Amid the Winter Snow

by Grace Draven

Stella popped into human shape again—wriggling and naked toddler—throwing her arms around my neck and planting a kiss on my cheek. “Ash,” she proclaimed.

  “Yes, sweetheart,” I gave her a one-armed hug. “Go with your mother now.”

  She planted one more kiss on me, jumped off the bed, neatly ducking Ami’s grab with shapeshifter speed, and darted out the door, black hair flying and tiny butt twitching. Ami stared after her in dismay. “I’ll be so happy when she learns the Tala trick of shifting back with something to wear. She’s a princess, not a naked hoyden.”

  “She’s a baby,” I replied. “She can run around naked for a few more years before she has to worry about her gowns all the time.”

  The wrong thing to say because Ami fixed me with a withering glare. Oh—that’s right—she was no doubt still mad at me from before. “She is not a baby,” Ami informed me. “Not anymore. And you spoiling her won’t help her character any. I should know.”

  “You’re not spoiled, Ami.”

  “I was—something you pointed out any number of times.”

  “Well, I was wrong. How many times do you want me to apologize for how badly I treated you?” I needed to get up and move. I threw back the covers, and swung my legs over.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “If we’re going to fight, I want to do it standing up. I’m tired of lying abed.” Like a weakling. I didn’t say it but Ami’s expression softened. “Plus I have to piss, so you might want to absent yourself.”

  “Do you need help?”

  “No, I don’t need help.” Though once behind the screen, I leaned against the wall. She didn’t say anything, which made me think she’d left. But when I emerged, she was sitting in the armchair she’d slept in while keeping vigil, looking forlorn and far too young.

  “I don’t even understand why we’re fighting all the time,” she said, sadly enough to wrench my heart.

  I blew out a breath, sat heavily on the side of the bed. “Because I’m an ass.”

  She smiled a little, as I’d hoped, but grew solemn again. “You are an ass, but that’s not it. We just can’t seem to stop taking bites out of each other and I don’t understand why.”

  “Maybe because we’d resolved to part ways and now we’re forced together again because of this.” I lifted my arm as I said it. “We know in our hearts that we shouldn’t be together, and so—”

  Ami’s eyes had grown wide. “Ash!” she interrupted. “Your arm.”

  I looked at it, ready to see whatever new damage had appeared, but it… looked so much better. No longer so bruised, the lacerations more knitted together. Experimentally, I flexed and curled my fingers, finding I could very nearly make a fist. I met Ami’s astonished gaze.

  “Stella,” I said. “Guess she has healing abilities along with the empathy.”

  Ami stared back, then dropped her gaze to my arm. “What does that mean for her?” Then she jumped up. “If she’s anything like you after a healing session, she’s going to be dead on her feet.”

  She flew out the door and I followed—more slowly, but far faster than I’d have guessed I’d be capable of. I didn’t have to chase her far. Ami stood in the hall, then glanced back over her shoulder with a smile. The torchlight danced through her tumbling curls and her eyes danced with amusement and love.

  My heart turned over, and I had to catch my breath at the emotion she stirred in me.

  Holding my injured arm tight against my chest, I eased up behind her to find Stella, still naked, curled up in a ball in the middle of the hallway, little fingers tucked firmly in her mouth, fast asleep.

  “We’ll have to watch her,” I murmured with a sigh. “She’ll want to heal anyone she perceives as hurting. It won’t be good for her growth if she drains herself too much or too often.”

  Ami crouched and gathered her daughter up, pressing a kiss to the girl’s brow. “Not just anyone,” she said, then fastened her gaze on me. “She loves you. We all do, you know.”

  Why that sounded like an accusation, I didn’t know.

  “Since you’re up and so spry,” she continued, “you can join me for supper. Half an hour in the main hall.”

  “I—”

  “Your queen commands you,” Ami cut me off in an arch tone. “And take a bath. Nilly is right about that. You stink.”

