The herald went on in similar style for some time, but Ysabelon, having blanched as white as winter itself at this mention of her name, heard little more of it.

  ‘Am I, then, this queen?’ said she, to the ladies surrounding her.

  ‘Of course you are, Majesty,’ said the one in silver, soothingly, as though Ysabelon were a confused child.

  ‘How long we have waited for you!’ said the one dressed like the snow. ‘The Court simply hasn’t been the same without you.’

  ‘In fact, it’s been exactly the same,’ said the one in blue, rather coldly. ‘That’s the problem.’

  ‘But now all shall be well,’ said the rose-lady, beaming upon Ysabelon.

  Ysabelon heard all this with a sinking heart. She had been game enough to follow, when those odd Dreams of hers had led her steps towards the Kottow Tree. For who, after so long and wearying a life as hers, would turn down the offer of adventure? Having earned her bread variously as a Seer (in name at least; in practice more of a fortune-teller); a scribe; and even, during one rather thin season, a washer-woman, she’d had little to leave behind that could cause her much regret. She had even married at one time, an experiment she had never repeated, for while he had grown old and died, she had not.

  Her Dreams had frequently shown her the ice-bound realm in which she now found herself. But they had not warned her of what awaited her once she was in it.

  ‘I am not your queen,’ she tried, speaking as firmly as she could. ‘I feel certain I would have remembered it, if I was.’

  But this protestation found no more favour than her previous attempts; her ladies (Maids of Honour, she supposed, just as the queen possessed, in the world outside) laughed this off.

  Most of them did, at any rate. The one in blue regarded her more thoughtfully, and finally said: ‘Can it be that you have forgotten?’

  The other three, engaged in some chatter among themselves, fell silent at this.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ysabelon. ‘I have.’

  Below the dais upon which sat her throne, the members of her Court were celebrating in riotous style. Having performed a pavane with unusual vigour, they were now venturing upon a lively galliard. The music, jaunty and ethereal, would have lifted Ysabelon’s heart, were it not so weighed down with confusion. How oblivious they were to her plight, celebrating the return of a monarch who had forgotten herself!

  ‘So if you will tell me what’s afoot,’ continued Ysabelon, ‘and why it was I was gone, perhaps, I shall be grateful to you.’

  This plea went partially unanswered. ‘We must fetch the thaumaturge,’ said the blue-clad lady, after some consultation with her sisters. ‘He will know how to get her memories back.’

  ‘No, Peronel,’ said silver-robes. ‘He will throw things at us, as you well know.’

  ‘We need him,’ insisted Peronel. ‘What are we to do with a forgetful queen, otherwise?’

  There followed some sighing, after this reflection.

  ‘If you will tell me where to find this fellow,’ said Ysabelon, ‘I will go myself.’

  ‘Gracious, Majesty, no,’ said the lady in the rose-coloured gown. ‘That would never be seemly.’

  ‘Seemly,’ repeated Ysabelon. ‘I cannot tell you how unconcerned I am with seemly.’ And, because she was hungry and the fabled almond-tarts smelled heavenly, she took one, and ate it, and felt immediately refreshed. ‘The trays may come with me,’ she announced, rising from her throne, and taking a marchpane confectioner’s conceit next.

  She paused, expectant, and when nobody spoke, she said: ‘Well? Time is wasting.’

  ‘I will go with you, Majesty,’ said Peronel, with a disgusted look at the other ladies.

  ‘Delightful,’ said Ysabelon, politely. ‘We shall go at once, if you please.’

  Peronel bowed her head, and stepped gracefully away; not out into the motley mess of dancers spread out from wall to wall, but to the rear of the throne, where nobody lingered.

  Ysabelon followed, her thoughts busy and her mouth full of sweet marchpane.

  ‘We will attend the throne!’ called one of the ladies after them. ‘Until you are come back, Majesty!’

  Ysabelon acknowledged this with a wave of her goblet, prior to downing a draught of apple ice-wine. All three of the delicacies were perfectly to her taste, which she supposed ought not to surprise her now. Whether she remembered it or not, she had of a certainty been to the Winter Court before.

  She might have expected that the search for this mysterious thaumaturge might take some time. So irascible and enigmatic a fellow ought to dwell at the top of some distant tower, or in some underground apartment buried deep below. Even the farthest reaches of the forest would have sufficed.

