by C. E. Murphy
"I suppose we would love her anyway."
"But would anyone else?" Father took my hand and squeezed it. "Very well, Amber. I'll heed your advice, and tomorrow, offer the Spidersilk to Stewart, at whatever cost he can afford. Then as soon as the weather breaks we'll go home. I miss your mother." A furrow creased his forehead, and I breathed a smile.
"Maman is my mother," I said gently. "The only one I've ever known."
Father nodded, but after a moment, said, "I miss your mother, too. You look like her, you know."
I shook my head. "I don't. I've seen paintings. She looked like Opal."
"Paintings flatter where they shouldn't always. Her smile was like yours." He gestured at my mouth, at its slight unevenness and the way it made even my sweetest smile look like a smirk. "A little crooked. The painters gave her more even features, like Opal has, but she looked more like you. Ah, I see her in all of you, though. She was often kind, like Opal, but she could be so haughty and reserved that in comparison Pearl looks like the most approachable of women."
"You never talk about her," I said softly.
"I wasn't good enough for her." Father lifted a hand, stopping my protest, and chuckled. "In truth, I wasn't. I met her during the Border Wars, while she nursed for the army. Her family wouldn't come to the wedding. She said they were furious with me for taking her away from them, and her for marrying me."
"Mother had family?" The idea struck me like a gong, reverberating astonishingly in my mind. "We have other family?"
"Her family were friends of the queen, a long time ago. Felicity knew them, too. She came to make sure you girls were all right, after Eleanor died, and after a while we fell in love." The corner of his mouth pulled up. "Her family were also furious, though she still wrote—writes—to them, and they to her. I've been graced with women who are too good for me, Amber, and that includes you girls. I'm sorry I haven't done better by you."
"The queen?" Everything else Father had said fell by the wayside with that revelation. The Queen's War—the one commemorated in the Queen's Corridor mosaics—had been years ago, so many years that the number of decades was foggy in my mind, and half impossible to believe. "Our mother—Maman?—knew the queen? But the queen is—is—" Ancient was the only word that came to mind, and though it was by all appearances true, it still seemed rude to apply to our sovereign.
"I didn't say they were age-mates," Father pointed out. "But yes, Maman, and your birth mother, did both know the queen. And I suppose you do have other family, Amber. I don't know them at all, so it's hard to think of them that way." He pulled at his chin, a gesture that would look better if he'd grown a beard, but he had resolutely kept the city's clean-shaven look, even after a year in the country. "I never thought to contact them," he admitted. "Even at the worst of our travails, I never thought of it. Perhaps I should have. For your sake, Amber. For all of you children."
"Sooner salt the earth and curse the sun," I said, offended. "If they wouldn't have you, they've no right to us."
Father chuckled again, but said, "I wonder if your sisters would feel the same way," before letting it go. "Tomorrow, Amber. We'll talk with Stewart tomorrow, and leave for home as soon as we can."
The weather had broken in the morning: sunlight reflected brightly off banked snow and cast blue shadows in its depths. Father whistled merrily on his way out of the inn, and I, mindful of the stories he'd told the night before, went to visit the mosaics along the Queen's Corridor for the first time since before our house had burned.
The elegant frames told the story of our country's darkest hour, so long ago now that even the children of its war veterans were dead, and their grandchildren old. We had been ruled then by a king thought too gentle to rule well: he preferred diplomacy to warfare, and conceded too much, too often, to those who pressed at our borders. When illness struck him down, our enemies amassed, anticipating an easy conquest of a weak country with only a young queen on its throne.
They were not prepared for Irindala's ferocity. She gave her son, the prince and heir to the throne, to her closest friend to raise safely while she rode to war, and ride she did, with an army of the people at her back. Irindala fought alongside the people, bleeding for her country as they did; the first few panels of the mosaic, depicting the king's death and the gathered enemies, then Irindala leading her army, and finally a bloody battle, had frightened me as a child. The centermost, though, had inspired me then, and, a little to my embarrassment, still did: Irindala tall and strong with light all around her, her sword in one hand and the other open to the people, upon whose uplifted hands she stood, trusting them for her strength and balance. I knew now it was a cunning piece of propaganda, but its affect was no less for knowing that.