  ~ 11 ~

  Though I minded the high-handedness of Ami’s command, it did feel good to bathe. Skunk hauled in water for me and I used the queen’s own brass tub to scrub more than four days of fever stink and old blood off of me. Ami’s bed was a mess, now that I had my head again enough to notice, so I wryly suggested that Skunk might get some of the maids up to change the sheets and freshen the chambers while I was out.

  I’d fouled her bed long enough. Which very well might have been Ami’s intent in prying me out of her chambers to go down and eat in the first place.

  Skunk helped me dress in some loose fitting pants and shirt in Avonlidgh purple, which made me think they’d been Hugh’s. But my own clothing consisted mainly of fighting leathers and a couple more formal uniforms Ami had arranged for me, so I wouldn’t shame her. Those were in a nondescript soft black. Dressing me in Avonlidgh colors would be as problematic as me wearing Tala bloodred. And of course, I still had the white robes of my order, folded at the very bottom of my trunk.

  So many allegiances, none of them exactly my own. But that had ever been my life. Part-blood, never more than half in any world, never fully belonging to anything. Except in prison, ironically enough. There I fit right in, along with every other mostly savage man incarcerated with me.

  I didn’t object to the clothes, though I was taller than Hugh had been, so the cuffs came up a bit short on me. Stuffed into my worn indoor boots of folded Tala leather, the pants didn’t look so bad, and with my arm in the sling Skunk helped me fashion, I ended up rolling the shirtsleeves up anyway.

  The good thing about having a man like Skunk assist—he didn’t blink when I asked for my short blade. He helped me cinch the belt over my shirt so I could reach the blade easily with my good hand. Finally I didn’t feel naked.

  I’d rather have my sword, but I wouldn’t be able to draw it in my current state. For the first time since I got a good look at the injury, though, I felt optimistic that I might be able to use that arm again—with Stella’s healing help. Hopefully what she’d instinctively done already would make all the difference. I wouldn’t call on her again. She was far too young to drain herself so. Over time, she’d learn to pace herself, and to build in time for the deep sleep needed for recovery from healing another. Right now, though, she needed her energy to grow into an adult, not to help others.

  Spoiling her won’t help her character any. I should know.

  Had Ami been like Stella at that age? I didn’t think so. Ami had been motherless, raised by her much older sisters, and—with her celebrated beauty apparent even at birth, so the stories went—a petted darling of the court. She didn’t have Stella’s inherent Tala wildness or the compassion of being an empath. But behind that bright and laughing façade, Ami was sensitive in ways most people didn’t perceive.

  I contemplated that as I walked down to the main hall, wending my way through Windroven’s twisting stone corridors and down steps with gentle divots at the center, engraved by generations of footsteps. People had lived here at least four centuries, so perhaps Ami was right, the ever-present rumbling of the volcano might mean nothing.

  But then again, those had been centuries when magic had been confined behind the barrier around Annfwn. Not eddying and surging as it was these days, waking all sorts of monsters. Like those wolf creatures, wherever they’d been conjured or created from. And very likely, given what had happened at Nahanau, a dragon sleeping in the depths below us.

  What staff remained in the castle had been busy, apparently, for the graceful old hallways were draped with new-looking silk moonflower garlands, dangling with crystals carved to look like snowflakes. No doubt thos
e were the duchess’s contribution. White candles burned in antique sconces tarnished black with age and set in niches that seemed to have been designed for exactly that purpose. Those might be as old as the walls they decorated. There was a comfort in that, the continuity of it. Something, I reflected, that had never been a part of my life.

  Perhaps that’s what Ami had connected to at Windroven. In many ways, she had little more history than I did. Daughter of an upstart conqueror who built his castle on the bones of another, and daughter, too, of a queen who had abandoned her people to live in a foreign land.

  Endings and new beginnings were part of the celebration of the Feast of Moranu. In my youth, we all helped clean our small cottage from top to bottom. The scent of soap and vinegar unexpectedly came back to me, a background for the spiced bread my mother baked and the hot wax of candles my parents lit at sundown. Then we wrote or drew images of what we wanted to leave behind with the old year, things we felt bad about or wrongs done us that we needed to let go of.

