A Winter's Promise

by Christelle Dabos

  “I don’t believe it, you’re not yet ready?” exclaimed Aunt Rosaline as she burst into the corridor, muffled under several layers of fur. “Go quickly to gather up your things, and if you don’t want to freeze before leaving the gangway, cover yourself up well!”

  Ophelia threw on two coats, a thick hat, mittens over her gloves, and wound her endless scarf around several times. In the end, she couldn’t lower her arms, so restricted was she by all the layers of clothes.

  When she joined the rest of the crew in the airship’s airlock, her trunks were being offloaded outside. A wind as cutting as glass swept through the door and was already turning the floor white with snow. The temperature in this room was so low that Ophelia had tears in her eyes.

  Impassive under his bearskin cloak, yet battered by the wind, Thorn set off without hesitation into the storm. When Ophelia, in turn, descended the gangway, she felt as though she were gulping lungfuls of ice. The snowy crust covering her glasses made her blind and the gangway ropes were slippery under her mittens. Each step was challenging; it felt as though, deep in her boots, her toes had instantly turned to ice. Somewhere behind her, smothered by the north wind, her aunt’s voice was shouting at her to watch where she put her feet. That was all Ophelia needed. She immediately skidded but somehow, with one leg dangling in the void, stopped herself from falling thanks to the security cordon. She didn’t know the distance remaining between the gangway and the ground, and she didn’t want to know.

  “Come down slowly,” a member of the crew advised her while gripping her elbow. “There!” Ophelia reached solid ground more dead than alive. The wind was buffeting her coats, her dresses, her hair, and her hat was sent flying into the distance. Impeded by her mittens, she tried to knock off the snow that had accumulated on her glasses, but she became stuck to the lenses, fast as a lead seal. Ophelia was obliged to take them off her nose to see where she was. Wherever she directed her blurred vision, all she glimpsed were patches of night and snow. She had lost Thorn and her aunt.

  “Your hand!” a man screamed to her. Disorientated, she randomly stretched out her arm and was immediately dragged on to a sleigh that she hadn’t seen. “Hold on tight!”

  She clung onto a handle as her whole body, frozen stiff, was shaken by all the jolting. Above her, a whip was being cracked, again and again, producing more and more speed from the team of dogs. Through the crack between her eyelids, Ophelia thought she could see intertwined streaks of light within the darkness. Street lamps. The sleighs were cutting right through a town, sending white flurries across pavements and doors. To Ophelia, this race across the ice felt never-ending, but finally the pace slowed, leaving her intoxicated with wind and speed on her pile of furs.

  The dogs were crossing a massive drawbridge.

  The Gamekeeper

  “Over ’ere!” shouted a man swinging a lantern.

  Shivering and with hair flying in the wind, Ophelia stumbled out of the sleigh to find herself ankle-deep in powdery snow. It poured over the top of her boots like cream. She had only a confused idea of where they now were. A narrow courtyard, wedged by ramparts. It had stopped snowing, but the wind was lacerating.

  “Good journey, m’lord?” asked the man with the lantern as he walked towards them. “Didn’t think you’d be away that long, we was starting to worry. Well, here’s a strange delivery!” He swung his lantern in front of Ophelia’s stunned face. All she could see of him through her glasses was a blurred glow. His accent was much stronger than Thorn’s; she could barely understand him.

  “Holy smoke, she’s a skinny ’un! Not too steady on the pegs, that one. Hope she ain’t going to croak on us. Could at least have given you a filly with more fat on her . . . ”

  Ophelia was dumbfounded. As the man stretched his hand towards her with the clear intention of fingering her, he got a whack on the head. It was Aunt Rosaline’s umbrella. “Keep your paws well away from my niece, and mind your language, you uncouth individual!” she protested from under her fur hat. “And you, Mr. Thorn, you might say something!”

  But Thorn had abstained from saying anything at all. He was already far away, his huge bearskin silhouetted against the lit rectangle of a doorway. Delirious, Ophelia plunged her feet into the footprints he’d left in his wake, tracking him up to the threshold of the house.

  Warmth. Light. Carpet.

