A Piece of Winter

A lump of coal, taken from the fire at midnight, soaked in the blood of one unjustly killed. Sea-salt; star-iron; three petals of moonsbreath, a wildcat's claw; a sample of the earth, of the water, of the air the curse would target. Anlia waited until the castle was in blackness, the fires low, the night cold settling in; she waited until she could hear only her own breath, her own heartbeat. Then, when the hour was almost completely still, time near-frozen, she slid out from beneath her covers and over to the fireplace.

She supposed that she ought to be afraid, the wrong eyes seeing this, her serving spy waking in spite of the seal she'd whispered over her eyes... But she was a princess still – however humiliated, however dispossessed – she had to believe that would still carry weight.

Anlia angled her shoulder beneath the lip of the chimney, snaked her wrist into the small gap she'd created all those years ago as a child, felt the hot-and-chill touch of the crystal as her fingers brushed it. She felt a jolt as she closed her fist around it. Well, this is what you get, she thought, as she drew it out into the night.

It no longer looked like a piece of humble coal. Delicate crystals in a multitude of colours had formed around it, as intricate as snowflakes, glowing softly in her palm like a red-blue-violet-green candle flame. She brought it up to her mouth and laced it with her breath. She pressed open the small cut on the base of her foot and laced with it her blood. The crystal took these things willingly – ate and drank of them. She felt it heat up in her hand, then cool suddenly with an ice-laden bite.

So be it. She returned it to its place and herself to her bed.

#

Three weeks ago.

She didn't know much about politics. She knew almost nothing. She knew that her father had made an enemy out of him – the distant and talked-about, Iron-Lord Hathwargen. Her father's refusal to join what he'd referred to as an “enterprise of murder” had seemed to her only right and just. When you had a enough, when your people had enough, why plunder what belonged to others? Why set out to make the land run with other men's blood?

“Bitterness,” her father said, “because he feels cheated out of the destiny his great-grandfather had. He wants his to be a name that is whispered by children in fear of being overheard. There are men like that, who would be bowed to at all costs.”

And then his banners: raised on the hillside – a white, raging serpent – winged and fanged – on a black background, bordered with gold. His men, lined up behind the banners. Her father: standing grimly still while his serving men dressed him in armour and one of his knights handed to him his sword. She remembered how finely polished it had been, how his face had reflected and distorted in it. She saw him for the first time as he had always been: a warrior first and foremost, a class of man who took his land-rights from the sword-arm willing to defend them.

The castle had been full of people – simple folk who sheltered in its walls, people who sheltered behind the same sword-arm and talked in whispers about the invaders' reputation, about the savagery he was known to unleash over all those who fell to him.

Her father's rousing speech: well, they would not fall today. They would never know the savagery first hand, because instead they would know victory, and this child-hearted villain, this upstart, this cruel and worthless idiot, he would be taught a lesson, beaten, sent home in disgrace. A speech to make men cheer. And her brother: standing gold and resolute beside him, holding his head high, looking so young in chain mail, and at the same time so noble, such an embodiment of everything that nobility meant.

#

Three weeks ago.

Her father brought back dead. Her brother brought back in chains.

Too few and too ill-prepared to hold the castle. She'd sat on the stairs, watching as the doors were breached, as not enough could be done to stop them. She'd watched the men storm in, watched the hall try to empty in their path. There was nobody left to guard her, and nobody left to tell her what to do.

“Iron-Lord,” she had walked so slowly down the stairs, she'd felt her legs tremble underneath her, she'd looked to her brother, trying to catch his eyes, to learn what she should do. “Iron Lord,” she tried to make her ten-year-old voice ring with authority: “why do you come here thus and invade these sovereign lands?”

He ignored her. He raised a cheer amongst his men.

“Iron- Lord -”

He cared nothing. She could only watch. She could only watch while her brother was dragged forward, while the Iron-Lord demanded his surrender.

He gave it – in a gravel-threaded, fifteen-year-old voice, a voice stained with grief, a voice little more certain than she was. What else could he do? They were lost. Overrun.

And she watched as her brother was pressed to his knees and asked to swear the oath he couldn't, the oath to give Hathwargen his fealty, his love, his sworn service and obedience. The sword that was held above him as he shook his head.

Again: will he take Hathwargen in perpetuity, as his sworn and only lord, master over him in all things, rightful King of Yunferrilon from the White to the Ravenmoor River, from ice-crusted Lake Noribed, to the Unbroken Coast?

Anlia watched as he shook his head, as he spat blood near the feet of the one who'd brought death to his father. She watched as the sword swooped down, as it sank through her brother's shoulders. She waited for the same to be her fate: steeling herself for the courage she'd need when the question was asked of her.

Instead: this imprisonment. This waiting. Her heart beating with fury for what had been done.

#

Anlia stood at the window. She watched the snow fall. There was a beauty to the way the world slowed as it came down. She looked out over the uniformity of mud-coloured tile roofs, saw how they grew dappled and white beneath the snowfall – like the coats of tough little mountain horses. There were fairly few people out in the streets, avoiding the cold, and the Iron-Lord's soldiers. Houses that had been burnt out looked like empty eye-sockets amongst the ones still standing.

Every tenth house. The people of Hathron Valley will pay for their resistance. Every tenth house, and everything in it. Any man who resists will have his throat cut on the doorstep.

“Come.” A voice startled her.

