But Hale pretended not to hear, and the next night, he waited for her at a place near her home where a flight of old wooden steps descended from a bulkhead on the surface down into the Coldway. They went on meeting there each night after that, to avoid as much as possible the other human foot traffic in the tunnels, which dwindled to next to nothing when the sun went down. Mair always brought some sort of sweet from the district above, because Hale’s delight at sweets made her laugh. Hale took Mair to places where the ice had frozen in the most interesting ways, because she loved to draw, and the subtle patterns and shiftings of color in the ice in the strange light of the tunnels fascinated her. Every night, when she first appeared on the stairs, he would reach up a hand to help her down, and every night she took it, even though they both knew she didn’t need it. Sometimes he offered a hand when the floor was uneven underfoot too, and when he did, she took it again, even though they both knew she was surefooted as an arctic hare on the ice. Things like this happened more and more frequently as the winter wore on, until finally they dropped the pretense without discussion and simply held hands as they wandered the tunnels.
And then, one night, Mair stopped walking. She pulled on the hand she held and drew Hale close. He put his arms around her—the first time he had done that since the moment they’d met—and Mair kissed him, and Hale’s heart-that-was-not-a-heart became a tide, just as the old recurring dreams had warned it would.
Winter passes, always.
When warmer currents begin to stir, so does the caldnicker under the ice, stretching its back in waves that send creaks throughout the Coldway. Mair began bringing the tether rope with its iron hooks down into the tunnels with her, and stepping more cautiously when she and Hale walked near the center of the ice. He whistled the cracks together when he could, but it got harder and harder to manage, requiring longer and longer stretches of song that left him breathless and slow afterward. There was no doubt about it: the Coldway was beginning to fail.
“What will happen?” Mair asked at last.
That night Hale had brought her to a place where ice and frost and lichen had made a picture like a landscape on one of the hulls, and they had been sitting on a blanket Mair had brought from home while she painted it with bits of chalky pastel crayon in the light of a lantern. Now and then they heard cracking from down the tunnels.
Hale hesitated. “The recurring ones say we sublimate. When the temperature warms enough, the conditions in the tunnels cause us to go directly from solid to vapor.”
“And then you’re gone?”
He nodded. “And then we’re gone, unless we are dreamed again.”
Mair put down her drawing. “There must be a way to keep that from happening.”
During the hours when Mair lived her life above the tunnels, Hale had passed his time in asking this question of every dream he could find. None of them had an answer, though many had tried to find one. Now he shook his head. “If there is a way, no one knows it.”
“Someone must know,” Mair insisted. “What about the caldnicker? Has anyone thought to ask it?”
“Yes,” Hale said simply. “It’s been thought of. But it can’t be done.”
“Why?” But Mair worked it out almost instantly. “Because the caldnicker stays submerged, and dreams dissolve in the Skidwrack. You can’t ask it because you’d be gone before you could reach it. And even if it were to come up for a breath or a look around, it would be after the ice above it melts, and then it would be too late.”
Hale nodded once. He did not like the emphasis she’d put on the word you. Ice creaked somewhere not far away. “Finish your drawing,” he suggested. “It’s getting late.”
Mair gave him a considering look before she went back to her picture. But it wasn’t long before she set down her pastels again. “Let’s try it.”
Hale shook his head again. “We can’t,” he said as resolutely as possible.
“You can’t,” Mair argued, “but I can. I’m a good swimmer, and I won’t melt.”
Hale knew her well enough by now to guess that if Mair said she was a good swimmer, she was probably excellent—but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was the second thing she’d said. “You won’t melt,” he agreed. “But you’ll freeze. Or you’d get stuck, lost under the ice.”
She laughed. “No, I wouldn’t. In the first place, the river is already warming up, or we wouldn’t have this problem; and in the second place, I didn’t spend all that time making a map of the routes down here just to get lost—not in them, and not under them. I know how to protect against the cold, and I know how to protect against getting stuck below. I can do it.”
All of this had occurred to Hale days ago, the moment it had occurred to him to wonder if the caldnicker might know how to keep him from vanishing in the thaw: that he couldn’t swim down to the creature, but possibly a human could; and that if there was anyone who could pull
