Bound to the IceDragon

Zeph,

The carriage stopped a quarter mile short of the gate, because the driver said he would go no further. "Ice on the road," he told me, without turning around. It wasn't true. The road ahead was black and clean and covered in salt, and it wound up the mountain like a dropped ribbon. He didn't want to be seen leaving a girl in a patched wool coat at the front steps of Frostveil Academy, where the horses were worth more than everything my family owned.

I gave him my last two coppers and climbed down with my trunk. It was a small trunk. My mother had packed it the night before and folded every dress twice, as if a few wrinkles might give me away.

The cold was nothing like the cold in our village, which was damp and mean and got into your knees. This cold was clean and sharp, and it felt like it was looking over at me. My breath rose in a cloud while I stood in the road and stared up at the school.

I had seen drawings of it, but drawings lie. In real life, Frostveil was huge and pale and a little frightening, built of blue-white stone straight into the side of the mountain, with towers so tall that their tops vanished in the clouds. Above it the glacier hung down the slope as if it had stopped in the middle of falling. The whole place seemed to say, we were here long before you came, and we will be here after you're gone.

I picked up my trunk and started walking.

It took twenty minutes. By the end, my arms were shaking, and I couldn't feel my fingers, but I reached the iron gates. A guard in a silver-trimmed cloak read my scholarship letter slowly, like he thought I might have written it myself.

"Vaelthora," he said, and frowned. "I don't know that house."

"It isn't a house. It's just my family."

He looked at me a while longer, then waved me through.

The courtyard was full of students arriving and shouting and hugging each other, while trunks rolled along behind them on their own like tame dogs. All of them wore the academy blue, a deep navy coat with silver thread at the collar and cuffs, in cloth that moved like water. My uniform was scholarship grey, plain wool the colour of dishwater, and I wouldn't get it until morning. Tonight I stood in my mother's old coat feeling like a stain on a clean tablecloth.

I kept my head down and headed for the nearest door. I nearly made it.

"Oh, look. Is that her?"

The voice was bright and amused, the way a mouse amuses a cat. I should have kept walking, but my feet stopped before I told them to.

Three boys stood by the fountain. The one in the middle was tall and golden, with the face of someone who had never once been told no. A silver pin shaped as a flame shone on his collar.

"The magicless one," he said, loud enough for twenty people to hear. "The Council's little charity case. They actually let you in."

"They did," I said.

"Do you know where you're standing? This is Frostveil. Half of us can pull lightning out of a clear sky. What are you going to do, read to us?"

His friends laughed fast and eagerly, the way people do when they're glad it isn't them.

My face went hot. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, because I'd practised it in the carriage a dozen different ways, and some of them were clever. But when I opened my mouth, the truth came out instead, which has never once helped me win an argument.

"I got in because I had the highest mark in the written exam in four provinces," I said. "So yes, reading is more or less my plan."

"Lysander Voss," he said, as though I ought to curtsy. "Remember it. You'll hear it a lot."

"I'll do my best to forget it," I said, and I walked through the doorway before my knees gave way.

Inside, in a narrow stone corridor that smelled of wet wool and candle smoke, I leaned against the wall and shook. It wasn't fear. It was the stupid, humiliating fact that my eyes were stinging. I had promised myself I would last three weeks without crying in front of anyone, and I had lasted about four minutes. I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes until it passed.

My mother's voice came to me, the way it always did when I was cornered. You don't have to be strong, Zeph. You only have to be stubborn. It's nearly the same thing.

She had worked double shifts at the laundry for two years to pay for my study books. When the letter came, she read it standing at the stove, with the soup boiling over behind her, and she didn't even notice. She just kept reading. Then she set it down on the table, very carefully, as if it might break, and took my face in her wet hands and said nothing at all. She didn't need to.

I wasn't going to waste all that on a boy with a flame pin.

The registrar was a thin woman with spectacles on a chain and no patience. She gave me a key, a map and a folded timetable, and told me the scholarship rooms were on the third floor of the east wing and that I would be sharing. She said "sharing" the way other people say "a mild illness."

"Is my roommate", I began.

"Has been here since noon and has already had two complaints made against her," the registrar said. "Next."

The room was barely big enough for two beds and a desk. The window was the size of a dinner plate and looked straight up at the glacier, glowing blue under the first stars. A girl sat cross-legged on the left bed with her boots on the blanket, eating an apple, and she looked at me as if I was the best thing that had happened all day.

