“I know all that,” Ama interrupted again. “I have seen all that. What I mean to say is, tell me about my face. That I haven’t seen.”
“Oh,” said Emory. “Your face.” He stared at her as if he was appraising some livestock. “You have light eyes,” he began, “not quite yellow, darker than that. Like honey. Better than brown. Quite lovely, even.”
“Please,” Ama said again. It was quickly becoming her most-used word. “I thank you for your compliments, but if you could just describe me as I am, without flourish or embellishment?”
This request seemed to make Emory uncomfortable, but after a moment he complied. “Your top lip is thinner than your bottom lip,” he began, and Ama nodded her encouragement. “Your eyebrows are darker than your hair, more auburn than red.” He tilted his head to the side and continued. “Your face isn’t round, nor square. Like a cameo, perhaps. And there’s pink in your cheeks, but not much. Some meat in your diet, perhaps, that’s what you need.”
It wasn’t a terrible attempt at describing a face, Ama felt, but still she could make no picture from his words. She lifted her hands to her face and felt it. Emory was right about her lips; the bottom did push out farther and softer than the top. Her nose, which he had not mentioned, was thin where it began between her eyes and widened at the nostrils. Still, she found she could not take the parts and make them whole.
Emory stood. “I’ve an idea,” he said. He retrieved the broken blade of his sword. It was, Ama noticed, stained red in some places, dusted with some sort of powder in others. Emory pulled his shirtfront free from the waistband of his pants and set to polishing the steel, wiping away the residue until the metal shone.
“Here,” he said, and he placed the blade in Ama’s hands.
She blinked down at the reflection there. The blade was too thin to show her countenance all at once, but here was her eye—amber, as Emory had said, flecked with gold—and here was her hairline, red and high, dipping down in the center of her forehead, the skin of which was pinkish-white, as Emory had told her.
There was her nose—a strong nose, not small, and her lips, the top one thin, the bottom full. Her chin, not as sturdy as Emory’s, perhaps, but a significant chin, nonetheless.
Ama searched in the parts of her face for something that she could recognize. Something—anything—that would tell her, this is who you are.
But there was no recognition. It was a face as unknown to her and as serviceable as her name.
“My thanks,” she said, and she returned Emory’s blade. There was a stinging in her eyes, and it frightened her, for she knew not what it meant, until water began to brim from them, and then she knew the word for tears.
Emory had but one bedroll, which he laid close to the fire for Ama, and she didn’t know if she was supposed to offer to share it with him or not, and so she chose to not. She still had his one rough blanket, too, and that she did offer him, but he refused it.
“What’s good enough for Reynard is good enough for me,” he said, and he wound the horse’s saddle blanket around his shoulders, sat with his back against a nearby tree, legs stretched toward the fire, and said, “You rest, lady. I shall be here when you wake.”
Ama lay down on the hard, uncomfortable ground, the thin bedroll barely any padding at all. She turned her face toward the fire and stared into its orange flames, breathing in the waves of heat it threw, hearing from somewhere nearby the call of an owl. “Who? Who?”
And it was with this question ringing in her ears, like a supplication for which she had no response, that Ama fell into a deep and troubled sleep.
Ama’s Dream
Luxurious warmth. Liquid warmth. Voluminous warmth.
She stretched her limbs, every joint of them, and she greeted the incalescence that radiated through her body in a powerful wave, in a jolt of welcome lightening.
Above her, huge and heavy in the sky, the red sun smiled down beneficently. She reached up toward it, head back, eyes closed, and lost herself in the wash of its heat.
It warmed her from the outside in, and she felt greedy for more, and more, and more.
She opened her eyes to gaze at her beloved, the sun, and found that it had grown closer. Perhaps she had made it so, with her own desire. It felt powerful enough—her desire—to draw the sun. It filled the whole scope of her vision now, and she could see that the sun was not one bright, flat disc of light, or even a ball of light, but rather a riotous monster of explosive flames.
She was seeing it the way it really was; she was seeing its true red heart aflame and alive. It was her lover, her mate, her first home and her last. It was her own heart made large, and she loved it. She loved the orange-red fuzz of its curve; she loved the roil and boil of its skin; she loved the explosive jets of liquid flame; she loved the quiet dance of whorls and swirls; she loved its glitter and its shine; she loved its movement and its silence. She loved the rivers of plasma, the sprays of flaming crimson, the ribbons of copper, the constantly changing, living, breathing, beating, churning, yearning orb.
She stretched her limbs to reach for it, and there it was. She took it in her hands, reveling in the burn of it. She pressed it to her chest, closed her eyes, rocked it against herself. It was her mother and her child and her lover, too, a trinity undissectible.
She brought it to her face and she kissed it, and then she opened her mouth wide, wider, impossibly wide, and she pushed the sun into her mouth, burning, yes, burning, and she swallowed it down, a path of fire scorching her throat, and then there it was, aflame inside the center of her, alive.
“She’s burning with fever,” said Emory, so far away as though heard through a long, cold, dark tunnel. “She is too hot to live.”
I am finally warm enough, Ama wanted to say, but her mouth was full of fire and she could not speak. Flames melted her eyelids closed and she could not see. The rush of roiling flames inside her made hearing Emory’s distant voice nearly impossible.
But she felt herself lifted, and carried, she felt herself jostled and nearly dropped, and then she heard another sound—was it the roar of a beast? The crackle of a fire?
Suddenly, terribly, cold assaulted her. First her feet, her buttocks, the backs of her legs, for she was slung in Emory’s arms, and then her knees, her hips, her breasts, her shoulders. She was moaning now, and clinging to him, for he was holding her, still, he was with her in this watery tomb, and she begged him, please, no, anything else, not this, please not this, and she felt the small warmth of his breath against her ear, and she turned toward it, the poor substitute of his human heat better than nothing at all, she turned to his warmth and clung to it, and begged, and then he whispered, “I am so sorry, Ama,” and then the cold closed over her, the very top of her head the last part of her to be submerged.
The sun inside her shrunk, closing like a crocus flower in the evening, turning inward, almost gone, almost nothing left at all.
She would die here in the cold. She would die in the wet and the cold, alone except for the arms that encircled her like iron bars.
She fought the cold, she fought the bars, she struggled and thrashed against the horror of it. She would not go like this! She must not!
But her fire was dying, and with it, her will, until, at last, she lay still in the iron maiden of her captor’s grip, and she accepted that now she must die.
It was then that her face broke the surface of the water and she gasped, and she coughed and sputtered and choked, and the arms felt not like bars but like buoys, and she clung to them, and she opened her eyes.