  The contrast with the tempest outside was almost violent. Half-blind, Ophelia crossed a long hall and dragged herself instinctively over to a stove, which set her cheeks ablaze. She was starting to understand why Thorn thought she wouldn’t survive the winter. This coldness bore no comparison to that of her mountain. Ophelia was struggling to breathe; her nose, throat, lungs were burning her from within.

  She jumped when a woman’s voice, even louder than her mother’s, burst out behind her: “Nice breeze, no? Give us yer fur, my good lord, soaked through it is. Business good? And company for madam, you’ve brought some at last? It’s just that time mustn’t ’alf drag for her, up there!”

  The woman seemingly hadn’t noticed the shivering little creature curled up by the stove. As for Ophelia, she found her hard to understand due to her accent, also very strong. Company for madam? As Thorn, true to form, didn’t answer, the woman moved away as discreetly as her clogs permitted. “I’m off to help me husband.”

  Ophelia slowly looked at her surroundings. As the snow melted from her glasses, strange shapes became clearer around her. Animal trophies, with mouths agape and eyes staring, jutted out from the walls along a vast hunting gallery. These were Beasts, judging by their monstrous size. The antlers of an elk, in pride of place above the entrance, had the dimensions of a tree.

  At the end of the room, Thorn’s shadow stood before a huge fireplace. He’d placed his carpetbag at his feet, ready to grab it at the first opportunity.

  Ophelia gave up her little brazier for this fireplace, which she decided was more appealing. Her boots, which were soaked through, squelched with every step. Her dress had also sucked up the snow and felt as though weighed down with lead. Ophelia lifted it a little, and noticed that what she had thought was carpet was in fact an immense gray fur. The sight sent shivers down her spine. What animal could be so gigantic alive that it could cover such a vast surface once skinned?

  Thorn had plunged his cast-iron stare into the open fire; he ignored Ophelia when she approached. His arms, saber-like, were crossed on his chest, and his long, restless legs shuddered with contained impatience, as though unable to stay still. With a quick snap of the lid, he consulted his fob watch. Click, click.

  Holding her hands out to the flames, Ophelia wondered what her aunt was up to. She shouldn’t have left her alone with the lantern man outside. When she listened, she thought she could hear protestations about their luggage. She waited until her teeth had stopped chattering to speak to Thorn. “I must admit that I can’t really understand these people . . . ”

  Ophelia thought, from his stubborn silence, that Thorn wouldn’t respond to her, but he finally unclenched his jaws: “In the presence of others, and as long as it pleases me, you will be two lady’s companions that I’ve brought over from abroad to entertain my aunt. If you want to make it easier for me, watch your language, in particular that of your chaperone. And don’t stand alongside me,” he added with an exasperated sigh. “It will arouse suspicion.”

  Ophelia moved back a couple of steps, tearing herself reluctantly from the warmth of the fireplace. Thorn was certainly going to a lot of trouble to keep their marriage quiet; it was becoming worrying. She was, moreover, troubled by the unusual relationship linking him to this couple. They called him “lord,” and their apparent familiarity towards him concealed a certain deference. In Anima, everyone was the cousin of someone, and no one bothered to stand on ceremony. Here, there was already a kind of inviolable hierarchy that Ophelia couldn’t quite fathom.

  “Is this where you live?” she aske
d in a barely audible whisper, from her withdrawn position.

  “No,” Thorn condescended to reply, but only after a silence. “It’s the gamekeeper’s lodge.”

  That reassured Ophelia. She didn’t like the deathly stench of the Beast trophies, barely masked by the smell of the open fire. “Are we spending the night here?”

  While Thorn had hitherto stubbornly shown only his rough-hewn profile, her question made him turn a falcon stare towards her. Astonishment had instantly relaxed the hard features of his face. “The night? What time do you think it is then?”

  “Clearly much earlier than I thought it was,” Ophelia muttered to herself.

  The oppressive darkness of the sky had confused her internal clock. She was tired and she was cold, but she said nothing about it to Thorn. She didn’t want to show any weakness in front of this man who already judged her to be too delicate.

  Suddenly, a thunderbolt hit the hall. “Vandals!” boomed the voice of Aunt Rosaline. “Clumsy oafs! Boors!”

