“Don’t you think,” he asked quietly, “if the caldnicker knew how to make its dreams hold their reality—to make its dreams come true—don’t you think it would have done it before now?”
“It’s asleep,” Mair said simply. “Maybe it would, or could, if someone only woke it up to ask the question.”
Hale kissed her forehead. “The answer is no. Let’s not waste the time we have.”
But Mair could not stop thinking about the possibility. Later that night, when they stood at the bottom of the stairs that would take her back to the surface of Flotilla, she made her arguments for seeking out the caldnicker all over again, and those arguments were devastatingly simple.
“I can do it,” she said. “I bet I can even work out exactly where to look for its head.” She put a hand under Hale’s jaw and, with fingers stained by chalky colors, touched the place where she had once felt no pulse. But now that he had a tide instead of slack water where his heart should have been, there was a beat there. “I love you,” Mair said, and she kissed him again. “Let me try to save you.”
Hale had known this was coming, and he had his answer ready. He didn’t say, “I don’t want you to do that for me,” because then Mair might have told him, “But I want to do it for you.” He didn’t say, “I can’t ask that of you,” because that left room for Mair to reply, “You don’t have to ask.” He didn’t say, “I couldn’t bear it if something went wrong and you didn’t come back,” because then she might have said, “Nothing will go wrong,” or she might’ve even gone so far as to point out that if anything did go wrong, Hale wouldn’t be around to feel anything about it. He didn’t say, “I can’t let you,” because they both would have known he couldn’t possibly stop her. There were so many potential wrong answers, and he had already worked through them all.
So he said, “Mair, I love you,” because it was the true answer. And then he said, “No,” because it was the right answer.
Mair stared at him in disbelief. “Just . . . no?”
“I believe in you,” he said, lowering his nose to hers so they were exactly eye to eye. “But I’m asking you not to try.”
She held his gaze, unblinking. “If you love me, you’ll let me.”
“If you love me,” he said, ignoring the hurt in her voice, “you won’t.”
They looked at each other for a long time, each wanting badly to kiss the other again but neither knowing whether it would help or hurt their respective arguments and both sensing that, help or hurt, it would’ve been unfair.
And then, something miraculous happened. Mair’s face, which had been looking mutinous and angry and wounded, wiped itself clear and reconfigured itself into an expression of resolve. “Then we’ll find another way.”
He smiled, relieved. “You could stick me in an icebox, I suppose.”
“Then I’d better start looking for one that’s big enough.” With no reason not to any longer, they kissed again, and then Mair went reluctantly up into the dawning daylight.
That day in the tunnels, in between asking despairing questions of every dream he could find, Hale whistled the ice together wherever he could, trying desperately to extend the life of the Coldway. Up above, the morning dawned frigid—much colder than it had been for the last week. Somehow this felt like a good omen, and Mair set aside every other task she had and threw herself into the search for a way to save the boy she had fallen in love with. Truth be told, if the stakes had not been so high and the time so short, she would have relished the challenge. Mair was an adventurer at heart, and she was young enough and fearless enough that so far, she had not really come up against her own limitations—all reasons why Hale was desperately lucky to have her on his side, and all reasons why he had been desperate to convince her not to venture under the ice.
First she went to the library and looked up every tale of the caldnicker that she could find. Hours passed while she pored over the stories, but nothing she read suggested any solutions to the problem she wanted to solve. She allowed herself ten minutes of panic and desperation while she figured out what to do next, and then she went to the cartographer who made each year’s map of the Coldway. After all, the cartographer was the first one to hear the accounts of the surveyors who ventured into the tunnels every winter. Surely, Mair thought, she wasn’t the only one who had come back with tales of the caldnicker’s wandering dreams. Surely the mapmaker had heard some of those tales over the years.
The cartographer’s apprentice welcomed her when she knocked at the studio door. “Mr. Oronti is out,” he said apologetically. “Is there anything I can help you with, Mair?”
Mair sat down at the apprentice’s desk and made herself comfortable. “Tell me everything you know about the dreams in the Coldway.”
The apprentice laughed, then changed his mind. “All right.”
He began to speak, and it turned out that Mair had been right: Nearly every year, he and the the cartographer heard at least one tale of a Flotillan encountering one of the caldnicker’s wandering dreams. Some of those tales were love stories; none of them ended happily, and at least one surveyor had never been heard from since. Both apprentice and master suspected that fellow had done exactly what Mair had proposed: he had ventured under the ice, looking for the head of the caldnicker in order to wake it and ask how to bring
