When the sun had set, the Icemen walked up the mountain to a grotto overlooking the hot spring. It was a natural formation, a deep cave that shielded them from the wind and—even more important—from detection from above. A fire blazed at the center of the cave and, as we walked inside, I saw how its flickering orange light glimmered over the walls, lighting up chunks of rock crystal and amethyst, geodes of pink and purple stone that clung to the walls like luminous arachnids. Animal skins had been spread over the stone floor and, one by one, everyone sat on the skins around the fire. A woman ladled brown liquid from a barrel into wooden cups. She passed a cup to me. I took a drink of bitter wine, feeling it warm in my stomach.
When the fire was going strong, some men pulled a skinned ibex onto a spit. The head and horns were intact, the light of the fire playing over its features in a macabre dance, as though they had caught the Krampus himself and were roasting the devil for our dinner. As the beast turned over the fire, its skin crackling from the heat, serpentine shadows cascaded over the crystals of the grotto. The entrance to the cave cut away to reveal the sky, a clear, moonless sheet of darkness. The Icemen talked and laughed. I watched them, fascinated by all that I didn’t understand.
I had been watching Ciba carefully since the hot spring, trying to see if there were other clues to her heritage. There was no evidence that she was any different from the others. Yet, her brown eyes were the only evidence I needed: Ciba, this young woman carrying Aki’s child, was a Montebianco descendant.
Maybe Ciba had noticed how I stared at her, because she gestured for me to join her by the fire. Her manner was friendly, welcoming. She didn’t seem to have any hesitation about me, no fear or prejudice. She moved over, making room on her deerskin for me. It was such a small gesture, this invitation, but it was one I hadn’t been given in a very long time, and I felt grateful to her, the way I had felt grateful when Luca had sat with me at lunch at school when the others rejected me. Ciba’s gesture opened a possibility to me, something that I had not considered: that I might find genuine friendship among the Icemen. That I might feel the same kind of connection that Leopold had felt with these people. That it was not my duty to be there, but my choice.
The smell of roasting meat filled me with hunger. I moved close to the fire, warming my legs and drying my hair. My feet tingled as the chill of the night melted away. How strange it felt, to sit there so openly, my feet exposed. A lifetime of hiding them had made me self-conscious to the point of neurosis. But there was no reason to hide my feet from these people. They were all like me.
Soon, everyone gathered around the ibex. Its charred head strained into the air, its horns curling, its eyes burned away. There were no plates, no eating utensils, nothing but a communal bowl filled with slices of the roasted ibex. The bowl was passed from person to person. By the time the bowl came to me, there was one piece of meat left, grizzled flesh on a knob of joint. I looked at the fat-marbled flesh, a dull brown bone lurking below sinew, feeling nauseated. I noticed that Aki was watching me, so I took the meat and passed the bowl. I couldn’t imagine eating it with my fingers, but when I looked around, I saw that everyone else was doing just that: biting the meat off the bone and washing it down with wine. I reminded myself that Leopold had participated in their rituals, learned their language, ate with them, slept with them, learned their customs. I picked up the meat and took a bite.
“Are you in pain?” Aki asked, gesturing to my stitches. He sat on the other side of Ciba, putting his hand on her leg possessively.
“No,” I said, sitting up straighter, trying to mask how uncomfortable I felt. Everything was so strange and disorienting. It took all of my strength to remain calm. “It’s just . . .” I waved my hand to the others, to the fire, to all of it. “All of this is so strange for me.”
“When I was below,” Aki said, “I felt that way. I did not understand your ways. I felt afraid.”
“How long were you at the castle?”
He gave me a blank stare, as if he didn’t understand the question, and I remembered what Vita had said: the Icemen did not record time the way we did. Years and months and days, all the ways we tracked our experience of living in the world, meant nothing to him.
“You were a child then?” I asked. “When you lived with Vita?”
“I was a child,” he said. “Kryschia brought me down the mountain, to her home. It was warm and dark, without the sounds we have here. There were so many windows in every room. She taught me to speak your language and to eat your food. It was very different from our life here, but I soon liked it.”
I did a quick calculation. Aki looked to be between twenty-five and thirty years old. Basil had come over twenty years before, and Sal and Greta had not been at the castle until more recently. They hadn’t been there when Aki and Uma were living at the castle, but Dolores had been.
“And Ciba?” I asked, fishing for information. “Has she ever seen the castle? Or met Vita?”
He shook his head. “Ciba was not alive when the kryschia last came.”
I glanced at Ciba. She couldn’t be older than twenty, I realized, which explained why Vita had not discovered her brown eyes.
Ciba was watching us, her eyes narrowed, as if trying to understand our foreign words. “Does she understand anything we’re saying?” I asked Aki.
Aki shook his head. “She never learned your language. Very few of us want to learn it. Uma must fight, sometimes, to make the group understand that your ways can help us.”
The bowl returned to me, this time filled with thick cuts of meat. I took a piece and ate. It was good, gamey and rich, and I was hungry. I took another bite and washed it down with sour wine. The meat was warm, tender, the skin crunchy, an aftertaste of salt lingering on my tongue. A rush of chemicals hit my blood as I ate. My strength was beginning to return.
We sat together, me and Aki and Ciba, in the warmth of the fire. It was our first meal together, and while I did not understand it fully then, I felt the significance of our meeting deep in my heart: with the three of us together, a perfect configuration had been put in place, a triangle that would form the foundation of my life thereafter.