  Funny to remember that now, as I’d never practiced the custom in all the years since. In prison, time went by unmarked by celebrations of any kind, grinding along like a stone wheel over grain, reducing us to spineless ash. The White Brothers, of course, looked to Glorianna, so while they marked her sister Moranu’s feast, they did not observe with more than a lit candle.

  My parents, though, kept the candles and fire blazing high, holding vigil in silence and reflection until midnight. Not a thing a kid stays awake for very well, and I’d only made it once, that last winter before Father died. But they always wakened me a bit before midnight, and we’d take what we’d written and a candle each, then go out to the village square where the bonfire towered with hot flame. Keeping silent, our neighbors would throw their remembrances into the fire—sometimes fancy scrolls, other times bits of leather or bark. Occasionally someone tossed in an object.

  Then we’d wait, holding the candles up to the sky in our cupped palms—toward Moranu’s moon if it was in the sky that year. We were supposed to concentrate on our hopes for the coming year. Mostly I’d be curious about what everyone else threw into the fire, imagining stories behind the occasional object I glimpsed. Back then my hopes had been confined to thinking about the iced spiced bread that awaited me. Odd to remember, too, that time when I’d been innocent enough for hope not to be a jagged blade that tore me from the inside out.

  At the stroke of midnight, the village elders doused the bonfire, and we blew out our candles. We’d stand there in the abrupt darkness, shivering with winter chill, smoke billowing and burning my nose. Then, one by one, people relit their candles, passing the flame from one to the next, until the darkness was illuminated again by all the candles reflecting on faces now wreathed in smiles.

  Many of the adults stayed up until dawn, keeping the candles alight and celebrating with drinking and dancing. I’d never seen that part. I would have been just getting old enough when everything changed. Shaking myself from the reverie, I hurried on, certain I must be late, and they’d be waiting supper on me.

  I paused at one of the rare glassed-in windows, the big one that looked east, on a high floor with a grand foyer before it. Several staircases led onto the foyer, making a landing of the otherwise unused space. I’d always figured it for a lookout point, but it had been decorated for the feast, tall candelabras and torchieres ringing the space, garlands hanging from the walls. Snow piled deep on the sills, the night beyond nearly white with the swirling flakes illuminated by the glow from the castle.

  Entering the main hall, I found only Ami present. She stood near the great fire, and turned at the sound of my bootsteps, a mug of wine cupped in her hands. She looked radiantly lovely—more so than usual—in a gown of deep purple, scattered with stars. Jewels fashioned to look the same as those decorating her skirts draped over her wrists and delicate collarbones, which always made me think of a white-winged bird about to take flight.

  I halted, clearing my throat. “I didn’t realize I should have dressed up.”

  She smiled ruefully and waved a hand, dismissing the elaborate gown. “No, I was silly to do it. This is—” She shook her head at something and drummed up a different smile, a brighter one to cover whatever emotion had choked her up. “It’s the Eve of Moranu’s Feast, you know. Or maybe you don’t, being sick and asleep so much.”

  “I didn’t realize. Though I wondered when I saw all the candles.” This room, too, had candles glowing their simple flames from the niches, all the way up to the ceiling, which gave the feeling of stars shining from the shadows. “When I was a kid, we only ever lit them the night of the feast,” I offered, feeling awkward.

  Interest lit her face. “Oh? At Ordnung they stayed lit for a week. For all the parties and everything. It was always such a mad whirl…” She trailed off, clearly realizing my life would have been nothing like that. I tried to think of something to reassure her. I wondered if I should go change clothes.

  “Anyway,” she said into the suddenly uncomfortable silence. “I’ve had this dress for nearly two years, made for this occasion, and I’ve never gotten to wear it. So…” She shrugged, her fair shoulders gleaming like moonlight against the deep hue of the velvet, her breasts rising in tantalizing curves above the indecently low neckline. “I thought, might as well. At the rate I was going, it would have hung in my closet here forever, unworn. And it’s so pretty.” She stroked a hand over the full skirt, a sensuous caress that went through me like fire, reminding me of how she’d once touched me. “It would have been just sad to only leave it for the moths to eat.”

