Ice

CHAPTER 1

Once upon a time, in a land far to the north, there lived a lovely maiden…

Latitude 72° 13’ 30” N

Longitude 152° 06’ 52” W

Altitude 3 ft.

Cassie killed the snowmobile engine.

Total silence, her favorite sound. Ice crystals spun in the Arctic air. Sparkling in the predawn light, they looked like diamond dust. Beneath her ice-encrusted face mask, she smiled. She loved this: just her, the ice, and the bear.

“Don’t move,” she whispered at the polar bear.

Cassie felt behind her and unhooked the rifle. Placid as a marble statue, the polar bear did not move. She loaded the tranquilizer dart by feel, her eyes never leaving the bear. White on white in an alcove of ice, he looked like a king on a throne. For an instant, Cassie imagined she could hear Gram’s voice, telling the story of the Polar Bear King… Gram hadn’t told that story since the day she’d left the research station, but Cassie still remembered every word of it. She used to believe it was true.

When she was little, Cassie used to stage practice rescue missions outside of Dad’s Arctic research station. She’d pile old snowmobile parts and broken generators to make the trolls’ castle, and then she’d scale the castle walls and tie up the “trolls” (old clothes stuffed with pillows) with climbing ropes. Once, Dad had caught her on the station roof with skis strapped to her feet, ready to ski beyond the ends of the earth to save her mom. He’d taken away Cassie’s skis and had forbidden Gram from telling the story. Not that that had slowed Cassie at all. She’d simply begged Gram to tell the story when Dad was away, and she’d invented a new game involving a canvas sail and an unused sled. Even after she’d understood the truth—that Gram’s story was merely a pretty way to say her mother had died—she’d continued to play the games.

Now I don’t need games, she thought with a grin. She snapped the syringe into place and lifted the gun up to her shoulder. And this bear, she thought, didn’t need any kid’s bedtime story to make him magnificent. He was as perfect as a textbook illustration: cream-colored with healthy musculature and no battle scars. If her estimates were correct, he’d be the largest polar bear on record. And she was the one who had found him.

Cassie cocked the tranquilizer gun, and the polar bear turned his head to look directly at her. She held her breath and didn’t move. Wind whistled, and loose snow swirled between her and the bear. Her heart thudded in her ears so loudly that she was certain he could hear it. This was it—the end of the chase. When she’d begun this chase, the aurora borealis had been dancing in the sky. She’d tracked him in its light for three miles north of the station. Loose sea ice had jostled at the shore, but she’d driven over it and then onto the pack ice. She’d followed him all the way here, to a jumble of ice blocks that looked like a miniature mountain range. She had no idea how he’d stayed so far ahead of her during the chase. Top speed for an adult male bear clocked at thirty miles per hour, and she’d run her snowmobile at sixty. Maybe the tracks hadn’t been as fresh as they’d looked, or maybe she’d discovered some kind of superfast bear. She grinned at the ridiculousness of that idea. Regardless of the explanation, the tracks had led her here to this beautiful, majestic, perfect bear. She’d won.

A moment later, the bear looked away across the frozen sea.

“You’re mine,” she whispered as she sighted down the barrel.

And the polar bear stepped into the ice. In one fluid motion, he rose and moved backward. It looked as if he were stepping into a cloud. His hind legs vanished into whiteness, and then his torso.

Impossible.

She lowered the gun and stared. She couldn’t be seeing this. The ice wall appeared to be absorbing him. Now only his shoulders and head were visible.

Cassie shook herself. He was escaping! Never mind how. Lifting the gun, she squeezed the trigger. The recoil bashed the butt of the gun into her shoulder. Reflexively, she blinked.

And the bear was gone.

“No,” she said out loud. She’d had him! What had happened? Bears didn’t—couldn’t—walk through ice. She had to have imagined it. Some trick of the Arctic air. She whipped off her goggles. Cold squeezed her eyeballs, and the white was blinding. She scanned the frozen waves. Snow blew across the ice like fast-moving clouds. The landscape was as dead as a desert. When the cold hurt too much for her to stand it a second longer, she replaced her goggles.

Her radio crackled. She pulled it out of her parka pocket. “Cassie here,” she said, trying to sound casual. She’d chased the bear onto the pack ice without backup. If she’d caught him, all would have been forgiven. But now… How was she going to explain this? She couldn’t even explain it to herself.

“Cassandra Elizabeth Dasent, get home NOW.”

Dad’s voice. And he was not happy.

Well, she wasn’t happy either. She’d promised herself that she’d tag a bear as a birthday present to herself—she was turning eighteen in just a few hours. It seemed the ideal way for the only daughter of the head scientist at the Eastern Beaufort Sea Research Station to celebrate becoming a legal adult. When this bear had sauntered past the station while she’d been out fixing the radio antennae, it had felt like a gift. She’d never expected the chase to lead her so far out onto the ice, and she’d never expected the bear to… He couldn’t have gone far. He had to be somewhere just beyond the ice ridges. She checked the gas gauge. She had another three hours of fuel to spare.

“Cassie? Cassie, are you there?”

“I’m going after him,” she said into the radio. She revved the engine, drowning her father’s response, and headed across the ice.

Cassie abandoned the snowmobile in the shed. Slinging her pack over her shoulder, she trudged to the station. She ached from head to toe, inside and out. Even her fingernails ached. The sun hovered on the horizon, as it would for less and less time every day before it sank permanently for the winter. The low-angled light made her shadow look like a snow giant out of an Inuit legend.

She’d lost him.

She didn’t know how, but she’d lost him. She kept replaying the search in her mind as if that would make her envision the tracks she must have missed. If she’d just searched more carefully in the first few moments instead of speeding across the sea ice…

Owen, the station lab technician, met her at the door. She blinked at him—a potbellied man with a pepper beard. Clearly, he’d been waiting for her.

“Cassie, the case!” Owen cried in an anguished voice.

She glanced at her pack. The syringe case dangled out of the bag. It was encrusted in ice. Cassie winced. “He got away,” she said.

Owen rescued the bag and gun from her. “Do you know how much these cost?”

Cassie followed him inside through the double door entryway. As she shut the inner door behind her, the thick, sour warmth of the station rolled over her like a smothering wave. It was the smell of home, stale and stifling and comfortingly familiar. She wished she had been coming home victorious.

Clucking over the tranquilizer gun, Owen said, “You have to be careful with this equipment. Treat it like a baby.”

Her stomach sank as she watched him examine her equipment. She didn’t need another strike against her. She’d taken the snowmobile out onto the pack ice alone and she’d been careless with equipment. Dad was not going to be pleased. Peeling off her outer layers, she asked, “Where is he? Radar room?” She’d better get it over with. There was no point in delaying.

Owen didn’t respond. He was absorbed in cleaning the tranq gun. She could tell he’d already dismissed her from his mind. She almost smiled. He loved his equipment like she loved the pack ice. Both of them were a bit… single-minded. She could admit that about herself. “Jeremy?” she said. The new research intern looked up from his desk.

“He’s not a happy camper,” Jeremy confirmed. “He wants to talk to you.” He nodded toward the research lab door. “You’re welcome to hide here,” he added helpfully, pointing under his desk.

She managed a grin. Jeremy had been blasted by Dad his first week at the station for going out on the ice without the proper gear, and now he had a healthy respect for Cassie’s father’s temper. Of course, in that case, he had deserved it. She didn’t care if he was from UCLA—what breed of idiot went out on the ice without a face mask? You’d never catch her making that kind of newbie mistake. No, she thought, I specialize in the more spectacular mistakes, such as misplacing a full-grown polar bear.

Cassie pushed through the door to the research lab. She scooted between the boxes and equipment. She could hear Dad’s voice, deep and clipped, inside the radar room. Ugh, this was not going to go well. Here in the faintly sour warmth of home, it was going to sound like she was quoting Gram’s old fairy tale about the Polar Bear King. What seemed almost believable out on the sea ice seemed patently unreal here, back in the prosaic old station. Here, it seemed far more plausible that she’d imagined the bear walking through ice. She wished she’d imagined losing him.

In the radar room, Dad was in his typical position, half-perched on a stool, flanked by two other researchers. Cassie halted just inside the doorway, watching them. Her father was like the sun. People tended to orbit around him without even realizing they were. Scott and Liam were his most common satellites. She wondered if that was how she looked next to him—overshadowed and small. Not liking that thought, Cassie stepped farther into the room.

The door swung shut behind her, and Dad looked up at the sound. He lowered his clipboard. His face was impassive, but she knew he was furious. She steeled herself. She’d deliver her report as professionally as possible. How he reacted would be his choice.

Scott flashed a smile at her. “Ah, the little workaholic.”

“Could you gentlemen excuse us?” Dad said to Scott and Liam. “Family discussion.” Oh, that was not a good sign. She swallowed hard.

Cassie wondered, not for the first time, if her mother hadn’t died, would that have softened Dad? Would she have been able to talk to him without feeling like she was approaching a mountain? So much could have been different if her mother had lived.

The two scientists looked from father to daughter, as if suddenly noticing the tension that was thick enough to inhale. Both of them bolted.

For a long moment, Dad didn’t speak. His expression was unreadable. His eyes were buried underneath thick, white eyebrows. His mouth was hidden in a mountain-man beard. Six-foot-five, he looked impervious. Cassie raised her chin and met his eyes.

Finally, he said, “You know better than to go out on the pack ice without backup. I raised you to be smarter than this.”

Yes, he had. One thing he’d always made sure of was that she knew the rules of the ice. Everything else in her childhood he may have left to others. With her mother dead soon after Cassie was born and Gram gone from the station when Cassie was five, she’d done a lot of her own raising—with only a sort of tag-team parenting from Dad, Max, Owen, and whoever else was passing through the research station. But he had made sure that she knew what to do when she stepped outside the station, and she was grateful for that. “I know,” she said.

“You could have fallen into a crevasse,” he said. “A pressure ridge could have collapsed. A lead could have split the ice, and you could have driven directly into ocean water.”

“I know,” she repeated. What else could she say? She wasn’t going to make excuses. Maybe she would have a few years ago, but she wasn’t a kid anymore. If she expected to be treated as a professional, she knew she had to act like one.

He continued to scowl at her.

Cassie felt her face redden, but she forced herself not to look away. She refused to be intimidated by him.

Dad sighed. “Report,” he said.

“There’s something unusual about this bear.” Taking a deep breath, Cassie plunged into a description of how she had tracked him and how he had walked into the ice. She told Dad about searching the pressure ridge and failing to find tracks leading out of it. She told him how she had searched the surrounding area, crossing miles of pack ice, with no further sign of the bear. Finishing, she braced herself, waiting for Dad to tear apart her report.

Instead, she saw the anger drain out of her father’s face. He dropped his clipboard to the table, and he hugged her. “I could have lost you,” he said.

This was new. “Dad,” she said, squirming. Anger she had expected, but hugs? They were not a hugging family. “Dad, please, I’m fine. I know what I’m doing. You don’t have to worry.”

Dad released her. He was shaking his head. “I should have known this day would come,” he said. “Your grandmother was right.”

Awkwardly, she patted his shoulder. “I’ll bring backup next time,” she promised. “I’ll catch the bear. You’ll see.”

He didn’t appear to be listening. “It’s too late for application deadlines for this year, but some of my friends at the University of Alaska owe me favors. You can work in one of their labs and apply for undergrad next year.”

Whoa—what? They’d agreed she would take courses remotely. She wasn’t leaving the station. “Dad…”

“You can live with your grandmother in Fairbanks. She’ll be thrilled to say, ‘I told you so.’ She’s been pushing for this since you were five, but I selfishly wanted you here,” he said. “I’ll contact Max to fly you there.”

She stared at him. “But I don’t want to leave,” she said. She loved it at the station! Her life was here. She wanted—no, needed—to be near the ice.

He focused on her, as if seeing her afresh. “You’re leaving,” he said, steel back in his voice. “I’m sorry, Cassie, but this is for your own good.”

“You can’t simply decide that—”

“If your mother were here, she would want this.”

Cassie felt as if she’d been punched in her gut. He knew full well how Cassie felt about her mother, how much she wished she were here, how much she wished she’d known her. To use that as a weapon to win an argument… It was a low blow. Cassie shook her head as if she could shake out his words. “I’m not leaving,” she said. “This is my home.”

Her father—who shied away from feelings so much that he had delegated her childhood to her grandmother and had left her puberty to a stack of bio textbooks—her father had tears in his eyes. “Not anymore,” he said softly. “It can’t be anymore.”

CHAPTER 2

Latitude 70° 49’ 23” N

Longitude 152° 29’ 25” W

Altitude 10 ft.

Cassie blinked at her clock: three a.m.

What were they doing? It sounded as if the whole station staff were stomping around outside her door. She could have sworn she’d even heard a plane engine. She tossed off her covers and raked her fingers through her hair. She knew she looked like a redheaded Medusa, and she was sure she had bags under her eyes the size of golf balls. She was wearing long johns, mismatched socks, and an oversize T-shirt that read: ALASKA—WHERE MEN ARE MEN AND WOMEN WIN THE IDITAROD. Cassie yanked on pants and a sweater over her long johns and T-shirt before she stuck her head out her door. She spotted Owen scurrying down the hallway. “Hey,” she called to him. “It’s three a.m.” She nearly added, And it’s my birthday.

“Max’s plane is here,” Owen said. “Just landed. We’d have had more warning if you had fixed the antennae instead of going off to chase trouble.”

She winced. She deserved that. After all, she’d wrecked his equipment. His crankiness was justified. But what did he mean that Max’s plane was here? Max wasn’t scheduled for a visit… Oh.

He’d come for Cassie.

Her heart sank. How had Dad convinced him to come so fast? Before the budget cuts, Max had been on the station’s staff. He’d flown his Twin Otter for them when Cassie was little; he’d been her earliest babysitter, practically an uncle to her—but now he worked for a commercial runway in Fairbanks. He couldn’t take off on zero notice. She hadn’t imagined Dad would call for him immediately.

Cassie brushed past Owen and headed for the research lab. She had to put a stop to this right now. She had to talk sense into Dad and convince Max to return to Fairbanks without her.

Before Cassie reached the lab door, she heard boxes scrape across linoleum, and the door flew open. “Cassielassie!” Max bellowed. He strode down the hall and scooped her up into a bear hug. He swung her in a half circle, then thumped her shoulder blades as if he were burping her as he set her down. “Did you find the Abominable Snowman?” he asked, their old routine.

“Stuffed and mounted,” she said, on cue. He grinned at her, his white teeth startlingly bright against his dark skin. She automatically grinned back. She’d forgotten how much she’d missed seeing him.

Maybe this is a normal visit, Cassie thought as Max beamed at her. Maybe it’s unrelated to my argument with Dad. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.

And maybe there really is an Abominable Snowman. She shook her head at herself. Max wasn’t here by coincidence, not within mere hours of Dad’s pronouncement. She shouldn’t bother trying to fool herself.

“Got a surprise for you,” Max said.

“Yeah?” He hadn’t said it like it was a bad surprise, but her stomach knotted as if it knew this couldn’t be good.

Cassie heard a familiar tap from the doorway—a cane. Gram. Max had brought Gram. Cassie wished she could be happy. She hadn’t seen her grandmother in months, and now she was here. Ordinarily, this would have been a wonderful surprise: Max and Gram, her two favorite people in the world, were here. But now she was going to have to tell her grandmother face-to-face that she didn’t want to live with her in Fairbanks.

She shouldn’t have told Dad about the bear walking into the ice. If she had simply left that detail out of her report…

Gram hit her mahogany cane sharply on the floor. “I haven’t shriveled to nothing. Come hug me.” She held out her arms.

Forcing herself to smile, Cassie bounded the remaining steps to the lab door. She wrapped her grandmother in her arms. It was like holding a bird. Gram was almost as tall as Cassie, but her bones were tiny. She felt breakable. Cassie released her quickly.

“You’ve grown,” Gram said.

“You’ve shrunk,” Cassie responded automatically.

Gram frowned and shook her head. Like Cassie, she had a fierce frown. Both of them had strong faces, but Gram’s skin hung loose over hers, and her hair, once as thick and red as Cassie’s, rustled like an old curtain. “Nonsense. I’m as beautiful as the day your grandfather met me. First time in the back of his pickup, do you know what he said? ‘Ingrid,’ he said. ‘Ingrid, God himself could not have more perfect breasts than you.’”

Cassie couldn’t help laughing. “I’ve missed you.”

“Oh, my Cassandra.” She hooked her arm around Cassie’s waist. “Let me look at you. So grown-up. Such a fine young woman now.”

Cassie swallowed a sudden lump in her throat. “Gram…,” she began. She stopped. How did she say this without hurting Gram’s feelings? The last thing in the world she wanted to do was hurt her grandmother. “How… How was your flight?”

“Idiotic FCC almost didn’t let us lift up,” Max said. “No Fed can tell me how to fly safe. Thirty years flying in the bush, and I can smell ice. It’s not like flying in the lower forty-eight… ”

Only half-listening to Max’s rant, Cassie watched her grandmother’s face and tried to read what she was thinking. “Gram, what did Dad tell you?”

Max fell silent.

Gram plucked lint from Cassie’s wool sweater. For as long as Cassie could remember, Gram was always tidying. Gram herself was as neat as a soldier. Her white shirt was pressed with a crease down the sleeves. She looked her neatest when she was most upset. She was looking very neat now. “Ah, my Cassandra.” Gram adjusted Cassie’s sweater, and then she took Cassie’s face in both her hands. Gram kissed her left cheek, and then her right cheek, an oddly formal gesture. Cassie pulled back. “Gram, what is it?”

“You found him,” Gram said. “You found the Polar Bear King.”

Cassie flinched as if she’d been slapped. Of all the things she’d been expecting Gram to say, that wasn’t one of them. “That’s not funny.”

“I wasn’t joking,” Gram said.

“Did Dad tell you I also saw Elvis?” Cassie said. “Oh, yes, the King’s taken up dog mushing. Saw him last week racing the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.”

Gram gripped Cassie’s shoulders. “Cassandra…”

Dad had told them… what? She’d been hallucinating? She was crazy? That was how he had convinced Max and Gram to drop everything and fly here?

Max inched backward down the hallway. “I’ll just… let you two talk… Yeah. Takeoff will be at six a.m. Um, happy birthday, by the way.” He fled through the lab door.

Some birthday. Why was everyone she loved and trusted acting crazy? First Dad, and now Gram… Gram steered Cassie away from the lab door. “Come, let’s go to your room,” Gram said. “This isn’t a public conversation.”

Yes, that was a good idea. She’d talk to Gram alone—find out what was really behind all this. There had to be an explanation for Dad’s uncharacteristic overreaction. Cassie managed a smile and tried for normalcy: “My room isn’t exactly Gram-ready.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Gram said.

