A Winter's Promise

by Christelle Dabos

  Fox pulled them onto his forehead, took a deep breath to give himself courage, cupped Gail’s fierce face in his hands, and kissed her with conviction. She was so shocked that her blue eye widened without her even thinking of pushing him away. When he released her, a huge smile stretched from side-­whisker to side-whisker. “Been after her for years, that woman,” he whispered.

  In the distance, the doors opened onto the silhouettes of the policemen. Gail pushed Ophelia behind a tarpaulin-covered car, led her along the wall in the shadows, and went out with her through the back door.

  “Imbecile,” she hissed between her teeth.

  Ophelia couldn’t see much, out in the fake starry night. But she could have sworn that Gail’s mouth, usually so hard, had softened.

  The Dice

  Along corridors and up stairs, Ophelia and Gail made it to the top floor of Clairdelune without crossing the policemen’s path. It was a relief to close the door and turn the key in the lock. Ophelia threw Thorn’s big coat onto a chair, lifted the drape of the bed’s canopy to check Berenilde was still sleeping, and then indicated the divan to Gail. On it, Aunt Rosaline was tossing and turning as though having a bad dream.

  “A Mirage has imprisoned her mind in an illusion,” Ophelia quietly whispered. “Can you help her to resurface?”

  Gail crouched beside the divan and scrutinized Aunt Rosaline. With arms crossed and lips pursed, she peered at her through her black curls for a long time. “Strong stuff,” she grumbled. “My compliments to the chef, sterling work. May I wash my hands? I’m covered in grease.”

  Ophelia filled Berenilde’s basin and looked for some soap. She was so nervous she spilt water on the carpet. “Can you help her?” she asked again in a tiny voice, as Gail was having a wash.

  “The issue isn’t whether I can help her, but why would I help her. Who is this woman, first of all? A friend of the Dragoness?” she spat, with a disdainful glance at the four-poster. “If so, she means little to me.”

  From the depth of her glasses, Ophelia focused on the black monocle to reach the person hiding on the other side of it. “Believe me, this woman’s only fault is having me for a niece.” Within the darkness of the monocle, Ophelia detected what she’d hoped for: a spark of anger. Gail hated injustice with all her being. “Bring me a stool.”

  Gail sat opposite the divan and took off her monocle. Her left eye, darker and more unfathomable than a bottomless well, scathingly surveyed Berenilde’s apartments. She wanted Ophelia to learn from the spectacle, to show her what this world looked like once the curtain of illusions had been lifted. Wherever her eye fell, that place’s appearance changed. The majestic carpet was nothing but a cheap rug. The elegant wallpaper turned into a mold-stained wall. The porcelain vases became plain terra-cotta pots. The canopy was now moth-eaten, the screen ripped, the armchairs faded, the tea service chipped. If the web of illusions unraveled under Gail’s implacable gaze, it respun itself as soon as that gaze turned elsewhere.

  “Varnish over filth,” Archibald had said. Ophelia was gauging how true that was. She would never see Clairdelune in the same way ever again.

  Gail leant forward on her stool and gently lifted the aunt’s sleeping face between her hands. “What’s her name?”

  “Rosaline.”

  “Rosaline,” repeated Gail, focusing on her with the closest attention. Her eyes, one blue, the other black, were wide open. Leaning on her elbows on the back of the divan, Ophelia was twisting her fingers with anxiety. Aunt Rosaline’s closed eyelids began to quiver, and that quivering spread through the rest of her body. She started to shake violently, but Gail tightened her grip around her face, turning the devastating beam of her Nihilism on her. “Rosaline,” she murmured. “Come back, Rosaline. Follow my voice, Rosaline.”

  The shaking ceased and Gail placed the waxen head back on its cushion. She leapt off the stool, put her monocle back in place, and swiped some cigarettes out of Berenilde’s personal box. “Right, I’m off. Fox knows nothing about mechanics and the cars won’t service themselves.”

  Ophelia was dumbfounded. Aunt Rosaline was still lying on the divan with her eyes closed. “It’s just that she doesn’t seem that awake.”

  As she was lighting herself a cigarette, Gail attempted a smile that was probably supposed to be reassuring. “There’ll be sleeping for a little while longer. Most importantly, don’t rush her, she needs to resurface, and believe you me, she’s returning from far away. A few hours later, and I wouldn’t have caught her.”

