Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

I nodded, took his hand and squeezed it. I felt as though every nerve in my body was firing at once. Bright images flared in my mind as the Curators and Paphians shouted—

“ hang the boy and raise the girl

‘ til Winterlong is broken!”

—figures resplendent as though painted on glass. Aidai Harrow; Emma Harrow in the Home Room, flinging ; broken hibiscus blossom into my lap; the Paphian child Fancy standing on tiptoe to embrace Raphael Miramar, hi face flushed as he gathers her to his breast, as he turns to me and it is my own face there, my arms enfolding the child. Sorrow pierces me and I feel my knees buckle. Darkness whirls behind my eyes. Justice catches me before can fall.

“Wendy—”

I lift my head and see him, his blue eyes worried. Behind him stands Toby Rhymer staring at me, his hand tight about a mug of steaming wine. He says nothing but continues to stare. I know then that he heard Justice name me, that he has suspected for some time and now he knows. Slowly a smile creeps across’ his face as he raises the glass his eyes glittering.

“Through Winterlong, Wendy Wanders,” he murmurs and drains the mug. He turns to gaze at the House before us, Paphians like brilliant pennons waving from the step and balconies and snowdrifted terraces of Saint-Alaban.

Adonia Saint-Alaban, the suzein of the House, greeted us as we clambered from the pantechnicon.

“Through Winterlong, cousins,” she called as she descended the main stairway to the drive. She wore a long tunic of scarlet cloth worked with green thread. Even in mourning, the Paphians would be fashionable. She was older than most of the other suzeins, older than any Paphian I had ever seen. Small and plump, she was still beautiful, with the same slanted blue eyes that marked Justice and Lalage and others of the House Saint-Alaban. On each high cheekbone a crescent moon was tattooed in red and violet ink. She chanted her words in a voice raspy from ears of smoking kef and opium.

“Justice, my dear cousin, everyone is waiting to see you!” he made him the Paphians’ beck, then kissed him. Behind her, Paphians radiant in gold and crimson and blue swarmed down the steps to join the crowd outside. Some of them began lugging props and baskets of costumes from the pantechnicon. Others brought steaming bowls of wine and whiskey to the Curators, and then helped them carry their macabre standards inside. Still others greeted the players, bowing to Toby and kissing Miss Scarlet’s gloved paws. Before I could rejoin Justice several of his bedcousins lifted him onto their shoulders. Laughing resignedly, he waved to me as they bore him up the steps. After greeting Toby and Miss Scarlet, Adonia Saint-Alaban took me by the arm and led me indoors.

“Dear Sieur Aidan, our House is honored to have you here, tonight of all nights.” She leaned against my shoulder, her tongue flicking unsettlingly close to my ear. I smiled uneasily, tossing back the folds of my heavy cape.

“What a lovely costume!” she exclaimed, admiring my boots and crimson tunic. Her eyes lingered on the ornament I wore around my neck, a gift from Justice: a necklace of gold worked to resemble vines and trumpet-shaped flowers like lilies, traded from the Historians.

I nodded my thanks. “Your bedcousin Justice helped me with it,” I said. We paused at a set of massive wooden doors flung open to reveal the Great Hall. I blinked at the sudden blaze of candles and gaslights, huge cylinders of glass and metal suspended from the ceiling by chains and so dazzling that I had to look away for a moment.

“At Winterlong we set the night on fire to keep the Gaping One at bay,” said Adonia, smiling. Her eyes darted across the sweep of marble, as though to make sure there was no corner left unlit.

I wished for a shred of darkness: my eyes ached at so much radiance. Hundreds of revelers moved across a floor of polished marble, blazing nearly as brilliantly as the chandeliers overhead. The masquers seemed to course through a forest of flame. Evergreens were everywhere trees that would have dwarfed the theater but here made copses of green and silver, their boughs so heavy beneath dripping candles that I marveled they did not break. Beside each one stood a Saint-Alaban child, clad in shifts of diaphanous yellow so that their slender forms were silhouetted in the candlelight. The children held salvers of water, and laughed and sprayed one another until their costumes hung wet and limp. I wondered aloud at this unreliable method of firefighting.

“Oh, there’s never any problem,” Adonia assured me “The candles are set far beneath the leaves, and beside the trees were all cut this morning. Green wood shouldn’t burn.”

A young boy from Illyria sidled beside her. A wreath of pine cones crowned his black curls. “The masquers from Illyria want to know where their seats are during dinner, he said.

Adonia’s hand fluttered before her face. “Oh! I forgot and put them with that spado from Persia—well, come quick, Hilary, you can help—”

Her fingers brushed my mouth and she kissed me fleetingly, so that I had a quick taste of the raw fear beneath her coy posings. Then she was gone, the spangled hem of her tunic lost among the masked harlequins and columbine and mock-Raphaels milling about the room.

I looked around at the trees like waterfalls of fire, the white smoke curled beneath the domed ceiling high above me. I inhaled the heady scent of evergreens, fir resin, and the hundreds of red roses the Botanists had brought from their greenhouses and piled beside the tinkling fountains where the children refilled their salvers.

She is afraid, I thought. She is thinking of the lazars and the Madman in the Cathedral.

I glanced at those around me: Persian dominatrices with tattooed eyelids; three swaggering boys from Miramar; an Illyrian gynander swathed cap-a-pie in ropes of emerald feathers woven to look like verdant leaves. Did they know the lazars had planned an attack this evening? If so, why were they here?

Why was I here?

I grabbed a passing girl, a Saint-Alaban with chalk-white face and eyes painted to resemble holly leaves. She went with me laughing, but her smile died when she saw who held her.

“Greetings, cousin,” she said gravely. “You honor me, Sieur Aidan.”

“What is your name?” I pulled her into a small alcove where a fountain bubbled gaily, hidden behind sheaves of dark-green holly and magnolia leaves. She trembled in my arms. “I will not harm you—”

“I know.” Her pupils had dilated with fear, but she did not resist as I drew her face to mine. “Tansy. Tansy Saint-Alaban. I was paired with your consort Justice last year at the Glorious Fourth.”

“Tansy,” I repeated. I would tap her, learn what it was that made her come tonight and perhaps face her death. “Kiss me, Tansy.”

She turned her face from me. I could see tears in her cornflower eyes.

“Why are you afraid, Tansy?” I asked, taking her chin and forcing her to look at me. “I am Aidan Arent, a Player. You’ve seen me?”

“Yes,” she answered, her voice scarcely audible above the fountain. “At the Chrysanthemum Carnival at Illyria.”

“Then why are you afraid of me? Why are you here if you are so afraid?”

She gave me a look of such sadness that I let her go. “This is my House,” she pronounced with dignity. “In ‘The Duties of Pleasure’ it says that great sorrow will come to it, but also that a Saint-Alaban will be the one to wake the Magdalene from Her long sleep. We believe that the Final Ascension is coming, now. We believe it will begin at Winterlong. So we are afraid, all of us upon the Hill; but we will not run away. Too many of us are already dead, and what good will it do to flee and join our cousins who have gone to serve the Lord of Dogs?”