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After a dragonback ride from the rim to a barren location on the crater floor west of Meteolumijärvi—a ride that did not, to both Reeve and Walter's surprise, involve either of them dying—Reeve dismounted Moody to find Millie still talking excitedly to Leaf, Këyvf, and Eero where they stood near Toothy some dozen yards away.

"Evie," Walter said as he completed his dismount and joined Reeve, "could we review what's happening? I have to admit I'm having a little trouble following what we're doing here."

Reeve watched Millie gesticulate with one hand while pointing with her staff toward Toothy. "How far back should I go?" Reeve said.

Walter did not respond right away.

"OK," Reeve said, "from the top. Game world is not pausing. May be other Level 4 AIs. Dusk was kidnapped. Deilmarkt's in Vyrdenh. Dawn is a bad-bass melióδin. I'm not totally sure how Eero factors into all this. Thomanji'yheri is MIA. Someone was impersonating him. Their crows led you here. Dawn also thinks something fishy is going on here. Possibly her mother. And my mother will probably pull us any moment…if she doesn't reappear to stagger around on six legs."

Walter's brow arched. "I was actually following pretty well until the very end there, Honey."

"That's all I got. Did I miss anything you know of?"

Walter looked around. "Are we in the north?"

Reeve considered the snow on top of snow that surrounded them. "I doubt we could get much more north without starting to go south."

"Then, yes, I can add that the rulers of that place where I didn't have very good games of chess with Millie—"

"Neecrus?"

"—yes, there. You know the rulers?"

"Sea Mist and Larry."

"You might want to check my facts with Leaf, but Sea Mist and Larry seemed to think that someone had stolen their people."

Reeve tapped her chest at the sternum. "We, we stole their people. Which they were quite happy about."

"No, not the undead ones," Walter said. "Well, yes, I mean the ones that were stolen also aren't dead, but they aren't undead." He shook his head and frowned. "Wait. I don't think that's what I meant. Let's just say the alive ones."

"Someone stole normal citizens from Neecrus? Other than the volunteers who came with us?"

"Yes, if I understood correctly."

"When?"

"By the time Leaf and I were back there, they were gone."

"When did you go back there?"

"Leaf and I ended up there when that first town you and I visited this trip was attacked. The one with the other Queen."

"That was Dusk! And no one called her a Queen! They call her 'Her Grace.'"

"Yes."

"You went from Deilmarkt back to Morbeet through the portal?"

"Yes."

"And the citizens were gone?"

"That is my understanding."

"Then they'd have had to be dissapearing at the same time we were bringing the volunteers through the portal."

"I guess so."

"What made you remember that now?"

"Sea Mist said the people who left the city—not the ones with us, the other ones—traveled north to a place called Iced."

"Wyste."

"Yes, that sounds right."

"That is where we are. Wyste." Reeve looked around the crater, and then her gaze rose and stayed elevated. "Did you really name them 'Scowly' and 'Angry'?"

Walter followed his daughter's gaze and watched the two adult dragons circle. Their periwinkle bellies were dark against the pale sky, and their counterclockwise orbits were framed by the clockwise rotation of the clouds that circled the crater. "It was an easy way for me to remember who was who."

"Those are the names that now appear in your Companion Log?"

"I don't have a Companion Log. Well, I do, but that's for Bunce. I have a separate Colony Log now."

"And those are the names that appear there?" Reeve dropped her gaze from the circling dragons to her father, who nodded slowly. She examined his concerned expression and suspected there was more to the story than he was sharing, but she found she didn't have the energy to pull that particular thread. "Let's go see what we can learn in town. Your winged colony will stay nearby?"

Walter nodded. "They apparently found a very walrus-dense area just north of here, based on how many now-deceased walruses are mentioned in the little notes in the Colony Log. This is part of their summer hunting grounds, it turns out."

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Reeve sucked a piece of fish skin from between her teeth, nodded, and turned to walk to where Millie and the other three were talking. As she approached the group, Toothy's head swung in Walter's direction and hung there for a moment before the beast crouched and launched itself skyward. A gust from behind Reeve signalled that Moody had done the same.

Millie's animated gestures and stream of words continued through the departure of the dragons and did not trail off until Reeve had been standing, watching the four, for almost thirty seconds, during which time Millie seemed to be explaining some of the finer points of the staff Dawn had given her.

When Millie finally stopped and took a long breath, Reeve said to Leaf, "How's it going? Learning more of 'her past'?"

Leaf tilted her head fractionally to the side.

Reeve nodded. "Was she still responding to the first question you'd asked?"

Leaf shook her head slowly, eyes widening slightly.

"You hadn't even had a chance to ask your first question, had you?" Reeve said.

Leaf gave Reeve a nearly imperceptible shake of the head.

"Oh, be nice," Millie said. "I'm excited!"

"I'm glad," Reeve said, "and we could all already tell you're excited. Should we get on into town? Looked like, what, a half-hour hike from here?"

It was just over half an hour later that the five reached the outskirts of Meteolumijärvi. The settlement had no defensive structures at its border, and the buildings along its edge were spaced irregularly, making it somewhat difficult to guess where a street might be originating from the surrounding crater floor. Eero guided them toward two low buildings, and it was not until they were fairly close that Reeve realized the buildings—all of the buildings in sight—were not snow-covered masonry, wood, or pete but free-standing ice.

"I guess you two aren't the only people around here who can shape ice with your magic," Millie said to Dawn and Eero.

"A specialty of casters of north," Eero said over his shoulder.

Reeve saw Millie surreptitiously tilting her staff at the buildings they had begun passing.

