Excerpt: Hibernaculum

oking young and beautiful again, aren’t you?” she asks me, and then laughs as if it were the most amusing thing she has heard in decades. For all I know, it is; in her widow’s bride-dress, she is as lonely and lovely as the seas she may never cross again. “But things are different now.”

Of course there is little point in asking her how she knows; one might as well ask her how she whittles down the ice into puppets, though I know she has little interest in pulling those strings these days. She is as thoughtful and thoughtless as I, and the silver and gold gleam at her wrists as coldly as do the bones about my own throat.

“Of course I will do as he asks,” she says, and the long dark hair moves about her slender form like the wings of the great rays from the depths she is forbidden. “It is not as if I can be given any choice in the matter, is it?”

She glides away from me, crossing the great marble floors to the entwined ancient patterns of the stonework centre, and stretches her arms wide. “There are songs, now. I don’t know if you can hear them. Can you?”

I tell her I cannot, but she does not believe me. I can scarcely blame her. Yet she does not challenge me, instead remarks idly: “I had not expected to see him again so soon, though perhaps it is ridiculous of me to say so? How long has it been?”

Neither of us answer the question, even though I suspect her accuracy is as bitter and particular as my own. She kneels to trace the emblem of the earth-god beneath her feet, ice in every stroke.

“Do you not feel guilt? For you know as well as I what is going on in that boy’s mind.”

My truth is as quick, as biting as the blade still sheathed in the mountains beyond Itradena. “No. I do not.”

She laughs again, tosses the dark hair beneath her floating veil of silk and lace. “And why should you? Why should any of us?”

This is how I will always remember her: beautiful and bold and oh so very bored, this false maiden in her grey tower at the end of the world as she knows it. She laughs at me then, even as she knows that she is as powerless as the sea, and says: “But things are different now. I have no choice, but I think he gave you yours. Not that I resent you for that – why should I? You are something older than I, you are something so very different. And if you should be allowed to go beyond the borders of your own servitude, then what can I do but call down the sky as I am commanded?”

Yes, so very beautiful is this demi-goddess of snow and ice as she turns her attention to the broken stairs of her broken palace and laughs. “This is where it ends, and this is where it begins. I can feel it, can’t you? There is something here with us now, something waiting. Something crying. Saltwater. Can’t you taste it?”

I taste nothing but bitter gall, and I think she knows it. Yet she walks away, as relentless as the path of tides and moons, and I wonder what it is that she thinks she knows, what it is she hears in that song when to me it is only the restless rise and fall of water that can slumber uneasy but never awaken; I am not privy to the thoughts of that one sleeping, but I know He cannot return from that dreaming. This is what I tell myself, but as I watch the Lady smile at the sky I wond