Chapter 4: First Snow
The snow had come in the night.
Quỳnh Chi woke to a strange, hushed light through the shutters of the King's Tower, a brightness that had no colour in it. The fire had burned low. Beside her, Vladimir still slept, his breathing slow and heavy, one arm heavy across the furs between them. She lay still for a long while, watching the pale glow seep through the gaps in the wood, and wondered if the sky itself was burning.
She did not wake him. She dressed quietly, with Bích's help, in the cream-coloured dress with embroidery at the hem, and then the red outer cloak that the Northern tailors had made for her, thick white fur at the collar, the cuffs, the hem. Bích pinned her hair up with the little gold ornaments and, at the last, a tiny red flower of silk, because it was the princess's name-day month and the southern courts never let a name-day month pass unmarked.
"You will freeze, Highness," Bích said in their own tongue, her breath fogging the room.
"I want to see it," Quỳnh Chi answered. "Whatever it is."
The servants' corridor down from the tower was warm, and then the vestibule was warm, and then the great iron-bound door opened and the cold hit her like a wall of water, only dry, only bright.
The world had turned white.
The roofs of the courtyard ranges wore snow like spun sugar. The branches of the bare trees carried thick white layers, so heavy they bent. The garden paths she had studied from her window for two months had vanished beneath a soft, unbroken blanket, and the statues along the colonnade stood transformed, their shoulders and heads covered white, so that grim old kings looked like gentle ghosts. The sky was pale, the colour of the inside of a shell, and from it the snow was falling, slowly, without wind, in flakes that drifted rather than fell.
Quỳnh Chi stopped on the top step and did not move.
She had seen drawings. Her tutors had shown her paintings of the Northern kingdom, mountains rendered in grey wash, and one careless sketch of winter that she had thought was simply an unfinished picture. Nothing had prepared her for this. Nothing had prepared her for the silence of it, deeper than any temple silence, as if the whole world had knelt.
A flake drifted past her face. She watched it turn in the air, six-armed, precise, smaller than her smallest fingernail, and then it settled on the fur of her collar and vanished.
"Highness." The guard at the door shifted, uneasy. "You cannot stand out in it without..."
She heard him, distantly. She was looking at the garden. Two months she had lived inside these walls, learning the names of servants and the shapes of corridors, measuring every room for exits, rehearsing her Northern words at night in a whisper. And all that time this had been waiting outside, this whole white country, and no one had thought to tell her it was beautiful.
She went down the steps slowly, holding her skirts, and the snow took her footprint after footprint, small and neat beside the guard's great boot-prints.
The courtyard of the Citadel had usually been full of little sounds: servants walking the stone paths, guards changing posts, birds in the trees, the distant movement of carriages beyond the gate. This morning the birds were quiet. The carriages had gone still. Only a few servants paused at the archways to stare, not at the snow, at her, the tiny red figure walking out into the white with her head bare and her face lifted.
High in the windows of the east range, faces gathered.
Quỳnh Chi held out her hand. She had meant only to catch a flake, the way the kitchen girls caught flour. But the snow kept coming down into her palm and vanishing the moment it touched her, one after another, six-armed and perfect and gone, as if her skin were too warm for the world. She turned her hand over. Nothing. She held it out again.
She was still doing this, absorbed, when the second door of the courtyard opened.
Vladimir had woken to an empty bed and a cold half of it, and for one bad moment, two months of nights had not cured him of it, he had thought of the treaty, of the ships, of a hundred ways a small princess could vanish from a large fortress. Then Bích had appeared, wringing her hands, saying the Highness had gone into the courtyard, into the snow, with no hood.
Now he stood in the doorway and forgot the scolding he had prepared.
She was ankle-deep in white, red cloak and cream dress against all that blankness, her dark hair pinned with gold and one small flower, her hand held out to the falling sky as though she were greeting it. The snow came down on her and she tilted her face up to it, eyes half closed, and the flakes caught in her lashes and melted there. Around her, the citadel's grey stone and iron seemed to have been built for no other purpose than to frame this.
Behind him, Ilya stopped. The spymaster said nothing. He had learned, in two months, when not to speak.
"You are not dressed for this," Vladimir said, and his voice came out lower than he intended.
She turned. Snow dusted her shoulders. "It is not cold," she said in Northern, careful with the words, "if you do not know it is cold."
