Frost Flowers at the Rail
The warm wind stopped, and Ada felt the cold arrive on her cheeks. She had been climbing the low stairs of the cloud kingdom with Bram, who shook out his striped face and looked up. All afternoon the air had lain over the vapour like a blanket. Now the blanket slid away. The clouds turned from pink to pale blue, and Ada's breath went white in front of her. She pushed her hands up inside her sleeves. Bram's fur was thick and warm where it touched her arm. Along the high rail above them, something small and white began to grow.
Ada climbed two more stairs to see. On the cold rail, tiny feathers of ice were opening, one beside another, like a hedge coming into flower. Some were curled. Some stood straight up, thin as paper. When she breathed near them they trembled and did not break. "They only come when it's cold," Ada said, and Bram nodded slowly, the way he did when he agreed with everything. The best ones, the widest and the whitest, grew further along the rail, out where the stair ended and the cloud went on by itself in a soft pale shelf.
Between the stair and the shelf there was a gap. It was only as wide as Ada lying down, and the cloud floor beneath it was smooth and unbroken. Still, her stomach went tight. "I'm scared of that bit," she said. Saying it out loud made it a small thing, the size of a stone in a pocket. Bram sat down at the edge and put one broad paw out onto the cloud. It held him easily. He did not say anything. He waited, and his shoulder stayed warm against Ada's knee.
Ada tried one step. Her foot met the cloud and the cloud met her foot, cool and firm, like sand under shallow water. Then the wind moved and she came back, quick, and sat down hard on the stair. Her heart bumped. Bram shuffled closer and Ada pushed both hands deep into the warm fur of his neck until her fingers stopped aching. She watched the frost keep opening along the rail, patient, in no hurry at all. "One step, then wait, then one more," Ada said. Bram's ears went up at the sound of it.
So that was how she went. One step. Wait. The cold air on her face, the warm fur under her hand, Bram moving when she moved. Another step, and wait again while she counted the frost flowers she could reach. Four. Seven. Eleven. The gap was behind her before she noticed it had begun. Out on the pale shelf the air was colder and cleaner, and the rail was crowded with ice, every flower different, each one spun overnight out of nothing but chill and quiet. Ada crouched down until her nose was level with them.
She chose the widest one and touched it with one warm fingertip. It melted at once, into a bead of water no bigger than a seed, and the bead ran down her finger and was gone. Ada laughed, then went still. She had wanted to keep it. Instead she cupped her hands close, not touching, and looked at the rest: the fans, the little white ferns, the ones like combs. Bram breathed beside her and his breath hung in the air. "One step, then wait, then one more," Ada said, quieter, just to have it there.
Far below, Earth-coloured light came along the edge of the sky, and with it came the warm wind, sliding back over the vapour. Ada felt it on the backs of her hands first. The frost flowers went soft. They shrank, and shone, and let go, and the rail was only a wet rail, dark and plain. Ada put her palm flat on it. "See you tomorrow," she said. It was not a sad thing to say. The cold would come again when the wind turned, and she knew now exactly how many steps it took to reach them.
They walked back along the shelf together, and the gap was just a place on the way home. On the lower stairs the air was warm again and smelled of rain somewhere else. Ada yawned so wide her eyes watered. Bram made a low, pleased sound and lay down where the cloud was thickest, and Ada lay down against his broad striped back with the vapour soft under her cheek. "One step, then wait, then one more," she said into his fur. Then she found his paw with her hand and held it, and the sky went on turning slowly beneath them.
