The Book of Snow & Silence

by Zoe Marriott

  The lack of respect – and the strange word, which was clearly an insult of some kind – brought my hackles up in a rush of fury that overruled exhaustion. I opened my mouth to deliver a stinging rebuke. But before I could speak, Uldar’s voice suddenly rang out.

  “Watch your tongue! You address my future wife.”

  He was straightening unsteadily beside me, shivering in his thin, damp undershirt. I brushed away my brief stab of resentment at being referred to as a mere ‘future wife’. He was flushed and blotchy, feverish; such pettiness was beneath me. I hurried to offer him my shoulder as the chastened sailor quickly bowed in my direction and then rushed to his other side. The other men let out a chorus of war-like shouts as, one by one, they realised that a miracle had occurred. Their Crown Prince had been returned to them.

  “Morogana be thanked! We’re saved! The Prince is saved!”

  Their shouts made my head ache and I was already regretting letting Uldar lean on me. I barely had enough strength to support myself, let alone him. His arm was grinding into another tender bruise on my left shoulder. But their obvious joy and relief was heartening, and I let a small smile pull at my lips. I might be a stranger to this icy land, a foreigner, but I had preserved His Royal Highness Crown Prince Uldarana when his people had thought all hope was lost. Surely none here, now, could judge me unworthy to be their Queen.

  *

  I was ushered into a tiny space below decks on the new iron-hull that had come to find us – the lone cabin, offered up as an emergency haven for a waterlogged princess. Despite the size and the strong smell of unwashed socks and aniseed, it possessed the only two luxuries that I desired: a brazier, glowing with black and orange coals, and a door that locked from the inside.

  I flung Uldar’s coat off, hearing it hit the planks with a heavy splat as I crumpled down before the brazier. Its heat rippled and coiled around me in the air. For an instant it was gentle, like the caresses of some soft-furred, invisible cat. Then suddenly it hurt, as if I had plunged my face, arms and front into nearly scalding water – an exquisite pain that made me shudder even as I crowded closer, closer.

  The draught on my clammy back was like needles. Within arm’s reach there was a small, neatly made bed. With a hasty lunge, I pulled the brightly coloured blanket off and wrapped it around me. I dragged the long rope of braided hair away from the cold, wet trail it had made down my spine and began to try to untangle it. My fingers could hardly penetrate the tight plait. I dragged and pulled, teasing my broken nails through the wet mess and squeezing out fat trickles of water that steamed as they fell.

  I wasn’t even close to unthawed when a brisk knock at the door drew me from the beautiful agony of the brazier. I flung my half unbound hair back over my shoulder, and ensured the blanket was covering me fully. Then I opened the door to admit a servant boy no older than nine or ten, bearing a tray wider than he was tall, and beneath it, a heap of mismatched clothing. All I could see of the child were a pair of pale, bright eyes and a short fuzz of otter-coloured hair.

  “With Captain Farang’s compliments, Miss – I mean, Highness!” he stuttered, breathing coming fast with effort as he deposited the tray down on a small round table beside the bed. “Captain says you can use his bed here to rest. We’re heading for home as soon as the Wind Caster can get the sails filled, and you should be safely on dry land before nightfall.”

  This was the Captain’s cabin? It was half the size of the one I had inhabited on Volin’s ship. They had called that the State Room, though I had thought it must be some kind of joke when I first arrived in it.

  Wait.

  “Doesn’t the Captain intend to search the sea and the Ice Field for survivors before we weigh anchor?”

  The boy stopped in his scamper for the door, frowning. “Survivors, Miss? You and the Prince are the survivors.”

  There was a word missing there. It was in his tone, in his blank look. “Only.”

  You are the only survivors.

  I had been right, then. No human could survive in those waters. My throat seemed to swell closed. I had to clear it twice before I could dismiss the boy. He was gone before I had finished forcing the words out. If they were preparing to set sail again he probably had other tasks to do. Good. Yes, let us be gone. Let us leave this cursed sea behind as fast as the Gods’ blessings could carry us.