  But Peronel, walking at a fine clip, her shoes making ringing clop-clop sounds upon the floor, led her only some ways farther down the length of the seemingly endless half-hall, past the trunks of a few trees marooned in the middle of the Court, and stopped before one particular tree. This appeared more thoroughly winter-bound even than its fellows, its bark so crusted in ice as to appear ice-wrought itself. Ysabelon, tilting up her chin, beheld the vast heights of the tree disappearing into a haze of snow-clouds far above, its boughs spreading out to form some semblance of a ceiling for this forestal hall.

  A short way up the trunk, there was inset: a door.

  Peronel did not attempt, in her Court finery, to clamber up and knock upon it. Instead, she produced (from thin air) a bell made all of clear crystal, its handle a length of, perhaps, the same wood as this pallid tree. When she shook it, crystalline peals reverberated about the hall, and the tree’s branches swayed.

  Ysabelon held some private doubts as to whether that door would open. Could open, in fact, for the thing was solid ice, even its silvered handle and hinges beheld under a veil of hard-frozen water. And indeed, for a while, nothing happened at all.

  ‘The thaumaturge does not wish to speak to us,’ she observed into the ringing silence, after the bell’s tolling had died away.

  ‘No such thing,’ said Peronel dismissively. ‘He will answer the summons.’ She said this firmly, and with a mulish expression; Ysabelon collected that if the thaumaturge did not answer, Peronel would climb up there herself — fine shoes or no — and haul him out by his hair. If she could pull summoning-bells out of nowhere, doubtless she could spirit up a hatchet as well, or an axe.

  These measures did not prove necessary (slightly to Ysabelon’s disappointment), for a pounding began from the other side of the door. The trunk shook; ice splintered, and fell away; and the door swung open with enough force to expel its occupant all in a rush.

  ‘Are you the thaumaturge?’ asked Ysabelon of the winded fellow lying at her feet.

  He squinted up at her, scowling. ‘Oh! So you’re back, are you?’

  Peronel kicked him. ‘Some respect is wanted, Mermadak.’

  Mermadak the thaumaturge hauled himself to his feet, and bowed to Ysabelon, still fiercely scowling. His was an odd appearance, for he seemed scarcely older than the page-boy who had first brought Ysabelon her almond tarts, and she had expected some venerable sage of a man. He wore Court attire, like Peronel, and all the rest: a silver-threaded doublet with slashed sleeves, all velvet, and rainwater-coloured hose. His was a trifle shabby, however, and not at all clean. In his dark hair he wore a scattering of rain-droplets, spellbound into inertia: or at least, she must assume it was a conscious choice to take them for ornament, or they must surely have dissipated long since.

  ‘Well, and what is it you want from me?’ said this sapling. ‘The Queen is back, all’s well at the Court, huzzah.’ This was spoken sourly, with a resentment Ysabelon did not know how to interpret.

  ‘So they say,’ said Ysabelon. ‘But if I have been here before, I cannot recall it. Perhaps I am not this Queen of yours at all.’

  Mermadak subjected her to a hard-eyed stare, a scrutiny she returned with bland disinterest. Then, he grinned. ‘Forgotten? Well! And what will you of me? Am I to have the honour of mending this complaint?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peronel firmly. ‘If you please, thaumaturge, for there’s naught else to be mended until you do.’

  ‘Naught else?’ echoed Ysabelon. ‘And what am I expected to mend, pray?’

  ‘Why, the Court!’ said Peronel impatiently. ‘‘Tis too long since any one of us has set foot beyond the ice, and the forest beyond all empty this while.’ She gestured incomprehensibly, adding, ‘I thought it lost forever, ‘till just today, when they wandered in.’

  What Ysabelon had taken for a pair of statues of eccentric design proved, upon inspection, to be a hapless pair of fey-folk, frozen solid, and all covered in rime. ‘What have you done here?’ she cried, storming over to the unfortunate two. ‘This is no way to treat guests! And I do not see why you should have done so, if they are your first visitors this age. They might have shown you the way back into the forest, if that’s what you wanted.’ And they might show her the way, thought, Ysabelon, if she decided that flight may be preferable to lingering.