  Ophelia hugged herself to control the shaking of her entire body. Suddenly, she realized that she was burning hot. Her rib seemed to be throbbing to the same rhythm as her heart. It was at once painful and soothing.

  “Everything alright?” murmured Gail, concerned.

  “It certainly is,” Ophelia assured her with a weak smile. “It’s . . . it’s nerves. I’ve never been so relieved in my life.”

  “One mustn’t get into such a state.” Cigarette in hand, Gail seemed totally perplexed.

  Ophelia pushed her glasses up her nose to look her straight in the face. “I owe you a great deal. I don’t know what the future holds, but you’ll always have an ally in me.”

  “Spare the fine words,” Gail cut in. “Not wishing to upset you, my darling, but either the court will break all your bones, or it will rot them to the marrow. And I’m not someone to be associated with. I did you a favor, I paid myself in cigarettes, we’re quits.”

  Gail looked thoughtfully, almost sadly, at Aunt Rosaline, and then, with a fierce smile, tweaked Ophelia’s nose. “If you really want to do me a favor, don’t become one of them. Make the right choices, don’t compromise yourself, and find your own path. We’ll talk about it again in a few years’ time, okay?” She opened the door and tipped the peak of her cap. “Be seeing you!”

  When Gail had gone, Ophelia locked the door behind her. The embassy’s bedrooms were the safest in the whole of Citaceleste; nothing harmful could happen anymore to anyone here while that door remained locked.

  Ophelia leant over Aunt Rosaline and stroked her pinned-back hair. She wanted to wake her up, to be reassured that she really had returned from her past, but Gail had advised not to rush her.

  The best she could do now was sleep. Ophelia yawned so hard her eyes watered. She felt as if she had a whole lifetime of sleep to catch up with. She pulled off her maid’s bonnet, untied her apron, pushed off her shoes with her toes, and sank into an armchair. When she started flying over forests, towns, and oceans, Ophelia knew that she was dreaming. She spanned the surface of the old world, the one that was but a single entity, as round as an orange. She saw it in a wealth of detail. The sun bouncing off the water, the leaves on the trees, the avenues in the towns, everything leapt out at her with perfect clarity.

  Suddenly, the horizon was blocked by a gigantic top hat. The hat grew bigger and bigger and bigger, and beneath it was Archibald’s bittersweet smile. He soon filled the entire landscape, holding Farouk’s Book open in his hands. “And yet I did warn you,” he said to Ophelia. “Everyone hates the Treasurer, and the Treasurer hates everyone. Did you really think you were so special as to be an exception to the rule?”

  Ophelia decided she didn’t like this dream and opened her eyes. Despite the warmth from the radiator, she was shivering. She blew on her palm and hot breath returned. A touch of fever? She got up to find a blanket but, between them, Berenilde and Aunt Rosaline already had them all. Ironically, all that was left to Ophelia was Thorn’s big coat. She wasn’t so proud as to cold-shoulder it. She returned to her chair and curled up in a ball inside the coat. The clock chimed, but she couldn’t bear to count the chimes.

  The chair wasn’t very comfortable—it was too crowded. Space had to be made for the ministers with their haughty moustaches. Would they ever shut up? Ophelia could never sleep with all this waffle. And what were they discussing? Food and drink, of cou
rse; it’s all that came out of their mouths. “Provisions are running short!” “Let’s levy a tax!” “We must punish the poachers!” “Let’s discuss it round a table!” Ophelia felt only revulsion for their bulging bellies, but none sickened her more than Farouk. His very existence was a mistake. His courtiers tried to impress him, they intoxicated him with pleasures, and they held the reins of power in his place. No, Ophelia could definitely never rest here. She would have liked to leave this place, to go outdoors, the real outdoors, to gulp enough wind to vitrify her lungs, but she lacked time. She always lacked time. She sat on tribunals, in councils, at parliaments. She kept herself to herself; listened to the opinions of one side and then the other; sometimes deliberated, when those idiots were rushing headlong down a dead end. In any case, it was the numbers that decided. Numbers never get it wrong, do they? The potential of the resources, the number of inhabitants, that’s all concrete. So that little fatso, there, who’s claiming more than he’s due, he’ll go off empty-handed, quietly cursing Ophelia, complaining about her, and that’s it. As far as complaints, Ophelia would receive a daily dose. She no longer counted her enemies, but her implacable logic always carried the day over their biased interpretation of sharing. They’d already tried to saddle her with a legal clerk, just to check, you know, that her integrity was unimpeachable. And they’d fallen flat on their faces because she relied only on numbers. Not on her conscience, or on ethics, only on numbers. So much for a legal clerk!

