by Rebecca Hahn
Sylvie’s chair is empty too. I didn’t hear her leave the room, and I wonder if he started kissing me because she left, or if she left because he’d started kissing me. Then I wonder what the queen would say if she knew I was all alone in my rooms with a man—a man the king near hates by now. I smooth my skirts out, avoiding Edgar’s eyes.
“Thank you for your visit, my lord,” I say. “I’m afraid I had lost all sense of the time, and I should be well abed.”
The fire crackles. Edgar rises from his chair slowly, and I force myself not to back away, and I watch his feet as they come near.
He lifts my chin with a finger. He’s smiling, that cocksure grin. “Too soon, my lady?” he says.
I’m not certain what that’s supposed to mean, but I’m flushing, and I pull away from him. I sweep to the door. “Good night, my lord,” I say pointedly, and as Sylvie’s not here to do such things, I open the door for him.
For a moment I even think he might refuse to leave, but then he’s walking past me. He grabs my hand before I can flick it out of the way, and he bows over it, brushing the back with his lips. There’s no tingling now, though, no warm rush of abandon. I’m cold all the way through, and when he murmurs, “Good night, lady,” I give him my politest smile in return without a shiver or a flinch. When he passes out into the hallway, I shut the door at once and turn the lock, and I stand with my back against it, wondering why I still feel so afraid.
Later that night, after Sylvie’s helped me into my nightgown and gone off again to her room, I sit in my window seat and look out toward the mountains. The moon is full. I’ve pushed the window open even though it’s dead cold and I’ve no wrap.
It has only just, in the last few days, begun to snow regularly, and the mountains are sparkling a thousand different colors in the moonlight. As I’m looking out over this world, which is almost as bright as it is in the day, as I’m leaning out and breathing it all in—a dragon flies across the moon.
I know it for a dragon; I know it without question. It near takes my heartbeat, the spread of its wings and the power, the downright royalty of its shape. There’s nothing like a dragon. I’ve never seen one before, and I know already there’s nothing to match its fierce beauty. As I watch it swoop across the sky again and once again, my ears resound with a cry they can’t possibly be picking up this far away—a piercing cry, a roar like the boundless black sky all lit with the moon’s cold fire.
I don’t know how it is, but I’m standing, and then I’m up on the window ledge, outside the room, bare feet on gray stone, hands holding tight to the shutters.
I think if I wanted to, I could let go and balance perfectly. I think if I wanted to, I could jump and not fall. I could make that sound, the one that’s still echoing through my body, and it would turn me into something bold and beautiful, something more like who I am than I’ve ever been before.
Then the dragon’s gone, disappeared back into the bright white expanse.
I stand there a moment more, and then I leave the sky, leave the sparkling snow to take my needles from their place beneath my mattress. They are singing to me. Not in the usual gentle quiver, but with a loud hum I feel right down to my toes and along the nape of my neck.
And it’s not just the needles, is it? The dragon’s flight has done something to this whole room, has cast a spell over it so that the fire diminishes, the shadows melt away. The stones are thrumming softly. There’s a tension, a breath, and when I close my eyes, I think I feel my mother’s hand upon my hair.
She did this. She turned men from her room. She watched a great, wild beast fly across the moon. She had everything you’d think she could have wanted, and she gave it up to jump from a window, to run until she scarce could remember her own name.
And I would too. I would be running and running, forgetting all this and remembering a truer, older part of me, the part that knows the language of the woods. But the needles prick against my palm, and at long last I sit against the windowsill and I know what it is I am to knit. I call out to the moon; it answers with a skein of light, bright and strange. I wind it around my fingers. I know my uncle’s gaze. I know how he hates me, and I know the bitter pain he steeps in daily, and through that I reach the deepest part of him. I tie it into the song I’ve started to sing, and I lace it with the sharpest tip of a claw, the hottest flick of a flame, the empty nothing of a moonlit sky.
I knit until the winter birds are starting their morning songs, and then I slip my vengeance back beneath my bed and sleep for the few last hours before the castle wakes.
