The King of Winter looked at her.

For the first time, Linnea saw something behind the eyes the colour of the river under the ice — something that was not amusement, and was not curiosity, and was not gentleness, and was something else, something she did not have a name for, something that had been there a very long time and had not been seen by another living creature for nearly as long.

He said, 'No.'

He said it quietly.

He said it the way her father had once said no to her mother on a Tuesday in November, before her mother had died, before they had known her mother was going to die — no, Mara, do not get up, sit down, I will bring it, do not get up.

The King of Winter said:

'I will not keep you. You will not be a prisoner here.'

He took a step towards her.

'You will be my consort. For one year. Beginning at dawn. At the end of which, you will walk freely back across the river, and your sister will be returned to your father at the southern bank, and the wolves of my court will never cross to your village again, in your lifetime or hers.'

He stopped.

He did not extend a hand. He did not reach for her. He stood, in the great quiet of the throne room of the King of Winter, six paces from her, and he looked at her, and he waited.

Linnea said, 'Why.'

The King of Winter looked at her for a very long time.

When he answered, his voice was so quiet that Linnea would not have heard him at all if the hall had not been carved from a single piece of stone that carried sound the way a bell carries it.

He said:

'Because you walked across my river, in your sister's coat, with an iron stick, and when my wolf met you at the gate you did not flinch.'

He paused.

'No mortal has come into my hall and not flinched, in eight hundred years.'

He paused again.

'I find I would like to know why.'

—

Linnea looked at the King of Winter.

She looked at the alcove, where her sister was sleeping under the furs.

She looked at her own hands, which were holding an iron-tipped staff she had taken from her father's shed, and which were, to her enormous surprise, not shaking.

She said, 'One year.'

The King of Winter inclined his head.

'One year,' he said.

Linnea Vaer, twenty-two years old, of the village of Marrow's Cross, on the southern bank of the frozen river — Linnea, who had been told three things by every village child she had ever known, and had broken the first two of them before noon — Linnea took one step forward, and held out her hand.

The King of Winter looked down at her hand.

He did not take it.

He smiled.

He said, 'Not yet, Linnea Vaer. Not until dawn.'

And the lamps in the throne room of the Frostbound Court went out, all at once, in a single quiet exhalation, leaving only the soft blue light of the alcove where her sister was sleeping, and the eyes of the King of Winter, which did not need light to be seen.