Stella Starflake Pearl sat down on her favourite ice bench in the garden and sighed. Her recent expedition with her friends Beanie, Shay and Ethan had been extensively covered in all the papers and expedition journals – not just because the four junior explorers had been the first to reach the coldest part of the Icelands, and not only because Stella was the first girl to ever be admitted to the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club, but also because it turned out that Stella was actually an ice princess.

She looked over at the witch puppet she’d brought back with her from the Icelands. When she’d discovered it was a magical thing that could move around all by itself, she’d been delighted, but her adoptive father, Felix, had insisted on taking the puppet away and shutting it up in the top room of the East Wing.

From her position on the bench, Stella could now just make out the pointed outline of the witch’s hat as the puppet walked up and down the windowsill of the turreted bedroom. Every now and then the witch would stop and rap her wooden knuckles on the glass and the sound carried clearly to Stella through the frozen air, making her shiver.

‘She won’t be locked up forever,’ Felix had promised. ‘But we can’t be too careful. This puppet is an exact likeness of Jezzybella. Not only did she kill your parents, but she tried her best to kill you too. I’ve heard of witches making images of themselves and then being able to see through their eyes. If that’s what this puppet is then we can’t have it anywhere near you.’

Stella knew that what Felix said was perfectly sensible, and yet, deep in her gut, she couldn’t help feeling that he was wrong about the puppet. Yes, it was a toy version of the witch who had killed the snow queen and king, but Stella had felt compulsively drawn to it back at the ice castle, and she still did somehow now.

The small, sad sound of the puppet rapping her tiny knuckles against the glass carried through the air once again, and she had to force herself not to run up to the turret to let her out. Felix had sent for a puppet expert from Coldgate and, until he arrived, she would leave the witch where she was.

Stella smoothed out the powder-blue skirts of her dress and ran a finger lightly over the sparkly silver crowns stitched into the fabric. Her magical tiara had been put on display with other curiosities at the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club and word of the junior explorers’ adventures had travelled fast. In the two weeks since she’d been back, gifts had poured in from people Stella had never even met. There had been dresses, lace gloves, beautiful b