The Snow Queen's Captive (9 page)

Carefully, he sat up in the icy nest, wrapping the furs around his body. The low sound of voices continued, so he tucked a smaller fur around his hips, forming a kilt, and tiptoed through the room, looking for the sound of the voices.

He went down another hallway before the voices started again.

“But, I don’t want to be the snow queen,” he heard Charlotte saying. “I’m just a normal woman. I’m not the bad guy!”

“You’re a whiner,” a high, nasally voice said emphatically.

“Now, now, Fifi,” said another voice. “Let’s be nice to our clients, all right? What she meant to say, Charlotte, was that when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.”

“You keep saying that, and I’m tired of hearing it! There’s no lemonade to be made here! You’ve put me in an impossible situation! Do you understand that if I win this, I screw over Kai and his girlfriend and everyone in the village? They can’t live in all this ice! Nothing grows! I’m destroying the crops and their livelihoods simply by being here.”

“Then lose,” the kind voice said. “If you value the lives of strangers more than your own, lose and this won’t be a problem.”

“But you told me if I lose this challenge, I’ll be stuck between worlds forever, right?”

“Well, yes, that’s right.”

“Then I can’t lose,” Charlotte’s voice rose to a panicked level. A sob escaped her throat. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Well, crying about it won’t help,” came the nasal voice again.

“Fifi,” the other one warned.

“She’s whining,” the nasal one continued. “I thought you said she’d be happy for a second chance?”

“Well, most of them are.”

“Not this one! All we hear is ‘waaah, I’m so sad that I have to be the bad guy. It’s so awful that I have all these magic powers and get to live in an ice castle. Oh, my life is sooo terrible’.”

“You suck,” Charlotte said in a tear-choked voice. “It’s your fault I’m here. I’m supposed to be the other girl! The one that Kai likes! Not his enemy! I wish you hadn’t messed everything up!”

“Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one—“

“FIFI!”

The quarreling voices fell silent.

What in all the heavens was going on? Who was the snow queen arguing with? Why did she keep saying that this wasn’t supposed to be her?

“Please,” Charlotte said after a long moment. “I just want to go home.”

“I’ve told you before,” the authoritative voice said. “You cannot go home. You cannot be transferred. You are, for all intents and purposes, an evil queen. You’re stuck, so why not have fun with it? You’re evil! Cut loose! Go wild! This is your second chance to cram in everything you never got to do before!”

“You’re my fairy godmother!” He heard Charlotte cry. “I thought you were supposed to help me!”

“I am helping you! Look, this is me playing the world’s smallest violin at poor you, stuck with a second chance at life as a magical queen.”

“Ugh!” Footsteps slammed on the ice, and Kai barely had time to slide against one glittering wall before Charlotte swept out of the room in a puff of frost, swiping at her eyes. She stormed away, heading for her apartments, and Kai was pretty sure he heard the sound of weeping.

He wanted to go after her. For some reason, her crying tore at him. Maybe it was because he’d never heard her cry until she’d changed? Or maybe it was that he was sensing she was just as trapped as he was. Who had she been talking to?

Curiosity won out, and Kai cracked open the ice-lattice door to the room that Charlotte had left behind.

The room was empty. He frowned, stepping inside and looking around. No one was there. He ran his fingers along every wall surface, looking for a door he might have missed, but there was nothing.

Odd.

Maybe he’d overheard a conversation with her invisible servants. He glanced around, wondering if someone lurked silently in the corners. But there was no one, and nothing to see. It was all so strange.

When he returned to her room, Kai was surprised to see that her eyes were red and swollen, and her nose looked like a red berry. She’d been crying, and was obviously still upset. She had one of the fur satchels and was tossing cubes into it, along with anything else in arm’s reach.

“Who were you talking to?” he asked.

“I can’t say,” she said with a sniff.

He’d expected that answer. It still irritated him to hear it. She shared nothing with him. Not that he expected otherwise – she was his captor. Still, she kept trying to convince him that she was different…and then did the same sort of thing that made it difficult for him to trust.

He watched her for a minute more. “What are you doing, then?”

“Packing,” she said in a watery voice. She wiped her eyes and shook the ice off of her fingers. “I’m taking a vacation.”