Cassie banged her hip on her bedroom door, and it popped open. Socks spilled into the hall. She kicked them out of the way and switched on the bedroom light. Long johns were draped over the dresser. Her bivy sack was wound around the bed frame. On her pillow, Mr. Fluffy, her old stuffed fox with the chewed ear, sported a roll of duct tape around his neck. Gram surveyed the wreckage. “Mmm,” Gram said. “You didn’t make your bed.”

“You can see the bed?”

Using her cane, Gram picked her way over a nest of climbing ropes. She scooted a heap of maps off the bed and onto the floor and spread the comforter. “Fix your side, dear.”

Cassie really didn’t want to talk about the state of her room. She was sorry she’d mentioned it. “Gram…,” Cassie began.

“Dear?” Gram repeated, more steel in her voice.

Cassie knew her: Gram wasn’t going to talk until the bed was made. Dad had learned his implacable resolve from her. Sighing, Cassie tugged the comforter straight. “Tuck in the corner,” Gram said. Cassie obeyed. “Very nice,” Gram said. “Now, fetch your bag, dear. We need to get you packed.”

“Gram… It’s not that I don’t want to live with you. I just don’t want to live in Fairbanks. I want to stay here.”

“You’ll need sweaters and underwear.” Gram plucked a backpack out of the mess. She laid it open on the bed.

Stay calm, Cassie told herself. This is Gram. Cassie continued in a reasonable tone, “It’s prime season—bears are migrating back onto the sea ice. I’m needed here.”

Gram poked her cane into Cassie’s closet. “Clean or dirty?” She extracted a wool sweater and sniffed it. “You need to take better care of your clothes.”

“Gram, talk to me,” she pleaded.

Gram handed Cassie three sweaters. “Fold.”

Cassie dumped the sweaters onto her bed. Gram gave her a look, and then neatly folded the sweaters and placed them inside the backpack. Cassie fished them out again and tossed them back into the closet.

“Don’t be difficult,” Gram said. She fetched the sweaters. “Your father worries. He has always worried, the stubborn fool.” Gram refolded the sweaters. “He wanted to shield you. He thought ignorance would protect you… but that’s an old argument, and the point is moot now. The important thing is to get you to Fairbanks. I’ll explain everything once you’re safely there.”

Cassie felt a chill. She didn’t need protection from a fairy tale. There was no Polar Bear King. What was Gram hiding behind this ridiculous lie? “Gram, what ‘everything’?”

“You aren’t going to make this easy, are you?” Gram said.

No, of course she wasn’t. Gram was asking her to leave her life, her home, her career, and her future. “What aren’t you telling me?” Cassie asked.

Gram sighed. “Oh, my Cassandra, he should have told you the truth a long time ago. He only wanted to protect you. We both only wanted to protect you. We merely disagreed on the best approach.” She sounded tired. Old and tired. Cassie had never heard Gram sound like that.

“What truth?” Cassie asked.

Gram sat on the edge of Cassie’s bed like she used to when she’d tuck Cassie in at night. Gram held one of Cassie’s sweaters on her lap. “Your mother,” Gram said gently, “was the daughter of the North Wind. She bargained with the Polar Bear King, and now, on your eighteenth birthday, he’s coming for you.”

Cassie heard a roaring in her ears as her pulse pounded. Her mother, the daughter of the wind? That was only a story.

“You know it’s true,” Gram said. “You’ve seen him.”

She’d seen a bear, larger than any on record, who’d walked into solid ice. But that didn’t mean… Cassie shook her head. Why was Gram doing this? It wasn’t funny. Teasing her about the Polar Bear King, teasing her about her mother… It was cruel. “Don’t do this,” Cassie said.

“Cassandra, it is true,” Gram said. “You know I left the station because your father and I had a disagreement. This was what we fought about. I believed you should have been told the truth.”

Gram’s expression was grave. Her eyes were kind and serious. Her hands were nervously flattening the sweater on her lap. Cassie stared at her. For a brief, marvelous, crazy instant, Cassie thought, What if…

But no, it wasn’t true. Her mother had died in a blizzard shortly after Cassie was born. She wasn’t at some troll castle. If she were… If she were, if there were even a possibility that Gram’s story were true and her mother was a prisoner somewhere, then Dad would have rescued her. Cassie wouldn’t have had to grow up feeling like she was missing a slice of herself.

“You need time to think,” Gram said kindly. “I understand. It’s a lot all at once.” She patted Cassie’s shoulder. “You rest. We’ll leave in a few hours.”

Before Cassie could object again, Gram left her alone.

Cassie tossed her backpack into the closet and deposited the sweaters onto her dresser. Why had Dad and Gram invented this lie? They’d never lied to her before. But they were either lying to her now or…

Cassie blinked fast. Her eyes felt hot as she stared at her bed. Years ago, Gram used to sit there, a profile in the dark. Her voice, telling the story, was as familiar as a heartbeat. She’d told it every time Dad had been away from the station. Cassie had always thought that was because Dad had disapproved of fairy tales. His idea of a bedtime story was Shackleton’s journey to Antarctica. Now she was supposed to believe he’d objected to Gram telling her the truth?

She wished she’d caught that bear. If she had, they could’ve run tests on him, taken a blood sample, even tagged him with an ID and tracked his movements. She could have proved he was ordinary.

Maybe she still could. If she called their bluff, they’d have no excuse to force her to Fairbanks.

Without waiting for second thoughts, Cassie tiptoed out into the hall and then cut through the research lab. The fluorescents were off, but the computer screens glowed green. She heard hushed voices from the direction of the kitchen. If she were quick enough, no one would even notice she had left her room. She exited the lab, closing the door softly behind her, and then flicked on the light of the main room.

Someone stirred. “Whaa…”

Cassie froze. It was Jeremy. He’d fallen asleep at his desk again. “Go back to sleep,” she whispered.

“Mmmuph,” he said, closing his eyes.

She held her breath. He was the newbie—the cheechako, to use Max’s native Inupiaq. Dad and Gram wouldn’t have told him anything, she assured herself. If she acted normal, he wouldn’t be alarmed, and he wouldn’t fetch her father. She moved slowly to her desk and pulled on her Gore-Tex pants. The pants rustled, and Jeremy’s eyes popped open again.

Jeremy peered at her blearily. “Where are you going?”

“Repair work,” she lied. “Nothing to worry about.” She shoved her feet into her mukluks and secured her gaiters over them.

“Don’t know how you can stand it out there,” Jeremy said. “It’s a wasteland. An ice desert. At least you’re getting out, eh?”

Her fingers faltered as she fixed her face mask. “Who told you that?” she asked, trying to keep her voice calm and casual. She pulled the hood up over two wool hats—almost ready. She felt as if her insides were shouting, Hurry, hurry!

“That plane guy, Max, said you were going to undergrad.”

“Max talks too much,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.” She Velcroed the throat gusset of her hood shut and then fetched her emergency kit. The small pack held a flashlight, her ice axe, extra flannels, and a few food rations. With this, she could search the pack ice for several days, if that’s what it would take.

“Just because this is all you know, it doesn’t mean this is all there is,” he said. “Don’t you want a normal life? You’ve never lived outside this station. You’ve been homeschooled your entire life. Don’t you want to get out there, meet kids your age, do what normal people do?”

She loved the ice. She loved tracking bears. “This is home,” she said shortly.

“I thought this would be my home. Coming here was my dream, you know, for years. But now… Hey, whatever, dreams change. Nothing wrong with that. I’m applying for a nice, cozy postdoc back at UCLA.”

“Good for you,” she said. Her dreams weren’t changing. Nothing and no one—Dad, Gram, Max—could force her to leave her life here. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said as she opened the inner door and shut it behind her.

For a brief second, she debated staying inside and trying to talk sense into Dad and Gram, but words had failed to convince them before. No, she thought, if I don’t act now, I’ll be on a plane to Fairbanks in three hours. she couldn’t let that happen. She opened the outer door and stepped out into the Arctic.

Cold seared into her, slicing her, and her face mask instantly frosted. She took a deep breath of night air. It felt brittle and sharp in her throat, as if the air were filled with shards of glass. This was exactly what she needed to clear her mind. The piercingly cold air soothed her, as it always did.

Standing within the station floodlights, she faced out toward the blue darkness. Silence surrounded her. “Polar Bear King!” she shouted into the silence. “I’m coming to find you! Do you hear me?”

She waited for a moment, listening. Snow drifted over her feet. Rubbing frost from her goggles, she scanned the darkened ice fields. Wind blew surface snow over the moonlit snowbanks and ridges. Blue shadows oscillated over the ice.

Cassie shook herself. She hadn’t honestly expected the so-called Polar Bear King to answer, had she? That was crazy. Kinnaq, she remembered—that was the Inupiaq word for lunatic.

Just because she had let her overtiredness make her (for an instant) want to believe in a magical polar bear, that did not mean she was snow-crazed. Just because she’d wanted Gram’s story to be real and her mother to be alive, it didn’t make her crazy. She’d find that bear and prove to Gram, Dad, and herself that he was ordinary. Cassie marched toward the shed with the snowmobiles—

— and a shadow rose over her.

Towering over her, the bear was immense. He blotted out the stars. In the station light his fur was luminescent, his silhouette glowing as if he were some Inuit spirit-god, Mashkuapeu himself. Suddenly, the Arctic didn’t feel big enough. It collapsed down to just her and the polar bear.

He opened his jaws, and she glimpsed white canines and a black tongue. A massive paw came down toward her, and she dodged. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a glint drop from the polar bear’s claws. As the glint hit the snow, the bear twisted, dropped to four paws, and retreated to the edge of the station floodlights.

Cassie looked down at her feet, at the snow where the bear had stood. Dusting snow blew into the concave curves of his tracks. In the curve of a paw-print lay a silver needle with an orange tail, the tranquilizer dart.

CHAPTER 3

Latitude 70° 49’ 23” N

Longitude 152° 29’ 25” W

Altitude 10 ft.

She was only a few yards from the door. If she lunged, she could be safely inside with solid metal between her and the bear. But she had called to him, and he had come. The tranquilizer dart that she had shot on the sea ice now lay in front of her. Impossibly, inexplicably, the bear had brought it back to her. She felt light-headed, and she knew she was shaking. She raised her eyes to look at the bear.

He was a mass of shadows at the edge of the station floodlights. She could make out the shape of his muzzle and the hunch of his shoulders. “Cassandra Dasent,” he said. His voice was a soft rumble.

She felt as if her heart had stopped beating.

He spoke.

It was hard to breathe, and she felt dizzy. He’d said her name. She was certain she’d heard him say her name. But real polar bears did not speak. They couldn’t. Their mouths weren’t shaped for it.

“I will not hurt you,” he said.

He didn’t have the right vocal cords. His muzzle couldn’t move like lips. His tongue couldn’t form words. “Polar bears don’t talk,” she said flatly. “You aren’t real.”

“Do not be afraid,” he said. He stepped into the circle of light from the station floodlights, and she automatically took a step backward. Her heart thudded faster as he came toward her. His paws were silent on the ice.

“Wake up,” she whispered to herself. “Snap out of it.” Cassie dug her fingernails into her palm inside her glove. It hurt, but she didn’t wake, and the bear didn’t disappear.

He halted directly in front of her. Up close, she could see he was huge. His shoulders were even with hers, and his muzzle… On four paws, he was as tall as she was. They were eye to eye. “You’re a hallucination,” she said. Her voice sounded thin and weak to her ears. “A mirage, a sun dog.”

“No. I am not.”

She flinched as she felt his breath hot on her frozen face mask. Oh, God, that felt real. That could not have been her imagination. “I don’t believe in talking bears,” she said—a whisper.

“You are Gail’s daughter,” he said. His voice was soft, gentle even.

“You’re a scientific impossibility,” she said. She could not be seeing this, hearing this. The universe had rules, and they did not allow for talking bears, especially talking bears who knew her mother’s name. She swallowed. No one had ever referred to her like that, as her mother’s daughter.

“You called to me,” he said softly, inexorably. “I have watched you for a long time, waiting until you were no longer a child, waiting until you knew me. A few hours ago, you did not know me, but now you called to me. Your family told you who I am?” It was a question. She almost missed it, caught in the slow rhythm of his voice.

“They told me fairy tales,” she said. She thought of Gram: Once upon a time, the North Wind said to the Polar Bear King… Fairy tales and lies. But which was the lie?

“Believe them, beloved.”

Beloved?

“No,” she said. No, she wouldn’t listen to this. She wouldn’t believe. Believing meant Dad had lied to her. Believing meant her mother had bartered her off before she’d been born.

But believing also meant her mother hadn’t died in the storm that had flattened houses in Barrow, Alaska, and buried half of Prudhoe Bay.

“Doubt your family, then, but believe your own eyes and ears.”

Her eyes told her he was an Ursus maritimus; her ears told her he was talking. Cassie squeezed her eyes shut. “You don’t exist.” She was deluding herself. Her senses were betraying her and making her believe something she’d given up believing more than a decade ago: that her mother was still alive. Cassie opened her eyes. The bear was still there.

“I am the polar bear,” he said, “and you are my bride.”

“No,” she said—no to him, no to this, no to everything.

His expression was unreadable. “Your mother made a promise.”

This was cruel. Simply cruel. “My mother is dead. Killed in a blizzard after I was born.” She felt her heart twist as she said it.

There was silence for a moment. Snow swirled around them—around Cassie and the giant polar bear—like in a snow globe. “Is that what you want?” the bear asked.

So softly that her voice barely carried beyond her face mask, she said, “No, of course not.” All her life, she’d wanted a mother. It was a hole inside her that nothing had ever filled. Not Dad. Not Gram. Not Max. Not any of the station staff who had come and gone.

“The North Wind did not kill her. He blew her to the trolls. For that, he has never forgiven himself.” The polar bear’s voice was a low rumble that rattled in her bones. Part of her wanted more than anything else to believe him. But she couldn’t let herself. Fact was fact; gone was gone. It didn’t matter how badly she wished it weren’t. “And I regret that the Winds found her, despite my best efforts.”

“Your best wasn’t good enough,” she said. She knew the words of the story: Bring me to my love and hide us from my father. If the story was true, then this polar bear had failed Cassie’s mother. If he’d done what he’d promised, Cassie would have had a mother.

“I did all I could.”

“Your promise is invalid,” she said. “You’ve no right to be here.”

“The promise holds,” he said in the same calm, impossible voice. “The North Wind would not have found her if it were not for his brother.”

He talked about the winds as if they were sentient. She squeezed her eyes shut. “You should have hidden her from him, too,” she said. “You failed.”

“I cannot leave the Arctic. I have responsibilities that I could not neglect,” he said. “I had to hide her in the ice. I am sorry.” For the first time, she heard a hint of emotion. That was almost as disturbing as the speech itself. He believed what he was saying. He believed her mother was alive.

“’Sorry’ doesn’t help,” she said. She tried to sound strong, but her voice betrayed her and cracked. Her heart beat so fast and loud that it thundered in her ears.

“If I could make it right, I would.”

Would he? Could he? “Would you free her from the ‘trolls’?”

His great jaws opened and shut, as if she had struck him speechless. She nearly smiled—she had flummoxed him. She’d turned the tables on the creature that was turning her world upside down. “You do not know what you are asking,” he said finally.

Oh, yes, she knew very well what she was asking: an impossibility. “Bring my mother back from the dead.” She felt light-headed as she said it.

“She is not dead.”

“That should make it easier.”

“I have responsibilities that I cannot risk.”

Without stopping to think, she said, “You free her from the trolls and I will marry you.”

For a long moment, he was silent. The northern lights filled the sky behind him. With his brilliant white coat and black unreadable eyes, he looked majestic and wild. Wind stirred his fur. “Is that a promise?” he asked at last.

Suddenly, it didn’t seem like a dream. It didn’t seem like a hallucination. It seemed real, overwhelmingly real. She put her hand on the station wall to steady herself. Her fingers were numb inside her mittens and gloves, and she felt her disbelief cracking as if her words had shattered it. Her mother… My mother is alive? And she had the opportunity to save her. Her head reeled. “Yes,” she said.

“Climb onto my back,” he said, kneeling in front of her.

She stared at him as the word “yes” rang in her head. Yes, she’d said. Yes, her mother was alive. Yes, Cassie would save her.

“I will carry you home,” he said.

She tried to read his inscrutable black eyes and failed. Her throat felt dry. She started to speak, swallowed, and then tried again. “Home?”

He inclined his massive head, and she shivered. “Your mother will be returned to the Arctic once our bargain is complete,” he said. “I will arrange it after we arrive.”

Wind whipped into her. Ice crystals pelted her parka. Gulping in burning air, she tried to nod as if she understood.

“Climb onto my back,” he repeated.

If her mother was alive, then she had been a prisoner for years and no one had rescued her. Dad had not rescued her. Dad had pretended she’d died. He’d kept this all a secret from Cassie.

Suddenly, she wanted to climb onto the bear’s back and ride as far away from the station as she could. She put her hand on his back and swung her leg over. She steadied herself. Oh, God, she was on a polar bear.

“Hold tight, beloved,” he said.

She gripped the bear’s neck fur as he carried her away from the only place she’d ever called home.

CHAPTER 4

Latitude 76° 03’ 42” N

Longitude 150° 59’ 11” W

Altitude 5 ft.

The bear bounded through the snow. Cassie clutched his thick fur and clenched her teeth as the impact jarred her bones. Snow spewed out in waves.

“Are you afraid?” the bear shouted to her.

“Like hell I am.”

“Keep tight hold of my fur, and then there is no danger,” he said.

Impossibly, he increased speed. Blurring into white, the frozen sea rushed beneath them. She squeezed her eyes shut, and then opened them. Don’t think about the bear, she repeated to herself. Just focus on the ride.

The bear raced across the ice. Shadows streaked. Stars stretched into the comet tails of time-lapse photography. Faster and faster. She felt like she was flying. She was moving faster than a snowmobile, faster than Max’s Twin Otter. Wind buffeted her face mask, and she laughed out loud. She wanted to shout at the top of her lungs, Look at me! I’m faster than wind! Than sound! Than light! She felt as if she were light. She was an aurora streaking across the Arctic.

He ran on and on.

Eventually, as the stars faded and the sky lightened, she fell into a numb rhythm. Her pack bounced, bruising her shoulders rhythmically. She rode in silence, except for the harsh whistle of wind.

Several long hours later, Cassie heard ice crunch under the bear’s paws. Granules crackled in the monumental Arctic silence. She straightened and thumped her muscle-sore thighs. The bear had slowed and was simply walking now, across the shimmering frozen sea. The earth was painted in white and blue streaks of ice, reflecting the sky and the low, pale sun.

Squirming inside her parka, Cassie fished her GPS out of her inner pocket. She pressed the on button, and the signal flashed. She moved it back and forth, trying to get a clear reading. The longitude fluctuated wildly: 0° to 180°, as if she were at the North Pole. Worse, the latitude said 91°. This reading didn’t make sense. There couldn’t be a satellite over a location that didn’t exist. She shook the GPS, but the abnormal reading stayed. Cassie stared at it, and her heart started to thump faster. Either the GPS was malfunctioning or…

Or here was empirical proof that the impossible was real.

