There were two ways back from a party on New Years: the safe way or the dangerous way.
Terry meant to take the dangerous way, but was misinformed of the contents of the punch and had to forgo such hazardous joys. Then she meant to take the safe way, but she was a stranger in the neighborhood and turned left on Elm instead of right.
So Terry took the wrong way, and things happened as they would. Three turns down a tumbled path and who knew which way was home, or barely even which way was up? Oh, it was too late for such things.
So she kept driving, because why not and she had snow tires; whatever was the worst that could happen, they’d stop. The night was clear and the year was still sparkling new and there was no reason not to go and nothing for it. She turned left on a hunch, right on a whim, then three lefts in a row because her right arm felt itchy and she wanted to spite it.
The first sign was the snowflakes. The wind was just right to send them slipping over the windshield and off the hood of the car as chilled water, catching them for brief seconds. But after about ten minutes, they grew fatter, and stopped melting. She flipped the windshield wipers on and watched them grudgingly scoot free, scraping against the glass with their reluctance.
At some point the stars winked at her, and it was only shortly after that that she found herself passing the first snow structures. At first only tiny blobs in the distance, Terry was soon cruising through a village of squat, stout little cottages of congealed ice and slush. Periwinkle and lime lights twinkled past sheet-frosted windows, all lit by the comforting glow of snowball lampposts.
This confused Terry, and for a time she wondered if she indeed had taken the dangerous way home and was bleeding out in a ditch with only dying hallucinations as company. But that was silly, so her body ignored the fancies of her mind (as was usual) and kept her firmly on the road even as it faded from gravel to dirt, dirt to slush, and finally to a lightly snowed path through a grove of pines so thoroughly covered in frosting that they put ice cream cakes to shame.
It was at this point, to Terry’s everlasting annoyance if not sorrow, that her beloved, faithful car, veteran of many miles, gave up in despair as its battery noisily froze itself to death. Neither repeated attempts at reinition, nor thumping the hood, nor swearing would force its tires forwards one more inch; it was resigned to remain where it was, to become an unusually boxy snowdrift come hell or sleetstorm.
Terry was tired. Terry was angry. Terry very much had wanted to be drunk four hours ago. Terry was covered in snowflakes that still seemed very much reluctant to melt, even the ones landing directly on her exposed skin, which was making her look a bit like a snowman. Terry also needed to find a place to get some help, which was why it was very helpful that her car’s battery had died as its license plate brushed against the very front door of a sumptuous, crystalline palace, rimmed in rime, surmounted with snowflakes, and filled with frost.
She tried knocking, and nearly lost the skin from her knuckles. A heavy tread, a thud, a bump, a crunch, and the door swung wide.
“Good night,” said the doorman. He was about ten feet tall, thickly furred, and had tiny little pinpoints of black eyes hidden underneath a veil of hairy forehead. Also, tusks. “Welcome to Winter.”
Terry briskly but politely made it known that her car was broken and did he have a phone or something oh my name is Terry what is yours.
“Bergmann,” said Bergmann, “servant of Lady Winter. I do not have a phone. I do not know what a phone is. But I can help you, if you do as I say.”
Terry informed Bergmann that she had a can of mace, but politely. She didn’t want to offend the man too much, because frankly, she was freezing to death and there was a snowflake in her eyelashes that seemed to stuck there.
Bergmann listened to what she had to say, cocking his head occasionally, almost like an owl. “You may choose and take any three objects within the palace of Lady Winter,” he said, ignoring her last comment. “You may not choose more or less than three. Then you may depart for home. But if you fail to reach home before dawn, Lady Winter will extract payment from you.”
Terry had a credit card, that didn’t worry her. Did Lady Winter have a garage?
“I do not know what either of those things are,” repeated Bergmann. “You should choose, and choose quickly. Lady Winter will begin to stir soon, and you will fare better with a good head start.”
Terry brushed past him and started searching the house, opening and shutting random doors.
One room was full of at least seven hundred and ninety-four bears – black, white, brown, and slightly blue. All of them were asleep, and snoring. That door was shut extremely carefully.