  But that was actually a strange thought, because Ophelia suddenly realized that she was herself a legal clerk. A legal clerk with an astronomical memory, keen to prove herself, inexperienced. A young clerk who never made mistakes, which infuriated the old treasurer. He saw her as a pernicious insect, an opportunist prepared to push him down the stairs to usurp him. What an imbecile! He’d never know that, behind her stubborn silences, all she sought was his approval, and that at least one person would grieve on the day he died. But that would be much later.

  For now, Ophelia was writhing in pain. Poison. It was so predictable; she couldn’t trust anyone, anyone but her aunt. Was she going to die here, on this carpet? No, Ophelia was far from death. She was just a little girl who spent her days playing with dice, alone and silent, keeping herself to herself. Berenilde tried everything under the sun to entertain her—she’d even given her a lovely gold watch—but Ophelia preferred the dice. The dice were random, full of surprises; they weren’t inevitably disappointing like human beings.

  Ophelia felt less bitter as she continued to become younger. She ran around Berenilde’s estate until she was breathless. She tried to catch an already well-built adolescent who taunted her from the top of stairs by sticking his tongue out at her. It was her brother, Godfrey. That is, her half-brother—she wasn’t allowed to say “brother.” It was a stupid expression; it wasn’t, after all, half a boy who was charging just ahead of her. And it wasn’t half a girl who, around the corner of a corridor, threw herself at her legs in fits of laughter. Ophelia liked it when Berenilde invited Godfrey and Freya over, even if they did sometimes hurt her with their claws. She didn’t like it, on the other hand, when their mother came, too, and gave her that disgusted look. Ophelia hated that look. It was a look that tore into one’s head, tortured one from the inside without anyone seeing a thing. Ophelia spat into her tea as revenge. But that was after, long after the disgrace of her mother, long after the death of her father, long after her aunt had taken her under her wing. Right now, Ophelia is playing her favorite game with Freya, up on the ramparts, at that rare time of year when it was mild enough to make the most of the sunshine. The dice game, with dice carved by Godfrey himself. Freya throws them, decides on the combination of numbers—“you add them,” “you divide them,” “you multiply them,” “you subtract them”—and then she checks on her abacus. The game in itself bores Ophelia. She would have preferred it tougher, with fractions, equations, powers, but catching her sister’s look of admiration every time, it warmed the cockles. When Freya throws the dice, she feels at last that she exists.

  An alarm sounded. Ophelia blinked, dazed, all twisted in her chair. As she was untangling the strands of hair caught up in her glasses, she looked frantically around her. Where was that noise coming from? The sleeping shadow of Berenilde was quite still behind the drape of the canopy. The flames of the gas lamps were gently sputtering. Aunt Rosaline was snoring on her divan. It took Ophelia a long while to realize that it was the ringing of the telephone that she was hearing.

  Finally, it shut up, leaving a deafening silence in the apartments.

  Ophelia dragged herself out of her chair, feeling stiff all over, her head humming. The fever must have gone down, but her legs were all numb. She leant over her aunt, hoping to see her open her eyes at last, but she had to resign herself to waiting a bit longer. Gail had said she would resurface on her own; she must trust her. She padded over to the bathroom, rolled up the flapping sleeves of Thorn’s coat, pulled off her gloves, folded her glasses, turned the tap on, and splashed plenty of water on her face. She needed to cleanse herself of all those strange dreams.

  Her shortsighted eyes met in the mirror above the sink. Her dressing had come unstuck and the gash on her cheek had been bleeding again. It was when she put her gloves back on that she noticed the hole through which her little finger was poking. “Well,” she muttered to herself, taking a closer look, “that’s what you get for chewing on the seams.”