"That is the first lie you have told me." He came down the steps toward her, his boots crunching, and the sound of it made her look down at her own feet, where her soft southern shoes were already dark and wet at the seams.
"I woke and the light was wrong," she said. "I thought... the sky was burning. I had to see."
"And now you have seen. You will lose your toes."
"You would not let me lose my toes," she said, and there it was again, the small boldness that two months had grown in her, the tilt of her chin that no one at her own court would have dared to see. "You are very careful with me."
She did not know how that landed. He looked down at her, at the snow in her black hair, at the wet shoes, and thought of Ilya's report from last week, delivered flatly in the map room: Baron Kettrin has taken to walking the garden colonnade at the hour you take your midday meal. The knight Varo stands post at the east gate and faces the courtyard. Even the clerks, sire. Half your hall would fight a war for a kind word from her.
"I am careful with the treaty," he said.
"Yes," she said, sweet and even. "The treaty."
He was not certain, still, after two months, whether she was mocking him or simply agreeing. Her face gave him the polite mask of the southern court, her eyes gave him something else entirely, a flicker, quick as the snowflakes vanishing on her palm.
Behind them, Ilya cleared his throat. "Sire. The steward asks whether the morning meal is to be served in the hall or..."
"In the hall. As always." Vladimir did not turn. "Ilya. Her shoes."
Ilya looked at the small wet shoes and then at the sky, with the expression of a man being asked to interrogate the weather. "The cobbler can have boots by tomorrow, sire. Today, I would suggest the princess go back in."
"She will not go back in," Quỳnh Chi said.
Both men looked at her. She stood in the falling snow with her hands folded at her waist, in the exact posture of a supplicant before the Emperor, and said nothing more, only waited, because she had learned in two months that silence, in this iron country, argued better than words.
"The hall, sire," Ilya murmured, "or the lords will eat in the courtyard."
Vladimir exhaled through his nose, a fog of breath. "Then the meal waits a quarter hour." He pulled off one glove. "Give me your arm."
She took it. Even through his sleeve, even after two months, the size of him beside her made the courtiers in the windows murmur to each other; her hand on his forearm looked like a child's on her father's, except that nothing about her eyes was a child's. They walked together along the colonnade, where the snow had drifted against the statues in soft white shoulders, and she looked up at each one as they passed.
"In my country," she said, "we do not have this. The cold. Snow came once in a hundred years in the old records, and the scholars wrote poems about it, and no one believed the poems."
"And what do the poems say?"
"That the sky is shedding white flowers. That a hundred mountains have turned to old men weeping salt." She recited it in Vietnamese first, softly, and then in her careful Northern, and Vladimir listened to her voice carry in the dead silence of the courtyard, thinking, as he had thought every day for two months, that he had been sent ten thousand generals and never one of these.
"Your scholars," he said, "needed better winters."
She laughed. It was small and startled out of her, and it stopped him where he stood, because in two months of court appearances and careful evenings he had heard her speak low and soft and measured, he had heard her whisper, he had heard her cry once, quietly, into his chest. He had not heard her laugh. Neither, by the stillness in the windows above, had anyone else in the citadel.
She caught herself immediately, hand to her mouth, the old etiquette snapping back into place. "Forgive me. That was disrespectful."
"To whom? Me?"
"To a king."
"I have been called worse by better." He looked down at her, and made the mistake he had been rationing himself against, he smiled. "Again."
"Again what?"
"The sound. Again."
She went pink to the ears, which he could see despite the cold, and looked down at the snow, and the snow went on falling between them, and far above, in the east windows, SerVaro leaned on the sill and forgot his post entirely, and a clerk in the west range put down his ledger and did not pick it up again.
"I cannot order it," she said at last, demure. "It comes or it does not."
"Everything comes when ordered. It is the whole science of kingship." He steered her toward the fountain at the courtyard's centre, a stone basin with a king of two centuries past standing over it, crowned in white now, his granite trident furred with ice. "The steward's gardens. Have you seen them?"
"From my window. The paths disappeared this morning."
"Under the snow, there are roses. Southern ones. I had them planted eleven years ago for a queen who liked the colour of them." His voice did not change at all. "They die back every winter. They come back every summer. It is the only thing in this country I have never understood."
She looked at the fountain king, then up at him. "You planted roses."
"I gave the order. Ilya carried it out. It amounts to the same thing."
