Tillie’s face grew more and more concerned. “You have to get up, lady,” she said, on the first morning that Ama refused to rise from bed, two weeks after the first snow had fallen. “Moving around gets the blood flowing, it does. Just lying there, like that . . . well, it isn’t right!”
Ama found it difficult to muster the energy to answer. “Leave me be,” she said at last.
“And you’ve got another training session with Pawlin to get to,” Tillie said, as if by way of enticing Ama, but Ama only repeated, “Leave me be.”
Tillie obeyed. But she returned with two boys from the kitchen carrying armfuls of wood, which she ordered stacked by the fire, and she hung a kettle of herbs and water to steam. The room did warm, growing moist and fragrant as the kettle boiled, but still, Ama did not rise.
She was neither a cat nor a rabbit. She was, perhaps, a lizard, slowing near to death and waiting for winter to pass.
The next day, when Ama still refused to leave her bed, Tillie insisted. “Lady,” she said, throwing back the furs and blankets, both, “you must move.” She put her hands on Ama’s ankles to help turn her to stand, and gasped. “Oh, lady,” she said, “how can you be this cold, under all this warmth?”
Tillie’s hands burned like brands on Ama’s legs, jolting her, at last, awake.
“Leave me be,” Ama said, grasping for the blankets.
But Tillie would not let her have them. “Up, lady,” she said briskly, and so Ama obeyed.
Tillie led Ama to the fire, and there she dressed her. A thick black gown. A leather vest. Fleece-lined slippers. Hair, plaited and wound into a bun, then covered over with a head scarf pulled over Ama’s ears to keep them warm.
“Something must be done to warm you through,” Tillie said, more to herself than to Ama. “The queen mother warned me about letting you get too cold. I’ve done all I can think of!” She shook her head in frustration. And then, as if it had just that moment struck her, Tillie said, “I know where I shall take you, lady. If there is any place where you may be made warm . . .”
It was as if Ama’s mind was sleeping, so little did she care where Tillie led her. Out of the room and down a hall, down a staircase, and then another, and another still.
Ama did not know how long they walked. Perhaps a minute. Perhaps an hour. Perhaps forever. They had reached the bowels of the castle now, that much was clear. Here it was dark and still. Here it was tomb-quiet. They were beneath the snow. They were buried.
Perhaps she would follow Tillie like this, obediently, for the rest of her life. It made no difference to Ama, not really: lying abed or trailing behind her serving girl. Did any of it matter? She could eat or not, sleep or not, speak or not, die or not. One was no better than the other.
But there. There, up ahead, was light. Closer, they drew.
Warmth. Even from here, still a hundred feet away, Ama felt the heat, rolling up the hall toward her. She felt her heart move, clenching and pumping, clenching and pumping, as if it wanted to know from whence the heat came.
Her steps quickened. Tillie, who had been leading, fell behind. “I knew you would like it, lady!” she called, but Ama did not answer.
At the end of the hall, a wide-open door.
Heat hissed from the room’s wide mouth. Entranced, Ama stepped through it. Waves of blissful warmth washed over her, visible waves, distorting the air around her. Ama closed her eyes and breathed it in, pulled it into her lungs, felt it rush through her chest and spread to her arms, her legs, her head. When she opened her eyes, she felt . . . clearer. Stronger. Curious.
And she saw a man, small, with wispy gray hair brushed back from his high forehead. Dressed in a heavy leather apron, he stood with an iron rod in his hand; at the end of the rod glowed a tiny sun, which he spun to keep in constant motion. He nodded at her, once, and then he crossed the room to the source of the heat: at the far wall, a massive oven, three men tall, rumbling and hissing with fire.
And he entered the fire with his rod, the blistering hot orb disappearing into the blaze within.
Still he spun, spun, spun the rod. “So,” he said, glancing back at Ama. “You are the damsel, come to warm your bones.”
“Yes,” said Ama. “How did you know?”
“You are not the first, nor will you be the last. Come, child,” he said, nodding to a chair nearby. “Sit, and watch me work, and warm yourself. It is as it should be.”
Ama obeyed. Tillie did not follow; perhaps the great fire was too hot for her to stand.
Once Ama was sitting, the glassblower seemed to forget that she was in the room, turning back to his work.
Ama watched.
The glassblower took his gather of glass from the fire and rolled it along the steel surface of his worktable. He rolled and rolled, and as it became an even more perfect sphere, the glow began to fade from sunfire orange to darkest brown. Back to the fire it went, and back to the table. Fire, table, fire. Sunbright orange. Darkest brown. Orange again. It was hypnotic, the back and forth of it, the shine and fade of it, the twisting turn of it.
Warmer and warmer, Ama softened in her seat. Blood thrummed in her veins now; she felt nearly drunk on the bounty of it.
She watched as the glassblower, satisfied at last with the shape of his orb, plunged it once more into the fire before lowering his mouth to the far end of the metal shaft, blowing into it and then capping the opening with his thumb. It was as if the orb took in the breath he expelled, and as it expanded, Ama breathed in a deep, hot breath as well, felt her lungs stretch against her ribs.
And then, again. Back into the fire. Roll the sphere on the table. Heat. Blow. Roll.
Luxurious warmth. Liquid warmth. Voluminous warmth.
She was back in that dream, her hallucination from her first days with Emory. The man held the sun on his staff, and Ama yearned to reach for it, to take it in her hands. She stood and walked, trancelike, to the glassblower’s table. She watched him work the glass, and it warmed her from the outside in. She felt greedy for more, and more, and more.
It was her beloved made small, the sun. She narrowed her gaze and tilted her head, burning her eyes by staring, unblinking, into its brightness. It was a tiny, riotous monster of explosive flames.
The sensation of reliving a moment she had already experienced, of stepping into a stream of memory, overwhelmed her. Here, fierce and bright, was the sun and her very own heart, manifested as one, and she loved it.
She loved the orange-red fuzz of its curve; she loved the roil and boil of its skin; she loved the explosive jets of liquid flame; she loved the quiet dance of whorls and swirls; she loved its glitter and its shine; she loved its movement and its silence. She loved the rivers of plasma, the sprays of flaming crimson, the ribbons of copper, the constantly changing, living, breathing, beating, churning, yearning orb.
“Give it to me,” Ama said, looking up at the glassblower.
“What?” said the glassblower, his attention taken from his work.
“Give it to me,” Ama repeated.
“Nonsense,” he said. “This is not an art for a woman. Your place is beside the fire, not controlling it.”
Ama’s fingers itched to grab the staff from the glassblower’s hands. She balled her fingers into fists. Ah, how she wished he would pass the staff to her.
“Women’s art is soft,” the glassblower continued. “Embroidery and needlework. Tending to children. Mending. Receiving.” He finished the orb and set it on a rack to cool. “This piece will become one of the lanterns for your wedding feast,” he said. “There will be twenty-one of them, as you shall be married on the twenty-first day of the month, winter solstice.”