And now …

I’m afraid for you, Neel had said. I’m afraid for me.

Fear. She supposed that’s what it was, coiling inside her alongside her eagerness to return home. But Petra felt Astrophil scramble to the top of her head, his tin legs pricking against her scalp. She looked at Tomik seated in front of her, his back turned, his golden hair windblown and wild, his arms rising and falling as he hauled at the oars. Petra took heart.

When they’d rounded a crag jutting out from the island’s shore and the dwindling figure of Neel disappeared behind the rock, Tomik called for them to shift directions and head into the open sea.

Finally, they paused, the oars thunking against their locks, the boat bobbing on the rough waves.

“Oooh,” Astrophil said. “I feel seasick.”

Something wet seeped down Petra’s head. “Astrophil. Did you throw up in my hair?”

“No,” he said, then added weakly, “Well. Maybe a little bit of oil.”

“We’ll soon be on dry land.” Tomik unfolded the Loophole map and consulted it. “Here’s as good a spot as any to set the globes free.” He opened the wooden box, and the small spheres vibrated as they sensed the nearness of a Loophole. They burst from the velvet-lined box, whizzing across the waves until they paused, humming and hovering as they marked the Loophole’s invisible entrance.

“You know, Tomik,” Petra said, eyeing the globes, one red and one white, “we’ve never had an adventure together. Just you and me.”

“I beg your pardon?” Astrophil rapped her skull. “And what about me? I suppose I do not count. I might as well not even exist. You probably have forgotten I am even here.”

A large wave rocked the rowboat. Astrophil made a burping sound, and Petra felt another dollop of oil dampen her hair. “Don’t worry,” said Petra. “I know you’re there.”

Tomik laughed. He tucked the map into a pocket and reached across the boat to take Petra’s hand. “To our adventure. Let’s not get killed, all right?”

“Deal.” Petra shook his hand, then tightened the belt that bound her sword to her side. She and Tomik shrugged into their furs and sweltered under the Indian sun as they rowed toward the globes, Astrophil standing tiptoe on Petra’s hooded head as if it were the crow’s nest of a boat. He had the best view, even if it was making him ill.

“Perhaps you should not row so fast,” he said.

“Why not?” Petra pulled at the oars that would bring her home.

“We do not know where the Loophole will take us.”

“Sure, we do,” said Tomik. “The Novohrad Mountains.”

“Yes, but we do not know exactly where…” The words died in the spider’s throat as the boat passed between the spheres. The hull scraped against rocky ground. There was a gentle thud as the globes dropped into their velvet-lined box. Freezing air punched Petra’s face, and for a moment she was blinded by the sheer whiteness of snow.

She leaned against the side of the boat, squinting her eyes against the bright light, trying to see where they had landed.

“Stop!” cried the spider, who saw the icy valley yawning beneath them. The boat teetered on the edge of a cliff.

Petra froze. Tomik dropped the oars in their locks and reached for Petra. The wooden rattle of the oars echoed across the valley, and the boat rocked as if still on waves. With one final wobble, the rowboat plunged off the cliff.

14

Snowdrifts

THE ROWBOAT WHIPPED DOWN the mountain, hissing and slamming over stones and snow.

Petra gripped the sides of the hull, aware of little else than Astrophil’s screams and Tomik’s arm around her waist. The boat thumped over a pile of rocks, and several boards broke beneath Petra’s feet. She saw a chunk of wood wing away into the crystal sky.

“The boat’s coming apart!” Tomik shouted.

“ACK!” Astrophil cried. “RORR! OCK! SSS!”

What? Petra’s brain rattled in her head. She sucked in lungfuls of icy air and tried to focus on the panicked spider’s shouts. What was he trying to say?

Then she saw it, looming ahead of them.

Oh.

They were heading right toward a giant pillar of stone.

“ROCKS!” she yelled.

Tomik’s arm tightened around her. He yanked her to one side of the boat. With a wooden creak, the rowboat veered left, shooting up a spray of powdery snow behind them. Tomik and Petra leaned as hard as they could against the boat’s side, but they were still careening toward the rocks.

