Soft Days

Spring came late that year, and it came in on the back of the quiet.

Nobody could have said precisely when the quiet began. The Church's deadline passed at midnight and nothing happened. No Cardinals marched on the palace. No bells tolled. The Conclave, which was to have met in the first week of the thaw, was postponed twice on account of an outbreak of fever in the Cathedral quarter, and then a third time because Cardinal Marenne had developed, with remarkable suddenness, a bad chest. Inquisitor Verre reported to the Pontiff that the Emperor's household had been observed for ten days and found to be engaged in nothing more sinister than gardening. Sister Hester, who was asked to confirm this, said that it was perfectly true, and added that the Emperor had been seen laughing, which she was not certain was a heresy.

The snow went from the palace roofs in a single warm night. In the morning, water ran in every gutter. The gardens woke. The black-barked trees along the east terrace, which Berylla swore had been dead for a decade, broke into a froth of small pink blossom, and Soot, who had never seen a flower, ate three.

"He'll be sick," said Solaia.

"He's a dragon," said Brannoch Hale. "He can digest a cart."

The old Dragonwarden had begun coming to the palace on the pretext of examining the hatchling, and had stayed, by degrees, for most of every afternoon. He sat in the sun on the low wall of the terrace with his iron hook propped beside him and a cup of cider in his good hand, and watched the little ash-gray creature lurch across the flagstones in pursuit of a butterfly. His face had changed. The grim cut of it had softened. When he laughed, which was often now, the sound startled him.

"You'll spoil him," he said.

"I'm not spoiling him."

"You carry him in your sleeve."

"He gets cold."

"He's a dragon, my lady." But he was grinning. "A dragon who cannot breathe fire, and does not know it, and has decided it is a game."

It was true. Soot had discovered, some days before, that although no flame came when he opened his mouth, something else did: a small, cool, silvery breath that settled on the stone in a frost of fine crystals. He had breathed it on a puddle. He had breathed it on the Dragonwarden's boot. He had breathed it, with an air of great ceremony, on the Emperor's morning tea, and watched with huge gold eyes as the cup froze solid to its saucer.

Kieran had looked at the cup for a long moment. Then he had looked at the dragon.

"Was that intentional?" he said.

Soot sneezed, and a small cloud of ice rose into the air and glittered.

"I believe," said the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom, "that I have been outdone."

…

They had never had so many mornings.

It was a thing she noticed with a kind of wonder, as the days went on. In the early weeks of her life at the palace, time had been a hostile country, a series of rooms to be crossed with her back to a wall. Now she woke with the sun in her face and the smell of damp earth coming through the shutters, and a warm weight beside her in the bed that stirred and said, without opening its eyes, "Do not get up. It is far too early."

"It's nearly nine."

"It is a quarter past eight. And I have given instructions that no one is to disturb us until ten."

"You can't give instructions to the sun."

"I have given them to the staff, which is the same thing." An arm slid around her waist and drew her back. "Be quiet. I am not awake."

She had not known how much of him there was that she had not met.

He was, to begin with, an appalling sleeper. He sprawled. He stole the covers. He muttered in his sleep, in a low urgent voice, snatches of old campaigns and fragments of council debate, and once, quite distinctly, an argument with a horse. In the mornings he was incoherent and bad-tempered until he had had two cups of black tea, after which he became abruptly human, sharp-tongued and quick, with a dry cutting wit that she had not guessed at behind the mask of the tower.

He read in the bath. He could not abide the taste of cinnamon. He had a scar on his left thigh from a childhood fall off a pony, and he had never in his life, he confessed, lost an argument with a servant, because no servant had ever dared. When she demonstrated, with some firmness, that this was no longer the case, he stared at her with such blank astonishment that she nearly dropped the tea tray.

"I have never been scolded," he said.

"Then it's high time."

"By a person in my own bed."

"In my bed. You keep coming into it."

A long pause. And then, wonderingly, "I do."

He laughed.

It was not a sound she had heard in the beginning. In the tower, in the council chamber, she had known his mirth only as a cold thin blade, flicked out and put away. This was a different thing. It began somewhere deep in his chest and came up through him unwillingly, as if it had been shut a long time in a cellar, and when it broke free it transformed his whole face. His shoulders shook. His head went back. The hard lines at the corners of his eyes dissolved, and for a few seconds he looked, God help her, about nineteen.

She thought: I would do almost anything to keep that.

She thought it so clearly that it frightened her.

…

Osric taught her to read.

It had begun as a joke, and become a ritual. She would go down to the Archive in the afternoons, with a basket of bread from the kitchen and a bundle of the Emperor's old maps, and find the old man in his usual place at the long table, hunched over a heap of curling scrolls. He would look up, beaming, and say, "Ah! The student. We shall begin with the vowels."

