Author: Caledonia James

Edutch and Embla: Four

Haret required a readjustment. Embla pulled the chairs closer together, exchanged Annette for Kellen, who was taller and broader. She had a beautiful young man carry the rosewine, and offer it to Haret on bended knee like she might a visiting king. 

Even-tempered if his pride’s not rankled. 

“My apologies, Lord, that I did not speak with you first. You were not to be found.” Though Embla had known exactly where he was – having one of her courtesans behind the privies. He didn’t know she was a courtesan, of course, dressed as she was in a Lebion servant’s livery, but every server among them at risk of being approached was a professional, and paid handsomely for their work. 

Haret was magnanimous with drink and feasting, however. “I am not so proud a man.” 

“No.” Embla agreed, weighing out more courtesies. “I did wish to thank you again for the gift of the lamb. It was generously given.” 

He arched a brow, looking down his nose. “You may think us barbarians, Queen, but we are no less god-touched. Now,” he growled, “speak plainly.” 

“We desire peace.” 

“Peace,” he spat the word, “is for women and weak fighters.” 

“But you consider it. Here, at this feast.” 

He was looking into the goblet of wine, only half-listening, and Embla registered the true extent of his drunkenness. A grim grin crept up his mouth. “What wealth you have, Truce-Queen. Even with half your kingdom put to my torch.” He gestured to the wine, to the view of the palace in the distance, the beautiful young man waiting attentively to refill his drink. 

“We are blessed, Lord.” Embla said carefully. “Our gods are generous, and fierce.” 

His laugh had a whetted edge. “Not so fierce as ours.” 

“Yet your people are starving.” 

His mouth twitched; she tracked the flex of his thick fingers. “We have starved before. We have starved for centuries, waiting for this age of ice. If we die, more of us will come. It is our way.” 

Embla hated the menace in those words, the shadow as large as a continent behind them. “Perhaps we can speak instead of you, Lord Haret. There are pleasures to be had in our wealth, surely, and more easily given from grateful hands than pried from dead fingers.” 

He clucked derisively at her turn of phrase. “You’re a clever little bitch, aren’t you?” 

Kellen’s sharp intake of breath heralded the hiss of steel. Embla raised a hand to stop him, and Haret roared with laughter. 

“That pup thinks he can best me?” He waggled his tongue obscenely at Kellen as her guard put his sword away. “Yes, yes. Do as she says, good little pup. I will never understand it.” 

“Understand what, exactly?” Embla’s words prickled her throat, frosted with anger. 

“Among our people, strength rules. But among yours?” He snorted. “How fragile your kingdom must be, held together by decorum.”  

“I assure you, Lord, we are held together by much more than that.” Embla reached up and pulled her veil away. She hoped he could see her anger; she hoped he might not notice her fear. 

Haret’s eyes widened, all pleased surprise, and he drank up the lines of her face as greedily as his wine. “What a warwife you would make.” He murmured absently, and Embla’s stomach turned. 

“I make no offer of my hand.” She snapped, cool. “Only this: that with peace you will receive lands, titles, pleasures – no longer forced from fate’s fists but freely given.” 

“Given from your goodwill.” He bit, his fascination retreating into sour disapproval. “You have much to learn of us, Truce-Queen.” 

Abruptly, he stood, snapping a dismissive nod in her direction.  

Embla bit back the loose words in her chest. Instead, she inclined her head, refusing to acknowledge his dismissal with so much as a curtsy. But as he stormed away into the trees, dread prickled her gut. 

It wasn’t the right approach. She’d failed on Haret entirely. Which meant she must do better with the rest. 

***

After Annette relieved Kellen, Embla asked for the she-shoal Mirosha. She had her shadow behind her, a large young man whose gaunt cheeks wore violent scars delivered by a steady hand. Mirosha swaggered onto the dais, eyeing Embla haughtily as she took her seat in a single, graceful collapse. Her gaze flickered across the dogs, over her head to Annette. A smile tugged at her lips. 

“I did not think you thaw-bloods let women touch your steel, Highness.” She crooned. 

“On the contrary, Lady Mirosha. A Queensguard is most often made of women. We must make allies of our sex, do you not agree?” 

The she-shoal snorted, eyes eating up the air between them. 

Embla hesitated for the length of a heartbeat, long enough to decide that Mirosha was too shrewd for lies. “I confess, I wished to speak with you not at all, Lady. You might be the shrewdest of your people, and the most fiercesome.” 

“Compliments, Queen?” 

Embla clucked her tongue. “You are too cruel for flattery, are you not?” And before Mirosha could answer, Embla pointedly, passively raised her veil. 

Mirosha’s eyes dilated like a moor cat, flickering along her features, latching on to her neck and raking up to her mouth. The look was asexual, greedy, malicious. “What a delicate, pretty little thing you are.” She mused, glancing at Annette. “Could you reach her in time? If I slit her pretty throat?” 

Annette’s armor creaked, but her Captain had a cooler head than Kellen, and a better read. Embla curled up a brow. “I imagine my guard could not reach you, but my dogs?” She tapped once, hard, on the arm of her chair, and Knives growled deep in his throat. 

Mirosha smiled at that too. “Very well. What do you have to say of peace then?” 

Embla carefully maneuvered into the shift, shrugged. “You do not want it.”  

“I do not.” 

“And you cannot abide it being thrust upon you by failure. That, you can abide least of all.” 

A black sneer clapped across Mirosha’s face in surprise at how easily and quickly Embla cut to a truth. “Do not pretend you understand me, little Queen.” The she-shoal hissed, rattling the back of her teeth together. 

Embla tracked the way tension sprung to Mirosha’s body, the way her shadow leaned into the balls of his feet. Embla herself tried to relax the grip her fingers made on the chair arms, but all she could do was keep her voice level. “Do I tell lies? You lust after blood, and the look in the eye when it’s drained away. Peace has no quarter to sate such lusts, and failure burns them brighter.” 

A shiver ran through Mirosha as clean as a spring. She leaned forward on a slight, ominous intake of breath. Her eyes were wide; the white showed on all sides, and her teeth gleamed in the firelight. A terrible, trembling moment peaked between them, Knives’s low growl the only sanity. Mirosha seemed just on the edge, just on the peak of release, when at last her gaze flickered over Embla’s head and caught sight of the palace lit in half a thousand torches. Green swam in her irises. 

And just like that, the bloodlust went out of the she-shoal. She sucked in a sharp, shattering breath and relaxed back into the chair, her chest rising and falling with the exertion of her own will. “You are wise beyond your years, Queen.” She spat. “But perhaps I can make space for peace, yes? For now.” 

Surety shifted into place in Embla’s mind. The way Mirosha had stared at her lords and ladies over dinner, the way she stared now, at the palace molten silver and gold by torchlight. Embla had gotten her wrong, just a little. Mirosha craved one thing more than she craved pain and blood. 

Power. 

