The girl's name is Arachne, which Icy had thought was overreaching when they were introduced in first year and has thought every time since. She is from somewhere with a long coastline and money and she has never let either go unmentioned for long. Not powerful enough to be worth knowing, not weak enough to be safely ignored — Icy has a file on her which she checks periodically and otherwise does not think about her.

She is thinking about her now because Arachne is standing in the corridor outside the charms classroom with two girls from the year above and is looking at Icy with an expression Icy has catalogued on approximately forty different faces since she arrived at Cloudtower. Weighing whether they can survive Icy’s attention.

"Your sisters are looking for you," Arachne says.

As always, Icy's face is blank with a hint of derision. She looks at Arachne and says, "are they," and walks past her down the corridor. Behind her, Arachne says something to the girls from the year above. Icy doesn’t slow down to catch it.

Darcy and Stormy are in the east library, which nobody uses because the heating runes don’t work and the section on elemental theory is incomplete, therefore it’s the one they have used since the second week of first year. Darcy has three books open in front of her and is reading none of them — she needs the text nearby when she is thinking through a spell; ambient, a surround. Stormy has one book and is reading it with the focused aggression she brings to anything she finds interesting, elbow on table, chin in hand, her free hand moving across the page like she wants to push the information faster.

Icy sits down and takes out her notes. The cold in the east library is damp, runes sputtering out the barest hint of warmth every few hours, and she adjusts the air around her chair without thinking — her cold pressing back against any heat that manages to survive — and across the table Stormy shifts fractionally toward her side without looking up from her book.

This has been happening since October. Icy has not remarked on it. Darcy does it too, more subtly, the angle of her chair drifting over weeks until it points slightly away from the window and slightly toward Icy. They have not discussed it.

Icy opens her notes and looks at them. She reads the same line three times.

Your sisters.

When Arachne used it, it did not feel like a taunt. It felt like an assumption; the casual application of available vocabulary, sisters meaning: girls who move together, girls who sit in the library nobody uses, girls who by all external observation have functioned as a unit since October at least. Arachne had not meant anything by it except the obvious, and the obvious had arrived in Icy's chest with a weight she is now cataloguing clinically: noting the presence, noting the dimensions, the weight, the mass of this realization, not yet determining what to do with it.

Your sisters are looking for you.

She had not corrected her.

As with anything that deals with emotion, this requires examination, and Icy examines it from the outside in.

Fact: she had not corrected Arachne.

Fact: she had not wanted to.

These are different things. The first could be tactics. Correcting Arachne would have made the moment larger than it needed to be, would have looked like the word had landed somewhere it mattered. The second is not tactics.

She had not wanted to.

She thinks about Darcy, who had glanced up when Icy sat down and then back at her books. I see you, I'm not going to make you account for it through words when presence is enough. Icy has come to rely on this in a way she has not examined.

She thinks about Stormy, whose shoulder moved toward Icy, and who would be offended if someone pointed that out but would also not deny it.

She thinks about them a lot.

The first time she had used it — said my sisters, out loud, to a teacher who had asked where Darcy and Stormy were and whether they had authorised her to speak for them — she had not planned to. It had come out plainly, truthfully, and had accepted it without comment, which was its own kind of answer. Icy had walked away from the conversation and hadn’t thought about it until much later.

She had thought about Sapphire then.

She does not let herself think about Sapphire often. She built a system for this, years ago, maintained it with the same deliberateness she brings to everything else. But the word had made a door and she had stood between two worlds for a moment before she closed it.

Sapphire, who could not say Ikaite correctly until she was three had shortened it, softened it, worn it down to something that fit in a small mouth, and the name had stuck, had followed Icy off Dyamond and through Cloudtower's gates and into every room she had ever walked into since, and nobody here knows where it came from and nobody will. Sapphire, who had followed her around the castle with patient, un-self-conscious certainty. Who looked at Icy not with impression or wariness or careful navigation, but simply: looked. With wonder in her eyes.

Sapphire. Who was gone, or lost, or—

Icy does not have a clean word for it and has stopped looking for one. She had closed the door and kept the system maintained, and this word had made it open again, so she had closed it again, and kept it closed.

Except that Arachne had opened it today without knowing it even existed, and Icy had stood in it again — two seconds, in the corridor outside the charms classroom — and she had not corrected her, and she had walked away, and now she is in the east library reading the same line for the fourth time.

They call her Icy. They have called her Icy since the second week of first year, since before she had decided anything about them, and she has never told them that the name came from a small mouth who would chew up consonants it couldn’t pronounce, on a planet she does not talk about. That someone else wore it down to that shape first, that when they say it they are, without knowing, saying something that was spoken by her baby sister first.

"You're doing the thing," Stormy says, without looking up from her book.

"I'm reading," Icy says.

"You've been reading the same line since you sat down. I counted."

Stormy turns a page and keeps going. Across the table Darcy's pen slows, just slightly, and then continues scribbling.

Icy looks back at her notes. She moves to the next line. Her cold holds its ground against the east library's damp with a hint of warm and Stormy's shoulder stays where it is and the door that Arachne opened without knowing it was a door Icy closes again, cleanly.

She does not think about the fact that in the unguarded shorthand of her heart, the part she does not have to allocate carefully, she has started calling them, without deciding to, without examining whether she means it:

her sisters.

She means it this time.