Constance awakes shivering. She peels her heavy eyes open. Her breath frosts the air, blurring the space between her and Marek. Blanket slipping down her shoulders, she pushes up.

The room is covered in ice, from the ceiling to the floor, creeping slowly toward the center where they sleep. Her teeth chatter as she takes it all in. Behind the ice, the murals have changed to show skeleton-fae instead, still merry-making, but these pictures dance and move. Couples look directly at Constance and smile blissfully, as if to taunt her. Illuminated letters take up one whole wall, depicting a madcap wedding scene.

TELL HIM YOU LOVE HIM, CONSTANCE WYLF
SIMPLE WORDS TO WARM MORE THAN THYSELF

The A in WARM is painted as a large wedding arch. Beneath it, encased deep inside inches of ever-thickening ice, is a book.

Constance springs up and throws herself at the ice, beating at it, clawing at it. The cold burns her skin and freezes her bones. Blood smears the ice and solidifies, but the ice doesn't yield, doesn't give, only grows...

Marek calls out in alarm. His arms wrap around her, and he drags her, struggling, back to the center of the room.

"The book," she gasps. "We need—"

"You don't need to kill yourself getting it!" He lets her go but puts himself between. His frame covers up the hateful taunt on the wall, and her shoulders release their pent-up tension. "Let me see your hand."

Confused, she looks down, then cries out. The flesh of her right-hand fingers are a bloody mess, shredded and torn and... Nausea crawls up her throat, and she spins and loses it to the floor. Warm hands hold back her hair and help her keep her balance.

"I'm sure it's not as bad as it looks," he says. "Shh, shh, let me see."

Squeezing her eyes shut, she manages to straighten and holds it out for him. The cold numbed it at first, but now feeling is pulsing back in hot, tingling waves, and her face contorts. There's the sound of cloth tearing, and then Marek is wrapping silk around her hand. He talks as he works. "Now, you'd be the first person to tell me to work smarter, not harder. You wanna tell me what that was about?"

He hasn't seen the inscription, she realizes, and she wonders how long she can keep him from it. Because down that path only lies false hope and disaster and ice between them that will never melt. "It's the first book we've seen in here," she murmurs.

"Uh-huh." He finishes his wrap job and lets her hand go. "Well, next time you think the answer is 'attack it', maybe send me."

She nods, eyes coming open. The floor is getting icier, the air more frigid, and despite Marek's light tone of voice, there's no way he doesn't notice it. If they don't get to that book soon, they're going to be encased in ice, just like the statues already are. If they don't freeze to death first.

"But," he adds, hope (terrible, soul-crushing) lilting his voice, "fairies like clever answers, right? There's got to be something hidden we don't see."

Constance winces. Brow drawn, Marek follows her guilty gaze over his shoulder. The frost creeps closer to their feet as he reads, and the walls of ice close further in.

Marek's head tilts. Slowly, stiffly, he glances back at her. "You read this?"

She cringes and steps back. "I'm sorry, Marek, I—"

Her foot slides out from under her in her retreat, and like always, he catches her. "Constance—"

She pulls out of his embrace, dodging around him, but there is nowhere to escape with the ice advancing from every angle. She wraps her arms around herself.

"Constance," he starts again, voice even and far, far too warm.

"Please don't."

"You don't have to mean it."

She can't read the emotion in those words, and she's not sure whether to be grateful for that or to despair, because she wants to. She wishes she could understand what he sees in her because she never chased him. She never gave him a reason to, no matter what dreams came to her at night. Because that's all they were: dreams.

"You don't have to mean it, Constance." His voice is steady somehow, despite the way her teeth chatter, and she wraps her arms tighter around herself. "That's the catch. That's the clever out."

"I can't do it," she whispers.

For half a second, the crackling ice is the only sound. When Marek speaks again, his voice is tight—angry even—in a way she's never heard before. "You can't even pretend?"

"I—" Her voice catches in her throat, and tears burn her eyes. "I can't lie."

"I think you might forgive yourself when it saves your life." His voice is as sharp as the blades of the ever-growing icicles above.

Emotion chokes her, no matter how much she swallows it. Drowning on it, she drops to her knees. The ice creeps onto her dress.

"Well how about this?" He comes around in front of her to kneel. His hair is mussed, and the shadows from last night linger beneath his eyes, but his eyes themselves are intense, full of terrible sincerity. "If we're going to die in some fairy land, I might as well get it off my chest. I love you, Constance Wylf. And I might not be good enough for you, or straitlaced enough, or smart enough. I might repulse you in every way, but I love you."

Tears roll down her face, wet against her flesh and freezing solid against her bones.

"Constance, please." He takes her shoulders, hands warm against her icy shoulders. "Lie for me. I swear I'll leave you alone after this, but don't die here. Just lie."

The ice creeps taller around them, closing in like a Siberian tomb. "If I tell you," she says, voice breaking, "it makes it true."

His hands take her face, thumbs wiping away her tears, and she shakes. "What's so wrong with that? Konnichiwa, what would be so wrong with that?"

"Because it won't last." Sobs, irrational and ugly, tear from her throat. Marek pulls her into him, and she cries against his chest. She cries for her father, abandoned again and again. She cries for her brother, who let love blind him. She cries for herself, caught in between, desperate not to repeat their tragedies. The room goes dark as their tomb closes itself off, and Marek pulls her closer, as if trying to shield her from the disaster she herself has created. "I'm sorry," she gasps. "I'm so, so sorry."

"Shhh," he says, rocking her. His chin rests atop her head. "Nothing lasts forever, Konnichiwa."

"Science lasts forever," she says between breaths. "Logic lasts forever."

He brushes hair away from the bones of her face. "Science can't save us now."

There is something so cruelly ironic in that, she laughs, a sharp, hiccuping thing.

"What is it," he murmurs, his breath warm atop her hair.

She pulls his arms tighter around her. "Science was supposed to constrain all this mess. It was supposed to govern the magic, the—" Emotions. But the word gets stuck in her throat, and she laughs again, bitter and broken. "'What is science,'" she quotes, "'if not magic governed by laws instead of emotions?'"

The ice creeps in tighter, brushing their shoulders, forcing Marek to curl in around her as it bears down. It's proof, pure condemnation, that she was never in control of herself to begin with. She always knew her feelings had the power to destroy her, but she never thought she would damn Marek with her.

Marek shifts with the ice, and his breath blooms warm against her face as he holds her. "There's a corollary to that, you know." His lips brush her forehead as he murmurs, "What is magic, if not emotion?"

Her voice cracks along with every piece inside of her. "I can't live like that. I can't." Her bony hand finds his face in the dark, and she traces the curve of his jaw.

"I know," he whispers back.

Trembling, she tips her face up and gently pulls his down. Their lips meet, and something frozen inside her melts. Hot tears pulse down her face, and Marek draws her into him. She kisses him harder, desperate to fill the hole widening inside her chest. But it is too deep, too old a wound to heal in a single moment, and she cries harder as the ice around locks them in their embrace.

"Shh, shh," he tries to comfort her, even as she kills them both. "Goodnight, Konnichiwa."

"Don't leave," she begs.

"I never would have," he whispers.

"You don't know that."

"Then pretend." His face presses against hers, check against cheek, as the ice crushes closer. Breathless, he says, "Pretend so hard it comes true."

So with the last of the air in her lungs, Constance dares to pretend. "I love you, Marek Starke."