“What about me?”

“You’ll be fine here in the ice keep,” she said in a dull voice. “I’ve reinforced the doors. You won’t be able to get out, but no one will be able to get in, either.”

“I’ll make a fire and burn a hole through,” he threatened. Why did he care if she left him? Why did it make him so angry?

“No, you won’t. It’s enchanted ice.”

“Enchanted how?”

“Um. Enchanted not to burn.”

He’d never heard of such a thing. “I don’t believe you.”

She flushed. “I don’t care if you believe me or not. It’s true. You’re stuck here. And I’ll be…back soon. Ish.” Her face crumpled and she wiped more tears from her eyes.

For some reason, her tears tore at him. He felt helpless to assist her. In her own way, she’d been kind to him, and he could do nothing in return. “And who will bring me food while you’re gone?”

She stilled, blinking.

Ahah. He’d found something she had not considered. “Your servants only respond to you. Who will bring me water and soup when you are gone? Or do you care if I starve? Is this another one of your tortures?”

He knew she hated it when he threw out the ‘torture’ word.

Sure enough, her jaw set in a mulish line. “I’m not torturing you.”

“I seem to recall ice in unpleasant places that tells me otherwise.”

Her face flushed again, rather prettily. “That’s not fair.”

“Is it not? What about this is fair?”

She threw her bag down, now angry at him. “I didn’t choose this!”

“Nor did I.”

Her mouth firmed again.

“If you’re leaving, take me with you,” he said, though he wasn’t sure why. She just seemed so desperately alone and unhappy. “You can keep an eye on your prisoner and still get away.”

She hesitated, and then began to stuff the furs in the bag. “You’ll need furs. You can’t go naked.”

“I’ll get them,” he said easily.

He didn’t know why, but he felt like he’d won a battle. “Where are we going?”

“Anywhere but here,” she said, a grim look on her pretty face. “I’m not staying here to wait for the end.”

“The end?”

She turned and glanced around the room, then looked at him. “Someone’s coming here and I doubt they’re leaving without my head on a pike.”

“I’m sick to death of this place.”

She wasn’t the only one. “We can go south, to my people.”

Charlotte gave him a pointed look. “Yeah, right.”

He found himself smiling. “I had to ask.”

Her tears dried a little, and her mouth turned up, just slightly, at the corners. “I suppose you did.”

“So…where are we going?”

She shrugged. “There’s a mountain in the distance. I thought I’d see what was on the other side.”

“Walking?”

She thought for a moment, and then got a mischievous look on her face. “Not walking…”

~~ * * * ~~

From atop the back of her polar bear, Charlotte stared over the cliff. “Okay, so apparently there is no other side of this mountain.”

Behind her rode Kai, his hands on her icy waist. “This is probably why no one lives on the mountain,” he said with amusement. “My people never come here.”

That struck her as odd. “Really? Even when I wasn’t here?”

“It is a long climb and my people travel by foot.” His long black hair fluttered near her face as the wind picked up. “We’ve had to range further and further for food due to the cold, but never up the mountain. As you can see, there is not much to commend this side.”

He had a point. Charlotte pushed her hair back behind an ear and studied the world laid out below them. Their polar bear (she’d asked her invisible servants for a mount and this was what had showed up) waited patiently on a narrow, snowy ledge. Far below, the craggy granite of the mountain seemed to sheer off, leading to white-capped waves and floating glaciers hundreds of feet below. If she squinted, she could make out dozens of dark, lounging forms below. Walruses, or seals, perhaps. The wind was high, whipping her hair about no matter how much she tried to tie it back, and seagulls cried out in the distance. It was all very beautiful.

Not super useful, but beautiful. “Do your people fish?”

“They do. Why?”

She pointed below, at a seal flopping across the ice. “They’re obviously eating something. My guess is that there’s some good fishing below.”

“Yes, so I will just tell my starving people that if they will only cross an icy mountain and then scale a cliff, there is fishing to be had. I will carry that message home as soon as you let me go.” His voice was full of harsh sarcasm.

She winced. “Okay, okay, good point. I was just trying to think of a way to make everyone happy.”