She could rein herself in, control herself, if she must. 

She could agree to peace for power. 

It was a victory, and not one Embla had expected. 

***

Cole of the Thunderers did not so much as bow his head in her direction when he climbed the dais, stinking of drink and sex and grinning ear to ear. He lazed into the seat across from her like a magnanimous prince, legs spread, arms thrown wide. His shadow was a tall, strong woman with a striking profile, and she leered at Annette, painted eyes framed in a fan of blood-dyed fur, a cloaked demon. 

Embla tried to ignore her, to focus, her nerves still prickling from Mirosha’s intensity. She had another plan entirely for Cole, and it required greater dishonesty. So she waited for him to settle, and made herself smaller, more reticent. Her shoulders down-tilted, her chin pointed away so that her lashes flickered under the veil. “Lord of Thunder.” She said, shy, and inclined her head. 

A slow smile widened Cole’s crooked jaw as he looked down at her. Close together, with the firelight sweeping up under his heavy head of blonde hair, she had a better look at him. He was handsome, boldly so, with black eyes crinkled from laughter, a noble nose evidenced of repeated breaking, and lips swollen from revelry. 

“How pretty it sounds on your lips, Queen.” He sang in a deep, felted voice, his gaze bouncing around the clearing – not as Titulus’s had, observing and retaining, but like a child with far too much to enjoy. 

Tambre lifted her head at his undirected energy, and Embla felt, rather than heard, a warning rumble in the dog’s chest. Cole seemed to catch it; he lifted his lip in a sneer, showing his teeth at the dogs so that Knives’s hackles prickled as well. 

Embla redirected immediately. “I have heard of your exploits.” 

Cole’s gaze flicked back to her veiled face. “All my exploits, Queen?” Feral, animal wildness crackled around him, his big hands lain over his knees, stubbed and bruised from bloodletting. 

She made a show of shifting uncomfortably in her seat – not much of a show given the pulse of fear running beneath her skin. With a note of carefully curated embarrassment, she said, “It is improper, Lord, to speak on all I have heard of you.” 

This earned her a gratified leer, and Embla was forced to consider what it might be like to have those heavy hands on her body. A chill ran through her, like cold water from a brass ewer, the first of the morning. Unpleasant but bearable. He had the look of a man who would grow easily bored and set her aside, if she could survive his initial interest. 

“Suffice it to say, I know that you are a terrifying adversary.” 

Cole grinned, eating up the compliments, the delicate movement of her hands, the softness of her voice. His gaze roved over her, trying to see through the veil, through the furs, thinking of all the ways he could pin her beneath him. “Is that why you wish to speak of peace, Queen? Because you fear me?” 

“My people fear for their lives, and their fear is my fear.” 

He wasn’t interested in that though, and when he answered, he tilted his head playfully, a rumble creeping up his throat. “Is that all you fear of me, Queen?” 

Embla resisted the urge to roll her eyes. He was drunk, decidedly, and couldn’t bring his attention off the animal ramblings of his cock. Very well then. She fidgeted, made a show of pulling at the collar of her robes like she’d grown hot. “Please, Lord.” She cooed. “Let us speak instead of peace.” 

His desultory grin was a brief reprieve. He was playing along, pretending, but it was clear that politics, truces, compromise – these were beyond his purview or his interest. “What do you say of it? We will not starve, if that’s what you think. Or we will, and die. That is the way of things. Life, death, fighting, fucking.” 

“Is there nothing you want more than that?” She asked, weighting her words with breathless curiosity, cloying at his ego. “I thought we might see eye to eye.” 

He cocked a brow. “No man needs more than that.” 

“What of lands, estates…advantageous marriages?” 

That got his attention. “What, to you?” He laughed, but the sound quieted. 

“At a cost, of course.” Embla said softly. “That cost is peace.” 

He bristled, repeating Haret’s words. “Peace is for women and weak fighters.” But the palace’s bright spire reflected in his black eyes and length pressed against the front of his pants as his weight tipped into the edge of his chair. 

He needed more, and she couldn’t make it easy for him. He didn’t like to be given. He liked to take. 

“Then what cost, Lord of Thunder, would you pay?” She brushed a hand across her veil and he tracked it, eyes flaring. 

“Raise it.” He snapped suddenly. “Raise the lace.” 

Embla reached for it, hesitated, placed her hands squarely in her lap. “No.”  

He rankled at the steel in her voice as sharply as if she’d struck him, and half-raised from his chair. Annette took a step forward with a hand on her hilt, the dogs growled, Embla remained very, very still. 

“If you want it raised,” her softened voice stroked through the tension, “raise it yourself. Are you not a conqueror?” 

Something hot and fierce flickered in his eyes, a pulse she knew passed straight into his cock. He sneered greedily. It was a dare, and he was up for the challenge. He leaned far forward, bridging the distance, and Knives and Tambre growled. Embla whistled sharply, and though they hated every second of his nearness, the dogs only showed their teeth and watched him from below. 

He was close enough now that she could smell the mead and ale and sex on him, the stink of the grease under his fingernails as his hands reached for her veil. She remained absolutely still, and as he peeled it up off her face, she raised her chin and met his gaze. Demure, afraid, delicate, she reminded herself, but proud. 

For a moment, he stared in fascination, hand hovering almost tenderly near the cup of her jaw. Then an unpleasant trap closed in his eyes. A large, hard palm latched onto her face, fingers digging painfully into the back of her neck, thumb shoved deep into the hollow of her cheek. Embla jerked and Knives snarled. Annette had steel at the back of his neck. 

“Hold!” She choked out over the wave of undiluted fear, and Cole stared into her, a pit opening in the hedonism of his eyes. A slow, penetrating smile crept across his face, slithering across her flesh. 

“There now, little Queen.” He cooed, a cruel mimicry of comfort. “Now we see eye to eye.” 

Embla jerked again, instinctively, and he drove his thumb deeper into the hollow of her face, until she almost cried out. 

“Release her!” Annette’s vicious bark was distant. “Release her now!” 

Embla quelled her impulse to struggle, forced every bit of cool command into her words. “Release me, Lord, at risk of your own life.” 

Cole licked a sated little smile onto his lips; in one movement he released her, hands raised in boyish placation as he settled back into his chair. He grinned, eyes stroking over the bright red line where his thumb had stabbed into her. 

“That was unwise, Lord.” She managed, refusing to flinch at the pain in her jaw. 

But Cole watched her with dreamy fascination. “They say the thaw-blood gives you strange powers.” He murmured. “And strange beauty.” 

Embla registered nausea, pain, terror in her body like a workman running through a list. She wanted to scour his touch off her cheek, but she forced herself to look away and back again under her lashes, like she was coquettishly thrilled by his overstep. “Consider, Lord, what strange power and strange beauty you may buy with peace.” 

Cole’s gaze had gotten sleepy, drink and adrenaline catching up to him at last. He gave a snort, amused by her audacity. But he stood unceremoniously. “I need a piss.” He growled, and shoved off the dais toward the clearing, his shadow in tow. 

