Bigby turned out to be an oft-grimacing man who had to be detached from several children to take her to 'the gap.' They didn't speak much on the trip, since he kept her before him, eyes cold stone on her back. Either he didn't trust her or didn't approve of her, or didn't like her, or had never liked anyone ever. It might be all of the above.

"So, you knew Kay?" she ventured, after twenty minutes of walking and silence.

"Yeah."

"Did he ever talk about his—"

"Nope."

"Or how he became blind?"

"Only know the basics and the shard, just like everyone else."

"Was he happy, at least?" In the aftermath of Frau's 'insanity' comment, this was a silly question but maybe—maybe Bigby had seen him at other times…

It gave the stalking man pause "I saw him happy, a few times. Sight made him miserable. He'd be pleased when he'd dug out his eyes again."

The thought of that made a lump of sympathetic pain gather in Gerda's throat. "And the Snow Queen—?"

"Didn't talk about her. We're here." He slid Gerda's pack off his shoulders easily and doled out instruction by rote memory as Gerda looked warily at the dirt path. It seemed to start from nowhere and lead into the trees, heading due north. "Stay on the path, walk straight through. Don't step off for four hours or 13th Floor says it'll warp the passage and you could end up anywhere. Might be cold. There's a coat."

She took the thick garment from him absently, still eyeing the trees as she pulled it on. "Do you know where it comes out…?"

"Not a clue."

"And you're not coming." She picked up the weighty pack, hoping that whoever had packed it had a good idea of what she would need. Heaven knew she had no idea what she might face. Bigby pushed a tightly-folded map, about the size and weight of a matchbox car, into her hand.

"Not my job."

"But—"

"I got cubs and things to do, sweetheart. Good luck." And he shooed her onto the path. He didn't even tell her to start walking; he just vanished into the trees. She knew she could follow him, but it wouldn't have gotten her out of the situation, the curse, or the fact it felt like the first meaningful thing she'd done for the past eight years.

-plus, when she meandered experimentally towards the edge of the path, fierce growls came from the undergrowth.

Fine. She shouldered the pack and headed north.

#

It was no strangeness for Kay to wake up in a cold room. His bedroom was cold; his childhood in the Homelands had been cold; there was little in his life that didn't have the touch of ice.

However, it was a strange thing to wake up from dead. Also, strange to see. The room made no provision for humans, it being large and arching and composed entirely of shaped ice, and Kay the only soft thing in it. Every wall was an assault of mirrors, all of them built into the wall with no frames just rectangular gaps in the wall where their surfaces stretched. Hundreds of untroubled lakes of glass.

They were not aligned at right angles to one another, but mosaic'ed, as if someone had flung them all at the wall in a fit of fury—and they had stuck. Since no one was coming, Kay moved to examine them, kicking something across the floor as he did. A piece of broken glass.

Kay glanced around reluctantly, assuring himself that all the mirrors were perfect. They were. He dropped to the floor, out of the mirrors' eyes, to investigate the floor. This was not a lone piece of glass—there was another, and another, and another. Off in the corner, a massive pile of them. He circled the room, looking for a broken mirror of such magnitude and noticed quickly that some pieces had been fitted at the edges of the room. The floor was subtly depressed from the walls to accommodate them and thin, faint lines radiated just under the surface, as jagged and various as the glass shards.

He let these alone and paced to what looked like the outline of a door. He ran his fingers over it, trying to ignore the image of his doppelganger doing the same. There were at least four mirrors directly in his field of vision, but this was where the door was.

Pulling out the dark glasses (miraculously unbroken) in his shirt pocket, he let the narcissus-white room turn black. All right then, search for the doorframe. Fingers did all the work here; his cane hadn't made the trip. Probably buried under the rubble back in Fabletown—but that was not for thinking of.

Fingers, wall, exploring.

He found the ridge of a door, explored it all round with his fingers. It was welded shut with ice.

"Oh for crying out loud—Lumi. …Lumi!"

He said it twice because the first time it did not echo. Shouting didn't change it. The puzzle shards clattered when he kicked at them, yet his voice would not echo. As if it were too big to hear him, all involved with something more important, but the shards would echo.

Kay felt his way around the room, discovering that several very short caves connected to it. Brief, one-room affairs, they all had mirrors on the wall and looped back to the main room in their design. No furniture, no sign that they were meant to be inhabited or had ever been. The glass puzzle was always visible below the blackness of his glasses. It was too tricky not to look at light in his peripheral vision; the temptation was too great.

Somberly, he took off the glasses, eyes fixed on the floor to avoid the mirror walls, and selected one of the pieces at his feet. Slippery, it began to melt almost immediately in his palm and he knelt, brushing away the other shards surrounding his feet. It had been a long time since he used his eyes… yet fingers wouldn't work on tracing the interconnected lines buried in the ice - thin and grey-white, like the images of an X-ray against a light box. He was good at seeing the dark that outlined white and where none might've existed for others, patterns emerged for Kay.

Even with this skill, it took fifteen minutes to find the first piece's slot. He set it into place as carefully as a magic pebble before looking with hesitancy at the room around him. A thousand mirrored Kays looked back, mired in evil and in a thousand different ways deserving of the suffering they found here; of this and more.

But one winked out.

There were, if Kay had cared to count, exactly one thousand and one mirrors; now there were one thousand. The knowledge would have comforted and dismayed him. As it was, he stared at where the mirror had been until the vision in its surrounding mirrors became too much to bear.

Above, a tiny thousand men bent to the task of repairing a shattered floor, the only merit of which was that, once placed, the pieces stayed set in place regardless of kicking or prying. Kay realized this quickly and worked with less care.

He was only doing it to repair the décor anyway. This many mirrors could drive a man insane.