Mars says, without bothering to check the mirrors.
I’ve no such restraint. In my side mirror, I see a plume of snow. It fills the pass and blots out the sky beyond it.
“She hated you before,” I say. “She’ll try to kill you now.”
“This is not the first battle between Winter and myself, Miss Quine. We’ve bloodied each other plenty.”
The road curves for another mile and then straightens out. We’ve reached the Shiv Road, a stretch of highway that has a very different feel. There are kol mines and twyl farms beyond the mountains to our left and the Desolation constantly on our right. We catch glimpses of it between gaps in the line of snow-plastered evergreens trimming the road.
“I wonder what it was like for the Shiv, swimming in the pool, taking their leisure in waters that heal.” With her window covered by canvas, Hyla watches the Desolation through the windshield. “Do you ever wonder such things?” She doesn’t look at me, doesn’t address the question to me, but she’s speaking so softly no else could be expected to hear.
“No,” I say.
“Truly?” she asks, wincing as she turns to face me. “You truck this road all the time, do you not?”
“Not all the time.”
She stares back at me, her goggles tangled in her hair and warmth bleeding from her eyes. She’s like Drypp, I think. Warm. Kind. Out of place in this frozen world. Why did she ever leave Paradyia?
“It would insult Winter,” I say, forcing my eyes back to the road. “To imagine her any other way. I wouldn’t do that.”
Beneath the tank tread the ice is solid again. I adjust myself in the seat and loosen my grip on the wheel.
It’s not long before Hyla’s asleep.
“How long have you been friendly with the Rangers?” Mars asks.
“I don’t know what you think you saw back there, but we’re not friendly.”
“But you pay them for safe passage?”
“Clients won’t trust your abilities if you have a reputation for losing your haul to Rangers. I learned early on that a few coins are the best way to get them to leave you alone.”
“If the Majority found out—”
“You’re a smuggler, Mars. Flouting Majority law with every shipload of goods,” I say, testing.
“But outlawing the private mining of kol, keeping it only for their own profit, enslaving two peoples who lived here long before they did—those are laws I cannot support. Laws I happily bend.”
“Bend?”
“Break. Shatter. One day I hope to use their own laws against them.”
“And how do you plan to do that?”
“There are ways.”
It’s easier to talk to him like this. With him behind me, with his sneers and piercing gaze impossible to see so long as I avoid the mirror.
“I hate kol,” I say.
“Do you?” He’s amused.
“It has its uses. I know that. But there are other ways—there have to be—ways that don’t have us playing with a mineral that causes so much harm.”
“Shiv Island is kol. The black veins are at its very heart, buried beneath the snow and the colored rock. You speak of dishonoring Winter by imagining her differently. What does it say that you would imagine your home another way? The island that cradles you.”
“It’s not the same.”
“The kol has taken no pains to befriend you,” Mars says, a smile in his voice.
“That’s not it.”
“Kol knows its place, Miss Quine.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that Winter does not. She oversteps.”
“Is that why you hate her so much?”
“I hate her for what she did to my family. What she still does to them.”
“The Kerce?”
“They should have been left in peace on their own island. To live and thrive as they had for generations. Instead, the Majority invaded and the Kerce people fled here—in desperation, needing help—”
“From the Shiv.”
“—but they were too different.”
“Is that real feeling I hear in your voice? I’m surprised.”
“That the heartless smuggler has convictions? I have my own law, but I would never condemn the Shiv to live as they have done. In caves, exposed to Winter’s hate, yearning for—”
“Begynd?”
“Your doubt feels desperate, Miss Quine.”
I don’t reply.
“I suppose they’ve done all they could while they waited.” His last words trickle away, swallowed by the Dragon and her rumblings.
“What was that?”
“The Kerce have meandered and peddled their gifts—”
“No not that. You were speaking of the Shiv.”
He finds my gaze in the mirror. “I was saying that the Shiv did better than the Kerce. They did the best they could while they waited.”
“While they waited for Begynd to climb up out of the Desolation and save them?”
“They