  Ophelia noticed Thorn tensing up. Crimson with rage under her fur hat, the aunt made a grand entrance into the trophy gallery, with the gamekeeper’s wife following hot on her heels. This time Ophelia had a chance to see what the woman looked like: she was a creature as pink and chubby as a baby, with a golden plait wrapped around her forehead like a crown.

  “Who’d just turn up at the home of decent folk with a contraption like that?” the latter protested. “Think we’re a duchess, do we!”

  Rosaline spotted Ophelia in front of the hearth. Brandishing her umbrella like a sword, she immediately sought her support: “They’ve wrecked my beautiful, my magnificent sewing machine!” she exclaimed with outrage. “And how am I going to hem our dresses? How am I going to mend any tears? I specialize in paper, I do, not material!”

  “Like everyone else does, say,” retorted the woman with disdain. “With a needle and thread, my dear!”

  Ophelia wanted to question Thorn with her eyes to know what attitude to adopt, but, seemingly uninterested in these fishwife quarrels, he had resolutely turned back to the fireplace. She could guess, however, from his stiffness, that he disapproved of Aunt Rosaline’s indiscretion.

  “It’s intolerable,” the latter said, choking. “Do you at least know to whom you—”

  Ophelia placed a hand on her arm to make her pause for thought. “Calm yourself, dear aunt, it’s not the end of the world.”

  The gamekeeper’s wife rolled her pale eyes from aunt to niece. She cast a telling look at her soggy hair, pallid complexion, and ridiculous getup, which was dripping like a mop. “Expected something more exotic, I did. Hope Lady Berenilde’s got the patience!”

  “Go and get your husband,” Thorn said, abruptly. “He must harness his dogs. We still have to cross the woods; I don’t want to waste any more time.”

  Aunt Rosaline parted her long, equine teeth to ask who Lady Berenilde was, but with one look, Ophelia stopped her.

  “You wouldn’t prefer to go there by airship, m’lord?” asked the gamekeeper’s wife, amazed.

  Ophelia would have liked a “yes,” the airship appealing more than the frozen woods, but an annoyed Thorn replied: “There’s no connecting service before Thursday. I’ve no time to lose.”

  “Right, m’lord,” said the woman, bowing.

  Clutching her umbrella, Aunt Rosaline was outraged. “And us, Mr. Thorn, no one asks our opinion? I would prefer to sleep at a hotel while waiting for this snow to melt a little.”

  Thorn grabbed his bag without looking at Ophelia or her godmother. “It won’t melt,” was all he said.

  They went out through a large covered terrace, not far from a rustling forest. Ophelia, breath seized by the cold, could see the landscape here more clearly than when coming down from the airship. The polar night wasn’t as black and impenetrable as she had imagined it to be. Indented by the tops of the firs, all swollen with snow, the sky was an almost phosphorescent indigo, turning a delicate blue just above the ramparts that separated the neighboring town from the forest. The sun was hiding, yes, but it wasn’t far away. It was waiting there, almost visible, just above the horizon.

  Hiding behind her scarf, her nose in a handkerchief, Ophelia got a shock when she saw the sleighs that were being harnessed up for them. With their coats ruffled by the wind, the wolfhounds were as big as horses. It was one thing to see Beasts in Augustus’s sketchbook, quite another to encounter them for real, all fur and fangs. Aunt Rosaline almost fainted at the sight of them.

  Boots planted firmly in the snow, his face inscrutable, Thorn was pulling on sleigh-driving gloves. He had exchanged his white bearskin for a gray fur cloak, less bulky and less heavy, which clung to his wiry body. He was listening without paying much attention to the verbal report of the gamekeeper, who was complaining about poachers.

  Once more, Ophelia wondered who Thorn was to these people. Did the forest belong to him, then, to be entitled to this official account?

  “And our trunks?” Aunt Rosaline asked, interrupting them, between two chatterings of her teeth. “You’re not loading them onto the sleighs?”

  “They’ll slow us down, lady,” said the gamekeeper while chewing a quid of tobacco. “Worry not, we’ll get ’em delivered pronto to Lady Berenilde’s.”

  Aunt Rosaline couldn’t understand him at first, due to his accent and his quid. She had to make him repeat his sentence three times. “Women cannot travel without the bare essentials!” she declared with outrage. “And Mr. Thorn, he gets to keep his little case, doesn’t he?”