The next frame, though, broke my heart. Irindala returned to an empty castle, her trusted friend and her son both gone. In every remaining mosaic, Irindala wore a gown with a red slash across the breast, as she was said to every day, to show that her heart had been cut out and could never heal.
She did not become a cruel mistress, though. Despite her own heartbreak, she ruled fairly, and the next panel was broken into four smaller images, showing critical moments in her reign. The last of those reflected a battle from the Border Wars that Father had fought in, pushing back against an encroaching enemy said to be infused with faery blood, so relentless and powerful were they. But Irindala's army triumphed again, as it, and she, had done all through her long reign, save in the matter of her son.
At the end lay one final open space, where the end of Irindala's story would be told with beads of colored glass and glue, marking the end of an era so extended it already belonged to the stuff of legend, and someday would be thought myth.
I could hardly imagine my father fitting into that story somewhere, his part too small to be seen in a mosaic, but still a part of it, if my birth mother and Maman had both, somehow, known Irindala herself. Nor could I imagine asking Maman about it; she was inclined to vapors over a chicken wandering across the threshold, and I thought asking her about her childhood would induce one of her month-long silences. I tried, briefly, to imagine what kind of life we might have had, if our mothers had stayed in contact with their royally-associated families, and my imagination failed me there, too, although the idea made me laugh. We girls, at least, had grown up in luxury. Improving on it would have brought our comfort to unimaginable levels. No one needed that level of indulgence. I had learned, in fact, that no one even needed the kind I had grown up with, although that thought would have once been incomprehensible to me.
I gave the mosaics an unselfconscious curtsy, and went on to the shops to buy a few more gifts—finer fabrics, newer shoes, sweets that would last the journey, and other things—for my family, and was ready to leave when Father returned from selling the Spidersilk to Captain Stewart. We wouldn't get far with only an hour or two of daylight left to us, but we were both eager to be on the road home.
Beauty, on the other hand, paused at the stable doors and glowered at us, as if the snow—packing down now, at least—was our fault, and as if a filthy enough look would make us agree to put the journey off until the snow had melted. I patted her jawbone, apologized, led her out to hitch her to the wagon, and we were on our way.
Clear, cold weather followed us, the lengthening days letting us eke a little more distance out of each day traveled. We stopped reluctantly the sixth night, knowing ourselves to be within a day's travel of home, but also knowing we were most of a day's travel from home, and that we would only exhaust ourselves and Beauty if we pushed onward that night. That was my doing; we had lost half a day's travel when I'd recognized the road our lady's maid, Annalise, had taken to the village she said was her own. Father had not objected aloud when I turned Beauty down the little track, and we had emerged into a healthy village nestled in the woods only a little while later.
We were strangers there, drawing the attention of first children, then parents and grandparents who emerged from warm houses to see what we wa
nted. I asked for Annalise, and followed the child who ran to fetch her; I did not want to talk to her in front of her entire village. She met me at a doorway near the far end of the village, wrapped in a wool shawl and with anger tightening the lines of her face.
"Our debts are settled in the city," I told her quietly. "I've brought the wages we couldn't pay you a year ago, and if you'd like to return to the city to work, I'll ask Glover to come in the spring and offer you safe escort. Mostly I wanted to say I'm sorry, Annalise. I'm sorry you were pulled down into this with all of us. You deserved better."
Agreement and surprise, still dominated by anger, fluttered across her face. "I did." She took the purse of coin and folded it against her belt, glaring at me. "What work could I find now, after disgracing myself by running away with you? Your references would be of no use to me."