Anlia hated it. She hated to curtsey to one below her rank, to a woman who served the evil usurper. But she also knew it was hopeless. And Lady Muthwyn did not seem so evil in her own right. She was guard as much as hostess, spy as much as governess. Anlia would have been surprised if it hadn't been so. Her jailer stood in silk, in thick, padded cream skirts, with sculpted silk flowers lining her bodice – an array of spring colours. Her hair was swept up in the new fashion, braided with coloured ribbons.

“Madam.” Anlia made a tiny dance of her curtsey, not knowing herself if she intended more to mock or to impress.

“Come. There is breakfast.”

“Thank you.”

The lady sat at table, dipping her bread into sweet porridge. “So cold,” she murmured. “It cannot always be this way, not so late in the season.”

Anlia schooled her expression. “It's not.”

“Such a harsh winter, so soon.”

“Yes.”

There were ripe crops still in the field, and now a dusting of snow sat on them. Those that had not been burned soon after the fighting. This was occupied territory now – what had once been home. Anlia glanced toward the window, it really did seem like alien territory: the town, so jagged with intermittent ruin, broken and burnt houses, streets torn up, the bones of supposed traitors still hanging up in cages to make grisly warnings. No, this was not her home any longer, it was tainted now. It belonged to these people.

“Poor girl,” her jailer said.

Anlia felt suspicion tug at her. “Why?”

“My dear, to have lost your family the way you have. I know it must have been hard for you.”

“Indeed.” It was hard too, to speak civilly, to keep inside the words she would really like to have said.

“You will have to think of House Vashlon as your kinfolk now. It's the only way really... I have a daughter, you know-”

She didn't want to hear about that. She didn't want to make this woman – distant of kin of horrible Hathwargen – into any kind of friend or kinswoman. She asked sharply: “What's going to happen to me?”

“Dear, nothing. You're safe.”

A pawn. A bargaining chip. A thread of legitimacy. But she had no intention of being used that way. “He's keeping me around for a purpose.”

“We aren't cruel. To harm children.”

Children in the village. Women. Girls not much older than she was.... Did the woman think she was blind and deaf, shielded in some way from rumours and distant screams? “He'll marry me off one day, reward some knight or minor lord.”

Muthwyn admitted “Perhaps, but not for some years. Perhaps he'll be handsome and wrestle tigers for you.”

She thinks I'm a child. But she wasn't. Not since that day She'd put away her childhood, once and for all.

A cart clattered by, beneath the window. A man's voice cursed the snow.

I won't miss it at all, she thought, not now they're dead. Her father, her brother: those had been her home.

#

Three weeks ago.

Hathwargen. Iron-Lord. Thrice King. The Six-King. Now Seven-Times-King. A new kingdom under his belt. Hathwargen: Hand Without Mercy. Impassible Blade. Lord and Master of the Four Horizons. He had no trouble styling himself so. And now they set up trestle tables, rolled barrels out of the cellars. Soldiers and knights were getting drunk on her father's wine. She was made to sit there, to watch it, to raise her cup to them. She was shamed – she had promised herself she would die before giving the oath her brother had disdained. But such was never asked of her – only to sit amongst his people, accepting of them, eating and drinking with them, and her nerve had failed her in refusing it. What difference, her heart had whispered, if I eat at that table or not? She refused to smile, she played the prisoner, the martyr, the wronged child. But she didn't speak out. A compromise of sorts.

In the night there was drunken butchery.

Overnight she learned what men would do when given free rein over those in their power. She wouldn't let herself stuff her ears – she owed it to the people down there to hear their suffering. The laughter was the worst: the way a gang of drunken soldiers could take such delight in abusing and tormenting those weaker than they were.

But she wasn't as helpless as the Iron Lord might believe. She waited until the moon and stars told her it was midnight. She took the coal from her fireplace and crept to the cellar, to her brother. He didn't look like himself any more, death had rewritten his features, he seemed pale, somehow unrealistic, a poorly rendered sculpture of a sleeping man. It was hard for her to go to him, to whisper her grief and regrets. She cut his flesh with her knife, and took what little blood that flesh still had to spare. She held his hand for a while and buried her head in his golden hair.

Then she climbed the stairs to a half-forgotten tower, knelt down on the stone, began her ritual.

#

And so: the snow fell. It was late in the harvest season, crops still in the ground, two months or more too early for snow. But snow fell. Anlia watched it with a cold satisfaction. Lady Muthwyn, it isn't like this most years. This is unseasonal weather. But it's only going to get colder. Each night, with her coal crystal, she would add a little more fuel to that fire.

She thought about the future. This was no place for her. The most loyal of its people had fled or been killed. Some who stayed were empty figures, peasants she didn't know, unimaginative halfwits – so she said to herself – who would serve under any ruler. Others she pitied. But she couldn't stay amongst them, and she couldn't leave  Hathron Valley, in all its beauty and fertility, to Hathwargen. It would snow, and it would keep snowing.

She didn't know yet, how she'd escape. But she would. She would flee Lady Muthwyn's kind steel chains. It seemed romantic and terrifying – sometimes impossible: living off the land, off the generosity and still-burning loyalty of farmwives. Surely somebody opposed Hathwargen still – she would offer herself there, she would bring him down, somehow. A part of Anlia knew it for a fantasy, but she held onto it with everything she had – for it was all she had – and in the meantime it would snow, and it would snow, and it would snow.