They bumped over a small hill of snow, and one of the five bags whirled out of the boat.

“No!” cried Tomik.

“Yes!” Petra kicked another bag out of the boat. The weight of the boat shifted. They leaned left again, and whizzed past the stone pillar.

And straight over a ledge.

The boat launched into the air, soaring over the snow. Then it hit the slope again and burst into pieces.

Petra spun down the hill. A stray board smacked into her. She kept tumbling, headfirst. No magic she had could save her from this.

Pressing her face against the snow, she jammed her fists deep into the freezing white powder and swung her legs so that her feet were pointing down the mountain’s slope. Her fists created friction, and her body slowed, but didn’t stop. Petra dug in her toes, and she sank into the snow, buried almost entirely. She dragged to a halt.

For a moment, she simply lay there, panting into the snow, her face blazing with cold. Then she shoved herself up. “Astrophil?” Astrophil!

“Here,” he said faintly. He was hanging onto her braid.

Petra’s relief was short-lived. “Tomik!” She scanned the mountainside for him, but saw only the ruins of the boat.

She was plunging through the snow, terrified, when one of the boards shifted. A dark shape lifted it aside, pushing through the snow’s surface.

Petra waded toward Tomik and flung herself into his snowy arms. They huddled together, warm cheeks and freezing noses. They breathed, and breathed, and were grateful.

“No bones broken?” Tomik murmured in her ear.

“No. You?”

He shook his head. “We were lucky. The snow softened our fall.”

A gasp from Astrophil broke them apart. “The supplies!” wailed the spider, pointing at the ruins of the boat. “They are gone!”

The blood drained from Tomik’s face. Petra stared at him, then at their surroundings: the mirror-bright snow, the frozen sun, the sharp peaks that caged them in at all sides except the only way down. A dark smudge marked a ridge of trees far below.

Petra attacked the jumble of wooden boards at Tomik’s feet. He joined her, and they flung parts of the boat away, searching for the bags that contained everything they needed to survive in the mountains. They had vanished.

Tomik suddenly sank to his knees. His silence changed. It hardened, and struck Petra with its force. Tomik had seen something. She followed his gaze.

Peeking out from under the paddle of a broken oar was a brown box. It was flung open, and the blue velvet interior held nothing but glass shards.

“The globes,” Petra whispered.

Tomik stared at the broken glass. “We’d never find the Loophole again on our own,” he said. “There’s no going back.”

Petra glanced up the slope. “We need to find the bags.”

“That is suicide!” said Astrophil. He scrambled up Petra’s braid and tugged at her fallen hood, trying to drag it up over her head. He struggled under its weight. “We flew down hundreds of feet. The bags could be anywhere, and you will waste precious time searching for them, climbing up, when you should be moving as quickly as you can down, to the forest. There you will be sheltered from the cold. You will find food.”

“Not for you, Astro.” Frowning, Petra plucked the hood from his legs and pulled it over her head. Astrophil climbed inside. “The brassica oil is gone.”

“Oh, me. I am fine. I can go days without eating. I am a machine.”

Petra said nothing to this. While it was true that Astrophil had once gone almost a week without his usual daily dose of brassica oil, no one had any idea of how long he could run without it, or what would happen if he stopped working. Would his gears start whirring again the instant they poured brassica down his mouth? Or, if he stopped, would he never start again?

Petra did not want to find out. Yet she gazed at the sparkling slope and knew that it would be risky to flounder up the mountainside in search of the missing supplies. Perhaps Astrophil was right. He usually was. This kind of cold was dangerous, and the sooner they reached the forest, the sooner they’d reach Krumlov and the brassica oil Iris surely kept in her castle. The rich always had some oil on hand, for lighting lamps if for nothing else.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Do you have your sword?” Tomik asked Petra, his breath fogging the air.

“Yes,” she said, and was grateful, at least, for that.

“Maybe you can hunt in the forest.”

“And what, fence a rabbit?” She shook her head. “Swords aren’t made for hunting. They’re made for killing people.” She had never spoken so bluntly about her father’s gift, and her own words shocked her.

Petra had the power to kill someone.