Embla remained where she was, still and unaffected, until he was out of sight. Then she peeled her broken fingernails out of the wood of her chair arms and burst to her feet, storming across the dais. She ripped the veil off her head and scrubbed at her face where he’d touched her, crumpling the delicate lace in a fist. 

Annette was beside her. “My lady!” Her concern barely shielded an immensity of rage.  

“I’m fine!” Embla shouted; she heard the warped edge of hysteria in her voice and fought it down. “I’m fine, Annie, really.” 

Annette’s scowl steamed. “By your leave, I’ll have a knife through him at the trenches before he’s done taking his piss.” She hissed. “Or if you’d rather, I’ll spare his life and bring you his dick.” 

Embla barked one hard laugh; it bucked off some of her fear and tension like a door slamming in fresh snow. She covered her guard’s hand with her own where it rested on her shoulder. “It’s enough just to fantasize.” 

The woman snorted, clearly disagreeing, but she relented. Snow crackled along the path to the clearing; Kellen had arrived to take Annette’s place for their last meeting. As he took in the scene, confusion and concern flattened his features. “Your Highness?” 

“Kellen.” She smoothed a hand down the front of her undisturbed furs. “Do you have the last of the warchiefs? Edutch of the Fawkes.” 

“He cannot be found, Majesty.” 

Of course. “Annette, let me know at once when you locate him.” She said as Kellen took the woman’s place.

Embla was so desperate for this day to end, and end well, and Edutch of the Fawkes would delay it. Irritation spiked through her, but she knew it was a feint; she knew it was fear, anxiety, revilement at Cole’s touch. Her jaw still ached where he’d speared her. She closed her eyes and took a few steadying breaths of cold, fresh Lebion air. 

A delay was for the best, she told herself. More time to relax. To prepare. What did Titulus say of Edutch? Reasonable, but with more room on his war belt. A second son made warchief after his older sister’s death. It could mean he responded well to female authority. Or that he rankled under it. She couldn’t know which, yet. 

Embla tried to calm herself, and made decent enough headway, but her hands were still shaking when a voice strolled out of the forest behind her.  

“Queen.”

Edutch and Embla: Three

The day passed in feasting, and eventually, enough tenuous goodwill built between them that both the ice shoals and Embla dismissed their better-armed retinues. Entertainments crushed the snow of the clearing until it was packed ice and slush around the bonfires. Borean drums competed with the strings and dancers of Lebion, intermingling pleasantly, clashing at odd angles. General good humor followed full bellies, and unsurprisingly, the sea-shoals could hold their drink. 

Embla, on the other hand, drank her wine watered away to nothing, and had to be reminded to eat, so intently did she watch their enemies from beneath her veil. As night approached on that long day, their uniformity at last peeled away like the layers of their furs and seal skins. She began to understand each one. 

At her right hand, Rebelard, her father’s closest advisor and her own, quizzed her softly. “Their leader?” 

“Haret of the Nava.” She answered. “An old man, for a shoal.” He was crossed in scars and half blind, like the most rancorous of apex predators. Yet for this he was no less of a threat. He took drink and sustenance with the entitlement of an undefeated warchief, and leered without pause at the servants who pleased him. “He has a curiosity for our thawness of blood, favors rose wine and glory. He will be weak to flattery and bravado.” 

Rebelard tutted, then gestured. 

“Titulus of the Riveners.” Of the five, she liked him best, but that was not a surprise. “A clever and watchful man, with summer silk for speech. He seems wise, perhaps sincere. Fond of wine, women, word games, and keeping the peace.” She said this last with some savor. 

Rebelard was more wary. “A well-spoken enemy often has daggers in his teeth.” 

“Mm.” She nodded. “A shoal still, is he.” 

Her eyes moved down the table as he indicated the next two.  

“Mirosha, the Maiden of the Arderns.” Embla frowned. 

The she-shoal was sharp-eyed and acerbic, handsome and pristinely well-kept except where she blacked her long blonde hair in oil and soot until it shone. There was something unsettling about her, a keenness that pressed beyond bloodlust and reached for pain. 

“She is vain and bloodthirsty, and her ax has something to prove. While she watches the dancers, her eyes return again and again to our lords and ladies. I do not trust her.”

“And her brother?” 

“Cole leads the Black Thunderers. His mood and temperament are as unpredictable as the name.” She’d seen him move from joviality to menace in the breadth of a moment, and he of them all had the most difficult time tempering his impulses. Raiding is for taking, he’d said rather inarticulately when they first broached truce terms over lunch. He’d looked her up and down as he said it. “He lusts for thrill and impulse, lusts after me, and prefers to take rather than accept what is freely given.” 

On her other side, Annette, the Captain of her Queensguard scoffed into the lip of her cup. “He accepts our wine and feast-food freely enough.” 

Embla made a move to stifle her laughter, remembered the veil, and let her hand drop. “Why, Annie, don’t you know he’s entitled to those trifles?” She returned dryly, and Annette rolled her eyes. 

Rebelard cleared his throat, and Embla made a point of looking abashed, before she remembered again that she was wearing a veil. A veil she was beginning to hate. “Right. The last.” 

Her gaze found Edutch of the Fawkes at the end of the Borean table, watching the festivities coolly from behind a chalice of, according to her servants, very dark red wine. 

“That is Edutch of the Fawkes, sharp-eyed as an old woman at the scrying bones.” She said testily. 

He was as young as Mirosha and her brother Cole, as well-spoken as Titulus when he spoke at all, and not half so scarred as Haret. He watched her with ice chips in his eyes, frustratingly difficult to read. 

“He is temperate, I think, though slow to trust. His gaze follows everyone and sticks to no one. He favors our darkest wines, honeycomb, having his back to the fire.” 

“Weaknesses?” 

She bit her lip. “Arrogance.” 

“Arrogance?” Rebelard sounded surprised, near as Rebelard could be surprised. 

Embla nodded absently, watching him from the safety of the veil. It was the way the warchief’s mouth twisted up when certain words were spoken, by his people or her own. Like he knew better. And maybe he did. 

“Yes.” She repeated. “Arrogance. But still, he strikes me as reasonable. Among his people, that may be a weakness all its own.” 

“Mm.” Rebelard murmured thoughtfully. “So?” 

“Titulus and Edutch may be the most amenable to truce-talks. Cole,” she felt her mouth shift down of its own accord, “may be pliable to flirtation and proposals of marriage. Mirosha cannot be approached at all.” 

“No?” He mused. “I gather from her a penchant for paranoia and power. Perhaps she seeks a prestigious marriage, or can be turned to infighting?” 

Embla grimaced. “I do not trust her, and I would not doom my people to marry her. She’d slit my throat at the wedding altar and call it an offering to their gods.” 

