The ringing of falconry bells broke the evening stillness, and Noellia glanced at the norway spruce that towered over her. Its needles were frosted with snow, the scent of pine wafting over her senses. Icicles fell from the larger boughs of the trees, like crystalline ornaments dangling from the canopy.

"Oh, there you are!" Her hawk had finally returned. With a sigh of relief, she blew her whistle, gauntlet raised and garnished. Majora watched the tempting piece of rabbit haunch for a moment before tucking his wings and landing gently onto the glove. He swallowed the tidbit whole, as Noellia's mouth spread into a grin. Silly bird. He always did this, tried to eat pieces of meat that were far-too-large for him. One of these days she feared he'd choke.

They were quickly losing daylight, the orange and yellow shade of twilight dampening the sky. Dark clouds loomed on the horizon, harbingers of the lake-effect snow storm on its way. The meteorologists had been calling this the "storm of the century" for days, and Noellia's mouth quirked into a half smile. The forecast was always over-exaggerated.

December, the month of short days, was her favorite month to hunt, especially when the ground was white with snow. There was something about the stillness, the absolute silence after a storm that put her soul at peace. The crunching of her boots as they sank in the crisp layer of

These days game was scarce, however. After the severe ice storm several years ago, the rabbit population had yet to bounce back.

Although Majora had most certainly caught something while he was out of sight, if his huge crop was any indicator.

Hopefully just a vole or something, Noellia thought, and fed Majora's braided jesses through his anklets. Hopefully nothing too big, or he would be too heavy and stubborn tomorrow.

Even if he had caught something, that still didn't answer the question as to why he had taken off in the first place. With such great eyesight, he could see much further than she could, especially from a low soar like he had gone into earlier that morning. But he never strayed far, or for long.

And Noellia's telemetry- it had been on the fritz the entire time she'd searched for the bird. Something was definitely off today.

Even now, Majora seemed more high strung than usual, pausing every few seconds to survey their surroundings. His feathers sat flattened against his sleek form. Alert.

Must be the storm.

Noellia hoped it was just the storm.

Majora had never liked bad weather. Perhaps the local meteorologist was right about this one. Maybe there was a chance that this would indeed be the "storm of the century." The dark, billowing clouds were closing in with haste, the trees surrounding her heaving in the gusts.

It was time to get out before nightfall came, although a full moon was beginning to crest over the horizon, illuminating the dusty clouds of snow that were starting to fall ferociously.

She picked her way through the woods, dodging fallen ash trees and puddles underneath the thin sheets of ice. Majora danced on her glove as she strode home, nervously trying to hurl herself off of Noellia's hand. She really should have hooded the bird, but she'd left the small leather cap at the house. Hadn't expected the hunt to spiral so out of control so quickly.

It seemed like only moments before the air pressure changed, and the wind picked up, more bitter than before. Majora cried out in distress as a wall of white buffeted into them, and Noellia's world spiraled into a blinding, frozen hell.

A blanket of white, a strong squall.

Noellia was buffeted and turned, spun like a leaf caught in a gutter's current. She lost all sense of up and down, of which way was home and which way was deeper into the trees. Snow drove sideways into her face, needling her cheeks raw.

"Majora!" Her voice was swallowed whole.

She threw her free arm up to shield her eyes and stumbled, boots skidding over black ice hidden beneath the drifts. The world had gone the color of a television screen tuned to static, white on white on white, and the wind screamed through the spruce boughs with a voice that sounded almost like words.

Her foot caught on a root. She went down hard, glove first, and felt Majora's jesses rip free of her numb fingers.

"No, no, no, no!"

She scrambled up, snow packed into her collar, her sleeves, the seams of her boots, and reached blindly for the bird. Her fingers closed on empty air. When she opened her mouth to whistle for him, the wind ripped the sound away before it had even left her lips. The ground gave way beneath her next step, a slope hidden under a lip of drifted snow. She pitched forward with a cry, the world a tumble of white and dark and the distant, panicked cry of her hawk somewhere above her. Her shoulder struck something solid. Her vision sparked and dimmed.

The last thing she registered before the cold took her under was the sound of bells.

Noellia's first thought was that she had died. Her second thought, once she'd cracked her eyes open and found herself staring up at a ceiling of carved white stone laced with veins of frost that glimmered like captured starlight, was that Heaven was every bit as beautiful as she had been told. She was lying on a bed piled with furs so white they seemed to glow from within, in a chamber that stretched high above her, its walls a pale, translucent ice that let the moonlight bleed through in soft, shifting patterns. No fire burned anywhere that she could see, and yet the room was warm.

