Instead of answering, the boy asked, “Are you all right?” He looked at the rope that still tethered her to the loop of cordage overhead. “Oh, I see. You were fine all along.”
“Well, you did save me from wet feet and a lot of maneuvering,” Mair said. They were still holding fast to each other, but neither moved to release the other. It makes for a very romantic image, but for her part Mair was occupied with working out the safest way to let go, and the safest direction in which to move when she did. Also, she’d dropped her staff, which she would need in order to disengage the tether hook from the loop it hung from, directly over the center of the radiating cracks—along with her drawing pad, which there was no way she was leaving without.
That is, she was mostly occupied with all that. Because she had never held anyone so closely or for so long, there was a small collection of synapses in her brain that could not fail to notice that out of the corner of her right eye she could see the boy’s cheekbone, and a scattering of frost clinging to his curling dark sideburns. And as for the boy—well. For reasons that will shortly become evident, he was in a state where nearly everything he encountered made his heart ache with wonder and joy, and although he had acted on pure instinct when he’d pulled Mair out of the way of the splintering ice, now he was holding on simply because he didn’t want to let go.
“I need my staff there,” Mair said, nodding back toward the center of the tunnel. The boy had to lift his head to see over hers in order to follow the gesture, and for a moment Mair felt the skin just below his jaw press against her forehead.
Under different circumstances, she might have noticed that she ought to have felt his pulse there. Or then again, perhaps not.
In any case, she let go of the boy at last, reached past him to the hull at his back, and felt around until her fingers found an iron ring. Then she unhooked the end of the rope that was connected to her belt, and threaded the hook through the ring so that now a line ran from the wall to the loop of rope hanging down over the cracked ice.
The boy looked critically from the line to the compromised ice at the center of the tunnel. The staff lay between the two of them and the worst of the cracks. Reluctantly, he let go. “It will hold,” he said. “At least, it will hold long enough.”
“I think so,” Mair agreed. She inched carefully out, both palms curled around the rope overhead, until she could reach the end of the staff with one foot and pull it toward herself. She let go of the rope with one hand, bent slowly, picked up the staff, and, after a moment’s pause to make sure the fissures didn’t seem to be spreading, she stretched her foot just a bit farther and caught the drawing pad she’d been using to map the tunnels with her toe. “Catch,” she called over her shoulder, and kicked the pad back toward the boy.
“Got it.”
“Thank you.” Another pause, then she reached up with one end of the staff and nudged the iron hook out of the loop of cordage. She caught it as it fell, hung it from her belt, and eased herself back toward the hull wall where the other end of the rope still held fast. When she was safely back at the solid verge of the ice, she disconnected the second hook. Then she and the boy edged down the tunnel and away from the cracks, with Mair testing the floor all along the way. At last they came to thicker ice, and then some that was thicker still. Only then did the boy and the girl stop and face each other.
“I’m Mair,” said the young surveyor.
The boy had no name, but he knew the terms for a number of cold things. “Hail,” he said, choosing one at random and quite accidentally picking a word that is both a cold thing and, sometimes, a moniker.
“Hale,” Mair repeated. “Thank you.”
He handed back her drawing pad. “You’re mapping the cold roads?”
“Yes.” She permitted herself a long look at the strange boy. “You’re not, are you?” His eyes were wide and black, with no visible line where the pupil ended and the iris began. Frost dusted his hair, and his eyelashes. He smelled like the cold, but when he had held her, the skin against her forehead had been warm as her own. Mair remembered the flicker of motion that had distracted her just before she had nearly fallen through the ice, and she realized she was talking to one of the caldnicker’s dreams, though she wasn’t sure how he would feel if she asked outright. Would he even know?
(As it happened, he did know—though not all dreams do comprehend that they’re dreams, as you probably understand from your own experiences. And he recognized that Mair was not, but since she didn’t mention it, neither did he.)
They explored the Coldway together for the rest of the night, and when finally Mair led the way back to her own home, they arranged to meet the following evening after she had submitted her survey.
The dream called Hale wandered in a daze until the agreed-upon time. The other dreams in the tunnels watched him with sympathy. It was easy to fall in love when the world was new and everything was wonder, and Mair was fearless and brilliant and resourceful and confident and they had no trouble understanding why Hale would be fascinated by her. But the older dreams—the ones the caldnicker dreamed over and over again, year after year—always warned the younger about contact with
