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The journey to the fortress without a name had been long and cold, but Margaret was accustomed to the winter. Though the Feywild was a place of a thousand unexpected dangers, and though by the time she arrived her snow-white hair was adorned with ice and her cloak frozen stiff in the wind, she nevertheless walked with calm and purpose to the gate, and knocked thrice.
One moment, two, and then the frostbitten door creaked open, and Margaret stepped through into the court of the Frost Queen.
The halls, too, were naught but ice, ice and pale white stone, frozen and cut in strange, unearthly designs. Margaret averted her eyes from the patterns upon the floor as she passed, her footsteps echoing eerily in the towering space. The length of her walking was interminable, as was the way of time in the realms of the true fey; it seemed half a moment and half a century before she arrived to the place where the hall widened into a great throne room, and beheld the Frost Queen sat alone.
She appeared as an eladrin woman, like Margaret herself, unearthly beautiful and dressed in white as pure and cold as the winter-stilled sea. Her pale hair flowed to the floor and pooled there like poised water, flash-frozen into ice by a sudden storm; her skin was silvery as the moon, and when she lifted her eyes to her visitor, Margaret saw them illumined a brilliant ice-blue.
“Approach, traveler,” said the Frost Queen in a voice like a thousand winter storms, and Margaret did. “What brings you here?”
Margaret swallowed, her throat suddenly dry with nerves. “I desire to pledge myself to you.”
The Frost Queen regarded her with eyes so cold that Margaret felt the blood freeze in her veins. “And why do you desire such a thing?"
“I am a seeker after knowledge before all else,” replied Margaret, and the well-practiced words were something of a comfort to her even here. “I was a great scholar, poised to make discoveries the likes of which this world has never seen. I was a mind of the type that appears once in an age, but— I lost it. My knowing, my power, all of it was gone in an instant. A laboratory accident, a moment of carelessness.” She took a deep breath. “I want back what has been stolen from me.”
“Very well,” said the Frost Queen, in a voice like the freezing of a thousand rivers. “What will you give me in return?”
“I can give you my labor,” said Margaret readily. “The workings of my mind, once it is returned to me. I can serve you as well as any man is able.”
The Frost Queen paused for a moment, looking down at Margaret from her cold throne, and then said: “I do not desire your mind’s working, Margaret Gwynne.”
“What, then?”
The Frost Queen was silent, and the silence was like the sudden ceasing of all sound when the deep snow is thick upon the ground. Margaret was herself a child of winter, but she was nevertheless struck to her core with a chill so powerful that it seemed she would never know warmth again.
“You are a woman of great knowledge,” said the Frost Queen, after a time. “Are you not, Margaret Gwynne?”
“Some would say so,” replied Margaret.
“When one is making a pact of this nature, it is customary to give up what she holds most dear.”
“Yes.”
“So for you, that is the working of your mind, your labors of intellect.”
“I have much work to do in this world,” said Margaret, “if I am to fulfill the purpose I have set for myself. My labor is as valuable to me as gold and jewels are to a poor man.”
“And what is that purpose, Margaret Gwynne?”
Margaret took a deep breath. “To know as much as I am able.”
“And is not the heart a great part of these knowings?”
Margaret blinked. “I’m sorry?”
The Frost Queen rose from her throne and descended the dais, and as she did her hair moved with her like slow-gliding ice on a frozen sea. “I am asking you,” she said, “to trade one sort of knowledge for another. One may know the formulae of magic and the boundaries of continents, but one may also know the joy of dear companionship, and the grief of a lost child. You shall know, Margaret Gwynne, all the things which you seek: the maps of foreign lands, the incantations of lost spells, the most secret workings of the weave of all that is. But you shall never again know love or grief, anger or delight, wonder or despair.”
The Frost Queen reached out and took Margaret’s cheek in her hand; and Margaret did not shy away from her touch, as cold and spare as a thousand solstice nights. “If it is knowledge you desire, Margaret Gwynne, then knowledge you shall have. But your heart shall be mine alway, and you shall not feel as mortals do. This is your pact. Do you accept?”
“Yes,” said Margaret, and the word fell from her lips like a snowflake in deepest winter.
There was no expression on the Frost Queen’s face, only the same regal calm, but Margaret thought she detected a note of sadness in her voice when she said, “Very well,” and placed her palm upon Margaret’s breast.
“Will it hurt?” asked Margaret, breath fast and shallow with anticipation. She could feel the cold of the Queen’s hand seeping through her shirt, stealing the living warmth from her body, though the flesh against her own did not grow any warmer.
The Frost Queen met her gaze, eyes blank and blue as an ancient glacier. “Yes.”
And it did hurt, quite a lot— but Margaret was accustomed to pain, and bit her lip as she felt the Frost Queen’s hand pierce her skin, pull aside her fragile ribs, and grasp her heart. The cold was unimaginable against the living heat of her heart, like the shock of a thousand seas of wintry ice; Margaret felt it in her very soul, the sense of something vital being parted from her spirit. As the Queen severed her arteries and veins with a quick, surgical pull, and withdrew her bloody heart, that something drained away within her, and she gasped despite herself.
The sight of her heart in the Queen’s own hands was nearly enough to make her cry out. It was still beating and brilliant red, red as the blood dripping down the Queen’s hands and pooling at her feet, so red it made Margaret dizzy with the shock of it— but as she looked upon her heart, Margaret saw it turn the same glacial blue as the Frost Queen’s eyes, spreading from its center, until it was cold and pale as the rest of the palace, and the Frost Queen herself.
Margaret looked down at herself, and saw that where the Frost Queen had opened her there was no ruin, no remnant of violation: only her shirt, and her breast, and her skin unbroken beneath it. And when she placed a wondering hand to the spot, feeling for damage, she realized something else: she had no heartbeat.
“What do you feel?” asked the Frost Queen quietly, Margaret’s icy heart still and quiet in her hands.
Margaret took a moment to look within herself. She thought upon the death of her father, and the long illness of her mother. She considered the departure of her sister, a screaming fight that had lasted for hours before the new-minted cleric stormed out the door into the night. She recalled the accident that robbed her of her power, the revocation of her position at the university, and the long, exhausting search for a way to regain what she had lost. She remembered, most of all, the endless tears she had shed in her two centuries of life, the ocean-wide grief that had plagued her since she first learned to look out at the world and wonder.
“Nothing,” said Margaret Gwynne, warlock of the Frost Queen, and knew that she spoke the truth.