Chapter 2

My office at the ice palace was small and cold and smelled of cedar shavings, because I had built the paneling myself the winter we broke ground and I had never let anyone refinish it.

Mabel sat in my leather chair with her boots on the floor and her knees drawn up and a blanket around her shoulders, and she ate like a person who had been hungry for days rather than hours - both hands, head down, no words. Tessa had brought a plate of the gala food: braised short rib, potatoes, a roll. The girl ate the roll first.

"Slow," I said.

She stopped chewing and looked up, ready to be corrected.

"I'm not going to take it from you," I said. "It'll make you sick is all."

She nodded once and slowed down. That nod told me more about her life than the parka did.

Tessa stood at the door with her back to the wall, arms crossed, radio at her shoulder, watching me as much as the hallway. I pulled my chair around to face the girl and set a glass of water where she could reach it.

"Tell me about your mom," I said.

Her jaw worked. "Ruth."

"Ruth."

"Ruth Keller." Mabel said it carefully, like a thing she had been drilled on. "She's my mom. She's not my real mom. My real mom's name was Astrid and she died when I was a baby, and Ruth took me." A pause. "Ruth said don't tell anybody that. But she said tell him and only him."

The cedar room went very quiet. Tessa's radio crackled once and died.

"Where is Ruth now?" I asked.

"Three nights ago a man came." Mabel's hands went still in her lap. "Two men. They made her give me the charm. She put it in my sock and she pushed me out the back door and said, Mabel, run to the ice palace, find the man who owns the first snow, and press the little blade, and don't stop running." Her chin trembled and she bit it still. "They took her. She was yelling my name."

My hands were flat on my knees. I had not moved, I was certain, but the room felt like it had shifted an inch to the left.

"Press the little blade," I repeated.

"It opens." She said it like a fact she had been given, not a miracle. "Ruth said only her grandfather presses it. She said if a man who isn't my grandfather tries, it stays shut."

I looked down at the charm in my palm. Silver, worn, warm from her skin.

I made it twice, that charm. The first time was at a bench in the shop behind the house on Arrowhead Road, the winter Astrid turned ten. The second time was eleven years later, in the same shop, on a night she came home with her jaw set and her hair wet and told me things about Julian Kade I refused to hear.

That night I cut the small brass latch and set the hinge into the hollowed blade and closed it with solder, and she watched me do it and said, "What's it for?"

"For whatever you can't say out loud," I told her.

"Will it stay shut?"

"Nobody knows it's there but you and me."

Astrid took it off her neck and pressed the seam and it opened in her hand. Then she snapped it shut and hung it back around her throat and said, "So I can press it, Papa."

I set the charm down on the desk between us and turned it over and found the seam with my thumbnail.

"Mabel," I said. "Do you know what's inside?"

"No, sir. Ruth said I wasn't allowed."

I closed my eyes and pressed.

The latch gave with a click so small that a room full of forty people would not have heard it, and the little blade swung open on a hinge I had soldered with my own hands, and inside, fitted into a hollow no wider than a thumbnail, was a photograph.

Astrid. Thirty-three years old. Sitting on a porch step somewhere green, hair down, holding an infant in a white blanket and looking at the camera with her whole face lit up. I had never seen the picture. I had never seen the baby.

On the back of it, in her handwriting, four words:

Ruth, keep her safe.

I heard myself breathe. It came out wrong - not a breath, something lower, more like a door giving way.

"That's my real mom," Mabel said, very quietly. "Ruth showed me another one. Not that one."

I could not look up yet. "How old were you? In the-" I gestured at the picture, at the porch, at everything.

"Six months." She'd memorized that too. "Ruth said six months and two days."

The door. The door behind Tessa, the one from the corridor.

Someone knocked twice, hard, with a knuckle, and Julian Kade said through the cedar, "Conrad. Open the door."

Tessa looked at me. I snapped the blade shut on my daughter's face and put the charm in my breast pocket, next to my reading glasses, and I stood up.

"Ten minutes," I said to the room, mostly to myself. "Give me ten minutes."

"Conrad, I'm coming in."

I have built things my whole life, and I know the sound of a hinge about to give.