Chapter 1

“Don’t let the beast escape!” The command pierced Pembroke’s mind, slurring his thoughts like a river under the spell of Frost.

The barking of charging armored walruses echoed off the walls of ice.

He had to get out of there.

He had to teleport away.

What were the coordinates of the herd’s current camp?

His antlers couldn’t lock on to any.

3 °2928’ N…

…1 °0982’ E?

Crippled by panic, Pembroke’s antlers faltered.

He couldn’t detect anywhere but here. His horns malfunctioning, confused by the deadened signals of his skinned comrades beneath his hooves.

Pembroke stood on a bed of reindeer pelts in a turret of carved ice, deep in the bowels of the Slayer’s new kingdom.

The murderer.

The banished one.

Now returned.

Pembroke couldn’t shake that first moment when it all changed.

A large snow cloud, rising in the distance, like an avalanche from the sky, blotting out even the sun. It rose above the workshops and stables. The blizzard had seemed to reach into the sky, snatching away the sun and all its light. It had happened so fast, elf and deer given no warning.

The banished elf, 492 now calling itself “the Frost,” had returned with a fury of swirling ice and snow.

The elf, destroying all in its way, found the Toy-Maker in his private workshop.

Pembroke yipped, trying to concentrate, not on the exploding mountains of piled sugar plums, nor the approaching self-appointed king, Frost itself, flanked by a pod of walruses with sharpened tusks.

Fear like ice slithered through the cracks in Pembroke’s concentration.

He couldn’t remember his own Emergency Wink Route.

Pembroke cycled through all the coordinates he could remember, 60°…N…15’ E…

His grid faltered. Once, like a golden net of ribbons, he’d threaded the globe in his mind, stringing the latitudes up and down, looping longitudes east to west.

He could teleport anywhere with the right coordinates.

Yet now, it seemed to waver, his fear unthreading all.

He needed to calm himself down.

He lapped at the blood trickling from the limp elf sprawled below him.

Its blood, distilled with dust, proved the quickest way to a holly jolly.

Or so Kassel had always said.

Pembroke let the blood, sparkly with dust, cloud his vision. The reindeer swallowed the sweetness down, his tongue lazily falling loose from his muzzle.

He shook his crown of antlers. It swayed back and forth, heavy with the blood of the elf.

In drills as a fawn, Pembroke had found that panicking only made remembering coordinates even more impossible. If he was struggling to remember the correct longitude of Bovina or the latitude of Beppu and felt anxiety coming on; he’d divert the squall of panic into a stillness.

He’d pushed his fears through a net woven of happy thoughts. Only a joyful reindeer could lead a fleet. If Pembroke could dig up some bliss within, the coordinates would eventually come. But only if he could unwrap the ease, which now trickled out of his mind like the syrup down his throat

The elf blood was helping.

Pembroke’s mind thawed a memory of mirth.

It was the first time he had tried elf blood.

His first holly jolly.

Pembroke had just returned from leading his first group wink. His crown of antlers hummed from the vibrations of all the fawns’ connections. Every fawn in their squad had their own antler signal.

With concentration, the fawns learned to braid their signals into one. Only then did they transmit a united signal to their squad leader. Unison and synchronicity: the keys to guiding a sleigh even on the foggiest and darkest of nights.

In this particular group teleport, Pembroke had been the leader.

He had easily reshaped their signal, pulling the strands apart, bestowing each of their individual frequencies to one of the bone spokes of his crown. Together, he had led them to 34° 03’ N, 118° 15’ West.

He shook away their frequencies as he did the remaining dust, his own antlers passing for silver in the moonlight.

Pembroke stopped his prance towards the barns.

Something was off.

He felt eyes on him.

He was being watched.

He looked across the airfield. Most of the fawns had maintained their deer form, while only a few had changed to a humanoid form. All of them, Pembroke could see, were travelling in small excited groups towards the showers.

The air tasted fresh, full of dust-laced hay. The northern lights sparkled above, but something pulled his focus back to the ground. Another bright twinkle—as if fallen from the sky.

Pembroke’s eyes turned towards the stables.

Within the shadows, a stag stood.

Eyes twinkling brighter than the northern lights—Kassel.

A pelt of midnight, his horns bluer than white.

A pouch tied with gold strings hung from his mouth like mistletoe.