These are old stories, of course, and there isn’t much talk of the caldnicker outside of Flotilla in these modern times. But to this day, the people of Flotilla call the annual freeze of the waterways beneath their city the nick—as in, There’s no Coldway until after the nick settles in properly. And, of course, while the explanations for them have changed over time, the nick still brings with it the peculiar sounds and lights that have always haunted the ice-floored tunnels below Flotilla.
And speaking of the changes time brings: Because the Coldway is, of course, never the same place twice, each winter when the river freezes, someone quite intrepid has to go into the tunnels and map them. Because without a map, it doesn’t do to venture into the Coldway. It’s frigid, of course, and precious few are the places where the vaulted bow-and-gunwale ceilings part to reveal open sky. Voices carry there, but not up to the surface. If you get lost in the Coldway, you will freeze before you are found, if you are found at all. Most likely your body will keep in the cold until the river-ice melts and the Coldway disappears, and then it will sink into the Skidwrack, never to be seen again.
The people of Flotilla keep those maps to themselves: the Coldway and its route are their secret. And here is the secret of the secret: To this day, the intrepid surveyors of that in-between place are almost always children, because they can venture down onto the ice before it’s thick and strong enough to hold an adult. In addition to being reckoned a great adventure (and one that logically ought to be forbidden on the grounds of danger), it can be lucrative. Good surveys of the Coldway fetch high prices.
One winter, at midnight on the coldest night yet, a girl called Mair dressed in her warmest clothes, packed a bag of matches and candles, a canteen and some bread and cheese and a chunk of cake, some artist’s pastels, a staff, and a long rope with hooks at either end, and snuck out of her bedroom window into the frigid night. It was the first night she thought the ice might’ve been sturdy enough to dare walking on, and if she hurried, she thought she might well be one of the first surveyors to venture out, which meant a generous bounty if she was also quickest to get her survey to the cartographer who would make that year’s map.
For an hour or so, nothing outside the ordinary happened. The cavern was gold and green in the light of her lantern, and the ice floor had frozen in the same uncommon pattern of frost-edged scales it always did. The walls and roof were a curving patchwork made up of scores of boat hulls in a rainbow of chipped and faded colors. Thick icicles hung from them, along with knotted lengths of cordage, which, by long-standing tradition, were always lowered down from the houses and ships by their owners and masters for the aid of anyone using the passages below. Mair knew to stay close to the hull walls, where there were handholds and where the ice was thicker. She walked with one end of the hooked rope tethered to her belt and the other end clutched in the hand that also held her pencil as she noted the twists and turns of the labyrinth. She knew how to test the floor’s thickness before she put her weight on it, and she knew the particular, peculiar sounds the ice made in that space, and how those creaks were different from the sound of the ice splintering.
There were other sounds in the cold and the dark too: she was not alone. But that was no surprise; she’d known she wouldn’t be the only child who snuck out of her room that night. And although they were all technically competing for the first-survey reward, they also all knew that it was much better not to be alone down there when the nick was still settling in.
And then the inevitable happened. Distracted momentarily by the reflection on the ice of something moving up ahead, Mair put a foot down where she hadn’t tested the floor. The ice squealed in protest, a sound so like a scream that Mair dropped her staff in shock. But she recovered herself in a heartbeat and jabbed an iron hook through the nearest hanging loop of rope just as the floor under her feet cracked to pieces. The tether at the other end of the rope was secure on her belt, so she knew she wouldn’t fall far, but she braced herself for the stabbing pain of freezing-wet feet and ankles.
She felt the ice go, felt the beginning of the short fall. But the stabbing cold-wet didn’t come. Instead, her feet scrambled on the crumbling floor and she felt herself yanked hard by the belt toward the nearer of the hull walls. She grabbed for handholds and found herself clinging not to a bumper or a length of cordage or any other bit of boat hardware, but to a boy with wide, terrified eyes. He wrapped his arms around her and held her as tightly as she had ever been held as the floor behind them splintered and reached out with its webwork of cracks in all directions, as if the ice itself knew Mair was still there and it still wanted to see her fall.
With his back to the wall, the boy whistled three discordant notes, and instantly the splintering stopped just shy of the surface directly under her feet.
“How did you do that?” Mair whispered, turning