Cassie leaned forward and cleared her throat. “Excuse me… Um, where are we?”

“One mile north of the North Pole,” he said.

Obviously, the GPS was broken, and the bear was wrong. Or lying. But she didn’t need either the GPS or the bear. She knew at least a half dozen low-tech ways to find south. All she needed to do was head in that direction, and she’d find the station. Everything was under control. She might be deep in the ice pack, but she was alive and well. She wasn’t even cold.

She should have been cold. Her breath was condensing into crystals on the rim of her hood, but she felt hot. Her armpits were damp, and her neck itched from the many layers. It didn’t make sense. The air had to be cold enough for five-minute frostbite. It was even cold enough for a fata morgana. Dead ahead was the most magnificent example of the Arctic air’s mirages that Cassie had ever seen.

Cassie squinted at the castle as the bear carried her toward it. She’d never seen such a beautiful mirage. Spires soared above her. They shimmered in the bending light. At the tips of the spires, the ice curled into the semblance of banners, frozen midwave. She waited for it to shrink to its normal proportions: an ordinary ridge or an outcrop of ice that had been stretched by a trick of the light.

But it did not shrink or stretch. It shone like a jewel in the sunlight. Cassie felt her gut tighten. It had to be an iceberg frozen in the pack ice—it was as white as a moonstone, while the sea ice encircling it was a brilliant turquoise—but she had never heard of an iceberg in such old ice, except near Ellesmere, on the opposite side of Canada. She studied the GPS, which continued to display its nonsensical reading. Even at the phenomenal speed the bear had traveled, she could not have crossed the thirteen hundred miles to the North Pole… Could she have?

No. It simply wasn’t possible. There had to be another explanation, a rational and scientific explanation. She slid the GPS back into her parka.

Looking up again, she saw a blue wall of ice around an opalescent castle. “Oh,” she said faintly. It was not a fata morgana. She tilted her head to see the banner-crowned spires that rose behind the wall.

“Welcome to my castle,” the bear said.

There couldn’t be a castle in the Arctic. The whole expanse had been covered by satellite photography. Someone would have seen a castle.

It was, she thought, beyond beautiful.

The polar bear brought her through an archway of blue ice into the castle grounds. Ornate turrets and overhanging arches glittered above her. Before her, a great door, a twenty-foot crystal lattice, tinkled like a thousand champagne flutes clinking in a toast as it swung open. The bear carried her inside.

Inside… took her breath away. She was inside a rainbow. Chandeliers of a million shards of ice danced colors over the foyer. Ice frescoes covered the walls, swirling with sapphire and emerald reflections. Frozen ruby red roses wound up columns. GPS forgotten, impossibility forgotten, Cassie lowered her face mask and pushed back her hood. Strangely, her cheeks stayed warm. Lifting her goggles, she squinted at the sparkles. She had never seen anything so magnificent. Her imagination could not have created this. She slid off the bear’s back and walked over to the wall. It was too vivid, too detailed to be a hallucination. She reached toward it and stopped an inch away.

What if it wasn‘t real?

“Are you going to free my mother now?” She asked.

The bear was behind her. “Once we have made our vows, I will see to it,” he said. “I cannot contact the trolls directly—they are beyond my region—but I will send word with the wind.”

She couldn’t tear her eyes from the rainbowed ice wall. “Vows?” She said.

“Do you, Cassandra Dasent, swear by the sun and the moon, the sea and the sky, the earth and the ice, to be my beloved wife from now until your soul leaves your body?”

Until my soul leaves my body. Until death, he meant. His beloved wife until death. Cassie swallowed hard. “Is this… Is this how we complete the bargain?”

“Yes,” he said.

He said it so matter-of-factly. Yes, this will fulfill the bargain. Yes, this will bring your mother back to life.

Cassie took a deep breath and laid her mittened hand on the ice wall. It felt solid and real. All at once, she couldn’t help but believe: Her mother was alive and about to be rescued. All she had to do was say the word. So simple, so easy. “All right. I do.”

“You must say the vows back to me now,” he said.

Somehow, that seemed worse. She couldn’t really marry him. Years from now, she was supposed to marry some researcher, some scientist who loved the Arctic as much as she did. She sometimes daydreamed about starting her own research station, where she and her future husband would lead expeditions together. Or maybe she wouldn’t marry at all. Like Gram, she’d be an old lady with a dozen suitors. Regardless, she was not supposed to marry a talking bear.

But it wasn’t a real wedding. It was only words. She didn’t have to mean them. She just had to say them, and she would accomplish what no one else—her father, her grandmother, no one—had been able to accomplish: She’d bring her mother back! “Do you…” She halted. “What’s your name?” She turned to look at him. His massive head was inches from her shoulder. Instinctively, she flinched. She couldn’t do this. He was… She didn’t know what he was: magic or monster, predator or rescuer.

“You may call me Bear,” he said.

“Bear,” she repeated. She was marrying a creature simply called Bear to save a woman she’d never known.

That was the crux of it: a woman she had never known. Cassie had never known her mother. All she had to do was say a few words, and she could change that. Her mother would live again.

Looking into his black eyes, she began. “Do you, Bear, swear by the sun and the moon…” After this was done, she would demand to go back. He didn’t want an unwilling wife. She knew Gram’s story. He’d said so himself to her mother, I would not have an unwilling wife. He wouldn’t refuse Cassie. She’d divorce him as quickly as she’d married him. “The sea and the sky…” She could divorce him, right? Her voice faltered. She felt a roaring in her ears.

“The earth and the ice,” he prompted.

“The earth and the ice,” Cassie said. It was almost done. What did it mean to marry the Polar Bear King? Her eyes flicked to the door—the crystal lattice shimmered like a thousand stars in a net—and then back to the bear.

“To be my beloved husband from now until your soul leaves your body,” he encouraged her.

“And you’ll bring back my mother?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Our vows are void if I fail.”

Cassie closed her eyes. She had to do it for her four-year-old self, who had believed with all her heart that her mommy was in a troll castle. “Fine. Let’s finish this. To be my beloved husband from now until your soul leaves your body?”

“I do,” he said.

She thought she heard a sound like a bell, but she didn’t hear it in her ears. She heard it inside, as if it were resonating in her rib cage. Her knees wobbled.

“Do not be afraid,” he said softly. “As long as these walls are standing, nothing here will harm you.”

Eyes closed, she tried to breathe. It felt as if there weren’t enough oxygen.

“Come,” he said.

Cassie opened her eyes to see the bear walking down the shimmering hallway. For a second, she didn’t move. She looked back over her shoulder at the outside world, and then she took a deep breath and followed the bear.

The corridor widened into a golden and glowing banquet hall. The faceted walls glittered so brightly with candlelight from the chandeliers that Cassie saw sparkles when she blinked. Translucent, the cathedral ceiling glowed like stained glass. She looked around her in wonder. Carved birds and animals decorated the walls and ceilings. Buttresses arched over statues. A banquet table stretched the length of the hall with thronelike ice chairs on either end. It looked like… She tried to think of places to compare it to, and failed. It was as if every beautiful ray of light, every beautiful shape of ice that she had ever seen, were here all at once.

“We have had a long journey,” the bear said, suddenly behind her. Startled, she spun to face him. “You must wish to eat.”

When she turned back to the banquet hall, the vast table that had waited in silent splendor now overflowed with food. Fruit cascaded from ice crystal bowls. Steam rose from blue-white dishes. Breads were piled in pyramids. She breathed in a hundred spices. “I don’t understand,” she said. She saw no waiter and no chefs—nothing to explain the sudden appearance of a feast.

“It is food,” he said gently. “You eat it.”

As if to demonstrate, the polar bear swallowed an entire loaf of bread. She shook her head. The act was so incongruous with his fierce appearance. “Bears don’t eat bread,” she said. “You’re a carnivore.”

“We all have flaws,” he said.

Was that a joke? Did he have a sense of humor? She stared at him. “This can’t be real,” she said.

He nosed a throne. “Please. It is yours.”

Backing away, he let her approach it. Her throne. Taking off her mittens and gloves, she touched the curled arms of the ice throne. “It’s not cold,” she said. It was an ice castle. Either she should have been cold, or the ice should have been melting. But she was as warm as she would have been inside the station. “Nothing even drips.”

“It cannot melt,” he said. “Not so long as I am here. I will not allow it to melt.”

She jerked her hand back. “What do you mean ‘allow it’?” She said. “Ice doesn’t ask permission.”

“It is part of being a munaqsri,” he said.

“Moon-awk-sree,” she repeated. It sounded Inupiaq.

“Yes,” he said.

“Your word for ‘talking bear’?” she asked.

“It means ‘guardian,’” he said. “We are the caretakers of souls. Every living thing needs a soul, and everything that dies gives up a soul. Munaqsri are the ones who transfer and transport those souls.”

Cassie stared at him again.

“Altering molecules. That is one of the… ‘powers,’ for lack of a better word, that nature has given us so that we can fulfill our role,” he said. “On the ice, I use it to reach my bears. Here, I use it for the shape of my home, the food on the table, the warmth in your body.”

She felt as if she were spinning in a centrifuge, dizzy with the sparkling light of the chandeliers, the smells of spices, and the strangeness of the bear’s words. “You transfer souls,” she repeated. “Others like you—other munaqsri—transfer souls.”

“We are the unseen way that life continues,” he said.

“Scientists should have seen you,” she objected. “How can you be… transferring souls… and no one has noticed? How can you be here in a castle and no one has noticed? How can you be a talking bear—” She stopped when she heard her voice crack.

“People have seen us before,” he said. “Munaqsri sightings have inspired many stories. Have you heard stories of werewolves and mermaids? Sedna and Grandmother Toad? Horus and Sekhmet?”

“Stories, not science,” Cassie said. Like the story of the Polar Bear King and the North Wind’s daughter.

“You are correct. The stories are not accurate,” he said. “Sedna, for instance, appears in stories as a mermaid goddess, but in truth she is the senior munaqsri of the Arctic Ocean. She oversees all of the munaqsri in that region, like the Winds oversee the munaqsri of the air.” He paused. “Your family has explained none of this?”

“There’s no such thing as mermaids,” she said. “And I don’t believe in magic.” She knew as she said it that it was a ridiculous thing to say. She was talking to a bear in his magical castle in a part of the Arctic that could not exist.

“We are not magic,” he said. “We are part of nature. We are… the mechanism by which life continues. Everything we do—transform matter, move at high speeds, sense impending births and deaths—is part of nature’s design to enable us to transfer souls from the dying to the newborn.”

“I don’t believe in souls,” she said as firmly as she could. “A brain is a collection of chemical reactions. Complex neurochemicals.”

“As you wish,” he said mildly.

She wished she were home where she belonged and where things made sense. Or did they make sense only because Dad and Gram had lied to her? Would the world still make sense after she met her mother?

When she didn’t touch the food, the polar bear barked at the table, and the dishes melted. Pooling into colored water, they spread across the table to form a lacy tablecloth. Breads and soups disappeared like bubbles popping. Cassie backed away.

“Come,” the bear said. “You must be weary after our long journey. I will show you to the bedroom. Perhaps you should rest while I arrange for your mother’s release.”

She couldn’t imagine sleeping now, here. But she followed the bear out of the bright splendor of the banquet hall into the blue silence, deeper into the castle. She clung to his words like a lifeline: arrange for your mother’s release.

The bear’s paws were soundless on the ice. Silence wrapped around her as the hallway narrowed and the castle darkened. In the shadows, the bear loomed impossibly huge.

Candlelight danced across animal faces on golden walls. Blank, icy eyes stared at Cassie. She shrank back from them. All her instincts screamed at her to run back into the light. Deep blue, the ice surrounded her. She felt entombed. Was this how her mother felt in the troll castle? She fell to the ground and was captured by trolls. Cassie tried to picture her mother in a castle, and failed. What had her mother’s life been like? What was her mother like? Cassie wished she could remember her. She would be as much a stranger as… as the bear. Suddenly, the idea of meeting her mother was terrifying.

The bear halted at the foot of a staircase. Amber candlelight licked his fur. His eyes were inscrutable shadows. He seemed feral in the darkness. “You will find the bedroom at the top of the stairs,” he said. “You may wish to bring a candle.”

She fetched a candle from a wall sconce. Even the wax was ice, and like everything else, it wasn’t cold.

He rumbled, “I hope that you will be happy here.”

She didn’t intend to stay long enough to be happy or unhappy. Just long enough to ensure her mother was free, and then she would demand that the bear return her. But for now, she said nothing. She simply clutched the candle and stared at him.

He retreated into the blue shadows, and then she was alone. She lifted the candle higher so that the light fell shimmering onto the stairs. “Just until she’s free,” Cassie whispered. And then she shivered, even though it wasn’t cold.

CHAPTER 5

Latitude 91° 00’ 00” N

Longitude indeterminate

Altitude 15 ft.

As the bear had said, Cassie found a bedroom at the top of the stairs. She pushed open the door, a thick slab of opaque turquoise ice. She held the candle inside.

“Oh, wow,” she said.

Everything looked as if it were doused in diamonds: wardrobe, washbasin, table, bed. The canopy bed arched fifteen feet into the air and was made of shimmering ice roses, interwoven like lace. Posts at each of the four corners were carved like narwhal tusks. Cassie touched one of the smooth curves. Like all the ice in the castle, it felt as warm and dry as wood. On the bed itself, feather mattresses were heaped as high as her waist, and pillows were stacked as high as her neck.

Coming inside, she put the candle on a bedside table. She shed her pack and opened the wardrobe. A nightshirt fluttered from a single hanger. Cassie fingered the silk. Was it for her? Why would the bear want her to wear… She pushed the thought aside and closed the wardrobe.

She sat on the edge of the bed and thought of Gram’s story, the only link to her mother that she truly had. Once upon a time… All she knew of her mother was a fairy tale.

She leaned back into the pillows and tried to imagine her mother, the daughter of the North Wind. Without intending to, she fell asleep. She dreamed of a dark-haired woman and a polar bear bargaining in the snow-swirled Arctic. When Cassie looked closer, she saw the woman had her own face.

Several minutes or hours later, Cassie woke in darkness to a scraping sound. Automatically reaching for her bedside light, she remembered in the same instant that she was not home in her bed, she had no matches for the candle, and her flashlight was in her supply pack. She shot bolt upright. “Who’s there?” she asked. Her ears strained, listening.

She heard nothing.

The bear had told her that nothing within these walls would harm her. Could she trust him? “Overactive imagination,” she told herself. She lay back against the pillows.

She felt the mattress sink beside her.

Yanking the sheet, she leaped out of bed. “Get out!”

“Do not be alarmed,” a voice said. She didn’t recognize the voice. It was male.

Dammit, she should have found her flashlight when she’d first woke! Her heart pounded as she backed to the wall. Inching along it, she crept toward her pack. She rounded the washbasin, and a hand touched her arm. She elbowed backward with all her strength. She felt him double over. “Don’t touch me,” she said.

“I will not hurt you,” he puffed.

She kept moving toward her pack. Where was it? She had thought it was this corner. Her foot hit something solid—the pack. “One scream and you’ll have a thirteen-foot predator at your throat,” she warned him. Feeling for the pack, she knelt. Where was the bear? Why had he let this stranger in here? It occurred to her that she knew very little about why the bear wanted her here.

“Do not be afraid, beloved,” he said. “It is our wedding night.”

Oh, God. “You are not a polar bear,” Cassie said. “I didn’t marry you.” She loosened the top flap of the pack.

“I am Bear.”

“He’s much furrier. Less human.” Unsnapping the buckles on her pack, her hand brushed across wood. Better than a flashlight, she thought. She grinned wolfishly as she pulled the ice axe out of its loop. She gripped the handle and stood. “Do I look like an idiot?”

“You look beautiful, even with an axe.”

He could see her in the dark? She tightened her grip. Her heart thudded, but she kept her voice steady. “Just evening the odds.”

“You can trust me. I am not your enemy. In your heart, you know that.”

“One step closer and I swear I’ll swing.”

He put his hand on her shoulder. “I do not believe you will.”

Cassie swung.

She felt a rush of air—he’d leaped backward.

“Out,” she said. Brandishing the axe, she advanced on him in the darkness. She heard him retreat. She heard the door open and shut. Her heart beating in her throat and her breath quick, she did not lower the axe. Her hands were sweating, and Cassie realized to her horror and embarrassment that she was crying.

CHAPTER 6

Latitude 91° 00’ 00” N

Longitude indeterminate

Altitude 15 ft.

Cassie woke goose-bump-coated. “Stupid heaters,” she muttered. She bet Owen was tinkering with his motheaten computer instead of fixing the heaters. “Owen!” she called. She flung up an arm and thumped the wall. It felt smooth and chilled, and that jolted her into alertness. She wasn’t in the station, she remembered, and Owen couldn’t hear her.

She snapped upright and fumbled for her flashlight. She’d left it on the nightstand after evicting her unwelcome visitor. Her heart pounded so hard that her hands shook as she turned the flashlight on.

Cassie swept the light’s beam across the room. The light danced over the ice. Carvings of seabirds glistened on the wardrobe, as if the birds had frozen midflight. She’d used the wardrobe to block the door. It had worked. She was safely alone amid the crystal beauty.

She exhaled, her shoulders collapsing and her heart finally slowing down from a gallop. How could she have fallen asleep again? Outside this room was the man who’d wanted a “wedding night.” Outside this room was the polar bear she’d married. Outside this castle was her mother. Cassie didn’t know which of those three was more terrifying.

But I’m not going to cower here, she thought. She’d never hidden from anyone before, and she wasn’t going to start now.

Leaning her back against the wardrobe, she threw her weight into it. The wardrobe grated on the ice floor. She grunted as it slid the final inch. She wondered if the man had heard it. Cassie gripped her flashlight, testing its weight as a weapon, and stepped out into the hall.

Nothing happened. She was alone.

Silent and blue and beautiful, the crystalline hallway felt peaceful. Shining her light down the hall, she saw several doors, shadows in the glistening golden walls. She wondered what was on the other side of them. How did a—what was the word? Munaqsri. Did he really transport souls? Were there stashes of souls in those rooms?

Cassie took a step toward the first door and then stopped. She wasn’t here to explore. Remember the man, the polar bear, my mother, she thought. She had to find the bear and insist he take her home. She glanced backward over her shoulder and headed down the stairs.

She found the bear in the banquet hall. Seeing him, she halted in the archway. The Bear King had a seal on the table. His muzzle was stained red, and blood speckled the banquet table, brilliant scarlet against the white ice. He wiped his muzzle with his paw, as if embarrassed by his table manners. “Excuse me,” he said. “I had thought you were resting.” Gore now covered his paws as well as his muzzle. Cassie was suddenly aware of her own blood and the fragility of her skin. Those teeth and claws could tear her as easily as paper.

She focused on the caribou sculpture in an alcove behind him, instead of on his jaws. “Earlier,” she said, forcing her voice to sound steady and strong, “a man entered my room.”