He snorted softly, his heavy, salted brows rising. “Do not trust any of them, my Queen. What of Haret?”

“Haret,” she sighed, coming back to herself, “is of an age where offered comforts may outweigh the heaviness of his blade. Perhaps he can be bribed with land and women and a full belly.” 

Rebelard stroked a hand down his graying beard. “Very well. Where shall you start?” 

Embla glanced at her advisor. The lines in his face had grown deeper, but he’d lost nothing in his eyes. “Titulus, I think. His gaze cuts glass; maybe I can pry insights out of him.” 

Rebelard grinned absently. “You are your father’s daughter.” 

Gods, but she hoped that was true. 

***

This part had been painstakingly arranged. Embla knew she had no reason to fear, her Queensguard had been over it again and again. But it was only Knives’s warm weight against her knees that calmed her. 

They’d claimed a rough crown of snow and earth uphill from the clearing, chosen for it’s easily defensible position against a sheer drop and the rather remarkable view it gave of the palace. She’d ordered every torch lit on the fortress grounds for that evening, and the white marble walls shone like the face of a goddess against the velvet horizon. It should stun even Cole into silence if she played it right. 

Embla fought down a nervous nausea as she took her seat.  

The space was set with just two fur-draped chairs and a hot fire, with rough-hewn railing at its back to protect from the steep drop. Here she would wait to meet each warchief. Over her right shoulder, either Annette or Kellen would stand in parade rest, flame licking off their livery. At her feet, Knives and Tambre already lay, ears pricked toward the clearing where revelry painted the treeline in noise and cheerful flame. 

Titulus emerged from it, coming up the hill along the snow-cut path, with his shadow behind him, and Embla settled into herself. 

The warchief climbed into the clearing, competency in his light-footed step, and he smiled charmingly at her while his eyes roamed. They took in her minimal guard, her dogs, the grand view of the palace in its high place, just over her shoulder, and missed nothing. Behind him, his shadow settled against a tree, watching Annette blithely. 

“Truce-queen.” Titulus said through his teeth, and gave a small, polite bow. It was not very deep, but it was more than she expected to get from the rest. “What a lovely view.” And he nodded toward the palace, dropping into the seat across from her entirely at his ease. 

“Thank you, Lord. Though I’ve heard it’s truest beauty was seen in the summer centuries. Fountains of warm water and banners of living flower and ivy.” Embla’s mouth twitched down behind the veil, but she kept her tone cheerful. “All that is behind us now, I’m afraid, isn’t it?” 

He arched a brow. Close, she saw that he was older than she’d approximated, a faded roguishness to features that had seen hard fighting and harder living. “May I ask, whose idea was it to bring us here one by one? To set us before the palace framed so perfectly against the night?” 

It was a pointed question, and it put Embla’s hindbrain on guard. He enjoys games, she thought, and most men she knew also enjoyed explaining them to women. So she schooled her voice into girlish playfulness. “I’m afraid you will have to blame my love of aesthetics for that, Prince Titulus. Or my art tutors, who taught me the value of a beauty in all moments.” 

He tapped a few fingers on the arm of his chair, head tilted to the lilt in her voice. “Your art tutors?” There was something curious and goading in the words. “Not your political advisors? Rebelard de Ingesh? Or your own cunning mind?” 

Embla forced a delighted, empty giggle. “Shame, Lord. You’ve caught me. If you already knew the answer, why did you ask?” 

Titulus’s smile grew even more cunning, even more charming, cutting into the notch he’d found in her facade. “To see if you would lie, Queen. Naturally.” 

Embla was glad the veil shielded the quick wave embarrassment that swept up her cheeks. 

He seemed to notice it anyway. “I wouldn’t hold it against you. If I were some of my brethren, I might not have even noticed.” Then he gestured around them. “This meeting place, that view, the playful voice with which you engage me, even your veil. Half-truths, if not outright lies.” 

Embla snorted softly. She grit her teeth over the flood of nerves from this first small failure in diplomacy, forced herself to let it slip away. She would have to take a different tact. More direct, maybe. There was something familiar about the ice-lord, almost comforting. Something that reminded her of her father, when she was quite young. A man who saw in shades of gray. 

So she reached up and pulled back her veil, and his shrewd gaze traced her features in the firelight. 

“Ah, there.” He said approvingly. “There is honesty.”

Embla folded her hands in her lap, and took a studied breath. “What say you of peace, Lord?” 

His wise eyes brightened. “Is that why you started with me, Queen? You think I am more amenable to peace?”

“Aren’t you?” 

He shrugged a shoulder. “I am not opposed.” 

“May I ask why, Lord?” 

His expressive mouth pursed. “Maybe because I am not as young as I used to be. I miss my homeland. My wives and husbands. My children and my children’s children.” 

“May be.” She inclined her head. 

His gaze darkened. “Or maybe we’ve glutted on bloodshed and bounty long enough, and our greed tempts the gods of fortune.” 

Another truth, delivered with a bitter edge. 

“Or,” he settled his own hands in his lap in a nonchalant mirror of her own, “I simply know when we’ve been bested.” 

Embla did not let a muscle of her face move at that. They were not beaten, not yet. It felt like the kind of question meant to test. “Do the warchiefs know you crave peace?” She redirected. 

His mouth soured. “Crave is a strong word, Queen. They know where I stand, if that is what you mean.” 

“And they don’t care that you disagree?” She asked dubiously. 

“Where I come from,” he strolled a gaze along the horizon, the palace, then to the circlet of Queendom in her hair, “we are not ruled by blood. Every shoal worth their salt can have their own opinion, as long as it does not distort their loyalties.” 

“Which are?” 

“Each other.” 

A trickle of annoyance and despair mingled strangely in her chest; her nostrils flared. “Then you are ruled by blood, Lord, if you cannot change your allegiance to it.” 

He grinned, like she’d landed a blow and it delighted him. Like they were sparring over trade agreements and not apocalypses. Embla swallowed a chaffing lump in her throat. 

“How likely is it, then? Peace.” 

His laugh was dry. “Not at all likely. Shoals bleed. Raid. War. We know very little else.” 

“Perhaps you wish to know something else.” Embla leaned forward, leaned into the notch she’d carved into his facade. “Farmlands where a man could live peaceably. Forests where he might hunt. Space enough for his husbands and wives, his children and his children’s children. Food enough for the coming age of ice.” 

A look she had not expected passed in Titulus’s eyes. Startled, almost. Wounded, regretful. She had the strangest desire to reach across the space between them and comfort him. “Lo, though I wish it could be so, Truce-Queen.” 

Embla swallowed again, forcing down the knot of despair at the base of her throat. “You would not accept such a fate?” 

His brief softness retreated behind a sardonic grin. “Surely I would, but not at the cost of my loyalties. A shoal still am I, Queen. You will have my vote among my people, but if they will not have peace, neither will I.” 

Embla frowned, retreating, settling back against her seat. She cleared her throat.“Would you – would you share advice then? About your fellows.” 