  My fingers were steady as I locked the door again, and sat down on the edge of the bed to examine the contents of the tray. Black tea steamed in a silver pot. A small crystal flagon of some amber liquid sat beside it – a spirit to spike the tea with, no doubt. A plate of hard biscuits and crumbling pale cheese amongst which someone had placed a single soft pink fruit as an offering. And there, in a lidded wooden cup, plain fresh water.

  I carefully spun the two outer rings of the filigree design on my locket. It separated into two neat halves, revealing a round glass vial, filled with greenish-grey powder. Dry. Enough medicine to last for a little over a week. Ten days if I was very, very careful.

  I had carried this emergency supply, carefully refreshed every few months, on my person since I was ten years old. Since my first – attack. Since I had first realised what it would mean if anyone ever found out, even my Mother.

  Especially my Mother.

  Strange that I had never worried about Aramin learning my secret. I had trusted her. Stupid of me. Fatally stupid, as it turned out.

  Licking dry, salty lips, I measured out a careful, sparing dose into the water cup. I had seven to ten days in this alien country to find a new supply of the drug. It wasn’t a particularly rare or expensive preparation. It would be enough. It would have to be enough. The familiar chalky taste coated my tongue, making my teeth squeak.

  Sounds carried on a ship, and there was always someone nearby. Crawling back to the brazier, I curled up beside it, pulling the knitted blanket up over my head. I fixed my teeth in their familiar groves in my lip, and buried my face in the crook of my elbow.

  Only then did I allow myself to weep.

  Found in the ruins of the great library at the Ice Palace of Silingana, after the thaw

  I never blamed Aramin. I was angry at her. Hurt and shocked. And humiliated, of course. That, most of all. Just as she planned.

  But looking back, I don’t believe she ever tried to fool me. Fool any of us. Not about her true nature. She showed us every day, with her games and her tricks and her traps, who she was. It was just – easier to ignore the parts of her that didn’t fit. Ignore her slyness, her cunning and her ambition. Her ferocious, capricious intelligence. Pretend the smiling, laughing, careless face she presented to everyone else was all there was of her. After all, what good would it do to encourage those traits? She was the spare. The extra sibling. The just-in-case baby of the family. She would be happier if she accepted that.

  Yes, we fooled ourselves.

  Our Mother loved us equally. I never doubted that, and I am sure Aramin knew it too. But she did not value us equally. And I think that must have burned Aramin. It burned her, hurt her deep inside, that Mother pushed me, judged me, chastised me, and above all expected the very best from me, while Aramin she simply indulged.

  No. I don’t blame her. I love her as much as I ever did. There are times, small stretches of numbness or remote despair, when I even feel a sort of admiration for the way she pulled it off.

  The one I hold responsible is my Mother.

  You did this, my Queen.

  You are the one who destroyed me.

  7

  “Help me!”

  I would never have let them see me like this. If they had been here, I would not have lain by the fire, vulnerable and weak, knotted up over my knees, shaking and sobbing beneath a blanket. They had never, not once in all our weeks of travel, seen me cry.

  “Princess! Help me!”

  Their absence was all around me, throbbing voids where heartbeats and footsteps and voices should have been. Kind, sensible Sereh, silly young Elo, and Ane, to whom I could not
even apply adjectives, because I had not known her well enough. I had never known any of them, not really. And it had been on purpose, that distance, and it had seemed wise and good. But now – it was too late. Too late to regret treating them so coldly, too late to regret bringing them in the first place. Too late for the watchful sailors and for Captain Volin. For The Black Tern and every soul on it. Everything was gone.

  “Princess, help me! What should I do?”

  I didn’t answer her. I didn’t answer.

  I relived that feverish, desperate moment in the storm, tossed to-and-fro in the flimsy shelter of the boat, grasping at Uldar’s sodden dead weight. That glimpse of a something – someone – floating amid the waves. Of a hand reaching for mine. What if it was more than my imagination? I had heard someone shout for help. What if it had been Sereh? What if there had been a chance to save her after all? If only I had... If only I had answered.

  I would never know.