“I know. It was I.”

“You?” She felt all the blood drain out of her face. But… but she was sure the intruder had been human: He’d had hands.

“I did try to tell you,” he said mildly. “You swung an axe at me.”

She stared at him, and he licked a bit of gore off his snout. “You can be human? How… Why…”

“I wanted to surprise you,” he said. “Remember, I told you that I can alter matter. We can take the shape of the species that we care for, but it is not our only shape or even necessarily our original shape. I am not always how you see me now. I thought you would be pleased.”

Pleased? “You turned human, and you climbed into my bed.”

“It is our bed,” the Bear King said. “Husbands and wives share a bed.”

Looking at his massive and bloody paws, she felt sick. Husbands and wives… No. She wasn’t sleeping with a stranger. Especially a magic-bear stranger.

Every fiber in her wanted to run out of the banquet hall. Stay calm, she told herself. “I fulfilled my end of the bargain,” she said. “I married you. Now I want a divorce.”

“I frightened you,” he said. “I am sorry. It was not my intent. Please, give me another chance. I will be charming.”

She looked at him with blood matted in his fur and seal pieces clinging to his muzzle. “You can be the Casanova of polar bears,” she said. “I’m not staying.”

“Do not judge me so quickly,” he said. “You have only just arrived.”

Cassie looked down at the seal carcass. It was a mangled mess. He ate like a polar bear and spoke like a man. She couldn’t judge him. He was too far outside the realm of possible for her brain to know how to judge.

“You are like nothing I have ever known,” he said. “You are brightness. You are light. You are fire. I come from a world of ice.”

She shivered. He sounded like he really meant that. No one had ever said anything like that to her before. She felt unbalanced. “Oh?” she said. “You know what fire and ice make?”

He looked at her with his inscrutable bear eyes. “Tell me.”

“Lukewarm water,” Cassie said. “I want to go home.”

“I need you,” he said. “I need you for my wife.”

No one had ever said that to her either. She swallowed.

“Why?” She said. “Why me? Why a human wife at all? Why not a bear?”

“Because I do not wish my children to be cubs,” he said.

For a second, Cassie could not breathe. Children.

“Only the children of munaqsri can choose to accept the power and responsibility, and we need more munaqsri with human intelligence. We are spread too thin; our regions are too large. We lose too many souls, and species dwindle.”

She didn’t know what he meant by regions or losing souls, and she didn’t care. “You married me to breed me?”

“Of course it is not the sole reason—I meant what I said about your brightness and light—but our children were a prime consideration.” He sounded so calm. She couldn’t believe how calm he sounded. Our children?

“You want a human incubator.” Cassie felt nauseous again. She clutched the edge of the banquet table. “Count me out. Absolutely not.”

“You agreed,” he said.

“Not to kids.” She wasn’t ready to be a mother. Especially to furry children. “You’re a bear. You aren’t even bipedal.”

“I can be,” he reminded her.

“Kids were not part of the bargain,” she said. “Deal is off.” Turning sharply, she walked out of the banquet hall.

She made it to the corridor before her nerve broke and she ran.

Crossing through the crystal lattice archway, Cassie slowed. She couldn’t run all the way home. She was thirteen hundred miles from home—thirteen hundred plus one if the bear was to be believed. She couldn’t reach home on her own. She needed the bear to take her there.

Cassie looked back at the castle. Its soaring spires and elegant arches glowed as golden as dawn. A sculptor had carved delicate lines of icy leaves on the ice walls. More roses, carved to petal precision, curled around the window arches. It was so beautiful that it made her feel an ache inside that she couldn’t describe.

Why did such a place have to come with a bear husband?

She walked farther, rounding the corner of the castle, and halted in her tracks. “Oh, wow,” she breathed. Spread before her was a topiary garden of ice. Hundreds of sculptures sparkled in the liquid light of the low sun. Hedges, flowers, apple trees, figures of dragons and mermaids and unicorns. With her breath caught in her throat, Cassie touched a leaf on an ice rosebush. She could see veins traced on the thin folds of ice petals.

She walked down paths between ice griffins, frozen fountains, and trees with glittering glasslike fruit. She ducked under a trellis of grape leaves. She’d never seen anything like this. It was the Garden of Eden in ice. Who had created this? She turned to look back at the castle—

— and saw the Bear King standing two feet away from her, silent between the roses. She jumped backward. “Don’t do that,” she said.

He said nothing, and she was aware of sweat forming in her armpits. She lifted her chin and met his stare.

“I did not think you were the kind to give up without trying,” the Bear King said.

“I don’t give up,” Cassie said automatically. She thought about it for an instant and then repeated, “I don’t give up.” He’d seen her stubbornness firsthand. She had tracked him until she was nearly out of fuel, despite knowing she was disobeying station rules. That chase felt like it had happened a lifetime ago.

“It is not an easy thing to have your world turned upside down,” he said. “I do not blame you for not being strong enough to accept what you have seen here, or not being brave enough to want to see more.”

She winced—two insults in one breath. She was not leaving because she was weak or cowardly. Was she?

He added, “I had thought that you would have the strength for this. It is not your fault that I was wrong.”

That was not… Wait. “Are you daring me?”

He considered it. “Yes,” he said.

“You think it’s a joke?”

“I think you are frightened,” he said.

“Like hell I am,” she said.

He lumbered toward her between the crystalline shrubbery. His fur brushed ice leaves, and they tinkled like crystal. She retreated, bumping into a statue of a mermaid. “I can show you a new world,” the Bear King said. “I can give you wonders that you cannot imagine, that you do not know exist, that you cannot yet comprehend.”

“I comprehend enough,” Cassie said, inching around the statue, away from the bear. “You want me to mother your children. Your cubs.” She heard the pitch of her voice rising, and she stopped. I’m not afraid, she repeated like a mantra. I’m not.

“I will wait until you are ready,” he said.

“I’ll never be ready.”

“I can wait beyond never.”

Cassie shivered and hugged her arms, even though she wasn’t cold. Her breath was condensing into miniature clouds, but she felt just as warm as she’d felt inside the castle. How long did he intend to keep her here? How long was “beyond never”?

“You have nothing to fear from me,” he said gently.

“Then take me home.” Home. Home to a mother she’d never met and a father who had lied to her.

“You have stepped into a larger world, Cassie,” he said. “Why do you wish to throw it away so quickly? You have barely glimpsed it.”

Involuntarily, she glanced again at the castle with its soaring ice turrets and crystalline ivy. If he was real, then all she knew of the world—all she knew of science and the rules of the universe—was false. Half of her wanted to explore every inch of this place. The other half wanted to turn back the clock and redo the day before.

He padded closer to her, and this time she didn’t retreat. “You can return to your ‘research’ station and pretend all is the same as before. But it is not the same, and it will never be the same. You cannot erase what you now know. Your world has changed.”

He was right. She couldn’t go back to pretending none of this existed, especially with her mother there to prove that it did. His gaze burned, and she had to look away. She watched the sun dance in the topiary garden. Lemon and pink, the sculptures winked in the light.

“Do you like it?” he asked. He sounded oddly hesitant.

“It’s beautiful,” she admitted. “Impressive sculptor.”

“The castle itself was complete before my tenure here,” he said. “I have concentrated on the gardens.”

A polar bear artist? Staring at his massive paws, she could not imagine him creating anything as beautiful and delicate as the ice topiaries. His paws were designed for killing seals, not shaping roses.

“I sculpt every day except in polar bear birth season,” he said. “During the heart of winter, I must patrol the ice near the denning sites. My munaqsri skills—the speed, the ability to sense an impending birth or death, the ability to transform the physical world—make my work possible, but they do not ensure success. I cannot risk being late for a birth for the sake of my gardens.” He hesitated, and then added, “Or even for spending time with you.”

“I won’t still be here then,” she said as firmly as she could.

“We shall see,” said the Bear King.

CHAPTER 7

Latitude 91° 00’ 00” N

Longitude indeterminate

Altitude 15 ft.

With ice leaves tinkling in his wake, the Bear King walked back toward the castle. “You have questions,” he said over his shoulder. “I have answers. Shall we bargain? For every question I answer, you remain one day in my castle.”

“You like bargains, don’t you?” she called after him. “How do I know you keep them? How do I know my mother is home?” He rounded the corner. “Hey, come back!” She hurried after him.

The Bear King waited for her by the grand entrance, flanked by shimmering pillars. “A munaqsri cannot break a promise,” he said. “It is the way that nature ensures we fulfill our roles. It is the price of our power.” He walked inside. She followed him and was again surrounded by iridescent sculptures. “The winds brought your mother to the ice while you slept,” he said. “I carried her to your research station before you woke.”

She halted. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe. The ice frescoes blurred, and she blinked rapidly. Her mother was in the station, walking through the rooms Cassie had walked through, sitting in the kitchen, brushing her teeth in the bathroom, doing all the little things that Cassie couldn’t imagine her mother, mythical person that she was, doing. Just thinking about it made Cassie feel as if the ice had cracked open under her feet. “Was she… Was she all right?”

“She was well,” he said.

Cassie wanted to ask more: what he’d said and what she’d said, what she looked like, what she sounded like. But Cassie’s throat clogged, and the bear was still walking away from her. “Where… Where are you going?” Her voice cracked.

He looked over his shoulder at her. “I wish to show you what you will leave behind if you return home. Come.”

Cassie followed him. He led her up spiral blue staircases and into rooms that looked as if they were carved of diamond. She saw a music room with a translucent grand piano and an orchestra-worth of violins and cellos. The strings of the violins were impossibly delicate strands of ice. She wandered down a hall lit by iridescent chandeliers and lined with mirror-smooth ice. In a sitting room with frost-edged sofas, she marveled at a chessboard with carved ice pieces the size of her hand, each sculpted into the shape of an Arctic animal.

He was right. She had never seen a place like this. She had never imagined any of this existed. What else had she not imagined?

Her mother, home.

Maybe if I take a little time, she thought, a couple of days maybe… just look at this place. Think of the secrets here, the knowledge. A bear who turns into a man, ice that doesn’t melt, a hidden castle—She could study any one of these mysteries for years. Plus, think of the progress in polar bear research she could make, the questions she could ask and he could answer.

“Your mother,” she said, asking the first question that popped into her head, “is she a munaqsri like you?”

“No,” he said.

Cassie turned to face him. He was sitting by a frozen fountain, images of fish midleap carved into the frozen streams of water.

“My father is a munaqsri,” he said. “He is a… The simplest term is ‘overseer.’ There is a hierarchy of munaqsri. There are munaqsri who care for the souls of a particular species, as I do, and then there are senior munaqsri who care for all the munaqsri of a particular region, such as the wind munaqsri. My father is responsible for the munaqsri of a mountain range in Scandinavia. I have not seen him since I became the caretaker of the polar bears.”

His face was turned away from her, as if he studied the frozen tumbling water. She tried to imagine what he’d been before he’d become the Bear King. “You weren’t always a bear?”

“A child of a munaqsri must choose to accept the power and the responsibilities,” he said. “He or she is then assigned to a species by an overseer.”

“So you chose to become a munaqsri? You had a choice?” She didn’t know why that question was important to her, but it was.

“I was needed,” he said. “Everything in the world—bears, birds, insects, rivers, seas—requires its own munaqsri to facilitate its existence. Most species require several. Humans, for instance, have hundreds. Beetles, even more. Polar bears need only one, due to the small population size. But still, there is a shortage of munaqsri. Children of munaqsri are rare, and the world desperately needs all of us.”

That didn’t sound like much of a choice.

In a quiet voice, the Bear King said, “I did resent my father for my non-choice. Being a munaqsri… We keep the world functioning, but we are not truly a part of it.”

Life at the station wasn’t exactly ordinary either. Cassie shook her head. She couldn’t believe she was empathizing with him. Could they actually have things in common?

“You must be hungry,” he said abruptly, as if he’d said too much.

The Bear King led her down another spiral staircase, back into the banquet hall. At his command, the table sprouted another feast. It opened like a flower, bowls of fruit unfolding like petals. A stalk shot into the air and bloomed into a tray of breads. It detached and floated toward Cassie. Staring at it, she retreated.

“Do not be alarmed,” he said. He sounded amused.

The tray shook as if impatient, jostling rolls. She stiffened and took a croissant. She wasn’t “alarmed.” She just had never eaten levitating food before. He took a muffin with his massive paw.

Gingerly, Cassie sat on the ice throne. The throne dwarfed her. Her toes brushed the floor. She was suddenly aware of how small and powerless she was inside this pristine perfection.

Steam rose from the dishes, and her stomach rumbled. She licked her lips, her mouth watering. She’d never seen so much food before. And it all looked good. She shook her head at herself. The impossible had happened, was currently happening, and her reaction was hunger. Maybe she was adjusting to all the strangeness. Or at least her stomach was. She reached for a steaming dish of carrots in a white sauce.

The silence stretched, broken only by the tinkle and clink of the serving dishes as they jostled across the table. Cassie tried to picture her mother at the station, sitting down to a meal. She imagined her with Cassie’s favorite mug, as Owen flipped pancakes, and she pictured herself at age four at the table beside her. Again, Cassie’s eyes felt hot.

She tried to think of a question, an innocuous question, that would let her get some modicum of control back. Making her voice as cheerful as she could manage, she said, “So… what were you like as a young cub?”

“Very humanoid,” he said dryly.

She almost smiled. He really did have a sense of humor.

“My childhood…” He paused and regarded her as if weighing how he should answer. “My childhood was many years ago,” he said finally. “I am older than I appear, several centuries older.”

Several centuries? She tried to digest it. “You don’t seem so old.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Several centuries?

“I had a good childhood, a human one,” he continued. As Cassie filled her plate, he told her about growing up straddled between his father’s mountains and his mother’s Norway. His mother, he said, had been an ordinary human, and she had raised him as a human. He had played with the other village children and had gone to lessons with a tutor. His mother had had hopes he would pursue law. Weekends he’d spent with his father learning about all the things not in his tutor’s books—learning about magic and the responsibilities of the munaqsri, learning how a munaqsri used his power to fulfill his responsibilities.

“Your turn,” he said when he’d finished.

“What?” she said, startled.

“You tell me about your childhood,” he said.

She hesitated, but she couldn’t think of any excuse why not to. Besides, for some reason that she didn’t explore too closely, she wanted to talk about it.

She told him about Max and his planes, Gram and her story, and Owen and his gadgets. She told him about how different things were for her compared to, say, Owen’s niece in Fairbanks, whose life consisted of makeup and movies. “First time I ever saw a movie,” Cassie said, “I was four—my first trip to Fairbanks. I was terrified.”

“I find nothing so strange about that.”

“It wasn’t a horror movie. It was Mary Poppins.” When she had first seen Julie Andrews float through the air with her umbrella, she had screamed, and Dad had shoved popcorn at her to quiet her. “I managed to calm myself until the scene where the children jump into a chalk painting.” She had thought the sidewalk had swallowed them, and she had proceeded to scream herself hoarse.

They swapped stories as Cassie devoured honeyed breads, delicately spiced fish, a raspberry tart. Eventually, they fell silent.

She shifted on the ice throne. She hadn’t meant to talk so much. He was just so easy to talk to. She didn’t like how… comfortable she’d felt. He was supposed to be the Polar Bear King, and now when she looked at him, he looked like an overgrown stuffed animal or the Coca-Cola polar bear. Abruptly, she stood up. “Is there more to the castle?” she asked.

“You do not need to rush,” he said. “You have a full week.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You asked at least seven questions; you owe me at least seven days,” he said. “It is not a lifetime, but it is a beginning.”

“I never agreed to your bargain,” she objected.

He blinked at her. “You are correct,” he said, surprise in his voice. “You did not.”

They looked at each other for a moment. Then the Bear King focused on the table, and the dishes began to disappear. She jumped as her plate popped like a bubble. Her silverware dissolved into the ice. The frost tablecloth withered. “Stay one week,” he said, “and then decide. Only one week. You waited eighteen years for your mother. Wait one week more.”

She thought of all the memories she’d just spilled, all the moments she’d lived believing her mother was dead and gone. And now… Cassie looked away from the Bear King’s brilliant black eyes. She didn’t want to think about this. “Show me more of the castle,” she said.

He led her to a grand ballroom with pillars reaching up into arches and the roof open to a pale, cloudless sky. The northern lights wafted over and the deep blue floor mirrored the ribbons of light with shimmering perfection. Staring up at the sky, Cassie walked into the ballroom and slipped. She landed smack on her butt.

The Bear King bounded over to her. “Are you all right?”

“Fine, fine, fine.” Her tailbone felt bruised. He bent his neck down to help her, and she automatically shied away. She stood on her own.

“I never noticed it was slippery,” he said, an apology in his voice.

“You have bear paws,” she said. “I need crampons on this floor. Or ice skates.” She shuffled over to a pillar. Outside the ballroom, through the arches, she could see the sculptures of the topiary garden glittering with reflections of the night aurora. It was so beautiful her breath caught in her throat.

She had an idea. She didn’t stop to think about whether or not it was a good idea. Sitting down fast, she unstrapped her mukluks. She wiggled her toes within three layers of socks.

The Bear King hovered near her. “Are you hurt?”

Cassie used the pillar to stand. “Not yet.” She pushed off. In socks, she skated across the ballroom. It made a perfect ice rink. Whooping, she crashed into the opposite pillar. Clutching it, she called to the Bear King, “Your turn.”

He looked aghast.

She laughed out loud. She felt better already. “Too undignified for you, Your Royal Ursine Highness?”

“Munaqsri are not royalty. I am merely Bear.” Spreading all four paws wide, Bear skidded across the ballroom on his stomach. With his legs splayed out, he spun a hundred eighty degrees to a stop. Laughing, Cassie shoved away from the pillar and slipped to the center of the room. She smashed into Bear.

“Yikes, sorry,” she said, disentangling herself. What was she doing? He wasn’t her friend; he was a magical soul-transferring polar bear.

“Stand still,” he told her.

She tensed but obeyed. She shouldn’t have started this. She was supposed to be on her way home, not—Before she could complete the thought, Bear pushed. She careened across the ballroom.

Laughing, she caught herself on a pillar.

She looked back at the polar bear, sobering. One week, he’d asked for. Was that such an awful price for all the wonders she’d seen? “One week,” she said. “I’ll stay for one week.”

CHAPTER 8

Latitude 91° 00’ 00” N

Longitude indeterminate

Altitude 15 ft.

One week slid into two and then three and then four, and so on. As the days passed, it became easier and easier for Cassie to find excuses to delay returning to the station and facing whatever (or, more accurately, whoever) waited for her there. She hadn’t forgiven Dad for the heavy-handed way he’d tried to ship her off to Fairbanks, or for the way he’d lied to her for her entire life. As for her mother… Cassie wanted to see her, but every morning, she woke up and said, “Just one more day, and then I’ll go home.” And every night, she went to bed alone and dreamed of bears and ice.