"It does not," she said, with the small stubborn certainty he had begun to recognize as the true face beneath the meekness. "A man who orders roses for his queen is not the man my court described to me."
Vladimir was quiet for a moment. The snow ticked softly on the fountain's stone.
"And what else did your court describe," he said, "that has not proved true?"
She hesitated. It was the first time in two months she had hesitated over an answer, and he watched her weigh it, her fingers tightening slightly on his sleeve.
"That you were... large," she said carefully. "That was true."
He made a sound that was almost a laugh, rough and short. "Careful, little sparrow. You will set the whole court laughing, and then where will I be."
The name did what it always did to her; he saw it, the slight sway toward him, her whole small body orienting to his voice like a needle to iron. Above them a shutter creaked. In the windows, the faces were multiplying, servants and clerks and at least two household knights, and Ilya stood back at the far archway with his arms crossed, pale eyes moving from window to window, counting them as he always counted, and thinking of dispatches.
Then the quarter hour ran out, as quarters do.
The steward came out onto the steps, snow gathering in his beard, and announced with ceremony that the hall was served and the lords assembled, and Vladimir turned with the reluctance of a man leaving a warmed bed for a frozen field.
"You will dress properly before you come in," he said to her. "Dry shoes. Hood. If I must explain to your Emperor that his princess lost her ears to the frost, the treaty will not survive the correspondence."
"Then I will go and change, my king." She let go of his arm, and the loss of the small weight of her hand was absurd and immediate, and he hated that he noticed it.
She turned to go, then stopped, and did the thing that would be talked about in the Citadel for the rest of the winter. She stooped, quick as a bird, and swept one mitten-quick hand through the snow on the fountain's rim, and packed a small white ball of it between her palms, and held it up to him in her two hands like an offering at an altar, her eyes bright and her face solemn as a court portrait.
"For the hall," she said. "So that the lords can see I survived it."
For a heartbeat Vladimir Makarov, who had taken three arrows and one axe in his body and never once flinched before his court, did not know what to do with his face. Then he took the snowball from her hands, formally, as if accepting the surrender of a city, and carried it into the hall at his side like a sceptre, and set it on the high table before the assembled lords as the first course of the meal, and the silence that followed was a thing the chroniclers would argue about for years.
Quỳnh Chi stood in the doorway behind him, red-cloaked and snow-dusted, watching a hall of iron-hard northern lords stare at a small mound of melting snow, and thought, with a clarity that surprised her, that she was beginning to understand this country after all. It was not the cold that ruled here. It was the moment when the cold was allowed to mean something else.
Ilya appeared at her shoulder, escorting her back toward the tower to change, and after a dozen paces he spoke, quietly, in the careful trade-tongue they shared.
"The windows were full this morning, Highness. Every one of them."
"I know," she said. "They watch me."
"They watched the King carry a snowball into his hall like a holy relic." The spymaster's pale eyes were on the snow-dusted steps ahead. "Do you understand what you have done?"
She thought of the poems. White flowers from a shedding sky. Old men made of mountains.
"No," she said politely.
Ilya believed her, which was the dangerous part, and did not believe her, which was the safer one, and said nothing more the whole way back to the tower, while behind them, in the great hall, the King sat down to his meal with melting snow on the table in front of him and did not once look at the door she had gone through, because he knew, with the certainty of a man who had survived a succession war by counting such things, that if he looked, the whole hall would see exactly how ruined he already was.
The changing of shoes did not take long, but the walk back to the hall was longer than the walk from it, and her new boots, warm and stiff, slowed her on the drifted steps. Vladimir met her at the tower door, frowned at the steps, and simply picked her up.
One arm under her knees, one at her back. She weighed nothing to him, a bundle of red wool and furs.
"What are you doing?" she said, very precisely.
"The steps are iced. You will fall."
"The steps were not iced an hour ago."
"The snow came back." He carried her through the colonnade at his usual pace, unhurried, and the windows began to fill again.
She lay rigid in his arms, ears burning, and then, because no one could see her face from this angle, she let her head rest against his shoulder.
"You like this," she said.
"I like dry boots on my queen."
"You are smiling. I can feel it."
He said nothing, which was his way of agreeing, and carried her the whole length of the courtyard, past the fountain, past every staring window, and into the hall where half his lords stood up at once.