The old script was not like any she had learned. It had no letters. It had shapes, long sinuous flowing marks like the paths of birds, and each one was a word, or a feeling, or a note, depending on how it was read. He drew them for her in brown ink on scrap paper. She copied them, clumsily at first, and then, quite suddenly, not clumsily at all. One afternoon she looked down and found that she had written a line without thinking, in a swift clean hand, and that Osric had gone very quiet.

"What does it say?" she asked.

He did not answer at once. He took the paper from her fingers and held it close to his spectacles.

"It says," he read slowly, "I have been very happy here."

"I didn't mean to write that."

"No." His voice was soft. "I don't suppose you did."

She looked at the words. The ink was still wet. They shone in the lamplight, and she felt a prickle at the back of her eyes.

"Is that allowed?" she said. "To be happy? When there's a... when everything's..."

"Waiting?"

"Yes."

Osric laid the paper down. For a moment his round brown eyes were full of an expression she could not read, tender and grieved and old.

"My dear," he said. "It is the only thing that has ever been allowed. All the rest is argument."

…

In the evenings they flew.

It was Kieran's idea. He appeared at the foot of the terrace one night after supper with Gron looming behind him like a scarlet cliff, and said, in the tone of a man proposing a tax reform, "I have been thinking that you ought to see the city from above. At dusk. There is a particular light."

"Is that an invitation?"

"It is a proposal. It is entirely open to refusal."

"I accept."

"You have not heard the terms."

"I don't need them."

Something moved in his face, quickly, there and gone. He held out a hand. She took it.

They rose over the rooftops in a sky the color of peaches, and the whole world lay beneath them gold and rose and violet, the river like a thread of molten copper, the lamps coming up one by one in the narrow streets. They flew until the sun was gone. They drifted along the dark edge of the mountains with the first stars pricking out overhead, and he told her the names of the constellations, which he had learned from his mother, and she told him the names that she thought she remembered, and found, laughing, that they were not the same.

"You have the Hunter upside down," he said.

"It's a girl."

"It is a man. With a bow."

"It's a girl with a bow, and she's falling." She leaned her head back against his shoulder. "Look at the way her arm's thrown out. She's not drawing the bow. She's reaching."

He was silent for a moment.

"I had not seen that," he said.

"Now you can't unsee it."

"No." His arms tightened around her. "I do not think I can."

Below them, the gold lamps of the capital burned in their thousands, and no one looked up.

…

It was a good season. She knew it was, even then.

She knew it in the way one knows the last warm day of autumn: not by any sign, but by a kind of exact and tender precision, as if every detail had been engraved on the air. The smell of the lilacs under the east window. The sound of Berylla humming, very low, as she folded linens. The clatter of Crane's boots in the corridor and the cough with which he announced himself. The weight of Soot's small hot body against her collarbone, and the way he sneezed frost on the Emperor's dispatches and was forgiven.

And yet she noticed, as the weeks passed, that she was tired.

It was not a bad tiredness. It was a gentle one. She would wake in the morning feeling lighter, thinner, as though a layer had been rinsed from her. Her appetite waned, and Berylla, frowning, doubled the portions. She found that she could not run as far as she once had. In the practice yard, her cuts had lost an edge. Twice she had caught Kieran looking at her across a room with an expression of fixed, silent attention, and when she asked what it was he said, "Nothing," in a voice so mild that it frightened her.

It's only the work, she told herself. I healed him. It cost something. It'll come back.

She did not say it aloud.

And on a warm night near the end of the season, she woke to find the bed empty.

She lay still for a moment, listening. The shutters were open. The room was full of the soft blue light of early dawn. Far off, a cock crowed. She sat up slowly, and drew the sheet around her shoulders, and padded barefoot to the door.

He was in the study.

The door stood a few inches ajar. She could see him through the gap, standing in the gray light with his back to her, in his shirt, quite still. He had opened the tall window, and was looking out of it toward the north. Toward the faint dark smudge on the horizon, so far away that it might have been a bruise on the sky: the Black Ridge, where the Church's surveyors had been working all winter.

His hand was resting on the desk.

On the drawer. The top left one, with the old brass lock. His fingers lay flat across the wood, lightly, the way a man touches the head of a sleeping dog he is afraid to wake.

She watched him for a long time.

He did not turn. He did not move. After a while she went back to the bed and lay down with her face to the wall, and closed her eyes, and did not sleep. And when he came in, soft-footed, at the first call of the dawn bells, and slid in behind her and put his arm around her waist, she kept her breathing slow, and said nothing, and felt his heart beat against her back.

It was very fast.