“Well, you’re the one who ate the wisdom cookie.”
“Like I said,” said Mini, clearly annoyed,“it only makes you wise until the thing you’re asking wisdom for is done.”
“Technically, we’re not done. We’re still questing, or whatever, through this place. Honestly, what’s the point of making us go through all this? Don’t the godswantthe world to be saved quickly? This journey is more useless than a unicorn’s horn.”
Mini looked highly affronted. “What do you mean,useless? It wouldn’t be a unicorn without a horn. That’s what the word means!Uni, forone. And thencornfor, you know,horn.One-horned.”
“Yeah, but they’re supposed to be all peaceful and nice. Why would a unicorn need a horn? What’s itdowith it?”
Mini turned red. “I dunno. For shooting off magic and stuff.”
“Or they use it to maul things.”
“That’s horrible, Aru! They’re unicorns. They’re perfect.”
“Maybe that’s just what theywantyou to think.”
She, personally, did not trust anything that had a built-in weapon and claimed not to use it.Yeah, right.
“It’s so cold all of a sudden,” said Mini.
She was right. The temperature had dropped. Well, not dropped so much as fallen off a cliff and tumbled straight down.
Aru’s long-suffering Spider-Man pajamas did little to protect her. The wind blew through the cloth, chilling her skin. “Imagine having to live in a place like this,” she said through chattering teeth. “You’d have to pick your nose all the time just so that your boogers wouldn’t freeze into icicles and stab the inside of your nose.”
“Gross!”
The air felt tight. Not that stifled, staleness of the palace. It reminded Aru of how sometimes in winter it hurt to breathe because the air had become overly sharp and thin.
“Aru, look, it’s snowing!”
Aru craned her neck and saw blue-bellied clouds drifting above them. In slow spirals, white flurries fell to the ground.
A single white flake landed on her palm. It looked like a snowflake, down to the delicate lacework of ice. But it didn’tfeellike snow. Even though it was cold.
It felt like a pinch.
Beside her, Mini winced.
The snow, or whatever it was, was beginning to fall harder. Now the flakes were hitting the ground. They didn’t melt.
As Aru watched the snow, she spotted a tall tree with hundreds of tiny mirrors for bark. Something slipped behind the trunk. A figure—pale and slim, with a cloud of frosted hair. But when she blinked, she couldn’t remember what she had seen.
“Aru!” called Mini.
She didn’t respond. Not because she hadn’t heard, but because she hadn’t realized Mini was talking to her.
For a second, she had forgotten that Aru was her name.
Panicking, Aru tried to rub the snowflakes off her arm and shake them out of her hair. Something about it was making her lose track of things she should remember. It wasn’t like snow at all. It was like salt thrown on a slug. Slowly dissolving what you were.
“Is it such a bad thing, children, to forget?” asked a voice from somewhere in front of them. “If you never remember, you never grow old. Innocence keeps you ageless and blameless. People are rarely punished for deeds they cannot recall.”
Aru looked up. The snowflakes now hung suspended in the air, a thousand white droplets. A man parted the droplets as if they were a giant beaded curtain. He was beautiful.
Not movie-star handsome, which was something else; this was a distant, unearthly beauty. The way you could watch a thunderstorm brewing across the ocean and find it lovely.
The man was tall and dark-skinned, his hair a shock of silver. His eyes were like blue chips of ice. His jacket and pants were an unnaturally bright shade of white.
