Free Ice by Sarah Beth Durst

Bear said. He dropped down onto all fours and trotted out of the ballroom.
     
    “Don’t you want to watch?” she called after him.
     
    “Don’t you want a better view?” he called back.
     
    Grinning, Cassie chased after him. She had only been up in the spires a few times. Bear disliked the narrow stairs. One of his predecessors had designed them for humans, not bears, and it embarrassed him, he’d told her, to waddle up them. She’d teased him about that for days, but she didn’t tease him now. Today felt different somehow. Maybe it was the loss of light. Maybe it was the dancing.
     
    Bear squeezed into the stairwell and climbed up the spiral stairs. Emerging onto a balcony, Cassie walked to the delicate bowed railing. “Careful,” Bear said.
     
    She ignored him and leaned over the ice railing. “Look at that,” she breathed.
     
    The Arctic sprawled before her. Gold and silver, it looked like vast riches. The sky, enormous, glowed blue. Streaks of rose clouds faded into deepening blue, staining the ice azure.
     
    “Do not turn around,” he said—it was a human voice, softer and thinner. She may have heard it only once, but still she recognized it instantly. Her back straightened, tingling. He put his arms around her waist. It felt perfectly natural to lay her hands on his. She did it without even thinking about it. Both facing the horizon, they watched the last drop of gold melt into blueness, and then he released her.
    When she turned around, he was a bear again.
     
    “Bear . . . ,” she began. Her back felt cold now. Wind blew her hair into her face. She brushed it away from her eyes.
     
    “I look forward to tomorrow,” he said. It was the same phrase he said every night before he left her.
     
    Where did he sleep? She’d never asked. Maybe he went onto the ice or out into the gardens or into one of the other glittering rooms. He’d told her once that she slept in his room. “Stay with me,” she said.
     
    He looked at her. Cassie saw the twilight sky reflected in his black bear eyes. She felt her face blush.
    Tonight was . . . different. She just didn’t want it to end. That was all. “I mean, you don’t have to leave,” she said. “It’s okay. I trust you. You can sleep in your room again.” She added quickly, “Just sleep.”
     
    He regarded her silently for a moment longer. She shifted from foot to foot and began to wish she could swallow the words back out of the air. Maybe she should have thought first before she’d made the offer. It would change things, if he stayed. She knew that instinctively, but she shied away from thinking about how they’d change.
     
    “As you wish,” he said.
     
    He waited for her to lead the way. She brushed past him as she left the balcony, and she laid her hand on his back, intertwining her fingers in his fur. She’d touched his fur a thousand times before, but this time she pulled her hand away. He wasn’t just a bear. She remembered his human arms around her waist and his breath on her neck. This was the first time since that first night that he’d turned human.
     
    Outside the bedroom, she had him wait in the corridor while she changed into her flannels—and then changed again into the silken nightshirt that she’d found on her first night in the castle. She told herself she was just being polite. The nightshirt had been a gift. She climbed under the covers. “All right. I’m decent now.”
     
    The polar bear padded softly into the room.
     
    Cassie tucked the sheets around her body as he approached the bedside table. She could still change her mind, she knew. If she asked him to leave, he would. But that felt . . . cowardly. This was Bear, after all. And she’d only invited him here as a friend. Friends could share a bed.
     
    She wished she’d stuck with the flannel.
     
    He breathed on the candle. It flickered and died with the scent of waxy smoke. Now the room was so black that it looked thick. Bear (now human, she guessed