Stealing Snow (13 page)

As he unrolled the paper, familiar lines stared up at me. But instead of being etched onto my skin, they were right there on a map marked “Algid.” I lifted my sleeve and put them side by side. How was this possible? Unless … unless the story about me walking through a mirror wasn’t true, either? But I remembered it … I remembered all the blood. It was one of the few things that had stuck with me from my childhood. That mirror was the dividing line of my life. Between pre-Whittaker and Whittaker. Not-crazy and crazy. And Kai and his geography lesson had just called it into question.

“Incredible!” Gerde leaned over the map and my arm, her eyes wide with amazement.

I noted a mountain range in the top right corner of the map. Below it was a castle of some kind, and beneath it the words “Snow Palace” on Kai’s map. On my arm the palace wasn’t there, but the mountain range was.

“Where are we on this map?” I asked.

Gerde started to point to an area on the bottom left when Kai snapped the map shut again.

“Why’d you do that?” I said angrily.

It was the second time he’d done that. Kai had stopped Gerde from telling me something I wanted to know. He may have been protecting her, but he was pissing me off.

Kai said nothing. His face was a mask again, closing off me and Gerde. He walked back into the other room.

Gerde rolled her eyes. “Just ignore him. He’s always so grumpy.”

I nodded, even though I thought there was more to his attitude. And it likely had something to do with me.

“Do you believe what the River Witch said about me?” I asked as I traced a finger along the mountain ridge of my scar.

“The witch is tough, but fair. And I have learned much from her. She’s changed my life. But if you let her teach you, you will change all of Algid.”

“So you believe in the prophecy. Or prophecies. I heard there were two.”

“I only know of one,” she said, biting her lip. “But I think when the Eclipse of the Lights comes, the whole world will change. Or at least I hope so.”

I looked around. I dropped my voice to a whisper. “I don’t want to change all of Algid. I just want to bring my friend home.”

Gerde blinked hard. “The boy from the water? You were calling his name and another when the River Witch brought you to the boat,” she said, remembering.

I nodded.

“The boy from where I came from. His name is Bale.”

Maybe it was because Gerde had shown me her top secret snow-growing crop, or maybe it was because I could see how much hope she had in me for the future of her land. I just couldn’t let her continue to pin those on me, when I was not here to help her or Algid. I needed to be honest with her. And I needed to recite the story of Bale and Snow again out loud to keep it real for me. To keep me going. I left out the part about Bale being dragged into Algid through a mirror. And I left out the part about Jagger, too. “I need to find Bale.”

Gerde was quiet, but her look was thoughtful. I was expecting her to be disappointed that I hadn’t come here to save the world. But there was understanding in her gray eyes instead.

“You love him. You’ll find him. If you let the River Witch train you, you’ll be able to.”

I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but it did make sense. I needed to survive this world, and if I really possessed the powers everyone said I did, knowing how to use them might help. Gerde said there was a virtual army of beasts out there in the forest. I could not outrun them. But maybe I could defend myself. And if I was being honest, without Jagger I didn’t have the first clue where to find Bale. Maybe I needed the River Witch after all.

“If I ask the River Witch for help, it has to be on my terms,” I said hesitantly. “And there’s no way I’m going back to her boat.”

Gerde laughed heartily. “I think that can be arranged. Kai will bring her here. In the meantime, would you like some clothes that are a little bit more … a little less…”

“Less me?” I joked, pulling at my Whittaker pajamas.

Kai grunted disapprovingly. He had drifted back into the room. Kai didn’t like me. But I wanted to dissect his dislike instead of punching him like I did Jagger. There was something about his attitude that was maddeningly interesting to me. Maybe it was because he wore his thoughts on his face, like I did, with no effort to hide them. Like right now, I couldn’t help but notice the flash of his blue eyes even as his lips scowled.

“Don’t mind him,” Gerde said, turned on her heel, and returned with a green dress. “I made this. I promise that it will feel like you,” she said with a small smile.

“To be honest, I don’t know what
me
feels like,” I said, taking the dress.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into Kai,” Gerde said matter-of-factly. “When he gets his mind set on something, he doesn’t budge easily. He’ll warm to you in time.”

“Why would he?” I blurted, and headed upstairs to change. I had a limited history meeting new people, but Kai’s feelings about me seemed pretty intractable. It was dislike at first sight.

The dress Gerde had made was simple and pale green. She had used the wool that I’d seen on the loom in that strange room
last night. I slipped it on. The material was soft to the touch. It clung to my torso before gently sloping out into a full skirt. Delicate buttons shaped like tiny sparrows and made out of what almost felt like bone dotted down the center of the dress. I twirled around, liking the way the fabric swirled around me.

When I got downstairs, Gerde was humming and there were literally birds in the kitchen chirping along with her. They’d flown inside and were perched along the top of the cabinets. My nose filled with the smell of her buttery batter frying up on the stovetop.

I felt jealousy well up in me. I had never had anything like this and would never be anything like Gerde. She hummed and sang, not to keep her anger down. She did it because she felt like it—because that happy noise needed to get out.

“The dress looks perfect on you,” Gerde said brightly, complimenting herself and me in one breath.

“Thank you. I really … it’s lovely,” I said, an inexplicable lump forming in my throat as I got the words out. The gesture meant more apparently than I knew.

