Stealing Snow (11 page)

In the next clearing, giant white sails sat atop a glass cube perched high in the trees. Colorful lights—which I can only assume were the North Lights—blazed brightly in the sky and were reflected on every surface as the house disappeared into the sky.

“Awesome …,” I gasped. “What is it?”

“Shelter.”

But it was more than that.

“What are the sails for?”

“They capture the wind’s and the sun’s energy and run the house,” Kai said.

“How far north are we?” I nodded toward the light show in the sky. “Where I’m from, lights like those are mostly near the poles…”

He shrugged. “You can see them from everywhere in our land. We just call them the Lights. The River Witch says there is a lady up there conducting an orchestra of light in the sky. But I think they’re just lights.”

So far nothing had been
just
anything since I got to Algid. Everything had a story, some hint of magic. And these lights were fated to go out. Time was up for whatever was going to happen.

“Come on,” said an impatient Kai, already halfway up the stepladder to the front door. I was having a Goldilocks moment. I hadn’t even stepped inside yet, but I knew it was perfect. It wasn’t too big or too small, and it was up high and transparent. A place from which you would never feel hemmed in. You could see so much of Algid from there. If I could draw my ideal home, it would be exactly what stood in front of me now.

The inside of the house was compact and genius, though bigger than it looked from the outside. There were floor-to-ceiling windows for walls through a labyrinth of rooms. And the bones of the house were exposed within each wall. Metal braces were welded to the tree branches. The house, as modern as it was, wasn’t just in the tree. It was part of it.

Kai said nothing as he handed me a blanket. He may not have wanted me there, but at least his manners had kicked in.

I handed the blanket back to him. I was chilled, but he was the one still sopping wet from the River. His lips even looked a little blue.

“You need to get warm.”

He blinked and nodded, but when he tried to unbutton his shirt his fingers shook so hard that he couldn’t do it.

“Hey, let me help you.” I reached for his shirt, but he batted my hand away.

“I got it,” he snapped. Then he turned away from me and pulled his shirt roughly over his head, tossing it to the ground. I
stared at the muscles along his back for a moment before he wrapped the blanket around himself and faced me again.

I avoided his eyes as he made his way to a chair and sat down.

Outside, the strange birdcalls got louder, and then they were drowned out by a low whistling sound.

He was right. Something was coming. The trees bent like matchsticks.

“Kai?”

I looked through the icy wall of the cube structure, searching for the source of the noise. A giant wave of snow was coming right for the house. I started to tap my fingers, my go-to comfort move, but it did not help me. I needed to draw, but there was no paper in sight. I squatted down, bracing myself, but Kai, slowly warming up, moved about the house as if there weren’t anything wrong.

“The house will hold,” he assured me.

Seeing my distress, he joined me on the floor and sat next to me.

“The house will hold,” he repeated, sounding sure.

The wave of white hurled toward us until I couldn’t see its crest. The accompanying sound was that of a train.

I grabbed Kai’s hand and held on to it, squeezing too hard as the glass wall in front of us whited-out. The house and tree bent backward with the whipping gusts of wind, but they did not break. They just swayed back again.

I let go of Kai’s hand with an apology. “Sorry.”

I never apologized.

“Don’t get any ideas. I was just…”

“Scared,” he completed my thought.

Scared was worse than sorry.

“I was not scared,” I protested a little too much.

Mercifully, he shrugged and looked out the window.

“Was that a snow tsunami?”

“We call it a Snow Wave.”

“Well, whatever it was, we should send the architect of this house a thank-you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You built this place?” I asked, surprised. “I thought you were an apprentice to the witch.”

“Gerde’s the apprentice. I am more of a caretaker. And I go to school in town.”

He got up and moved to the glass hearth, the blanket still around him. My eyes followed his half-naked form. He was no longer shaking. Apparently, the effect of the River had worn off.

“Is this house magic?” I asked as Kai touched something near the tiny glass hearth and a fire sprang up.

Kai looked at me funny. I understood so little of this place.

“It’s not magic. It’s engineering. I don’t do magic.”

There was pride in his voice, and when he saw the relief in my face, his body language softened slightly. I felt the tension that had somehow built from the second we’d stepped inside the cube diffuse between us. But something else clicked into place.

“What do you mean, you can’t do magic? You were with Gerde and the River Witch when they …” I remembered again that he hadn’t actually had a hand in my revival; he was just an observer. Apparently, he was a reluctant one.

“No. It comes at too high a price.”

“Do you mean it’s expensive, or is it a selling-your-soul kind of thing?”

Kai blinked hard. Maybe the selling-your-soul idea wasn’t in the Algid vernacular.

“It’s both. It feels like a shortcut. If I want something, I’d rather work for it.”

“Not everyone can do what you do, Kai. Not everyone can build this.”

He blushed, not meeting my eyes. I guess he wasn’t used to compliments.

“But the magic—how does it work?”

He sighed. “There is small magic and big magic. People can buy small magic for healing and cosmetic enhancements, for running the house. The King has big magic. So does Nepenthe. And the Witch of the Woods. And the Fire Witch. The Enforcer, though, does not have that power. Just brute force.”

“Who’s the Enforcer?”

“The Hand of the King. Some say he’s the Eyes of the King, too.”

“What does that even mean?”

“That the King can see through him and make him do whatever he wants. It’s just a rumor. The Kingdom runs Algid on rumors and fear…”

Great, so my alleged ice daddy also has freaky mind-control powers.

“What about Gerde? What kind of magic does she have?”

“She’s not a witch. Or at least she wasn’t born a witch; I don’t know what she is. She has always been this way.”

“So what are you? Why do you live here?”