As the weeks went by, she stopped thinking about home at all. One afternoon when they’d finished carving ice roses into the pillars of the ballroom (Bear carving and Cassie directing), they lay in the center of the floor admiring their handiwork.

“Why does this castle even have a ballroom?” she asked. “Did any Bear King ever hold a ball? Were there waltzing walruses? Say that ten times fast. Waltzing walruses…”

Beside her, Bear pushed himself up onto his hind legs. Standing, he was loosely humanoid—if one ignored that he was thirteen feet tall. He held out his paw. “May I have this dance?”

Cassie grinned at him. “Delighted, Your Royal Ursine Highness.” She put her hand in his. Her hand was minuscule in his vast paw. “Don’t fall on me,” she ordered. She could not reach his shoulder so she settled for putting her other hand on his forearm. Her fingers sank deep into creamy white fur.

Gently, he guided her across the ballroom. His paw covered half her back. They danced in silence. Across the topiary garden, deep amber sunlight filled the horizon. Warm orange spread across the ice. It was… The word that popped into her mind was “romantic.” He spun her. She felt dizzy staring up at his fur.

I’m happy here, she realized. Thinking that, she felt as if she were on the edge of a sea cliff. “We need music,” she said, trying to break the mood.

“I could sing for you.”

“You sing?”

“No,” he said.

She grinned. He dipped her backward. I’m happy here because of Bear, she thought. She glimpsed the golden light, and a tear welled in her eye. He pulled her upright. “Sun,” she said quickly to explain the tear.

“It is the last of the light,” Bear said.

Startled, she stumbled over her feet. He steadied her. How could she have stayed here for so long? What did Dad think had happened to her? And Gram? And her mother. She shook her head. She didn’t want to think about her mother right now, not during the end of the light. She always loved the last glimpse of the sun’s rays before the long polar night.

“Come with me,” Bear said. He dropped down onto all fours and trotted out of the ballroom.

“Don’t you want to watch?” she called after him.

“Don’t you want a better view?” he called back.

Grinning, Cassie chased after him. She had only been up in the spires a few times. Bear disliked the narrow stairs. One of his predecessors had designed them for humans, not bears, and it embarrassed him, he’d told her, to waddle up them. She’d teased him about that for days, but she didn’t tease him now. Today felt different somehow. Maybe it was the loss of light. Maybe it was the dancing.

Bear squeezed into the stairwell and climbed up the spiral stairs. Emerging onto a balcony, Cassie walked to the delicate bowed railing. “Careful,” Bear said.

She ignored him and leaned over the ice railing. “Look at that,” she breathed.

The Arctic sprawled before her. Gold and silver, it looked like vast riches. The sky, enormous, glowed blue. Streaks of rose clouds faded into deepening blue, staining the ice azure.

“Do not turn around,” he said—it was a human voice, softer and thinner. She may have heard it only once, but still she recognized it instantly. Her back straightened, tingling. He put his arms around her waist. It felt perfectly natural to lay her hands on his. She did it without even thinking about it. Both facing the horizon, they watched the last drop of gold melt into blueness, and then he released her. When she turned around, he was a bear again.

“Bear…,” she began. Her back felt cold now. Wind blew her hair into her face. She brushed it away from her eyes.

“I look forward to tomorrow,” he said. It was the same phrase he said every night before he left her.

Where did he sleep? She’d never asked. Maybe he went onto the ice or out into the gardens or into one of the other glittering rooms. He’d told her once that she slept in his room. “Stay with me,” she said.

He looked at her. Cassie saw the twilight sky reflected in his black bear eyes. She felt her face blush. Tonight was… different. She just didn’t want it to end. That was all. “I mean, you don’t have to leave,” she said. “It’s okay. I trust you. You can sleep in your room again.” She added quickly, “Just sleep.”

He regarded her silently for a moment longer. She shifted from foot to foot and began to wish she could swallow the words back out of the air. Maybe she should have thought first before she’d made the offer. It would change things, if he stayed. She knew that instinctively, but she shied away from thinking about how they’d change.

“As you wish,” he said.

He waited for her to lead the way. She brushed past him as she left the balcony, and she laid her hand on his back, intertwining her fingers in his fur. She’d touched his fur a thousand times before, but this time she pulled her hand away. He wasn’t just a bear. She remembered his human arms around her waist and his breath on her neck. This was the first time since that first night that he’d turned human.

Outside the bedroom, she had him wait in the corridor while she changed into her flannels—and then changed again into the silken nightshirt that she’d found on her first night in the castle. She told herself she was just being polite. The nightshirt had been a gift. She climbed under the covers. “All right. I’m decent now.”

The polar bear padded softly into the room.

Cassie tucked the sheets around her body as he approached the bedside table. She could still change her mind, she knew. If she asked him to leave, he would. But that felt… cowardly. This was Bear, after all. And she’d only invited him here as a friend. Friends could share a bed.

She wished she’d stuck with the flannel.

He breathed on the candle. It flickered and died with the scent of waxy smoke. Now the room was so black that it looked thick. Bear (now human, she guessed from the sinking of the mattress) climbed into the bed beside her. She remembered the last time he’d climbed into bed with her—on their wedding night. “Touch me and it’s back to the axe,” she said.

She heard him sigh. “I would never hurt you, not intentionally, not ever. You should know that by now.”

“I don’t taste as good as a seal.”

“You do not have enough blubber,” he agreed.

She felt the mattress shift as he settled into his pillows. Flat on her back, she lay as rigid as ice. “Don’t snore.”

“Your wish is my command.”

She snorted. “Cute.”

“Good night, Cassie.”

“Night.” Clutching the sheets to her chin, she listened to him breathe. It sounded like a gentle wave. Gradually, his breathing slowed. Could he be going to sleep? She prodded him. “You awake?”

“I am now.” He rolled over, and she felt the mattress dip down toward him. He was facing her, she guessed. Her skin felt hyperaware. At least a thirteen-foot polar bear did not make a thirteen-foot man, she told herself. He was, at most, seven feet tall.

“Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me a story.”

“As you wish,” he said. “Once upon a time, there was a little wallaby…”

She smiled. “Wallaby?”

“Yes, wallaby. And this wallaby lived…”

She was smothering in sheets. Cassie kicked. Her foot contacted something solid. She heard a grunt. Bleary, she blinked awake. Walls did not grunt. “Bear, that you?”

“Hmm.”

She kicked harder.

“Ow!”

Served him right. He was sleeping in the middle of the bed. She yanked the covers back and curled with them on the pillows.

“Thief,” he said. He tugged on the sheets.

She grunted at him.

“Was I snoring?” he asked.

“You don’t snore,” she told him. It was a definite plus.

“You do,” he said. “It is like a cat purring.”

She kicked the covers away. “Too hot,” she said. “Is it morning?” Crawling out of bed, she found her flashlight. She turned it on.

She saw a sudden flurry of sheets. Bear rolled off the bed in a tangle of white. “Stop the light!” he said.

Cassie pointed the flashlight at the white lump. “Hey, I’m the one who hates mornings,” she said lightly, but he continued to conceal himself. “Bear? What’s wrong?”

“You cannot see me.”

She’d never seen him, she realized. The two times he’d transformed—last night and her first night here—she hadn’t seen him. With the flashlight, Cassie climbed over the bed. He was buried on the floor under the covers. Not an inch of skin was visible. “Come on,” she said. “I promise I won’t laugh.”

“You cannot!” There was a blur of sheets as he stood up. He looked like he was wearing a bad ghost costume. He knocked the flashlight out of her hands. It rolled under the bed. “You must never see my human face,” he said. “Promise me you will not try.”

“Why not?”

“Promise me.”

He sounded serious, even desperate. She didn’t think she’d ever heard that in his voice before. “You certainly have your quirks,” Cassie said lightly. “Turning into a giant bear wasn’t unique enough?” He didn’t laugh.

Bear begged her, “Please, beloved. If you care about me at all, do not look.”

He hadn’t called her “beloved” since the day they’d met.

She dangled over the bed and retrieved the flashlight. She switched it off, and the room plunged into darkness again. “Happy now?” she said, but her voice shook. His pleading had unnerved her. She felt as if she had violated some sacred taboo. But she hadn’t meant any harm. All she’d wanted to do was look at him.

Bear said nothing.

She waited another second. “Bear? Are you all right?”

“I must go,” he said.

He couldn’t be that angry. “I didn’t…,” she began.

“There is a bear being born,” he said. “I am needed.”

“Now?” It wasn’t birth season yet. The bear cub was premature. “You… feel it?” He’d told her about this once, how munaqsri could sense an imminent birth or death. They could also, he’d said, summon each other, but she’d never seen him do that. “Can I come with you?”

“It is a munaqsri duty.”

She felt a rush of air, and then she heard the door open. She called after him, “See you at breakfast?”

The door slammed. She hugged her shoulders as the room chilled.

Sometime the following night, Bear slid into bed. Automatically, Cassie curled against his warmth. She didn’t think about how natural it felt to do so. She murmured, “Hello.”

He said nothing, but buried his face in her hair.

Gradually waking, she remembered she was annoyed with him. He had left her alone. Her whole day had been turned upside down. She’d resorted to eating dried fruits and nuts from her pack. She couldn’t work the table without him. Worse, she’d been bored for the first time ever here. It reminded her of blizzards in the station: nothing to do, nowhere to go.

His breathing sounded uneven, choked. She frowned and reached to touch his face. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Are you sick?”

His cheek was damp under her fingers. She snatched her hand back as if it had burned. “Bear, what’s wrong?”

“I was late,” he said. His voice shook. “It was far. I was too late.”

“What do you mean ‘too late’?” She wished she could see him. She peered into the darkness as if she could pierce it. “What happened?”

“I should have been patrolling the ice. If I had been nearby, I could have given that cub a soul in time. If I had been an hour closer, it would have all been well. I was miles late.”

“Late?” She tried to understand. He’d missed the birth?

“The cub was stillborn,” he said. “No soul, no life.”

She could hear the tears in his voice. Did he want her to comfort him? Hesitantly, she put her arms around him. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m here.” She held him close.

CHAPTER 9

Latitude 91° 00’ 00” N

Longitude indeterminate

Altitude 15 ft.

Through the dark days of winter, Bear “patrolled” the ice, waiting to feel the summons of a birth, while Cassie waited alone in the castle and grew more and more restless. In his absence, she prowled the topiary gardens under the perpetually starlit sky. By winter solstice, she knew them by heart.

Carved owls stared down at her with glassy eyes reflecting a thousand stars. It was as silent as a museum. She could hear the crunch of ice under her mukluks. It sounded like firecrackers. She had a great urge to run through the gardens with her arms stretched wide, shattering all the trees in her path—but she didn’t. Instead, her feet took her through the maze of translucent hedges to the center of the garden. Rosebushes ringed a single sculpture, the newest.

It was her: her long hair, her high cheekbones, her bony elbows, her height. It is the heart of the garden, Bear had told her after he’d finished carving it.

She studied the statue. The ice hair looked blown by wind. Stray pieces curved upward, twisted together. It was a perfect likeness, down to the short lashes on her eyes and the short nails on her hands. Her twin grinned upward, as if she were laughing at the castle spires, or higher at the star-choked sky. What am I still doing here? Cassie wondered. I should be on a snowmobile, not a pedestal.

Who was tracking bears now? Dad? Owen? Scott would be taking bets on the number of cubs being born. Jeremy was probably stir-crazy by now.

And what about her mother? Cassie couldn’t imagine what she was doing. All she could picture was her mother’s image from photos she’d seen, but even that memory lacked details, such as the color of her eyes.

Cassie snapped a perfect stem. The ice rose fell into her hands. Absently, she twirled it. Petals caught the moonlight, and tiny moon rainbows flickered in their curves. She put the rose behind her ear.

She’d never meant for this to become permanent. She was supposed to be an Arctic researcher, not the Polar Bear Queen. What had happened to all her plans? Didn’t she care about them anymore? Didn’t she care about her mother? Or her father? Or Gram? Or Max or Owen? When had she stopped thinking about them?

Cassie turned away and pushed past the bushes. Ice tinkled like a thousand bells. She halted in front of an ice apple tree. Grabbing hold of the branches, she clambered up the tree. The ice creaked under her weight, and the rose fell from her ear and shattered.

From the top, she could see out onto the Arctic. Low and fat, the moon danced over the translucent ridges. Wind stirred stray snow. She watched drifts form and dissipate, deep blue in the polar night.

Silhouetted, Bear came over the lip of the ridges. He was majestic on the ice. She watched him take great strides across the floes. His fur rippled in the moonlight. He almost glowed.

He galloped to the castle and disappeared inside. Finally, he was home. She swung down from the tree and landed with a crunch on the ice. She followed him to the banquet hall. He was waiting for her at the table. Melting frost dripped from his fur.

Cassie flopped down onto her throne. “What’s the news from the ice?”

“It is icy,” he said solemnly.

Cassie picked up a frozen apple. “Perfect day here,” she said. She tossed the apple up and caught it. “But then, it always is.” She threw it higher, and caught it. “Monday: perfect.” She tossed it. “Tuesday: perfect.” Caught it. “Wednesday: perfect.” Tossed it. “Thursday.” Caught it. “Friday. What day is today?”

“I do not track human days.” He cocked his head at her. “Are you all right?”

She tossed the apple back into its bowl. “Perfect.”

“You are not happy,” he said.

“Yes, I am,” she said irritably. She was queen of the ice. She was the Polar Bear’s wife. Of course she was perfectly happy, wandering around alone in an ice castle every dark day. Maybe if she could convince Bear to take her with him… But they’d had that discussion. Alone, he could travel unseen. With her, he ran the risk of detection. And besides, she’d serve no more purpose out there on the ice than she did here. She couldn’t help him be a munaqsri.

“Cassie, talk to me.”

“I don’t know what color my mother’s eyes are,” she said.

“Green,” he said. “Like yours.”

“All better.” She dared him to contradict her. Instead, he growled at the table. The table shot up a stem. It blossomed into a glass. Red wine filled it. Another bit of table folded up into a plate. Steam rose from it as her dinner grew. It was her favorite dish: chicken soaked in a white wine sauce. She stirred it with her fork. He treated her like a queen. How could she think about leaving?

The thought stopped her. Was she thinking about leaving? Truly leaving, as in never coming back, never seeing Bear again, not being his Polar Bear Queen?

Bear summoned a seal carcass and a dinner roll for himself. He held the carcass down with his paw and ripped upward with his teeth.

She didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to never see him again. But did she want to stay? What about her life at the station? Why couldn’t she have both? “I could do research,” she offered.

Bear raised his head. Seal blood stained his muzzle a brilliant red. It looked like a child had smeared lipstick on him. “You cannot,” he said.

She scowled at the red stains. “Can’t you eat without dripping?”

“I have a large head.”

“You’re a slob.”

“All polar bears eat this way.”

“You’re making me lose my appetite.” Grabbing her linen napkin, she marched to Bear.

“I am sorry,” he said contritely. She wiped the gore from his chin and then went back to her seat.

With her watching, he snipped the blubber delicately with his incisors. He let the blood drip onto the floor before gulping the fat whole. “Better,” Cassie said. “You know if I had work to do, I wouldn’t obsess over your table manners. Plenty of research topics out there. You could tell me how polar bears navigate so effectively on the changing ice, or I could have the final word on whether polar bears are evolving into sea mammals.” She could be a station staffer on sabbatical, sort of. She’d already planned to do her college degree remotely. This would simply be more remote than anyone knew.

Gently, Bear said, “You cannot be a human scientist here. No one would believe you. What would you tell them? Your source is a talking bear? You live in an ice castle and feel no cold?”

Cassie swirled the sauce. She watched seal blood pool on the ice and thought about her future. Her path had always seemed so certain before. But she’d given it up by staying here, and she hadn’t even noticed. No wonder she felt so restless. She’d abandoned her future and replaced it with what? Gourmet dinners and pretty sculptures? She had no purpose here.

The table absorbed the blood, and the red vanished as if down a drain. She looked at her chicken. “Have you ever seen a polar bear in a cage?” she asked. “It paces. Back and forth. All day long: back and forth. It wears a rut in the floor. It doesn’t stop to eat. It doesn’t stop to sleep. It simply paces until it wastes away and dies.”

“You are unhappy?”

Unable to answer that, she looked up at him. “I want to go home,” she said.

It didn’t take her long to prepare to leave. Bear watched her from the bedroom door as she packed her belongings. All was silent around them. There was no wind, no creak of ice, no nothing. It felt as if the castle were holding its breath.

“Do you plan to return?” Bear asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. She couldn’t look at him.

“How can you not know?”

“I just don’t.” All she knew was the idea of staying made her miserable and the idea of leaving made her just as miserable.

“So I must wait like a good little puppy dog while you decide our future?”

Cassie couldn’t answer that. Instead, she focused on pulling on her Gore-Tex and flannels over her clothes. She was heading back out into a world where she’d need all her layers. She had a memory of herself, age eight, being dressed by her father in so much fleece and down that she couldn’t lower her arms. When she got back to the station, she’d see her father again. She tried to imagine that conversation. How was she going to explain why she hadn’t returned sooner?

Bear growled, low in his throat, making the hair on the back of her neck prickle. “I have been a fool,” he said. “I believed you cared about me.”

Cassie frowned at him as she zipped her parka. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s me.” He was… sweet. And fun. But this wasn’t about him. It was about her—who she wanted to be, what she wanted her future life to be.

“Of course it ‘has to do’ with me,” he said. “It is my life you speak of.”

“And my life,” she snapped back. “You want me to sacrifice my career, friends, family, a mother I have never even met.” Granted, after the first few weeks had passed, she hadn’t missed her mother at all. Ruthlessly, she pushed that thought aside. “I can’t do that.” She’d worked so hard—late nights studying for Dad’s pop quizzes, long treks chasing bears, weekends cleaning equipment, all so she could someday earn an official staff position, a future she’d just tossed away to do what? Be Bear’s companion? Play in the topiary garden? Dance in the ballroom? It wasn’t enough.

“You do not belong there anymore,” he said. “It is your past. You cannot go back. This is your home now.”

Cassie shook her head. This wasn’t her home; this was Bear’s castle. Her eyes swept over the ice rose bed and the seabird wardrobe and the shimmering walls and golden door. She did know every curl of ice now, every rainbow reflection. She loved the shimmering sheen of the ice, the soothing wind outside, and all the memories she now had of everything here. But it’s not home, she told herself firmly. She had to remember that. Home was the station.

“You belong with me,” he said. “We are one.”

“No, we’re not. You’re out being munaqsri, and I’m…” She felt like… like a pet, kept at home until he was free to play with her.

“Should I let the polar bears be stillborn? Is that what you want me to do? Let their souls drift beyond the ends of the earth? I have responsibilities. You know that I do.”

