Winterwake

The Winter Palace liked to pretend it was above color. Necro ice climbed the walls in slabs of blue and black. Ribs arched. Skulls watched. Soulflame orchids burned a very dignified, very joyless cobalt. The great ascent hall felt less like a home and more like a very expensive tomb that was proud of its angles. Tonatiuh Xīhuitzin stood in the center of that hall with his hands on his hips and sighed like a disappointed artist.

“This palace,” he announced to no one in particular, “is serving frostbite in a sensible shoe.” Four skeletons waited around him in a loose half circle. Each wore a splash of his old work in place of uniforms. One had a violet sash tied like a beauty queen banner. One sported a crooked flower crown of bone orchids. Another had a shawl that kept sliding off non-existent shoulders. The last clutched a basket of beads with the solemnity of a holy relic.

“I have seen mausoleums with more flirtation,” Tona went on. “We are going to fix that. Politely. Offensively. Both.” He snapped his fingers. The Ghost Loom bloomed into being behind him. Threads of pale light pulled themselves into a floating frame. Shuttles of bone and shadow flickered. Cloth began to grow from the empty air, shot through with color that had no business existing in a place called the Palace of Winter Death.

Violet that flirted. Gold that smirked. Green that remembered jungles and refused to apologize. Phosphor, the tallest skeleton, lifted a bony hand. “Yes, Phosphor,” Tona said. “I am quite aware that Lady Winter did not specifically request a full gay reformation of her main hall. She also did not forbid it. And she has finally brought home a guest. We must help her pretend she owns more than three moods.” He had heard it at breakfast. Quiet, clipped reports traded over ledgers and patrol charts.

The Marchioness returned late. She was not alone. No one had seen the woman yet. Whispers said sand on her boots. Warm breath. A new shape in Ixqueya’s orbit. Tona had not chased the rumor. A surprise was better. Besides, poor Ixqueya could use a distraction that did not arrive carrying casualty figures. “Think of it as emotional support décor,” he told his crew. “If she has brought a guest up from the border, the least we can do is make sure the palace looks like a place where living people might have feelings.”

Skein, the smallest skeleton, pantomimed a swoon. “Exactly,” Tona said. “Tragic. Let us begin.” He turned in a slow circle, eyes narrowed, assessing the ascent hall the way a surgeon assessed a wound. The staircase climbed in shallow flights toward the upper galleries. Necro ice ribs crossed overhead. Orchid troughs lined the walls. The floor shone in cold stone veins. Footsteps here echoed in a very serious, very Frostmarrow way. Tona clucked his tongue. “This is all so… recruit intake. We are not hazing her guest. We are seducing her.”

He raised his voice. “Tally, love. Bring the frost-silk runners. The ones that shift from cobalt to jade. They are moody and therefore perfect.”
Tally shuffled off, basket rattling. The Ghost Loom thrummed at his back. A length of translucent silk poured down, pooling around his boots. He scooped it up, let it slide through his fingers. Orchid light hit the fabric and broke into shards of emerald, amethyst, pale gold. “Now that,” he said, “is a proper sin.”

He draped the first length over a low rib that jutted from the wall. The silk caught, hung in a graceful curve, then slowly adjusted its color to match the necro ice. Not the same shade. Never that. Just close enough to tease. “Up,” he said. Phosphor and Skein moved, long fingers sure from a hundred fittings. Silk went up across the arch. Beads followed. Tona chose necro ice spheres he had tinted with his most scandalous death-dyes. Some burned blue. Some glowed like captive sunrise. All of them knew how to flirt with cold light.

In a few breaths, the first landing changed. The ribs still gave the feel of a cage. The orchids still drank warmth. Yet the silk and beads turned it into a cage that wanted to be admired. “Better,” Tona decided. “Still ‘do not cross this border,’ but now we also say ‘do not cross this border unless you look worth my time.’” Skein did a little shoulder shimmy. Vertebra clicked in approval. They moved up one flight. Tally returned dragging a coiled runner behind him. The cloth shimmered dark and deep, patterned with ribs and branches so subtle they were only visible when light struck them at an angle.

“Oh, look at you,” Tona breathed. “You are mysterious. You are brooding. You are going right here.” He knelt at the top of the first stair and set the runner straight with the care of a priest placing an altar cloth. Phosphor and Tally took the far end and together they unrolled it down the long ascent. The cold stone vanished under shadowed cobalt. Orchid light hit the runner and woke hidden suns in the weave. They scattered into a slow, shifting constellation underfoot.

“Now every step says: I am entering a story, not a tax audit,” Tona said. “We approve.” He walked the first length to test the feel. Tap. The cloth answered with a muffled, almost musical thud. Tap. The echoes softened. “Yes,” he said. “Hear that. Less execution, more entrance. The palace is learning to say welcome, not guilty.” He spun, letting his own coat flare. The Ghost Loom hummed like a pleased cat. They repeated the process on each landing. Runners down. Silk up. Beads wherever bare bone screamed for earrings.

At one point he paused at a window of sheer necro ice overlooking the Winterwake Marches. The fens lay outside. Gray. Cold. Hung with distant spiderweb lines that only people from the March noticed. Beyond them, somewhere, the Pale Gate where Ixqueya had met this mysterious guest.
Tona considered the view. Considered the stark sill. “Absolutely not,” he muttered. “We are not giving the poor woman a panorama of emotional hypothermia.” He lifted his hand. The Ghost Loom answered with a heavy drape of fabric. Deep green fading to blue, embroidered along the edge with bone orchids and tiny stylized spiders. Each spider wore a thread of gold.

He hooked the drape above the window and tied it back with a length of jade ribbon. The view remained. The world beyond still looked like a wet grave. Now, though, it had a frame that implied someone inside knew how to enjoy being alive. “There,” he said, satisfied. “From funerary brochure to dramatic landscape. You are welcome, everyone.” A dry voice came from the hall behind him. “Master Xīhuitzin.”

One of the Quiet Line undead constables stood there. Bone lantern hanging from a pole. Necro ice shackles at its belt. It regarded the new runner as if it were a suspect at the gate. “The Lady gave no order for alterations,” it said. Tona smiled at it with pure sunshine. “My dear White Line,” he said. “These are not alterations. These are life support. I am simply helping the décor reach its full potential. Think of it as… embalming, but for taste.”

He gestured to the runner. The constable’s lantern light fell across the weave. Suns sparked and faded. The hall looked less like the throat of a beast and more like the inside of some solemn, very fashionable creature that had recently discovered accessories. “The passage remains clear,” Tona pointed out. “The ribs remain fortified. The sigils remain untouched. I have only suggested to the walls that they stop sulking.”
A pause. The constable’s jaw bones shifted.

“This will be recorded as decorative maintenance,” it said finally. “Perfect,” Tona replied. “Put it under ‘emergency measures, emotional.’” He turned away before the skeleton could answer and clapped twice. His crew snapped to attention. “Onward. Lady Winter will be back any moment, dragging some poor creature behind her frost. We must make sure the first thing this guest sees is not a hallway that looks like it bites.” They climbed.

The last stretch before Ixqueya’s great audience doors had always annoyed him. The designers had clearly woken up that morning and said, what if a corridor could actively judge people. Ribs swelled out from the walls, lacework of bone and ice. Bone orchids in troughs watched with empty mouths. Every footstep came back three times, as if the palace asked, are you sure, are you sure, are you sure. Tona stopped at the threshold and folded his arms.

“No,” he said out loud. “Absolutely not. This is not an interrogation. This is foreplay.” Phosphor slowly turned its skull. “Spatial foreplay,” Tona clarified. “Do not give me that look. We are not doing anything improper. We are doing something fabulous.” The Ghost Loom jumped, as if delighted by the word. Threads tightened. New cloth began to grow. This time heavier. Velvet weight. Silk sheen. “Runner,” Tona said. “Full length. Deep as midnight. Hidden pattern of her sigil and my good taste. Go.” Cloth fell. A shadowed river down the center of the hall. When he smoothed it with his palms, small designs glimmered. A stylized necro ice ribcage. A spider. A tiny, almost secret sun. The House, the March, and the scandalous little star that had moved into its attic.

Phosphor and Tally unrolled the runner all the way to the doors. Skein followed behind, setting necro ice beads in a careful rhythm along the edges like drops of frost. Next, the verticals. Tona summoned sheer silk in long strips and hung them from the overhead ribs. Each panel faded from pale white at the top to rich violet at the bottom. He stitched threadbound sigils for calm, confidence, and a very gentle warmth between them. Nothing that would offend Necro Ice. Just enough to tell anxious shoulders to drop.

When someone walked through that hall now, the silk would breathe with them. Not a cage. A curtain. At the halfway point he added alcove shrines to his own sensibilities. Small clusters of necro ice beads and carved bone lilies, anchored to the wall at intervals. They caught the orchid light and scattered it in unexpected sparks. From the doors, the effect was clear. The hall still belonged to House Frostmarrow. It just now understood that intimidation and allure were cousins. Tona tested it properly.

He stepped back to the far end, drew a breath, and walked as if he were that unknown woman. Not his usual lazy glide. A stranger’s careful pace. The runner muffled the ring of his boots. Secret suns blinked underfoot. Silk drifted at his shoulders. For a heartbeat he almost felt the nerves his threadbinding would taste when the real guest came. He reached the doors, turned, and walked back as himself. Hips loose. Arms relaxed. Expression pure trouble.

He imagined Ixqueya at the far end. Tall, cold, insufferably composed. He imagined the way her eyes would narrow when she saw what he had done, the tiny crease at the corner of her mouth when she realized it worked. “She is going to say it is frivolous,” he told his skeletons. “Then she will walk through it four times to ‘test sight lines’ and secretly enjoy every step.” Skein mimed zipping an invisible mouth. Tally did a little hip wiggle that almost counted as a strut. “Exactly. Discretion, my loves. We are enhancing security by distracting the enemy with thighs and light refraction.”

Farther down the hall, the Winter Palace woke up around them. Whispering Vein lines pulsed under the floor. The blue soulflame of the Winter Heart Tree above sent a faint ripple through the necro ice. Somewhere, a clerk paused over a ledger as a garland threw unexpected color across their page. Tona tilted his head, listening. “Do you feel that,” he asked quietly. “Even the building is nervous. New pattern. New warmth. New person on the way up.” He had not seen the guest. He did not know whether she was pretty, clever, doomed, or all three. He only knew this.

Ixqueya brought her into the heart of her house. That meant something. That meant the frost wanted company. And when frost wanted company, it was his holy duty to make sure the stage honored the moment. “Come,” he said, voice bright again. “We are not done. We must also rescue the vestibule outside her private hall. At present it looks like a waiting room for people about to be sentenced to tasteful execution.” The skeletons gathered up the remaining silk and bead baskets.

He led them toward the uppermost tiers. Necro ice creaked softly as they passed, adjusting to new weight, new color, new intent. The palace might not have invited joy. Tonatiuh brought it anyway. If Lady Winter was going to drag a guest through all this bone and frost, then by the time they reached the top, the palace would be dressed for it. Not just a fortress, but a runway.

The moon sat huge and white above the Winter Palace, a cold coin pressed into the bruise of the sky. Its light poured through the necro ice apertures of House Frostmarrow’s great hall, shattered on the ribs and skulls and sigils, then gathered itself again on the figure seated at the top of the steps.

Ixqueya Jorgenskull did not soften under that light. She sharpened.

The throne had been carved from fused ribs and thick plates of Necro Ice, a glacier that had learned geometry. No cushions. No fur. The seat was a statement that comfort was for guests and weakness. Bone orchids clustered along the risers below, pale petals veined in cobalt, each bloom drinking what little warmth dared the air and giving it back as ghostfire. Behind the throne, the Undying Tree rose in relief, its roots and branches picked out in bone and frost. Every limb was stripped bare, a winter icon, a god of endurance rather than mercy.

She was the warmest thing in the chamber and that was deliberate theology.

Bronze skin, rich and deep, gleamed against the blue of the Necro Ice. The hall’s cold light turned the long lines of her legs into carved pillars, all muscle and presence. One leg hooked over the arm of the throne, thigh cutting an arrogant diagonal across the moon that hung behind her in the aperture. The other foot planted lower on the steps, heel biting the ice, calf flexed in quiet readiness. Gold sandals gripped her feet, high heels catching light. In the March they would have been absurd. Here they rang like little bells of sacrilege against the stone.

The habilment she wore clung like a dare.

Across her chest the leather harness cupped and lifted the heavy weight of her bust, more architecture than indulgence. Straps crossed her ribs and back, each line cut with an engineer’s certainty, distributing strain like a bridge carries stone. From the central housing, fans of feather burst in teal, cobalt, and rust red, edged with threads of Necro Ice so fine they caught the orchid glow like hoarfrost along a wing. Enough fabric existed to keep the Temple clergy from swooning. The rest was unapologetic geometry.

At her waist a broad belt of turquoise bead, bone, and patterned cloth cinched the narrow point of her torso, a bright ring between the sculpture of her ribs and the broad flare of her hips. From it fell feathered panels, short and bright and treacherous. They swung when she moved, a suggestion more than a barrier. The rest of her midriff was bare. Hard muscle. Smooth skin. Evidence that the Winterwake Marches bred function before ornament and that she had never forgotten it.

Her legs, almost entirely exposed, were the kind that made poets either devout or profane, depending on their prior convictions. Thighs thick with a hunter’s power. Knees scarred in small white crescents where training had bitten deep. Calves corded and clean, the line of Achilles tendon setting off each heel like a knife edge. She did not hide the scars. They read like notches in a weapon. Each one said that something had tried and failed.

Her hair fell in a black cascade down her back, heavy and liquid, streaked through with veins of cobalt that caught the moonlight whenever she turned her head. The front sections had been braided back from her face, thick cords threaded with turquoise, bone, and small shards of Necro Ice that kissed the skin beneath in small, precise chills. Those braids framed her features. The rest of the hair poured loose, over shoulder and down the line of her spine, a night river that had decided to stay.

