Brushing snow off the lamp that mysteriously still burned on the front table, I tried to turn up the flame, but my efforts were ineffective. It remained static. Unchanged. Strange. “Hello?”

We inched our way into the great room, both of us instinctively going to the fireplace where the banked coals glowed cherry red. Sabine held her hands out to them, then jerked her fingers back. “No heat,” she said, bending and blowing on the charred wood in a failed attempt to draw up the flames. “Something about this isn’t right.” She reached a gloved hand for an iron poker, seeming intent on rectifying this one trivial thing in the face of all the many things that weren’t right. I turned my back on the process and called out again. “Hello?”

No response. Nothing but silence.

I shouted, “Well? We’re here. And given you owe your freedom to me, perhaps you might show somewhat more courtesy.”

An unearthly chuckle filled the room, and I stumbled into Sabine as the air in front of me tore like a panel of silk. The opening spread wide, revealing a throne carved of solid ice, which would’ve been unremarkable if not for countless eyes of all shapes and colors frozen into its depths. Eyes, which judging from the bloody veins and tissue tangling from them, had been torn from their owners’ heads by force. To either side of the throne sat two immense lupine creatures, fangs as long as my hand protruding from black lips. But it was the creature sitting on the throne that stole my attention.

I’d seen her before.

“Owe?” The sound of her voice made my head ache, and I pressed a gloved hand to my temple, trying and failing to relieve the pressure. “I recall making no deals with you, human. Nor do I recall you doing me any favors.”

“Maybe not,” I conceded, dropping my hand from my head. “But you’ve benefited from my actions.” She was the woman – fairy – that I’d seen in my dream. The one the Summer King had called wife; and sure enough, there were bonding marks across one of her hands. Only in my dream, in that land of endless summer, she’d seemed… passive. And what sat before me was anything but. This was the Winter Queen.

“Have I? Are you so sure about that?”

I hesitated. “You’re here, aren’t you? A day ago, that wasn’t possible.”

She shrugged one elegant shoulder, long black hair brushing against a gown made of mist and stars that shifted and moved in a way that made it dizzying to look upon. “Do not look for gratitude from me, mortal. I’ve walked through worlds beyond number; what does the loss or gain of one filthy bit of earth matter to me?”