Ciba leaned into me, and I could smell her wet hair, feel the heat from her body, see the veins snaking through the transparent skin of her hands. Aki poured me more wine and made sure the bowl of meat came to me again. Their proximity made me feel every inch of myself—my arms, my neck, my heart—everything tingled with the pleasure of discovery. Nothing had prepared me for it, that sense of belonging I felt when I was with them, but I knew that this was what Vita had tried to describe. I felt how rare and precious this sense of belonging was, and how much I needed it. For the first time, I understood what drove Vita to protect the Icemen at all costs.
After a while, Ciba stood and walked from group to group around the fire, her hand resting on her belly, laughing and talking as she swam between pools of firelight and shadow. Everyone loved her, and I understood why: she was warm and friendly and beautiful. Every angle of her pale, alien features was exaggerated in the firelight. Ciba must have thought me equally strange. Every so often I caught her staring at me, as if I were the most exotic thing she had ever encountered. The others’ reactions to me fell somewhere between Jabi’s violent dislike and Ciba’s fascination: I was dangerous and invasive and marvelous, something to be watched with fear or wonder.
Aki opened the package of goat cheese I had brought from the mews and refilled our cups with wine. Another bowl went around, this one with roasted nuts, the shell charred black, the taste—when I put one in my mouth—buttery sweet. Eventually, Ciba returned to us, bringing a bowl of roasted beets from the fire. The food was simple, but it was a feast to me, a kind of homecoming celebration.
When the fire had burned down, a woman sang, her voice lifting into the still night air. Aki fell back onto the animal skin. Ciba lay by his side and gestured for me to join them, and so I lay next to her, listening to the music.
“That,” Aki said, gesturing so I looked to the ceiling of the grotto, “is our past.”
Above, the rock surface was covered with drawings. I saw the valley that led down to Nevenero. An avalanche falling over a group of people. A man with a spear, and a pack of ibex, their horns curling. Enormous figures standing on the top of mountain peaks. Then, at the far side of the ceiling, there was a representation of the arcade of caves, the stone huts, the pool of mineral water.
“There,” Aki said, pointing to the figures standing on the peaks of the mountains. “We came from this place at the top of the world. Before us, there were no people, only giants made of ice. They were very powerful because they never felt cold. They had ice palaces and ice tools. But they were not happy. They were masters of all they saw, but they were alone. And so they created us from ice. We were tall and pale, like them. But we were not strong or immortal. We felt the winds and the snow. We needed fire and the fur of animals. The giants hated our fires. The heat melted their ice palace, and so they banished us from the top of the world. Since then, we have been here, far from the Ice Giants.” Aki pointed to the very far end of the cave, to a castle in black coal, clouds hanging over it. “Now we are closer to you.”
My gaze fell upon a figure with long white hair and a black dress. Vita. Their protector. The wise woman who brought medicine from another world. Their kryschia.
We sat there together, the three of us side by side, as the woman sang. The fire had died to embers by then, and a freezing wind blew down from the mountaintop. When the fire was gone, and the song faded to silence, the three of us stood and left the grotto together.
Aki and Ciba’s hut was dark when we arrived. We slipped inside and soon Aki had a fire going in the fireplace. It burned weakly, throwing dull light over the bearskins strewn over the stone floor. As the flames grew, I saw that the hut was furnished with a wood-framed bed, a wooden table and chairs, a shelf made of knotted birch logs, some wooden boxes, and a stack of blankets. The walls were bare, and there were no embellishments, but it seemed sturdy and, as the fire warmed the air, and the smell of burning cedar filled the hut, more comfortable than the large, drafty rooms of the castle.
I warmed myself by the fire. Seeing that I was cold, Ciba brought me a wool blanket, and wrapped it over my shoulders. I had eaten well and drank too much wine. Soon, I lay down on the bearskin and fell asleep.
I jolted awake at the sound of voices. Ciba and Aki sat together at the table talking. I tried to sit, and a rush of pain flooded through me. Everything hurt. The pills had worn off, leaving me sore and aching. The sensation began at the base of my skull and spread, warm and fluid as blood, leaving me dizzy. My vision blurred, and so I focused on the table, on Aki and Ciba.
How distant Bert Monte seemed to me then. How far from her I had traveled. It had happened in small steps, each one tiny in itself but—when I looked back at myself from the vantage of how far I had come—staggering in its distance. My old life was gone, burned to ashes, and there was nothing left ahead but these strange people and endless vistas of ice. All the pressure of the past months collected in my chest, heavy as a rock, pressing down, pressing hard, until I could not breathe. Panic, swift and electric, moved through me. My skin moistened with sweat. My breath quickened. The room spun around and around and around. I gasped for air, buried my face in my hands, and sobbed with fear.
I was dimly aware of movement from the table, and then Ciba pressed a jug of water into my hands. I recognized the jug—its pattern was the same as Dolores’s china in the salon, the Bavarian farm scene with roosters painted in French blue, a gift from Vita, like so much else. It was a small thing, but seeing this familiar object, this human object, calmed me. I drank the water, my hands trembling. Ciba was clearly worried and gestured for me to drink more. In the face of her kindness I began to cry.
Ciba squatted down onto the fur, the weight of her stomach ready to topple her. She took my head between her hands and looked at me, her large brown eyes warm and reassuring. She wiped the tears from my cheeks and spoke to me. I didn’t know what she said, but her voice was soft, maternal, and while she was younger than me, I was comforted in a way I had not felt since my mother died.