Her face was a study in hard inheritance. High cheekbones that spoke of old Jorgenskull lines, broad jaw that would not yield. Her nose was straight, with a faint ridge where a training mace had broken it and been forced back into place without fuss. Kohl hugged the upper lids, narrowing her eyes into blades. Those eyes themselves shone a pale, glacial blue, clear and flat. When she drew deep on her power they glazed to molten gold. Tonight they remained the color of a lake that killed quietly in early winter.

Her mouth was full, shaped in a natural softness that her expression never allowed. Painted in a red that sat between fresh blood and dried flower, it curled now into the smallest of smiles. Not warm. Not wide. A curved line of knowledge and verdict.

The expression in the animated image of her that lived in rumor and whispered sketches was the expression she wore now. Chin tipped a fraction downward. Eyes half lidded. Amused and contemptuous and profoundly sure of her own place in this world of bone.

Around her, the hall told the rest of the story.

House Frostmarrow’s great audience chamber had been designed as a devotional to doctrine. Necro Ice climbed in stepped walls. Ribs arched overhead, their undersides carved with sigils of the Undying Tree and the Court of Blessed Bone. Bone orchids filled recessed troughs along the floor. The Whispering Vein grid hummed below, sending messages and soul weights through frozen nerves. At the far end, gigantic doors of ribbed metal and ice recorded each visitor’s name in ghost script, a ledger the hall itself refused to forget.

It had once felt like a perfectly carved tomb that occasionally permitted the living to petition it.

Now it glittered.

Tonatiuh’s handiwork had dressed the severity in spectacle. Frost-silk runners drowned the stone floor in a deep, almost black cobalt. Patterns of ribs, branches, and tiny stylized suns were woven into the cloth so subtly that one only saw them when light struck from an angle. Vertical sheets of sheer fabric hung between the stone ribs above, fading from snow white near the ceiling to bruised violet near the ground. Necro Ice beads and carved bone lilies had been fastened in small clusters along the walls. They caught the blue orchid glow and fractured it into peacock flashes and small sudden stars.

The god of the room had not changed. The altar cloth had.

Ixqueya had permitted that desecration. Quietly. For him.

She had heard him earlier in the day, humming his Loom Quarter work songs as he dragged his fabrics up the ascent, his skeleton crew clacking behind him. She had allowed the Ghost Loom to set up in the main hall. Allowed the silk to go down over stone that had seen only blood and boot heel for years. Allowed the woman she had brought up from the border to be greeted by something other than judgment on the way to the throne.

It was a concession to the Shaitan she respected and to the strategy she lived by. If you brought someone into the heart of your organ, you chose whether the first sensation was awe, fear, or wonder. Today she allowed a controlled dose of wonder. It cost the frost nothing. It bought her options.

She sat on the throne while he finished, letting him believe she did not watch.

He moved below, not far from the foot of the stairs, adjusting the fall of some last sheer panel, speaking in low, rapid cadence to a skeleton that clutched a basket of beads. His coat shimmered in violet and gold, his hair catching glitter like pollen. His skeletons wore ribbons and sashes like absurdly earnest acolytes. He clapped once to test the echo. The hall answered him differently now, softer, the way a temple changed its voice when new tapestries were hung.

Ixqueya watched the way he held himself.

There was more brightness in the set of his shoulders than usual. More rhythm in his hands. He had always been theatrical. Today there was something behind it. A secret pact with his own joy.

The Marchioness of Winterwake rose.

She did not do so gently. The throne made a small sound as her weight left it, ice answering muscle. Feathers shivered. Necro Ice threads in the harness chimed. She unhooked her long leg from the arm, planted both feet, and stood in one fluid, deliberate motion, the way a glacier might decide to move after a century of patience.

Every line of her body fell into place as she stepped forward.

Shoulders back. Spine tall. One hip rolling with each step because a frame like hers made it inevitable, not because she sought to charm. Arms relaxed, but with a predator’s economy. Her face stayed carved in that half smile. Her eyes said winter.

As she descended the steps, the hall reacted. Orchid petals shifted, turning toward her as if tracking heat. The Whispering Vein pulses quickened under the Necro Ice. Above them all, in the unseen crown of the ziggurat, the Winter Heart Tree’s blue flame leaned a fraction in her direction, a ghostly acknowledgement from the organ that she walked.

Gold heels bit into the runner. The frost-silk muted the sound, turning each impact into a heavy, controlled thud instead of a ringing threat. Feathers at her harness and hip stirred with her motion, little storms of color against bronze skin. The Necro Ice shards braided into her hair caught the changing angles of moonlight, flashing like frost along river stone.

She stopped just where the last step met the cloth, at the edge of his new-made runway.

Tonatiuh turned toward her. One of the Quiet Line lanterns had guttered near the doors, a wordless herald. His gaze climbed from heel to crown. She saw the recognition in the first heartbeat, the aesthetic cataloguing in the second, the almost-religious appreciation in the third. He was wise enough not to let his mouth fall open.

She did not speak at once.

Silence, here, was a tool she wielded better than any mace. She let it run out to its natural end, until the hall itself seemed to hold its breath. Only then did she lower her chin a fraction more and let the small curve at the corner of her mouth sharpen into something like approval.

“You have done well,” she said.

Her voice carried easily in the cold. It never needed to be raised. The hall had been built to hear her.

“The palace looks less like a sentencing chamber. More like a place the living might endure for an afternoon. That is an improvement.”

In her mouth, that was lavish praise.

Her gaze slipped from his face to the silk, to the beads, to the curtained ribs overhead. She weighed the choices he had made. The palette had obeyed Frostmarrow. They were still colors of ice and bruise and bone. Yet he had brought in other notes. Greens that remembered far jungles. Hints of sun caught in necro ice beads. It was a priest’s trick, she decided. Dress the altar in new cloth, never change the god.

“You have dressed my house,” she observed, “the way a clever cleric dresses an altar. Different fabric. Same doctrine. You know when not to lie. I respect that.”

Her eyes returned to his.

Whatever warmth had touched her words did not reach them. The gaze was still a ledger, still measuring.

“But tell me,” she went on, tone flattening into something colder, “what has you in such a chipper mood?”

She moved forward a little, just enough that her scent reached him. Snowmelt. Dried citrus. A thread of marrow. His own blend on her skin, chosen this morning because it pleased her to weaponize the gift.

“You are humming,” she said. “You are whistling at my guards. You have turned the main ascent of Thanal Iztac into what looks very much like a festival route instead of an interrogation gauntlet.”

Her gaze flicked to the nearest skeleton, then back.

“That is not simple vanity. You are vain, but you are not a fool. A man who spends this much cloth on an ordinary day is trying to hide something. You have never needed to hide.”

She tilted her head, the movement small, the way a judge leans over a new line in a long column of numbers.

“So,” she asked, voice soft as falling frost, “have you won something I have not yet heard about, or are you merely gambling that my guest is worth the effort you have lavished on her steps?”

The question settled between them. The orchids listened. The ribs above caught and held the sound.

Ixqueya let the silence grow teeth.

The March had taught her that sermons were not always shouted. Some simply asked a question and waited to see who sweated. Here, in her ice-dressed cathedral, draped in sinful feathers and holy scars, she watched the most famous clothier in the realms and waited to see which kind of answer he offered her.

Her eyes did not waver. Her posture did not soften. Whatever color now painted the hall, her deportment remained what it always was.

Frigid. Beautiful. And utterly convinced that she was the cold at the heart of Hextor, and everything else was either weather or décor.

Tonatiuh had dressed cathedrals, war councils, courtesans and corpses. None of them walked like this. For a heartbeat, as Ixqueya descended, the Necrocouturier simply watched. The frost-silk he had laid down took her weight like an oath. The feathers he had trimmed himself fanned perfectly with each measured step. The harness sat exactly where he had intended, lifting the heavy gifts of her chest as if the Undying Tree itself had decided to grow in curves.

His heart did something undignified under his ribs. He ignored it. Instead, he smiled. It was not his shop smile, all easy warmth and low prices. It was the rare one. Bright and sharp and edged with a craftsman’s satisfaction. The smile a sculptor wore when stone finally admitted what it had always been. When she finished speaking, when that quiet blade of a question about his mood hung between them, he swept into a bow deep enough to appease even the frost.

“First,” he said, voice rich and unhurried, “we will address the miracle in the room.” He rose, letting his gaze travel up her body with the frank appreciation of a man who knew measurements to the finger width and still allowed himself to be stunned. “Look at you,” Tona breathed. “My Lady Winter, seated under Yohualtzin like some very specific prayer that has finally been answered. The harness sits as if your ribs were carved for it. The belt does not dare slip. The feathers behave. This is, I confess, offensive. The gods should not let a tailor be this right on the first fitting.”

His eyes flicked to her face, to the cold line of her mouth, the faint curl at one corner. “And then there is the matter of your beauty,” he went on, letting the word sit without flinch. “The border has seen crusaders, caravans, monsters, saints. None of them ever marched in with bronze like hammered dawn and eyes like ice that has learned to read accounts.” He circled a fraction, careful not to invade the space she held at the head of the runner. His skeletons shuffled aside, sashes swaying.

“If any fool sings that death is ugly after seeing you in that ensemble,” he added, “they are lying to themselves and insulting my craft.” Only then did he let mischief lighten his tone. “And yes,” he said, fingers tapping against his lips in mock thought, “I may also be in a good mood because the halls are buzzing. I heard a rumor that Lady Winter has brought home quite the exotic little morsel.” He tilted his head, earrings chiming softly.

“Now, this is purely professional curiosity, of course,” he said. “I must know what sort of creature is important enough to climb this runway. Is it a man, My Lady. Please tell me it is a man.” His grin widened, wicked and bright. “And if it is, how hot is he. On a scale from 'respectable kiln' to 'I will need to reinforce the stone to keep the heels from sinking'.” He lifted a hand, fingers miming the line of a throat.

“Does he like men,” Tona asked, utterly unashamed. “Specifically, men who can sew on the run, command a dance line of skeletons, and perform a very respectable sword swallowing act when the mood and the stage are right.” He let the innuendo hang, light as incense. Nothing explicit, only suggestion and the gleam in his eye. The skeleton nearest him, festooned in a violet sash, did a tiny hip wiggle in solidarity. Then he rolled his shoulders as if physically brushing away her accusation about his decorating.

“As for my alleged festival,” he said, flicking his wrist toward the garlands, “you wound me. This is not a festival. This is triage. I had almost no notice, the halls of Iztāmictlān are large enough to make lesser men weep, and your guards insist on standing exactly where I want accent pieces.” He clicked his tongue, feigning outrage.

“On such short time, there is only so much a poor mortal can do,” he went on. “A few runners. Some silk to teach the ribs how to behave. A handful of necro ice beads to remind the orchids that color exists. I assure you, if I had a full cycle and fewer regulations about 'structural integrity' and 'not blinding the Household Guard', we would be having a very different conversation.” He sobered a fraction, enough that she would hear the conviction under the glitter.

“But no,” Tona said, “I will not apologize for fighting the macabre.” He gestured around them, taking in the ribs, the ice, the ghostfire. “Yes, this is the world of the dead,” he said. “Yes, the border is sacred, the ledger must balance, the Tree drinks our marrow, and all that very serious doctrine. I have embroidered it on enough vestments that I can recite it in my sleep.” His hand fell back to his chest, thumb pressing lightly against his sternum.

“Yet even in the land of winter death, people still breathe,” he added quietly. “They still feel fear on these steps. Hope. Pride. Whatever strange thing your exotic morsel brings with her boots.” His smile returned, bright as cut glass. “Why should our walls pretend they do not,” he finished. “Cold keeps the border. Certainly. Color keeps the living from turning into more bones for my crew before their time.” He flicked a fond glance at the skeletons, as if to say they were already enough company.

“So forgive me, My Lady,” Tonatiuh said, bowing again with a dancer’s flourish, “if I prefer that Hextor’s guests walk through a cathedral that looks like it remembers joy, instead of yet another corridor that only knows how to practice its own funeral.” He straightened, eyes meeting hers again, steady despite the sparkle.

“You asked why I am chipper,” he said, softer. “The answer is simple. You are glorious, I have an excuse to make your house match, and there is possibly a handsome stranger climbing my fabric at this very moment.” A flash of teeth. “If that does not put a spring in a man’s step, My Lady Winter, he belongs in your organ vaults, not on my runway.”

Ixqueya listened without interrupting, the way a shrine listens to candles. His praise, his innuendo, his defense of color all poured toward her like incense. None of it moved the ice in her eyes.

Yet something in the line of her shoulders eased.

The corner of her mouth twitched. It was not a smile, not quite. More the ghost of one. A crack in a glacier that only the attentive would notice.

“When a man flatters me,” she said at last, “I usually assume he wants something. In your case, Tonatiuh, I accept the compliment as simple professional honesty.”

Her gaze swept down herself and back up, not with vanity, but with the calm inventory of a commander checking gear before a march.

“You should approve of the dress,” she added. “You made it. If it failed, we would both look foolish, and I have no intention of sharing that stain with you or anyone.”

The hall tasted of her voice. Quiet. Precise. Each word laid like a stone in cold water.

She regarded him for a moment longer. Threads of ouroboros gold in his eyes. Silk clinging to his shoulders. Skeletons standing at respectful attention, wrapped in his scraps of joy like altar cloths on borrowed saints.

“If death must dress itself,” she said, “better it wear the work of a man who understands that a shroud can preach as fiercely as a sermon.”
There. For anyone else, it would have been effusive. For her, it was a benediction.

“As for this ‘exotic morsel’,” she went on, voice flattening again, “you may relax. You will not be deprived of your theater. She is warm. She is foreign. She is not yet accustomed to the March. That is all you need to know until I decide whether she belongs in my ledgers as guest, asset, or problem.”