“I know!” This was hard enough, and he was making it worse. It reminded her of how she’d come here—by being blackmailed with a bargain she hadn’t been able to refuse. But that wasn’t fair. The bargain to save her mother had been her own idea. And after that, Cassie had chosen to stay. At least, she’d thought she’d had a choice. She’d believed him when he’d said she wasn’t a prisoner. What if… He wouldn’t force her to stay. He wasn’t like that. “If you really cared about me, you’d let me go.”

He turned away from her. “Go,” he said. She exhaled a breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. He added, “I will stay here and pace like a bear in a zoo until you return to me.”

Cassie sat down hard on the bed as the anger and frustration drained out of her. “I didn’t mean…” Didn’t mean what? To leave? But she did mean to leave. From the beginning, she had meant to leave. She just hadn’t meant to hurt him. And she hadn’t meant to care if she hurt him.

Bear sighed. “If you wish it, I will take you home.”

CHAPTER 10

Latitude 70° 49’ 23” N

Longitude 152° 29’ 25” W

Altitude 10 ft.

Cassie hadn’t remembered the station being so ugly. She’d always thought it resembled a sideways soup can, but she’d never noticed what an old soup can it had become. Its metal walls were pockmarked with the red-brown stains of decades of rust. The shed walls were worse. The whole complex was incongruous with the pristine ice desert. After all the years she’d walked in and out of that dented, rusted door without ever looking at it, seeing it now felt… strange.

She dismounted from Bear, but her hand stayed on his neck. He turned his head to look at her with his soulful eyes. “It looks different, that’s all,” she said, in answer to his unspoken question.

“You are different,” he said. “This place is not your home anymore.”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” she said, taking her hand off his neck. “This is hard enough as it is.”

“I do not want leaving me to be easy.”

“Well, it’s not, so stop it.” He subsided, and she went back to staring across the station compound. Skidmarks from a Twin Otter crossed in front of the shed and headed behind the station. Max was here. Max. Owen. Liam. Scott. Jeremy. Dad and… and Mom. Cold pierced her cheeks even under her face mask now that she wasn’t touching Bear. Cassie closed the gusset on her hood.

“Are you afraid?” Bear asked gently.

“Like hell I am,” Cassie said. Ridiculous to be nervous about meeting her own mother. This should be the best day of her life.

But her feet wouldn’t move. All she had to do was walk to the door and open it, and there she’d be—her mother. “You could come in with me,” Cassie said.

Snow drifted across the doorstep in silence.

“I know you do not want that,” Bear said finally.

She nodded. She didn’t know what had made her say it.

“Raise the station flag and I will come for you,” Bear said.

No more thinking, she told herself. It was time to do this. Shouldering her pack, Cassie marched briskly across the lit snow. Closer, she heard the generator humming—a comfortingly familiar sound, like the welcoming whine of a family dog—and she slowed to a stop in front of the door.

Behind her, she heard Bear rumble, “I love you.”

Suddenly, going inside seemed easier than staying outside. Without looking at Bear, she pushed the door open. The smell of unwashed bodies hit her in a wave, and she reeled backward from the sourness. Steeling herself, she stepped into the entryway and closed the door behind her. Breathing shallowly through her face mask, she opened the second door.

And she was home.

Cassie stood in the second doorway and blinked, her eyes adjusting to the barrage of color: orange life vests, red parkas, bright blue packs, green and purple climbing ropes. Slowly, as the colors resolved into familiar shapes, she started to relax. Heaps of gear, stacks of files, rats’ nests of clothes on top of and around the desks and file cabinets… She knew this mess. Cassie stripped off her outer gear. She could hear voices in Owen’s workshop. She left her pack and gear on her desk and crossed to the half-open door.

The scene was very familiar: Max and Owen stood at the workbench. They were muttering over a chunk of engine. Leaning against the door frame, Cassie watched them. Max and Owen. Her two pseudo-uncles. She used to play in here while they muttered over some hunk of metal, exactly as they were doing now. She felt a grin tugging on her lips. “Nice toaster,” she said lightly.

Owen dropped the clamp.

“You should be more careful with that equipment,” she teased. “Treat it like a baby.”

Max whipped off his goggles, reverse raccoon mask underneath. “Cassie? Lassie!” He leaped over a sawhorse and scooped her up into a bear hug. Max! She’d missed him! She hugged him back fiercely. “Look at you, Cassie-lassie!”

Owen was frowning at her. “Cassie?” he said.

“It’s me. In the flesh. Good to see you.” She meant it. It was very good to see them, surprisingly good. She’d focused so much on her parents that she hadn’t thought about what it would be like to see the rest of her family. “Good to be home.” She threw open her arms and inhaled the smell of home: stale winter. She coughed.

“Cassie… we didn’t know if you were alive or dead, lassie,” Max said.

“Your mother always believed you lived,” Owen said.

Your mother. Cassie felt her heart stop for an instant. Bear had done it. Her mother was here. Alive and here. Cassie hadn’t realized that up until this moment, there had still been doubt, lurking. But hearing it from prosaic Owen’s lips, here in the unmagical, ordinary station… When her heartbeat resumed, it felt loud, like a timpani under her skin, and her voice sounded far away to her ears. “Where is she?”

Max grinned broadly. “Come on, Cassie-lassie.” He draped his arm around her shoulder and shepherded her out the door. “I want to see the expression on their faces when they see you.”

Cassie let herself be led. She didn’t feel her feet touching the floor. She barely saw where she was walking. Their faces, plural, when they see you. Max propelled her through the research lab to the kitchen. He released her as they entered.

There was only one person in the kitchen.

Her father was sitting at the table with his head bent over his notebook. A pot simmered on the stove behind him. For a long moment, she stared at him, feeling her insides tumble, unable to sort out what she was thinking or feeling.

After months with Bear, her six-foot-five father looked small and fragile. Gray streaked his hair, and his neck sagged beneath his mountain-man beard. She had forgotten his gray. She stared at him, trying to match this man to her memories. How had she ever found him intimidating? She wanted to cross to him and push his hair out of his eyes. He looked so… human.

Max cleared his throat, and Dad glanced up from his papers.

“Hi, Dad,” she said.

He looked stunned, as if she had dropped from the sky into the kitchen. Recovering, he shot out of his chair. The chair clattered backward to the floor behind him. In two large steps, he was in front of her. He crushed her in a hug. “Oh, my little girl,” he said.

He hadn’t called her that in years. Cassie swallowed a lump in her throat. “Where’s Mom?” The word tasted strange in her mouth.

His face split into an enormous smile. Still holding her shoulders, he called, “Gail! Gail, she’s home!” He squeezed her shoulders. “Gail!”

Cassie heard footsteps from the hall behind her. Her mother’s footsteps, running. Cassie’s back muscles tensed. The footsteps stopped at the doorway, and her father released her. But Cassie couldn’t turn around. Her feet felt glued to the linoleum. She had dreamed of this too often for too long. What are you afraid of? she challenged herself. Turn around.

No, I don’t want to.

Tough, she told herself. Turn the hell around.

Slowly, she turned—counter, cabinets, wall, Max, Owen… “Gail,” Dad said to the woman in the doorway, “this is Cassandra. Cassie, this is your mother.”

Green eyes. For a long moment, Cassie had no other coherent thought. She stared at her mother’s eyes and felt as if her brain were spinning like a coronal aurora. Cassie did have her mother’s eyes.

But the resemblance ended there, at the eyes. Gail was short compared to Cassie, maybe five-foot-five. She had black hair, not red. Instead of sharp cheekbones, she had soft baby-doll cheeks. Decked out in a red blouse and jeans, she looked nothing like Cassie, except the eyes.

“Mother,” Cassie said, testing it.

Her mother swallowed and fluttered her hands as if she weren’t sure what to do with them, as if she were surprised that she had hands. “You can call me Gail, if it makes you more comfortable,” she said, her voice quivering.

Her mother was a stranger named Gail. “Gail,” Cassie said. She had not pictured using her mother’s first name. Cassie attempted a smile. “Very punny. North Wind’s daughter. Gale.”

Her mother sparkled at her with a smile out of a Crest commercial. “It’s short for Abigail.” Inanely, Cassie wondered where her mother had found lipstick up here. It was as red as Red Delicious apples, and as inappropriate as cotton jeans in fifty-below. “Oh,” Cassie said, continuing to stare. Her mother seemed smaller than she’d been in her daydreams.

The smile faded, and Gail twisted her hands. “Could I… Would it be all right if I hugged you?”

“Maybe,” Cassie said. Was it? “Yes.”

Gail took a step toward her and awkwardly held out her arms. Cassie took a matching step forward. Her mother smelled like pine trees, like wild air. Her arms felt bony around Cassie’s back. Cassie placed her hands on her mother’s shoulder blades. She was hugging a stranger. This close, Cassie could feel the gulf of every year, of every minute.

Her mother said in a soft voice, “My baby. My little girl.”

And something inside Cassie broke. She felt it give, like a sagging spruce under the weight of a winter’s ice. All of a sudden, Cassie’s cheeks were wet. Water filled her eyes, and she couldn’t see. She buried her face in the sharp shoulder of her pine-scented mother. Her mother’s arms started to shake. “My baby, my baby.” Gail’s voice cracked. She was crying too.

Something had to happen next. Cassie had never thought beyond the first hello. But now the first moment was over and Cassie didn’t know what to say to this woman, this stranger, her mother.

Owen—Owen, of all people—came to her rescue. She hadn’t even realized that he and Max were still in the room. “How did… How did you escape?” Owen asked.

Gratefully, Cassie turned to him. “No escape. I asked to leave, and Bear brought me home.”

“Just like that?” Gail said, surprise in her voice.

Cassie thought of Bear outside the station. I love you, he’d said. “Just like that,” she lied.

“But munaqsri promises can’t be broken—,” her mother began.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dad cut her off. “She’s here now. She’s free.”

Yes, it did matter. Munaqsri promises. Her mother—Gail, she corrected—was right. Cassie had made vows, promises, to a munaqsri. He could have made her stay if he had wanted. But he had chosen to let her go, even though he loved her—or maybe, she had the sudden thought, because he loved her?

“We won’t ever let him take you again,” her father said.

“Oh, no, it’s not like that,” Cassie said quickly. “He’s not like that. We’re… friends,” she finished, for lack of a better word. Until the birth season had begun, he’d been her constant companion. They’d talked and laughed and spent every second together.

“Friends? With the monster who took you from your family? With the monster who kept you from us for months? Cassie, we thought you might be dead.”

Cassie flushed. She should have at least tried to send word. But she’d never even thought of it. It was her fault that they’d worried. “He’s not a monster,” she said. He’d said he loved her… Stop thinking about that. She was here with her mother, her mother, who was alive and here.

“What you did…,” Gail said. “It was very brave. Thank you.”

She didn’t know about “brave.” She’d liked it at the castle. She’d skated in the ballroom, designed new sculptures for the topiary garden, lost chess games. Her mother was waiting for her to speak. “I couldn’t leave you… there,” Cassie said. There, in a troll castle. It still sounded implausible. Gail fluttered her hands, obviously uncomfortable. She had a debutante’s fingers, long and slender, with pristine nails and smooth skin. For eighteen years with trolls, she did not seem the worse for wear. “What are trolls anyway?” Cassie asked—the question came out harsher than she’d intended.

“Cassie, your mother doesn’t like to talk about it,” Dad said.

Gail shook her head. “It’s all right, Laszlo,” she said. To Cassie, she said, “There truly were trolls, and I truly was trapped in their castle.”

Cassie glanced away, unable to keep looking at those familiar-yet-foreign green eyes. She hadn’t meant to snap like that, not at her. At Dad, maybe, who had left his wife trapped in an impossible castle, leaving it to Cassie to save her.

“Trolls are… difficult to explain. It is an inadequate name,” Gail said. “They have no shape, no physical bodies. Their queen is chosen from those who can hold a shape for the longest, but still…” Her voice faltered. “It’s an island of wild spirits.”

“How did Bear free you?” Cassie asked. Bear had never told her. She had never asked. She had, in fact, avoided every subject related to her mother, including trolls and the winds. Now she wished she had asked everything.

Gail shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “One night, I went to sleep, and when I woke, I was on the ice and the Polar Bear King was carrying me home.”

Silence fell over the kitchen. It was impossible not to hear Gram’s voice as Cassie looked at her mother, the North Wind’s daughter, free from the troll castle. And so, the Bear carried the North Wind’s daughter to her human husband…

On the stove, bubbles spilled over a saucepan, and the burner hissed. “Ack, beans!” Dad swooped down on the saucepan. With a look of relief flashing over her face, clearly eager for the distraction, Gail dove away from Cassie and slid a bowl under Dad’s elbow; he drained the beans into it. Gail took the saucepan, and he took the bowl—saucepan to the sink, bowl to the table. It looked like a dance, a well-rehearsed dance, one that didn’t include Cassie.

She thought of dancing with Bear in the ballroom and then firmly pushed the thought away. “Where’s Gram?” Cassie asked. “Is she back in Fairbanks?”

“I flew her back about a month after you left,” Max said. “She waited a month, in case you returned.”

Cassie had never meant to worry Gram, either. She owed a lot of apologies.

“Cassie,” Dad said, “the others don’t know about the… everything.”

She blinked. “How can they not know?” Max and Owen knew. Granted, they had known Cassie’s mother from before, and the others hadn’t, but still. Her mother had come back from the dead. Surely, they must have noticed.

“Story was that we only thought she was dead,” Max said with relish, “but really she was in a coma and no one knew who she was, and one day she woke up. As soon as she was released from the hospital, I flew her here to surprise your father.”

Cassie gawked. That was the stupidest story she’d ever heard. “They believed that? What soap opera did you plagiarize?”

Max shrugged and looked embarrassed.

“We decided it was best,” Dad said, “to attempt to preserve normalcy. For your mother’s sake.”

Before Cassie could respond, the two researchers Scott and Liam tumbled into the kitchen. Cassie realized with a shock that it had been such a long time since she’d even thought about them that she’d almost forgotten what they looked like.

Scott saw her first. He grinned. “Cassie?” He thumped her on the back. “Good to see you. How’ve you been? What’s for dinner?” Scooping beans into a bowl, he straddled a chair.

Liam shook her hand. “Missed a great season,” he said. “How’s Fairbanks?”

She shot her father a look. If he’d claimed Gail had been in a coma, what had he said had happened to Cassie? “It’s good,” Cassie said. Dad nodded approvingly.

Jeremy stomped into the room. “Liquid nitrogen would freeze at this temperature.” After shucking his gloves, he went for the beans. Mouth full, he nodded casually at Cassie, as if she hadn’t been gone the whole migration season. “I know, I know, I’m still here,” he said.

“He owes me three more months,” Dad said as he handed Cassie a bowl of beans.

With beans squashed on his teeth, Jeremy said, “And then I’m outta this icebox. Beautiful, balmy L.A. Changing my concentration to Amazon jungles.”

Gail teased, “You’ll complain of sunburn in L.A., and you’ll melt in the Amazon.” She smiled at Jeremy with her full-teeth smile. Cassie felt her heart suddenly squeeze. Her mother was strangers with her daughter and friends with that newbie, that cheechako, who wasn’t even family and couldn’t track a polar bear in a zoo? Cassie stirred her beans, not hungry.

Jeremy wagged his spoon. “Mark my words: Hell is frozen. I should never have chosen Arctic research. But I’m man enough to change.”

Cassie searched for something innocuous to say. “So… how are the bears?”

Scott’s face lit up. “Earmarked a hundred twenty-six. That’s thirty-two more than they got at NPI.” National Polar Institute was one hundred fifty miles west, near Prudhoe Bay, and it was the closest thing to a football rival the Eastern Beaufort station could have. “Not that we’re counting,” added Max as he sat on his stool and helped himself to rice and beans.

“Course not,” Cassie said. “You visiting, or back on staff?”

Grinning even more broadly, Max said, “We got the grant. Two years’ worth.”

“It’s joint with NPI and the Chukchi Sea guys,” Liam said. “But Max is back on staff, and Owen got his equipment—brand-new computers. Very snazzy.”

Max was back! And they’d gotten the grant! And she’d missed it. “That’s wonderful!” she said, as enthusiastically as she could. Really, it was wonderful news. She’d wished for Max to come back for years. Cassie grinned at her former babysitter. “What’s the grant for?”

“Denning behavior,” Dad answered. “All five polar bear nations are participating, but we are the ones who will be combining the data.”

“Laszlo had us out poking sticks into dens till we got Max back on staff. Scouting the ice with headlamps. Your kind of stuff, kiddo,” Scott said. “Sorry you missed it.” So was she.

Jeremy gave a visible shudder. “Insanely suicidal.”

“You didn’t get eaten,” Dad said.

“Pure luck,” Jeremy said. “Glad that’s over with.”

She’d missed all of it. Well, she was back now, and she wasn’t missing anything else. Out of the corner of her eye, Cassie watched Gail perch on a stool and smooth her napkin across her lap. I’m home now, Cassie thought, and I’m staying.

Cassie shot upright in her bed. What the hell was that? “Bear?” she said. A woman was screaming. It took Cassie several seconds to remember where she was, and several more seconds to remember what other woman was in the station.

Her mother was screaming.

Cassie chucked off her comforter and ran out her bedroom door. She made it to outside her dad’s room as the screams subsided to sobs. “It’s all right,” her father was saying. “You’re here. You’re free. It’s over. It’s all right. They won’t take you again.”

“You don’t know that.” Her mother’s voice, broken.

Cassie pushed through the door. “Mom? Gail?” She halted in the doorway. Her mother was curled against Dad and was weeping on his shoulder.

Dad raised his head, and the expression was so raw that Cassie had to look away. “Nightmare,” he said to Cassie. “She’ll be all right. You go back to bed.”

Cassie took a step toward the door. She wanted to retreat. She didn’t know what to do with her mother weeping like that and her father looking so… so… stricken, so helpless. Every crease in his face was a deep shadow. His eyes looked like smudged holes. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“Go ahead,” he said. He pressed his face against her mother’s hair, and she could tell that to him she was already gone. Cassie backed out the door and closed it behind her. She hesitated in the hallway. She could hear her father’s voice clearly through the door.

“Same dream?” he said.

Cassie couldn’t hear the reply.

“Blame me,” he said. “I failed you. I should have saved you. Blame me. Hate me. But don’t be afraid. You don’t have to be afraid. It’s over. It’s all over. You’re home.”

CHAPTER 11

Latitude 70° 49’ 23” N

Longitude 152° 29’ 25” W

Altitude 10 ft.

Cassie threw herself into data processing. For five days, she transferred several thousand latitude and longitude measurements into minuscule triangles on a topographical map, one triangle per den. She finished late on day five, and then stepped back to survey her work. She wrinkled her nose. Anyone could have done this—a kid, a monkey, Jeremy.

“Good,” Dad said behind her. “How many do we have?”

Cassie counted. “Forty-one on eastern Ellesmere, maximum distance twelve and a half miles from shore, twenty-eight within five miles.” Bear could be there now, distributing souls. “Baffin Island, twenty-three near Cape Adair.”