“You could send me home.”

They’d had this argument before. “I will in about two weeks.”

He grunted amicably.

For some reason, their arguments about sending him home had lost a lot of their bite. Even though they’d ridden together today into the wild, he’d never once attempted to leave her side or overpower her. In fact, it had almost seemed as if both of them were enjoying the afternoon out in the wild.

Either that, or they were enjoying being together. She was, but she was starved for company. She might have been assuming that he was enjoying himself as much as she was. But there was no animosity between them. And…she really liked it.

Charlotte gazed down at the glacier-peppered waters, at the seals basking in the sun on the sand below the cliff. All that food, and too remote for his starving people to get to. They’d have to pass her icy domain, up the mountain, and then, as Kai had said, find a way down the cliff.

And she was no help. She was the bad guy. She sighed. “It’s a shame I’m not the crop princess instead of the snow queen.”

He snorted. “You’d have to pry me from your side if that were true.”

And wouldn’t that be a lovely problem to have? Charlotte gazed wistfully down at the blue waters below. If she had Kai’s help, she wouldn’t be running away from her ice castle so his avenging girlfriend wouldn’t come and kill her. If only Kai was on her side. She thought for a moment, then asked, “What happens if I win?”

“What do you mean?” Kai’s hands shifted on her waist. She could have sworn she felt his hands give a bit of a comforting squeeze, but perhaps she’d imagined it. He often had to adjust his hands – his fox-skin gloves tended to stick to her icy clothing if he didn’t shift or move about every so often.

“Your people will come after you in two weeks. It’s been foretold.” Well, if a fairy tale was considered a divination of the future. “When they do, they’ll either win or I’ll win. What happens if I win, do you suppose?”

“Unending winter,” Kai said softly. “Endless cold. You’ll be the queen of a dead land. No one will live here or be able to survive here.”

She gazed down at the seals below. They seemed happy and well-fed enough. But she knew what Kai meant – there’d be no people. There’d be nothing for them to eat, no crops to harvest. She’d be alone, a queen of nothing but ice. But…people could survive in cold, if they knew how. Entire Native populations lived in icy Alaska and Canada and they seemed to cope just fine. But Kai’s people weren’t prepared for that sort of lifestyle, and she couldn’t blame them.

Charlotte didn’t know what to do. Either she screwed over an entire kingdom, or she destroyed herself. Logic told her to be self-sacrificing and to give herself up for the good of the many, but this wasn’t just death and then moving on to the Afterlife. This was
no
Afterlife. She’d just cease to exist, full stop.

And that was completely terrifying.

“I hate being the bad guy,” she said abruptly. “Hate it, hate it, hate it! I don’t want to be evil!”

“So don’t,” Kai said.

She sighed and slid off the side of the polar bear. She couldn’t sit still; she was too agitated. “You don’t understand. I’m the snow queen—“

“You have a lot of magic,” he agreed. “A lot of power. If you don’t want to be evil, then do something about it.”

He made it sound so simple. “Like what?”

“You’re the one with the ice powers. If you can come up with unique ways to build your castle, unique ways to travel up the mountain, and unique ways to torture me, why can you not think of ways to do something good with your powers?”

She blinked. Thought for a moment. Blinked some more. Why…had it never occurred to her that she could do something other than evil? She’d simply heard the label ‘evil queen’ and assumed the worst. Fifi had put her in the wrong person, and she’d just gone along with it. She’d accepted the fact that she was ‘bad’ and whined instead of doing something about it. She’d moped instead of taking action.

Who said she had to
be
the bad guy? She could do whatever she wanted with these powers. If she could feed Kai, maybe she could feed everyone. She just had to figure out how. If she could make ice cubes that were food appear out of midair – and a nourishing soup for Kai as her captive…why couldn’t she do more?

Who said she couldn’t? Muffin and Fifi weren’t here to stop her. So the fairy tale got a bit more off the rails? So what?

“Oh my God,” she said softly, her hand going to her breast. She could feel her heart pounding with excitement all the way through her skin and her icy bodice.

“What?” Kai slid off the side of the polar bear and approached her, his bundled furs sweeping through the snowy path. He regarded her cautiously. “What is it?”