It seemed this was a topic of great amusement to the shoal-prince. He cranked his brows and grinned like a mischievous badger. “Gladly. They are a predictable bunch. Haret is even-tempered if his pride’s not rankled. Cole is a lout. He’ll do as his sister says.” 

“Mirosha?” 

He frowned; it was almost a wince. “Mirosha, yes.” 

“And Edutch?” 

“Edutch.” A flicker of fondness came and went on his proud face. “A reasonable man, but do not take his reason for want of peace. He was not always leader of his clan – a mother and two sisters died first. So there is still much room on his war belt for glories.”

A brief moment of silence passed. Titulus watched her with his cunning, calculating eyes, and finally, Embla spoke. “Your…candid words are a boon.” 

Something in her tone struck him; she watched his mouth draw down into a thoughtful frown. “Do you know,” he said quietly, “I have five daughters of an age with you? I cannot imagine them sitting at a war table with the likes of Mirosha and Cole.” 

Embla grew uneasy at the pity in his face. “Age matters little between peace and war.” She whispered. 

And like a twig snapping in a still wood, he seemed to come to his senses, measuring her again as an enemy royal rather than a young woman. “We are a hard people, Queen. Don’t let my civilized tongue and charming manners fool you. Perhaps it was unwise you saw me first.” Then he rose, shoving off with his hands on his thighs. She rose as well, and had to snap at Knives when she offered him her hand. 

Titulus gave the animal a bemused glance, but he took her hand, even bowed slightly over it. “May the gods of good fortune smile upon your cleverness.” 

“And yours, shoal-prince.” She agreed, offering him a curtsy. 

Then he was gone, he and his shadow snaking down the path, and Embla slumped back into her seat, petting Tambre’s ear compulsively as she chewed over his words. 

A heavy, comforting hand squeezed her shoulder and she gave Annette a brief, conciliatory smile before reaching up and repinning her veil.

“Who is next?”

Edutch and Embla: Two

They held the truce-talks in a clearing close to the shoal-side of a thin, dying wood. Dawn was crisp beneath its skeletal fingers, hardwood trees reaching into a sky that would not bless them with warmth enough to sprout their leaves ever again.

It gave Edutch an uneasy feeling, but the Corean forests always did. 

Some time in the night, people had come from the palace and set an impressive display – blazing bonfires and two long tables facing each other, set with a king’s feast. There were baskets of fresh bread still steaming and kegs of ale, gifts for the warriors who would not sit at table. It was wealth on display, foolishness or scheming. 

Across the clearing, nearly into the trees, a wildwood throne had been bowed together with evergreen saplings so fresh he could scent the citrus in the crisp air. There the Queen sat, dressed in pale blue and fleckless gray furs. She was hooded and veiled, a clever ploy to draw out their curiosity, and every eye was drawn to her like a dousing rod. On either side, she kept two massive dogs who watched them with bright, unforgiving eyes.  

“Heard her dogs are men she charmed into thralldom.” Cole grunted beside him, the brutish warchief spitting over his left shoulder to ward off demons. “Thaw-blooded witch.”

Mirosha, in her chieftain finery, scoffed. The sound was as unstable as lake ice. Then she darted hooded eyes at Edutch. “Careful, little brother. Lord Edutch comes from a long, distinguished line of witches.”

Edutch showed his teeth at Mirosha’s ugly smile. A ripple of disdain flickered through him, lashing waters of rage that hid deeper griefs. But he’d never give her the satisfaction.

“Better born of the loins of witches than the cunts of demons, Mirosha darling.”

He ignored the daggered cut of her eyes and Cole’s squeamish grunt of laughter, returning his gaze to the enigmatic queen.

Behind her, firelight glinted off the steel of soldiers’ belts and the bolts of crossbows, a threat to keep the peace, while the shoals were backed by their own arsenal of fur-wrapped warriors watching uneasily from the edge of the clearing. Truce-talks were not common among the tribes of Borea, and when they were, this tenuous assemblage was the most dangerous part. 

Into the tension, the Queen raised a gloved hand. 

“Lords.” Her voice was deep, and it carried, but Edutch suspected it was with much practice. “Welcome to our table. As a show of good faith, the sons and daughters of my own lords will eat first from the feast before you.” 

To allay worry of poison. Clever twice over. A line of well-dressed youth, some only children, walked together out of the shadows of the soldiers in the treeline. They bypassed the first table and stepped up to the second, their thaw-blood rosy in their cheeks. Each ate a little from the steaming platters, then they returned to the trees, pausing only to tap a knee before their queen. 

“Does this satisfy you?” She asked, and he could not see her eyes behind the veil. 

Haret, the oldest and grimmest of them, answered. He glared at the queen as he crossed the clearing, snatched a pheasant’s leg off the table, and ripped the flesh off the bone with age-yellowed teeth. 

The Queen didn’t blanch. “The table is yours, then, Lords. One day and one night of feasting, as is customary among your folk, is it not?” 

Haret snorted reproachfully, begrudging her the good manners. “As you say, Queen. But first,” and he nodded toward his retinue, “a gift for you.” 

Edutch clenched a fist behind his back. Haret’s soothsayer broke from their line leading a pale lamb by a sacred red rope. He stopped short of the table in dripping black gauze, in clear view of the gathered, and barked the Queen’s name with such violence that birds startled. One of her dog’s growled and steel rattled collectively in her soldiers’ lines, but the queen stilled them all with a notched hand. 

Haret’s soothsayer drew a wicked sickle knife blessed by their gods; the gray blade slashed and red stained the snow, melting it in rivets as the bloodlet spread across clean white down. The gathered shoals, he among them, barked in unison, a single, cracking word to draw the eyes of their gods. 

The force of it rattled through the clearing, and Edutch noted the tightness with which the queen gripped the arms of her sapling throne. It was an honor, to have a lamb given over to the gods in your name when so many in the camps were going hungry, and Haret and the others had wanted to see what this Queen would do at the sight of fresh blood.

Her veil foiled much of that plan. 

“I thank you, Lord, and in the spirit that this gift was given, I wish to return the lamb to your people. Food is precious at this time, is it not?” 

An ugly intake of breath. Edutch tensed as the soothsayer growled a harsh, harrowing word. But Titulus stepped quickly forward, his voice clear and effortless. “Truce-Queen, you do not know all of our ways. Was it your intention to insult our warriors? To call down the demons of hunger upon them?” 

She was very still on her throne; only her breath moved the veil. “No, Lord. It was not my wish.” She said at last, and made a sharp gesture. One of her attendants came forward immediately and spirited away the lamb’s corpse, its blood staining the white of his gloves. 

Titulus eased the tension even further by offering her a handsome, cunning smile. “Very well, Queen.” He said, then he nodded to Haret, who turned and jerked his chin at the rest of them. 

