With her other hand she reaches out and pulls him closer, winding her icy fingers through his hair and drawing his lips to hers.
Everything is too hot and too cold and Zachary’s entire world is an imagined kiss in brightest darkness that tastes like honey and snow and flame.
There is a tightness in his chest that grows and burns and he can no longer tell where the ice ends and he begins and just when he thinks he can tolerate no more it shatters and stops.
Zachary opens his eyes and tries to catch his breath.
The ice likeness of Mirabel is gone.
The key is missing, leaving the sword and compass abandoned on the chain. The burned impression of the key is marked on Zachary’s chest and will remain there always.
The rest of the keys have vanished as well, along with their trees.
Zachary is no longer in the woods.
He stands now in a snow-covered alleyway that never, if it still existed in its true form, would contain such snow.
There is a new figure carved from ice with him now. A smaller one, bespectacled and curly-haired, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and carrying a backpack, facing a brick wall that is not ice but genuine brick, most of it whitewashed and pale, blending in with the snow.
Upon the wall there is an intricately painted door.
The colors are rich, some of the pigments metallic. In the center, at the level where a peephole might be and stylized with lines that match the rest of the painted carving, there is a bee.
Beneath the bee there is a key. Beneath the key there is a sword.
Zachary reaches out to touch the door, his fingertips meeting the door between the bee and the key, and they come to rest on smooth paint covering cool brick, a slight unevenness to the surface betraying the texture below.
It is a wall. A wall with a pretty picture on it.
A picture so perfect as to fool the eye.
Zachary turns back to the ghost of his younger self but the figure is gone. The snow is gone. He is alone in an alleyway standing in front of a painted door.
The light has changed. A predawn glow chases away the stars.
Zachary reaches for the painted doorknob and his hand closes over cold metal, round and three-dimensional.
He opens the door and steps through it.
And so the son of the fortune-teller finds his way to the Starless Sea.
DORIAN NAVIGATES THE DEPTHS with Fate’s heart in its box carefully wrapped and contained in a pack strapped to his back and a sword that is much more ancient than him but not nearly as ancient as the things staring at him from the shadows and all of them are still sharp.
A sword does not forget how to find its mark when it is held by a hand that knows how to use it.
Its blade and the sleeves of Dorian’s star-buttoned coat are covered in blood.
There are…things that have followed him since he left the inn and more that have joined them as he walks on.
Things that want his life and his flesh and his dreams.
Things that would crawl under his skin and wear him like a coat.
They have not had a mortal come so close to tempt them in countless years.
They change their shapes around him. They use his own stories against him.
It is not what Dorian had expected, even with the moon’s warnings.