A second door led to a gallery of extraordinary icicles, all keen-edged and jagged, with vicious cutting edges and wickedly needle-sharp points. Their grips were crafted with sheets of thick walrus-hide leather. Terry didn’t need a weapon – she had some mace, and that was good enough for her. But she took one anyways, because hey, conversation piece. And she had room for two more.
Another was not a room, but the sky – a door opening onto an endless, hazy expanse of grey, washed-out cloud that turned the whole world into a dirty eggshell. It made her dizzy, and she slammed the door shut a bit more forcefully than necessary.
A fourth handle, a fourth turn, a fourth door. This appeared to be the inside of an ice hut, complete with a seemingly infinite supply of empty and half-empty glass bottles and a sweaty, fishy sort of scent. A small fire crackled in an iron pot, and half of the biggest trout she’d ever seen simmered in a pan above it. Terry took the fish, because she was hungry and the last thing she’d eaten were some quarter-cooked vol-au-vents before midnight. Besides, she still had room for something to fix her car with or something.
The fifth door opened out of the largest snowman she’d ever seen, its head somewhere high above her and obscured by its massive, rippling pectoral muscles. Terry couldn’t help noticing that it was so anatomically correct that it very nearly became incorrect. A faint stirring high above showed that it was leaning down to look at her, and she closed the door quickly.
What lay behind door number six? An ice-block stable containing a white yak twice as wide as Terry’s car, browsing idly from a bin of frost-speckled clover. It looked up to greet her, and puffed warm air from its nose.
She patted it. It felt like burp-scented velvet. And that – and some of the harness from the wall too, because they were really a package deal and thus only one thing, really, when you got down to it – made three.
Bergmann watched over her as she bustled her way outside. Then he helped her attach the harness to the car, because really, how on earth could just ropes and things be that complicated it was quite ridiculous. Terry didn’t know how people managed before cars.
“Much more slowly,” said Bergmann, “judging by the speed you came in at.”
Terry thanked him for the sarcasm and wished him good day and gave him her address, so they could bill her.
“If Lady Winter doesn’t reach you,” said Bergmann, “no payment is needed. If she does, it will be taken on the spot. This,” he said very slowly and politely, as if to a toddler, “is a fair trade.”
Terry thanked him for the ominous threat, clambered onto the luggage rack of her car, swished the reins, and was off through the snows of Winter at a fast, yak-puffing clip. Sleigh bells jingled-jangled on the reins like the obnoxious noisemakers that Terry had twirled no less than three hours past, filling her with sadness yet again for the hangover that would never be. Also irritation that that same snowflake seemed to have set up permanent residence in her upper left eyelash.
Winter closed in around her again, a sea of pines filled with unsavoury eyes that seemed to follow her. The road was even more snow-filled than before, and she doubted that she would have been able to move her car under its own power at all, even if the battery were working. Which reminded her, she’d need to pay for that. And borrow someone else’s car for work. Maybe she could carpool. Or just ask for time off. They’d probably make her use sick days for it, the bastards. Well then she’d just have to
oh my, there was a creature on the car hood with her and it was trying to eat her kneecap.
Terry booted the little squealing pest and watched it flop into a snowdrift up to its neck, backside-first. It glared at her from its chilly prison, and bared fangs too big to fit in its mouth.
It was a goblin, obviously. Terry had no experience with this sort of thing, but that’s just what goblins looked like. All twenty-seven of them swarming up over the car’s sides, shimmying along the yak’s reins, jabbering and shrieking and making obscene gestures.
Terry had good, strong boots. Her mother had given them to her three years ago, and the worst they’d picked up since had been some stains on the soles from her dog. They had no-nonsense, tough-as-leather laces, firm metallic buckles, solid, unflinching heels, and toes that had been lovingly steel-capped.
Terry put them to work with great gusto, but even so, this was all a little much for just two feet. It was time for mace, and an exciting time it was until the fourth goblin that reeled away wheezing took the can and the last half-centimeter of her left pointer’s fingernail with it between its teeth. She swore into the wind, fruitlessly flapped her hands at the critters attempting to crawl up her legs, fell over, and nearly split her head open on the walrus-leather-wrapped hilt of the icicle blade.
Oh. Well then, that problem was solved.