Beside him, Edutch’s shadow gave a low whistle of relief, and Edutch grunted his agreement as he followed the other warchiefs across the warming snow. They each spat into the lambsblood stain as they passed before taking to the longtable. In his periphery, Edutch caught his shadow’s eyes widening when they came within scenting distance of the feast-food, and even his gut gave a rumble of traitorous approval. 

The Boreans had been on rations for uncountable weeks, culling out reedy rabbit and even thinner deer from the dying wood and scraping the last of the crops out of conquered villages. Their seal hunters scoured the bays, but the colonies had not yet moved this far south. Hunger wasn’t beyond their capacity, but neither were they immune when twenty different platters were set before them steaming and swimming in gravy.  

With wicked restraint, none of them touched the food. Not until Haret was done scowling at the thaw-bloods across the clearing like a rutting godsdamned buck. Just when Titulus was going to step in, Haret decided he’d intimidated them enough and gave a final, fierce pound of his fist against the table. Dishes clattered, and on the shoal side, music broke out in bounding leaps. 

Edutch grit his teeth at the theatrics, but a wave of relief washed through the clearing. The most dangerous moments were passed. The warchiefs tore into the meal, Mirosha with brittle control, Cole like a demon who hadn’t eaten in weeks. Edutch forced himself to go slowly, but he frowned at the way his shadow’s hands shook as the boy reached for a breast of pheasant.  

“Nothing too rich,” he murmured, “or you’ll be sick all night. Eat the greens whether you like them or not. Your mother will never forgive me if you die of wricken before you notch a glory on your belt.” 

Aren gave a very small, very impish grin and nodded wordlessly, piling an overlarge serving of cooked vegetables over the pheasant on his plate. Edutch kept one eye on him and made his own. Lean, roasted meats, roots in herb cream, a fist of tender greens. Bread and salt and butter and wine lay within easy reach. It was a spread the shoals might see once a year on Borea, if that year had been good, and still not quite as fine as this.  

Something about it made the center of him clench unpleasantly. 

Then the truce-queen rose unobtrusively from her throne. 

Edutch tensed, tracking her through his periphery instinctively, sure she would settle at her own table. But she did not, and when she waved off a displeased-looking queensguard, he perked, warm bread uneaten in his fist. The other warchiefs noticed her one by one by one like a pack scenting prey and quiet clarified through the clearing as the veiled queen approached. 

Only her dogs followed as she carved a path behind enemy lines, a move that might have been foolish without her crossbowmen in the trees. She skirted the table, very close to Edutch as she came. Unwisely close. He could see how small she was, and how large and silent her dogs. Her face was a flickering silouhette beneath the veil. 

Leather and steel creaked as the warchiefs tracked her, and her dogs watched them with malicious intensity in return. She paused before the stain in the snow, the place where the lamb had given its lifeblood to the gods in her name. Here, the truce-queen hesitated. 

With deliberate grace, she slipped off a fur-lined glove, revealing pale, fine-boned fingers alive with blush. The nails were tapered and clean and she wore no ornaments. Edutch tracked them as she lifted the edge of her veil, exposed the curve of her jaw, and spit into the blooded snow as they had done. 

A heartbeat passed. Another. 

Then Haret roared with laughter. Cole followed, and Mirosha and Titulus. Even Edutch cracked a smile as she let the veil fall back into place and turned wordlessly toward her own table. 

“Well done, Queen.” Haret boomed, raising a cup to her. 

As she took her seat – and a band of relieved counselors and lords joined her – she only inclined her head. Edutch wondered if he imagined it, or if the edge of a bright mouth smiled beneath the veil. 

Edutch and Embla: One

Embla woke to the wolves. Her dogs stirred; Tambre growled softly, the hair beneath Embla’s half-asleep hand prickling. “Shh.” She stroked the rough fur back into place, lifting to an elbow. The room was luminously dark, clean blue moonlight against the wide, frosted windows. As the blankets slid off her shoulder, she shivered. 

Silence. The wolves did not call again, but sleep was already slipping away, retreating before the vanguard of worries that would accompany sunrise. Embla sighed. 

She extricated herself from the bed, a chore that took twice as long as it should. As the cold deepened, so did the number of dogs curling against her at night – all except Knives, who would not leave his post by the door when she slept. Tambre made a disgruntled sound when Embla shoved her sideways, but she managed to get her feet into fur boots, throwing on her heavy robe and pacing to the wall of windows. 

Knives was beside her in a silent instant, not even his nails scraping the ground. His pricked ears twitched through a frame of coarse, woolly fur as she gave him a reassuring stroke. “With me.” She whispered, trying not to rouse the rest of them. The last thing she needed was her menargie of furred bodyguards calling down her human ones when all she wanted was a little fresh air. 

The room filled with crystal, and a dagger of icy wind cut through as the door opened. Knives went out first. His upright tail led the way, nose and night-eyes sweeping for threats. 

The night-cold gave her a shock. She pulled the edge of her robe up over her mouth so that her breath might take the dry edge off the air. Thoughtlessly, she took a turn around the garden, circling the empty fountain planted over in winter seed, a remnant of the thaw ages not two generations past. By the second circle, she’d cleared the sleep from her eyes and drifted toward the lip of the pavilion. 

The palace in which she stood was carved from the white cliffs of Lebion, and below, the castle town pressed quaintly against it in ribbons of woodsmoke. The southern forests were a dense fringe along snow-softened farmland, curling toward the wide, frostbitten bay. Her lands as she knew them. Beauty the thaw-kings before her had never seen, marred only by a deep rut of burned, blackened earth carved from the lip of the bay up through the farthest farmland. Stark against it lay the camps of her enemies. 

The sea-shoals.

They came first in her father’s reign, when she was a child that could only remember the panic of the people and the smell of the salt-dead. They came again, five years ago, when she was nineteen and barely crowned, and this time, they did not leave. Five years clawing their way savagely along the coastline. Five years glutting themselves on crop and plunder, torching land her father had so meticulously groomed for the ice-ages. They would not even hear of peace. 

Then her northern generals cut off their supply lines from the sea. 

Barbarous fools. 

They were a wild people, but even a wild people needed to eat. This was how she’d leveraged them into truce-talks. Two envoys killed, but the third accepted. They would come tomorrow, and speak of peace. Or they would starve. 

In the distance, the wolves sounded again. Knives huffed into the night air. Embla relaxed a clenched fist and stroked his neck. “Leave it,” she said softly, watching the greenwood firelight of enemies’ camps. “They are only hungry.” 

***

The keen of the wolves drew his lip off his teeth. 

Edutch looked toward the dense wall of trees, saw nothing moving against it but the smoke of their own fires. Since the sea-shoals set camp north of those godforsaken forests, wolves had crept out of the wood to spoil their herds and pick off lone folk too near the edge of firelight. It made for unhappy warriors, unaccustomed as they were to being prey.  

