A spark seemed to leap from me at our touch, but his lips remained cold and unresponsive.

Pulling back, he pushed me away, and I once again stumbled backward away from him.

“Did you not understand me before? I do not want your kisses, Celine. I suppose it must have amused me to dally with you when there was no one else around, although now I can’t imagine why. Whatever my reason previously, I’m no longer interested.”

I screamed, rounding on the Snow Queen and throwing fire ball after fire ball at her head. She reacted instantly, throwing up an arm and pulling a shield of ice from the base of the dais. My fire balls burst against it, shattering the ice, but as each one made a dent, she waved again, bringing up a fresh layer of ice to strengthen it.

I circled around her, moving away from Oliver, as I looked for an opening in her protective layer. If I couldn’t burn this ice from Oliver, I was going directly to the source. But as fast as I could throw my fire, she raised her shield to match.

Wheeling back around, I changed tactic. Dropping the fire, I let my anger and pain burn brighter and brighter inside me. When it reached a peak, I thrust my palms outward.

A gale force wind, the type that had blasted rocks from a blocked tunnel, shot out and smashed against the queen’s protective wall of ice. With an angry shriek, the queen leaped on her throne and vaulted over the ice as it fell before my onslaught, crashing into the seat where she had sat a moment before.

With a feral grin, I directed my palms toward her, and the wind swept her up and pushed her body against the wall behind us.

“Prince!”

She managed to yell the word despite my wind stealing her breath.

Oliver nodded once and stepped between us. I snapped my hands down, cutting off the air before it could do more than sweep back his hair. The queen straightened slowly as Oliver eyed me with disgust.

“Always so impetuous, Celine, that’s your problem. Always ready to rush into some ill-thought plan with no consideration of others. And why would you consider them? When you’re so sure of yourself. So brash. You hurt others with everything you do. I can’t imagine why your kingdom allowed such wild behavior in a princess. I would have expected them to beat some sense and manners into you long ago.”

I had thought I knew this wasn’t really him. Had thought myself armored against the Snow Queen’s poison. But his words beat against me and wormed their way into my heart. I had told Giselle that the words were not his, but the Snow Queen did not know me like this. Her magic mirror was broken. She had not been watching me, living with me for weeks. It was Oliver himself who knew my faults. Who had seen my confidence spill over into dangerous, willful stupidity.

I swayed and fell to my knees. Tears blurred my vision. So this was how Oliver truly saw me, once my beauty had been stripped away by the magic. I tried to remember the words he had spoken among the trees of Valley View, to hold on to the moment we had shared, but I couldn’t actually remember him saying anything. Other than that I was beautiful. And that I burned with fire. Both true, but neither the foundation for love.

Blinking, I saw vague movement, but only Giselle’s scream gave me the warning to throw myself sideways. My vision cleared as gleaming icicles stabbed through the space where my body had recently been. As the queen stalked toward me, I twisted and sprang back to my feet.

I tried to call fire to my hands, but my insides had gone cold. I almost fell down the stairs as I backed off the dais. The queen continued to stalk toward me, only now she was smiling, her face twisted out of any semblance of beauty. Oliver remained behind, apparently uninterested in further intervention.

“It’s not true, Celine,” said Giselle, her sudden presence warm at my back. She gripped my elbow and dragged me backward away from the advancing queen. “Ollie doesn’t mean any of that. It’s like you said to me. It’s just her poison speaking.”

“But Giselle…” I choked on the words as I remembered the snow leopard, and Valley View, and every stupid thing I’d muttered unthinkingly under my breath. Only the night before, I had scared her with my thoughtless words.

She continued to pull me back, maneuvering us through the gap in the queen’s ice wall.

“I love your confidence,” she said. “And so does Oliver. The true Oliver, anyway. You saved us all from the blizzard, remember? We would be dead if not for you. And you nearly killed yourself doing it. You were unconscious, and Oliver was nearly beside himself. I’ve never seen him like that.”

I tried to cling to her words, to regain some of that confidence she spoke of. The confidence that had always driven me into foolish scrapes.

“Even in my fog,” she continued, still moving us backward, “even when my heart was frozen, I saw something in you. Back in Marin. During the Princess Tourney. The piece of me that still survived recognized that you had the strength to save us. That’s why I invited you to visit.”

I regained my feet, moving away from her dragging grip. “But it was Emmeline who invited me.”

“Because I asked her to.” Giselle smiled up at me, but her eyes were afraid. “And now I need you to use that strength. It’s time to save us, Celine.”

As she said the words, she pushed me to one side and spun me around. The sudden movement pushed me out of the way of another burst of icicles and left me standing in the middle of the throne room, facing the queen.

The Snow Queen laughed mockingly, the sound bouncing through the room and echoing from the ceiling.

“Inspiring words, I’m sure. But if your Oliver once saw those things in you, he will never do so again. Because I have discovered that the mirror fragments work differently when placed in the eye rather than in the heart.” Her smile grew even broader. “It is not only his heart that is frozen now. And a splinter in the eye means that the bearer will see the world as it truly is.” Her smile dropped away. “Ugly. They will see only the ugly truth about everyone and everything they see.”

