Read Ice for Free Online Page B

eat.”
     
    When she turned back to the banquet hall, the vast table that had waited in silent splendor now overflowed with food. Fruit cascaded from ice crystal bowls. Steam rose from blue-white dishes.
    Breads were piled in pyramids. She breathed in a hundred spices. “I don’t understand,” she said. She saw no waiter and no chefs—nothing to explain the sudden appearance of a feast.
     
    “It is food,” he said gently. “You eat it.”
     
    As if to demonstrate, the polar bear swallowed an entire loaf of bread. She shook her head. The act was so incongruous with his fierce appearance. “Bears don’t eat bread,” she said. “You’re a carnivore.”
     
    “We all have flaws,” he said.
     
    Was that a joke? Did he have a sense of humor? She stared at him. “This can’t be real,” she said.
     
    He nosed a throne. “Please. It is yours.”
     
    Backing away, he let her approach it. Her throne. Taking off her mittens and gloves, she touched the curled arms of the ice throne. “It’s not cold,” she said. It was an ice castle. Either she should have been cold, or the ice should have been melting. But she was as warm as she would have been inside the station. “Nothing even drips.”
     
    “It cannot melt,” he said. “Not so long as I am here. I will not allow it to melt.” She jerked her hand back. “What do you mean ‘allow it’?” She said. “Ice doesn’t ask permission.”
     
    “It is part of being a munaqsri,” he said.
     
    “Moon-awk-sree,” she repeated. It sounded Inupiaq.
     
    “Yes,” he said.
     
    “Your word for ‘talking bear’?” she asked.
     
    “It means ‘guardian,’” he said. “We are the caretakers of souls. Every living thing needs a soul, and everything that dies gives up a soul. Munaqsri are the ones who transfer and transport those souls.” Cassie stared at him again.
     
    “Altering molecules. That is one of the . . . ‘powers,’ for lack of a better word, that nature has given us so that we can fulfill our role,” he said. “On the ice, I use it to reach my bears. Here, I use it for the shape of my home, the food on the table, the warmth in your body.” She felt as if she were spinning in a centrifuge, dizzy with the sparkling light of the chandeliers, the smells of spices, and the strangeness of the bear’s words. “You transfer souls,” she repeated.
    “Others like you—other munaqsri—transfer souls.”
     
    “We are the unseen way that life continues,” he said.
     
    “Scientists should have seen you,” she objected. “How can you be . . . transferring souls . . . and no one has noticed? How can you be here in a castle and no one has noticed? How can you be a talking bear—” She stopped when she heard her voice crack.
     
    “People have seen us before,” he said. “Munaqsri sightings have inspired many stories. Have you heard stories of werewolves and mermaids? Sedna and Grandmother Toad? Horus and Sekhmet?”
     
     
    “Stories, not science,” Cassie said. Like the story of the Polar Bear King and the North Wind’s daughter.
     
    “You are correct. The stories are not accurate,” he said. “Sedna, for instance, appears in stories as a mermaid goddess, but in truth she is the senior munaqsri of the Arctic Ocean. She oversees all of the munaqsri in that region, like the Winds oversee the munaqsri of the air.” He paused. “Your family has explained none of this?”
     
    “There’s no such thing as mermaids,” she said. “And I don’t believe in magic.” She knew as she said it that it was a ridiculous thing to say. She was talking to a bear in his magical castle in a part of the Arctic that could not exist.
     
    “We are not magic,” he said. “We are part of nature. We are . . . the mechanism by which life continues. Everything we do—transform matter, move at high speeds, sense impending births and deaths—is part of nature’s design to enable us to transfer souls from the dying to the