“Max,” Zachary calls but she does not turn. He moves toward her but the snow slows his progress, allowing only single steps at a time. It seems like an eternity before he reaches her.
“Max,” he calls again but still the figure in the chair does not turn. She does not even move as he gets closer. The hope he had not realized he was clinging to so tightly dissolves beneath his fingers along with her shoulder as he reaches to touch her.
The figure in the chair is carved from snow and ice.
As her gown cascades around the chair the ripples in the fabric become waves, and within the waves there are ships and sailors and sea monsters and then the sea within her gown is lost in the drifting snow.
Her face is empty and icy but it is not merely a resemblance like the statues from before, this is as precise a likeness as could be captured in frozen water, as though it has been molded from the flesh-and-blood version. It is Mirabel down to its snow-flecked eyelashes, perfect save for the now broken shoulder.
Within her chest there is a light. It glows red underneath the snow, creating the soft illusion of pink that he had seen from afar.
Her hands rest in her lap. He expects them to be held out and waiting for a book like the statue of the Queen of the Bees but instead they hold a length of torn ribbon, like the ribbons in the trees, only if this one once had a key strung on it the key has been removed.
Zachary can see now that she is not looking out into the trees. She is looking at the other chair in front of her.
This chair is empty.
It is as though she has been here, always, waiting for him.
The keys hanging from the trees sway and clatter against one another, chiming like bells.
Zachary sits down in the chair.
He looks at the figure facing him.
He listens to the keys as they dance on their ribbons, striking against one another around them.
He closes his eyes.
He takes a deep breath. The air is cool and crisp and star-bright.
Zachary opens his eyes again and looks at the figure of Mirabel in front of him. Frozen and waiting, her gown weighed down by old tales and former lifetimes.
He can almost hear her voice.
Tell me a story, she says.
It is what she has been waiting for.
Zachary obliges her.
DORIAN WAKES IN an unfamiliar room. He can still feel the snow against his skin and the sword in his hand but no snow could survive here in this warmth and his fingers are clutched around the blankets piled on the bed and nothing more.
Outside the inn the wind howls, confused by this turn of events.
(The wind does not like to be confused. Confusion ruins its sense of direction and direction is everything to the wind.)
Dorian pulls on his boots and his coat and abandons the comfort of his room. As he fastens the star-shaped buttons the carved bone against his fingertips feels no more or less real than the sword had felt in his hand moments before, or the memory of Zachary’s chilled skin against his.
The lanterns in the main hall have been dimmed but the fire still burns in the expansive stone fireplace. Candles increase the spread of the light over the tables and chairs.
“Did the wind wake you?” the innkeeper asks, rising from one of the chairs by the fire, an open book in his hand. “I can get you something to help you sleep if you’d like.”
“No, thank you,” Dorian says, staring at this man who has been plucked from his head, in a hall he has longed to visit a thousand times. If Dorian could conjure a place to forget where he had come from or where he was going it would be this.
“I have to leave,” he says to the innkeeper.
Dorian goes to the door of the inn and opens it. He expects the snow and the forest but he looks instead at a shadowed, snowless cavern. In the distance there is a shape like a mountain that could be a castle. It is very, very far away.