On Borea, his ancestors had killed all the wolves. The only predators there were the shoals themselves, and sometimes the ice bears in their deep caves. Here, they hunted, and their call drove something primal through him. “Aren, go and circle the north edge of camp. Make sure the watchguards do not sleep.” His shadow was up in an instant. 

“And the south?” 

“I will go.” Edutch pulled a frost cloak over his furs and together, they split from the firelight. 

Camp was uneasy. None of the warchiefs’ tents were silent. It was not just the wolves, nor even the hunger. Shoal-folk were used to hunger. Their continent was ice and death, and even as infants, their mothers never had enough milk in the breast. But news had come that the Queen Embla’s forces had routed their supply lines – a mass of seal meat, salted shark, fermented rookroot, and drink that would have seen them through five more years of raiding. 

It was enough to keep them all awake in the night. 

“Can’t sleep, lord?” It was Titulus, a warchief himself. He was among his fighting men, drinking at his fire. 

Edutch slowed, curving into Titulus’s firelight. “Can anyone?” He asked, and a flicker of a smile came and went from the clever man’s mouth with the moving flame. 

“Is it tomorrow you’re worried about?” 

“All of it.” He scowled, gestured toward the treeline, and those at Titulus’s fire grunted their agreement. “We stay still for too long.” 

Titulus laughed and folded his hands across his belly to watch the flames. It was a sign of confidence, looking into the fire like that. Blinding himself to the outer dark. “This truce-queen.” He said thoughtfully. “She says she wants peace.”

Edutch leaned against the framing of Titulus’s great tent, keeping his eyes on the night. Listening for the wolves. “Mirosha thinks it’s a trap.” 

“Mirosha wishes it to be a trap. She and Cole both.” Titulus shook his head. “They would burn it all down and claim they could eat the ashes if they had their way.” 

“Ashes do not fill a belly.” Edutch answered absently, eyes drifting to the bone-white palace high on its impregnable cliffside. “Do you think she means it, this want of peace?”

The other lord let out a long breath, looking deeply into the flames. “Why not? Perhaps she’s got no ice in her veins. These thaw-blooded,” he waved a dismissive hand, “they have no stomach for war.” 

Edutch snorted. “I don’ t know if I agree. It’s ice-blooded enough to call again for truce-talks after Haret returned her two heads.” 

Bloodless laughter from the older man. “Spoken true.” 

“Have you seen her?” One of his warriors dared greatly, interrupting two lords. “They say the thaw in her blood gives her strange beauty.” 

“Supersition.” Titulus batted a hand again. “Not that it matters. She could be hag-ugly, and she’d still a war-wife make.” 

Edutch didn’t answer. The wolves howled again, ringing closer. “They’re near.” He said softly, turning fully toward the darkness. 

“They are only hungry.” Titulus shrugged a shoulder. “We are just not used to being prey.” 

Those around the fire grumbled. Edutch bid his goodbyes and moved into the dark, aiming for the southern edge of camp. The moonlight was bright against the snow, and against the bone-pale walls of the thaw-palace. As he prowled, he snatched glances at it, and wondered if the wolves of this world were as pretty as that high place. 

Edutch and Embla: A Prologue

The snow lay so thick and hard upon the earth that not even the legate’s prized bull ox could break it by plow. As the creature strained against its rigging and the great sledge made no motion, the people gathered round the fields. They whispered, and the words famine – ice age – slipped from their fearful tongues. 

It was no secret that an age of ice was drawing near. The shoremen spoke of the great clots of glaciers hardening in the north sea. The snow phoenix made billowing patterns in the skies. The cold constellations rose in the east and the thaw stars had begun to set. 

Worse still was the call of the ice shoals’ hawks as they scouted the shorelines. It would not be long now before the raiders would come. Perhaps even in their lifetimes, and certainly in the lifetimes of their children. 

So it was that this mess of frozen earth was a harbinger, not just of a hard year, but of hard centuries to come. 

Prince Omere stood in the summer halls in winter robes. The straggling gardens that sprouted in the false spring were choked with frost, and as he watched the snow fall in summer, his heart wept. Beside him, the chaplain’s face was hidden in a scrawl of cowl and breath fog. 

“Woe to all those,” the holy man whispered, “born unto an age of ice.” 

Omere frowned, but did not look at him. “We will just to have pray, wise one, for our children and their children and those who come after. Those who might see a summer for all the sacrifice we make now.” 

In the decade preceding, they lost a month abreast of spring and summer. Now it seemed that those blessings were gone. Another month of summer slipped from their fingers, and with luck or favor, they might have three months to crop this year. 

“What will you do, Omere?” 

The Prince glanced over the fold of his shoulder. His wife and her silent steps stood at the birth of the hall, and she asked him this with the Princess Embla swaddled to her breast. 

“Your lord father King Eser will not see reason.”  

“No.” Omere grit his teeth and the blue cold glinted in his eyes. 

The chaplain steepled his fingers, heavy with cold brass rings, and spoke with sincere trepidation. “Your father is a thaw king, Prince. It will take an ice king to prepare this nation for what is to come.” 

The Prince did not speak, neither to the holy man nor to his bride. Such was his nature. He watched the haze of the white winter sun stall against the horizon, and behind him, little Embla made her newborn cries. 

In three days, his father was dead and King Omere did not look back. 

There were preparations to be made. From the grain stores, the cold seed would need planting. All land would be forfeit to farming, all mills for grinding. They had only so long to build a surplus for a century of heavy ice. 

Omere sent men out to the hilltops, where the old forts lay bare to the elements for near on three hundred years. They were to dig them out, and the women to prepare them. The people would return there soon, to shelter from the cold, and from the ice shoals and their seal blood warriors. 

He doubled the shore watchmen and conscripted every man of able body into his ranks. He made good on his father’s false promises to trade for smelt and improve their weaponry, their armor. All this he did in good conscience, and at night, he lay with his wife and play with his daughter. 

And it was good he did. For what King Omere did not know was the ice age that crept toward them like the slow cracking floes would be one of the worst in known history, and even that of unknown. 

Reflecting on Early Creative Writing

A few years ago, I found my first printed story in a box of kid stuff sent up from my childhood home. I was seven when it was written, living on an Air Force Base in Mississippi. I distinctly remember the bright, red-brick face of the off-base grade school, tapioca-tiled halls that felt endless, the way the school bus bumped through the base gate every day.

The story is printed on tissue-thin paper in typewritten font, one long paragraph of thrilling familial commentary, and the spelling is, as you’d expect, absolutely flawless: 

Not bad, little Caledonia. A scrappy meat-eater-defying protagonist, a question posed and answered, an emotional journey complete. Bonus points for the electoral monarchy. I don’t remember writing it, but I can only assume my obsession with the Land Before Time was something of an influence. 

Derivative character name notwithstanding, finding this filled me with a mystifying sense of the Rightness of writing. The roots of a passion that started as soon as I could put down words. A bliss that had hold of me long before I could ever grasp it in return. 