  ‘Well, they could not,’ said Peronel, folding her arms. ‘I asked them. And it was not I who made sculptures of them; the Court did that. It is welcoming of no one save Winter’s folk, as you will recall, if this lazy-bones can be pummelled into mending your lost wits.’ So saying, she advanced upon Mermadak, one dainty fist raised high, setting him cowering with his hands up.

  ‘No pummelling will be necessary!’ he cried. ‘I’ll mend the Lady Frost, and your interlopers too, if you will it. Provided you leave me in peace, Peronel.’

  ‘For how long this time?’ she said, lowering her fist. ‘Isn’t a hundred years long enough?’

  ‘No,’ he said, blinking at Ysabelon, and narrowing his eyes. ‘What do you recall, milady?’ He helped himself to one of her almond-tarts as he spoke, which had her minded to issue a reprimand, save that the tray seemed so gratified by the attention.

  ‘Nothing of this place,’ answered she. ‘Only a stray Dream, here and there, and I now think those were glimpses of lost memories, not visions of the future. Until this day, I lived well beyond the borders of your lost forest, and came into it by way of a wandering Tree.’

  Peronel said, ‘A Tree? Wandering about, and beyond the forest? Ha!’ Her face lit up with delight, or mirth, or both. ‘Well accomplished, Merigot! And to think I doubted you!’

  ‘And who is Merigot?’ asked Ysabelon.

  Peronel waved this question aside. ‘I shan’t keep explaining. It will be needless to do so, the moment Mermadak does his duty.’

  Mermadak eyed her sourly. ‘You’ve waited a hundred years, Peronel. Another hour won’t hurt you.’

  ‘Who is to say that’s true?’ she retorted. ‘You have not spent the ages drifting from wall to wall, bound in cold, and with never a glimpse of aught but ice. You’ve been asleep.’

  ‘Not all of the time,’ muttered Mermadak.

  Peronel lifted her foot threateningly.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the thaumaturge hastily. He straightened his doublet, rather fussily, and shook out his full sleeves. ‘I will return shortly,’ he announced, and to Ysabelon’s dismay, retreated back into his home in the frosted tree’s trunk, and slammed the door hard enough to send a rain of rime drifting down.

  This did not appear to trouble Peronel, who stood complacently by with her arms folded.

  ‘He is to return, I suppose?’ said Ysabelon.

  ‘If he does not, I shall burn down this tree,’ answered Peronel.

  ‘Perhaps he will not expect that you would do such a thing.’

  ‘He certainly will.’ Peronel bared her teeth in chilling smile.

  Ysabelon fell silent, torn between a feeling that Peronel might make a sturdier monarch than she, and a sense of relief that she had not made any attempt to demonstrate the capacity. Things may have gone rather ill with the folk of the Winter Court, if she had — or perhaps she would have put it in order long before, who could say?

  Peronel turned the full weight of her regard upon Ysabelon, a slight tapping of her foot betraying her impatience with the wait. ‘And where have you been all this time, Majesty, if not in the lost forest?’

  ‘Is that where you imagined me to be?’

  ‘Of a certainty. Where else?’

  ‘The world is far larger than these two forests, you know.’

  ‘They are not two forests, but two distinct parts of the same one.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Ysabelon drily. ‘Of course they are.’

  Peronel nodded. ‘Well, and? Where were you?’

  ‘In different towns, far away. You would not know them; they are of no particular note, save that I was contented enough in one or two of them.’

  ‘How could you be contented, outside the Court?’

  Ysabelon had no answer. She had been contented enough, or so she had thought. But she had also known a perennial restlessness, season after season, which prevented her from making a true home anywhere. In none of the towns of her memory had she known real peace, or been able to set down the roots of a permanent and comfortable existence.

  Perhaps this was why. She wasn’t one of those plain, good, comfortable folk. She was a creature of Winter, ice through to her core, and could be happy nowhere outside of her Court.

  Strange, when she had never much loved the snow.

  ‘Right,’ said the thaumaturge, hurling his door open again with a terrific crash, and barrelling out of the house. He half-tumbled down, landed on both feet before Ysabelon, and presented her with an ornate bottle made of glass… or crystal, or cracked ice? One or several of those, at any rate.

  Ysabelon took it, doubtfully. ‘I have seen these.’

  Mermadak raised his brows.