What happened over the next few minutes for Terry was something of a blur – a messy, inelegant blur, with lots of fumbling, swearing, breathless cold, and the hack-chop-thud of blades into meat. It reminded her of carving the turkey at thanksgiving, but with less appetizing aromas. By the time she was finished, the icicle blade was a gleaming ruby red stub attached to a hilt, steaming with the heat of gobliny torsos.
Then she threw up. When that was over, she looked up and she was somewhere else. The pines had vanished from around herm, replaced by the snowy little houses of Winter’s village. Calm. Placid.
All the doors were open. Tiny little furry creatures were standing in the streets, shaking their fists and hooting and howling in unison. It sounded like the end of the world as forecast by a herd of Chihuahuas.
Terry thought about yelling out something friendly and welcoming, then thought better about it and clicked the yak faster. She’d had enough small angry creatures trying to bite through her jacket tonight already. The last thing she needed was for a wolf the size of a school bus to peer around the side of the nearest house and snarl at her, which was not what happened next. It was more the size of a tour bus.
Terry had a three-step process to dealing with her dog, and she followed it here as faithfully as she would’ve at home. First, she ignored the wolf and hoped it would go away.
Second, as it closed in on her, she frantically flapped the reins like a deranged chicken’s wings and yelled incoherently at it and hoped it would go away.
Finally, as the drooling jaws began to open wide and the neck aligned itself with the spine, she gave in and threw the fish at it and hoped it would go away.
It made a noise that was a cross between a yelp, a wuff, and a burp, then set to. The sounds of its tearing and gnawing didn’t die down for a full half-mile, by which point Terry’s teeth had nearly stopped chattering. She blew on her hands to warm them up and peered forwards through the shallow veils of snowflakes. The road was more slush and less ice under the crunching footfalls of the yak, the coffee-cream sky was visible in between flurries. She was going to make it.
At this point, she looked up at the sky again.
In the long, long moment that followed as she saw the first sunrays creeping across the fading stars, she heard a sound billowing up from behind her.
Terry made the worst mistake of her life then, which was turning around. She looked Lady Winter full in the eyes, and what she saw nearly drove her blind with reflected snowglare, sending her skidding onto her back and tumbling off the hood of the car – bump bump WHAM onto the road, all over the sound of the suddenly-roaring winds. She hauled herself upright against the reins, cursing, and jumped back aboard the nearest object she could reach, which was the yak, and was promptly flipped off its back head over heels and into a snowdrift.
Terry was not burly, and the snowdrift was not compacted – a natural feature, no creation of the plow this. She shot straight through it like an error and rolled across asphalt. Blessed, comfortable, real-as-dirt-is-real asphalt, coated in a thin layer of wonderfully real, thankfully tiny snowflakes.
Lady Winter’s face hove into view above her, and Terry rescinded her opinions and shut her eyes very quickly.
“You have something of mine,” said Lady Winter. Her voice was hollow, wide as a frozen sea, deep as a glacial rift.
Terry was sure that she’d made it by sunrise. If that wasn’t how this worked, she recommended the Lady get better taste in manservants.
“You have something of mine that was not yours to take.”
Bullpoppy. Terry had taken three things exactly from the Lady, and not only that but she’d lost all three of them.
“Four things. One too many.” And Lady Winter reached out a long, cold, dead hand from her fur-covered greatcoat and touched the snowflake that was clinging, still stuck, to Terry’s upper left eyelash. “A fair trade is a fair trade. You had the chance to take three for a good race. Your loss of the three is no violation of mine, but the fourth is not yours to steal.”
Terry’s mind raced, in circles as minds do under stress. And as she ran in circles through the hamster cage of her head, screaming in blind panic, her body opened her mouth for her and asked “How would you like a car?”
“I do not know what that is,” said Lady Winter.
“That’s fine,” said Terry’s body. “It has snow tires.”
Lady Winter cocked her head to one side, like an owl. She was beautiful, in some ways, Terry supposed. But she suspected she’d liked her better when she wore her coat more thoroughly. It was a lot less bright.
“Fair trade,” repeated Lady Winter. She raised her hand, extended the middle finger, jabbed once, and was gone.
Terry was able to replace her fridge by putting the snowflake at the bottom of a big, insulated crate. So overall, she came out of the deal all right.
The new snow tires cost a fortune though.