my inner life is a sheet of black glass. if I fell through the floor I would keep falling—
It is on the coldest day of winter that I first see my mother in her warpaint.
Outside, the city is covered in snow. The roofs of the barracks, the storefronts, the prayer-places, are all capped in thick swirls of white; they look like the buns that the bakers downstairs are always careful to slather extra icing on when they see me skipping out of my room. And the little flurries in the air make everything faintly smudgy, so that the streetlamps bleed into one another like stars in a fairytale. When I press my head against the window to look further out, the glass is cold enough to make me flinch, and from my silent room I watch the snowflakes drift softly down and glaze the world in pale glitter.
I feel peaceful. It’s the only feeling I know so far.
When my door swings open, I don’t jump. I don’t even turn to check who it is. My mother’s steps are a pattern I’ve come to recognize within just a few beats, and the scent of pine needles and clay paint that follows is another confirmation of my suspicions; when she reaches out and touches her mouth to my small shoulder, I know the shape of her kiss and lean back into it. Her breath warms the back of my neck. I tell her: “I was watching the snow come down.”
“Do you know why it snows, elskede?”
“No,”I tell her. I turn to press my forehead into the warm curve of her neck; and that is when I see that her usually unmarred dark skin is marked now with cracked lines of paint. A setting red sun is painted on her shoulder, underlined with angular waves. Little streaks of red and white flow down the side of her neck and from her forehead over her eye; her wing is dipped in white, drawn on in narrow lines: she looks dangerous, beautiful but intimidating, and I stare at her with my eyes blown wide in surprise, silent in my sudden awe. “What—what are you wearing?”
“My warpaint, elskede.”
Without thinking, I ask excitedly: “Can I wear it too?”
I have never seen her disappointed in me. It is my first taste of real pain.
She says something to me—something kind and loving, I’m sure, if a little stern. But I can’t hear it over the rush of blood in my ears, and the way my heart beats at the way she looks at me, her lips turned down into a frown so mild it’s somehow worse than being screamed at. (But she would never do that, anyway.)
And if she finishes her story about why it snows; well, I don't hear that either.
The snow is still falling lightly when I make my way outside. My eyes are puffy and red, and I rub them agitatedly against one shoulder and then the other as I walk, white hair streaming loose and wild around me, my head tucked into my chest. I don’t know what the feeling in my chest is called, exactly; but it burns and steals my oxygen, and I have a hard time breathing properly as I walk.
I’m headed to the barracks, but I don’t think I know that.
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.
my inner life is a sheet of black glass. if I fell through the floor I would keep falling—
One day I will be a Halcyon warrior.
This is indisputable. I am the daughter of two warriors, and I have been born and raised here, and I have wings, and to imagine being anything else is simply a pipe dream.
I don’t think it’s that my mother would stop me, exactly, if I tried to take a different path. She is kind in ways I can feel but not fully understand; this is one of them. I could apprentice with the Fosters if I wanted to become a bookkeeper. (Mother says she even knows a nice girl who’d say yes to teaching me if I sent a nice letter. Her name is Isabella. I think.) Or I could wade my way into the swamps to find the moss-carpeted house of the Silvas. They could teach me which herbs to gather, which berries are poisonous, the recipe for panacean tinctures. I think, if I really tried, I could even land myself a spot with the De Clares: I’ve always been awed by the oil paintings of the sea we’ve hung up in the main hall, and a talent like. that never goes to waste.
(They’re scary, though. I’ve met the headmaster once, and I think once will be enough. At least until I’m more grown-up.)
I could do all these things. But all my daydreaming and fantasizing, all these thoughts of could and want and might, are irrelevant in the face of the knowledge that is:
My mother is Queen. My mother is Commander. She wants me to become a cadet. And I love her—fear her?—too much to do otherwise.
So it is the barracks I flee to after our argument—was it even an argument?—simply because it is the place I know best. I know the path from the castle to its front doors well enough to run it without fear, even now, when the cobblestones are slick with black ice. I know which doors lead where; which rooms belong to who. I know the pattern of the scones and the lanterns on the wall. A light, a door. A light, a door. A light—
Gunhilde?
I stop so sharply I almost trip. My back legs slide all the way under me until all four of my hooves meet; I let out a little noise, almost a squeak, that is no way befitting of a princess, and by the time I scramble back to my usual, carefully practiced posture, my whole face is hot with embarrassment. My heart beats in my throat as frantically as if there were any real danger.
But there is nothing to be scared of. I repeat this to myself until my pulse abides to a normal height inside my chest: there is nothing to be scared of. Slowly the blood rushes down from my ears. And when I finally collect myself enough to peer down into the hallway and find the source of the voice, I realize that I was right.
It’s only a girl.
I recognize her. I think. She’s taller than me, and older, I’d guess, from the way she’s a little more filled out. Her auburn hair falls in damp ringlets, capped at their ends by pieces of ice; her eyes stare out at me from the darkness, and they are a soft blue so winter they’re almost gray; but the rest of her is obscured by the gentle, flickering darkness that surrounds us. I can only pinpoint to height of her face by the slashes of white on her nose and her forehead.
I recognize her, I think. But not enough to remember her name. And—and I don’t know why, or how, but I’m less embarrassed by that fact than I am desperate to resolve it.