  ‘At the Frost Fair,’ she said. ‘Someone gave just such a bottle to me — I had it about me somewhere —’ She performed a brief search for the article in question, and finding it gone, dismissed the thought. ‘It contained rainwater.’

  ‘This one,’ said Mermadak proudly, ‘is full of wine.’

  ‘Then I shall be roundly drunk, but I do not see how that will help me.’

  ‘It is Seeing wine,’ said Mermadak, rather huffily. ‘You will Dream, vividly, and you won’t have to sleep to do it.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ysabelon. ‘And you rustled this up in just these few minutes, did you?’

  ‘Well, I had the wine already,’ Mermadak admitted. ‘I’ve added to it.’

  ‘Added what to it?’ Ysabelon held the bottle up, and attempted, by squinting her eyes and turning the vessel about, to see through the clouded exterior and examine the contents.

  ‘Better not ask,’ Mermadak advised. ‘Nothing you’d like to drink, ordinarily. But it won’t harm you.’

  Ysabelon sighed, and thought with brief regret of her washer-woman years. Hard work, that, but simple, and nobody expected her to pickle her insides with stale rainwater, or wine full of unspeakable things.

  But if she did not drink it, what then? She could not retreat; the way back into the lost forest — or the greener, balmier part of it — had been closed for long ages of time, and why should it open again just for her? And even if she could get back there, what then? Would the Kottow Tree consent to take her back into the rest of the world, as though nothing had happened?

  Would she want it to?

  ‘If I am sick,’ she told Mermadak, ‘I shall be sure to be horridly so, and all over your shoes.’

  The thaumaturge took a prudent step back.

  Ysabelon raised up the bottle, set her lips to the chill glass, and drank a long draught. It tasted, to her relief, of apple ice-wine, the same that she had drunk not so long ago. If there were other ingredients in there, they manifested upon her tongue as naught but fleeting hints of oddness: a taste as of dried grass scythed down in the summer; a hint of pastry; something, briefly, meaty.

  She drank and drank until the bottle was empty, and this she handed back to Mermadak.

  He, warily, hovered, eyeing her with profound distrust. ‘Well, and are you going to be sick?’ said he.

  Ysabelon thought about it. Her stomach thought about it, too, being unused to so large a helping of wine all at once. But it contented itself with an unhappy surge, and then quieted.

  ‘No,’ she said, adding with a smile, ‘Not yet.’

  Which was not to say that she felt well; not in the least. Her head began to whirl, and a cool mist floated across her vision.

  ‘Oh,’ she said in surprise, sitting down all in a rush. Peronel, and even the thaumaturge, appeared far taller from so ignominious a vantage-point, and Ysabelon blinked up at them in a daze. ‘I cannot see your faces,’ said she, and then she was elsewhere.

  3

  Ysabelon had no difficulty in recognising the place she was come to. There were the twisting, towering boles of ancient trees grown every which way, their grand old boughs and profusion of leaves shading the ground far below. Some few of them looked as though they might at any moment pull up their roots and, like the Kottow Tree, take a constitutional about the forest. Perhaps they had recently done so, or perhaps they shortly would.

  The season had altered. When Ysabelon had walked beneath those old boughs before, with Diggory Stokey and Mother Gantry, the freshness to the air and the new growth all around had heralded the onset of spring. Now, the air was grown heavy and sultry, with a slow, deep heat, a sun-dappled balminess — all told her she was gone into high summer. Bees droned somewhere nearby, dancing from wildflower to wildflower, and — more astonishingly — butterflies covered the trunks of the trees, their outspread wings as wide across as her own face. They were painted all the colours of a jewel-box, only more vivid; these were colours to mesmerise, shimmering with latent magic.

  That sense of magic pulsed through the forest-floor, in point of fact, the same bedewed and leaf-strewn earth upon which Ysabelon lay. She felt she could soak it up herself, take it up as though she, too, had roots with which to plumb the depths of the earth.

  Though she was not lying on bare earth, or even upon an aging leaf-carpet. Under her, there was cloth: a sumptuous length of it, glimmering silk in all the colours of a summer twilight. The pretty thing was spread there by careful hands, she concluded, for she also had about her a feast of morsels and sweetmeats, almond-tarts and marchpane and apple wine, and much more besides. She reclined there, a queen still, pampered and luxuriant.

 

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