She turned mercifully back to the stovetop and said, “You’re welcome. By the way, we eat a lot of greens and breakfast-for-lunch here. Sometimes we even eat it for dinner. I hope that’s okay.”

There was a pink porridge next to a leafy salad already on the table. A griddle full of bright-green pancakes sat on the tiny stovetop.

“On Tuesdays we have plain egg-white omelets. On Wednesdays we have cereal,” I blurted, surprising myself. I was reciting the Whittaker menu. Days ran together there. However
bland, sometimes the only way I knew the day of the week was by the food that Vern handed me on a plastic platter.

Gerde blinked at me, unsure what I was talking about, but played along. “Well, that sounds delicious, but I hope you don’t mind trying something a little different.”

“Everything’s different here,” I said, deflecting, as she plated a pancake for me and I took my first bite.

All of what Gerde had shown me back in the greenhouse was pretty mind-blowing, but I didn’t know that food could actually make me feel things. As the green pancake melted in my mouth, I saw colors. I tasted colors. Technicolor ones. It was sweet and sour and spicy all at once. The flavors chased one another. It was a first, middle, and last course in one single bite. Maybe every surprise in Algid wasn’t Snow Wolves coming out of the ground. Maybe there were good things for all the scary ones.

“How did you do that?”

Gerde shrugged and placed one of her tiny hands over my heart. “May I? I don’t know how to explain. But I can feel that there’s something … not right in there.”

She took her hand away. “Never mind. I’m sorry. I’m still learning. Maybe I should stick to the animals in the menagerie.”

I put a hand over my own heart. Gerde was still a novice, but maybe she sensed something that I knew for sure. My heart was still broken.

The next day I woke to find my arm hanging over the side of the bed, submerged in water. I was still reaching for Bale. The water
lapped at my fingertips, and my eyes opened. This was not a dream. My bed was floating, and the ceiling was coming closer; the water was raising the bed farther and farther up.

I could still sit up. But if I didn’t get out of the room soon, I was going to drown. Panic seized me, but I felt paralyzed, all while the water inched up. Faster and faster.

I didn’t have much time. I tried to paddle toward the door. If I didn’t do something, then I was going to drown for the second time in the same week.

“Help me, please!” I screamed.

“What is it now?” a disdainful voice said through the door.

It was Kai. A part of me wished that I didn’t need his help right now so I could tell him where he could shove his “
what is it now
.” But my life depended on his opening the door.

“The room is flooding. Open the door—please!”

I could hear him trying to throw his weight against the door.

“It’s stuck—”

“No shit, Sherlock,” I blurted, realizing that Kai would not get the reference from my world.

“Kai, there’s so much water …” I heard my voice change from its normal tone to the high-pitched range of fear.

“Use your snow! Save yourself. It’s the only way!” he yelled.

This was not a fairy tale. No one was coming to save me. That’s what he was saying. And I finally heard him.

Despite what he’d instructed, he hadn’t given up trying. I could hear him making contact with the door again and again.

“I’ll get the River Witch or Gerde.”

“Don’t leave me,” I begged.

“Okay,” he said, calling out for them instead of leaving the door.

I rocked back on the bed I might die in. I felt anger come again in waves. I did not want to end like this. But the fear and the panic that I’d felt in the River was back again, too.

“Think,” I told myself as the bed rose higher and the ceiling grew even closer.

I started to hum like I used to back at Whittaker.

“Don’t think. Freeze it—use your power and freeze it!” Kai yelled to me, his voice forceful and commanding.

“I don’t know how.”

“You do. You just haven’t done it yet. The River Witch always says take what you are feeling and put it in the magic. You’re angry and scared. Just take that and put it all in your snow.”

He was trying to save me, but all I could think of was how easy it was for him to say that from the other side of the door.

I closed my eyes and tried to focus. This time something actually happened. I felt a flash of cold go all over my body like a shiver. Colder than cold. Like I’d reached my cold saturation point. Another shiver and the cold began to drain from me through my fingertips. A crystal formed on the surface of the water. It wasn’t like the paper cutouts of snowflakes I remember making as a little kid when I was still allowed to use scissors. It was something like the graffitied Tree that let me into Algid, a strange language that I couldn’t understand clustering on top of itself in a solid icy pattern on the surface of the water. Then one crystal split into two. And that crystal split again, multiplying over and over.

Suddenly my fingernails extended and resealed around metallically hard ice. The shards of ice were a few inches long and
came to razor-sharp points. Like icicles. Like claws. My ice claws were out.

Somehow, within seconds, the entire room beneath me was frozen. My bed no longer moved. My head was an inch from the ceiling. I began to laugh, looking at the skating rink I’d made of Kai and Gerde’s guest room. I looked at my hands that were now weapons.

What had been hidden from me in the other world my whole life, what was always there just beneath my skin, waiting for me to let it out all along, was proof that I was not crazy and that everyone in the world but Bale and maybe Vern had been completely and utterly wrong about me. My claws cut both ways.

The pain hurt, but it was good.

I had saved myself, just like Kai had ordered. And whatever else the River Witch had said, it turned out the part about me having the power of snow was true. For a girl who had spent the better part of her life stuck in a hospital for crimes against sanity, this was everything.