“Melted down, of course,” said the glassblower. “You think I keep a barrel of scraps for no reason?”
“It was not no reason,” Ama said, anger rising in her throat. “The reason was, I had need of them.”
“Beg your pardon, lady, but even the queen-in-waiting cannot tell the glassblower how to do his work.”
It would be nothing but a waste of time to argue her point. “No matter,” Ama said. “I shall make more.”
She took up a great glass bowl from its place on a rack, raised it a foot or so, and let it slip from her fingers.
The glassblower’s protest died on his lips as the bowl shattered into pieces, some as large as her hand, others as slight as dust. He watched, openmouthed, as Ama moved on to the next piece she wanted, this one a wide rosy platter, and knocked it against the edge of the rack, splintering it into a thousand fragments.
“You have lost your mind,” the glassblower said, rising.
“When I am queen,” Ama said, “I shall pay you well for your lost work, and even better for your discretion.”
The glassblower weighed her words for a long moment. Then he lowered himself back into his chair. “You shall pay me very well,” he amended her promise.
“How well,” Ama said, “will depend on how thoroughly you are able to leave me to my work.”
The glassblower sipped his drink, nodded curtly, and turned his back on her. Not quite as good as leaving the room entirely, but better than nothing.
Ama looked at the shards she had made. Each was a sliver of the thing she planned to create. She would need many, many more of them.
After all, she was building a memory. Of what, she did not yet know.
Ama’s Three Days
What is three days? To a young beauty in the arms of her beloved, it is a moment. Nine months later, to the woman she becomes, and gripped in labor, it is a lifetime.
Ama’s three days passed in both ways at once. She fell in love and she birthed, in the same motions: in the breaking of each cup, plate, bowl, platter, and vase; in the gathering of every shard, from the tiniest to the greatest; in the melting heat of the poker taken from the fire, touched to the tips of the shards, softening and melting each one.
At first, Ama did not know what she was making, only that she must make it. The pounding in her head and in the scar on her hand beat to her the queen mother’s word: Remember. Remember. Remember.
It began to take shape. Slow, slow, but sure.
As Ama melted together fragments and shards and little broken bits, her eyes began to see what her hands were making.
It was a great spined beast. Opaline. A triangular-tipped tail that widened to a thick root. An ovular body with four clever clawed hands. A crested neck. A high, wide forehead. A pointed snout.
It was, Ama saw, a dragon.
Each scale was a fragment of glass, each softened by fire and hardened into this, the thing Ama made in her three days.
At first the glassblower did his best to ignore her, as she had told him to do. But the days were long, and the nights still longer, and though Tillie appeared and reappeared, begging Ama to leave her work, to attend her final dress fittings, to sleep, if just for a little while, Ama worked on. The glassblower stayed, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep. Even while he dozed, Ama worked on, and each time the glassblower jolted awake, it was to find Ama still at her work, and her dragon becoming something more.
At last, the glassblower could neither ignore Ama’s creation nor pretend to. He stood from his chair. He peered from behind Ama, grunting as she attached another and another glassy spine. He crept closer and closer until Ama could feel his hot, moist breath on her neck.
“If you want to be of service and not just in my way,” she said finally, “you can tend the fire.”
It was to his credit that the glassblower did not complain about being relegated to the assistant’s role. The truth was that he wanted to see what became of Ama’s three days nearly as much as she did.
And so he stoked the fire to greater heat, and when his flask was dry, he refilled it with water rather than more liquor, and as the second day rounded into a third and Ama’s creation became undeniably a dragon, his grunts shifted into aahs of appreciation.
“’Tis nearly alive,” he said, “the way it catches the fire and glows. ’Tis as though it breathes.”
Ama did not look up from her work. She held a palmful of glass shards as fine as whiskers, and one by one she put the tip of each to the poker, fresh from the fire and glowing red-orange with heat, until it softened, and then she took it to the chin of the dragon, where she pressed it gently among the others, framing the dragon’s mouth with tiny, knife-sharp scales.
“What about eyes?” the glassblower said. For the dragon’s face was flat from forehead to snout.
“You would not show me how to make eyes,” Ama said, still absorbed in her delicate work.
“That was before,” the glassblower said. “Now I will show you.”
It was a moment until Ama answered. Then, “No,” she said. “Thank you, but no. I shall make the eyes on my own.”
And when she finished with the dragon’s chin, Ama took a bright-yellow chalice she had found pushed to the far back of one of the glassblower’s shelves, dusty and forgotten. She dipped it in water to clear the dust away, and then she broke it neatly on the table. She gathered the pieces into a thick metal bowl and pushed the bowl into the fire, where the fragments fell in upon each other and went from solid and sharp to liquid and without beginning or end.
But the color was not quite right, Ama saw, when she retrieved the bowl from the fire and stared into the molten glass. She took a knife-sharp shard from the worktable and ran it along her finger. Red welled up, like tears, and Ama squeezed her blood into the liquid glass.
She stirred the mixture, blood deepening the yellow to honey-rich amber, and then Ama was ready to craft the dragon’s eyes.
Now the glassblower had set himself back in his chair, arms loose at his sides. Ama formed the blood-glass into two orbs, and these she affixed to the face of her dragon.
She finished her work just as the sun went down on her third day, and she stepped back to admire it. The glassblower admired it too.
“It is beautiful,” he said, and Ama knew it was, though she knew not what it meant. They stood together, in silent appreciation of the thing Ama had done.
And then the glassblower’s door slammed open, and Emory filled the doorway.
Emory’s Third Weapon
“Master Glassblower,” Emory said, teeth set in a line, “give me a moment alone with my intended.”
And though the glassblower had not been willing to leave his room on Ama’s request, he scuttled like a beetle, through the door and away, even as Emory spoke the words.
“I have come to collect you, Ama, and take you to the altar. For it is time that you take your place at my side. I ask you, Ama—why have you not returned to your room to ready yourself for our nuptials? Surely you know that this is the night we wed?”
“I have been working,” Ama said.
Emory laughed. “Working? But . . . why?”
“Look,” Ama said, and she stepped to the side, revealing, behind her, the dragon she had made.