  I’d believed that I had sacrificed all in coming here. Well, now it was true. Now I was truly and perfectly alone. Each tiny, precious scrap of home that I had brought with me was gone. My ladies. My furs, clothes, jewels, maps, medicine, letters, books.

  They had been my Mother’s books. I had filled the trunk from the royal libraries in the week after the betrothal contract was signed, before we set off for the coast. Technically it was theft. Some of those volumes were rare. Others priceless. But no one had tried to stop me. Right up until the end, Mother kept hoping I would change my mind. That she could convince me to stay in Yamarr. I still didn’t understand why she had bothered. Why did she even care if I stayed or went? I wasn’t good enough. Was I expected to be grateful for an existence as a spare princess, pitied and petted, living on my sister’s indulgence? She would never have accepted such a life herself. And yet Mother had not stayed my hand as I packed, honestly believing that the books would be returned to their places on the shelves, the jewels to their boxes in the vault, and my hastily fitted, heavy new clothes consigned to the backs of my closets, unworthy. That the trunks would be emptied and hauled back to the dust of the palace attics.

  Now they rested at the bottom of the ocean.

  I had brought precious things here to this icy place and like a spoiled, careless child, I had lost them. Damn the sea. Curse it. Curse it three times.

  Strange noises echoed through the hull. Hard slaps of water, creakings and groanings, mad sloshing that only seemed the more frenzied for the sudden periods of stillness and silence, as if the ship had come to a full stop. Presumably we were undertaking the perilous task poor Volin had spoken of – navigating the Numinast. I tried to stir some interest, some energy of inquiry, within myself. I should get up. Dress myself, go above decks into the grey, misty frozen air and prove that I was a Princess, strong and undaunted.

  But hours passed, and I sat on the floor and wept. Why had I come here, to this benighted frozen wasteland? Why had I ever left home?

  The light had grown more dim still by the time the door echoed under impatient knuckles again. I wiped my face, climbed to my feet, and lifted my chin before I lifted the latch. My swollen eyes and nose would have to pass for effects of the cold. “Yes?”

  The cabin boy. “We’re about to make landfall, Miss – I mean, Highness. Captain thought you might want to see? Unless you’d rather stay below decks and rest?”

  I did not want to see. I didn’t care what this awful place looked like. But if I stayed down here despite the invitation, would I appear frightened and weak to them?

  The words were out before I could think. “Rest is for the dead.”

  His brows crinkled up. I realised that I had spoken in Yamarri. Logical enough – my Mother had always spoken in Yamarri when she repeated the phrase. It had been one of her favourites. Whenever I signalled my surrender during weapons training and collapsed, panting and sweating, onto the sand, or dared to put down the pen with my translations or mathematical problems only half completed, whenever I begged for a break to clear my head, or a simple afternoon to visit the markets or go riding with my sister: Rest is for the dead.

  And I wasn’t dead yet.

  A humourless smile pulled at the corners of my lips. Why had I come here? I remembered now. Pity is more bitter than death. I would never allow anyone to judge me unworthy again.

  “You may tell the Captain that I will join him on deck shortly.”

  *

  It took very little time for me to ready myself, once I had given up on achieving anything my ladies would have approved as a respectable appearance. No one, on this ship of rough seamen, had thought to offer me a comb or a mirror, and although my hair was almost completely dry, I had never learned to knot or braid it for myself. There was no choice but to leave it loose. Under the influence of clumsy fingers and the salt water, it had formed long, drifting curls that ran down my shoulders and back like smoke.

  My clothes were a mishmash of sizes and colours, clearly left behind by women of various stations who had been guests on the boat at different times. A natural desire to create a flattering result had fought with my desire never to be cold again – and lost. I had piled layer upon layer, finishing it off with a grey-brown cloak of some soft foreign skin, lined with dense greyish- brown fur.

  There were no gloves that fitted, and no muff.