  Ophelia sat on the edge of the bath and stared at the huge coat she was wrapped up in. Had she read Thorn’s memories due to the hole in her glove? It was an adult’s coat, and she’d gone back to his childhood—it must be something else. She rummaged in the pockets and finally found what she was looking for under a seam in the lining. Two little dice, clumsily carved by hand. It was them that, totally unintentionally, she’d read.

  Ophelia looked at them with nostalgia, even a little sadness, and then got a grip by closing her fist. She mustn’t confuse Thorn’s feelings with her own. That thought stopped her in her tracks. Thorn’s feelings? If that schemer had once had any, he’d lost them along the way. Doubtless, life hadn’t been kind to him, but Ophelia wasn’t in the mood for showing compassion.

  She got rid of the coat as she would have shed a skin that didn’t belong to her. She changed her dressing, shuffled around the little sitting room, and consulted the clock. Eleven o’clock—well into the morning. The Dragons must have set off for the hunt a long time ago; Ophelia was delighted to have escaped that family duty.

  The phone started ringing again, and finally succeeded in waking up Berenilde. “The devil take that invention!” she grumbled, pushing back the drape of her bed. But she still didn’t answer it. Her tattooed hands fluttered like butterflies to fluff up her waves of blonde hair. Sleep had given her back the freshness of a young girl, but it had crumpled her lovely costume. “Do make us some coffee, dear girl. We’re really going to need it.”

  Ophelia was of the same opinion. She put a saucepan of water on the gas cooker, almost set fire to her glove striking a match, and worked the coffee grinder. She found Berenilde leaning her elbows on the little table in the sitting room, her chin resting on her linked fingers, her eyes searching her cigarette box. “Did I really smoke that much, yesterday?”

  Ophelia put a cup of coffee in front of her, deeming it not essential to inform her that a female mechanic had helped herself to her supply. As soon as she sat at the table, Berenilde turned her crystal-clear eyes on her. “I don’t have a very detailed memory of our conversation yesterday, but I remember enough to declare this a grave time.” Ophelia passed her the sugar bowl, expecting the verdict. “Speaking of time, what is it?” asked Berenilde, glancing at the clock.

  “Past eleven, madam.”

  Gripping her coffee spoon, Ophelia braced herself for the thunderbolt that was about to hit the table: “What! And the thought of getting me up never entered your little bird brain? Are you not a
ware of how important this hunting party was to me? Because of you, I’m going to be called feeble, good-for-nothing, past it!”

  But not a bit of it. Berenilde dropped a sugar cube into her coffee and sighed. “Never mind. To be frank, I stopped thinking about that hunt the very moment Farouk laid eyes on me. And honestly,” she added with a dreamy smile, “he’s exhausted me!”

  Ophelia brought her cup to her lips. That was the sort of detail she’d have gladly done without.

  “Your coffee’s terrible,” Berenilde declared, puckering her pretty lips. “You really haven’t any talent for life in society.”

  Ophelia had to admit that she wasn’t wrong. Even after adding sugar and milk, she was struggling to drink her own cup.

  “I think the Knight leaves us no choice,” continued Berenilde. “Even if I gave you another face and another identity, that child would strip you bare in the blink of an eye. The secret of your presence here is unravelling. There are two options: either we find you a better hiding place until the day of the wedding . . . (Berenilde’s long, smooth nails tapped the handle of her porcelain cup) . . . or you make your official entrance at court.”

  With a flick of her napkin, Ophelia wiped the coffee she’d just spilt on the tablecloth. She’d envisaged this possibility, but it pained her to hear it spoken. As things stood now, she’d actually prefer to play at being Berenilde’s valet than at being Thorn’s fiancée.

  Berenilde leant back in her armchair and crossed her hands over her rounded stomach. “Obviously, if you want to survive until your marriage, that can only be done on one condition, and one condition alone. You’ll have to be Farouk’s official ward.”

  “His ward?” repeated Ophelia, stressing both words. “What qualities are required to deserve such an honor?”

  “In your situation, I think that you yourself are all that’s required!” Berenilde teased her. “Farouk’s dying to know you, you represent a great deal in his eyes. Too much, in fact. That’s why Thorn has always categorically refused for you to go near him.”