The thought was colder than the snow at her feet. A memory hissed in Petra’s mind. Assassin, an air spirit had called her with a sly smile. Assassin.

Tomik must not have liked what he saw on Petra’s face. He turned away and began picking up pieces of wood and stuffing them into his coat. “We’re wasting time. Come on. Take some wood, too. We can use it for a fire.”

“We’ve nothing to start a fire with,” Petra said grimly. “No matches.”

“That is not what I would call a positive attitude,” Astrophil said directly in her ear.

Petra sighed and packed the inside of her coat with fragments of the rowboat.

They started down the slope.

* * *

THEY STUMBLED THROUGH THE DARK, their Glowstones lighting the way as they slogged down the mountain. They could no longer see the distant trees—only the snow surrounding their feet in a circle of blue light. They had no idea if they were still heading for the forest, or if the forest would really be any better than this.

It has to be, Petra thought numbly. A cold wind scraped at her cheeks. She couldn’t feel her toes anymore, and the only thing that kept her moving was the thought of her father—and the certainty that if she stopped, the sweat slicking her skin would ice over.

Astrophil jabbered in her ear, reciting reams of crazy poetry about a man who flew a winged horse to the moon to find his bottled-up soul. He’s trying to distract me. The thought was fuzzy. That’s nice.

The spider poked her cheek. “Don’t ignore me!”

Or not so nice.

Tomik grabbed her hand and tugged her through a snowdrift. “We have to go faster!”

Everyone was yelling at her. Even Neel, she thought, seemed to be trying to get her attention. She could feel a pressure on the mental link. An insistence. But she didn’t have the energy to listen.

I could freeze to death, she realized. It was hard to care. Everything was so cold.

Her foot hit a jumble of pebbles and skidded. She slipped, realizing that they weren’t walking on snow anymore, but on a scree. Tomik caught her, and they slipped together, tumbling down the slope in a shower of small rocks.

When they stopped, Petra lay on the ground, faceup. Astrophil was standing on the tip of her nose. “Petra! Speak to me!”

She focused and saw a fringe of pine branches above him, oddly blue in the light of the Glowstone that seemed to still be in her hand, even if she couldn’t feel it. She heard a muffled chopping sound and turned her head to see Tomik using a board to dig into a large, hardened snowdrift at the base of a tree. “The forest,” she said. “We made it.”

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Of course. I’m very warm.”

Tomik stopped digging. “Astro.” His voice was tight. “Keep her awake.”

Oh. The thought prickled at the back of her mind. That’s right. People feel warm, just before they sleep and freeze and die.

She tried to worry about this, but the cozy warmth spread through her like liquid. Even with Astrophil jabbing her face and shouting in her ear and mind, Petra’s eyes slipped shut. The spider pried one lid open, and she could see Tomik hollowing out the snowdrift, working quickly with his broken board.

He tossed it aside, yanked open his coat so that the wood inside fell to the ground, and crunched over the snow to Petra.

She couldn’t really understand words anymore, just heard the anxious tones of Astrophil as Tomik fumbled with her coat and dragged out pieces of wood. She was vaguely aware that she should feel colder with her furs open to the air, but she didn’t.

Tomik grabbed Petra under her arms, dragged her to the snowdrift, and pushed her into the hole he had made. Then he slipped inside, squeezing next to her in the coffin-shaped hollow in the snow.

“Petra.” He was murmuring in her ear, reminding her of stupid pranks they’d pulled on the village schoolmaster back home, telling her that they were home, or almost, that they were so close to the Bohemian border, and didn’t she remember her plan? “This is our adventure. Ours. And I will help you, I’ll do anything. Just tell me you’re all right.”

She blinked in the blue Glowstone light, and realized her head was pillowed against his chest, and that Tomik had pulled his open coat over her furs and the invisible rapier at her hip. She saw the green Vatran shirt he had worn at the beach, felt its soft cotton on her cheek as Tomik’s heat radiated from his body to hers. It was a healthy heat, so different from the otherworldly one that had almost sent her to sleep outside. This warmth smelled like him and her and spices from the delicious island food they’d eaten for weeks. She sighed. It was a gorgeous heat.