The next day, when we are going out to the river to test the new ice for skating, the Lord of Ontrei offers me his arm and I turn my head and keep on walking.
I hear the whispers. I hear the rumor starting through the court already, that the princess and her favorite have quarreled. I hear Edgar’s laugh behind me, and I near turn back, angry, but I’d rather avoid a real fight in front of everyone, so I keep on.
I stay away from him as I poke about the edges of the ice with some of the ladies, but I can feel him watching me all the same. Turns out that the river isn’t solid enough after all. We spend the afternoon throwing rocks out into the center to see if they’ll stay or slide off into a hole and disappear, and we race one another up and down the riverbank and watch the lords trying to push one another out onto the ice.
When we’re all trooping in for dinner, I find I’ve somehow lost my scarf, and I peel back to search for it along the banks, telling Lady Susanna to go in without me, much as she tries to come help.
I was thinking it would be nice to have a few minutes on my own out in the winter silence, but I should have let her come along after all, for as I’m fetching my scarf off a bush and lifting my head to the gray, dense sky, Edgar says, “A hand, lady?” and reaches out to help me back up the bank.
I blink at his hand and want less than anything to take it. Behind, the river murmurs, and I’ve a sudden wild wish to run out to the middle until the weight of me shatters the undeveloped ice and I fall into the rushing blackness and sweep away, far from anyone.
Or if I jumped, maybe the sky would take me, swoop me into scatterings of wind and leaf bits, toss me across the land until I melded with the roll of the hills, the rustle of the trees, the sharp, unyielding mountain peaks.
It’s only a hand, though, and what harm will it really do? I take it, mumbling my thanks as he pulls me up onto the castle lawn, and when he tucks my arm within his to lead me back to the castle, I don’t protest.
But when we arrive at the steps up to a side hall where the nobles are gathered like a bunch of chirping birds, waiting as their servants rush around, plucking the layers of coats and hats and mittens from them, Edgar stops me from going in.
“Are we friends still, Marni?” he asks. “Are we allies?”
“Yes, of course,” I say. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
He’s looking at me, again with that intensity, and I wonder where my frivolous companion has gone. Where is the man who spun me around until I was dizzy? Where the whisperer of scandals, the daring horseman? “I think you have been avoiding me since last night,” he says. “I think you are frightened of me, maybe.”
When the firelight was playing across those eyes, it seemed right for them to draw together so, to be that serious. But the sky is wide and open, the breeze is teasing at my hair, and the voices of the nobles are drifting from the hall. He’s as out of place as a daffodil in the snow.
I laugh, as naturally as I can. “I’m not frightened of you, mighty Lord of Ontrei.” I toss my head, even. “I’m not frightened of anything.”
There, the sparkle’s back in his eyes, his smile. “Good,” he says, and I’m starting to relax when he bends his head toward me and kisses me soft on the lips.
Again, there’s that immediate melting, that urging to kiss him back and let us see what happens next. But I’m not the girl I was last night. The sun is full upon me, and I’ve sleepless hours and the memory of a dragon
against the moon to separate me from the part that wants only this, only him.
After the briefest of moments I push him back, harder maybe than I need to, and he trips over the steps and sprawls into the hall, bumping a servant who has her hands filled with coats, who loses her bundle and trips as well. The coats go flying in all directions, and the nobles suddenly find themselves busied with catching the girl and holding themselves up and turning around to see Lord Edgar on his backside and me, standing just outside the door in the snow, gaping at them all and looking as guilty as anything.
The silence spreads through the hall like honey over a cake.
Lord Edgar’s laugh rings out. He’s pulling himself to his feet, brushing off his legs as though it’s all a great joke.
But I’ve never seen that look on his face before.
I’ve never told him no quite like this, neither.
He comes over to where I’m standing and reaches out a hand to help me up the steps. I don’t want to know, somehow, what would happen if I refused it, so I let him pull me inside, though I drop it as soon as he eases his hold. “My lady,” he says, still with that laugh in his voice, but it’s not the laugh I know, not the carefree joy when we dance or ride, not the surprise at what a different sort of girl I am. “I am sorry if I have caused you any offense.”
