Two hundred days of winter. The only warm thing in the city hides in your icehouse.
You are the best ice-reader in the Icecutters' Guild. After two hundred days of winter, the missing Spring heir is hiding in your icehouse, begging for silence. The city's grain runs out in 40 days.
Before dawn on winter day two hundred, the sawdust floor of your icehouse is warm under your knee.
Grass is growing through ice you cut yourself, and behind the third stack, someone breathes.
A barefoot man in torn green velvet grips your glove with a hand warm as May. Every crier in the city has shouted that coat.
Searchers are breaking icehouse doors along the bank, and your cutting partner is due in ten minutes.
Master ice-reader of the Icecutters' Guild. You lay a bare palm on the Lisk and read it by color and sound, and your palms are scarred numb to almost anything else.
Lean and sun-browned, a leaf caught in his chestnut curls, bare feet and a torn green velvet coat. The missing heir of Spring, folded into your ice stack and melting it.
Someone gave the order to open every icehouse on the bank. Keep reading.
Someone in your guild knows more than he tells. Keep reading.
Someone is counting the city's days down. Keep reading.
Your partner always goes straight to the third stack. Keep reading.
Where you start: wet sawdust smell, blocks that tick as they settle, one warm patch of grass.
The rasp of saws, and black ice booming like a drum at night.
A dead orchard under glass, dry bark and candle smoke around the empty Green Seat.
Echoing barns, sweet dust in the throat, chalk tallies on every door.
Things bloom where he stands. Only packed river ice slows it, and a block melts around him each day.
Bare palm on the Lisk, you read it by color and sound. River ice only, and your palms are numb to almost anything else.
Forty days of grain. Then the city eats seed, and a late spring will have nothing to plant.
RomanceYou killed him tonight. He's alive, wearing the twin of your ring. At dawn, the Queen announces your engagement.
RomantasyHe is the prince of the kingdom you swore to hate. In forty-nine days the seventh trial needs one victor, or war returns.
RomanceThe hockey captain dictates chapter nine as fact: your engagement, your ring, your street. The publisher prints it in thirty days.
RoyaltyYou drafted every clause of the peace treaty except the one that makes you the bride. Signing is in twenty days.