Chapter 5: Trap is Sprung
Gerda woke with a start, the dream of falling through ice still clutching her throat. She was in a small, unfamiliar room of rough-hewn wood, a borrowed blanket scratching her chin. The kindly woodsman and his wife snored softly in the next room. She’d told them she was searching for her lost friend. She hadn’t told them about the whispers on the wind that had guided her this far north, whispers that sounded like Kai’s voice, stretched thin and desperate.
The air in the room had changed. It wasn’t cold. It was still. A deep, waiting stillness that pushed against her eardrums. And there was a light—a soft, blue phosphorescence—seeping under her door from the main room of the cottage.
She rose, her wool socks silent on the plank floor. She pushed the door open.
The main room was empty, the fire reduced to embers. The light came from the far wall. Where the woodsman’s antler trophy had hung, there now swirled a surface of molten silver, pooled within the frame like mercury. It was a mirror. But it didn’t reflect the room. It showed a corridor of jagged, glowing ice.
Her breath hitched. She knew that place. She’d seen it in nightmares for years.
She took a step closer. The image in the mirror shifted, swimming inward, down the frozen hall. It stopped at the entrance to a vast chamber. And there he was.
Kai.
He was on his knees, wearing only thin linen pants, his torso bare and criss-crossed with faint, pink marks. He was shivering violently, his arms wrapped around himself. He looked up, his eyes scanning something just beyond the mirror’s view, his face a mask of raw fear.
“Gerda?” His voice was a dry rasp, but it was his. Truly his. Not a whisper on the wind, but his familiar, breaking tone. “Please… I can’t… it’s so cold. She’s… she’s coming back.”
Gerda’s hand flew to her mouth. “Kai,” she whispered to the glass.
He heard her. His eyes snapped to where her reflection would be, meeting her gaze through the impossible distance. A spark of the old Kai flashed there—the boy who’d shared his bread with sparrows, who’d held her hand when she skinned her knee. “Help me. Please, Gerda. You found me before. Find me now. Follow the river of black ice. Hurry.”
The image blurred, dissolving back into a swirl of silver before settling into a reflection of her own horrified face. The mirror was just a mirror again. The antlers were back on the wall.
She didn’t stop to think. Thinking was for warm, safe places. She pulled on her boots, her coat, and slipped out into the pre-dawn gloom. The river of black ice. She’d crossed a stream yesterday that looked like frozen oil. She ran towards it.
The forest here was not friendly. The pines grew close, their branches knitting a roof that blocked the weak morning light. Their needles were a dull, grayish green, and they seemed to lean in to watch her pass. The only sound was the crunch of her boots on frost-hardened moss and the mad hammering of her heart.
For hours, she followed the sinister, slick ribbon of the black stream. The air grew thinner, sharper. Her cheeks burned, then went numb. Just as her legs began to shake with exhaustion, the trees abruptly gave way.
Before her stretched a plain of flawless white, and at its centre, piercing the low, bruised sky, was a palace of ice. It wasn’t beautiful. It was a wound in the world—a colossal, jagged spike driven into the earth, throwing off razor-edged spires. It hurt to look at. The black stream flowed directly towards a dark, arched entrance that looked like a waiting mouth.
Gerda’s courage, which had been a burning coal in her chest, guttered. This was it. This was the heart of every childhood fear born from her old tale. She forced her legs to move.
The entrance swallowed her. Inside, the cold was intelligent. It pressed against her, probing the seams of her coat, seeking her warmth like a predator. The blue light pulsed from the very walls. She moved through empty, echoing halls, following a terrible pull in her gut. She knew the way.
She stumbled into the bedchamber.
And there he was, just as the mirror had shown. He was on the floor by the great bed of furs, crumpled on his side. He wasn’t shivering now. He was utterly still.
“Kai!”
She fell to her knees beside him, her hands fluttering, afraid to touch. “Kai, it’s me. I’m here.” She rolled him onto his back. His skin was pale, too pale, but his chest rose and fell. His eyes were closed. She brushed his hair from his forehead. “Wake up. We have to go. We have to leave now.”
His eyelids fluttered. Opened.
They were not the eyes from the mirror. The fear was gone. The recognition was gone. They were flat, polished stones of winter sky. Empty. Cold.
A smile touched his lips. It was a foreign expression, thin and wrong.
“Gerda,” he said, his voice a calm, hollow echo. “You’re late.”
Before she could process the words, his hands shot up. They locked around her upper arms with a strength that bruised. In one brutal, fluid motion, he shoved her away from him, sending her sprawling backward onto the hard, slick ice.
The wind was knocked from her. She stared up, gasping, as Kai rose to his feet. He moved with a languid, unfamiliar grace, looking down at her as one would look at an insect.
From the shadows beside the jagged ice throne, a shape coalesced. The Snow Queen stepped into the light, her gown flowing like mist. She did not look at Gerda. Her eyes were only for Kai. She came to stand beside him, her hand resting possessively on the back of his neck.