He’s not keeping his voice down one bit. He’s letting the whole court hear, and while my uncle isn’t in the room, there are plenty who will tell him anything we say, so Edgar must not care that everyone will know our business.
There’s a ringing in my head, and my hands are trembling something fierce. “No, my lord,” I say, and I can scarce hear myself. “I should be the one to apologize. I never meant to be so rude.”
He smiles at me, but it’s a smile the way a winter gale is a warm breeze. “There are things a lady doesn’t want the world to see,” he says. Oh, how they are listening now. He’s kept us near the door, so it could be thought we’re trying to have a private conversation, but in this silence not a scuffle of a shoe is private. “I understand. I will keep my distance until I can come again to your room tonight.”
And then, the knave, he’s bowing to me and walking away. Walking away!
The rage is a freezing fire running through me, and for three seconds, four, I cannot move or speak or think, and he’s on his way out, and all the court will believe what he wants them to believe, and he must know—oh, he must be so sure!—that I will do whatever he wants. That I will marry him tomorrow, even, just to keep them quiet.
And it won’t be long before they know, because this court always knows such things, that he was in my room last night in truth, and that we were alone, long enough—long enough for whatever they want to say.
There’s no dark river or bright sky or dragon against the moon in my mind now, only a clear, cold anger that throws me after him to grab his arm.
He’s raising an eyebrow at me, so calm, so certain.
I don’t bother with the ladylike responses I’ve been taught. I don’t berate him with well-turned phrases. I don’t give him a haughty glare. I don’t even slap him across the face, as I’ve seen the Lady Elinor do to Lord Lesting when he became particularly forward after a few too many drinks at cards.
I am not a lady. I’m the heir to the kingdom if my uncle will ever admit it, and I’m my Gramps’s only granddaughter, and I pull back my arm and punch him, as hard as I can, straight on the nose.
Now, I’m not one to condone pointless violence. But if there was ever a thing to show all those nobles that I’m not the sort of person to get myself into a romantic tryst, if there was ever a thing that would stop the rumors of how I’d thrown myself into this man’s control, it’s that savage punch, and the crack as my fist connects, and the blood that starts dripping at once.
He doubles over before pulling himself upright. I’ve never hit a man before, and I have to say I’m pleased with my success. He’s holding his nose with red fingers and blinking at me, tearing up, I think.
“My Lord of Ontrei,” I say, and again I’m pleased, because my voice is steady, without a trace of fear. “I don’t know who you think you are, but I’m the king’s niece, and the closest blood he has left, and you’ll keep a civil tongue or I will cut it out.”
I can feel them, the looks, the way nobody in the room is breathing just now. A serving boy has taken a step or two toward us. I don’t know if he means to protect Edgar from me or to help me beat him up. The loyalties of the court must be all confused—the king’s men will love to see Edgar brought low, but they won’t want to support me in it; my men—well, are they mine or Edgar’s?
Nobody says a word, though, and at last he bows to me, wiping his hand on a handkerchief from his pocket and holding that to the blood. “I am,” he says, “as always, your servant, lady.”
I go up close to him, until we’re as near as we were last night, that moment before our lips touched and he almost swept me away from myself. “I’m not afraid of you,” I say, so that only he can hear it. I’m looking into his eyes so he knows I mean it. “And you can ask, and you can threaten, and you can start up whatever rumors you like, but none of that is going to make me marry you.”
He hasn’t looked away; he barely seems shamed, in fact. “Marni,” he says, “I didn’t mean—”
I don’t let him finish. “You made a grab for power,” I say. “I can understand that. But I won’t be used, Edgar, and I won’t be rushed, and I won’t be forced into anything I don’t want.”
He’s shaking his head. “I would never—”
“Or coaxed into it, or enticed, or what have you. I won’t be persuaded.”
