“Time is of the essence,” I said, thrashing around in the snow in an attempt to free myself. “We can’t be sitting around waiting for Tristan’s permission for every move we make.”

“For goodness sake, what are you doing?” Sabine grabbed me under the armpits and heaved.

“My skirt is stuck on something,” I said, kicking my feet.

She pulled harder, and both of us inhaled sharply as a frozen corpse appeared from beneath the snow. Half of a corpse.

“The dragon,” I said, tugging my skirt free from where it was caught on the shattered ribcage, my plan suddenly seeming far more risky as we glanced skyward.

What felt like icy fingers brushed my brow and the world seemed to shudder. The sensation faded in an instant, but Sabine was also shaking her head as though to clear it. My spine prickled with unease. “Maybe we should go back.”

Sabine’s fingers tightened on my arms. “I’m not sure we can.”

I looked back and my stomach tightened. Shadows dragged themselves out from under the bridge, consuming the light from the gas lamps on either side of it until the route back to the castle became a yawning mouth of blackness. And over the wind, the skittering sound of things with claws filled the night.

“We’ll go into the city. Someone will give us shelter.” Sabine grabbed my hand and hauled me toward a café, but before we’d gone more than a pace, a gale-force wind blasted from above, driving the snow into drifts that blocked all the doors and windows from sight, leaving the center of the street bare. A pathway.

“I should never be allowed to come up with plans,” I breathed, trying to keep my fear in check.

“Maybe you should summon Tristan?” Sabine was digging at the snow bank, but the wind only pushed her efforts back in place, seeming to mock her with its little teasing gusts.

“No.” I needed to prove that my worth hadn’t ended the moment Anushka drew her last breath. Not to Tristan, but to myself. I’d unleashed the trolls, which meant I was responsible for everything that happened as a result. “If they’d wanted to harm us, they would have. This is… This is something else.”

Holding tight to each other’s hands, we followed the path through the streets, Trianon growing steadily less recognizable as we progressed. The drifts of snow blocking the buildings rose higher, turning to walls of transparent ice, swirling whorls and patterns forming before our eyes as though an invisible hand were scoring whimsical designs.

“It’s leading me home,” I said, averting my eyes from a woman standing utterly still behind the wall, her mouth open and fixed mid-sentence. There were dozens of others like her – men and women who appeared to have been frozen in place.

“Look.”