“You see, my pet?” she said, her voice a silken caress. “I told you she would come running. The little hearth-helper, always following the scent of warmth.”
Kai leaned into her touch, his eyes never leaving Gerda’s stunned face.
“Now,” the Queen said, her tone shifting to one of mild instruction. “Show our guest her place.”
Kai nodded. He walked toward Gerda, who scrambled to get her feet under her. He was upon her before she could stand. He grabbed her by the front of her coat and hauled her upright, then spun her around, locking one arm across her chest, pinning her back against him. His body was a column of chill against her spine.
“Kai, stop!” she cried, thrashing. “What’s she done to you? It’s me!”
He buried his face in her hair and inhaled, as if smelling a flower. “I know,” he whispered, and the warmth of his breath was the most horrible thing of all. “That’s the point.”
The Snow Queen glided forward until she was a breath away. She raised a hand. Gerda braced for a slap, a blast of frost.
Instead, the Queen placed her palm gently, almost lovingly, against Gerda’s cheek.
The touch was absolute.
Cold fired through Gerda’s nerves, a flash-freeze that raced from her skin to her marrow. She tried to scream, but her throat was already seizing. The cold spread down her neck, across her shoulders. It was not the cold of winter; it was the cold of oblivion, of nothingness. It solidified the air in her lungs, crystallized the blood in her veins.
She felt Kai’s arms release her, but she could not fall. She was held. A faint, crackling hiss filled her ears as the air around her thickened, shimmered, turned to solid clarity.
She was inside it. A perfect, transparent coffin of ice, from her numb toes to the roots of her hair. She could not blink. She could not suck in a frozen breath. She could only stare straight ahead, her eyes locked in the only direction they had been facing.
Towards the bed. The massive, rumpled bed of polar bear furs.
The Snow Queen looped her arm through Kai’s, leaning her head on his shoulder. “Watch,” she commanded, her voice muffled but perfectly clear through the ice. “Watch and learn what you lost.”
The Queen turned from the frozen block containing Gerda’s horror. She walked a few paces toward the center of the room, a deliberate performance. She glanced over her shoulder at Kai, who stood waiting, his expression blank and expectant.
“Disrobe me,” she said, the command casual, as if asking for a cup of wine.
Kai moved forward, his movements fluid from practice. His fingers, which had once clumsily untied Gerda’s bonnet strings, now found the nearly invisible fastenings at the Queen’s shoulders and back with sure precision. The gown, a fabric of woven frost and shadow, sighed open.
It pooled at her feet like melting night. She stood revealed, her back to Gerda, a sculpture of immortal, pallid skin and severe curves. Kai’s breath fogged in the air. He sank to his knees behind her, the ice barely muffling the sound of his descent.
The Queen turned, looking at him. “You may taste me,” she said, her voice low and permissive. “Show our little spectator how a true devotee worsires.”
Kai obeyed without hesitation. He leaned forward, his hands spreading the cool flesh of her folds. He buried his face between her legs with a desperate, hungry noise.
Gerda saw it all. From her perfect, frozen prison, every detail was crystalline. The way Kai’s shoulders tensed. The obscene, wet sound of his mouth working on her. The Queen’s head tilted back, a strand of her frozen hair cracking with the movement.
But the Queen’s face swung back around. Her crystalline eyes found Gerda’s through the ice. Locked. Held.
She maintained that searing, unbearable eye contact as she reached down and tangled a hand in Kai’s hair, guiding his rhythm. A soft, sighing moan escaped her lips, a plume of frost in the air. Her free hand drifted down to cup her own breast, pinching the nipple until it stood a hardened, bluish peak.
“Yes,” she breathed, her gaze drilling into Gerda’s soul. “Just there. Use your tongue. Lap at your Queen’s pussy like the starving thing you are.”
Kai groaned against her, a vibration Gerda could almost feel. His fingers dug into the Queen’s thighs, pressing them wider. The Queen’s breath began to hitch, her placid mask dissolving into something raw and greedy. Her hips pushed back against his face, riding it.
“You see his hunger,” she said to Gerda, her voice tight but clear, each word a spike. “It belongs to me. This is what you traveled so far to find. This is your Kai now.”
A tremor ran through the Queen’s body, starting deep within. Her knees trembled. Her grip on Kai’s hair became vicelike, forcing him deeper as her back arched. A raw, guttural cry was torn from her throat, a sound of exquisite conquest.
Her climax pulsed against his mouth, and she ground herself down onto his eager, servicing face, milking every second of it. Her eyes, wide and blazing with victory, never once blinked, never once strayed from Gerda’s imprisoned gaze. It was a violation poured directly into Gerda’s mind.
Finally, shuddering, she released Kai’s head. He slumped back on his heels, his chin glistening wet in the blue light, his chest heaving. The Queen turned fully to face Gerda again, a slight, satisfied smile on her swollen lips. She ran a thumb over Kai’s moist mouth, then slipped it inside, letting him suck it clean.
“Good,” she murmured to him. Then, to the ice, she said, “The lesson is just beginning, little one.”