Her father took notes. “Foxe Basin?”

“Bear must have visited a number of these by now,” she said. It was the height of birth season. Had any of the cubs been stillborn? Some must have been. If he were in Karaskoye More and he felt a call in the Chukchi Sea, he might not make it even at superspeeds. She thought of Bear alone in his castle, mourning the cubs he’d failed to save.

Dad’s pencil paused. “Cassie, you don’t need to think about him anymore. You’re safe here.”

Not again. She forced herself to smile and say in an even voice, “He’s not dangerous. He’s sweet.” And fun and funny.

“It’s a common psychological reaction for people to identify with their kidnappers,” he said. “But you’re home now. We won’t let him take you again.”

Dad was so stubborn. “You know what Bear did one time? I woke up with a sore throat, and he brought me breakfast in bed.” More like a feast, really. Pancakes, waffles, cereals. She’d never had anyone bring her breakfast in bed. “And then the rest of the morning, he told me stories so I wouldn’t have to talk and I wouldn’t be bored.” He’d even acted some of them out. Even with her sore throat, she had laughed a lot. “Does that sound so terrible?” She hadn’t laughed like that since she’d returned to the station.

“You don’t need to tell me,” he said. “Whatever happened, you’re safe now. You’re with people who love you.”

Bear loves me, she thought. “He’s not a monster,” she said.

Gail poked her face into the room. “It’s after midnight. Would you two workaholics come to bed?” She smiled with all her teeth.

“Do you want to call it a night?” Dad asked kindly, as if talking to a child.

Cassie sighed. One more argument wasn’t going to convince him. “All right.” She deposited her papers onto her desk, and she trotted after Dad and Gail.

At the door to her bedroom, Dad paused. “Good work today, Cassie.”

She wasn’t sure of that. Bear did more to help the polar bears in one jaunt across the ice than she could do in one year of drawing triangles on maps.

“Night,” Gail said. She didn’t try to hug or kiss Cassie. After the first few awkward nights, they had let that drop in a tacit acknowledgment of the gulf between them.

Managing a halfhearted wave, Cassie backed into her bedroom and closed the door behind her. She heard her parents’ voices receding, and then their door shut too.

Cassie flopped down onto the bed. Yellow fluorescent light reflected on the photographs that her younger self had taped to the cement walls. She rolled onto her stomach to look at the shrunken images of snowdrifts and mountaintops. She leaned over and smoothed the crumpled corner of one photograph. She had scrawled: “Lomonosov Ridge 89° N.” She remembered it: the fierce jumble of ice blocks, the expanse of sky, the burning cold. “Oh, Bear, what are you doing now?”

She threw a rolled sock at the light switch, and it bounced off. Third sock, she got it. In the darkness, she missed Bear more. She knew she shouldn’t. She was home now. She had her life back, plus her mother. So why wasn’t she happy?

Tossing beneath her comforter, Cassie thought about her life in the castle, how she’d never gotten tired of the afternoons they’d spent in the garden, of the evenings they’d spent playing chess (even when he’d won three out of four games because she’d never had a backup plan), or of the late nights when they’d drunk hot chocolate in the dark and he’d made up stories just for her. She remembered how he had laughed the first time she’d slid down the banister, and how he had cried when that first cub had been stillborn. How many more stillborns had he had to face alone? If only she could find a way to be with him and help the polar bears.

Cassie sat up in bed—she was on the verge of an idea. She could feel it. Bear missed births because he did not know where and when they would be. But she had access to the precise denning dates for hundreds of expectant bears.

Cassie threw off her comforter and hurried to Owen’s workroom. She clambered over boxes and engine bits to the new computer. After yanking the protective cover off, she hit the power button. She paced as it booted. Births were not random. She could predict them—or at least their likelihood. Cassie perched on the desk chair and clicked to the denning file.

“Let me do that,” a voice said.

Cassie jumped. Owen was two feet from her elbow. How on earth had he heard her from back in the sleeping quarters? “Do you have a baby monitor on this thing?”

“You’re not exactly light-footed.”

She relinquished the desk chair. “Be my guest.” He sat, and she leaned over his shoulder. “I want an extra column on the denning sites spreadsheet.” He inserted the column. “Mmm. Okay. Now put in a formula to add two months to each of the denning times to account for the final stage of the gestation period.” He did. “Can you print a page?” she asked.

“It’s going.”

The printer whirred, and Cassie hovered over it. “Slow.”

“Ink-jet. Leave it be.”

“You think I’m going to break every piece of equipment, don’t you?”

Owen shrugged.

“I am not a klutz,” she said.

“Excitable,” he said.

She yanked the page out before it finished, blurring the ink. Pacing, she scanned it. “Label that column ‘Predicted Birth’ and sort the data by date and location. Date first. Please.”

He made the adjustments and printed. After grabbing the pages, Cassie perched on a stool. She chewed on her lower lip as she read. Could this work?

Owen cleared his throat. “The grant said nothing about predicting births,” he said. “Up to your father, but I doubt we can change the basic premise now.”

“Uh-huh.” She barely heard him. Dates overlapped for disparate locations, but it was not impossible. If he had a route that took him from Hudson Bay… It would be a challenging project to determine the route and to update it, adjusting probabilities, on the fly. It would need someone with training and skills…

Owen waited for a response. Cassie smiled at him. “Can you print a few more files for me?”

Cassie rolled her sleeping bag and stormproof bivy sack into the bottom compartment of her backpack. She was packing full expedition gear this time, in preparation for trips out on the ice. She added freeze-dried food packets, oatmeal flakes, nuts, dried fruit. If her plan worked, she’d be out on the pack ice every day—just like she’d always wanted.

As she packed, Dad hovered beside her. Flushed, his face looked like angry lava. He leveled a finger at her. “You’re not going. And that’s final.”

Cassie examined her MSR stove and tested the fuel pump. She wasn’t going to fight with him.

“I won’t let you ruin your life.”

“It’s my choice to make.” She kept her voice calm. She didn’t know when she’d see Dad again. She didn’t want to leave angry.

He gripped her arm. “Cassie, I only want what’s best for you.”

Cassie yanked out of his grip. Turning her back on him, she packed quickly with practiced skill—heavy items braced by clothing. “I know I’m not making the choices you would, but—”

Red nail polish flashing, Gail wrung her hands. “Cassandra, you don’t have to go. You fulfilled my promise. He has no hold over you.”

She shook her head. She wasn’t going back because of promises or because of Gram’s story or to save her mother. “I want to return to him,” she said.

Owen wordlessly handed Cassie a stack of printed data. She thanked him and packed it. Scanning her desk, she found an ice screw. She added it to a side pocket.

“Cassie.” Dad dropped his voice low. “He’s not even human. You told me yourself you don’t know what he looks like when he isn’t a bear. You don’t know what he is.”

She was not going to fight with him.

Without a word, she marched through the lab to the bathroom. She slammed the door behind her and shoveled her toothbrush, deodorant, and shampoo into the bag. “I know perfectly well what he is,” she said through the door. “He’s Bear, and he’s my husband.” She rooted through the cabinets until she found one more item: birth control pills, left by an intern who’d worked at the station prior to Jeremy. She packed the pills and zipped the bag.

Flinging open the door, she added in a low voice, “And isn’t all this a little hypocritical coming from the man who married the North Wind’s daughter?” His jaw fell open, and she brushed past him. “Owen,” she called, “do you have the rest of those maps?”

“Just a minute here, young lady…” Dad strode after her.

Max emerged from his bedroom. “What’s going on? Cassie-lassie?” He followed Cassie and Dad back to where Gail waited. “What’s she doing?” Max asked.

“Ruining her future,” Dad said.

“Following my future,” Cassie corrected. Owen handed her another stack of maps, and then, with a quick glance at Cassie’s father, retreated across the room.

“You have a future here,” Dad said. “You have family and friends here. You’re giving up everything to be with this ‘husband.’ You’re giving up college. You’re giving up your goals. What about your plans to be a professional tracker? You always said that’s what you wanted.”

Cassie put on her hat and zipped her parka. Sweat heated in her armpits. “I shouldn’t have expected you to understand. After all, you left your wife in a troll castle.”

“Dammit, Cassie, I did that for you! You’d been born. I had to keep you safe! I couldn’t go traipsing off to the ends of the earth. I had to be a father to you!” He thumped a desk with his fist for emphasis. Papers scattered, and Owen jumped. “Do you think it was an easy choice?”

It hadn’t been a choice; it had been cowardice. Why else had he lied to her all these years, leaving it to Gram to finally tell her? Shame was a powerful motivator. She knew he wished he had rescued Gail. She’d heard the regret in his voice that first night when she’d eavesdropped on her parents. She slung her pack over her shoulder.

“I forbid it.” Dad blocked the exit. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Cassie turned to her mother. “You talk to him.”

“But I don’t…,” Gail began.

“History is repeating itself,” Cassie said. “Your father didn’t want you to leave either.”

Startled, Gail looked at her husband.

“It’s not the same thing at all,” Dad protested. But Cassie could see her mother understood. It was the same. Cassie watched her mother’s face as her father blustered. Every night, her mother woke screaming, afraid she would be imprisoned again. Would she let her daughter be kept somewhere against her will? Cassie didn’t know her well enough to be certain, but she was betting not.

Gail touched his arm with her red fingernails. “Laszlo, let her go.”

Aghast, he turned to her. “Do you know what you’re saying? You want to send our only child, our baby girl, back to the mercy of a bear?”

Gail lifted her chin and did not back down. Max, wide-eyed, looked back and forth among the three of them like he was watching a convoluted Ping-Pong game. Owen ducked behind the doorway of his workshop. Dad broke first. Lowering his eyes, he said, “Cassie, please, don’t do this. It isn’t safe. It isn’t smart. You’re rushing in again. Wait for a while and then decide. Don’t leave so soon.”

Gail reached toward Cassie and then let her hand fall. “Cassandra… Cassie… I was just getting to know you.” Cassie looked at her mother. What could she say? That no matter how much time she spent here, it wouldn’t be enough to bridge the lost years? Cassie couldn’t say that. Better just to leave.

“Stay with us,” Dad said. “We’re your family. This is your home. Please, think about this. Think of what you’re giving up.” Max’s eyes were overbright, and Gail had tears in hers.

Looking at them, Cassie started to blink fast. Her eyes felt hot. “Tell Gram I’m sorry I didn’t get to see her.”

She went outside quickly—before she could change her mind, or have it changed for her. Silence slammed down on her as she closed the outer door. She inhaled deeply, and cold bit her throat. Feeling her way along the perimeter of the station, Cassie raised the U.S. flag in the blinding white darkness of an Arctic blizzard.

CHAPTER 12

Latitude 79° 48’ 44” N

Longitude 153° 37’ 58” W

Altitude 6 ft.

As Bear carried her north, Cassie laid her cheek against the soft fur of his neck. She breathed in his scent—sea salt and damp fur. Above, the northern lights played between the stars as Bear ran across the endless ice. She thought of the last time Bear had carried her away from the station. Same ride, but now she knew what waited at the end of it.

Or at least she hoped she did. What if Bear rejected her plan?

After many hours, they reached the castle. Cassie saw the spires, luminous in the light of the moon. Bear slowed to a walk, his paws crunching on granules of ice.

“We’re home,” Cassie said softly.

Bear paused, and she knew he’d heard her. She wrapped her arms around his broad neck, and then she dismounted and walked through the shimmering castle gate with her hand resting on her Bear’s back.

She led him to the banquet hall and removed her pack. She unzipped it and began to pull out maps, binders, and notebooks and pile them on the banquet table. Frost curled around a map as she unrolled it. “Can you tell the table not to eat this?”

Bear focused on the table, and the frost retreated. “What is all this?” he asked.

Cassie took a deep breath. Time to see if she truly had a future here. For all her fine words to Dad, Bear could squash everything without even knowing he was doing it. If he was unwilling… I’ll have to convince him, she thought. She pointed to a section of the map. “Here’s the coast. And here are this season’s dens. One bear per triangle.” Cassie flipped open a three-ring binder. “This is a record of the denning dates with the predicted dates of birth, which I can use to plot routes for you that will bring you closest to the most likely births at any given time for the rest of the birth season. Predictive modeling. We can use it to change the odds.”

Bear furrowed his broad forehead.

She plunged on. “Eventually, with enough data points, I should be able to be precise… within an order of magnitude, of course.” Thanks to Owen, she had printouts of all the files from all the cooperating research stations. It wasn’t a complete record of the full bear population by any means, but it was a start. “Look,” she said, “I’ve already plotted a preliminary course. We can test it out tomorrow.”

She watched him, waiting for his reaction and trying to read his glass black eyes.

“You wish to come with me out onto the ice? Out to the births?”

“I have to,” she said firmly. “For this to work, we need to record more data, and you can’t do both jobs. Besides, you won’t know what data we need.” She tried a grin. “And you won’t have opposable thumbs.”

His laugh was a familiar and welcome soft rumble that washed over her, and then he was serious again. “All munaqsri travel alone. We must avoid detection—”

“All munaqsri miss delivering souls,” she interrupted. “You’ve told me that yourself. I can help. Maybe we won’t make all the births, but we can improve the odds.”

He nodded slowly.

Cassie felt her shoulders unknot. He wanted to save the cubs badly enough. He’d agree. Together, they could save bears.

“You are certain you wish to do this?” he said. “It is not without risk. Once outside these walls, if I am not touching you, I cannot magic you. If we are separated…”

“I’ll have my gear,” she said, patting her pack. “If necessary, I can survive an entire week on the ice with this equipment.” All her training, her skill, her education, had led to this. She’d be directly helping the polar bears instead of writing papers and securing grants. If he agreed.

Swinging his massive head over the documents, he studied the maps, the files, the lists of numbers. “If this helps… all polar bears will thank you. I thank you.” He leaned his head against her stomach, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. In a lighter voice, he added, “It is, though, quite unnatural.”

“So says the talking bear,” she said.

His fur shook as he laughed again. “I had no one to mock me for days.”

“Vacation’s over,” she said. “Cassie’s home.”

Softly, he said, “You have no idea how happy that makes me.”

She felt her cheeks warm. She felt as if she could float to the ceiling. “Romantic,” she said.

He covered his muzzle with his paw, miming embarrassment.

Cassie opened another binder. She wanted to show him everything. “Look, here are all the current tagging numbers from the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the IUCN.”

“Come,” he said, nudging her with his nose. “We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”

Cassie grinned. Out on the ice, together. Leaving the IUCN binder, she walked alongside him, past the carvings in deep blue ice and up the staircase lit by candlelight. “You know I had a number all picked out for you: A505, Alaskan ID.”

“A505,” he repeated.

“I think you’d look nice with a tag. Just like an earring.” She tugged on his furry ear. She couldn’t get enough of touching him. It reminded her that he was real. “Not to mention the green ink on your gums. Very attractive.”

As always, he waited in the hall while she prepared for bed. Once she slid under the covers, she blew out the candle. Everything descended into darkness, and she heard the pad of bear paws and then the footsteps of a man. The mattress sank as he climbed into bed beside her.

For the first time in five nights, she slept well.

Cassie woke first. Her cheek lay against his bare chest, smooth and human. Her arm was draped across his stomach. She lay there for a long moment, feeling him breathe. Her husband. She reached up in the darkness and lightly touched his face. Her fingers traced his chin and lingered over his lips. She’d never kissed him. She wondered what it would be like.

She felt him stir, and she pulled her hand away quickly. She rolled to her side of the bed. “Ready to patrol?” she asked him.

She felt the sheets shift and the mattress rise as he stood.

“We’re going together, right?” she asked.

Cassie felt a wisp of wind in her face. When he spoke, it was with his deeper, polar bear voice. “Of course, O Intrepid Leader.”

She grinned.

Cassie heard the door open. She waited until she heard it click closed before finding her flashlight and turning it on. She dressed quickly in full expedition gear—Gore-Tex pants, mukluks, all of it—and then she met Bear at the front archway to the castle. Soon, she was riding him across the ice.

The Arctic spread before them, blue-shadowed and as broad as the Sahara. Cassie leaned over Bear’s neck as the wind slapped her face. This was wonderful. This was magnificent. This was… far too slow. She shouted a dog sledding call into his ear: “Mush, mush, mush!”

“Very amusing,” he said, but he sped into a blur. She whooped as the deep night-winter blue stretched into a single sheet of ice and sky. Yes! She was flying! The midday moon hung low and fat on the southern horizon. She waved to it.

Bear leaped over a pressure ridge. Laughing, Cassie grabbed his fur and clamped her thighs around his middle to keep from falling off. She loved this! They should have done this months ago.

She squinted into the dark whiteness. She saw the aurora borealis curling around the fringes of her vision, green and white flashes. According to Inuit legend, the northern lights were the dancing spirits of the dead. Cassie wondered if that was where the unclaimed souls went, the ones munaqsri missed, the ones that should have gone to newborns. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. The aurora was caused by electrically charged particles from the sun hitting the upper atmosphere, not floating souls. The souls went… She had no idea where missed souls went. She supposed they could go to the aurora. Bear had said once that they were lost. Maybe eventually, she’d have enough data to map paths for deaths as well as births. Wouldn’t that be something? But she shouldn’t get ahead of herself. First she had to see whether her plan would work at all.

The first route Cassie had planned took them down into Lancaster Sound to Hudson Bay and then east to Davis Strait. At the opening to the sound, Bear shouted that he felt a call. Cassie hung on as Bear leaped and crashed through pressure ridges and over creaking ice pans.

Bear braked without warning, and Cassie flew into his neck. “Hold on,” he told her. “We’ll take it slow this first time.” Gripping his neck fur, Cassie opened her mouth to ask what he meant.

He walked into a snowbank.

Snow melted like a mirage around them. Cassie shuddered as it slid through her. A few seconds later, she felt warm wet air on her face. Half her body was within the bear’s den; the rest was immured in the hard-packed snow. She listened to the sow pant in the darkness. She’d never been so close to a birthing polar bear in the wild. She didn’t think anyone ever had. This was amazing, she thought. This was impossible.

This was the power of a munaqsri. This was why he had power: to reach the bears as they were born or died. All the magic existed to make this moment possible.

“It is time. It is coming,” Bear whispered.

“Can’t see,” she whispered back. Suddenly, she could. She saw white: fur and ice. Bear, she guessed, had altered her eyes. He’d changed her body, in the same way he did when he kept her warm on the ice.

Bear inched forward and laid his face next to the sow’s stomach. Cassie wiggled closer too. “Do you have the soul?” she whispered.

“Watch,” he said. Bear opened his mouth, and a shadow fell like a drop of water. It sank into vast mounds of fur. Cassie didn’t breathe. A tiny wet shape, the cub, slid out of its mother and squirmed. In a soft voice, Bear said, “And that is how we make babies.”

“It’s… a miracle.” She had no other word for it. Bear created miracles.

The cub mewled. Blind, it wormed through its mother’s fur, and the sow licked it with a tongue that covered it in one swipe.