A pause. The faintest dry gleam entered her eyes.

“If she turns out to be a man,” Ixqueya said, “I will inform you of his temperature in degrees of your concern. Until then, do not measure people by how easily they are charmed by your throat tricks. The God Beneath measures by use. Not by who swoons when you threaten to swallow steel for them.”

The rebuke landed soft as snow and just as cold.

She let her gaze travel once more over his silk and beads, the way the frost-silk runner altered the sound of her own heartbeat when she moved. There was a kind of holy service in what he had done. A jester’s liturgy. Brightness held up like a mirror to the tomb.

“The Undying Tree needs many roots,” she said more softly. “Some drink rot. Some drink blood. Some drink fear. You, it seems, drink boredom.”
Her chin dipped in a fraction of a nod.

“I will not begrudge you that. The border is ugly enough. If your work keeps the living from becoming statues before their time, then consider your flamboyance an approved rite of the Cold Way.”

She stepped past him then, perfume and frost and feather brushing the air.

“Keep the palace brushed and bedecked, Tonatiuh,” she said over her shoulder. “You may prance, preen, and flirt at will, so long as the ribs stay sharp and the doors still close when I give the word.”

A beat, the faintest hint of humor threading the ice.

“And if this guest survives my questions,” Ixqueya finished, “you may discover for yourself whether he is worth a sword or only a needle.”

Tonatiuh made a small, tragic sound in his throat when she named the guest “she.” “Of course,” he sighed, hand to heart, head tipping back in operatic despair. “The one time I get advance gossip and it is not about a handsome prince in need of having his inseam redeemed for the glory of Hextor.”

His skeletons shifted, as if they had heard this lament before. One offered him the bead basket in consolation. He waved it away and straightened, theatrics smoothing into something quieter. The pout lingered for a heartbeat, then he folded it neatly away, like a costume between acts. When he spoke again, his voice was still warm, still bright, but the edges had changed. “Well, if our foreign morsel is not a prince, she will at least have the decency to be impressed. I will make do.”

His gaze climbed to Ixqueya’s and stayed there.

For a moment the palace fell away. The ribs, the orchids, the silent guards, even the moon framed behind her like a halo made of interrogation lamps. All of it blurred to backdrop. There was only the woman in the scandalous armor of feathers and ice, and the fact that he had been allowed closer to her than almost anyone who still breathed.

“You know,” he said more softly, “you speak of ledgers and guests and categories as if you are not writing in one of your own columns.” He took a cautious step toward her. Not enough to crowd. Enough to make his words meant for her, not the hall. “I heard the rumors first and I will admit it,” Tona continued, “I was very disappointed it was not some lost prince with shoulders for days and a tragic backstory about needing his trousers properly sized.”

A flash of grin, quick as a spark on Necro Ice. “But that was not why I laid runners and silk up your throat,” he said. “That was only the joke I told myself so I could move fast.” His tone shifted again, losing the showman’s swell. What remained was the Loom Quarter boy who had learned to count by buttons and pray by pleats.

“I have seen winters, My Lady,” he went on. “Long ones. Not the kind that crack stone outside, the other kind. The ones that move into a house and take a chair at the table. You feed them duty and they do not leave. You pour your life into their cup and they only ever complain the tea is cold.”

His eyes searched hers, knowing he walked near lines no one else dared. “You are very good at that winter,” he said. “At being the cold that keeps the border. The rib that never bends. The flame on the Tree that always leans the right way. The Court looks at you and sees an organ that works. The March looks at you and sees a wall that does not crack.” He spread his hands, fingers splayed, bangles chiming.

“I look at you and see a woman who has not had a real party in… ever,” he added. “Not a victory feast. Not a war council with better wine. I mean a party where you were allowed to be something besides the knife at the threshold.” Skein, the smallest skeleton, tilted its skull toward Ixqueya as if in silent agreement.

“You keep your front strong,” Tona said. “It is a good front. Very intimidating. Very Frostmarrow. But winter that never ends is a failed season. The doctrine forgets to write that down.” He glanced around at the silk he had hung, at the beads, at the softened echo of her own heels on the runner.

“So yes,” he said, “I dressed the hall for your guest. I wanted her to see that Hextor knows color, that the dead can walk through light without flinching. But mostly I dressed it for you.” His voice dropped a fraction. “I wanted you to walk down your own ascent and remember you have a friend in this icebox, not just an ally.”

The word friend landed between them with more weight than any title he could have chosen. “Do you remember the first time I came before you,” he asked, head tilting. “All glitter and theories and a ledger full of men’s names that the respectable priests thought meant I should be quietly buried in a nice, anonymous wall.” He raised his brows, a small, incredulous echo of that younger self.

“You looked straight through me,” Tona said. “Saw every sin they had stitched into my back. My taste in men, my refusal to hide it, my habit of teaching skeletons to clap on the off-beat. You had every excuse to turn me away. Call me a distraction. A liability.” His smile softened, edges rounding.

“But you did not,” he said. “You said, ‘If you can make a corpse look like it died on purpose and a general look like he won on purpose, I do not care who you kiss when you are off my clock.’” His impression of her voice was not mocking; it was fond, precise, shaded with respect. “That was the first time in my life,” he added, “anyone with power spoke over my neck and chose usefulness instead of disgust.” He nodded toward her, feathers and bronze and all.

“So here we are,” he said. “You accepted me. All of me. The Necrocouturier, the man, the one who eyes your guards and asks impolite questions about princes.” He lifted one hand, palm up. “It is only fair,” Tonatiuh went on, “that I accept you in return. All of you. The Marchioness, the inquisitor, the martyr who would rather freeze herself than ask the fire to move closer.” His eyes were steady now, no glitter hiding them.

“I see the way you treat your own comfort,” he said. “Like a dress one size too small. Something to be endured until the duty is done. I see the way you carve yourself thin so the border can be thick.” He shrugged one shoulder, shifting his coat. “I cannot fix that,” he admitted. “I am a tailor, not a theologian. I cannot rewrite the Marrow Doctrine so it stops asking you to bleed on the altar every time the wind changes.”

A small, wry smile. “But I can do this much,” he said. “I can make sure that when you come home from whatever crusade or inquiry or ruin you are marching toward, your palace does not look like it already buried you.” He gestured once more at the hall. “I can make the ribs glitter,” he said. “I can make the corridors applaud. I can remind the stone that you are not just its organ, you are its inhabitant. And if I must act the court jester in the process, then very well. Every cathedral needs one saint who wears bells.”

His hand fell back to his side. “So yes, I am sulking that your guest is not a handsome prince with an emergency trouser situation,” he added lightly, letting the humor rise again like steam from hot cloth. “I will complain to the God Beneath about this breach of contract at a later date.” Then, gentler: “But do not mistake that pout for the reason I am chipper,” he finished. “I am chipper because you are glorious in my work, because you let me lace a little joy into your bones, and because for once, My Lady Winter, you are not the only color in the room.”

He dipped his head, almost a bow, almost a vow. “You gave me a place in your house when no one else would,” Tonatiuh said. “As long as I breathe and stitch, you do not walk it alone.”

For a heartbeat, the glacier cracked.

Not for the hall. Not for the guards. For him.

Ixqueya’s eyes held Tonatiuh’s and something in them loosened, the way ice loosens around a spring. The set of her mouth eased. The cold in her shoulders dropped by a finger’s width. For one breath she looked less like a carved saint of winter and more like a woman the season had chosen to live inside.

Then she cleared her throat, low and soft, as if grinding that moment back into powder.

“You are sentimental,” she said. “It is an unwise habit in Hextor. It will get you killed long before your taste in men does.”

The words were cool. The tone was not unkind.

Her gaze flicked once around the hall he had dressed, then returned to him.

“I accepted you because I am not in the business of throwing away working organs,” Ixqueya went on. “The border does not care whom you kiss. The Undying Tree does not distinguish between one sinner and another. It counts only what they bring to its roots.”

A faint ghost of humour touched her mouth.

“Hextor’s ledgers do not mark a separate column for sword swallowers and ball jugglers,” she added, the innuendo light and deliberate. “Only for the useful and the wasteful. You have always been firmly in the first.”

She let that sit. A judgment. A reassurance.

“You make the dead beautiful,” she said. “You teach the living not to dress like they have already failed. You remind this palace that it is not only a tomb, but also a womb. Something that must hold new purpose, not only old bones.”

Her eyes softened again. Only slightly. Enough that someone who knew her could see it.

“You say I have not had a real party,” she murmured. “You are wrong. I have had three.”

She ticked them off on her fingers, as if enumerating crimes.

“The day the March stopped losing more men than it kept. The day the Court stopped calling Frostmarrow a frontier experiment and started calling it necessary. The day a loud, glittering necromancer from the Loom Quarter stood in my hall and told me he did not care what the priests thought, he would dress my Dominion in color anyway.”

Her gaze sharpened. The warmth did not leave, it went under the ice.

“I do not require warmth to function,” Ixqueya said. “The organ vaults are cold. The border is cold. My work is cold. That is the point. A feverish wall is no wall at all.”

She inclined her head, a small bow that would never be mistaken for submission.

“But I am not blind to the cost,” she added quietly. “Martyrs rot early. Frozen ones crack. It is useful to have one man in the house who insists on reminding the stone that I am still alive.”

The next breath she drew was slow, controlled.

“I accept you, Tonatiuh,” she said. “All of you. The stitches. The glitter. The sword swallowing. The ball juggling. The way you look at my ribs and think ‘runway’ instead of ‘rampart’.”

A thin, wry line at her lips.

“In return,” she finished, “you will accept me. All of me. The knife at the threshold. The woman who will always choose the border over her own comfort. The winter that does not know how to end on time.”

She turned slightly, profile cutting against the moonlit ice.

“If you wish to call that friendship,” Ixqueya said, “I will not correct you. Call it what you like. Just remember what we are.”

Her eyes found his again, clear and cold and honest.

“You are my tailor,” she said. “My enchanter. My jester. The single warm candle I tolerate on this altar. I will let you dress my house, and I will let you try to dress my solitude in silk and noise.”

A pause. Then, softer, almost playful for her:

“And since you seem to require it written plainly, yes. I approve of the dress. It serves its purpose. It pleases my vanity. It flatters your ego. We are both allowed that much, once in a while, before the next storm arrives.”

Tonatiuh clicked his tongue. “Single warm candle,” he echoed, eyes narrowing as if she had personally offended every taper in Hextor. “Listen to her. Lady Winter of Iztāmictlān, patron saint of understatement.”

He took two easy steps into her space, utterly unafraid of height or reputation, and leaned his shoulder against her hip as if she were a very elegant, very judgmental pillar. On anyone else it would have been presumptuous. On him, it landed like habit. The feathers at her belt brushed his cheek. Necro ice shards in her braids cooled the air above his head. He braced an elbow on the curve of her thigh and looked up at her, gold brown eyes glittering.

“I will tolerate being your candle,” he declared, “but I refuse to be your only one. The palace has room for at least three more, and one of them should be tall, handsome, and in urgent need of having his inseam measured for the glory of the border.” Before she could flatten that, he swept on. “Speaking of urgent needs,” he said, words bright and quick, “let us attend to the important matter. This guest.”

He wiggled his fingers in the air as if shaping gossip out of frost. “You did not drag a total stranger up my runway,” Tona went on. “You are many things, My Lady, but impulsive in your hospitality is not one of them. You weigh caravans like coins. You sniff out relics like a hound. You audit people. So.” He tipped his head, earrings chiming, mouth curving into a bratty little smirk.

“What is she,” he pressed. “Warm, yes, foreign, yes, possibly a problem, obviously, but that is not a flavor, that is a weather report. I want history. I want context. I want names, crimes, tragic backstory, embarrassing virtues. Spare no detail. You know I live for good gossip and girl talk.” He stretched the last two words like silk.

“Think of it as confession,” he coaxed. “You pour the sins into my ear, I cut the cloth accordingly. If she is a stray lamb, we give her hems that say comfort. If she is a knife, we give her a sheath that lies about it. If she is a crusader who has forgotten which god owns the grave, I will need to know how many sequins to sew on her funeral outfit.”

His free hand fluttered at his own chest, theatrically wounded. “And you owe me, by the way,” he added. “I have just been told that my great mystery guest is not, in fact, some lost prince with shoulders like doorframes, a doomed romance with his squire, and a terrible habit of wearing beige. My heart is shattered. My dreams of a royal trouser emergency lie in pieces at your feet. The least you can do is give me the story you dragged in instead.”

He shifted his weight more firmly against her hip, comfortable as a cat claiming a sunlit stone. “I promise not to interfere,” he lied cheerfully. “I will simply listen, clutch my pearls, and perhaps design something appropriately sinful or saintly, depending on how your tale lands. You can return to being the knife at the threshold, I will be the choir in the back muttering opinions.”

His eyes searched her face, the frost and the faint crack she had let him see. “And if you are very good,” Tona added, tone dropping into a conspiratorial purr, “I will keep the ball juggling and sword swallowing strictly within palace walls and only weaponize them against people you already dislike.” He gave her thigh a light, friendly pat.

“Now,” he said, bright and insistent, “tell me about our guest before my imagination starts dressing her as a bald crusader with bad teeth. I will not forgive you if you let me waste good silk on someone that boring.”

Ixqueya felt him lean against her hip and, for once, did not shake him off.

The corner of her mouth curled. Not wide. Not soft. A small predatory smirk, like frost admitting it is faintly amused that someone keeps walking into it.

“Your thirst for gossip,” she said, looking down at him, “would drown a lesser man.”

Her fingers brushed an idle line along the top of her belt, as if weighing how much to give him. Then she turned her gaze past him, toward the distant dark of the fen beyond the palace walls, and spoke as if she were reciting a case from an old ledger.

“Her name is Pihkta.”

The name hung in the cold a moment, foreign and soft against the hard vowels of Tlacuatl.

