Jack sighed. His lips were already chapped from the flaming, but the Frost Giants would have no idea who Jack Archibald—turned out it was his father’s father’s name—Gale was when he was home. His actual name, his dragon name, involved ten minutes of lineage and a few sounds the Human mouth wasn’t designed to make. It hurt, and he licked away blood when he finally finished.

“Highness?”

Something about the voice, the fear and relief combined, made Jack think of his cousin Penny. Who was twelve.

Two moving glimmers of white/blue slid between the rows of meat about halfway down the freezer. The taller was no more than four meters tall, if that, height mostly torso over short, thick legs. A teenager by Frost Giant reckoning. The second giant was half a meter shorter. Half a meter younger.

“Look, I can see you, you can’t see me, so I’m going to turn the light on to even things up, okay?” Straightening, Jack patted the wall until he found a switch.

“It is true! You are a sorcerer!”

Jack looked at the light switch and squinted at the two Frost Giants who stared at him from much closer than he’d expected. As he was a sorcerer, and as both of them gripped three-meter shafts of ice, he decided to skip the lecture on technology. “So I’m guessing a couple of butt munches from the Courts said land of ice and snow, have a great time, something to brag about, yadda yadda, created a gate, and closed it after you went through. Am I right?”

“I do not know this yadda,” said the taller.

“Not important,” Jack sighed.

“The Courts told us lies,” said the other, clutching the ice spear like a pointy security blanket.

“They promised adventure.”

“Promised enjoyment.”

“But there was only warmth until we found this shelter.”

“Now we are trapped and the meat has died.”

“Yeah, well, you’d love this place in February.” Jack jumped off the table, skidded a bit, and slapped half a cow. “And the meat was dead when it got here.”

“Not that meat.” The taller straightened and gestured with one long, angular arm, fingertips drawing frost lines in the air. “That meat.”

A middle-aged man stared out of a block of ice, dark eyes narrowed, brows drawn in, mouth open. He wore a puffy red parka and a toque with the name of the packing plant knit into it. He looked like he originally came from somewhere warm, and he’d died angry not afraid.

“The meat ran at us to make us leave,” the taller explained.

And they’d stopped it. Him. Jack didn’t blame them. He blamed the Courts.

“You are meat, Dragon Prince. Is he yours?”

“Yes. He’s mine.” Not when he lived, but the Courts wouldn’t have sent the Frost Giants through if he hadn’t told them about the asteroid.