Chapter 2

      “You picked a bad year to become a Claus.”

      A little impatience for my bad timing edged into Lucia’s matter-of-fact voice. She sat straight as a post in the seat of the sleigh and navigated the curved icy pathway down from the castle through Kringle Heights, holding the reins as casually as if she were born driving a team of reindeer. No surprise, given her genealogy. Of course, no other Claus had a sleigh custom-built both to be pulled by and to carry reindeer. Quasar stood in back, his head jutted forward between us like an impatient kid’s. I almost expected him to ask, Are we there yet?

      “Christmas season is always hectic and tense,” Lucia went on, “but it’s definitely worse this December because of poor Chris’s accident, and with Nick trying to fill his boots, and everyone trying to adjust to all the changes.”

      “Chris must have been a wonderful person.”

      I glanced at her through the maze of Quasar’s scruffy antlers. She bit her lip, her eyes filling with the emotion I’d seen on the face of everyone who’d known Chris.

      “He was bigger than life,” she said. “So much energy. Maybe it’s a cliché, but he really brought life to a room just by walking into it. He got along with almost everyone.”

      “Nick told me the same thing.”

      “I have to admit that I’ve had a hard time mentally adjusting over the years, being the oldest sibling and yet ineligible to inherit the prized family position just because I was born female. No female Santas, you know—especially not when there were three brothers behind me. An heir and two spares. I never stood a chance. It probably would have driven me mad if Chris hadn’t been so perfect. Objectively, he was worthier to be Santa than I was in every way.”

      I nodded, understanding, though her confession made me slightly uncomfortable. Somewhere beneath what she said lay the implication that Nick wasn’t perfect, or worthy.

      “Don’t get me wrong,” she added, as if following my train of thought. “Nick’s nice, too. In fact, he’s always been my favorite brother—but it’s a harder lift for him, isn’t it? Chris did things effortlessly, but with Nick, you can see it’s work. And he’s never satisfied with the status quo. Christmastown would have trundled along as it had for centuries if Chris had lived, but Nick wants to make things better. People don’t always appreciate that.”

      “Like the stipend rule.”

      “Exactly.”

      Members of the Claus family, both immediate and distantly related, had always been able to live in Santaland free of charge. Even if they did nothing to help with the Christmas season, they were given land and a stipend. The number of freeloading Clauses was beginning to cause disgruntlement among the hardworking elves, so over the summer Nick had decreed that every family had to contribute to the workload for their stipend, a dictate that had caused hard feelings. Some of the Clauses were having to work for the first time in their lives.

      “And there’s Tiffany, poor woman,” Lucia continued, “moping around all the time, hovering over Christopher. And now this business with Giblet. Some holly-jolly Christmas season this is going to be for Nick—or for any of us. I can only imagine how it must seem to you.”

      “It’s all new to me, so I don’t know the difference.”

      “No, I guess not. That’s good. And don’t let Mom get you down. She’ll warm up to you.”

      I frowned. “Pamela doesn’t like me?”

      “Oh.” Lucia hitched her throat. “Well, you know. She worries you and Nick got married too fast, not to mention too soon after Chris’s death.”

      These thoughts had crossed my mind, too. Having someone else voicing them wasn’t helping my insecurities.

      “Anyway, never mind about Mother,” Lucia continued blithely. “She can’t disapprove of you more than she disapproves of me. She’s ferociously loyal to the Claus identity and is going to will herself to put on a cheerful front even if the castle comes down around her ears.”

      I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

      Lucia flicked a glance over at me. “Most everybody else thinks it’s a good thing Nick got married. Would’ve been strange to go through Christmas without a Mrs. Claus.”

      She made it sound as if Nick could have plucked practically any woman off the street to marry, so long as there was a Mrs. Claus in Santaland for Christmas. But it often seemed to me that there were too many Mrs. Clauses around. Three in one castle: me, Tiffany, and Pamela.

      I sank down in the seat, shivering. The sun was shining, but the cold still penetrated bone-deep. “Are we almost there? ”

      Who sounds like a kid now?

      Quasar’s nose sizzled. “C-close.”

      The most populous area of Santaland was referred to as Christmastown, but Christmastown proper was the old village at the foot of Sugarplum Mountain, just below Kringle Heights, the area where most of the Claus family and their retinue lived, which of course included the castle. Kringle Lodge was farther up at the summit of the mountain. The village was small and picturesque, with a mix of Tudor-style and shingled cottages. The immaculately plowed streets were strung with white lights all year long, but during the holiday season, the town went nuts with twinkling colored lights, wreaths, bows, and other decorations.

      We’d sped through the high street—everyone was used to Lucia’s brisk driving and dived out of our way—and then through the more sparsely populated outskirts. Now we were in part of the Christmas tree forest.

      The forest wasn’t the thick expanse of woods most people think of as a forest. According to legend, the first Claus came to the barren north and planted the evergreen seedlings that became the strip of trees that snaked around the various neighborhoods of Christmastown, dividing Tinkertown and the industrial area including the Candy Cane Factory to the south from the old village. More snaking lines of the forest provided a natural barrier to separate the many rival reindeer herds. The forest varied in density, but it was at its thickest in the ring around the entire region, providing a border between Santaland and the Farthest Frozen Reaches, where the outcasts and snow monsters lived. The trees that made our hidden corner of the north so unique were pampered, pruned, and lovingly managed by the same dedicated rangers who looked after the snowmen.

      Living at the North Pole gave me a new sense of the word permanent. Once someone created an ice sculpture, for instance, it was as permanent as Michelangelo’s David. And a few snowmen lived longer lives than humans, elves, and elfmen. They took forever to melt, although wind eroded them, and the older ones could look fairly threadbare. The snowmen were also honored, as their slow-moving lives gave them the chance to witness things red-blooded creatures rarely saw. For a snowman, moving took enormous effort and eroded his base. Restlessness, it was said, was almost as dangerous to snowmen as a heat wave.