“I found her in the swamp,” Ixqueya went on. “Alone. Half-starved. Less a woman than a question the God Beneath had forgotten to answer.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly at the memory.

“Not one of ours,” she said. “Not Crusader. Not caravan. Something new. Amphibious. Limbs wrong for any empire I know. Skin like wet stone. She looked as if some tired minor god had tried to sculpt a daughter out of marshwater and then lost interest halfway through.”

There was no cruelty in the description. Only that flat, precise assessment she reserved for diseased organs and enemy banners.

“I told her I wished to study her,” Ixqueya continued. “That much was true. A new species wandering my March is not a footnote. It is a potential plague. Or a resource. The doctrine demands we find out which.”

She drew a slow breath. Frost from her lungs touched the air between them.

“But it was not the whole truth,” she admitted. “There is something else. A tether.”

Her eyes dropped back to Tonatiuh, and for a heartbeat they were less glacial, more human.

“She is alone,” Ixqueya said. “Utterly. Like a stray prayer that never found a shrine. No House. No Court. No Tree. Just a body trying not to sink in a swamp that does not know her name.”

The faintest shrug rolled through her shoulders.

“I recognized the shape,” she said. “I have worn it myself often enough. Different swamp. Same silence.”

She let that confession sit, bare and small amid all the necro ice.

“Do not misunderstand,” she added. “I have not laid with her. I have not touched her in that way. I did not drag her here to break in a new toy.”
Her lip curled, this time in open disdain, but the disgust was directed inward as much as outward.

“I am tired of toys, Tona,” Ixqueya said. “Boy toys and girl toys alike. They burn like candles in a crypt. Brief light. Brief heat. When they gutter out, the stone is exactly as cold as it was before, and you are left with more smoke on the ceiling and less patience for the next flame.”

Her fingers closed loosely at her side, knuckles pale against bronze.

“I have had my share of warmed beds and pretty distractions,” she went on. “They filled the hours. They did not fill the void. There is a difference. The void belongs to the work. To the border. To the Tree. I know what I am. A knife does not cure its own edge by rubbing against softer metals.”

She inclined her head, as if acknowledging some private, relentless truth.

“So with Pihkta,” she said, “I am careful. I offer shelter. Food. Study. A place inside my ledgers that is not ‘threat’ or ‘waste.’ I do not offer myself as another vice to drown in. I have no interest in seeing her added to the pile of spent comforts the March has already swallowed.”

The ice in her voice gentled, just a fraction.

“If there is anything between us,” Ixqueya finished quietly, “it will be built like Necro Ice. Slowly. Under pressure. Clear enough to see the cracks and strong enough to bear weight. Or it will not be built at all.”

Silence held for a breath. The orchids listened. The ribs above kept their counsel. Then, mercifully, the smirk returned.

“As for your sad princes and their terrible trousers,” she said, looking down at him with cool amusement, “you need not despair.”

A thin line of humor cut through the frost.

“The March is full of men who pray to the Undying Tree with one hand and to their own loneliness with the other. When the next of them comes weeping about his burdens and his ill-fitting leggings, I will be sure to send him to you. You may measure his inseam, mend his soul, and juggle whatever balls you deem appropriate.”

Her gaze sharpened, but the warmth did not quite leave it.

“After all,” Ixqueya added, “I accept all useful organs in my domain. Sword swallowers. Ball jugglers. Martyrs. Even sentimental candles that insist on lighting up my altar.”

A beat. The faintest, rarest hint of fondness threaded through the ice.

“Consider it my own small act of charity, Tonatiuh,” she said. “You tend my loneliness as if it were a garment. I will make sure the saddest boys find their way to your fitting room.”

Tonatiuh made a pleased little hum in his chest, the sound one might make on discovering a bolt of cloth that was both rare and on sale. “A stray prayer in my Lady’s swamp,” he said, eyes alight. “Now that is the sort of gossip I get out of bed for.” He shifted, leaning his shoulder more comfortably into Ixqueya’s hip, fingers idly tracing a nothing-pattern in the frost-silk at her thigh.

“You do realize,” he went on, “that you have just described my favorite kind of creature. Half-drowned, half-starved, no god, no house, no proper hems. The cosmos sends you a question and, very magnanimously, you have decided not to answer it with a mace.” He glanced up at her, lashes low, lips curling. “Instead you bring her home,” Tona murmured. “Wrap her in study and shelter. Call it doctrine, call it research. It is very pretty, the way you lie to yourself. Almost as pretty as your legs.”

The compliment came light and easy, tossed like a bauble he knew she would not bother to catch. He rolled the name on his tongue. “Pihkta. Mmm. It sounds like a drop of water hitting ice. I approve.” His tone softened, but the sparkle did not leave his eyes. “You feel that tether because you recognize the shape of her emptiness,” he said. “You and I, we work with absences. You carve them out of people to make the border strong. I carve them out of people to make their silhouettes behave. Loneliness is just another negative space. Most try to stuff it with toys. You have simply lived with yours long enough to know toys don’t fill it. They just rattle around inside.”

He gave a little shrug, bangles chiming against bronze. “It is very sensible of you not to climb into her hollows yet,” Tona continued. “Strays are fragile. They mistake the first hand that feeds them for salvation and the first bed that lets them stay for destiny. That is devotion of a sort, but it is devotion built on hunger, not choice. Hunger is a dangerous mortar. It cracks.” He tilted his head, adopting the thoughtful, almost absent look he wore when considering a new commission.

“Better to let her grow a spine first,” he said. “Let her learn which part of the swamp is you, which part is the March, which part is the Tree. If she stands after that, then perhaps she is worth more than a season’s distraction.” His fingers flicked, as if snipping invisible thread. “And if not,” he added, “then you have rescued a lost thing, fed it, catalogued it, and set it somewhere it can decay usefully instead of screaming in the dark. The Undying Tree will give you a polite nod for that, I am sure.”

Her jeer about sad boys drew a brighter grin from him. “Ah, so that is the bargain,” he said. “You gather the sad boys at the border, file off their rough edges with war and doctrine, and send the ones who survive to my fitting room with their hearts and trousers in equal disarray.”
He pressed a melodramatic hand to his chest.

“My Lady,” he sighed, “you are good to me. A man could build a very comfortable afterlife on such referrals. The weeping eyes, the trembling chins, the ‘no one understands me, my doublet doesn’t fit’ speeches. I shall be drowning in them. It will be terrible.” His grin sharpened. “Worry not,” Tona added. “I will take their measurements, adjust their inseams, dab their tears, and send them back up your steps with their spirits properly hemmed. You are the knife at the threshold. I am the man who makes sure nobody meets the knife in last year’s fashion.”

He shifted just enough to look her over again, up close this time. Harness, feathers, scars, the cold line of her mouth. “And as for you,” he said, his voice dropping to a quieter register, “I am not fooled. You say you are tired of toys. Good. Toys are noisy and break easily. What you are doing with Pihkta is not play. It is investment. You are testing whether the God Beneath has finally sent you something that is not just another candle, but a piece of ice that might actually bear weight beside you.” His smile gentled, edges less knife and more needle.

“I approve,” he said simply. “I rather like the idea of another warm body in this palace who is not either on your payroll or my arm. It will do you good to have someone whose first instinct is not to salute, confess, or strip.” He paused, then waggled his brows. “Though if she ever does decide to strip,” he added airily, “tell her she is welcome to consult me about flattering angles.” One of the skeletons snorted, or would have if it still had lungs.

Tonatiuh patted Ixqueya’s hip, a light, familiar tap. “So,” he finished, a playful glint returning full force, “you keep your swamp-stray on ice and see whether she freezes or sets. I will prepare a wardrobe that suits both outcomes. And when your sad boys come sobbing about their burdens, send them down to me. I will swaddle their grief in good cloth and, if they are pretty, perhaps let them help me practice my sword swallowing.”

He flashed her a wicked, bright smile. “Between your knives and my needles, My Lady Winter, we will see to it that no one goes to their grave in ill-fitting trousers or unexamined loneliness. That, I think, is what the gods call a working partnership.”

Ixqueya was not seated like a queen on her throne.

She stood. Nine feet of winter-shaped flesh, planted at the edge of the frost-silk runner, one hip cocked with the kind of unthinking authority that made the air learn new habits. The ice of the steps caught Yohualtzin’s light and threw it up along her bronze legs, turning muscle and scar into moving sculpture. Gold heels bit into the cloth with every small shift of balance. The feather panels at her hips flirted with gravity, flashing teal and ember-red against the deep warmth of her skin.

Tonatiuh leaned against that hip as if it were a column that existed solely for his comfort.

Her groomed brow rose above him, a dark, clean arch of skepticism. The expression pulled her face taut into something even more striking than usual. Modelesque was too small a word for it. The lines of her cheekbones, the hard grace of her jaw, the strong bridge of her nose - all of it sharpened by that one lifted brow. A bitchy smirk unfurled slowly across her mouth, painted the color of thickened blood. It was not friendly. It was not hostile. It was the look of a woman who found what she saw both amusing and potentially useful.

Her eyes did the real work.

Icy cold blue, bright as lake ice under noon light, they tracked Tonatiuh’s extravagance from head to toe. Violet and gold cloth, jade needles gleaming in his black hair, skeletons in their little sashes fussing behind him. The hall he had dressed around her - ribs veiled in sheer fabric, necro ice beads set to catch orchid glow, the runner softening her own footfalls - all of it catalogued in a breath.

Nature whispered behind her gaze.

She had hunted in jungles where frogs the color of jeweled idols carried enough venom to still a giant’s heart. She had watched birds in far canopies, plumage like spilled paint, whose beaks could crack bone. She had seen coral snakes gliding through ruin pools, red and yellow shouting a warning that only the foolish ignored. The brightest skins, the boldest patterns, belonged more often to venom and to hunger than to innocence. Tonatiuh, leaning into her side, belonged to that family.

He was not neutral ground. He was a hazard painted in festival colors. A poison flower seeded in a churchyard. A man who had decided that if the world was going to call him profane, he would lean into the liturgy and make a cathedral of his sin.

Ixqueya admired that.

She knew his story. Not every detail, but the shape of it. Loom-Quarter cradle, pins and thread instead of lullabies. A boy who sang shroud songs and asked the wrong boys to stay after. A magistrate’s disgust, a mob’s hands, a humiliation that ended in cold water. Somewhere between the cistern and the corpse, the God Beneath had taken interest. The boy who died came back a different thing. Queer as ever. Sharper. Brighter. Less patient with the small gods who demanded his shame.

He had come from nothing and from death both. Now he stood in the Winter Palace of House Frostmarrow, draping its bones, calling its mistress "My Lady" with warmth that was genuine and insolent at once.

Dangerous, she thought again. Not in the way crusaders were dangerous, all obvious blades and slogans. In the way careful poisons were. Slow. Patient. Pleasant on the tongue until the heart forgot how to count.

Her smirk thinned, but did not vanish.

He spoke of her loneliness with that honeyed tongue and hungry wit, then skipped away into talk of sad boys and trouser measurements, trying to pull her thoughts back toward safer, sillier ground. It was an old tactic. Distract the wounded area with laughter before it remembered how much it hurt.

He forgets, she thought, that winter hears everything. Jokes and prayers fall at the same temperature.
Still, she let him lean.

From a distance they might have looked almost domestic. The towering hunter-priestess in scandalous Mesomaerican feathers and ice-thread, the flamboyant necromancer draped against her hip like a spoiled cat in silk. Death and color sharing a length of cloth.

Trust, for her, did not get more intimate than this. “You worry about the wrong dangers,” she said at last.

Her voice came low and even, each word set down with the care of a ledger entry. The hall quieted for it. Even the bone orchids seemed to tilt their pale throats, listening.

“You speak as if I might be scandalized by your ambition. By your appetite. By the way you chase sad boys and rescue their inseams from mediocrity.”

Her gaze lowered to meet his. The ice in it did not soften, but it acknowledged what it saw.

“I have seen the record of your life,” Ixqueya went on. “A boy they drowned for kissing the wrong lips. A young man they tried to bury in shame and wet stone. A corpse who woke up and decided to make a profession of the very thing the world despised in him.”

Her smirk grew, slow and cutting.

“That is not a court jester,” she said. “That is a predator who has learned to hunt in confessionals.”

There was admiration in it, cold and unmistakable.

“You came from nothing,” she continued. “Not a House. Not a god. Not a banner. You clawed your way through death and stood up in the swamp with nothing but talent, taste, and spite. Now you dress queens and generals. You lace your name into their collars like a private curse. You are more dangerous than half the men who march under my banner, Tonatiuh. At least they are honest about wanting blood.”

She shifted her weight, the movement making the harness lift and settle, feathers shivering against bronze muscle. The ice runner whispered under her heel.

“Do not hide that from me,” she said. “Do not pretend to be smaller than you are just because the Court prefers its artisans tame. I have no use for tame things in my house. They break too easily.”

Her hand came down in a brief, heavy pat on his shoulder. For anyone else it would have been crushing. For him, it was something like a blessing.
“I know exactly what sort of predator you are,” Ixqueya told him. “You kill with cloth. With secrets. With the way you tell a man he could be beautiful and then wait to see which part of him breaks first to reach for it.”

Her lip curled, almost fond.

“The Undying Tree has room for many roots,” she said. “Mine drink rot and war. Yours drink vanity and desire. Both feed the trunk. I am not offended by that. I am reassured.”

She let the hand fall away and turned her gaze briefly toward the doors, where the fen’s darkness pressed against Necro Ice.
“You are also correct about Pihkta,” she said. “About how this will probably end.”

A simple statement. No theatrics.

“I will do what I always do. I will extend a hand. I will measure the threat. I will measure the hope. I will try, in my clumsy, glacial way, to see if there is anything in her that can stand beside me without snapping in the first hard wind.”

Her jaw tightened, then eased again.

“And when the march is done and the gods call in their debts, I will likely find myself where I began. Standing alone in a cold room, with the Tree satisfied, the border intact, and my bed as empty as doctrine prefers it.”