"You're Vaelthora," she said. "The scholarship girl. Thank the old gods. Everyone else on this floor is either asleep or in love with themselves. I'm Nysselle Thornveil, and don't be impressed by the name. It's mostly debt."

She had dark curls pinned up with what looked like a pencil, ink on both cuffs, and a grin far too wide for someone who had known me for ten seconds.

"Zephyrine," I said. "Zeph is fine."

"Zeph." She tossed me the other apple, and I caught it, mostly by luck. "I heard you told Lysander Voss to go and read a book."

"That isn't what I said."

"By tomorrow it'll be a speech. Maybe with a big finish."

For the first time that day, I laughed. It came out small and cracked and surprised, and Nysselle looked very pleased, as if she'd been waiting to see whether I had one.

Dinner was in the Great Hall, under long banners in the colours of the noble houses. The scholarship students sat together at the far end, a smear of grey among all that blue, and nobody sat near us. Nysselle talked enough for four people. I only half listened. I was watching how the others looked at me, then at each other, then away, as if a stray dog had wandered into a church.

Somewhere between the soup and the bread she asked what my speciality was. I said I didn't have one, and the table went quiet. A boy across from me stopped chewing.

"Neither does half the faculty," Nysselle said brightly, "and they still get paid."

I looked down into my bowl so nobody could see my face.

I didn't tell her about the testing. At six, a village priest with warm hands and a kind voice. At ten, a healer kept saying, give it time. At fourteen, a travelling examiner with a crystal that lit up for every child who touched it. The children lined up in the market square, and it glowed for each of them in turn, like lamps being lit one by one. When he pressed it into my hand, it stayed dark. He tried again, then he put it away and wouldn't look at me, and the whole square went silent, the way a room does after someone has died.

Nothing. Not even a flicker. Eleven years of being the girl nothing happened to.

I walked home that evening and found my mother waiting at the door. She took one look at my face and said nothing about the crystal at all. She made tea, and she cut the heel off the loaf, the good part she always saved for herself, and put it on my plate. That was how she said she loved me without making me carry the weight of hearing it.

That night, after the candles were out, Nysselle snored across the room, a little whistling snore she would later deny with her whole heart. I lay awake and listened to the stone creak in the cold. My hand went to my collarbone, as it always did.

The mark was there under my fingers, a small silver crescent, like a moon with a thin line cut through it. I've had it since I was born. The healers called it a birthmark and moved on. My mother kept it covered with high collars all my life and never told me why, and I never pushed, because some questions you can feel a parent flinch from before you've finished asking them. It had always felt like ordinary skin, warm and a little raised.

Tonight it felt cold. Not icy, just cool, like a coin that had been in a pocket. I told myself it was the room, and I told myself I was tired, and at some point I slept.

In the dream I was walking on ice.

It was a city, though I understood that slowly. Thin glass towers rose on every side, and the streets between them were paved in frost so clean it rang under my feet. The sky was the colour of polished silver, and there was no wind. There were people everywhere, hundreds of them, standing in the streets exactly as they'd been when it happened: a woman with a basket on her hip, two children in mid-run, an older man with his hand raised to wave. All of them were wrapped in ice and perfectly still, their faces turned up toward something I couldn't see.

The worst part was that I knew the streets. I knew which way to turn. My feet took me left at the fountain, right at the tall arch, and up a wide flight of steps to a door made of frozen light.

Then a voice spoke behind me. It was low and very old, and it seemed to come from many mouths at once, laid one over the other like a chord.

"Ysolveth."

I turned. There was nobody, only the silent crowd and the silver sky.

"Ysolveth," it said again, closer, almost gently. "Wake up."

It wasn't my name. I had never heard it in my life. But it fitted me like a glove that had been waiting years for my hand, and my chest ached with it, the way it aches when you hear a song your mother used to hum.

I woke up gasping.

The room was dark and bitterly cold, and across from me Nysselle's breath rose in small white puffs. It took me a moment to see what was wrong with the window.

Frost had grown across the inside of the glass, thick and feathered, spreading while I watched. In the middle of it, in lines too neat to be an accident, someone had drawn letters I had never seen in any book. They were curved and sharp, nothing like our alphabet.

I could read them.

I don't mean I worked them out. I knew what they said, the way you know your own name without spelling it. And what they said was, "He is coming."

My collarbone ached with cold. Through my thin nightdress I could see a faint silver glow, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. I pressed my hand over it as if I could smother it.

Down in the courtyard, a single bell tolled, and every torch went out at once.