Printed on the Ice

About this book

The river Callow freezes once in a generation, and when it does, Callowmouth builds a Frost Fair on the ice. Someone has to hold that ice together. Eighteen-year-old Ansel Pell rows ferries for a living and wants the river open, but his grandmother's gift for binding ice has passed to him, and the binding cold will kill him unless someone keeps him warm through every night. Sabine Darrow, a travelling printer's daughter who sets her press up on the ice to print visitors' names on cards, is offered a bargain by the man who runs the fair: be the binder's hearth for forty nights, and her father's debt disappears. Then, on the night the ice breaks, the two of them are adrift on a floe in the dark, carried toward the Ninefold Weir, with one night left to tell each other the truth.