She looked down at him once more, and there - just for a heartbeat - the ice in her eyes thinned enough that one could glimpse something underneath. Weariness. A stubborn, foolish thread of hope. The knowledge that she was building a life out of bones and still wanting, irrationally, for someone to stay.

“Do not mistake me,” Ixqueya said. “I do not expect toys to fill that void anymore. Boy toys. Girl toys. They all burn down to the same ash. I am not looking for a distraction. I am testing a hypothesis. Can anything that is not duty share space with me without rotting.”

Her smirk returned, a sharp little shield over the admission.

“It amuses you,” she added. “I can hear it. My attempts at connection are fodder for your girl talk, your fittings, your whispered stories over wine. That is acceptable. The gods enjoy their choirs. If my failures give you songs, at least the noise serves some purpose.”
She tipped her head in a fraction of a nod.

“As for your ambitions,” she said, “I approve of them. The world tried to crush you into silence. You answered by becoming the loudest man in any room. That is exactly the kind of stubbornness the Cold Way respects. Fire that refuses to go out when drowned deserves to be invited into the hearth - carefully.”

Her tone turned drier, closer to her usual edge.

“So be what you are, Tonatiuh,” Ixqueya concluded. “Be bright. Be venomous. Be the serpent coiled at the base of my Winter Tree, hissing gossip into every root. I will listen to your counsel when it serves. I will let you dress my hall and my doubts in silk when it amuses me. And when this latest experiment ends with me alone on a mattress that has never learned warmth, you may pour yourself a drink, roll your eyes, and tell the sad boys in your fitting room that you told me so.”

Her smirk thinned into something almost like a smile.

“Just remember,” she added, voice soft as fallen snow, “if they come to you with broken hearts and crooked seams, it is because I sent them. You tend their loneliness in cloth. I tend their corpses in ice. Between us, the gods will be very well served.”

Tonatiuh made a pleased little hum in his chest, the sound one might make on discovering a bolt of cloth that was both rare and on sale. “A stray prayer in my Lady’s swamp,” he said, eyes alight. “Now that is the sort of gossip I get out of bed for.” He shifted, leaning his shoulder more comfortably into Ixqueya’s hip, fingers idly tracing a nothing-pattern in the frost-silk at her thigh.

“You do realize,” he went on, “that you have just described my favorite kind of creature. Half-drowned, half-starved, no god, no house, no proper hems. The cosmos sends you a question and, very magnanimously, you have decided not to answer it with a mace.” He glanced up at her, lashes low, lips curling.

“Instead you bring her home,” Tona murmured. “Wrap her in study and shelter. Call it doctrine, call it research. It is very pretty, the way you lie to yourself. Almost as pretty as your legs.” The compliment came light and easy, tossed like a bauble he knew she would not bother to catch. He rolled the name on his tongue. “Pihkta. Mmm. It sounds like a drop of water hitting ice. I approve.”

His tone softened, but the sparkle did not leave his eyes. “You feel that tether because you recognize the shape of her emptiness,” he said. “You and I, we work with absences. You carve them out of people to make the border strong. I carve them out of people to make their silhouettes behave. Loneliness is just another negative space. Most try to stuff it with toys. You have simply lived with yours long enough to know toys don’t fill it. They just rattle around inside.”

He gave a little shrug, bangles chiming against bronze. “It is very sensible of you not to climb into her hollows yet,” Tona continued. “Strays are fragile. They mistake the first hand that feeds them for salvation and the first bed that lets them stay for destiny. That is devotion of a sort, but it is devotion built on hunger, not choice. Hunger is a dangerous mortar. It cracks.”

He tilted his head, adopting the thoughtful, almost absent look he wore when considering a new commission. “Better to let her grow a spine first,” he said. “Let her learn which part of the swamp is you, which part is the March, which part is the Tree. If she stands after that, then perhaps she is worth more than a season’s distraction.” His fingers flicked, as if snipping invisible thread.

“And if not,” he added, “then you have rescued a lost thing, fed it, catalogued it, and set it somewhere it can decay usefully instead of screaming in the dark. The Undying Tree will give you a polite nod for that, I am sure.” Her jeer about sad boys drew a brighter grin from him.

“Ah, so that is the bargain,” he said. “You gather the sad boys at the border, file off their rough edges with war and doctrine, and send the ones who survive to my fitting room with their hearts and trousers in equal disarray.” He pressed a melodramatic hand to his chest.

“My Lady,” he sighed, “you are good to me. A man could build a very comfortable afterlife on such referrals. The weeping eyes, the trembling chins, the ‘no one understands me, my doublet doesn’t fit’ speeches. I shall be drowning in them. It will be terrible.” His grin sharpened.

“Worry not,” Tona added. “I will take their measurements, adjust their inseams, dab their tears, and send them back up your steps with their spirits properly hemmed. You are the knife at the threshold. I am the man who makes sure nobody meets the knife in last year’s fashion.” He shifted just enough to look her over again, up close this time. Harness, feathers, scars, the cold line of her mouth.

“And as for you,” he said, his voice dropping to a quieter register, “I am not fooled. You say you are tired of toys. Good. Toys are noisy and break easily. What you are doing with Pihkta is not play. It is investment. You are testing whether the God Beneath has finally sent you something that is not just another candle, but a piece of ice that might actually bear weight beside you.” His smile gentled, edges less knife and more needle.

“I approve,” he said simply. “I rather like the idea of another warm body in this palace who is not either on your payroll or my arm. It will do you good to have someone whose first instinct is not to salute, confess, or strip.” He paused, then waggled his brows. “Though if she ever does decide to strip,” he added airily, “tell her she is welcome to consult me about flattering angles.”

One of the skeletons snorted, or would have if it still had lungs. Tonatiuh patted Ixqueya’s hip, a light, familiar tap. “So,” he finished, a playful glint returning full force, “you keep your swamp-stray on ice and see whether she freezes or sets. I will prepare a wardrobe that suits both outcomes. And when your sad boys come sobbing about their burdens, send them down to me. I will swaddle their grief in good cloth and, if they are pretty, perhaps let them help me practice my sword swallowing.”

He flashed her a wicked, bright smile. “Between your knives and my needles, My Lady Winter, we will see to it that no one goes to their grave in ill-fitting trousers or unexamined loneliness. That, I think, is what the gods of those mortally inclined call a working partnership.”

Ixqueya watched him.

She stood before her frozen throne, not upon it. Yohualtzin’s full face burned white through the soulglass aperture high above, a round, judging eye that crowned her silhouette in cold fire. Necro-ice steps rose behind her in a steep fan, ribs of carved frost and bone-plate framing the seat where she received petitioners. Tonight the throne sat empty. Tonight its mistress chose to stand on her own feet.

One groomed eyebrow lifted, dark and cleanly arched. The expression it framed was pure Frostmarrow. A bitchy smirk, slow and predatory, sprawled across modelesque features that had never once learned to apologize.

The great hall of the Winter Palace breathed its pale breath around them. Necro Ice covered the walls in layered plates, veined with faint cobalt where the Whispering Vein lines pulsed below. Carved ribs of stone and bone arched overhead, making the ceiling feel like the inside of a titanic chest. Faint glyphs crawled along those arches, the sigils of House Frostmarrow and the Court of Blessed Bone flickering in slow cadence with the heartbeat of the March.

Bone orchids bloomed from niches at regular intervals, their petals drinking every stray thread of fear, every whisper, every shiver. Frost lilies floated in shallow basins along the aisle, sipping heat from the air until each pool steamed very faintly in the cold. Sound was a disciplined thing here. Footfalls became measured echoes. Breaths turned to ghosts at the lips and fled upward to die against the ice-vaulted roof.

Tonatiuh’s additions cut across all that severity like laughter through a funeral hymn.

Silk runners in violet and gold lay over the usual stark path of bone tile. It caught the blue shine and turning it into warmer shades: wine, bruised plum, molten coin. Beads of Necro Ice and glass had been sewn into sudden constellations along the ribs. They were tiny star catching orchid light and fracturing it into prismatic ghosts that winked across the hall. Sashes knotted around the waists of skeletal attendants turned them into a macabre chorus line. Their bared ribs cinched with bright fabric. Their jawbones painted in clever, mocking smiles.

Even the lantern-skulls had not escaped him. A few now burned with a faint green-blue flame instead of plain white, the light passing through etched glyphs on each cheek to project softly spinning sigils along the floor.

The hall had not softened. It had simply learned to sparkle under protest.

Moonlight and orchid-fire painted Ixqueya in layers.

Nine feet of giant-blooded height held the center of the aisle as if the palace had been built around her and simply never recovered. Bronze skin, deep as old honey and warm as a remembered summer, gleamed against the cold blue of the Necro Ice underfoot. Her legs were long and thick with work. Thighs like carved pillars, cords of muscle running under smooth skin, knees marked with faint pale scars where training and campaign had bitten. Calves tightened above gold heels, tendons at her ankles sharp as bowstrings.

She stood with her weight stacked on one leg, the heel of the other foot set a little forward, toes turned as if she might pivot into a strike without warning. It was a stance that mixed battlefield balance with runway contempt. Nothing about it was accidental. Every shift of weight re-wrote the hall’s geometry around her.

The harness he had made for her embraced a torso built for war, not merely for spectacle. Broad shoulders. Sculpted deltoids. The long line of her back narrowing to a deep, sharp waist. The feathered cups at her chest rode high and arrogant, framed by leather straps and Necro Ice thread that chimed softly whenever she drew breath. The belt of turquoise, bone and colored bead cinched the hollow of her waist before flaring again over the generous breadth of her hips. Feather panels flirted around the tops of her thighs, vivid teal and ember-red, leaving most of that powerful geometry bare. It was less clothing than declaration; not a dress, but a verdict. The kind of ensemble that said the wearer had never once lost a fight worth counting and did not plan to start tonight.

Her hair fell around all of it like midnight given weight. A thick cascade spilling to the small of her back, black with cool cobalt streaks that flashed when she turned her head. The front sections were braided back from her face, heavy cords laced with turquoise beads and small Necro Ice shards that cooled the skin at her temples. The rest poured free, framing the strong jaw and the column of her throat, brushing the upper curve of her chest before disappearing down her spine in a dark river that almost touched the top step of the dais.

That face had been made by a cruel and meticulous god. High cheekbones, clean and cutting. A straight nose with the faint ridge of an old break. Full lips painted a dark, blood-warm red that turned every hint of a smirk into a sentence. Kohl sharpened the outer edges of her eyes. The eyes themselves were a pale, glacial blue, bright as ice under noon light. They studied Tonatiuh now with an intensity that had broken crusaders and made merchants forget to breathe.

He sparkled back at her.

Tonight he seemed carved from the same smug star that lit his sigils. Tall, though she still had to look down to meet his gaze; solidly muscled in the manner of a dancer who had learned early that leaps and lifts needed real strength beneath the grace. His skin was a warm brown, like roasted chestnuts brushed with oil, catching the hall’s cold light and warming it as it touched him. High cheeks, lean jaw, lips lifted in a knowing curve that hovered between smirk and invitation.

Elven ears, long and tapered, framed his head like dark petals, each one decked in small rings of jade and bone. His hair, thick and black as spilled ink, had been swept back from his brow and bound loosely at the nape, the length tumbling down between his shoulders in a glossy tail that caught hints of blue from the soulflame above.

He wore his work like armor. A long robe of deep violet clung to his torso and flared below the waist, panelled with sharp cuts that allowed easy strides. Gold trim edged every seam, curling into necromantic sigils that glowed faintly turquoise, each stitch a ward, a word, a quiet boast. The garment left his arms bare from just below the shoulder, and the musculature there would not have shamed a seasoned soldier. Ropes of sinew shifted each time he raised a hand, a reminder that the man who pinned silk to mannequins also wrestled coffins and skeleton frames without complaint.

Around his waist sat a belt of sculpted gold that echoed a ribcage motif, its lines clever enough to please even Frostmarrow masons. The buckle was a stylized skull with a fan of sunrays; his private little heresy of joy at the sternum of death.

He held a skull in one hand now, long fingers cradling it with an almost flirtatious care. Green flame blossomed from its crown, licking upward in slow, languid curls. The light painted his cheekbones in witch-fire, turned the whites of his eyes to pale jade, made the faint flecks of that same color in his irises gleam like inlaid stone.

He tilted the skull slightly as if listening to it gossip.

Behind him two skeletons in violet sashes mirrored his pose with exaggerated enthusiasm. One threw its arms wide, its jaw hanging at a permanent delighted gape. The other had somehow acquired a torn scrap of feathered trim and was attempting a stiff-hipped approximation of a dance, pelvic bones rocking in squeaky time. Their eye sockets remained empty, but the runes etched along their femurs glowed a faint, amused blue.

Tonatiuh’s body language was exactly what she expected and exactly what everyone else misunderstood.

He lounged against her hip as though the world were a chaise and he its favored occupant. One hand rested on his own waist, thumb hooked under the gold belt, forearm flexing just enough to remind anyone watching that vanity and strength were not mutually exclusive. His spine had the easy curve of a man at a party, not an audience with a frontier Marchioness. He looked as if he were rehearsing lines in a mirror rather than conversing with the woman who signed the orders that turned crusades into statistics.

But Ixqueya noted the details.

The angle of his feet, set shoulder-width apart, weight balanced for quick retreat or advance. The tiny, unshowy movements of his eyes, flicking not only to her face but to the flanks of the hall, measuring the doors, the nearest waystones, the chokepoints between pillar and basin. The way his smile sharpened by a breath whenever she shifted her stance, as if he were watching not merely a friend in a pleasing garment but a weapon taking stock.

Every flutter of ribbon, every tilt of skull, every lazy half-bow he gave her was placed as carefully as his stitches. People saw the spectacle and assumed frivolity. She saw the calculus underneath. A man who turned his own performance into armor. Who made his reputation as a jester so vivid that no one thought to look for the knife under the jokes.

