It was accepted, Ama’s self-imposed isolation; it happened this way sometimes, with damsels, in the days before the wedding, or so Ama heard from the whispers of the women who tended to her. But she did not respond. Her eyes were the only part of her that seemed to move at all; back and forth they darted, from the fire to the snow falling outside the window and back to the fire again.
Tillie pulled open Allys’s drawstring bag each day, redressing the burn on Ama’s left hand, but as soon as she left, Ama would wipe the balm away, leaving a greasy stain on her skirt, and stare into the glass-mottled scar as if trying to see something in it.
“Lady, please,” Tillie begged each time she entered the room, this time proffering a mug of ale, that time presenting a meal, another time suggesting a change of gown, a change of venue, a change of outlook.
But Ama had already changed. She did not know where she had started, or what she had been, but she knew it was not this.
Not this, she thought, looking at her hands, one scarred, one pure.
Not this, she thought, her breaths constricted by the gowns she had to wear.
Not this, she thought, shaking her head slowly as she watched Sorrow grow thin and lank, shoulder bones jutting.
Not this, she thought, upon seeing her reflection in the silver goblet Tillie forced into her hands.
But she did see something in the goblet’s gaze that startled her into motion. She blinked, set down the goblet roughly, its contents splashing onto the table, and strode across her room to the tall ovular mirror where she stood for all her fittings.
She stepped close as she could to the mirror and stared into the eyes reflected back.
Had her eyes always been this color? They were tawny, like chestnuts. Had they not once been lighter? More yellow? Like Sorrow’s, and like the Eye she had taken from the wall?
But the eyes that blinked back at her were not amber. Decidedly not.
Ama returned to the fire and knelt by the lynx. She stroked the cat’s greasy pelt, from forehead and down along her back, feeling each heartbreaking knob of the cat’s spine. After a moment, Sorrow blinked open her amber eyes, then dropped them once more upon the hearthrug, as if even the effort it took to hold open her eyes was too great.
She was dying. Ama knew it. Though there were just three days remaining until Ama’s wedding to Emory, Ama was certain that Sorrow would not live that long.
“Oh, Sorrow,” Ama said. “My darling Sorrow.” Sick of stomach but sure of what she must do, Ama rose to her feet.
“Tillie,” she called, her voice strong and clear, and the girl must have been just outside her door, for she appeared at once.
“Yes, lady?”
“Find the king,” Ama ordered. “Tell him I have need of him.”
No one wanted Ama to leave the castle in such weather. She was delicate, they said, and in poor health. She should wait until after the wedding, at least, to venture out of doors.
But Ama insisted.
And so it was that she and Emory were bundled into a carriage heaped high with furs, and with hot stones at their feet, and Sorrow, as well.
Ama did not feel like talk as their carriage steered through the town, and Emory did not press her for conversation, for which Ama was grateful. She and he sat side by side, underneath a shared fur, and she felt the warmth of his long leg down the side of her through the layers of their clothing. Sorrow lay pressed against the door, in spite of the cold that seeped in underneath, panting.
Ama watched the cat’s long needled tongue and listened to her labored breathing until she could stand it no more. And then she burst out, “It is not warm! Why does she pant?”
“It is a sign of stress in an animal,” Emory answered. “It need not be warm for an animal to fear.”
Ama leaned down to stroke Sorrow’s head. The lynx neither rejected nor registered this affection, her panting continuing, a ruff of her fur jutting up where her collar wound around her neck.
At last they reached the wall, and the gatekeeper—a different man than the one who had abandoned his post in the rainstorm, Ama noticed, but with disinterest—pulled back the bar to let the carriage through. But snow piled too high a mere fifty yards from the gates, where there were no peasants to clear it away after such a storm, and the horses couldn’t pull them much farther. So Ama yanked open the carriage door, ignoring Emory’s call—“Let me do it, Ama, you should stay inside”—and stepped out into the snow.
The drifts were knee high and dense as death. Ama’s legs felt the shock of cold, and then tingled into numbness. She turned back to the carriage and lifted the lynx, who was so large now, and awkward to carry. At least the lynx was large. Perhaps her size would help her.
Then, Sorrow in her arms, Ama turned into the vast whiteness of the world beyond the wall.
Each step cost her. The snow, like hands, gripped her ankles, clawed at her skirts. Ama walked a pitifully short distance away from the carriage—no more than a few feet—before her knees trembled and she could go no farther.
Then, gently, she set Sorrow on the snow. She took the lynx’s head in her hands and turned her face up so that Ama could look down into her amber eyes. She knelt, and kissed the lynx’s head, and pressed her forehead against the cat’s.
“Sorrow,” she said, low and quiet so that only the cat could hear, “I love you. Run free, my darling. Catch rabbits. Drink from streams. Remember me, if you like. Forget me if that suits you.”
Sorrow’s head was up now, her eyes brighter, her nose twitching in the cold air as if she smelled delights unknowable to Ama, who reached for the clasp of the collar and, with nearly frozen fingers, managed to wrench it free.
“Sorrow is no more your name,” Ama announced, her voice louder. “Now I call you Fury.”
The collar slipped to the snow, nothing but rubbish, and free of it, Fury shook her thick dappled coat. She turned her head in the direction of the forest, sniffed the air once more, and was off—her first few steps a trot until she found her legs in the snow, and then she ran, loping fast and free, away from Ama, and Emory, and the carriage, and the wall, and all the things behind it.
She did not look back, not once.
Emory’s Grip
Ama knelt in the snow, staring after Fury, long past the time when the lynx had disappeared into the frost-heavy trees of the forest.
It would be fine if I knelt here until I became the trees. Until I became the snow. The thought filled Ama’s mind, and she felt herself growing stiller and stiller, her limbs stiffening in the cold, her eyes half frozen, gazing after her Fury, not wishing her back but wishing her on, on, away, gone.
“Ama!” called Emory from the carriage behind her. She heard him throwing back the furs, she heard the squeak of his foot on the runner.
Quickly, now, with fingers so stiff as to be nearly useless, Ama reached beneath her cloak and plunged her hand—so icy—down the bodice of her gown. She fumbled blindly, fingers too cold to feel, and heard Emory trudging through the snow.
There. Her fingers clawed at the Eye, warmed by her breasts, and plucked it out. It flashed, amber and open, all-seeing and blank at the same time. And then she closed her fingers into a fist, and it disappeared.
Emory’s footsteps crunched ever closer through the snow. Quickly, now, Ama pressed her fist into the snow at her feet, only opening her fingers when they were deep buried. Then she pulled up her hand and smoothed the snow over, blanketing the Eye where it would rest until spring. Finally, she stood and turned to Emory.