Silently, Bear retreated. They slid through the solid snow. Cassie felt as if she were being smothered, and she fought to stay calm. Bear would never hurt me, she told herself. She gasped in air as they emerged. Her muscles shook. “Are you all right?” Bear asked.

“Love the night vision,” she said. “Hate the walking through walls.” She took a deep breath to calm her racing heart.

Hands shaking, she took out her GPS: latitude 63° 46’ 05” N, longitude 80° 09’ 32” W. She marked it in a notebook, then tucked pencil, notebook, and GPS back into her inner layers. “We should head toward Churchill next. There are a couple mothers overdue west of Hudson Bay.”

“As you wish, O Glorious Leader.”

She snorted. “Cute.”

That night, Cassie lay beside Bear. “You awake?”

“Don’t kick me,” he said into his pillow.

She smiled and reached over in the darkness to touch his human shoulder. “It’s going to work,” she said. “That cub’s birth proved it.” She had a place here, not just as Bear’s wife. She had a future.

“Yes,” he said. She felt him shift. He was facing her now, she guessed.

“We’re a team now,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

She reached out again, and her fingers touched his smooth cheek. She wondered briefly what he’d look like in the light. Not that it mattered. He was her Bear. Cassie shifted closer.

He stilled, like a polar bear by a hole in the ice, but she was hyperaware of how human he was right now. She felt him waiting. He said nothing. Cassie tilted her head up, and in the darkness, she kissed him. Not moving his body, as if afraid she’d flee, he kissed her back, soft and sweet.

CHAPTER 13

Latitude 83° 35’ 43” N

Longitude 123° 29’ 10” E

Altitude 4 ft.

As light returned to the southern Arctic, Cassie and Bear spent more and more time out on the ice. Every day under the blue-purple-pink sky, they patrolled the snowbanks of Alaska, Canada, Siberia, Greenland, and Norway. Every evening under the eyes of Bear’s ice carvings, Cassie refined her maps and plotted their route for the next day. And every night in the dark, she kissed her husband until she fell asleep, curled in his arms. She’d never been happier.

One afternoon, when they were north of the Laptev Sea, Bear said, “I feel a call.”

Fumbling for her notes, Cassie opened her mouth to ask which direction.

“Hold tight,” he said. “There’s little time.”

Flattening herself, she held on to his broad neck as he sprang into superspeed. Ahead, she saw blue blackness—ocean water. He lunged forward into the black waves. Under the waves, water soaked into her parka. It seeped through her face mask and around her hood. But instead of cold, the water was as soft as air. She grinned. She loved Bear’s magic.

On Bear’s back, she burst out of the water. He paddled toward shore. Head and shoulders in air, Cassie clung to his wet fur. On the other side, he scrambled onto the ice and ran.

She heard the thrum of a helicopter.

Up ahead, in the distance, on ice stirred by the wind from a helicopter, a lone bear ran toward a ridge of ice. The bear’s flank was streaked in red.

“Hold on!” Bear called. “We can’t be seen!”

She wrapped her arms tightly around his neck, and Bear impossibly increased speed. Around them, the world streaked into a blur of white and blue.

It slowed for only a fraction of a second. She saw a flash of red on creamy white as Bear sank his teeth into the throat of the wounded bear. Bear yanked, and Cassie saw a streak of silver—and then Bear was running again.

Behind them, the bear crumpled, and the helicopter landed, kicking snow into the air. She saw it all in a fraction of an instant before they rocketed away.

“Bear, the poacher!” Cassie yelled. “Stop him!”

Bear vanished in between ice blocks. He didn’t slow until they were miles north. When he did stop, he swallowed the streak of silver—the dead bear’s soul—whole.

Cassie shouted, “That bear didn’t have to die! We could have scared the poacher off, and you could have healed him, magicked his cells.” It was a waste. That beautiful polar bear… How could Bear have done that? Let that bear, one of his bears, die!

“Yes,” he said.

She choked down words she’d been going to say. Yes, he could have saved the bear. “You’re the Angel of Death for polar bears.”

“It is necessary. If I do not claim the soul, a munaqsri from another species will. If no munaqsri does, the soul will be lost. Without souls to give the newborns, the species will become extinct.”

He had prevented her from having hypothermia; he could have healed that bear. He could heal all the bears, all the time. But then where would the souls for the newborns come from? Those bears would be stillborn. She shook her head. All the implications…

“You knew my responsibilities.”

But it was the first time she had witnessed this part of it.

“Cassie?” he said, concern in his voice. “Does this change things?”

He had such enormous power. Did that change things? She took a breath. It was his job. He existed to transport these souls, not to choose who lived and who died. That’s what she had bought into—the continuation of the species, not the saving of individuals. Really, was it so much different from what a researcher did, studying without interfering?

Leaning forward, she laid her cheek on his neck. “It doesn’t change things,” she said. “You’re my tuvaaqan, my soul mate.” She’d never had a chance to use that Inupiaq word before. She tasted it on her tongue as she said it. “We’re a team. Right?”

He nuzzled her hand with his cold nose. “We are a team, tuvaaqan,” he affirmed. “I love that I can share this with you. I have never shared this with anyone. Thank you.”

She threw her arms around his wide, furry neck. “You know, there’s something else we’ve never shared, husband,” she said very softly, and her heart beat faster. “We never had a proper wedding night.”

In the dark bedroom, Cassie unzipped her parka and pulled off her gaiters and mukluks. She heard Bear slough his bear fur in the familiar rush of wind. He was a man now, she knew. She grinned in the darkness. She had expected to be nervous, but she wasn’t. This was Bear.

She slid off her Gore-Tex pants and pulled off three layers of socks.

She stripped off her wool sweater.

She removed her flannel shirt.

“How many layers do you wear?” Bear asked in his human voice.

“Some of us don’t have blubber,” she said, and took off her wool pants, her long johns, and her silkweights.

“Do you want to call me when you are done?”

“Cute,” she said. She located him by listening to his breathing. She managed not to stub her toes on the wardrobe or the washbasin. Standing in front of him, she reached her fingers up to touch the bones of his cheek. She laid her hand on the side of his face and felt his eyelashes brush her skin. He blinked, and it felt like the brush of butterfly wings. Now she felt a twinge of nerves. For the first time, she was grateful for Bear’s insistence on darkness. She could be bold in the dark. She could be beautiful in the dark.

“Are you certain this is what you want?” Bear asked.

It was so like Bear to ask. She felt her nervousness dissolve like sugar in water, and she smiled at him in the darkness. “Yes,” she said simply.

She slid her arms around him. Her cheek against his chest, she felt his heart beat. It was as steady and as gentle as waves in the ocean. She felt the curve of his shoulder blades as his arms surrounded her. His hands covered half her back, cradling her. She burrowed against his bare chest. Leaning down, he kissed her neck.

Her skin tingled as he kissed her, and all thoughts ran out of her head. She felt the chill of the ice room, the warmth of his breath, and the touch of his hands. It was all that existed in the world.

Around them, the ice was silent.

CHAPTER 14

Latitude 91° 00’ 00” N

Longitude indeterminate

Altitude 15 ft.

Cassie clutched the exquisitely carved ice toilet. Dammit, not again. For more than three months now, she’d endured random waves of nausea. Every time she thought she was well again, it reared its ugly… Uh-oh. She gritted her teeth as her stomach rose into her throat, tasting like rotten peanuts. Sweat pricked her forehead.

Bear padded into the bathroom. “Cassie, are you all right?”

She spat into the toilet. Her throat burned. “Ow.”

Cassie leaned her head against the rim of the crystalline bowl. It was smooth and cool. “I’m never eating again,” she said. Clearly, she’d had too many magical feasts. She had a potbelly now that pressed against the elastic waist of her pants.

Bear touched her damp hair with his nose. “Breathe deeply. Fighting it will only make it worse.” She felt his hot breath on her scalp. It made her itch.

“Stop hovering.” Like shooing a fly, she swatted the air in front of him.

“It will pass soon.”

“It better.” Oh, too much motion—her insides flopped, and she felt for the toilet. Her stomach squeezed as if it were ejecting a lung. Empty, she collapsed backward. “Can’t you magic me? Transform my sick molecules?”

“I do not wish to interfere,” he said. “Your body is reacting naturally.”

“Reacting normally for botulism.”

Bear blinked his glassy black eyes at her. “You are joking. You must know the cause of this—your daily nausea, your changing shape.”

Cassie clung to the ice rim of the toilet. When he put it that way… But no, she’d been careful. She’d been smart. “I can’t be. It’s not possible.”

“Because of the chemical imbalance?” Lying down, he curled around her like a giant cat and laid his head on her lap, as if to reassure her. “I know. I fixed it. All is well now.”

“You fixed it?” Cassie felt dizzy. She was… no. She tried to remember her last period and couldn’t.

“It was simple. All I needed to do was adjust the hormone levels,” he said, clear pride in his voice. “It was no harder than keeping your body warm or protecting you in the Arctic water.”

Cassie threw herself forward and vomited with all her strength, as if she could expel the fetus inside her. Bile scratched her throat, and she sank backward again, diaphragm sore from pushing. She dug her fingernails into her curved stomach. She sucked in, but it would not flatten. It was as firm as a muscle.

He’d retreated from her as she’d vomited, and he now stood beside her, casting a massive shadow over her. “Are you… You are not happy?”

“How could you do this to me?” He had deliberately altered her molecules to impregnate her without asking her, without telling her. “That ‘chemical imbalance’ was deliberate. I’m on the pill.”

“Deliberate? You caused…? But how…,” he said. He swung his head low, an agitated polar bear. “You were willing. I asked if you were certain. You said you were. I thought you understood.” She felt like she was drowning. His words drowned her. “You knew from the beginning: I must have children. This was the reason I sought a wife. There must be more munaqsri. This child—a future munaqsri—is desperately needed.”

“I thought you…” She felt as if her insides were shaking so hard that they’d fly apart. “I thought you loved me. For me. Not for…”

“I do love you,” he said. “You are my tuvaaqan, my wife, the mother of my—”

“You used me,” she said. “You didn’t even ask me. You just… ‘fixed’ me.” She had trusted him. She had believed they were a team.

He padded closer to her. “We are going to have a baby,” he said. “We are going to bring life into the world. Do you not see how wonderful it is?”

“Just… leave me alone.” Cassie pushed his chest, hands sinking into fur, and he backed out of the bathroom. She shut the door in his face and locked it. Back against the door, she slid to the floor. Her nausea threatened like a tidal wave. She wanted to rip her internal organs out of her. Heart included.

Through the door, he said, “I love you.”

She retched on the floor and then cried.

He had to reverse what he had done. It was that simple. He could manipulate her molecules; he could fix this. Ice crunched under Cassie’s mukluks as she walked through the topiary garden. If he could fix a “chemical imbalance” and keep her warm in the Arctic, he could put everything back the way it had been.

She found him between the rosebushes. Facing the permanent sun, he did not turn as she came up behind him. She swallowed a lump in her throat. He could do it, yes. But would he? She didn’t know. She felt as if he had turned into a stranger, hidden behind black eyes and cream fur. Looking down, she studied the roses. Amber and violet in the low sun, each petal and leaf twinkled with Bear’s reflection.

“You shot at me,” he said. “Do you remember? You shot at me with your tranquilizer gun, and I still married you. Did you ever wonder why?”

She hadn’t, until now.

“Because you shot at me. Because you chased me, before you knew what I was, before I dared reveal myself to you. You were so stubborn, so single-minded, so strong. Without a second’s thought, you risked your life chasing me, all for your work, for your father, for his station, and for the polar bears,” Bear said. She stared at him, but he wasn’t finished. “And afterward? You were so courageous that you would marry a beast to save a woman you had never met. So great-hearted that you could care about a ‘freak of nature.’ So intelligent that you could be my partner, my teammate, my tuvaaqan. These are the reasons I love you. It is not because of your ovaries or chromosomes; it is because I know, out of all the world, that you are my match.”

Cassie lifted her hand toward him. She wanted to bury her fingers in his fur and press her face against his neck. But she stopped an inch short of touching him. She desperately wanted to believe him. She’d thought he was her match too. She’d thought he was her tuvaaqan. Maybe he still was. It could all be a misunderstanding. “If it’s me you love, then take this creature out of me,” she said.

He shook his heavy head. “You do not know what you are asking,” he said. “It is not a ‘creature.’”

Who knew what kind of thing was growing inside her? It wasn’t human; it was half-munaqsri. Thanks to Bear’s “quirks,” she didn’t know what that meant. She hugged her arms across her chest. “How can I believe you? You won’t even let me see you.” For the first time in months, she wondered what the darkness hid from her.

“It is a child, and the world needs it.” He turned to face her. “Once you understand how important this child is, you will be as happy as I am. You have to trust me. All will be well. Give it time. You will see.”

Cassie tried to read his inscrutable bear eyes, but all she saw was her own reflection, distorted to a reverse hourglass. “How pregnant am I?”

“You are due in the fall, after the equinox.”

He’d known for at least three months. Months! He must have “Fixed” her during the polar bear birth season, maybe even the first time they’d slept together. She felt sick and dizzy all over again. He’d lied to her. He’d used her.

“You will be a mother,” he said. “We will have our own miracle.”

She didn’t know how to be a mother. “I am too young to have a baby,” she said.

“And I suppose I am too old?” He looked out across the ice fields. In a soft sad voice, he said, “I had believed this would make you as happy as it has made me. Perhaps I deluded myself. I had hoped… once it was real, inside you, you would be happy.”

She had been happy. She’d been happy with everything exactly as it was, or as she’d thought it was. “You were wrong.”

“I did not intentionally hurt you. You know I would never do that. I am not some monster, Cassie. You know me.”

Wind rustled the ice leaves. Cassie shivered, and the sun continued to circle the horizon.

You know me. Clutching the sheets to her chin, Cassie listened to him breathe. She felt a tight ache inside her chest. Did she know him? She’d thought she did. But now… Had he truly used her, or was it all a misunderstanding, as he’d said? Was he the man she thought he was? Was he a man at all?

Loud, her heart beat staccato as she knelt on the mattress. She cupped her hand over the flashlight. She had a right to know who he truly was and what was inside her, didn’t she?

She switched on the light. Her hand, covering the beam, glowed pink. Bear was now a shape in the semidarkness. She saw his chest rise and fall. Gathering her courage, she pointed the flashlight toward the ceiling and removed her hand. The beam hit the ice canopy, and light reflected in a thousand directions. Rainbows swirled over the bed.

And she saw Bear.

Like a polar bear, his skin was black and his hair was creamy white. The flashlight shook in her hand, and the beam danced over his muscles. He was beautiful, as perfect and as ageless as a Michelangelo statue. Looking at him, she could not breathe.

He looked like an angel, or a god.

She wanted to touch him and feel his familiar skin and know this godlike creature was her Bear. Now that she had her wish, she didn’t know what it meant that he was so beautiful. Seeing him did not answer anything.

She wanted to breathe him in and swallow him whole. She wanted to wrap herself around him. She wanted to feel he was real with every inch of her skin. Leaning over him, she brushed his lips with hers. Bear opened his eyes. “Cassie, no!”

Cassie dropped the flashlight. It hit her thigh and fell to the floor. Shadows spread across Bear, the bed, and the room. “Ow! Bear, don’t do that!”

From the floor, the flashlight cast giant shadows on the ice walls. Bear’s shadow stretched as he pulled himself to full height. Instinctively, she flinched. He looked like an angry god. “I told you never to look at me. You should have trusted me!”

Rising to her knees, she put her hands on her hips. “Trust you?”

As quickly as it had come, the anger seemed to drain out of him. He sank down on the bed and put his face in his hands. “Oh, Cassie.”

Disconcerted, she opened and shut her mouth. He seemed truly upset. But what was so terrible about her looking at him? He was beautiful. He was perfect.

“Cassie, my Cassie.” He raised his head. He looked like he was going to cry. What was wrong? He cupped her cheek in his palm. The look in his eyes… Wow, she was looking into his eyes. His human eyes. His hand was warm and soft on her cheek.

“Bear?” she said uncertainly. She didn’t like the look in his eyes, that lost look.

She felt mist touch her skin. She brushed her arm automatically, but it was dry. He released her face and took her hand. He ran his thumb over her fingers, pausing on her ring finger. “I have to leave you now,” he said.

He had to what?

Clearly, she’d heard him wrong. She looked at his expression, and she felt her heart squeeze. She hadn’t heard him wrong. She started to shake her head. He couldn’t leave!

“Please, listen, Cassie,” he said before she could speak. “It was the bargain to free your mother. You could never see my human face. Or know the reason why you could not. Cassie, it was the only way to free your mother. It was the only way to marry you.”

“You and your stupid bargains.” She tried to sound cold and angry but her voice betrayed her. “Did you expect me to be telepathic?” She was blinking furiously now. Oh, God, what had he promised? What had he risked? What had she done?

Bear said as if quoting something, “All ties between us are snapped, and I must marry the troll princess.”

She shook his shoulders. “You are not leaving,” she said. She was crying. She knew it and she couldn’t stop it. This was absurd. Troll princess! “I will not let the trolls take you.”

“That’s my Cassie.” He buried his fingers in her hair. “But you cannot fight this. I must keep my promise. It is the price of being a munaqsri.” She heard rustling like wind in leaves.

“You are not leaving,” she said even more fiercely.

He pressed his lips on her forehead. “Take care of our baby.”

“I’m not letting you go.” The false wind snapped her hair. It whooshed between them and circled around them.

“No choice,” he said. “It has already begun.”

Dammit, no! She was not losing him! “Then I’m coming with you!”

“You cannot.”

“Then I’ll follow!”

He shook his head sadly. “I will be taken to the castle that is east of the sun and west of the moon. You cannot follow me there. It is beyond the ends of the earth.”

“I’ll find you.” Sheets fluttered around them like breaking waves.

Bear gripped her. “No! It is too dangerous.”

“Not for me,” she said. “I find polar bears, remember? It’s what I do.” She’d chased him once; she’d chase him again.

The tide of wind was a roar, and Bear had to shout, “You will die before you reach it! Promise me you will not try!”

“I will find you!” She was not losing him. Not now, not like this.

Swarming faster, the water-wind swept Bear off the bed. He hung in the air like an angel ascending. “If you love me, let me go. Please, Cassie, keep yourself safe, keep our baby safe.”

She jumped to her feet and wrapped her arms around his waist. “No!”

“Cassie, promise me! Think of the baby!”

She didn’t want a baby; she wanted him! She couldn’t lose him! Pulled upward, he slipped through her arms. She squeezed his knees as the wind lifted him higher. His head reached the canopy, and the ice melted around him like meringue. His shoulders passed through it, then his chest, his waist, his thighs. Cassie’s head hit the canopy—solid. “No! Come back!” His knees slipped through her arms. She clutched his ankles. “No!”

He disappeared through the canopy, and Cassie fell. She bounced on the silken sheets, and her head smacked backward into the bedpost.

Everything went black.