  She lifted the mug in a toast. “Happy Eve of Moranu, Ash. May the goddess bless you.”

  Feeling like an ass—more than usual—I picked up the other empty mug and filled it, toasting her in return. “Happy Eve to you as well, Amelia. I have no doubt Moranu is terribly jealous that Glorianna claimed you all to Herself.”

  Ami blinked back some dampness, her eyes a luminous blue. “You say the loveliest things when you put your mind to it.”

  Which wasn’t nearly often enough, I knew. I searched for something else to say to please her, but most of what came to mind fell into treacherous territory. “Where are Willy and Nilly?” I asked instead.

  “Asleep.” Ami raised her elegant brows in significant delight. “Nilly hasn’t awakened, and if she’s like you after healing, I’m sure she’ll sleep straight through till morning. And Astar went down an hour ago, the consequence of diligent practice over hours with a garden stake he found and declared to be his sword.”

  I groaned at that. “I’m sorry. I wish they hadn’t seen that.”

  She cocked her head, a curling tendril falling against her temple. She’d put her hair up somehow, with more of the stars in it. I wondered where she’d dressed, as I’d been in her rooms.

  “I’m not sorry,” Ami was saying, and I dragged my thoughts back to the topic. “The twins were born into dangerous times and I doubt that will change any time soon. It’s good for them to see that there are men like you—men of integrity, honor, and courage—who will risk everything to protect them from the monsters.”

  I studied my wine, bemused by her description of me. Not how I saw myself.

  “Astar might as well start learning to hold his ‘sword’ correctly, as he’s so determined,” Ami added, pouring us both more wine. “Maybe you can get him started.” Before you go, she didn’t say, but we both heard the words anyway, our gazes catching on each other with a heated intensity that went to my core.

  Once, I would have given into that heat between us, likely dashing our wine cups aside and bearing her back onto the table, pushing up her fancy gown and burying myself in her sweet cunt until she screamed with pleasure and—I shook my head hard to dispel the image. I drained my wine and set it down to find Ami still staring at me, color high on her cheeks and eyes deeper blue with desire.

  “I’ll carve him a wooden sword,” I heard myself saying. “Tomorrow. It can be his feast gift. I don
’t have anything for either of them yet.” Gifts. Likely people who weren’t peasants gave beautiful presents, not the hand-written promises my parents and I had exchanged.

  “Can you carve one handed?” Ami asked, sounding breathless.

  Was this what normal parents did, sublimated their unwise lust in discussions of gifts for the children? Not that we were normal parents—or that I was a parent at all—nor did I have any clue what parents who weren’t mine did.

  “Skunk will help me,” I replied. “And I’ll think of something for Nilly.”

  She nodded. “I have several things for each of them.”

  “Good.” The strange conversation, so full of things we were saying under the words, lapsed.

  “Are you ready to eat?” Ami finally asked, gesturing to the table. Two places were set at the end of the long table, not as elaborate as at Lianore, but with more candles set in long holders of tarnished metal that looked like old wood, twisting and dense. Fresh-blooming flowers sat in little water-filled vases, making me wonder where Ami had gotten them. Domes of cut crystal covered the plates.

  “I told the staff we’d serve ourselves.” Ami glanced away, blushing. Had she also thought something like my momentary fantasy would occur? It certainly had enough times that she’d have learned to predict me. Except that we’d agreed to part ways, so she shouldn’t have expected anything of the kind. Right?

  “Of course,” I said, and pulled out the chair at the head of the table for her.

  “No, you sit there. I’ll take this one.” She moved to the chair immediately to the right.

  “The queen should sit at the head of the table in her own castle.”

  “It’s just us. I hardly see that it matters.”

  “At a formally set dinner at the big table in the main hall?” She knew how to do this Eve of the Feast of Moranu properly and I didn’t. “It obviously matters.”

  “I just wanted things to be pretty and it’s not as if there are dining tables for two in this place. Not elegant ones. It was this, the kitchens, or our rooms.”