Ama yanked her hand away, but everyone nearby was now focusing on her.
“Ama,” Emory said, “show me.”
For a moment, Ama considered refusing him. Her eyes darted around the table and found everyone staring at her, Pawlin with a twisted smile.
Slowly, she extended her hand. Emory took it. His mouth grew tight and hard as he examined what she had done to herself.
“It is nothing,” Ama said. “It barely hurts at all anymore.”
“How did this happen?” Emory demanded.
“An accident,” Ama said. “I was . . . watching the glassblower work, just staying warm by the fire, and I felt curious what it might be like to wield the glass myself. It was not his fault!” she added quickly. “I pushed the glassblower to let me try my hand at the fire. I am a silly girl. I was careless. It shall not happen again.”
The table was stunningly silent. No one moved, or even breathed—not the servants, not the nobleman Grant or his overloud wife or their four boorish sons—not even Ama herself, though she could feel the pressure of her held breath burning in her lungs.
“You thought to wield the fire,” Emory said, his voice nearly a whisper. “Tell me, what did you try to make?”
“Only a vase, my king,” Ama said, the truth, and then a lie—“for our wedding table.”
Emory looked up from her hand. His blue eyes were a storm. “Only a vase, you say?”
Ama nodded.
“You, dear damsel,” Emory began, and as he continued his voice swelled to match the storm in his eyes, “you do not make the vessels. You are the vessel.” And with this last word—vessel—his voice filled everything. The room. The cups. The ears of every guest and servant. Ama’s mouth, and stomach, and heart.
“You dare to burn the hand of my bride?” he said, his fingers tightening around Ama’s. And now his voice was quiet again, and all around the table, the nobleman Grant and his wife and four attending sons leaned forward, and Ama had the distinct impression that Emory was both angry and performing anger, in the same breath.
“Do you mean . . . my hand?” Ama asked.
“Your hand does not only belong to you, Ama. I found you, I named you, I brought you here. You are my bride, and your flesh is my flesh. Do not treat it so roughly. In fact,” he continued, discarding Ama’s hand and lifting instead his goblet, from which he took a deep pull of wine, “it is for the best that you do not return to the glassblower’s fireroom. Since you are, as you say, a silly, careless girl.”
“But,” Ama began. She felt heat rising in her cheeks. From shame? From anger? “But I must return,” she said. “What about the vase I intend to make, for our wedding table?”
“Nonsense,” Emory said. He motioned to a valet to bring him another slice of meat. The man leaped to obey. “I am sure the glassblower will be glad to have you out of his hair. He is a busy and important man, and he can make any piece we may require for our wedding feast far better than you could hope to do. We should not have forced him to be your nursemaid even this long.”
“That—” began Ama, but Emory cut her off.
“I am sure there is much for you to learn before our wedding night,” he said. “But best it be learned from the castle’s women. Perhaps you’d be better set alongside the kitchen hearth to keep you warm, and with the maid Fabiana as your teacher.”
His grin was wide and slow, as if he thought certainly his inference would be lost on Ama.
It was not.
That seemed to be the end of it, and the guests, with evident relief, returned to their food and conversation.
“A girl can be burned just as surely at the kitchen’s fire as the glassblower’s,” Ama said, but without any real hope of changing Emory’s mind.
“Perhaps after the banquet,” Emory said, leaning in close and dropping his voice so that just Ama could hear him, “you can show me how careful a girl can be.” And then he smiled again, and his inference, once more, was not lost on Ama. Not lost at all.
Ama’s Lessons
With the fireroom forbidden to her, Ama had no choice but to submit to the onslaught of wedding preparations, to the arranging of hair and lacing of stays that seemed to be the true backbone of her life here at the castle.
Banquets and guests and wine and spiced meats. Gowns and ribbons and slippers and braids. Chewing and sipping and swallowing, swallowing. All of it, the preparation, the repetition, the mastication, seemed absolutely meaningless to Ama.
If she were choosing—but, of course, she was not free to choose—her days would be spent in the fireroom, working at the glass, where Ama would not need fancy gowns—indeed, a place where elaborate dresses would be an undeniable detriment. She would need something simple, perhaps, to protect her tender flesh from the molten glass and fire, something not too loose so as to be a danger near the flames, but not so fitted as to constrict.
Constrict. Constrain. Conscript. Construct. Consume.
Words beat in Ama’s head as her heart beat against the boning and binding of the gown in which she stood, trapped—the dress that was to be her wedding gown. It managed to be both debilitatingly loose in sleeve and train, making moving even about the room a difficulty, and uncomfortably binding, squeezing against her ribs and pushing her breasts together and up in a terribly uncomfortable fashion.
“Be still, lady,” Tillie admonished through a mouthful of pins. She knelt at Ama’s feet to adjust the gown’s hemline, pinning it up so that just the toes of Ama’s velvet slippers peeked out.
“I am trying,” Ama said, and she heard the irritated snap of her words, “but how much longer will this take?”
“Longer if you move than if you submit,” Tillie mumbled, doing her best to pin the hemline straight.
The girls on either side of Ama, whipstitching the arms in place, broke into tandem giggles.
Ama could not see what was so funny about her predicament, and her face must have reflected her confusion, for Tillie said, “Don’t mind the girls, lady. Their minds go straight to the gutter, they do.”
“Ah,” Ama replied.
Behind her, Sorrow paced the room. It had been too long since last Ama had taken the cat out of doors, and Sorrow’s pent-up energy roiled beneath her darkening coat, stretching her muscles and sinews, and escaped in the form of a constant, low growl.
Ama made a decision. “I will give you ten minutes more,” she said to Tillie. “Then I shall take Sorrow to the gardens to train.”
“We do not have time for that today,” Tillie said, her eyes on her work. “And besides, it threatens to snow again soon. It is not a good day for you to go out of doors.”
“Tillie,” Ama said, “which of us will be queen in less than two weeks’ time?”
Tillie’s hands, full of pins, froze at Ama’s hemline. She looked up. “You, lady. You shall be queen.”
Ama nodded, once. “Ten minutes,” she said.
Ama expected that going outside with Sorrow would feel like a great triumph, an escape, but the garden, too, was walled, and though Ama would have liked to run and play with the lynx, and though she unclipped the golden leash from Sorrow’s collar when they reached the garden, Pawlin appeared almost as soon as they had arrived, as if he had been waiting for them, and reminded Ama that the pair of them still had work to do.