That’s not to say I didn’t face the same disheartening challenges all burgeoning young writers must. My first memoir at the age of six was a commercial failure, resulting in inexplicable confusion when my first reader (mom) laughed and laughed. Looking back, I’d written out my daily schedule in clean, imperative sentences: On Monday, I woke up and brushed my teeth. I ate a Pop-Tart for breakfast. I went to school. On Tuesday, I woke up and brushed my teeth…

In sixth grade, we were asked to read our creative writing aloud. I bemused a teacher by trying to power through four pages single-spaced on the unlikely friendship between a girl and her dragon. Her feedback taught me the word prolific! and the power of passive critique. 

In seventh grade, I inherited the old family desktop, an ancient Dell that couldn’t connect to the internet but ran Microsoft Word like a dream, and that’s all I needed. Writing spilled out of me, endless hours, stories that flowed and flowed and never finished. Fantasy and science fiction and a middle-schooler’s idea of romance. I didn’t care to complete a story. I wanted the scenes, the meaty moments between people, triumph over hardship. 

I was obsessed with the gem of goodness mounted in the heart of a hard world. It was the only story that mattered, the only one I wanted to tell, in all its facets, under all its faces. I wanted my characters to love and be loved and to persevere. 

It’s still there, in my writing. The core of why I write, and why I share it. The most important thing.

The Sacrosanct

Amelia leaned into the hiss of air, the cool pop, as one of the vacuum-sealed doors rushed open and mimicked a breeze. Liam’s silhouette passed out of the blackened sleeping quarters. He squinted in the saffron lowlights, his eyes flinty and ill-slept.

It was far too early in the morning. Or was it far too late at night?

On a colony ship, there were no mornings. Not by sunrise. Time was set to the seasons and passages of Earth’s calendar, but they had no sun or star of their own. Manya the Mistress, the mega computer, the machine that raised and dimmed the lights was dependent on the rising and setting of a sun somewhere so far removed that its warmth would never wake them from their sleep. 

She checked her wristwatch. Three-seventeen in the morning, in the heavens as it was on Earth. 

“You know what they call you?” Liam plopped to the floor beside her and leaned against the slate-chill wall. 

“A great intellect?” Amelia purred. 

“An insomniac.” He said, and ruffled her hair, the ink-black ID columns on his forearms casting shadows. 

She smiled. “Insomnia, from the Latin – in-somnus. Sleepless.” Then she handed him her glass of orange juice.

He drank, mouth puckering around the tart sugars. “Not bad this time around. You’re getting better.”

She’d been working on a project in the greenhouses – growing organically, avoiding the micro-nutrient additives that supplemented and sustained their perpetually-used soil. Working fervently on nursing plants to survival and production. Growing real, untouched food, like from the soil of a planet.

In the beginning, her tiny crops had been horribly inadequate – especially the lemolimes and the oranges. Citrus, consort of the Sun, struggled helplessly beneath the synthetic ray-lights. But she’d been getting better. She’d lock herself up in her laboratory grooming the leaves, and while the others credited her dedication, she took pure selfish pleasure in breathing the air – unprocessed oxygen fresh from the leaves that she was able to breathe before the wall units sucked it up into the main conditioner.

Amelia thought of them, the plants, the tiny crop that was her own. Her chest tightened, and her skin prickled. “We’re suffocating.” She whispered, her voice a plucked petal in thin air.

Liam frowned and set aside the empty cup. “I know.” He answered, and fished a hand from her lap to hold it. 

Amelia and Liam had not been given the choice to leave Earth and enter further space, to colonize. They were the Sacrosanct – an entire generation born unto space, who would not live to see the planet for which their colony ship and their future offspring were bound. Born into the craft, and destined to die upon it, as their ancestors had died on the death altars of the old temples or the ropes that hung in the ancient trees. 

Their only solace lay in each other, and the clandestine promise that their ashes would one day be spread across the fertile soil of a new Earth.

A fool’s deal made even before their conception. 

Amelia lay her head on his shoulder, staving off tears. “I’d like to petition the Ameliam Committee for a name change.” 

“It’s the Liamelia Committee, thank you very much.” He crooned.  

Amelia gave a small, sad laugh. She and Liam had grown up together and married young – as it was only together that they could stand the intolerable loneliness of time and of space. When they were children, they’d formed the Official Unofficial Colonial Expedition Committee to be Renamed. They’d entertained each other’s notions of escape, encouraged dreams of jettison, and every time they passed a planet even remotely viable on the scan-op readouts, they mock-plotted the hijacking of an escape pod. 

With time and age, the plans grew more cunning and the imagined worlds more elaborate.

Green, they liked to say. Verdant blankets of viridian that would cover their earth in every place but the long running rivulets and rivers of pearl-blue flowing with freedom and predestination into their seas. A world so green it would hurt the eye to behold after so long among the efficient, lifeless coloring of a colony ship – gunmetal grays and plastene whites and danger reds. 

Escape, even the hollow-boned dream of it, brought relief.  

Liam coughed out a long-held breath Amelia heard rattling around in his pneumonia-prone lungs. “I know what’ll cheer you up.” He said, a hand stroking idly through her lank, dark hair. “Wanna recycle a little oxygen in the supply closet with me?” And his eyebrows danced up and down over those pale, impossible eyes.

It was enough to send her into hysterics of laughter where hysterics of sorrow were moments from taking root, and they laughed for hour-long minutes before the knife-edged joy winnowed into tears and turned at last to silence. 

After a while, Amelia spoke, and her words stitched them a quilt of story, and her voice made moss and ivy of the unforgivable metal of the vessel’s walls. Into the morning, or was it the night, they traded tales that transmuted the terror and softened the sorrow of their sacrificed lives, that trimmed them in cloth-of-gold and in dragon scale, sharpened them as a sword shook loose from a stone, crowned them in circlets of emerald and hawthorn. 

Made their impossible burdens bearable once more.

And eventually, Manya the Mistress, the mega computer, brought the daylights up in rings of tiger’s eye and heliodor.

Amelia checked her wristwatch.

Six thirty two in the morning, in the heavens as it was on Earth.

On Leaving and Coming Home

The heat.

The moment we crossed the Cascades, it descended and held, an ever-present misery running backward from the Coast, a living ghost where the foothills broke the champaign, blistering Utah in red welts of flame, smudging the edges of every road in rural New Mexico; it followed us out of Texas, and even in the shadow of Boulder, the air burned, roasting the high passes through Idaho’s smoking slopes where the unseen threat of wildfire stayed on the nose.

But then I can speak of driving into the sunset glow which limned the backs of the Cascades off that endless Eastern Washington plain. Of Tahoma rising like a jagged god and setting beneath the earth. Of the Stuart Range like the spired back of a buried dragon illumined by dusk’s retreating strokes.

And to know, deep in what lives beneath the bones, that beyond those mountains lay the ocean and our home.