Hilda Frost-Born doesn't do sentiment. She does deals. When her dying forge-master needs frost-crystal — a material found only in the frozen north — she crosses the lethal Shatter alone to find it. What she finds instead is Kaldheim: the last frost-dwarf hold, buried in a glacier and dying under a three-century curse called the Slow Freeze.

Steward Torvik Ice-Heart has spent forty years watching his people die by degrees. The frost-seer prophecy says a mountain-hold bride can break the curse. He finds the arrangement morally repugnant, but four hundred lives outweigh one man's conscience. He offers Hilda the crystal she needs in exchange for a year of marriage.

But proximity has a way of thawing things. Every meal shared, every argument that cuts too close to truth, every moment where controlled silence gives way to something raw — Hilda begins to see the man beneath the ice. And Torvik begins to feel things he cannot afford to feel, because in Kaldheim, strong emotion accelerates the curse. Love doesn't warm the heart here. It stops it.