She went to find out what killed her mother. She found a wedding contract under the ice — already signed in her bloodline — and a groom who said she was twenty years late.
Mara Venn is hired to recover the final logs from Veyr Station, an Arctic research site abandoned after her mother's expedition disappeared twenty years earlier. The job is supposed to be technical: enter before the polar storm closes, copy the data, leave by helicopter. Instead she finds the station sealed from the inside, the crew quarters arranged like a wedding house, and an expedition log in her mother's handwriting containing a marriage contract Mara never signed. The groom named in the contract is Aksel, a man who walks out of the ice without leaving footprints and looks at Mara as if he has waited through twenty winters without once deciding to stop. He is not human. He is also not the thing that killed the station. The bargain under Veyr is failing, the polar night is opening, and the contract names Mara as the only person who can close it. Aksel was supposed to claim her. He is beginning to understand that claiming her may be the one act that destroys them both.
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