“The only thing I can tell you that might help you,” the apprentice said at last, “is that if you’ve read the folklore, you know that the caldnicker’s dreams are said to sublimate in the thaw.” He hesitated, and when he spoke again, his voice was reluctant. “Do you know what it means for a substance to sublimate?”
“It means to go directly from solid to vapor,” Mair said, remembering Hale’s words.
The apprentice nodded. “That is one meaning. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the process.” He took a piece of paper and a pencil and made a quick sketch of two beakers connected by a tube: one with fire below it, one with ice. In the beaker over the fire, he drew a lump. “A substance can be heated until it evaporates, then moved rapidly into a very cold chamber, where it condenses again.” He drew an arrow from the lump up through the tube and into the empty beaker over the ice, where he drew a handful of dots on the sides. “Chemists frequently do this to filter out impurities; alchemists do it to initiate transitions.”
“So even after a thing has been changed to vapor, that doesn’t mean it’s gone?” Mair demanded. “It can be made solid again? Whole?”
The apprentice put up a warning hand. “Solid again, yes. Whole again, no—the whole point of sublimation is that something is left behind. In alchemy, the point of sublimation was often to reduce the physical to the spiritual—that’s the solid-to-vapor part, if you follow—and then reconstitute the spiritual as a more perfect solid.” He smiled sadly. “A lot of alchemy sounds like allegory when you say it out loud.”
Mair’s excitement faltered. It did sound like allegory, but not like an allegory for anything she wanted to think about in connection with Hale.
Silence fell for a moment. “You’ve thought about this a lot,” Mair said to the apprentice. He nodded, and his face was grim. “Why?”
“Because I used to survey the Coldway too, when I was younger and lighter,” he said at length. “And because I couldn’t figure out how to save the dream I met on the ice. And I have never been able to bring myself to go back.”
The hand that held the pencil shook. Mair took it and held it until it stopped twitching. Then she tapped the drawing. “Did you try something like this?”
The apprentice shook his head. “I was too afraid. The whole thing depends on letting them go to vapor, you see. I couldn’t bear to suggest it.”
And even if it works, Mair thought, something will be left behind.
The clock on the mantel chimed. The sun was going down. “Thank you,” Mair said, and she left.
She didn’t wait for nightfall to go to the Coldway. She went straight from the cartographer’s studio to the place where she and Hale always met. During the day, public-safety officials monitored the entrances and exits to the tunnels, especially as it got closer to spring, and one of them shouted a warning to Mair as she ran to the stairs. “Take care,” he called, and his breath was visible in the air as he spoke. “Feels cold tonight, but it’s treacherous below nonetheless.”
“Thank you,” she called, but she slowed only as much as she had to in order to keep from losing her footing on the frosty wood-plank steps.
He was not waiting there when she reached the bottom, but Mair didn’t worry. It was earlier than they usually met. Still, the creaking of the ice floor and the shifting of hulls was audible right away, and it was coming from all directions. Mair hadn’t stopped home between the cartographer and the Coldway, and she didn’t have her safety equipment with her, so she gingerly tested the surface just below the stairs with the toe of one boot. It shifted. Not much, but enough. Her heart sank. The Coldway was failing.
She forced herself to wait there, and it was no easy feat. At last, she heard his whistle echoing through the tunnel as he approached. The melody sounded weaker than usual, and she wondered how much of the day Hale had spent trying to knit the ice back together all on his own.
But then he was there, and they fell into each other’s arms. Mair could feel how hard he was breathing, and the beat of the tide in his chest pounded against her. All around them, the tunnels protested; the hulls, whose subtle movements were barely perceptible even in warm weather and came to a near standstill when the nick set in, had begun again to stir in the fragmenting ice. Hale was near collapse as well. He’d known this might be his last night in the Coldway. He’d spent himself trying to hold just the one stretch of tunnel nearest Mair’s stairway together, and still it was crumbling. A shaft of sunset fell down the stairway, painting the girl he loved in colors he’d never seen before. He wanted to tell her she was beautiful, and he promised himself he would do that as soon as he could draw proper breath.
While she waited for Hale to get his wind back, Mair told him what she’d learned from the cartographer’s apprentice. She explained the idea that had taken shape as she’d crossed the stretch of Flotilla between the studio and the stairs. Then, as his wheezing breath rasped against her chest and the tide-pulse in his throat thudded against her cheek, she told him the risks: all the ways she feared this vague new plan was likely to go wrong.
As Hale listened, his breath quieted, and the arms around her stopped shaking. By the time Mair was finished speaking, his body and breath were calm. His hands stroked her back, and Mair realized she was crying.
He was silent for a moment, and then, in a voice very close to his normal one,