I made a face. "Being the center of gossip got us better prices on some things than we might have expected. Returning to the city as the only intimate witness to our downfall might be enough to find you an excellent place. If you decide you'd like Glover's escort, write to us. We'll do what we can. I am sorry," I said again, then left her alone to make her decisions. The village folk didn't bother waiting until we'd driven away to converge on Annalise's home. I hoped I'd done her some good with the visit, even if it delayed us by a few hours, and left us unable to reach home the night we'd planned to.
"Tomorrow," Father said cheerfully, as we tethered Beauty and tied the wagon cover tight to keep us warm. He had been cheerful since we left the city, as if selling the Spidersilk had lifted some last weight from his shoulders, releasing him forever from the mistakes he'd made in the past.
"Tomorrow," I agreed, but we were both wakened in the smallest hours of the morning, not by the sound, but by the silence. I sat up to peek through the puckered O of the wagon cover, and cursed softly.
Snow had begun to fall again, with such swiftness that the world was already freshly buried in it. Beauty muttered and stomped almost noiselessly in eight or ten inches, scowling at me when I scrambled out to brush its depth from the wagon seat and to begin harnessing her again.
"It may be better to wait it out, Amber."
"It would have been better if we'd stayed at the last village, or gone on to the next," I replied. Neither, though, had appealed to us; the villages were more isolated in this part of the country, or farther off the track, as Annalise's had been. Staying in the last one would have lost us half an afternoon's journey, and going to the next would have lost us half a night's sleep. "Beauty will probably be all right if it just keeps coming straight down like this, but the wind is likely to pick up, and she's too exposed. Either we go into the forest to try to build a rough shelter, or we hitch up and go on."
I looked back to see that, although he'd objected, Father was clearing more snow from the wagon bench before he pulled one of the straw-filled pillows from beneath the wagon's cover to sit on. Once I had her in the harness, I gave Beauty a nose bag and a scratch beneath the forelock. She gave me an impatient eye roll in return, but she put her head down, started munching oats, and plodded forward through the snow. I leapt onto the bench to sit beside Father and, wrapping my cloak around myself, peered toward the horizon.
We were hours from dawn: there was no hint of light anywhere, only the noiseless snow softening the edges of the world and weighing tree branches until they bowed and scraped our wagon's cover. Father, breath steaming in the cold, said, "You should climb inside, so when I'm frozen through you can drive."
"Imagine how awful this would be if you were alone." I did as I'd been bade, nestling back into what warmth remained, and, to my surprise, I fell asleep to the sounds of wheels squeaking faintly as they packed snow, and of Beauty's steady footsteps.
I awakened hours later to a jolting stop and a curse. Alarmed, I pushed back out of the wagon to find Father with a lap full of snow and a disoriented expression. "Father?"
"I fell asleep." He stood, brushing snow off his lap, and shook himself. I climbed all the way out, standing beside him on the footboard, and looked around us in dismay.
Daylight had arrived in the form of dusky, snow-laden grey light that did hardly any more to light the way than full night had, but we were clearly no longer on the main road. We hadn't been for some time, it appeared: trees grew up around us almost close enough to touch, the path beneath us no more than a single track. The snow immediately surrounding us was no more than ankle deep, but five steps ahead of Beauty, it rose feathery-looking and chest deep. Beauty, undisturbed by this, took a few steps forward, then paused to look back at us, as if making sure we wanted her to go on.
The snow in front of her dropped to ankle depth for as many more steps as she'd taken, and remained banked tall and relentless beyond that. Father said, "Whoa," to her, weakly, and after a moment of gaping I scrambled through the wagon to look out the back pucker.
There was no sign of our passage what-so-ever. Five steps behind us, snow lay chest-deep again, as if it had lain undisturbed since winter began. I called, "Back her up a few steps, Father," as if there might be a way out of a thing I already knew in my bones. The wagon lurched and backed up, and, after five steps, pressed against the bank of snow. The snow gave a little, collapsing and sliding under the wagon's belly, but it most certainly did not disappear the way it was doing in front of Beauty. After another step or two backward, the snow impacted enough to stop the wagon's progress. Up front, Beauty nickered impatiently and eased forward again into unimpeded space.
l sat hard onto one of the benches, a sick flutter of missed heartbeats occupying my attention for a few unpleasant breaths. Then, cold with more than the weather, I made my way forward again to say, in a strange voice unlike my own, "We've been enchanted."