  “That’s not the same thing at all,” hissed the gamekeeper, very shocked.

  Thorn clicked his tongue with annoyance. “Where is she?” he asked, conspicuously ignoring Rosaline. With a wave of his hand, the gamekeeper indicated a vague area beyond the trees. “She’s ’anging about near the lake, m’lord.”

  “Who are you talking about?” Aunt Rosaline asked, impatiently.

  With head wrapped in scarf, Ophelia didn’t understand either. She hadn’t a clue. The cold made her head ache and prevented her from thinking straight. She was still drowning in cotton wool when the sleighs set off again into the night, the drafts inflating her petticoats. Huddled at the back of the sleigh and thrown around like a rag doll by the jolting, she was using her mittens to stop her hair from whipping her nose. In front of her, Thorn was driving their sleigh, his huge shadow, straining forward, embracing the wind like an arrow. The muffled bells of the other sleigh, carrying the gamekeeper and Aunt Rosaline, followed them discreetly in the dark. All around, the bare branches of the trees were clawing the landscape, cutting into the snow, and spitting out, here and there, scraps of sky. Shaken in all directions, fighting the viscous drowsiness that was dogging her, Ophelia felt as though this race had no end.

  All of a sudden, the swarming shadows of the woods were shattered and a night that was vast, crystal-clear, dazzling, unfolded its starry mantle as far as the eye could see. Ophelia’s eyes widened behind her glasses. She sat up in the sleigh and, as the icy breath of the north wind swept through her hair, what she saw stunned her.

  Hanging there, in the middle of the night sky, its towers steeped in the Milky Way, a marvelous citadel floated above the forest, with nothing attaching it to the rest of the world. It was a totally crazy spectacle, an enormous beehive disowned by the earth, a tortuous interlacing of keeps, bridges, crenellations, stairs, flying buttresses, and chimneys. Jealously guarded by a frozen ring of moats, their long streams solidified in the void, the snowy city soared above and plunged below this line. Spangled with lit windows and street lamps, it reflected its thousand-and-one lights onto the mirror of a lake. As for its highest tower, it speared the very crescent of the moon.

  “Inaccessible,” reckoned Ophelia, elated by the sight. So it was this floating city that Augustus had drawn in his sketchbook?

  At the front of the sleigh, Thorn swu
ng a look over his shoulder. Through the pale strands of hair whipping his face, his eyes were brighter than usual. “Hold on!”

  Perplexed, Ophelia gripped the first thing to hand. An indraft, powerful as a torrent, took her breath away, while the enormous dogs and the sleigh itself caught that current and soared away from the snow. Her godmother’s hysterical scream almost reached the stars. Ophelia, on the other hand, was incapable of making the slightest sound. She could feel her heart beating wildly. The higher they got in the sky, the more they gained speed and the heavier the weight at the pit of her stomach. They traced a sweeping loop that seemed as unending as her aunt’s screaming. Showering sparks, the runners landed hard on the moat’s ice. Ophelia was suddenly bounced from the floor of the sleigh; she almost went overboard. Finally, the dogs curbed their speed and the sleigh came to a halt before a colossal portcullis.

  “The Citaceleste,” announced Thorn, laconically, as he got down.

  He didn’t look back once to check that his fiancée was still actually there.

  The Citaceleste

  Ophelia twisted her neck, unable to tear her eyes from the monumental city towering up to the stars.

  Perched on top of a high rampart wall, a road wound its way around the middle of the fortress and snaked up in a spiral to the summit. The Citaceleste was far more strange than beautiful. Turrets in a variety of shapes—some bulbous, some slender or else crooked—spewed out smoke from their every chimney. Arcaded stairways awkwardly straddled the void, and certainly didn’t inspire confidence. Windows—stained-glass or casement, in a palette of clashing colors—spangled the night sky.

  “I thought I was going to die . . . ” said a voice behind Ophelia.

  “Ware, lady. With them shoes, that’s a proper skating rink.” Supported by the gamekeeper, and close to collapse, Aunt Rosaline tried to keep her balance on the moat’s surface. In the lantern light, her complexion appeared even more jaundiced than usual.