"Majora," she rasped, throat raw, and turned her head.

Her hawk sat perched on an ice-carved rail at the foot of the bed, feathers preened and settled, utterly at ease in a way he had not been all evening. He blinked at her once, slow and unbothered, as if to say she was the one being dramatic.

"You," she muttered, "are the worst hunting partner I have ever had."

A soft laugh answered her from the doorway. "He was very worried about you," said the voice. "For a bird, at least."

Noellia's head snapped toward the sound, and the breath went out of her.

The woman standing in the archway seemed to arrive in it the room without entering. She was tall, her gown some fabric that moved like water, pale blue shot through with threads of silver that caught the light and scattered it. Her hair was white, but it was swept back from a face too sharp to be aged. Her eyes were the colour of glacier ice, and when they settled on Noellia, they did not blink nearly as often as they should have.

"You're--" Noellia swallowed. "Where am I?"

"Safe," the woman said. "Which is more than I can say for where I found you. Another quarter hour in that squall and I'd have had a very pretty ice sculpture instead of a guest." She tilted her head, considering. "Your bird found me first, actually. Circled my tower three times, screaming loud enough to wake half the palace, until I sent someone out to see what the fuss was."

"This is a palace," Noellia said slowly.

"Mine," the woman said. "I am called many things by many frightened villages. You may call me Sable, if titles bore you as much as they bore me." She smiled. "Or Your Majesty, if you'd rather stand on ceremony. I find I don't much care either way."

"Your Majesty." The word tasted strange in Noellia's mouth, half question, half apology. "I don't understand. Why would you--why send anyone out for me at all?"

Sable crossed the room without seeming to walk, her feet leaving no mark on the frost-dusted floor. She stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at Majora with open, undisguised admiration.

"Because," she said, "I have needed a royal falconer for a very long time, and I do not often find one delivered to my doorstep by a storm of my own making." Her ice-pale eyes slid back to Noellia. "So. Noellia...how would you like to stay?"

Noellia's grandparents had told her legends of winter fey: cruel and regal beings who controlled the snow and lived in castles made of ice. Their favor was not given lightly, and it never came without a cost. "What if I don't accept?" she asked cautiously.

Sable flicked her wrist and the gleaming double door snapped open, revealing nothing outside but the swirling storm. Cold air washed inside, and Noellia drew her jacket in closer, trying to block it out. The icy queen closed the door up and smiled, showing no warmth. "In keeping with hospitality, you are not a prisoner here. If you chose to return home, I would allow you to leave. Of course, in this snow, no return is guaranteed. And I believe your beautiful bird would miss you terribly if you left."

Majora hopped down from his icy perch and rubbed his head against a fur-lined pillow, a happy bird-purr forming deep in his throat. "Sellout," Noellia muttered.

Maybe he was on to something. Neither of them had many friends back home. And here, in this beautiful place, there was light and food and comfort.

She thought about it for a long minute. "What do you need a falconer for, anyway? Surely you don't need to hunt for your food."

A wistful look crossed Sable's face. "I recall when falconry was a sport of knights and lords. Tell me, do you know the difference between falconry and hawking? Falconry, traditionally, is for nobility; it is done from horseback." Her icy eyes fixed on Noellia, as if she was judging what size armor she could wear. "I need a falconer to hunt, but not for food. Monsters and beasts lurk in the periphery of my kingdom, hidden in the dark places where only the sharp eyes of the hawk can find them."

Majora took that opportunity to squawk happily, like he was excited to hunt monsters. Noellia, too, felt a rush of excitement despite herself.

"I will stay," she declared.

They outfitted her at dawn, though Noellia wouldn't have been able to tell what time it was if she had not been told. The light in Sable's kingdom had no sun behind it, only a slow brightening of the ice, as though the palace itself were waking. A silent attendant with skin the colour of frozen milk laid the gear out on a table of carved frost: a gauntlet of pale, supple leather stitched with silver thread, a new set of jesses braided from something finer than any leather Noellia had ever handled, and a hood. She turned the hood over in her hands. It was small and perfectly shaped, dyed the deep blue of a winter evening, with a plume of white feathers at the crown. It fit Majora as if it had been measured for him.

"I never told anyone his size," she said.

"No," said Sable, from the doorway, appearing silently. "But he did spend the whole night on my rail, and I am a very thorough observer."

Majora, for his part, accepted the hood without a single complaint, which was more than he had ever done at home. Noellia decided not to take it personally.

"The stables are this way," Sable said. "You'll want to ride."

"Ride," Noellia repeated.

