It rose, and drew together, delicately shaping itself into the curved bones of a ship. It spread like frost across the air, around her body, over her head, until the sculptor vanished inside her work.
The ship grew until it was the size of a house, details fashioned down to the bolts and the sails. And that would have been marvel enough, but then, it began to move. Rolling slightly as if caught on the waves. It went still again, but this time, there was a kind of menace to that stillness. An eerie calm. A child gasped, and soon Kell saw why. A single, icy tendril had appeared, curling itself around the ship. And then another. And another. The crowd held its breath as the limbs of a sea beast wrapped themselves around the hull, and the mast, and the sails, and began to squeeze.
The ship groaned, as if it were wood. It began to crack beneath the force.
Kell watched, awestruck.
It was one thing to sculpt an object from an element. It was another thing entirely to give it movement, to put wind into ice-made sails and tension into ice-made limbs. It was a feat of magic, a craft unlike anything he’d ever seen. To re-create the world in such detail, and then—
All at once, the ship shattered with a sound that shook the fair.
The whole scene burst apart, the ice dissolving into glittering flakes that drifted down over the spectators, dusting their shoulders and hoods with snow. The woman stood at the center of her platform, alone again.
The crowd erupted in applause.
Vasry whooped, and Kell clapped, and beside him, Lila’s face lit up, the way it had that first day in Red London, when everything was new. She took it all in, not with a wicked glee, but a hungry kind of wonder. And then she looked at him, and smiled, and started to walk on, but Kell caught her bare hand, and pulled her back to him, and kissed her.
Heat poured through him, and he didn’t know if it was her magic sparking on the air or his own body flushing, but either way it was welcome.
Lila pulled back, just enough to meet his gaze, her breath a plume of white between their lips. “What was that for?” she asked.
“For warmth,” he said, and they both smiled at the words, the memory drawn like thread between them, between now and that first night when she had done the same to him, and claimed it was for luck. She kissed him again, deeper, hands sliding beneath his coat. Kell leaned in. He loved her. It scared him, but frankly, so did Lila. She always had.
Delilah Bard wasn’t a soft bed on a summer morning. She was a blade in the dark, dazzling, and dangerous, and sharp. Even now, he half expected to feel her teeth against his lip, the bright prick of pain, the taste of his own blood.
But all Kell felt was her.
Nearby, Vasry cleared his throat. “I think I’ll find my own warmth,” he said, slipping away into the fair.
And then Lila was pulling away, too, drawn to the many stalls and their offerings. She looked back only once, lips twitching in a grin.
And then she was gone.
Kell was about to follow when a small weight collided with his side and bounced off. He turned to see a child stumbling back, landing hard on the ice. A girl, so bundled up against the cold that he could only see the tops of her flushed cheeks, and her blazing blue eyes.
She hiccupped, sounded about to cry, when a woman arrived and swept the child up into her arms, turning to Kell to apologize. She looked at him, and as she did, cold raked its fingers over his scalp, and he realized his hood had fallen back, revealing his red hair. His black eye.
Kell flinched, bracing himself for the weight of recognition. For fear, or awe, and the scene it would bring. But there was no scene. His appearance meant nothing to her. Of course it meant nothing. He was a thousand leagues from home. He wasn’t a prince, not in this land, and as for an Antari, perhaps she didn’t even know what an Antari was. Perhaps she didn’t care.
To her, he was just a stranger at the lightless fair.
She carried the child off, and Kell watched them go, a small laugh escaping in a cloud of fog.
“Hassa,” called a voice, and it took Kell a moment to realize it was calling to him. He turned, and saw a man in one of the stalls, a scarf wrapped tight over the lower half of his face.
“Hassa!” he called again, waving Kell over. He wasn’t sure what the man was selling—the table before him was full of figurines—but it was the back wall that caught Kell’s eye.
The entire space was taken up by a single sculpture, a large and impossibly delicate thing that might have been a palace, or simply a very ornate house, its fa?ade interrupted by a series of windows.
And unlike the stall itself, whose ice was several inches thick, the sculpted house was made of frost-thin panes, and looked like it might crumble at the slightest push. That, Kell realized, was the point.