I hold his gaze. My blood still rushes, and my fists are itching to hit something more, but I keep them quiet.
At last he nods. “Yes, lady.”
It’s not enough. I know it won’t be enough for this man, and what’s more, I know it won’t be enough to keep me from him when my anger’s ebbed, so I step back again and say, so everyone can hear, in the clear, calm sort of voice my aunt would adore, “For the last time, my lord, I will not marry you. Not for all the gold in the kingdom, not if wild horses were to drag me to it. You have not the slightest hope, and I wish you would stop trying.”
He’s looking at me all stricken, and even through my rage my heart is near to breaking. I turn and walk away from him, and the nobles part to let me pass.
After that, there are only a few days left in the festivals, but they are the dullest, the longest days of the last two weeks. Lord Edgar does not come near me. I don’t go to him. The court is still split, but it seems halfhearted, the way the nobles go to their opposite sides of the room and cast the others looks and whisper secrets. By the end of the second day, they’ve started to meld back together again, and I even see Lord Theodore, who was a staunch supporter of the king, laughing jovially with Lady Beatrice, who’d been part of Lord Edgar’s circle. When Beatrice catches my eye, she flushes and looks away.
I talk with the lesser nobles and stay as close as I can to those from the country, who have the least to do with this drama. They are kind enough, and I smile more than not during these final dances, feasts, and games.
But the spins have lost their sparkle, and the stories, races, and sweets, which so excited me only days earlier, are bland, uninteresting. I let the nobles sweep me along from each event to the next, just putting one foot in front of the other.
My only joy these days comes late at night, when the others have gone to bed and the moon shines full through my bedroom window. Then I take out my bright knitting, and I dream of death. I don’t see the dragon again, but I’ve no need. I can hear his roar all through my skin. When I close my eyes, I can feel my mother’s hands, too, placed over mine, guiding me along as we finally, bit by bit, create her vengeance.
On those nights I can forget that I ever knew the Lord of Ontrei. I can keep from wondering, as I do on dark, cloudy nights when I’ve nothing to take me away from my thoughts, whether I did ri
ght, in truth, to reject him.
Eight
WHEN THE COUNTRY nobles have gone, when it’s only the king and queen, the court nobles, and me, the real cold starts creeping in. Every other day, it seems, it snows, until our world is white. This is the snow that still looks fresh and clean. This is the snow we catch our breaths at, watching it from the floor-to-ceiling windows in the main hall.
The ladies and the lords go out into this snow, and they are like little children, throwing snowballs and kicking up great big drifts. The lords roll about on the ground with the real children, the ones the nannies usually keep hidden away in the children’s quarters, and these boys and girls laugh and scream, thrilled to bits.
I walk by myself when I get the chance, smiling up into the sky as well. I know this is only the beginning. I know that by the time the river shudders and cracks, opening itself to the sun again, we will be well sick of it all. The snow will be gray. The cold will have entered our lungs until we’re sneezing and coughing, every one of us, and we’ll be yelling and snapping at the slightest irritation.
It was always that way with Gramps and me: the beginning of winter was glorious, and we smiled at each other more in the first snowfall than we did the rest of the year, almost. By the end, we’d keep to opposite corners of the hut, barely holding on to our tempers and our wits.
I guess the lords and ladies know it will be like that too, but none of us cares during the first big snows. We can’t, can we? If we think about what’s to come, we’ll want to run off and hide ourselves under our covers, to sleep until spring. We’ve got to keep believing it will stay like this, even when we know it can’t.
Then, only a few weeks after the festivals, the real cold settles in, the bone-freezing cold, the kind that seems near alive, we get to hate it so. The snow doesn’t stop falling. The mountains are mounds of white, scarce distinguishable from the nearer mounds that cover the castle lawns, the river, and the streets of the city. The winds come down from the north, howling around my tower room all night long. All day they blow, too, whipping the world until it’s as though nothing exists but the castle, as if beyond our triple layers of clothing and our foot-thick stone walls is only a white, frozen void.