To Ixqueya, it was familiar. Comforting, in the way a known hazard was comforting. The kind of danger one could plan around.

Nature had taught her long ago that bright colors were never innocent. The deadliest frogs wore the loudest skins. The most poisonous flowers put on festival colors to lure flies and fools alike. Coral snakes. Jungle birds. Radiant fungi glowing in old battle pits. All of them dressed their lethal chemistry in spectacle.

Tonatiuh was the same sermon in another language.

Where she wore winter and shadow, he wore festival dusk and altar-gold. Where her weapon was the straight line of a mace and a verdict, his was a needle, a word, a secret that slid into a seam and then tightened. Both of them were predators. He simply preferred to arrive in plumage.

Her smirk deepened at the thought, one corner of her mouth lifting just a hair higher.

He came from nothing, she remembered. A Loom-Quarter cradle of pins and hunger in Kilk-Mire. A boy who had learned to count by buttons, who fell asleep to the scrape of shears and the murmur of shroud songs. Not a noble’s son. Not a crusader. Not a priest. A tailor’s child with the wrong loves in a world that liked its gods narrow and its beds empty of anything that unsettled the pulpit.

They had killed him for it once. It had not taken.

She could almost see the cistern when she looked at him now. Cold stone, stagnant water, the stink of disease and old offerings. A fever-weak boy sliding under, lungs filling, eyes burning. Threads of the world turning visible in the dark as his mind slipped sideways. Bright cords for joy, dim ones for grief, rotten ones for secrets left too long unvoiced. She imagined his skinny hand reaching for one of those threads with the stubbornness that had never left him, tugging it, refusing to drift.

Fever. Cistern. The first necromantic breath.

The dead nearby rising as gentle helpers to hold the towel. To steady his shaking knees. To become his first crew instead of his last audience. Versions of the story whispered through the Court of Blessed Bone added other humiliations. A lover who betrayed him to a street mob. A magistrate who had him flogged naked through the quarter for kissing the wrong mouth. Ixqueya had never asked which wound was accurate. The details did not matter. The pattern did.

The world had tried to punish him into silence.

He had answered by becoming louder.

Now he painted his life in the same bright defiance the gods had once called sin. Queer as ever. Proud. Defiant. Building the Sunspangle Atelier out of bone and thread and spite. Dressing queens, generals, priesthood. Standing now in the Palace of the Winter Heart, flirting with its mistress and lacing her fortress in color as if the gods had never once condemned him.

Dangerous, she thought again. That is what this is.

The most lethal poison did not scream. It smiled. It offered comfort. It made you forget it was there until your heartbeat miscounted itself.

Tonatiuh was not what the Court thought he was. Not merely a cloth-mage and convenient spectacle. Under the sequins and skeleton choreography, he was ambition sewn tight. A man who understood how people bled when you cut their vanity instead of their veins. A predator who did not need a sword to open a throat. He only needed a stage.

She remembered watching him once during a funeral procession that wished to be a festival. A widow in veils. Children in borrowed black. Priests muttering about austerity. Tonatiuh had stepped into that gray little tragedy with a burst of color that made half the mourners hiss. By the time the coffin reached the crypt, the widow was laughing through her tears, the children had roses threaded into their sleeves, and the most strident priest was staring at his own dour robes as if wondering when they had become a sin against hope.

He had not raised a single corpse that day. He had simply rearranged the living.

Ixqueya had watched from a balcony and thought, This one is more dangerous than any lich the crusaders dream about. Liches burn cities. Men like this rearrange empires.

She admired him for it.

She respected anyone who could crawl out of their own execution and turn into an artisan of their former shame. In another life, in another season, they might have been rivals instead of allies. In this one, they worked on the same body. She held the knife at the border. He dressed the corpse that empire called itself.

Behind her, the necro-ice throne glimmered, ribs carved along its back in echo of the House sigil. Above, the Winter Heart Tree thrust bone branches through the open crown of the ziggurat, its plume of blue soulflame rising into the night. The flame leaned slightly toward the fen. Listening. Measuring. The palace was a frozen organ. She and Tonatiuh were only two cells within it, speaking in low voices while the larger body watched.

Her raised brow lowered half a fraction. The bitchy smirk stayed.

“You compare yourself to a candle,” she said at last, voice low, the hall leaning in to hear. “It is inaccurate.”

Her breath left her mouth in a faint white thread. Orchid petals near the dais shivered. One of the frost lily basins exhaled a soft plume of steam, as if pleased that something finally disturbed the discipline of the air.

Tonatiuh’s head tilted toward her voice, the green flame on the skull bowing with him. His eyes narrowed in theatrical offense, but the corners were bright with delight. He lived for lines like this. For chances to parry.

She did not yet give him one.

She glanced down at him, at the violet robe cut to flatter his shoulders, at the gold belt shaped like a laughing ribcage, at the jade needles gleaming in his black hair. At the skeletons arranged like a chorus in the wings, their bony hands raised as if to applaud.

“Candles sit still,” Ixqueya went on. “They wait to be lit. They are simple things. Honest. A wick. Tallow. A short life in one place.”

Her eyes moved slowly from his polished boots to his laughing mouth, taking in the languid set of his stance, the way his thumb stroked idly along the skull’s jaw as if petting an overexcited pet.

“You,” she said, “are more like a poison flower in a churchyard. All color and fragrance and entirely too charming for the soil that birthed you. The sheep come to smell you. The wolves watch from a distance. The gravekeeper has no idea what you are until something important lies dead at your roots.”

The words could have been insult. In her voice, they were the closest thing to reverence.

The skeleton with the feathered scrap tried to mimic a bow, misjudged its center of gravity, and toppled into a clattering heap. Tonatiuh did not look back at it; he only flicked two fingers in a practiced gesture. Blue light rippled along the fallen bones and they snapped themselves back into order, reassembling with the resigned efficiency of staff who knew this was simply their master’s way.

“It is a compliment,” she added. “The most dangerous beasts wear the brightest coats. The God Beneath did not color coral snakes for vanity.”

She shifted her weight on her heels, one gold shoe whispering against the runner as the muscles of her thigh flexed. Feathers at her hip stirred, catching the light in little storms of teal and ember. Tonatiuh’s gaze dipped for a fraction of a heartbeat at the movement, appreciative, then slid back up, smugly unrepentant at being caught.

“You are a predator, Tonatiuh,” she said. “Like me. You simply kill softer things. Pride. Shame. Loneliness. I break bones. You break masks. Both have their place in the Marrow Doctrine.”

The hall accepted that judgment in silence. Somewhere above, Necro Ice cracked softly as it settled, like distant knuckles. The Winter Heart Tree’s flame bent, then straightened, as if acknowledging the taxonomy.

She let the quiet sit for a beat, then inclined her head the slightest degree.

“I know where you came from,” she said. “I know they tried to bury you for the shape of your desires. I know they failed. I know you walked out of that humiliation and chose to increase every offense. You sew beauty onto corpses and put glitter on the grief of men who once spat at you. You are still breathing. That alone marks you as dangerous.”

Tonatiuh’s posture shifted at that, barely. The easy lounge remained, but his fingers tightened very slightly on the burning skull, the smile on his mouth gaining a new, sharper line at the edges. Compliments from Ixqueya were like comets; rare, cold, and never casual. He knew better than to answer them with flippancy.

Her gaze sharpened, the ice in it not unkind.

“Do not imagine that you need to hide any of it from me,” Ixqueya continued. “Your appetite. Your ambitions. Your talent for swallowing more than swords. I am perfectly aware of what kind of animal you are.”

The smirk cut a little deeper.

“If the gods had wanted you modest,” she said, “they would have left you in the cistern.”

He laughed at that, a low, delighted sound that bounced off the Necro Ice and came back thinner, more brittle, as if the palace itself did not quite know what to do with such warmth. One of the skeletons snapped its phalanges together in a soundless clap.

Beyond the soulglass, wind moved over the Winterwake Marches. The fen sighed against the walls, reeds rasping like distant files on bone. Somewhere in the Necro Ice underfoot, an ice spider shifted in its hollow, sensing the change of pressure in its queen’s voice and the laughter cutting through it.

Ixqueya’s attention turned inward for a moment. To Pihkta’s name echoing in the chamber of her mind. To the memory of a famished woman half sunk in mire, eyes like wet stone, a body that did not fit any of Hextor’s tidy categories. To the odd tug in her chest when she had looked at that stranger and recognized the same shape of solitude she carried.

She remembered the way Pihkta had stared at the palace walls as if expecting them to close like a fist. The way her hands had hovered at her own throat when she spoke Xandera’s titles, as if expecting punishment for each syllable. The way hunger had not been only in her stomach but in the way she watched other people’s ease.

Tonatiuh had seen that too, of course. He saw any thread that looked as if it might take dye.

He always saw too much. The necrocouturier read people the way he read cloth. Pinched here. Too tight there. Seams under stress. Hems that would fail. He was reading her now as easily as he read Pihkta then, tracing the places where duty had rubbed the skin raw.

Ixqueya exhaled slowly, as if sending a small cloud of admission into the air where it might freeze before it caused trouble.

“You are correct about one thing,” she said. “This will most likely end as it always does. With me alone in a cold bed, the Tree satisfied, the border safe, and one more quiet absence folded into the morrows of the March.”

Her tone was matter of fact. No self pity. Just diagnosis. The hall accepted it like a line in a ledger, ink drying without flourish.

“I was not planted for shade,” she added. “The Undying Tree put my roots in the windbreak. Such trees stand alone. They crack if they lean too hard on others.”

Behind her, the Winter Heart Tree’s flame pulsed once, a small blue heartbeat above the hall. The light traced the line of her shoulders, the steel of her spine, the faint tension in her jaw as she spoke.

She looked down at him again, and now the glacial blue of her eyes held something softer. Respect. Tired amusement. The weary fondness one reserved for a particularly loud saint who insisted on ringing the bells at dawn.

Tonatiuh watched that shift with a predator’s care. His shoulders eased a fraction. The skull in his hand tilted in mirror of her head, as if the dead thing were also listening. His free hand, still braced at his waist, relaxed its grip, fingers splaying a little along the line of the belt as though ready to move toward comfort or mischief depending on the next sentence.

“Still,” she went on, “if my efforts at finding a connection strong enough not to splinter amuse you, I suppose the exercise is not entirely wasted. The gods enjoy their choirs. I am allowed one spectator.”

Her mouth quirked, almost playful. One could imagine, for a heartbeat, how she might have smiled had she been born to a gentler charge. It passed quickly.

“Your ambitions do not offend me,” she said. “They interest me. It is wise to have at least one friend in the house whose weapons are not axes and ledgers. You carve people with charm. I carve them with frost. Between us, there are fewer illusions than there might be.”

She let her hand drop to his shoulder then. A brief, heavy weight of bronze fingers and Necro Ice rings. A gesture that would have crushed a lesser man. On him it rested like a benediction, steady and sure.

Up close, the contact made the contrast stark. Her skin cold as river stone under winter light. His warm, almost feverish, blood pulsing quick beneath the muscle. Her fingers spanned nearly from collarbone to bicep; he might as well have been a favored younger brother, or an especially mouthy priest, under that hand.

Tonatiuh’s posture altered again, in ways only someone who had marched beside disciplined troops would notice. The spike of his hip against her thigh softened, his weight settling more evenly. The tilt of his jaw lost some of its theatrical angle and became something simpler. Present. His smirk did not vanish, but it gentled at the edges, the affection he normally buried under layers of camp and innuendo rising like warmth through frost.

“Keep being what you are, Tonatiuh,” Ixqueya said. “The bright serpent in my chapel. The poison flower at the base of the Winter Tree. The man who refuses to die on command.”

Her hand lifted away, rings clicking softly as she withdrew. The skin under her palm left a faint print of heat that the hall’s cold stole almost at once.

“Advise me when you wish,” she added. “I will entertain your counsel. I will even listen. But understand this. When the counting is done and the March is quiet again, I will make the choice that keeps the border whole, even if it leaves my bed as barren as a shrine after the candles burn out.”

As she spoke, she shifted a half-step, pivoting so that her body now stood slightly between him and the open doors of the hall. A subtle thing, but it repositioned the scene. No longer a queen and her jester framed on a dais. Now a shield and a flame sharing the corridor between the living palace and the frozen world outside.

The smirk returned in full.

“In the meantime,” she finished, voice dry as old scripture, “if my attempts at connection give you stories to whisper over fittings and wine, consider it my tithe to your particular cult. You clothe my solitude in silk and color. I will allow you to feast on the gossip of my failures.”

One of the skeletons made a show of fanning itself with its own hand at that, elbow wobbling. Tonatiuh shot it a look that promised extra bead-stringing duty. The skeleton froze, then slowly straightened, placing its hands primly at its sides.

Her eyes flashed, winter-bright.

“And when the sad boys you mend come weeping about their tragic hearts,” Ixqueya added, chin lifting a fraction, “remember that it was my charity that sent them. You may thank the Cold Way for your full appointment book.”

The green flame in the skull flared as if laughing with her, casting both their faces in ghostly light. On Tonatiuh it made him look briefly like one of his own posters—a necrocouturier saint of scandal and sequins, caught in painted halo. On Ixqueya it turned her into something more severe: a statue of winter judgment, carved from bronze and ice, smiling with all the warmth of a knife.

Above, the soulflame on the Winter Heart Tree leaned once more toward the hall, blue light washing over bright silk and bare bronze and bone. For a brief moment, as Tonatiuh’s laughter answered her and the orchids drank the rising warmth, the Palace of Winter Death looked almost like a place that remembered warmth.

Only almost.

Ixqueya’s smirk never quite became a smile. But she did not move away from him. She let the flamboyant necromancer lean his bright, dangerous weight against her hip while skeletons in violet sashes tried to copy their betters’ poise, and the cold heart of the March beat on around them, measuring threats, tallying debts, and making a careful place for this one improbable friendship in its ledgers of frost.

