personal offense. Every Duke leaves their own mark on the city, like the 99 statues along Salt Way, commissioned by another Duke long ago. The menagerie is Alberic’s.
A petty legacy for a last Duke.
“I don’t like the menagerie,” I say. “It makes me sneeze almost as much as spring.”
Alberic looks amused. “Say that too loudly and they will begin making up tales that Tabat has languished in the grip of Winter all this time to ward off your hay fever.”
“Hardly that.”
“Why then? Why do you love playing Winter so?”
Why indeed? I keep silent, thinking. Is it the chill and silence of Winter, the touch of ice preserving whatever it grasped, perfect and unchanging?
Or something else?
Years and years before the death of the Unicorn, while still at Leonoa’s parents’ house, Winter came back unexpectedly—a sudden storm late in the Spring, as though to make one last threat, pitch one last tantrum. I rose in the morning to find the world sugar-glazed, painfully brilliant in the early morning sunlight.
At that age, I was always hungry, but it had been before the days with Jolietta. Hunger was still a half-stranger, a tease, a flirtation, not a weapon that could be used against me with measuring-spoon precision, not a cudgel that could be used to drive anyone, anything to their knees. So I hadn’t worried about breakfast that day and had gone out in robe and slippers to walk in the rose garden that had been Coro Canto’s pride and joy.
All of the roses were encased in ice, better preserved than in any museum case. On the outskirts of the garden’s circle were great crimson roses like wounds in the air, further in were white roses like chalk and ivory and eggshells, and in the heart of the little garden were the sunshine and citrus colors that Coro’s son, long-dead Cosmo, had loved, roses shaded candy yellow and orange, bright as toys.
The ice cased up each rose’s fragrance, bottled it in crystal, hid it away with jealous closeness.
Yesterday when I had walked through the garden, the sweet perfume of each rose had bludgeoned me in turn, cloying as old sorrow, sweet as muscavado sugar from the Southern Isles.
Now, without the fragrances to distract me, I looked more closely at the flowers. A poet would have come up with a thousand ways to describe them, the tousle-headed blooms saved from their downward swoon, and upright, chaste buds who would never open their cores to the sunlight and now stood undrooping, filled with virtue and wasted potential.
Standing in the midst of the ice and silence, I tried to free a great red rose, shagged with petals like a lion’s mane, big as both of my fists laid together. I wrestled with its thick stalk, bending the stem back and forth, abrading it until it could be pulled apart. A thorn ran into my thumb, leaving a dark splinter in the soft pad. I swore—a schoolgirl’s oath that twitches me into a smile now—and picked it out.
I felt for a moment as though I was in a fairy tale. As though everything around me had come into focus, sharpened, become more significant. I held my breath. What was about to burst upon me? What figure would appear, the sky splintering around it? What would the Gods manifest in order to guide me all my days?
I waited, but nothing happened.
A bird fluttered in the tree dislodging clumps of snow. Scuffs of horsetail clouds marked the high blue sky. The shadows of trees laddered the gravel paths. Frozen dew had made glittering lace of the spider webs stretching between bushes.
I wanted something to speak to, wanted—well, I’ve never found it, not then and not later as a Gladiator. I was told, before I ever set foot on the arena’s tiles, that I would be taken over, would become the very presence of some God or Goddess on earth. My actions would show what was happening in the Spiritual Realm.
The wonder of it all was that such flabberjabber still worked, even when I don’t believe a word of it. For a long time, Winter seemed
A petty legacy for a last Duke.
“I don’t like the menagerie,” I say. “It makes me sneeze almost as much as spring.”
Alberic looks amused. “Say that too loudly and they will begin making up tales that Tabat has languished in the grip of Winter all this time to ward off your hay fever.”
“Hardly that.”
“Why then? Why do you love playing Winter so?”
Why indeed? I keep silent, thinking. Is it the chill and silence of Winter, the touch of ice preserving whatever it grasped, perfect and unchanging?
Or something else?
Years and years before the death of the Unicorn, while still at Leonoa’s parents’ house, Winter came back unexpectedly—a sudden storm late in the Spring, as though to make one last threat, pitch one last tantrum. I rose in the morning to find the world sugar-glazed, painfully brilliant in the early morning sunlight.
At that age, I was always hungry, but it had been before the days with Jolietta. Hunger was still a half-stranger, a tease, a flirtation, not a weapon that could be used against me with measuring-spoon precision, not a cudgel that could be used to drive anyone, anything to their knees. So I hadn’t worried about breakfast that day and had gone out in robe and slippers to walk in the rose garden that had been Coro Canto’s pride and joy.
All of the roses were encased in ice, better preserved than in any museum case. On the outskirts of the garden’s circle were great crimson roses like wounds in the air, further in were white roses like chalk and ivory and eggshells, and in the heart of the little garden were the sunshine and citrus colors that Coro’s son, long-dead Cosmo, had loved, roses shaded candy yellow and orange, bright as toys.
The ice cased up each rose’s fragrance, bottled it in crystal, hid it away with jealous closeness.
Yesterday when I had walked through the garden, the sweet perfume of each rose had bludgeoned me in turn, cloying as old sorrow, sweet as muscavado sugar from the Southern Isles.
Now, without the fragrances to distract me, I looked more closely at the flowers. A poet would have come up with a thousand ways to describe them, the tousle-headed blooms saved from their downward swoon, and upright, chaste buds who would never open their cores to the sunlight and now stood undrooping, filled with virtue and wasted potential.
Standing in the midst of the ice and silence, I tried to free a great red rose, shagged with petals like a lion’s mane, big as both of my fists laid together. I wrestled with its thick stalk, bending the stem back and forth, abrading it until it could be pulled apart. A thorn ran into my thumb, leaving a dark splinter in the soft pad. I swore—a schoolgirl’s oath that twitches me into a smile now—and picked it out.
I felt for a moment as though I was in a fairy tale. As though everything around me had come into focus, sharpened, become more significant. I held my breath. What was about to burst upon me? What figure would appear, the sky splintering around it? What would the Gods manifest in order to guide me all my days?
I waited, but nothing happened.
A bird fluttered in the tree dislodging clumps of snow. Scuffs of horsetail clouds marked the high blue sky. The shadows of trees laddered the gravel paths. Frozen dew had made glittering lace of the spider webs stretching between bushes.
I wanted something to speak to, wanted—well, I’ve never found it, not then and not later as a Gladiator. I was told, before I ever set foot on the arena’s tiles, that I would be taken over, would become the very presence of some God or Goddess on earth. My actions would show what was happening in the Spiritual Realm.
The wonder of it all was that such flabberjabber still worked, even when I don’t believe a word of it. For a long time, Winter seemed
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