Tillie went away, and Ama, propped up by bolsters, stared into the flames. Alone once more, Ama fished the Eye from where she kept it hidden, tucked into an opening in the seam of one of her bolsters. She could not have kept the Eye on her body; Tillie would have seen it there, for sure, though most likely she would not have betrayed Ama’s secret. Still, it felt unfair to ask Tillie to bear the burden of what Ama had done; who knew what the punishment would be for hiding the crime of taking an Eye?
So, when she had first been returned to her room that day, soaked to the skin, after Emory had left her, as Tillie had stripped her from her gown, Ama had palmed the Eye from where she had tucked it between her breasts and had slipped it in her mouth for safekeeping.
Tillie had fussed and bustled about, asking questions that needed no answers and directing the water bearers to set the bath in front of Ama’s roaring fire. When the others had left and Tillie had her back to her, Ama had gone, naked but for the length of linen in which she was wrapped, to her bed, thinking to tuck the Eye between the blankets and hope it would not be discovered. But then her glance had landed upon the bolsters and had seen the split seam on the edge of one of them—the red one—and quick as a blink, Ama had tucked the Eye inside.
Now, in the eerie hour between first and second sleep, Ama held up the Eye, the fire lighting it. It was orange-yellow like honey, and the glow of flames behind it made the Eye shine with life, as the lynx mother’s eye had done before Emory had ended her with his pickax. As she knew her own eyes to shine, having seen them often enough in the oval mirror while being dressed.
Why did she keep the Eye still? After all, her wish, such as it was, had been granted—Sorrow was hers, here, safe in this room, and learning to be a pet. Pushing back the furs and the blankets, Ama rose, bare feet on cold stone, and drew closer to the fire. She squatted down on the hearth, nightdress puddling around her, and held the amber orb up to the light. She watched the way the flames played against the strings of orange and yellow within it.
The Eye was dangerous. Maybe not in and of itself—it fit neatly in the cupped palm of her hand, not much bigger than an actual, human eye—but in what it represented. In what it proved she had done. And having kept it even this long, in the days since she had scraped it from the wall, seemed foolhardy. As if she were daring the fates. Would Emory take an eye from her head if he found what she had done? She remembered again that precious word on which her whole world seemed to balance—if.
Slowly, silently, Ama stood from her place by the fire and walked to the window, closed tight now by Tillie’s hand against the night. It was a blank black mirror, the windowpane, with the fire’s light within the room and nothing but dark outside. In it, Ama saw her reflection blinking back at her. She saw her long red hair, twisted into loose braids that fell to her hips. She saw the shock-white fabric of her sleeping gown. She saw her own face, her own eyes, but a trick of the half-light showed them not amber like the Eye in her curled-closed palm, but rather black like the queen mother’s.
Ama reached out and placed her hand on the window’s ice-cold crank. She knew what she should do: she should open this window once more and be rid of the Eye, right now, shrouded by night and snow. She remembered Tillie’s aunt, the price she had paid for her wish, and the way it had been granted—all good reasons for disposing of this Eye, and at once. But it was so lovely, refracting firelight, aglow like a tiny sun betwixt her fingers, that Ama found she did not want to let it go.
She could have cranked open her window—and she should have—in that frozen moment, when all the world around her slept, when snow softly fell. She should have flung it far into the silent, frozen night. By morning the snow would have erased it, buried the Eye deeply and well. By the time the snow melted in the spring, Ama would have long since been a queen, most likely rounded by a future king in her belly. No one would dare take an eye from a queen. Buried like that, it would be almost as if it had never happened, almost as if she had never scraped the Eye from the wall and wished upon it.
Secrets, like memories, do not disappear just because they are buried by snow or time or distance. Snow melts. The sun finishes its orbit and begins, again, where it started. Thrown or not, buried or treasured, the Eye had been plucked, and by Ama’s hand. She could not unpluck it.
Slowly, slowly, Ama withdrew her hand from the window crank. As silent as snow, she left the window. She returned to her bed. She pushed the Eye deep into the innards of the red bolster, squeezing shut its seam as best she could.
Sorrow yawned and stretched as Ama climbed back under the blankets, doing her best to not disturb the lynx as she rearranged herself beneath the furs. She snuffed out the bedside lantern. The fire’s dancing flames sent shadows across the far wall, and Ama made a game of picking out shapes among them.
There was a tree, branches blown in the wind.
There was a wave, blown into foam on a rocky shore.
There was a cliff, so steep and treacherous.
There, above, was a castle, rising up from the cliff as if it had grown that way.
And there, saw Ama, so tired, second sleep almost upon her—were her eyes even open anymore? Was it a shadow she saw, or a dream, or a memory?—was a creature with a wicked, sharp-spiked tail, a spine of stairs up its back, a pair of tendon-laced wings, folded in, and a large, triangular head, all rendered in shadow-smoke upon her wall.
The dragon’s head slowly turned. Then, there it was—the Eye from the wall, the dragon’s eye, one and the same, amber, glowing, full of promises and secrets, both.
Ama spun and fell, head over feet, lost and afraid and excited all at once, out of space and time and memory, deep into the eye of the dragon.
The Glassblower’s Staff
As another week passed and snow banked up around the castle walls, Sorrow grew restless from being kept indoors. She paced back and forth, back and forth, and put her paws up on the windowsill, yowling out into the frozen world.
“It is too cold out of doors,” Ama chastened her, but that was not really true—it was too cold out of doors for Ama, who was cold all the time now, terribly cold, no matter how close she sat to the fire, how many furs Tillie heaped upon her bed.
It was not too cold for Sorrow, whose coat had thickened and darkened as she grew. The tips of her ears, pointed and black, flattened now against her head, as if she did not like what Ama was telling her.
Truth was, this was the sort of weather Sorrow was made for. The giant paws, fluff tufting out between each claw and paw pad. The mottled coat, so dense that Ama’s hand completely disappeared when she pressed her fingers into it. The wound-tight energy of her, trapped here, in this room, with Ama, when it was clear that the cat yearned to run fast and hard and far.
Ama felt small and selfish.
And cold. She felt very, very cold.
The days were a pattern of dressing and eating and changing and eating again, of using the pot and climbing into and out of her bed, days that drifted by like snowflakes, as inconsequential and difficult to grasp, nearly impossible to distinguish one from the next. And as the snowdrift grew outside, Ama felt as if she herself, on the inside, was, perhaps, turning to ice. Her heart, it seemed, beat slower and slower still. Her lids grew heavy, as if invisible icicles weighted down each lash. Her breath grew slow and shallow. Even getting out of bed to go sit near the fire became an impossible chore.