Tonatiuh did not look away when the hand left his shoulder. Most men did. The weight of Ixqueya’s regard had a way of making pupils flinch and spines remember old sins. He only rolled his own shoulder once, luxuriant, as if the pressure had been a massage rather than a reminder that she could pulp his bones by accident.

The green fire in the skull flickered. His thumb stroked along its brow as if soothing it. “Well,” he said at last, voice soft enough that the orchids had to lean in with their petals to hear, “when My Lady Winter delivers a eulogy of my virtues, it feels rude to pretend modesty.” He turned under that pale gaze, not away from it. One smooth step brought him off her hip and into a little circle of space in front of her, still scandalously close. The violet skirts flared, caught the cold light, then settled in rich folds. He flourished the skull in a one-handed spin that set the green flames into a wide, delighted halo.

The skeleton with the feather scrap mimicked him and immediately set its own pelvis on fire. A second skeleton rushed in with a basin and doused it in a sulky hiss. Tonatiuh did not bother to hide his grin. “No masks with you,” he said, looking up at her again. “How refreshing. The rest of Kilk-Mire prefers its lies well powdered and its truths whispered behind silk fans.”

His smile sharpened, the Littlefinger edge sliding into place. Pleasant. Knowing. A man who had never met a secret he did not weigh like coin. “You call me a poison flower in a churchyard,” he went on. “Very well. I will not argue. I like the comparison. Poisons are honest. They do exactly what they are meant to do. People merely pretend to be surprised when their tongues go numb.” He inclined his head in a small, almost courtly bow.

“So yes,” he said. “I am every indecent thing you named. I want eyes on me. I want my name stitched into more collars than any saint in the Dominion. I enjoy that when nobles speak of their finest night, there is always one of my hems in the memory. I collect admirers and patrons and rumor the way your ice spiders collect frost.”

The skull turned with him as he paced a slow half circle, never straying far from her shadow. His free hand traced the air, fingers painting invisible diagrams. “I gather boys who want kissing and girls who want killing, magistrates who want their shame dressed in something presentable, priests who want their vestments to look holier than the man inside. I listen. They pay in coin and confession. I spend both. It is very simple.” The green light caught his smile, turned it fox-bright.

“You and I are not so different, My Lady,” he said lightly. “You count spears and waystones. I count hearts and mirrors. You build a congregation of soldiers who fear to fail you. I build a congregation of beauties who fear to be seen without me. We both cultivate devotion. We both stand very high above the crowd and ask it to move in the direction we prefer.” He lifted the skull to eye level, studying the grinning bone as if it were an audience. “People call it vanity when I do it,” he mused. “When you do it, they call it strategy. In truth it is the same game. We both know that. The only difference is that your board is marked in miles and corpses. Mine is measured in applause.”

He lowered the skull again and took a half-step back toward her, close enough that the top of his head brushed the feather fringe at her hip when he leaned. “What you call my cult,” he added with a wicked little sidelong glance, “I call efficient management of belief. The Court preaches that death is a resource. I simply apply the same principle to longing.” The skeleton chorus rustled behind him, as if in agreement. Then, with a small shrug, he dropped the slyness for a heartbeat. His shoulders softened. The practiced slouch eased into something that looked almost like sincerity. “You are right about another thing, I do not need to hide from you. Not the hunger. Not the ambition. Not what I do with boys who think a sword is only for holding in the hand.”

One brow lifted. His mouth twitched upward. “You saw it all and instead of drowning me again you gave me a workshop in your city and your name on my door,” he said. “You called me dangerous and kept me anyway. I would have to be a very stupid man to repay that with lies.” He turned again, showing the hall his profile, letting the green fire light the hard line of his jaw.

“So let us be plain,” he said. “I want power. Of my own kind. I want my fashions to outlive my heartbeat. I want skeletons three centuries from now to clack down some future street wearing cuts I drafted in this palace and for some apprentice to say, reverently, that it is an old Frostmarrow pattern from the time of the Pale Wing. I want my little Sunspangle cult in every quarter that has enough taste to deserve it.”

The skull’s fire flared at each want, as if punctuating them. “I want clients who cannot sleep until they know what I am putting on them for the next procession. I want priests who secretly fear that their vestments will not perform miracles unless I have touched the cloth. I want gossip to travel faster than plague and carry my name on its tongue.” He looked back to her, expression bright and shameless.

“And I see no reason to pretend otherwise with the woman who turns crusades into cautionary tales,” he said. “We are both greedy in our ways. You consume armies. I consume attention. The gods will judge which is the more indecent sin in their own good time.” He took another small step, bringing himself almost directly beneath her, so that he had to tip his head back to meet her eyes. It made him look smaller. That did not mean he felt it.

“You ask for my counsel,” he said. “Here it is. You worry that the Tree has planted you as a windbreak, doomed to stand alone. I say this. Even the most solitary tree shapes the forest around it. Lesser trunks lean with the wind it tames. Roots follow where its roots break the stone. Branches grow in patterns that imitate its reach. You call that loneliness. I call it influence.” The words were gentle, but his tone carried that Littlefinger twist. Complimentary, and at the same time reminding her that every choice carried weight on his side of the board as well.

“You do not visit brothels and noble feasts to enjoy yourself,” he remarked, mouth curling. “I have watched you at those little entertainments. Everyone else drinks, laughs, spills secrets like pearls. You stand in the corner like scripture given hips, and suddenly half the room remembers what modesty is supposed to look like.” He spread his free hand, sketching her at those gatherings.

“Do you know what happens after you leave,” he asked. “They do not talk about the singer, or the food, or even the scandal of the evening. They talk about you. How you did not smile. How you did. How cold your eyes were. Whom you stood near. Whom you did not greet. You are the only woman I know who can make an entire brothel behave by existing in the doorway.” His smile went sharp again.

“You must be tremendous fun at those parties,” he said. “Somewhere between a thundercloud and a confession booth.” The nearest skeleton slapped its own bony knee in appreciation. Tonatiuh clicked his tongue at it, then continued. “You call yourself barren in spirit,” he said. “I have seen you speak with peat cutters as if they were generals and with generals as if they were children caught stealing coal. That is not barrenness. That is discipline. It is very un-fashionable, of course, but that only makes it more valuable in a city that runs on indulgence.”

He rolled the skull once more, then cradled it against his chest like a strange, flaming bouquet. “You respect my poison,” he said. “I respect your austerity. Your lack of frill means that when you do wear something like this -” his eyes slid deliberately over the feathered harness, the cut of the belt, the bare bronze of thigh and hip “- the entire palace forgets how to walk for a few heartbeats. That is my idea of fun.” Tonatiuh drew a breath, let it fog the air between them, then let the theatrics soften again. His voice dropped a shade lower.

“You say you will choose the border over your own bed,” he said. “I believe you. The March believes you. That is why they sleep at all. But know this, Ixqueya. You may let your bed freeze. You are not invisible in this palace you think you haunt alone.” His eyes met hers without flinch. “I see you,” he said simply. “The martyrdom. The little cracks where the frost complains. The way you look at people who have someone to go home with and then pretend you were only measuring their posture.” The skull’s fire guttered, then steadied, as if embarrassed on his behalf.

“I accept it,” he added, with a small, crooked smile. “The part of you that chooses duty over touch. Just as you accept the part of me that chooses flirting and spectacle over safety. That is why I am here stringing glitter on your ribs rather than hiding in Kilk-Mire waiting for the next decree to fall on my neck.” Then, with the inevitability of tide returning to shore, the mischief came back into his eyes. “As for the sad boys,” he said, “by all means, send them. I will measure their inseams, mend their egos, and charge them enough that they think they have bought redemption. I will even remind them to thank the Cold Way for the privilege of crying into my fittings.” He leaned in. “And if any of them prove sturdy enough in spirit to be worth your notice rather than mine,” he murmured, “I will be sure to send them back to you polished, scented, and properly terrified.”

He straightened, raised the flaming skull high, and let his voice rise with it. “To your barren bed that terrifies kings,” he toasted. “To my crowded ateliers that terrify tailors. To your border. To my gossip. To the simple fact that we are both too stubborn to stay dead or quiet.” The skeleton chorus tried to echo him. One lifted its basin like a cup. Another wobbled into a pirouette. Tonatiuh brought the skull back down and added, more softly, for her alone, “Play your game, My Lady Winter. Keep your knives sharp and your heart frozen as long as you must. Just remember that when the walls seem too white and the ledgers too long, you have at least one flamboyant sinner lurking in your halls who is not here out of fear or obligation, but because he likes you exactly as you are.”

His grin flashed, all jade and green fire. “Besides,” he finished, flicking an imaginary speck of dust from the edge of her feathered belt, “if you ever truly tire of toys, you will still need someone to dress the altar for whatever comes next. Power looks best in something custom.” He ended.

Ixqueya studied him.

Her eyelids tapered, lashes narrowing the world to a slit of ice-blue. The look she turned on Tonatiuh was the look she reserved for foreign generals and suspect priests. Jagged, measuring, like a crown of icicles turned inward. A gaze meant to crack stone and peel motives from marrow.

It found, infuriatingly, exactly what he had already laid bare.

No flinch. No fluster. Only that smug, glittering creature with his burning skull and his skeleton choir, standing in the cold heart of her palace and confessing his hungers as if at altar. For once, ambition did not come dressed in borrowed humility. It came smiling, perfumed, and quite pleased with itself.

Her smirk thinned. Then steadied.

“You are a strange mercy,” she said at last. “Most men wrap their greed in scripture. They mouth oaths and pretend power fell on them by accident. You at least have the decency to admit you are climbing.”

Her voice carried clean through the hall. It always did. The orchids along the walls drank the edges of it and left the core sharp.

She tipped her chin a fraction, looking him over again from crown to boots. The violet, the gold, the easy strength in his arms, the little curl of his lip when he thought he had said something clever. A wicked amusement touched her mouth.

“It is a pity your eyes point in the wrong direction,” she observed. “Frostmarrow could have used a man like you for breeding. Poison in the blood and patience in the hands. My House would look very different in two generations.”

One shoulder rose in a small, unconcerned shrug.

“But the Undying Tree writes its roots where it pleases. It gave you a taste for swords that do not hang on the wall. I will not quarrel with theology over it.”

There was no venom in it. Only that dry, appraising tone that turned even her jokes into judgments.

“You need not fear I will try to straighten you,” she added. “I have no time to rewire altar candles. I prefer to use them as they are.”

Her gaze softened by a degree. Enough that the ice looked more like polished glass than broken shards.

“You call it efficient management of belief,” she said. “I call it priestcraft without the collar. You herd vanity as I herd fear. You fill houses with devotees who cannot imagine stepping outside your shadow. I can respect that. It is honest idolatry.”

She took a slow step, the gold heel clicking against Necro Ice, drawing a small gasp from the nearest skeleton as it scrambled out of her path. Her movement brought her a little past him, so that she looked at him now over one bare shoulder, feathers brushing the air like a quiet threat.

“Do not chide yourself for wanting power,” she said. “Only idiots pretend they do not. The only question that matters is what you spend it on. I spend mine on borders and ledgers and the privilege of saying no to kings. You spend yours on colors and bodies and the privilege of deciding who is seen.”

Her lips twisted, almost approving.

“In the scriptures they like to pretend saints and tempters are different breeds,” she went on. “The truth is simple. Both learn how to move a crowd. One uses fear of judgment. The other uses the promise of pleasure. You and I have chosen opposite sermons. The craft behind them is the same.”

She turned fully again, facing him square. The soulflame above bathed them both in blue.

“Very well. The world is a pit of rot. Everyone scrabbles. Some stack corpses to climb. Some stack coin. You are building yours out of sequins and whispered favors. I will be interested to see how high that construction rises before it cracks.”

The cold amusement in her eyes sharpened.

“Do not mistake me,” she added. “That is not a threat. If I intended to kick it over, you would not be standing in this hall. It is a promise of attention. The border has long winters. I welcome a spectacle worth watching.”

Her hand lifted, two fingers brushing a nonexistent fleck from his shoulder, mirroring the insolent gesture he had made at her belt.

“You say you see me,” Ixqueya said quietly. “Good. Then you understand why I indulge you. The March is full of men who kneel when I enter and lie when they stand. I have room in my house for at least one schemer who does not bother with lies.”

She let the touch fall away.

“You may climb your little ladder of chaos as high as you please,” she said, voice returning to its usual iron. “Gather your boys, your widows, your princes who want their shame hemmed in velvet. Turn the Dominion into your private congregation of the overdressed and overfeeling. So long as the border holds, I will not complain.”

A pause. The smirk returned, sharper now.

“In truth,” she added, “I look forward to seeing which one of us scandalizes the Court more. The queer tailor who refuses to die. Or the Marchioness who keeps him under her roof and lets him dress her like a festival idol.”

Her eyes glittered, thin and bright as frost on a blade.

“Climb, Tonatiuh,” she finished. “Climb until your sequins touch my winter sky. If you fall, you will make a beautiful noise on the way down. If you reach the height you want, then I will know I chose my poison flower well.”

She inclined her head, a queen conceding a point on a board only she could see.

“Either way,” Ixqueya said, “the Tree will have a story worth remembering, and I will have had the pleasure of watching you bloom in my snow.”

Tonatiuh accepted the verdict as if it were a standing ovation. He pressed a hand to his chest, skull still held aloft in the other, and gave Ixqueya a bow that was half stage curtain and half prayer. Violet skirts fanned, gold sigils caught the blue soulflame and threw it back in smaller suns. “My Lady Winter,” he said, rising with a grin that had offended lesser gods, “if you keep speaking of me like that, the skeletons will grow egos.”

