The harness-bells jingle tinnily.
He's wearing jeans and a thin white T-shirt and snow-soaked sneakers, and shivering appropriately. He doesn't look up when the sledge draws near.
He is too tall for a Dwarf, too small for a Giant, too young for an Incubus, too handsome for an Ogre - he is, in other words, a human.
And she wraps him up in fur. Her own body hasn't warmed it at all, but it's still better than exposure to the wind, and presently his own escaping heat has it a bit better than that. "There you are. But of course that will not do all by itself -" She produces a bottle of some wicked-looking, thin liquid, pours a droplet onto the snow, and watches at it becomes a steaming mug of something with a thick head of froth. She gestures at the dwarf, and he hops up, picks up the mug, and offers it to the boy with a bow. "What is your name, dear child?"
After something like half an hour, they arrive at her home, a castle so pointy it looks ready to carve great rents in the sky surrounded by a garden of stone creatures in postures combative or terrified, and she and Winter dismount the sledge and the dwarf takes it and the reindeer to put them away, and she begins issuing orders to other assorted minions of all shapes and sizes except human. She commands quarters prepared for Winter, and a suitable assassin's livery, and arranges lessons for him with the quartermaster, and instructs a specter of some sort to conduct him on a tour of the castle.
The specter shows off halls of statuary, and the throne room, and where he will be learning to stab and club various sorts of the Queen's enemies to death, and the dining hall where she eats with whoever is favored of an evening, and the servants' quarters, and the chamber where he will be staying "so long as Her Imperial Majesty allows", and a vault of treasure which is quite easy to open and look inside, but of course all of the treasure is surrounded further within the vault, by a wall of magic, which prevents any light-fingered servitors from absconding with it. Winter is not shown the Queen's personal chambers, but there is plenty else to see.
"Come, you have yet to see the dungeons," the specter says, and it shows Winter the dungeons. They are not well-populated, but there are a few creatures here - a Badger, a Dryad, a unicorn with her horn sawed off - who are locked away in the hopes that they may yet break and disclose information to their captors.
Jadis treats him much like a useful, working pet - her sheepdog, or perhaps her hunting falcon. When she is present with him at her side he does not have such a thing as personal space; she arranges him for her comfort as readily as she arranges her own limbs, and sometimes hand-feeds him the jellybeans.
He has been in her service for a year, and managed to kill a number of creatures for her who have been informed on by the Secret Police but proved too inconvenient to haul to the castle for stoning, when she says:
"Winter, I should like to retain you for a good bit longer, and Sons of Adam are so ephemeral, so I should like it if you would go to a place which I will describe for you, and go into it, and take an apple and eat it, and then I can keep you as long as I please."
And she calls for a map, and indicates the path to a certain garden.
"Today," she says. "And it is quite a long way, so bring whatever companion you like, except for the core of my Guard, who I will need here, and ensure that you pack well for it. I would give you a few jelly beans to content you on your way, but you would only eat them all at once, so instead I will give you a large number when you come back, and that will have to do."
He doesn't bring a companion; he does bring food that will last, and flasks for water, and a sword and a knife and a good coat. And the map. From all of the hunting he has done for his Queen, he knows little tricks like how to take shelter in the snow and which trees to trust with his business; he won't have any trouble crossing the country of Narnia.
After that, it may get interesting.
There are a great many mountains in his way, with hazardous slopes and even bitterer cold at the high altitudes.
But once they have been crossed, there is a garden.
At the second, he feels cold, when he first bites it - and colder as he goes on - and at the end of the apple he is so much so that "cold" has ceased to have meaning; he can no more feel cold than a snowflake can.
At the third apple, he may notice the color of his hands changing, as though he is a snowflake, or a human-shaped tracery of frost on the landscape.
And what happens is -
He laughs with delight, drags a handful of long curly hair in front of his face; the morning light ripples through it, glinting blue and white and green from the ice-black strands. He stretches out his arms and watches them shine with all the colours of frost.
"I'm Winter," he says gleefully, spinning around with his arms flung out, whirling and whirling until he sits dizzily at the base of the tree. He hugs it. It is a good tree and he loves it very much. He's not hungry anymore, not even a little bit, except for the familiar squirming ache when he thinks about jelly beans.
He doesn't get hungry again the whole way back to the castle.
He eats anyway, once or twice, and the rest of the time he doesn't; it doesn't seem to hurt him either way. He does get thirsty, but eating ice and snow solves that. He's stronger and faster, though not as strong as his queen; he tires more slowly, but he still needs to sleep.
He can curl up in a snowbank and it won't melt. Snow makes a nice blanket, when it's light and fluffy. He does that a lot.
A month and a half after he left, he arrives at the castle gate with snow in his hair and a bright beaming smile.
On one occasion, she produces a container of jellybeans not for him, but for Maugrim to distribute, because she is going to an island in the far North with some of her retinue - and not Winter - in the hopes of retrieving some arifacts and books that may have use for her. The jellybeans are to keep Winter "out of trouble" in her absence.
They are promptly distributed, and everyone who's received any - is, first of all, careful not to eat them, and, second, curious about the extent of how good they are at controlling Winter.
The supply of jelly beans was pretty generous, though. It lasts too; everyone has enough to do and can only occasionally spend their down-time sending him on amusing capers or delegating Winter their less delicate chores in exchange for candy.
One day there is a fateful combination: an incubus with a jellybean and spare time and no ideas.
He toys with the green bean between his clawed thumb and forefinger. "I wonder what you would do for this," he purrs, in a voice like velvet and a serrated knife. "Has anyone found a limit to it yet?"
Once it is clear that jellybeans are not, strictly, required as recompense, something of an open season is called on Winter. He must do more and more to earn smaller and smaller chances of candy; the supply dwindles, but there are one or two still floating around, and some of the incubi are capable of cooperating well enough to pass them around, keep Winter guessing, dole them out slower and slower.
News of this new era in Make Winter Do Things spreads quickly, and while incubi are the keenest, they are not the only.
Mostly.
Not completely.
He doesn't complain. That might get some of them to stop, but not the ones who are the problem.
Some of her minions ask her for a resupply.
She wants to know if they've been eating them, and they tell her they have not, they only feed them to Winter.
And she laughs and makes a new jar and distributes them to everyone who wants a few, and she calls Winter over to hand-feed him just one; it is the first jellybean he hasn't had to do anything for in nearly a year.