"Falconry is done from horseback, Noellia. I did say."

She had said. Noellia had simply been too busy being excited to hear it.

The horse waiting in the stable yard was white from nose to tail, with a mane that rippled like drifting snow and eyes the same glacier-pale as her queen's. It exhaled, and the breath crystallized in the air and fell tinkling to the flagstones. Noellia had ridden exactly four times in her life, all of them at a county fair, all of them on a pony named Biscuit.

"She's called Hoarfrost," Sable said. " She has never thrown anyone. Mind you, she has also never been ridden by anyone who flinches quite so much."

"I'm not flinching," Noellia said, though she suspected that Sable could see her micro-tremors as if they were full movements. She swung up into the saddle anyway, Majora riding hooded and quiet on her fist, and Hoarfrost shifted to accommodate her quite well naturedly. The great gates opened. Sable did not come with them.

"Ride north along the river," she said. "Past the Weeping Pines, where the ravine begins. There is something there that has been troubling my borders. Let your bird do what I cannot." Her gaze lingered on Majora. "And Noellia? If your telemetry begins to fail, turn back."

"How did you know about my telemetry?"

But the gates were already closing, and the queen was already a pale shape fading into the white of the courtyard. The land beyond the palace was a country of glass. Frozen rivers ran like silver ribbons between hills of unbroken snow, and the trees were hung with ice so clear that every branch looked like a blown-glass sculpture. The silence was the same silence Noellia loved most about December, the hush after a storm, only here felt like holding one's breath.

She rode for what felt like an hour, though she couldn't have said. Hoarfrost found her own way along the riverbank, hooves silent in the powder, and Noellia kept one eye on the horizon and one on her hawk. Majora's feet shifted on the glove, restless. When she slipped the hood off at last, at the edge of a wide, white meadow, he blinked once into the pearly light, and every feather on him drew tight.

"Easy," she murmured. "Easy, you big idiot."

The Weeping Pines stood at the far end of the meadow, a dozen enormous trees with boughs bowed low under the weight of their frost, long icicles dripping slow, silent drops that froze before they hit the ground. Beyond them, the land fell away into a dark crack in the earth. Noellia reached down to her belt and thumbed the switch on her receiver. Static hissed in her ear wetly like something breathing through a cracked reed. The little display flickered once, twice, and went dead.

She thought about turning back, but Majora leaned forward on her fist, wings half-mantled, and stared into the trees with an intensity she had only ever seen in him over a rabbit hole.

"What do you see, boy?"

She followed his gaze, squinting to where a shadow sat between the trees. Noellia's mouth had gone dry. She lifted her fist and felt Majora gather himself, felt every muscle in his body coil like a spring. She thought of the falconers in her grandparents' stories, riding out against the dark with only a bird and a whistle. She thought of the way the storm had swallowed her voice, and how Majora had found a way to be heard anyway.

"Go," she whispered, and blew the whistle.

Majora left her glove like a thrown stone, flying low across the meadow, skimming the snow, a streak of brown and gold against the endless white. Hoarfrost snorted and danced a half step sideways, and Noellia gripped the reins, her heart hammering so hard she could taste it.

The shadow moved.

It unfolded from between the pines, impossibly tall, a creature of splintered ice and darkness with too many joints and a long, narrow head like a wolf's skull wrapped in frozen sinew. Its eyes were pits of pale blue fire. It opened its jaws, and the sound that came out was the same sound she'd heard in the blizzard: a scream almost like words. Majora climbed in a tight, savage spiral, then folded his wings and dove, straight at that burning blue gaze. The creature reared back, claws of ice raking the air where he had been a heartbeat before. He banked hard, snatched at its face as he passed, and the thing shrieked and clapped a hand over one eye. Where his talons had touched, the fire guttered.

"Good boy," Noellia breathed. "Good boy, good boy, good boy."

He came around again. And again. Each pass drew the creature further out of the trees and into the open, where it staggered and swiped at nothing, blinded and furious, until it finally turned and fled into the ravine, a clatter of breaking ice fading into the dark.

The silence returned.

Noellia sat very still, her whole body trembling. Then Majora came gliding back across the snow, landing on her fist with a heavy thump. In his talons, he held a single shard of dark ice that pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat.

"You stole something," she said, half laughing, half in tears. "From a monster. You absolute thief."

Noellia pulled the hood back over his head, tucked the shard into her coat pocket, and turned Hoarfrost toward home. But as she rode back through the Weeping Pines, she could not shake the feeling that the creature had not been fleeing at all.

It had been going to tell someone.