in the burned house I am eating breakfast.
you understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast
yet here I am.
H
air whips across my eyes and I huff out strands of it with every breath, yet I don’t slow to fix it. I dart nimbly around an ice-filled gulley and hiss in pained delight when a gust of air slices my neck and swirls of snowflakes cling to the hollows of my numbing face. I ache to laugh but my teeth are gritted tight, to save my lungs for breathing, to extend this moment into forever, this moment where I feel completely—
Weightless.
My sword sings through the night as I dance and parry my shadow in the silver moon glow.
Despite the bitter cold, sweat drips in lines down my face. I have churned the fresh layer of snow to a cobbled mess of mud and sleet, and I glance down occasionally to avoid twisting my ankle in a pit. If there is anything I can't afford, it's injury. I don't have the patience. Stolas would say that I was born utterly without it, patience, a phenomenon rare as a third eye, yet locked up tight within.
My genius of a brother finds comfort in the science, yet I find mine in the truth. Tumbled out from Calanthe’s womb to be tumbled into a tub for washing; passed like a hot pan from wet nurse to wet nurse to wet nurse; vaulted from Father's attention to Calathe's manic obsessions to a Silva cousin's white pearly smile. When you're raised like that—you don't come with neatly printed instructions on how to stop.
I have always thought that if I die, I ought to do it quickly—a spear in the head, a dagger in an artery. To die slowly, or to trade away a limb for a few more years of dying slowly? If came down to either of those, I would cut out my heart myself.
There is a flash of white at the edge of my vision and it is too soft and airy to be more snow.
Practice had ended hours ago, yet if I am not the only one breaching curfew, then I ought to keep my fellow brave cadet company. I toss back my curls, freshly washed, their damp ends already crystallising into ice, before slipping quietly after the trailing white. Dimly I am aware that I am shivering, though I don't feel like doing anything about it. The Silva lands are warmer, much warmer, but I am trying to convince myself that I do not prefer it at all to this bone-aching cold.
There are very few cadets with hair as white as snow. And even so, none of them keep their hair as long and princess-flowing as she does.
The armory door shines a dull bronze under the enchanted torches that mark the way back to the barracks. I step up to it, hunching under the weak heat of a sconce, before dragging my eyes to squint down the echoing dark hallway. My voice is low and strangely soft when I am unsure if I am being heard.
"... Gunhilde?"
Sometimes I hear the other girls call her Hilde. But I don't, yet. I didn't allow anyone else but my old nurse and Stolas to call me Sisi, not even Jorah, and so this is the one and only courtesy I can be counted upon to show.
If it is really her—half of me still can't quite believe it—then she is braver than I'd thought. Gunhilde is the Commander's daughter. She is polite, and docile, and almost sickeningly perfect. I wonder if she knows that I watch her too often to bother being careful about it, now.
I wonder, my mouth twisting into a frown as my voice stabs weakly through the dark, if she cares.