I stared at her in horror. Giselle had been right. The Snow Queen had chosen to dwell in the darkest parts of herself for so long that she had lost the person she must once have been.

“Valley View,” I gasped. I finally had the answer to what poison consumed that place.

The queen smiled again, as if she approved of my joining the pieces together. “My experiments there were so very fruitful. I couldn’t have my servants losing the will to grow my food. But neither could I risk them being corrupted by outside forces—such as you—who might come up the mountain in search of the source of my new winter.” She looked insufferably pleased with her foresight. “I’ll wager they saw nothing of worth or value in any plea you made on behalf of the kingdom.”

“Well, that explains that,” muttered Giselle, now sheltering behind me. “Those poor people.”

Without warning, I whipped both hands forward, sending two fire balls soaring toward the queen. She ducked, but one of them clipped her crown, knocking it from her head.

With a screech of fury, she stooped to grab it, but had to leap the other way as I threw my next attack at the crown itself. One of my fire balls landed with precise aim, exploding the ice of the crown. Giselle and I ducked, shielding ourselves from the flying shards while the queen screamed again.

She staggered back to her feet, thrusting her arms out to either side and pulling them slowly upward, as if dragging a great weight. Spears of ice shot from the floor in every direction.

Giselle screamed and almost knocked me over as she threw herself from the path of one that erupted just behind her. I stumbled before regaining my feet and dancing away from her.

“Get to the door,” I shouted and watched her turn and run, weaving and stumbling as the spears continued to burst from the ice in a widening circle around the enraged queen.

Part of me wanted to flee after Giselle as fast as my legs would take me, but a bigger part pulled me in the opposite direction. I ran, sending my fire balls ahead of me to shatter any spears I couldn’t avoid. More and more of them thrust up toward the ceiling, and a deep groaning sounded through the hall.

I stumbled before running on. Had that been…? A groan sounded again, and the next spear that burst upward was accompanied by a terrifying crack. I saw the ice split ahead of me and put on a fresh burst of speed.

Another crack webbed out and then another, and Giselle’s earlier words seemed to echo in my ears. A frozen lake. A frozen lake. A frozen lake.

At last I reached the dais and the calmly disinterested prince. Rushing up, I grabbed his arm and looked around for another exit. Any exit. But I could see none. So, with a groan of my own, I tugged him back toward the frozen lake, now covered in towering spears of ice and crisscrossed with threatening cracks.

Oliver allowed me to pull him along but made no effort to hurry. Apparently he could no more be bothered resisting me than he could in attempting to save himself in the first place. Surely he could see that this entire place was about to crumble?

“I never liked this room,” he said, as calmly as if we were on an afternoon stroll through the forest.

Apparently he did know what was happening.

“Hurry up!” I snapped, losing my patience. “Or we’re both going to die.”

“Do you always have to be so dramatic, Celine?” he asked, deep weariness in his voice.

I staggered to a stop as a fresh groan sounded around us. Whirling, I grabbed at his jacket with angry hands.

“Yes! Yes, I’m always dramatic! And I’m overconfident. And I say what I think. But you love me, Oliver! You said you loved me!”

But even as I said the words, I remembered once again our conversation among the trees. The word love had echoed so loudly in my head then. But had he actually said it? He had kissed me, yes. But had he spoken of love?

I looked up at him, suddenly afraid as I had not been before. Had I once again leaped into something that I didn’t truly understand? The mirror fragment had twisted him, yes, but had it truly changed his heart? Or was it never actually deeply engaged at all? Did I only see in him what I wanted to be there? A reflection of my own feelings.

“Please,” I whispered, pouring every ounce of my heart into my words. “Please tell me you love me, Oliver. Because I love you. I love your strength, and your heart, and the fact that you burn just as brightly as I ever have.”

This time I was soft and gentle as I stretched up onto my tiptoes, ignoring the chaos of ice around us, and pressed my lips gently to his. Instead of a spark, a deep heat poured out of me, carrying all of my love and longing with it.

When I pulled away and looked at him, tears shone in both his eyes as he stared down at my face. As I watched, they spilled over, running down his cheeks. And something bright in them—no more than a speck on either side—caught the light, winking and shining as it ran down his face and was gone.

He gasped, his gaze still locked on me.

“I see you again.” His words sounded amazed. “You’re so full of beauty it almost hurts to look at you.” And something in his gaze told me he didn’t mean my ripped clothes, disheveled hair, or terror-filled features.

But as a smile broke across my face, the loudest groan yet made me spin around, suddenly remembering where we were. We’d made it only halfway across the throne room, the door still far out of reach.

A scream of rage made me look back at the dais. While we ran, the Snow Queen, it seemed, had made her way back to where her heartless, uncaring prince was supposed to be waiting. Her eyes were fixed on us through the jungle of ice spears, and I could see she knew what had just happened.

For the second time she raised her hands, but this time she brought them both swinging back down. A resounding, splintering crack rolled over me, and then the ice at my feet shifted, and I fell, Oliver torn from my grasp as we were both hurled into the freezing water below.