Behind him one of the bony attendants struck a pose. Another attempted a curtsy and lost a leg. The necrocouturier clicked his tongue fondly, then looked back up at the giantess who had just likened his ambition to a flower in her snow. “You call it pity that my eyes do not wander toward your bed,” he went on, voice warm and sly. “I call it providence. If I had been born with a taste that leaned your way, I suspect I would have spent my brief mortal life chasing you like a moth around a funeral candle. This way, I am at least useful.” He let that hang a beat. Then the mischief shifted, softened, became something quieter.

“You are also,” he said, “the only person who has ever taken me exactly as I am and not tried to drown it out of me.” The hall seemed to tighten around the words. Orchids stilled. Even the distant creak of Necro Ice settled. “In Kilk Mire they were happy to use my hands,” Tonatiuh continued, tone lower now. “They liked my seams, my colors, my miracles on their crooked bodies. They liked the way I made their bellies look flatter and their sins look smaller. They did not like what I wanted when the shop door closed.” His mouth twisted. Not in bitterness. In memory.

“They called it filth. They called it disease. They called it a phase the Lord of Light would burn away if I prayed hard enough. Then they called it a crime and I died for it. You know the rest.” He lifted one shoulder in a small shrug, as if being murdered for desire were an inconvenience that had delayed his work schedule. “And then,” he said, “I came back. Louder. Shinier. Hungrier. Most people chose to pretend the first part had never happened. You did not. You looked straight at it and said very well, I will take all of you or none. Bring your poison. Bring your lace. Bring your boys. Just do not bore me.” He smiled, bright and feline.

“I am grateful for that,” he said simply. “Eternally. House Frostmarrow gave me a roof that does not flinch and a mistress who does not avert her eyes. I am a vain man, Ixqueya, not a faithless one. I will connive. I will claw. I will stitch my name into every history I can reach, but never at your cost.” He stepped closer again, into the edge of her shadow, and the skull’s green light painted his cheekbones like war paint.

“If you ever doubt that,” he added gently, “remember this. If I had wanted an easier ladder, I would have thrown myself at some warm little court in the dunes where they mistake sparkle for safety. I chose the Palace of Winter Death instead. I chose you. That is as close to piety as I am capable of.” The grin returned, sharp and playful. “Besides,” he said, “I have no desire to topple the tree I am climbing. Much more profitable to help it grow new branches.” He turned the skull in his hand, watching the flame dance, then looked back to her with the seriousness of a merchant naming his price.

“You spoke of board and ladders,” he said. “Let me add one more piece. Every realm has its keeper of whispers. In Kilk Mire they hide him in dark corners and pretend he is only a clerk. In the warm empires they dress her in silk and call her confidante. You, for all your ribs and ledgers, have never bothered to name such a thing.” He tilted his head, earrings glinting. “Let me be that for you.” The words were soft, but they bit.

“You would be surprised what nobles say to the man who dresses them,” Tonatiuh went on. “To the one who sees them naked. To the one who pins their insecurities at the shoulder and tightens their secrets at the waist. They tell me what they fear, because they want me to hide it. They tell me what they desire, because they want me to flatter it. They talk while I fit them, and they forget that cloth remembers shapes.” He smiled, slowly.

“My fittings hear more treason than most council chambers,” he said. “They hear which merchant cheats his tithe, which priest keeps a lover in a rented attic, which captain drinks too much before patrol, which envoy from the warm lands thinks Frostmarrow law is a costume he can take off at the gate.” He spread his free hand, palm upward, as if offering a tray of invisible confessions.

“With your leave, I will gather all of it. Neatly. Quietly. A ledger made of sins instead of numbers. I will not pretend I do this for charity. Whispers are a currency and I like being rich. But you can have first claim on anything that matters to the border or to your House. I will be the little spider in the hems while you remain the hawk on the wall.” A skeleton behind him, as if on cue, tried to mime a spider. It looked like a crab having a crisis. Tonatiuh ignored it with practiced grace.

“I do not ask for titles carved in bone,” he said. “Call me what you like. Necrocouturier. Poison flower. Bright serpent in your chapel. In my own head, I will answer to another name. Master of your whispers. Tailor of your stories.” He dipped in a smaller bow this time, more intimate. “If there comes a day when that work no longer serves you,” he added, “you have my permission to trim me from your garden. Until then, let me do what I do best. Listen. Embellish. Sew truths together into something you can actually wear into war.”

The grin flashed once more, all jade and mischief. “And when the ladder of sequins finally reaches your winter sky,” Tonatiuh finished, “I would like you to be able to say that at least one of the rungs was useful.” He lifted the skull in a small salute. “To House Frostmarrow,” he said. “To the lady who runs it. To the only altar that ever let me kneel the way I am.” The skeletons, late but enthusiastic, rattled their bones in applause.

The soulflame above painted her profile in cobalt fire. Frost caught along the hard planes of cheek and jaw. Her eyelids lowered halfway, a glacial veil that did nothing to soften the cut of her stare. She regarded Tonatiuh as a priest might regard an overconfident supplicant. Measuring where to bleed and where to bless.

“When a man admits his nature without flinching,” she said at last, “it saves the gods the trouble of stripping him clean.”

Her voice moved through the hall like a cold psalm. Slow. Precise. Each word set down as if etched into Necro Ice with a ritual knife.

“You seek no absolution,” she continued. “You seek position. Influence. A choir of whispers hung from your ceiling like charms. You would weave confession into brocade and bind secrets into hems. Good. I have no use for saints who arrive in my house pretending they do not want.”

Her gaze narrowed, not in suspicion but in consideration. The Winter Heart Tree’s flame leaned toward them, as if listening in judgment.

“Understand something, Tonatiuh Xīhuitzin,” she said. “The Cold Way is very clear. Every gift has a ledger. Every talent has a tithe. You wish to be the ear of Frostmarrow. The tongue behind its teeth. Then you will accept the cost. You will hold what you hear as a priest holds relics. You will sort what belongs to gossip, what belongs to commerce, and what belongs to me.”

Her chin lifted a fraction.

“Whispers that threaten the border,” she said, “come first to my hand. Not to your amusement. Not to your bed. Not even to your ledger of little revenges. You may feast on the rest. You may trade in vanity and small corruption as you please. That is the meat you were born to gnaw. But the marrow of true treachery belongs to the House.”

She let that promise sit. The orchids drank the lingering echo.

Then her mouth curved. Not quite a smile. A winter front that had decided, briefly, not to break.

“You speak of kneeling,” she went on. “Save it for the men who pay you to lace them in silk. Before me you will stand, as you do now, and remember that the only reason your ladder touches this palace is because I find it entertaining.”

Her eyes brightened. Thin, fierce, almost fond.

“Do not mistake that for contempt,” she added. “Every organ needs a parasite that knows when to warn the host. You are very good at hearing the first tremor in a rival’s voice. The first crack in a marriage. The first doubt in a priest. Very well. Be my listener in the warm rooms where I do not waste my time.”

The green fire in the skull danced across his face. She watched it, then returned her attention to the man who held it.

“You said you chose Winter Death over softer courts,” Ixqueya said. “I believe you. Only a fool seeks shelter beneath a glacier by accident. You came because you knew that if I accepted you, it would be entire. No half measures. No polite forgetting.”

Her tone shifted, a thin note of dry humor threading the frost.

“For that,” she said, “I am almost inclined to call you devout.”

She took a single step closer. The cold of her presence tightened the air. Bronze muscle and feathered harness and the scent of sharp perfume, like crushed pine over snow.

“You owe your second breath to plague water and defiance,” she said quietly. “You owe your roof to Frostmarrow. You owe the ease of your tongue to the fact that I did not let the city drown you a second time. You have paid some of that debt with art. With discipline. With the useful habit of telling the truth about yourself, even when it damns you.”

She paused. Her eyes held his, unblinking.

“Consider this the next line in that account,” she finished. “Serve as the unseen choir of my hall. Listen in the fitting rooms, the baths, the salons drowning in incense and vanity. Bring me what matters and bury what does not. As long as you remember which is which, your ladder may climb in peace.”

The severity in her face eased by an almost imperceptible degree. A single snowflake allowed to melt on the tongue.

“You call yourself a poison flower in my snow,” Ixqueya said. “So be it. Every chapel of the Undying Tree keeps one candle that burns a different color. An indulgence. A reminder that creation is not obliged to be tasteful. You are mine.”

The smirk finally broke clean. Sharp. Beautiful. Entirely undeserved and given anyway.

“My favorite flamboyant soul,” she said.

The title dropped between them like a consecration.

“You are vain. Incorrigible. Chronically indiscreet in the safest possible ways. Yet when the March turns its head and sees you standing at my side, it understands that I have chosen to keep at least one bright sin under my own seal. That is useful.”

She drew herself up to her full height, nine feet of winter verdict, and inclined her head the barest fraction. In Frostmarrow, that counted for warmth.

“Go then, Tonatiuh,” she said. “Return to your looms and your skeleton chorus. Dress the Dominion. Feed its vanity. Strip it of its illusions while you lace it into brocade. If you hear a heartbeat that sounds like treason, you know where to bring it.”

Her hand lifted in a dismissive, almost lazy gesture. Rings of Necro Ice caught the soulflame and sent shards of blue across his face.

“You have my leave,” Ixqueya concluded. “Shine. Scheme. Seduce half the nobility if it pleases you. The border will watch. The Tree will remember. And when you have climbed as high as sequins and whispers will carry you, you will still find the same thing at the summit.”

Her eyes locked on his, cold and steady.

“My House,” she said. “My winter. And one tailor who knew where to kneel, and where to stand.”

The judgment delivered, she turned from him toward the necro-ice steps, the feathers at her hips rustling like quiet wings. The Winter Palace breathed in. The Winter Palace breathed out. The lady of frost had spoken.

Ixqueya exits the scene

Tonatiuh’s grin bloomed slow and wicked, like a forbidden flower opening under moonlight. “Favorite flamboyant soul,” he echoed, tasting the words as if they were a rare wine. “If you are not careful, My Lady Winter, I shall have that stitched on a banner and fly it over the atelier. Then the Court will have no doubt who to blame for my existence.” He dipped in one last bow. Smaller than before. Sincere under the flourish.

“To your House,” he said softly. “To your winter. And to the very odd mercy of finding a friend on the far side of drowning.” Then the moment broke and the showman came flooding back in. He snapped his fingers over his head. The skeleton chorus jolted to attention like a line of bony marionettes who had just remembered their cue. One with a feather belt tried to strike a sultry pose, slipped on frost, and only stayed upright because Tonatiuh caught it by the clavicle and spun it like a dance partner.

“Come along, my lovelies,” he declared, turning on his heel with a swish of violet. “The Lady has granted us leave. That means there are nobles somewhere wearing last season’s regrets, and we have a moral obligation to fix that.” He sashayed down the necro-ice aisle as if it were a runway built solely for him, each step precise and light, heels clicking a syncopated beat that echoed off ribs and stone. The silk runner he had laid gleamed underfoot, picking up soulflame and orchid-glow in little ripples of color.

Halfway to the doors, he glanced back over his shoulder. Ixqueya was already turning toward her throne and the long night of ledgers and war-maps. Blue fire crowned her. Frostmarrow incarnate. Unmoving. Eternal. Tonatiuh’s expression shifted for a heartbeat. The smirk softened into something gentler. A small, private smile, meant for no one and nothing, and yet it aimed itself right at her back.

“At least death has better company than life ever did,” he murmured to the skull in his hand. The green flame winked as if in agreement. One of the skeletons clattered up beside him, juggling a spool of thread and a stray femur in a valiant attempt at circus. Tonatiuh laughed, bright and sharp.

“Careful,” he chided. “If you drop that, we will have to explain to Lord Nival why his patrols are limping. He does not share our sense of humor.” He tossed the spool, snatched it back without looking, and made a little flourish toward the ceiling as if he were acknowledging an invisible audience.

“The Master of Whispers of Wardrobe,” he mused aloud. “The Tailor of Treason. The Couturier of Confession. Oh, we are going to have such fun.” The great doors at the end of the hall loomed. Necro Ice and bone, carved with ribs and tree glyphs, veined in faint cobalt. They had seen crusades smashed, ambassadors turned away, petitioners condemned. When Tonatiuh approached, they opened with a soft grinding sigh.

He stopped just shy of the threshold and turned once more, because leaving a room without a final image was against his religion. He posed in the doorway. Silhouette framed in bone and soulflame. Skull held at his shoulder, its green glow flaring like a scandalous halo. Skeleton crew arrayed behind him in slightly crooked formation, sashes askew, beads glinting, the worst coordinated but most enthusiastic honor guard in any realm. “If you tire of scripture and frostbite,” he called lightly, voice carrying back to the dais, “send for me. I will bring you rumors, new fabrics, and at least three men who deserve to be afraid of you for reasons that have nothing to do with war.”

He winked. “And if the Tree ever questions your taste,” he added, “tell it this: even a god deserves one outrageous friend.” With that, he pivoted on his heel and swept through the doors, cloak flaring behind him in a violet arc that left the faintest trace of glitter in the cold air. The corridor beyond bit at the lungs. Frost crawled along the walls in delicate veins. Somewhere far below, the Winterwake breathed and cracked and remembered the weight of armies.

Tonatiuh only hugged his skull closer and hummed a bright, irreverent melody as he walked, skeletons clacking along behind him. “Come, my darlings,” he said. “Back to the Sunspangle. There are secrets to harvest, egos to hem, and if we are lucky, at least one handsome idiot who thinks a tailor cannot ruin his life with a well-timed rumor.” He threw his head back, laughter ringing through the cold passage like bells in a heretic chapel.

Death had taken his first life. Hextor had given him a second. Ixqueya had given him something rarer. A place. A purpose. A winter to sharpen himself against. And, absurdly, gloriously, a friend. Not a bad foundation, he thought, for the ladder he intended to build. His steps quickened, turning into a jaunty almost-prance, silk whispering, bones rattling time. The palace of Winter Death closed behind him, still and solemn. In its veins, a new rumor had begun to move.

Tona exits the rp

Thank you for the rp.