Should it disturb her that preparations for her wedding were being made without her being consulted? Perhaps. But what bothered her more was the glassblower’s dismissal of her.
Ama pulled her stool closer to the fire and reseated herself. She could be patient, she told herself. She could watch and learn.
Satisfied that Ama would stay out of his way, the glassblower began work on another lantern. It was hypnotic, watching the glass spin on the rod, watching each gather grow with his blown breath, and Ama sat and watched, hands folded in her lap, as the rack filled with orb after orb, each one near-identical to the one before.
Enough time passed that the glassblower seemed to forget Ama was there, and so when she finally asked a question, he jumped a little, startled.
“I wonder,” Ama said, “about the Eyes.”
“Everyone wonders about the Eyes,” the glassblower answered, his own eyes fixed sternly on his work once again.
“You make every Eye, do you not, for the wall?”
“I do,” the glassblower said. “I have done, for fifty years. And before I did, ’twas my father’s job, and his father’s before that.”
“And the Eyes,” Ama asked. “Is it true they have the power to effect change? That is, do they really grant wishes?”
The glassblower’s face glowed with the heat of the flames as he turned another orb in the fire. Enough time passed—minutes—that Ama gave up hope that he might answer. Then, at last, “The weak wish. The strong act.”
“Perhaps sometimes,” she said, “the wish is the action.”
“I am no philosopher,” the old man replied.
Did it matter if the glassblower was right or wrong? Did it change anything, anything at all, if the Eyes held power real or imagined? It did not. What mattered right now was what the glassblower believed, and how Ama might mold that belief, like heat-softened glass, to fit her own desires. The weak, he said, wish. And the strong . . .
Ama pushed up once more from her perch. In three steps, she was beside the glassblower, and her hand, open, reached out. Lit by the fire within and without, Ama said, “Give me the staff.” Her voice was low and steady. “Show me how to do this. How to make the glass. How to wield the fire. I command it.”
The glassblower pinched tight his mouth. He had not, Ama gathered, intended for his words to incite Ama to action. Still, she was his queen-in-waiting, and that must have commanded her some respect, for, though he did so reluctantly, he handed her his instrument.
Ama’s Accident
The more time Ama spent in the bowels of the castle, in front of the forging fire, the stronger she grew.
At first the glassblower did not trust Ama; he stood just behind her, a hand on her elbow as if ready to yank her away from the fire at a moment’s notice, should she do something stupid, chanting, “Careful, careful!” as she spun the gather of glass on the rod, as she dipped it into the fire, pulled it out and spun it again, and again, and again.
But as her days fell into a routine—breakfast in her chamber, then down to the glassblower’s rooms to stand and work by the fire, then back to her room to dress for dinner, then a heavy meal with Emory and the queen mother—the glassblower grew more comfortable, and Ama proved through her work to have a gift for the art.
True, there was a constant, needling pain that came from leaving Sorrow alone in the room. But there was pain now, too, when Ama stayed away from the fire and her work. With Sorrow, Ama ached for the glass; with the glass, Ama ached for her companion.
She had tried to pair her two loves, on her third day down in the fireroom, but the lynx had started panting as soon as they had passed the threshold, before they were even close to the great fire itself. Her pink tongue folded out of her mouth, droplets of saliva stretching from its tip; she narrowed her eyes to slits as if to keep out the hot air; a whining sound came out from her, like a single fiddle note, high and sharp.
Ama had passed her back to Tillie, who, as on the days before, had walked with Ama down to the glassblower’s room, and she told the girl to return Sorrow to her chamber above. As Ama’s time spent below stretched into hours, the twist of guilt she felt for abandoning her Sorrow was counterweighted by her pleasure, the stretching and uncurling of her soul.
Emory was well pleased by the shift in his bride-to-be’s countenance. But though the king knew that Ama spent her days near the forging fire, the glassblower suggested that perhaps it would be best not to go into details about whether Ama was simply warming herself or actively participating in the creation of glassworks. “No need to tell everyone what you are doing down here,” he said, practically humming, as he carefully placed Ama’s newest sculpture—a silvery spray of water, like a breaking wave—onto a high shelf. “’Tis not my place to order the queen-in-waiting not to indulge her fancies, but neither ’tis it my place to upset Harding’s social order.”
Still, the regularity with which Ama’s artwork disappeared from the fireroom and the talk she heard at banquet about the glassblower’s sudden upsurge in creativity, combined with the growing stack of gold coins he rattled through his hands as she worked, told Ama that the elderly artisan would be in no great hurry to see her gone from his firing room.
And the compliments Ama gathered from everyone—Tillie, the queen mother, and Emory, most of all—on her rosened cheeks, the plumpness of her mouth, upturned into a smile, the comely way her breasts seemed to swell up out of her corsets, like risen bread, attested to the improvements in her health since she had begun spending time with the glassblower.
“The heat does you good,” Emory murmured at her ear one night just outside her chamber door after the evening meal. Ama, as ever, stood very still as Emory breathed, hot and moist, against her ear, his hands skimming her shoulders, down her arms, across her waist, and back up to her breasts, which he took in both his hands and squeezed. “Soon I will be the one to warm you, and from the inside,” he promised, before taking her bottom lip in his teeth and pulling it into his mouth, sucking there hard enough to leave it swollen.
But it was not the heat alone that was responsible for Ama’s blooming health. Ama knew it was the work that did her good. Perhaps even more than the heat, or perhaps it was the combination of them both—the constant fire, roiling and hot, and the feeling of channeling it into the creations she made each day.
Having the pieces she created soon disappear was a fair trade for the pleasure Ama had in making them, but still, when she would return to the furnace room to find her latest creation sold, it did bring a pang, each time. For Ama felt as if perhaps she was doing more than creating sculptures of glass; as the glass warmed and melted, changing shape beneath her hands and her breath, it seemed to her that she was pulling images out of her lost memory, out of her life before she was kidnapped.
A gray wave cresting into foam.
A sharp-edged tower growing from a cliff.
A garnet rose, big as her hand.
A blue-chested bird, perched on a delicate branch.
A yellow orb, round and perfect as the sun.
A series of flat green leaves, piled up haphazardly together.
Ama had never seen a green leaf since she had been rescued by Emory; it had been fall, then winter all the life she had memory of. She had never seen red roses, either, but she formed them out of heat and glass just the same. All the bright birds had flown south for the winter, and yet still Ama made them, one after the other, flocks of jewel birds, and as she created them, it was as if she heard their song. She smelled the rose’s scent as she crafted red petals; she knew the whisper of wind between waxy leaves as she formed her growing piles of green foliage.