“I couldn’t let Gerde do this alone.”

“But you don’t like it? And you don’t like me because you think I have magic.”

Looking away, he said softly, “I know you have magic.”

“Even if that were true, it isn’t something I can help. It isn’t something I asked for. You can’t hate me for what I am.”

He shrugged. “I’ve seen what the witch can do. And you’re supposed to be a million times more powerful.”

“Look, what you think I can do … I can’t. I am not like the River Witch, and I never will be.”

“You will, after she teaches you. Like she’s teaching Gerde. There’s a price for what she does for you. You just don’t see it yet.”

“She saved my life. She and Gerde. How can that be bad?”

“When she helps you, you’ll owe her. I just wonder if maybe all of us will pay for it.”

I had thought the awkwardness that had descended between us had something to do with us being alone and him being half-naked, but it was more than that. He objected to me. I was used to people not liking me. But not until I had done something to warrant it. Kai objected to the very idea of me.

Maybe we should have left her in the water
. I hadn’t imagined it. He had really said it. I knew that now with near certainty.

“Then why didn’t you just let me go?”

“There was a storm coming.”

“Before that—you tried to stop me.”

“You can’t run away on Gerde’s watch. I don’t want to see her punished.”

His concern for Gerde was the only thing so far that saved him from being a complete asshole. Well, that and the house. But my mind was caught on punishment. I wondered what that looked like in the hands or tentacles of the River Witch.

“Look, I should put something on. There’s a room on the opposite side of that wall, up the stairs. There might be another wave. It’s better that we stay here the night.”

“You want me to spend the night here with you?” My voice dripped with incredulity. I suddenly would rather be with the River Witch.

“It’s the last thing I want. But I didn’t make that storm out there.” He looked at me very pointedly when he said that.

“You think I did this? You think I wanted this?”

“You tell me! You don’t have to want it. You were emotional. That’s how it works. The snow responds to you. The Snow King can frown and cause a crevasse to fall all the way across Algid. The River Witch said you can control snow, even if you don’t know you can.”

“That’s insane. I did not do this.”

“I wish I was wrong. But everything I’ve seen tells me the opposite. I live with a witch who makes tsunamis when Gerde makes the dinner wrong, and Gerde herself, who …” He drifted off, stopping himself from saying more.

“Who what?”

He closed his eyes and gathered himself as if arguing with me
were physically affecting him. He took a step back from me and said, “I’ll see you in the morning.”

The me from Whittaker, who would have taken a bite of him, considered the fleshy part of his arm. But a look at the whited-out windows stopped me. I turned my back on him as he retreated.

Before I climbed the stairs of the cube, I noticed another door. Curious, I opened it and found a loom with green wool sitting in a corner and a cage with bits of bone and fur on the floor around it. I closed it again, unsure of what to think.

As I climbed the stairs to the guest room, I wondered if I wanted to know any more about this house or its inhabitants. And where was Bale? From the second I had landed in the River I had been sidetracked. But no more, I promised myself. I promised him. Every person I met would be a step toward him. And if it turned out I did control the snow, which I doubted in my core, I would use every single particle of it to build a bridge to him.

The windows faced the woods. The view was not obscured by the Snow Wave. Outside, I could see the rainbow of the North Lights. It might have been a trick of the eye, or maybe I was just tired, but they seemed to be just a bit fainter than when I had arrived in Algid. Or maybe the prophecy was true. The Lights were going out. A storm bird’s call rang out again, followed by another whistle. Another wave was coming. But after my talk with Kai, I felt like I’d already been knocked down by one.

I looked out the window and wondered how the strange, private boy downstairs had possibly done all this on his own. I’d never climbed a tree before, and from this vantage point it felt like I was standing on the tree’s top branches.

I turned back to my little borrowed room. The last few days suddenly weighed heavily upon me.

What Kai and the River Witch had said was in my mind now, whether or not I wanted it to be. I did not think I brought on the Snow Waves. But could I really be the child of two enchanted beings? Could I really have magic?

There was only one way to find out.

I decided to see if I really had powers. I did all the things I’d seen witches do on TV. I wiggled my nose. I waved my arms around. I concentrated on lighting a candle with my mind. I tried to move a little deer statue on the bedside table without touching it. I tried to freeze something. But all that happened was I ended up frowning at the wall.

Feeling silly and frustrated, I picked up the little figurine, ready to throw it at the wall, but recalled at the last second that it did not belong to me. Dr. Harris would be proud. I put it back down on the bedside table and listened to the sound of the wind against the house. Vern said once that I was just a bull in a china shop, that one day I’d be fine in the open air. I felt suddenly aware of how far from home I really was. I knew the schedule at Whittaker: the sound of the doors locking and unlocking, the scuff of the orderlies’ rubber soles coming down the hall. Here, I didn’t know anything.

I was so very tired. But I couldn’t sleep in Kai and Gerde’s guest bed. It was pretty. It was soft. It just wasn’t mine.

Eventually, I settled for underneath it. I took the blanket and pillow and curled up there.

When I awoke the next day, I opened my eyes to a gray metal wall. I stifled a scream before remembering that I was under the bed. The tree house … Gerde and Kai … It all came rushing back to me. I was staring at one of the brackets that connected the house to the tree.

I climbed out from under the little bed. My body ached from the cold, hard floor. Random thoughts scattered through my brain. Did Kai see me sleeping there? Would he say something if he had?

What did I care? He was a jerk. A talented jerk, but a jerk all the same. I heard the roaring sound again somewhere behind the tree house.
Another Snow Wave?
I wondered. But the sound was guttural. Alive somehow. I got dressed and went to investigate.