  I kept the hood of the cloak up and the frogs closed, and pulled the long sleeves of my dull green dress over my hands as I climbed the creaking steps to the long, narrow deck of my rescuers’ iron-hull. Deep ripples of blueish cloud swelled overhead. In the distance, above the Numinast, their bellies were streaked with the powdery handprints of falling snow. I had experienced snow before, on Volin’s ship. My dawning wonder at its beauty had been swiftly and literally dampened when it melted and trickled down my neck.

  We weren’t moving. In fact, I did not think that the boat could move. There was nowhere to go. I stared, bewildered. We were surrounded by what seemed a solid wall of ice, sculpted by the wind and ocean into savage shapes. In the twilight the icebergs showed little of the fantastic, glowing colours I had observed before. They might have been ordinary, dull grey stones. Stones that trapped us in this deep well of dark water.

  “My Lady – Princess Thee-oh-ay.” The Captain – Farang, I remembered his name was – stumbled over my name as Silingans usually did. He hurried toward me, halting far too close to be correctly respectful, and subjected me to a blast of aniseed scented breath. “I am glad to see you recovered so well! Let me welcome you properly...”

  I missed my ladies and their subtle protection the same way my chilled hands missed their favourite gloves. Oh Sereh. I am sorry.

  The thick fur ruff around Farang’s neck stirred in an icy wind that made the iron-hull’s sails creak and its deck rock queasily. The waves were disturbingly close to where I stood at the side of the small boat. I could not move away, to the craft’s centre. That was where the lines of sailors – or were they rowers? – sat at their benches, although their oars were motionless in the water now.

  The Captain had stopped talking. When had he stopped talking? What had he been saying? Locking one hand around the rail at the bulwark hard enough to make my knuckles crack, I turned a calm face toward him, smiling as if I had only been admiring the view, and resolutely not backing away to a more comfortable distance.

  “Thank you, Sir. The ship has put down its anchor?”

  “Put down its anchor?” he questioned, the large eyebrows jumping.

  “We are not moving, but the boy said we were nearly...” Not home. Not that. “Ready to land. Is there a problem?” I looked around again and noticed another oddity. “Where is the Prince?”

  The boat rocked again, jerking like a restive horse. I braced myself against the rail as my body reminded me, with a timely round of throbbing, of all my bruises and scrapes. I ignored the discomfort. I had spent too long brooding and fretting in the cabin already; I must not betray any more weakness.

  “He is – ah – he was muc
h chilled. And is still resting,” the Captain confessed, looking away from me. “And of course he – he has made this journey many times before.”

  There was an uneasy pause as we contemplated the fact that the Prince’s bride had found the strength to rise and dress herself and leave her cabin, and the Prince had not. My Mother would have had harsh words for him.

  But my power here, what little I had, flowed from him. And therefore his status must be protected.

  “That is not surprising,” I said blandly. “He was in the water much longer than I. I do not know much about the effects of cold, but I feel sure he will need the rest to avoid a dangerous fever. When I pulled him from the sea into The Ice Blade he was nearly frozen.”

  A nearby sailor dropped a bucket with a resounding clang and another swore, perhaps in response. When I looked around I saw that several of the men had stopped in their work and were staring, not at the clumsy sailor, but at me and their Captain. Eavesdropping. I glanced back at Farang, expecting him to send them on their way. He, too, was stricken in place, eyes wide. Had I made some error in my Silingan grammar?

  “You – you pulled him from the sea?”

  Someone laughed uncertainly behind me, and was hushed. My memory ran feverishly back over all of my words, searching for anything, some infelicitous turn of phrase, some foolish mistake. I could find nothing. The frustration of failing to be understood by these people, or to understand them myself, despite all my studies, made sweat prickle at my temples and upper lip despite the cold.

  I pressed my lips into a firm line. I had clearly said enough.

  The Captain seemed to agree. “Well,” he said, slightly too loudly. “We’ve wandered from the point, I think! No, Princess, we’ve not weighed anchor. This is the last stopping place before we enter the great harbour of Radavansk. Our Wind Caster is holding us steady here.”

  He gestured to an older man with a stooped back and a face as brown and wizened as a dried fig. Seeming clenched in upon his already bent spine, with knotted fists and jaw working, the man stared, unblinking, at the ship’s lone sail.