This place is cold as bones. Shadowed halls, garden fountains seized with ice, tapestries stiff with frozen dew. They say marble is always cold, no matter how long a body remains in contact with it. With every footstep across polished tiles, I believe it more.
I dress in two layers of everything: petticoat, skirt, high-cut blouse. The fashion is for exposed flesh in between. The inhabitants of this place were born to bear the chill, but I walk with arms clamped tight to my body, always.
The words that accompany the drafts in the halls, from the half-closed doors of staff and servants, are just as cold. Even if I don’t understand all of them, I grasp the meaning. The lord’s woman. The one in his chambers. Not for the purpose they pretend, and even they know that. He sleeps with his spouse under embroidered quilts, felted fabrics, luxurious furs. I sleep just beyond the foot of the royal bed, my body radiant as any brazier, warming the couple, the room, even as I shiver on the thin mat laid between myself and the unyielding marble.
Why should one who generates heat need to sleep heaped in furs and bedding? Won’t this reduce the warmth radiated? I shiver in the face of such icy logic as others sleep content in the warmth I offer, but cannot feel myself. My body is more sensitive to the cold, not less as these people wish to believe.
Any lord can have a hearth and a servant to tend it through the night as he sleeps. A fire-blooded servant in place of this is a rarer luxury by far.
I dream of the way I danced in the sands of home with my fire-blooded kin, family and friends and lovers. The desert seared our calloused feet with its pleasant, perfect warmth. The sun tanned and flushed our skins in turns. In the star-scattered nights we danced through bonfires that didn’t burn but fueled us to move swifter, even as we danced the flames higher, wilder, in communion with them. Embers skirted our fingers and flicked the ends of our hair.
I was wanted or, as they claimed, needed, for the strength of the fire in my blood. Despite the great distance and many differences between us, these people of snow and mountains were our countrymen, their leader our lord, as well.
I was given an ultimatum instead of a choice: the lord could take one of us, or many. I didn’t wait to hear more than this.
My bare feet pace the halls of the palace though they ache to dance as they once did. My callouses do not protect from cold as they did from fire. Frost bends grass blades into clear glass bangles, and sunlight glitters in the courtyard as though off of polished jewels.
I wish to stand under the sun, free of the press of stone ceilings, but even when I see it in the sky, it is so distant here, and I can’t bear the bitter wind.
When done with their day’s work, the servants gather in communal chambers based on their ranks and roles, but I belong to none of these predetermined groups. Despite this I press into the corner of one room or another. Even the collective warmth of so many bodies isn’t enough to ease the chill that deepens in me by the day. It is nothing like the heat of those I left behind.
My attempts to speak their dialect go disregarded or mocked. I sidle as close to each hearth and brazier as I can, the fire like a friend almost within reach. Other bodies cluster closer around their heat sources, as though they seek to ward off my greediness. My touch is enough to scald their cold-tempered flesh, so how can I desire more?
If only I could put my hands upon those flames and wake them, as I did amongst my kin and the bonfires we built. I am certain the fires of this place will know me, if only I can reach them.
Frigid eyes and words cut to the core of me, until I cannot bear them any longer.
I wander unfamiliar hallways on clumsy stone-numbed feet, wintry breath from the shadows raising the hair on my scalp, pricking my ears. Even my tears become cold as ice as they run down my cheeks.
The cold creeps deeper every day, like a disease. One day when the royal couple leave their room I slip under their quilts and furs. The captured heat of their bodies is scant compared to the blaze in my blood, a pale imitation of the warmth I remember. I swathe myself in memories of sleeping under the stars, free and safe and content, my head pillowed on the belly of one lover while another curled against my hip.
My fire is going out in this place, falling back to embers. The royal couple seem oblivious, but I feel its wane in myself.
If I could beg to go back to my kin I would, but that isn’t the answer. If I do, they will uproot other fire-bloods to dwell here in place of me, or alongside me. Would the presence of a few others be enough to warm me, or would I doom my own kin to have them brought here? I don’t know, so I don’t dare to speak of it. Avenues of escape freeze over even as I consider them. Those avenues, in truth, are the veins pumping through my body. The chill seeps into the marrow of my bones, toward my heart. When my fire goes out, when I succumb to the cold of this place, I know they will simply find more fire-bloods to replace me. Perhaps this thought that pumps through the frozen-over lump of affection in my chest is the thing that truly sustains me for so long; longer than I expected to continue.
If there is a cure for this disease of cold, an answer, an escape, I do not know it. My thoughts are sluggish as well as my blood.
I shiver in my sleep, until I hardly sleep. I scald my tongue on boiling soup but it cools before it reaches my belly.
I roam the halls on feet too numb to know where they are going, to understand what they are doing, each turn taking me deeper into cold and dark.
Finally, I sense warmth. Or a lessening of the cold, at least. Perhaps that’s all it is, but I follow it down halls and turns, a way I have never gone before. The smell of bread and meat, spices and herbs, fills my lungs.
The cook and assistants object to my presence but I ignore their indecipherable dismissals, the sharp objection in their tones. I am too cold to care that I am not allowed to be here, and the sudden warmth from the ovens stuns my feet to pins and needles, searing like the hot-glass sands. I want more. Need more.
A large pot hangs over the roaring fire in a hearth that could easily fit a few more like it.
I don’t hesitate, which is how I slip past so many bodies before they realize my intent. Hands grab at me then yank themselves away; I feel grim satisfaction to know that I still have enough fire to scald these chill-blooded people.
I step across the hearthstones and feel my skirts catch and scorch away as I slip behind the pot. Flames curl around me like a welcome embrace, soothing my cold-weighted skin, my ice-aching muscles, my frozen-over veins. The marrow of my bones thaws to a semblance of life.
The fire knows me for its kin, and the fire of my blood rekindles in response. The kitchen staff are all in a panic now; they shout and try to hook my ankles with their tools before I burn. The fire inside me builds, and the fire around me rises to press them back.
I feel the arms of my family, my lovers, holding me, tracing my skin in the caress of the fire. I am not alone.
I glow like a jewel; like a magnificent ember in the hearth. Joyful tears sizzle from my cheeks before they can fall. My hair catches and flickers like a torch around me, but it will not burn away like I know will happen to these people. Cooks and assistants lean over the hearthstones, dangerously close, in their desperation to pull me free before I become a cinder.
I will not burn, but the dragging ends of their skirts and scarves will, and the wooden tables and utensils and cutting blocks beyond, the pots of oil and cooking fat all around the room, the dried herbs hung all the way to the wooden doors that lead out in every direction.
This place is stone, cold stone, but it is furnished well enough in items that will burn.
I begin to dance among the flames, to spin, to whip cinders into a firestorm.
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As a fine art professional, Mar Vincent has wielded katanas and handled Lady Gaga’s shoes. As a veterinary assistant, she has cared for hairless cats, hedgehogs, and, one time, a coyote. As a writer, her short fiction can be found in Analog, Escape Pod, Apex’s Robotic Ambitions anthology, and many other publications. She resides in the Pacific Northwest or can be found on various social media @MaroftheBooks. |