Where did these things come from? Her past? Her dreams? It felt, as she worked the glass and the fire, that she was doing more than making objects. It was as if she was forming her very self out of the flames and hot soft glass. She was, Ama thought, realizing herself—that is to say, as she worked with the glass, she was making her very self more real.
Ama made a series of vases out of pink and red and peach-toned glass. This one was tall and long; that one was shallow and wide-lipped. It was when she was working on the third such vessel, this one rimmed in clear glass, all along the outer edge, like a river, that she received her first burn.
It happened in an instant; as she blew the clear ribbing for the vessel, she misstepped, turned an ankle, and tripped. She caught herself before falling, but her instinct was to reach out and save the sculpture, cupping the molten glass in the palm of her left hand as it fell toward the slate floor.
A heat so intense as to feel freezing cold shot through her hand, and her fingers convulsed from the pain. Half a second later, the vase struck the slate, shattering into fragments, tinkling apart into shards of brilliant sharpness.
Ama stared down at her palm, where it had, for just a moment, held the fire-hot glass. Her flesh, inflamed and reddened, angry, was coated over with a thin skin of opaline glass. Ama bent her fingers, and the glass coating splintered, still attached to her skin, into a fine network of fractures. The pain, so intense a moment ago, lessened as Ama flexed and straightened her hand. The glass moved like scales.
“Just sweep up the shards and put them in that far bucket,” ordered the glassblower, who heard the crash but did not see the burn. “They can be melted down again for use in something else.”
His voice came to Ama’s ears as if from very far away, and she did not respond immediately, still watching her glass-coated palm stretch and relax, stretch and relax, and feeling the scratching pull of memory from deep within.
At last she looked away from her hand and down to the floor. Glass shards had ricocheted out from the splintered vase at her feet, bigger pieces at the center, smaller and smaller fragments orbiting the first great crash.
The fragments were all shades of clear and peach and pinkish gray, like scales freshly scraped from a fish. Slowly, Ama knelt down among them. With her right hand, she picked up one of the bigger fragments. A candle’s flame illuminated it from behind, and Ama turned the glass shard this way and that, catching light and reflecting it.
She would not melt down these fragments, she decided. Indeed, she would need many, many more of them if she were to create the image that had just come to her mind. Then, in spite of the throbbing pain in her left hand, Ama began to collect glass fragments with her right.
The King’s Guests
But Ama had no time to work with the fragments she collected, for Tillie soon came to the fireroom to take her away, back to her chamber for a fitting.
Ama concealed her injured hand beneath the sleeve of her gown as she followed Tillie through the now familiar corridors and back to her room, but there was no hiding it once Tillie had loosed the stays of Ama’s dress and helped her shed it.
Standing before the fire in her underthings, Ama watched Tillie’s expression as she registered the ugly red welts, the melted-in sheen of glass on Ama’s palm—first, the serving girl’s eyes widened in surprise, and she reached out to touch Ama’s hand, and then, as she realized what this burn would mean on her own flesh, how much trouble she would be in for allowing the queen-in-waiting to come to such harm, her mouth trembled, her fingers shook, and she drew them away.
“Oh, lady,” Tillie whispered.
They were not alone this day; two others, Rohesia and Fabiana, were in attendance to help with the fitting, waiting now quietly, near the foot of Ama’s bed, and their expressions were easy to read: Rohesia, shocked; Fabiana, disgusted by the disfigurement.
“You,” Tillie said, turning to Rohesia, “go and fetch my aunt. Tell her to bring her medicines.”
Rohesia nodded and whisked from the room, disappearing through the door and down the hall in a whisper of skirts.
“You,” Tillie said to Fabiana, “help me pick away the glass.”
Tillie put her hands on Ama’s forearms and seated her in the chair before the fire, then took Ama’s damaged hand between her two. “Oh, lady,” she said, again, her voice raw with shared pain.
Ama blinked down at her hand. It did not hurt anymore—not much—and as she rotated it this way and that, the glass that had melded with her skin shimmered in the light. When she curled her fingers into a fist, the glass crackled. In a way, Ama thought, it was actually quite beautiful.
Sorrow slept as Fabiana and Tillie knelt at Ama’s feet, and Tillie took a tight grip on Ama’s hand. She nodded to Fabiana, who had fingernails long like pearlescent claws, and she began the work of pulling the glass away from Ama’s palm, piece by piece.
Fabiana pinched the first fragment in her nails and pulled, and up it came—oh, there was the pain, returned to a pinpoint—and with it came a pinch of Ama’s flesh, followed by a teardrop of blood.
Perhaps it was the pain. Perhaps it was the image of that glass fragment caught between Fabiana’s nails. Perhaps it was the upwelling of blood. Whatever the cause, Ama swooned, suddenly dizzy, the room around her whooshing into a single spot of light, and then everything was black.
When she awoke, it was to find herself on the floor, her hand wrapped in clean white linen, Sorrow curled against her side, Fabiana gone, and Tillie and her aunt Allys staring down at her.
“You’ve just had a spell, is all,” Tillie said, and the familiarity of her voice, the warm press of Sorrow’s body (for she had moved close when Ama had fainted), the keen expression in Allys’s one green eye all made Ama close her eyes again.
Tillie and Allys waited, crouched, silent, until Ama blinked her eyes open, and then they helped her to standing, gripping her tightly in case she swooned again, and set her back in her fireside chair.
“I don’t know what the king will say when he sees this,” Tillie worried, her gaze on Ama’s bandaged hand.
“Why should he say anything at all?” Ama asked.
“Oh, lady,” Tillie said, “a man does not like his woman to be scarred.”
Allys said nothing. She picked up her roll of linen and her jar of balm and placed them in a drawstring bag, which she handed to Tillie. “Dress the wound fresh morning and night,” she instructed. Then she nodded her head at Ama and said, “Take care, lady.”
After Allys had gone, Tillie prepared a cup of barley tea and passed it to Ama. “I wish you could stay here in your room this evening,” she said, “but that is not possible. The first of the wedding guests have arrived, and there is to be a feast in their honor. It is the nobleman Grant and his wife, from Outer Lessing, along with a contingency of their sons.”
“A contingency?”
“Just four of them, this time,” Tillie said.
“How many sons do the nobleman Grant and his wife, from Outer Lessing, have?” Ama sipped her tea and aimed to make her voice light, so as to soften the worry line between Tillie’s eyes.