Something had to happen next. Cassie had never thought beyond the first hello. But now the first moment was over and Cassie didn’t know what to say to this woman, this stranger, her mother.
Owen—Owen, of all people—came to her rescue. She hadn’t even realized that he and Max were still in the room. “How did… How did you escape?” Owen asked.
Gratefully, Cassie turned to him. “No escape. I asked to leave, and Bear brought me home.”
“Just like that?” Gail said, surprise in her voice.
Cassie thought of Bear outside the station. I love you, he’d said. “Just like that,” she lied.
“But munaqsri promises can’t be broken—,” her mother began.
“It doesn’t matter,” Dad cut her off. “She’s here now. She’s free.”
Yes, it did matter. Munaqsri promises. Her mother—Gail, she corrected—was right. Cassie had made vows, promises, to a munaqsri. He could have made her stay if he had wanted. But he had chosen to let her go, even though he loved her—or maybe, she had the sudden thought, because he loved her?
“We won’t ever let him take you again,” her father said.
“Oh, no, it’s not like that,” Cassie said quickly. “He’s not like that. We’re… friends,” she finished, for lack of a better word. Until the birth season had begun, he’d been her constant companion. They’d talked and laughed and spent every second together.
“Friends? With the monster who took you from your family? With the monster who kept you from us for months? Cassie, we thought you might be dead.”
Cassie flushed. She should have at least tried to send word. But she’d never even thought of it. It was her fault that they’d worried. “He’s not a monster,” she said. He’d said he loved her… Stop thinking about that. She was here with her mother, her mother, who was alive and here.
“What you did…,” Gail said. “It was very brave. Thank you.”
She didn’t know about “brave.” She’d liked it at the castle. She’d skated in the ballroom, designed new sculptures for the topiary garden, lost chess games. Her mother was waiting for her to speak. “I couldn’t leave you… there,” Cassie said. There, in a troll castle. It still sounded implausible. Gail fluttered her hands, obviously uncomfortable. She had a debutante’s fingers, long and slender, with pristine nails and smooth skin. For eighteen years with trolls, she did not seem the worse for wear. “What are trolls anyway?” Cassie asked—the question came out harsher than she’d intended.
“Cassie, your mother doesn’t like to talk about it,” Dad said.
Gail shook her head. “It’s all right, Laszlo,” she said. To Cassie, she said, “There truly were trolls, and I truly was trapped in their castle.”
Cassie glanced away, unable to keep looking at those familiar-yet-foreign green eyes. She hadn’t meant to snap like that, not at her. At Dad, maybe, who had left his wife trapped in an impossible castle, leaving it to Cassie to save her.
“Trolls are… difficult to explain. It is an inadequate name,” Gail said. “They have no shape, no physical bodies. Their queen is chosen from those who can hold a shape for the longest, but still…” Her voice faltered. “It’s an island of wild spirits.”
“How did Bear free you?” Cassie asked. Bear had never told her. She had never asked. She had, in fact, avoided every subject related to her mother, including trolls and the winds. Now she wished she had asked everything.
Gail shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “One night, I went to sleep, and when I woke, I was on the ice and the Polar Bear King was carrying me home.”
Silence fell over the kitchen. It was impossible not to hear Gram’s voice as Cassie looked at her mother, the North Wind’s daughter, free from the troll castle. And so, the Bear carried the North Wind’s daughter to her human husband…
On the stove, bubbles spilled over a saucepan, and the burner hissed. “Ack, beans!” Dad swooped down on the saucepan. With a look of relief flashing over her face, clearly eager for the distraction, Gail dove away from Cassie and slid a bowl under Dad’s elbow; he drained the beans into it. Gail took the saucepan, and he took the bowl—saucepan to the sink, bowl to the table. It looked like a dance, a well-rehearsed dance, one that didn’t include Cassie.
She thought of dancing with Bear in the ballroom and then firmly pushed the thought away. “Where’s Gram?” Cassie asked. “Is she back in Fairbanks?”
“I flew her back about a month after you left,” Max said. “She waited a month, in case you returned.”
Cassie had never meant to worry Gram, either. She owed a lot of apologies.
“Cassie,” Dad said, “the others don’t know about the… everything.”
She blinked. “How can they not know?” Max and Owen knew. Granted, they had known Cassie’s mother from before, and the others hadn’t, but still. Her mother had come back from the dead. Surely, they must have noticed.
“Story was that we only thought she was dead,” Max said with relish, “but really she was in a coma and no one knew who she was, and one day she woke up. As soon as she was released from the hospital, I flew her here to surprise your father.”
Cassie gawked. That was the stupidest story she’d ever heard. “They believed that? What soap opera did you plagiarize?”
Max shrugged and looked embarrassed.
“We decided it was best,” Dad said, “to attempt to preserve normalcy. For your mother’s sake.”
Before Cassie could respond, the two researchers Scott and Liam tumbled into the kitchen. Cassie realized with a shock that it had been such a long time since she’d even thought about them that she’d almost forgotten what they looked like.
Scott saw her first. He grinned. “Cassie?” He thumped her on the back. “Good to see you. How’ve you been? What’s for dinner?” Scooping beans into a bowl, he straddled a chair.
Liam shook her hand. “Missed a great season,” he said. “How’s Fairbanks?”
She shot her father a look. If he’d claimed Gail had been in a coma, what had he said had happened to Cassie? “It’s good,” Cassie said. Dad nodded approvingly.
Jeremy stomped into the room. “Liquid nitrogen would freeze at this temperature.” After shucking his gloves, he went for the beans. Mouth full, he nodded casually at Cassie, as if she hadn’t been gone the whole migration season. “I know, I know, I’m still here,” he said.
“He owes me three more months,” Dad said as he handed Cassie a bowl of beans.
With beans squashed on his teeth, Jeremy said, “And then I’m outta this icebox. Beautiful, balmy L.A. Changing my concentration to Amazon jungles.”
Gail teased, “You’ll complain of sunburn in L.A., and you’ll melt in the Amazon.” She smiled at Jeremy with her full-teeth smile. Cassie felt her heart suddenly squeeze. Her mother was strangers with her daughter and friends with that newbie, that cheechako, who wasn’t even family and couldn’t track a polar bear in a zoo? Cassie stirred her beans, not hungry.
Jeremy wagged his spoon. “Mark my words: Hell is frozen. I should never have chosen Arctic research. But I’m man enough to change.”
Cassie searched for something innocuous to say. “So… how are the bears?”
Scott’s face lit up. “Earmarked a hundred twenty-six. That’s thirty-two more than they got at NPI.” National Polar Institute was one hundred fifty miles west, near Prudhoe Bay, and it was the closest thing to a football rival the Eastern Beaufort station could have. “Not that we’re counting,” added Max as he sat on his stool and helped himself to rice and beans.
“Course not,” Cassie said. “You visiting, or back on staff?”
Grinning even more broadly, Max said, “We got the grant. Two years’ worth.”
“It’s joint with NPI and the Chukchi Sea guys,” Liam said. “But Max is back on staff, and Owen got his equipment—brand-new computers. Very snazzy.”