Mair punched him in the arm. “Have you been listening to me at all?” she exploded. “I just explained that you have to allow yourself to be reduced to vapor to so much as try this, and even if it’s successful, some part of you will still be lost! How are those acceptable risks?”
“They’re acceptable risks because they’re mine,” he said simply. “My answer is yes.”
“I don’t know if I can do it,” Mair said.
Hale smiled. “I can’t ask this of you.”
She smiled forlornly back. “You don’t have to ask.” Together they looked up into the red rays of the sunset. “Do you think that bit of sun and daylight will be enough?” Mair wondered.
“I think anything other than the freeze of the Coldway will be enough,” Hale said. “As long as you can get where you need to be quickly. I don’t imagine you’ll have much time.”
She swallowed and nodded shakily. “I know where to go.”
“Then take me there.” He took her hand, and together they walked up into the shaft of sunlight. As soon as they were fully above ground, Hale could feel something change: something elemental inside him began to rearrange itself. “Hurry,” he whispered.
Mair exhaled as much air as she could as he pulled her into his arms and she, in turn, pulled his face as close to hers as she could. And then the girl inhaled, breathing the waking dream in as he came apart and turned to mist in the sunset. He smelled of all the cold of the river, and when her lungs were full, she held her breath, though she wanted to sob, and she raced from the bulkhead by the stairs to the nearest frosty window shaded from the sunlight. She leaned in until her nose was a hair’s width from the glass, and she exhaled until there was no breath left in her.
As she leaned back again with a gasp, the frost on the window changed, warmed, faded, recrystallized before her eyes. Layer by layer, an image painted itself over the glass in a starry rime of cold condensate. As Mair watched, a boy’s face took shape. The details were hazy—the effect reminded her of working with her chalky pastels: you had to look at her paintings from a bit of a distance to really see the picture. But she was adept at looking at things that way, and so she had no trouble. Especially when the frost boy smiled at her. A hand resolved itself, pressing against the glass.
There was a bucket full of half-frozen water below the window. Mair took off her gloves, bent, and pressed her own hands to the freezing surface to chill them. When her fingers began to tingle with numbness, she straightened and put one palm to the glass where Hale’s frost hand was. She held her breath.
Five freezing-cold fingers curled away from the glass and intertwined with hers, and carefully, slowly, Mair pulled Hale away from the window: first his hand, then his arm, then one shoulder, then his face and head emerged. One foot, leg, and hip climbed over the windowsill, and then the other, and then there he stood, free of the glass, shaking with cold, but solid, and mostly stable.
He was never not cold from that day forward, but the chill was manageable; he was never completely stable, either, but then again, no human is ever completely stable, and it seems unfair to hold a dream to higher standards. Sometimes he felt that there were differences between a small tide and a heart, but those, too, could be worked through.
Neither he nor Mair was ever completely certain what was left behind in the sublimation. Whatever it was, in the long years of their life together that followed that winter, neither of them missed it.
And every year after, from that one to this, they have haunted the Coldway together from nick to thaw: Mair surveying and painting with her pastels, Hale whistling at her side. Now and then they come across another of the caldnicker’s roaming dreams down in the tunnels, and when they do, they are happy to share what they know of how dreams come true.
INTERLUDE
THE ROOM EXHALED again, and Captain Frost got to his feet. It was time to turn the glass. “You know,” he said as he lifted the sand clock and rotated it, “I rather thought, when you said you would tell a love story, that I knew which one you were going to tell. Or what sort, anyway,” he amended. He set down the glass, picked up his sherry, and said in a tone of mild surprise, “I was wrong.”
“What sort were you expecting?” Sullivan asked, nodding thanks to Sorcha as she refilled his glass of whiskey.
The chair Frost had occupied in between trips out into the rain was positioned by the window a few feet behind the sofa, which was nearer the center of the room. Rather than returning to it now, he crossed the room with his drink and his half-hour glass to the empty chair beside Negret near the display case, from which he could sit and face the young man sitting beside Petra on the couch.
“I rather thought,” said the captain slowly, “that you might tell a tale of the seiche.” At the word seiche, around the room, heads that had been turned toward the captain swiveled back to look at Sullivan with curiosity. Frost took another sip. “But damn me if you didn’t tell exactly the opposite of a seiche yarn.”
“What’s seiche?” Maisie asked, eyes on the handful of court cards, all hearts, that she was using to add a little pergola before the castle.
“You’ve never heard of the seiche?” Captain Frost barked a laugh as he set both his liquor glass and his half-hour glass on the small table between himself and Negret. “What this world is coming to, I don’t know.”
“It’s all right, Miss Maisie,” Tesserian said, taking a fresh deck