"Yes." Father sat on the bench again, heavily, and I sat beside him, the two of us staring wordlessly at the tall snow beyond us. There was nothing to be done about an enchantment, and no value in protesting that such things didn't really happen. No one properly believed they did happen, or at least, that they still happened, but sitting in a twenty foot rolling rectangle of shallow snow made it quite clear that they did still happen on occasion.
"We're going to have to go forward," I said after a while. "We might as well, before we get cold. The snow is still coming down."
Father shook first himself, then the reins, and Beauty, with a tail twitch that suggested it was about time, plodded forward. Enchantments, it seemed, did not distress enormous grumpy mares. Nor did I feel distressed, precisely. Stunned, perhaps, but—but, well, Pearl was a witch, and the Border Wars had been fought against faeries, and our country's queen was old beyond reason, and if those things could be, then a forest might be enchanted too, and we were lucky it hadn't gotten us before.
I sat up straighter. "Father, is this our forest?"
He gave me a look somewhere between amusement and the suspicion the snow had made me simple. "I suppose it is, but how do you tell the difference between the end of one forest and the beginning of another? If you mean, are we close to home, I have no idea. I don't know how long I slept, save for it still being dark when I'd last opened my eyes. It could be nine or noon, now, though, for all I know." He gestured at the indistinct sky's inability to hint at the hour. "I don't think we'll find our way home through the forest, if that's what you're asking."
"No. It's just that the villagers wouldn't hunt in our forest."
"Oh. Oh. The beast protecting it. An enchantment itself. I see." Father looked around more carefully, as if, now that he understood me, he might see a landmark to orient us with. I looked, too, and although we were neither of us talking as we searched, a different kind of silence came over us as we began to understand what we saw.
Beyond our peculiar little rectangle of safety, where the snow still fell constantly and swiftly, a ferocious storm raged. Had clearly been raging all along, but until we began to look hard, we had been as protected from knowledge of it as we were from its ravages. The more I watched, th
e more I realized that the trees just beyond us danced and rattled with wind, and the harder I listened, the more clearly I could hear that wind howling and shrieking, as if enraged it couldn't reach us. The snow outside of our enchantment didn't merely fall, but whipped and lashed and spun, creating a whiteout that we would never have been able to pass through safely.
I remembered Pearl's reading of the cards, and wondered, with a shudder, what would have happened if I had not been with Father. I said nothing, though, and rather than guess at our location, we rode on in silence, letting the enchantment guide us through the storm.
I looked up when Beauty stopped again as darkness fell, then stood, shaking snow off my blanket and quilt, to gape at iron gates twenty feet tall set into stone walls their equal in height. Father had gone back into the wagon to rest; I tried to say his name and produced only a squeak.
Beauty stood not two lengths from the gates, which, like our enchanted rectangle, were enveloped in a hard, steady snowfall nothing like the howling maelstrom surrounding them. I hadn't seen them before she stopped, either more magic or the storm itself blocking them until their enchantment melded with ours.
The gates were laden with a copper design that took every advantage of the metal's natural properties: golden-red roses 'grew' all over them, stems and leaves blueish-green with patina. The girl I had been a year ago admired the artistry, and the one I was now felt sorry for the servants who had to polish the roses while leaving the stems rough and green. Then again, the gates were clearly protected by charms, anyway, so perhaps the roses stayed polished of their own volition.
As if I'd guessed a secret and earned passage, the gates swung open—inward, silent, brushing snow into arches as they passed over it—to invite us down a long straight avenue lined with massive oak trees. The length of the road and the whiteness of oncoming night hid what lay at the road's end, but I remained on my feet, swaying with the wagon's motion, to await what would be revealed.
