“Sorrow, come,” Ama said to the lynx, who ignored her. The sky was gray in a way that felt like memory, but that only served to irritate her more. Tillie had been right about the snow—the air was heavy with the promise of it—and Ama and Sorrow would not have long in the garden before it began to fall. Ama knew that Pawlin reported each training session to Emory, and if she were to be allowed to keep the lynx, there could be no wasted time under Pawlin’s watch, no failed training sessions.
But the lynx was not yet fully grown, still more kitten than cat, in demeanor if not in size, and away from the castle at last she seemed far more interested in stalking shadows than submitting to any training plans Pawlin had devised.
“Come,” Ama said again, her voice higher with pleading this time.
Pawlin, leaning against the garden wall, Isolda on his shoulder, watched Ama attempt to bring the lynx to heel. “She will never listen to you if she does not respect you,” he said, almost lazily. He and Isolda perched and watched and judged as Ama failed to convince Sorrow to come to her side when called. “And respect,” Pawlin said, “is the twin brother of fear. The two are a pair, you see. You cannot have one without the other.”
“I won’t have her fearing me,” Ama said through clenched teeth. She wanted Sorrow to want to come when called. She wanted Sorrow to choose obedience, if obey she must.
“Then we waste the little time we have left,” Pawlin said, drawing his cloak tighter around his tall, slim form. Isolda ruffled up her feathers as if in pantomime.
“She will learn,” Ama said. But she walked to Sorrow and reattached the leash to the lynx’s collar, a concession she had not wanted to make.
“Only if you teach her,” Pawlin chided.
Ama tugged gently at the leash. Sorrow, who had been sniffing the base of a winter-dead bush, turned her amber eyes up reprovingly. “Come, Sorrow,” Ama said, doing her best to make her voice firm and authoritative.
Perhaps it worked; Sorrow left the bush and slunk to Ama’s side. “Good girl,” Ama praised, and began to walk the circuit around the garden, praying that Sorrow would stay close the whole way around, as Pawlin said she must.
There was no joy in this endeavor; watched and judged by Pawlin and Isolda, and sickened by the feeling that what she was doing—training a lynx to heel—went against the nature of both the animal and herself, Ama felt, as she almost always felt, that it was duty rather than pleasure moving her through this chore.
They circled past the wide trunk of the walnut tree. They rounded the stone bench. They made it three-quarters of the way down the straightaway between the far side of the garden and the wall where Pawlin leaned before Sorrow had had enough of the lesson.
She stopped walking. Just like that, she stopped. And when Ama tugged at the leash, the lynx settled her haunches into the frost-laced path and dug in her claws, as well.
She was so big now, Sorrow was. Almost too large for Ama to have any hope of controlling. Ama pulled at the leash, trying to disguise from Pawlin how hard she worked to move the creature, but Sorrow did not want to be moved, and she stubbornly resisted.
Ama felt the double gazes of Pawlin and Isolda, both judging, both coldly amused, both assessing all the ways she was failing.
What was wrong with this animal? Did she not know that her very ability to stay at the castle depended on Ama’s ability to bring her to heel? Did she not understand that it was her duty to submit to Ama, just as it was Ama’s duty to submit to Emory? And why should Sorrow feel as though she had any right to an opinion, or a preference, or a desire at all, for that matter?
Ama did not have such luxuries. Ama could not determine if she “felt” like being obedient, if she “wanted” to submit to Emory. It was her duty to perform as ordered. It was Sorrow’s duty, as well, but the beast seemed obstinately unaware of this very basic fact.
“Fear and respect,” drawled Pawlin. “Two pillars, I tell you!”
“I don’t want her to fear me,” Ama said again, but this time she spoke through gathering tears and a hard, hot lump swelling in her throat.
“Better that she fears you now than King Emory later,” Pawlin said. And in his voice was something like pity, some frank offering of truth. This was the thing that broke Ama. For he was right, and Ama knew it. Better for Sorrow to fear her now than King Emory later.
“We all must listen,” she told the lynx, almost pleading. “It is for our own good.” Still the cat would not move. Stubborn, willful, selfish beast.
So, from a fold in her cloak, Ama withdrew the leather-wrapped switch that Pawlin had given her, and which she had sworn she would never use.
She straightened up, squared her shoulders, and her voice rang clear as a bell when she said, “Sorrow, come.”
When the beast still did not move, Ama closed her eyes for half a second, opened them wide, and brought the switch down. The switch tore through the air and landed on Sorrow’s flank with a loud, angry slap.
Sorrow yowled and arched her back, ears flat against her head. Then she hissed, lips pulled back, teeth flashing.
“Sorrow, come,” Ama said again. She heard her own voice as if from far away. From the sound of it, she could not tell that inside her very chest, her heart was crumbling to ash.
The lynx hissed again, and narrowed her amber eyes. Then she slunk forward and came to Ama’s heel.
“Good,” praised Pawlin. “Well done.”
He could have been praising Ama. Or, just as easily, and perhaps more likely, he could have been praising himself. For, Ama thought, as she led her Sorrow on another loop of the dead winter garden, just as the snow began to drift down from the sky, it was almost midwinter, she was almost a bride, and, like Sorrow, she was learning her lessons very well.
Seven
Sorrow’s Collar
That was the last time Ama took Sorrow out of doors for training in the garden. That night, snow fell in earnest, like heavy wet ash, and dampened the world.
Days passed, seven of them. Sorrow languished. In the week after Ama took the whip to her, the lynx refused food, only lapping apathetically at her water dish. Her coat grew greasy and unkempt. She lay with her muzzle on the hearthrug, her amber eyes tracing embers upward as they went. Her chin, ashen from the rug, barely lifted at all. The ridge of her spine and the twin arches of her hip bones jutted out.
Emory needn’t have worried about Sorrow. Ama had done for him the work of making the animal into nothing more than a listless house pet. There was no danger in her anymore. Her teeth were not used for eating, let alone attacking, and her claws, darkened by ash, would not be raised in Ama’s defense.
Tillie came and went, building up the fire again and again, and Ama sat listlessly beside it, falling once more into her own dark sadness. Forbidden now from visiting the glassblower, she did not leave her room for any reason—not even to dine with the king and the onslaught of nobles arriving for the wedding.