awkwardly over the railing, claiming a seat in the back row. Brekken jumps up last and joins me in back.
Leaning down from the side of the sleigh, Ilya closes the gate to the doorway and locks it with a key pulled from within her long green wool coat. Then she snaps the reins, and just like that, we’re off, the sound of the sleigh’s treads slicing across the snow louder than the wolves’ paws.
I wonder what time it is here, and then realize I don’t even know what time system Fiordens use. I know their days are longer than ours, about thirty hours if I’m remembering Graylin’s lessons rightly. But there’s no moon by which to measure the night, and the aurora stays where it is, a quiet, bright presence at the edge of the sky. I know that over the course of the year it advances, until their warmest month—which still isn’t warm enough to melt the permafrost. And then the aurora covers the whole sky for one bright day and night.
“It’s beautiful,” I whisper to Brekken.
I had always figured that the doorway between Haven and Fiordenkill was located within Myr’s capital city, but it doesn’t seem like it; beyond the elegant row of trees lining the road, all I see are more trees, quickly growing wild and deep. Trees and ice gleam through the thin dusting of snow on the road. Maybe that’s why we seem to be going so fast. The trees whip by us on either side. But the wind isn’t as bad as I expected; the sleigh is cleverly designed to ward it off. I’m able to look at the sky, the trees, and at Brekken, who is watching not the landscape go by, but me. When our eyes meet, he smiles.
“What are you thinking?” he asks me.
I feel dizzy by the onslaught on my senses, too awed by the beauty of Fiordenkill to think much of anything at all. But I try to come up with something smart to say.
“I’m thinking how weird it is that after wanting to see your world my whole life and never thinking I’d be able to, now I’m here. And it’s for such a dark reason. But I’m still happy to be here.”
“I’m happy you’re here too,” Brekken says simply. The starlight plays over his face, disappearing into darkness occasionally when we pass under tree branches, then washing him with light again. “Is the gauntlet working? Are you feeling any pain?”
I consider it. If I focus, I can feel a slight pain, an ache deep in my bones, a feeling of needles like when my foot falls asleep, but deeper. Yet it’s faint, easily ignorable. It might even be my imagination. I smile. “Yeah, it seems to be working.”
Here, tonight, with the landscape zooming by us, the stars burning in their sphere and the aurora flickering at the edge of the horizon, it’s easy to ignore whatever small discomfort I feel. Brekken is holding my hand, and we’re pressed together, from our shoulders down to our thighs. The sleigh protects us from the wind, and he looks so very lovely in the starlight.
10
At some point, I fall asleep on Brekken’s shoulder, warmed by his proximity. His skin always felt cool to me in Havenfall, but here it seems warm. He still has his arm around me when I wake up, blearily, to a silver sun rising ahead of us, lighting the ice road up in a blue blaze. I look ahead at Graylin, suddenly nervous. I haven’t told anyone that Brekken and I are—whatever we are. Dating? Together? Kissing, my brain helpfully supplies, and I blush and shrug away from Brekken. No way am I telling anyone that Brekken and I are kissing. Especially Graylin or Marcus. But I’m kidding myself. They probably already know.
I shake away the embarrassing thoughts. No one is worried about who you’re kissing, idiot. Not with the daunting task ahead of us.
We’re most of the way to Winterkill, Ilya tells us, but we don’t want to approach it by day. Lord Cadius is hosting one of his feasts tonight. We’ll hide out today, rest up, go over our plan, and get our disguises in order. Tonight seems almost too soon—there’s not time to stake out the place and consider our attack from all angles. But the longer we stick around Fiordenkill, the greater the chance of being caught. Not to mention that even though I’m wearing the gauntlet, I can feel the ache