He, who had always thought that Winter brought perfection, who preferred Winter because it brought snowflakes, glass-smooth ponds and all ugliness covered with pure white, now was coming to find that he did not desire the cold nearly as much as he had thought.
He looked baffled; she sighed with feigned impatience. “The night when you and Gerda saw the falling star,” she elaborated. “You both made wishes. You wished that you could go somewhere far from people, where you would not be bothered anymore, and where you could have time for your studies and inventions.” She waved a hand at the implied expanse of the Palace beyond the throne room. “You wished that it would always be Winter, so that perfection could be preserved. You desired that you should be served invisibly, imperceptibly, so that nothing could intrude on your thoughts. Here you have all that. I fail to see why you are less than content.” She made a shooing motion. “Go. Study. I brought you here so that you could create wonders. Leave me in peace until you have something to show me.”
Long habit made it possible for her to repress her smile as Kay slouched out of the room. His shoulders were hunched, his hands balled into fists at his sides. He was angry but at the moment, he was not sure who to be angry with. Himself? He had gotten what he asked for. Her? She had given him what he asked for. As yet, he did not look any deeper than that. She hoped that he would, that he would see the fundamental wrongness of what he wanted, and why. Otherwise — well, something else would have to be done about him.
Any urge to smile faded once he was gone; she did not want to have to think about what would happen if she could not salvage him. She failed very rarely, but when she did fail, it meant she must act as an evil magician would — drain him of the magic building around him and place him somewhere that it could not build again. With some primitive tribe perhaps, but certainly in a land where he did not know the language and could not ever become a Clockwork Artificer. This would effectively ruin two lives, his and the girl's. She shook her head to clear it of the melancholy thought. She had not lost yet. She was not even close to that point.
She surveyed her surroundings with a sigh. Other than the benches around the walls, the only two pieces of furniture were the clear crystal throne and the clear ice mirror. She would have used crystal there, too — except that she was the Ice Fairy. The Tradition made it so much easier to enchant things if they were made of ice.
Dear gods, she was tired to death of ice.
She left the throne room, moving silently as the kiss of snow through the long white corridors of her Palace. She, of course, could see the servants polishing, cleaning, making sure nothing marred the pristine white surfaces. The walls alternated smooth panels with carved ones, bas-reliefs of mountains, snow-covered forests, iced-over lakes, ice-caves. No humans appeared in these carvings, only the birds and animals of Winter. White Bears, foxes, deer, white Gyrfalcons, white Peregrines, snow-hares. She paused at the carving of her very own mountain and put her hand to the peak. The magic recognized her, and the entire panel slid aside. Scented warmth billowed out to embrace her as she stepped into her suite of rooms.
Here, at last, in her quarters, where no one was allowed to come but her Brownie servants, there was not one speck of white. It was all fire colors, the warmest of scarlets and browns and golds, like the red, beating heart of the Palace. The sweet scent of applewood wreathed around her. There was a huge hearth where there was always a fire burning, and standing beside windows that looked out over the trackless snow around her home were delicately nurtured plants in terracotta pots. She had, in effect, her own garden, complete with trees that reached to the lofty ceiling and gave the lie to the name Ever-Winter.
If she had not had that, she would have gone mad. Doubtless, nearly every other Ice Fairy had felt the same, since the trees and the warm private rooms had been here when she was first apprenticed — and it took a long time to grow potted trees that tall. Aleksia had changed very little except the color scheme; Veroushkha, the previous Godmother, had favored deep rose-pinks rather than scarlet and brown.
Aleksia moved forward into the embrace of her rooms, then waited while one of the maidservant Brownies unlaced her gown and slid it from her shoulders where it pooled around her feet. She shook her hair free of the crystal-topped pins, and the Brownie wrapped her in a soft, quilted-silk robe. She stood before her fire for a moment, then settled into a nest of cushions, to reflect on the odd turns of her life that had brought her here.
Aleksia was unique among the Godmothers; most of them were involved with reprimands and rewards in equal measure. Like all of them, she had been beset by a plague of magic when she had been apprenticed by Veroushka. In her case, had all the surrounding circumstances matched up, she would have been a Snow White. She had everything that was needed: she was pale as a Snow Maiden; her hair was as white as the moon; she had a sister as rosy as a flower in Summer. Their mother died in their infancy; their father remarried a Witch.
However, their new stepmother was as kind as anyone could have asked. When her own child died in infancy, she did not turn vile to the little girls. Instead, she cherished them the more. As they grew, she tried to find husbands for them that they would like — and both understood that, as they were princesses, the needs of the Kingdom came before their own. Both were prepared to wed dutifully.
But their Kingdom had a very good Godmother, who made sure to intervene at all the right times. She counseled Aleksia's stepmother when the baby died, spending long hours with her that Aleksia only now understood. She spent equally long hours with the nannies and governesses, so that Aleksia and Katya grew up as decent human beings rather than spoiled, pampered brats.
And it all paid off, although at first it certainly had not seemed that way when Katya was stricken with a terrible wasting illness. Everyone had despaired. Until a strange fellow appeared, claiming to be a doctor — and cured her.
She could still remember how she had been so suspicious of this fellow, who had looked nothing like any doctor she had ever seen. He had looked like a cross between a gentleman fallen on hard times and an utter vagabond. She had been sure he was a fraud.
He was nothing of the sort, of course. He was another of that massive tribe of wandering Princes, who scoured the Five Hundred Kingdoms hoping that something would happen to give them their own happy ending. He had, in the proper fashion, befriended a Salmon, who had advised him to undergo a quest to this very Palace, the Palace of Ever-Winter, and beg for one of the fruits of the trees of what was then Veroushka's chamber. Which he did. And, of course, the fruit was the magical cure for Katya's wasting disease.
The Prince, having no Kingdom of his own, was overjoyed to settle in theirs and become a son to their father and stepmother. Katya adored him. Prince Kobe was kind, clever, and if not handsome, was certainly not bad to look on. He loved music and books, preferring them to hunting and hawking, although he certainly knew one end of a blade from the other, and could fight very well if he needed to.