Out on the field, icy shapes began to ascend.
Where the frost-ferns overlapped, something erupted from the soil. First came a simple bulge of ice, like the crown of a seed breaking free of the soil. It was followed a heartbeat later by a slender shaft that thickened into a trunk; crystalline and clear at the root, clouding to a milky translucence as it spiraled upward like a sapling reaching for the sun.
The growth was slow enough to follow with the eye, and up on the hillside, people stood on their blankets and climbed onto the terraces below just to get a better view over the heads of the crowd.
One lonely tree stood in the center of the field, shining with reflected and refracted radiance from above like a thing of wonder. It stood close to thirty feet tall, and it looked like it had been carved from a single block of ice, like a decoration at a lord's winter feast. Only no lord had ever beheld an ice sculpture so large, or so lifelike.