“Oh,” I say. My voice is froggy; I wince when I realize that, between that raspiness and the redness of my eyes, she will probably be able to tell at once that I’ve been crying. But I clear my throat, stubbornly, and continue. My tone is soft and timid enough it might only come through halfway. “Hello. I hope—I’m sorry if I woke you up.”
I wanna be a bottle blonde
I don't know why but I feel conned
I wanna be an idle teen
I wish I hadn't been so clean
I
think I startle her, and were it anyone else I surely would have found it funny.
I blame her hair. It is so soft-looking even from where I stand, white as snow and princess-flowing, that when I see her head bob as she slips, her back legs sliding to meet the front, my heart does a funny little leap and I am just about to spring out and catch her before she catches herself.
“Hey!” I say sharply, at the same time she whispers forth a hoarse oh. The icicles capping my hair clink together like wind chimes. I grind my teeth together and my breath plumes out in clouds. She is like a cat that leaps into the air at a shadow! I'm certain that even mushroom-hearted Stolas wouldn't have fumbled so.
I'm not certain if I am more irritated that she could be so easily frightened — or that my pulse has yet to settle. Flinging my hair behind my ears, I drag myself out from the warmth of the sconce and go to her. She is the Commander's daughter, isn't she? One wrong fall and she could roll an ankle and tear the ligament, bench herself for weeks. Somehow this frustrates me further, and makes meeting her eyes of palest goldenrod easier.
“Did you hurt yourself?” I soften my gaze just a little when I reach her. Her voice, like her hair, is as soft as petals. “You didn't wake me. I came back late, but — don't tell your mother that,” I say, rolling my lip between my teeth. My circumstances are special enough, and my movements in practice today had been sloppy to the point of distraction. Goddess knows what the Commander thinks of me, but unlike with Calanthe —
A feeling I know to be unpleasantness claws up my chest when I think about upsetting Queen Marisol.
Her daughter, however, is a different matter. I can't help but think of Stolas, with his poorly-hidden distress and tucked-in smiles, and before I realise what I am doing I lean in towards her and blink at the red rimming her eyes. It can't be from slipping, can it? Unless she truly did roll an ankle, and then it would be my fault and if she tells her mother...
“Goddess,” I curse softly, glancing from what I can see of her ankles to her wide eyes helplessly. The light from the line of sconces fizzle to blindness down this stretch of the hall; I stare hard at the pale, curved angles of her face, before leaning back against the clammy sandstone wall. The words taste foreign and strained on my tongue, but I push them out anyway. “... are you alright?”
I don't quite look at her now because I'm not sure what I would say if she told me no, or even yes (worse, even, because she won't mean it). With Stolas I would tug his hair and sigh loud enough for him to know that I am disappointed, again, before herding him into his room and digging around his drawers for bandages. (Unlike my Blessed brother I wield none of his handy healing spells. I rely on tinctures and spite alone.) With Jorah, I wouldn't even notice.
Instead — the wings behind my ears flap like a butterfly's as my face freezes into a smooth-browed coolness no one has ever believed of me.
my inner life is a sheet of black glass. if I fell through the floor I would keep falling—
I don’t think of myself—consciously—as young.
Aeneas and I have been competing since the moment we were born for our fathers’ doting affection, my mother’s grim and serious approval. It is the same hawkish, almost antagonistic sense of rivalry that I see between the cadets my mother oversees, who spend all day side-eyeing each other as they vie for her attention and beat each other senseless when they get it. I don’t pretend to understand it; I just know it happens, and that some part of me feels genetically inclined to participate.
I don’t think of myself as young, because I don’t think of myself much at all; because all the people I spend my time with are older than I am; and because, somehow, I am already exhausted with the world.
But when I look at this girl, I remember all at once that I am teenaged, because the feeling I get is one I’ve never come close to feeling before.
I stare at her. My eyes are wide, I know, and in the flickering light that drips from the sconces on the wall they are probably bright and pale as summer sunlight. I don’t know if she can see it, but I know I feel heat blazing in my face. It pools in my cheeks, my ears, blossoms over my throat like a rash until even swallowing feels like effort. And in my chest, my heart is beating as fast and light as a hummingbird’s wings, so fast and so light that I feel almost dizzy: the speed of it, I think, might very well pull me off the ground and force me to float.
Or, I think, my whole body purring, I might be floating already.
When she comes toward me, it feels somewhere between a promise and a threat. Her eyes are cool and predator-bright. Where they cross me, I feel my skin prickle. And as the distance between us closes, I can’t say anything at all, too awed by her soft-toffee curls; the sooty cast on her lips; the wings that splay out behind her like an angel’s.
I freeze myself in place against the instinct to jerk back. Whatever feeling this is, it is close enough to panic that I have to deal with it the same way. Deep breath. Steel yourself. Don’t flinch—or if you do, don’t let them see.
“I’m fine,” I say softly. “I’m not hurt, I mean.” I can’t meet her eyes from this close; it feels too frightening. Instead I stare at the lines of gold painted on her shoulder that somehow manage to glitter even in the dark. And it’s true—I am fine. Nothing hurts, and Aeneas has knocked me over enough times that I’d grit my teeth through it if it did, anyway. I shift my weight from leg to leg to demonstrate nothing is out of place.
There is a moment of silence. Then two. The third is unbearable, and suddenly I blurt out: “It’s just that—that my mother is upset with me. So I… didn’t want to be in the castle.”
Already embarrassed, maybe half-cringing, I glance up at her and wait.