"What's the plan?" Reeve said.

"Louhi runs an inn," Eero said. "We find her there."

Reeve noticed that the villagers whom they occasionally passed wore fur-lined ice cloaks in varying off-white shades of the same cut as Eero's cloak. Reeve also realized that Leaf, Këyvf, and her dad were still wearing the clothes in which they'd travelled from the south, and the incongruous garb was drawing sideways glances from the passersby. So, only Eero fit seamlessly in the streets of the ice village. But, thus far, none of the locals had said a word to them or made an issue of the party's appearance.

Millie paused her staff's interrogation of objects they were passing. "Dawn, I'd gotten the impression that we were behind enemy lines here. It'd sounded like your trips into the Wyste in the past were basically raids. This seems…pretty caszh."

"I was wondering the same thing," Reeve said.

Walking at Eero's shoulder, Dawn nodded. "I've found that the farther north I've come, the greater the distance from the southern border, the less suspicion I've drawn. But this level of indifference is a surprise to me, too."

Eero tilted his head toward a frozen arch in the front of a building they were approaching, and the party angled toward it. Three steep stairs rose to the opening, and the tops of the stairs were not the frosty bluish white of the rest of the building but a dark black.

Eero and Dawn had mounted the stairs and were going to brush through the split animal skin that hung down over the opening when Eero looked back and saw Reeve poking the black surface of the first step with the toe of her boot.

Eero paused. "The Meteolumijärviläiset apply a coating to their steps and other surfaces made of dust of the rock that broke from the heavens. Prevents falls."

Reeve glanced back at the snow-covered street. "It doesn't get everywhere? It seems like it'd get tracked everywhere like sand from the beach."

Eero shook his head. "Those who can shape a town of ice from snow can lock in the ice what they will."

"Ominous," Millie said and pointed her staff at the step.

Eero and Dawn brushed through the hanging animal skin, and the rest of the party followed.

As the skin fell closed behind them, Reeve and Millie paused to take in their surroundings, causing Walter to stop and peer between them and Leaf and Këyvf to push past them and follow Eero and Dawn.

"It's like we're inside of a," Millie said, "well, outside of a—"

"—walrus, I'm guessing," Reeve said.

Every wall of the substantial room, which held four large rectangular tables, formed from ice, and a long bar, also of ice, was covered by skins similar to that through which they'd just brushed. Half a dozen patrons sat along the tables on squat, meteor-dust-topped cylinders of ice. The floor was also covered with the meteoric powder. The ceiling was unadulterated ice, and pale blue light filtered through. A wide hallway exited the back of the room.

Millie nudged Reeve with an elbow, and Reeve saw that Eero, Dawn, Leaf, and Këyvf were standing at the near corner of the bar waiting for the attention of a bartender who was talking with two patrons at the far end of the bar, where the patrons sat on cylinders of ice similar to those at the tables, but taller. Reeve and Millie joined the others, and Walter followed. In the time it took them to cross to the bar, Reeve dismissed all of the patrons as non-essential NPCs and turned her attention to sizing up the bartender. She was a young woman, somewhere between Reeve's and Dawn's ages in-game, but she held herself with an authority that seemed to surpass even that held by Dawn and Dusk after their years of evolution in Reeve's absence. She was resting one hand on the bar, the other hand casually on her hip. She wore a shirt made of dark fabric under a loose-fitting, long-sleeved tunic of animal skin—more walrus, Reeve guessed—above flowing pants of the same material. The loose-fitting clothing made it difficult for Reeve to assess the woman's physique and whether she would be a melee threat, but Reeve had a feeling it would be best not to find out.

The woman glanced in their direction and raised one eyebrow as the corner of her lip curled into a half-smile. She tapped the bar with the fingers of the hand on which she leaned to acknowledge the party's presence and returned to her conversation with the patrons.

A minute later, the patrons to whom the bartender was talking burst into laughter, and the woman smiled, turned, and walked toward the party. Reeve could see that she was appraising them in the same way Reeve had appraised her a moment ago. Stopping across the bar from Eero and Dawn, the woman planted both hands on its surface and quickly made eye contact with all seven of the party members, ending with Eero.

"What say, Witch?" The woman said.

Eero snorted quietly, shrugged one shoulder, and then the two reached across the bar and clasped hands like arm wrestlers would. From where Reeve stood, she saw on the woman's wrist a tattoo of two equilateral triangles that met at a shared vertex. One triangle was filled, one was empty. A figure eight or lemniscate was centered on the shared vertex, crossing the axis of the triangles and orbiting the angular shape to either side like the electron clouds Reeve had learned about in Chemistry.

Releasing Eero's hand, the woman nodded at Dawn, and the two clasped hands in the same way.

"I have news for you," the woman said, and Dawn nodded. "Kaisa will be here soon, and I'll be able to leave her to the bar and kitchen. Until then…," she released Dawn's hand, reached behind the bar, and placed in quick succession on the bar top five shot glasses, into which she poured a bright yellow liquid. "Strega," she said with a smile and pushed the glasses across the bar. Glancing at Reeve and Millie, she placed two full-sized glass steins on the bar top and said, "And melt water for these pups. Find an empty table. I'll join you once Kaisa's here."

Dawn, Eero, Leaf, and Këyvf each took a shot glass and walked toward a table. Suppressing a frown, Reeve took one of the steins, and Millie did the same. They followed the others to a table, leaving Walter to stretch to the bar top to retrieve the remaining shot glass.

"You," the woman said, "I did not think I'd be seeing back so soon."