Snow (17 page)

and heard his quick intake of breath, but Michael surprised him.

"I'm sorry," he said, and sounded like he meant it. And then he'd left, closing the door quietly behind him.

A group of people came to see him later. They were dressed elaborately and spoke in measured tones, not pleading but almost, and the moment David looked at them he saw they'd been told who he was. What he could do. He saw what was in their eyes. They called him "Your Highness" carefully and stayed clustered in a knot by the door. They talked and talked, words about who he was, who he was supposed to be, and he grew tired of listening, turned away and looked back out at the gardens. Eventually they left. He heard their robes rustling, their voices fading.

"They're worried," someone said and he looked toward the door again, saw a woman standing there. He'd seen her before, with the others, but hadn't really noticed her.

"I'm Judith," she said, and her voice was kind, her smile warm, her gaze welcoming. "We all stood here, talking, and never introduced ourselves, did we?"

He shook his head, then looked back out the window again. The blue yellow sky of the desert garden still glowed brightly. Judith didn't leave and when he glanced over at her again she was looking at him very carefully, and the way she was, that careful expression, as if she was looking through him, down past everything and directly at him, made him think of Alec. He folded his hands together.

"I suppose it doesn't matter," she said. "I know who you are and now you know who I am. Do you want to know what they're worried about?" Her expression was still kind but her voice was a little sharper and that reminded him of Alec too. He thought about snow, about the quiet it would bring. He could almost hear it. When he still didn't answer she moved closer, kneeling down beside him as he sat in the still broken chair.

"They're worried about what you might do," she said and now her voice was very calm, precise.

"They don't know that you've been here for quite a while and the land--" She pointed toward the gardens. "Still as it ever was. Whatever power you have, it's not as it was, not here. But where you were," she paused for a moment and looked directly at him and in that moment he knew she was the reason why he was here. "Did you know it's still bound in snow? Oh, it doesn't fall anymore but all that did when you were young--it's still there. It's never melted and the land is still locked in winter. Your brother and sister would give anything to have you back with them, don't you think?"

"If you were going to send me back," he said slowly, carefully, "you would have done so already. But I'm here instead and you're the reason why, aren't you?"

She looked startled for a moment, but only for a moment, and then she said, "Yes. I'm why you are here. I found you, told the King."

"I was happy," he said softly and thought about her arm, lying so close. He could touch her easily and watch her face change. "I had--I had a home."

"The King needed to know," she said and didn't move but the softness in her eyes had faded away completely. "Every advantage that can be found is his by right. He deserves no less. And if you--if you dare to try and hurt him--" Her voice was proud, fierce. Frightened, and when he heard that he understood why she'd stayed.

"So you've come to tell me to be careful," he said and heard winter in his voice. "To warn me not to forget where I am, why I'm here. You, who told the King about me. You, who made sure this is where I'll forever be." He paused and then let one finger brush against her arm, whispered, "I'll be careful. I won't forget. Not ever."

He looked back out on the gardens again. Snow wasn't falling yet but he could hear it, feel it building. He closed his eyes and waited. He heard Judith's footsteps cross the floor, moving away.

Out in the hallway Judith stood silently by herself, waving away the servants that fluttered toward her. She thought of Alec asking for her promise, of his voice cracking when he asked her to be careful with David.
He doesn't understand how things are
. She had expected sadness, a fragile spirit matching all the stories she'd heard, a beautiful prince doomed to bear a curse. She hadn't expected such anger, such grief. She hadn't expected that David would love Alec as Alec loved him.

She would have to be very careful indeed.

It snowed that night, the sky filling with clouds and then endlessly drifting streams of snow.

David had waited for it, longed for the soft sounds it made, for how it would fill the sky, and when it finally came he thought of himself wrapped in it, of the entire palace surrounded by it, and smiled. There was a mirror on the wall and he looked at his smile, at his mouth stretched up wide and cruel, and liked it. He watched himself until the mirror iced over and then shattered, and then he watched the snow again. He willed it to fall faster, farther. Forever.

When it was still dark he watched a group of servants enter the gardens, stamping their feet and blowing on their hands, shoulders hunched against the cold. They began to clear everything carefully, wiping away the snow so it looked like it never fell at all. The pleasure he'd felt before faded and he thought of his nurse's hands trapped on a pew, of the look on her face as he watched her wait helplessly for them to warm. He watched the servants, working in the dark because of him, and thought of Alec underground, trapped in the dark and digging because rocks there held value to those with power.

The snow stopped and when the sun rose it cut through the gray clouds, scattering red-yellow light everywhere. David watched one of the servants cleaning the gardens stop and lift his face up toward it, smiling a little before turning away to brush snow off a clump of flowers. The servant's hands were shaking from cold but he still moved them carefully and when he was done the flowers looked beautiful, shining bright in the early morning light.

David looked at the shards of glass on the floor. After a moment, he got up and picked them up, placed them in a shining pile on a table in another room, out of sight. A maid, tall and strong and clearly not a maid at all from the short sword worn strapped to her side, came in when the sun had risen higher and the servants were gone, leaving the gardens empty once more. She asked him if he wanted another mirror.

"No," he said. "I don't."

Michael came back when the sun had reached the top of the sky and David sat watching the gardens with a tray of uneaten food in front of him. He slid across the ice-coated floor, a look of surprise crossing his face before it was replaced by a grin shaped by surprise and heat. He stopped near him and shifted from one foot to another, low laughter as his feet slipped again.

"Cold in here," he said, and as David looked at him his smile faded into something softer.

Something hopeful. David looked back out the window and hated the sharp pricking of joy he felt hearing Michael's soft sigh. He knew staying in this place would turn him into what he never wanted to be.

"Does--" Michael cleared his throat and he sounded like David had when he'd talked to Alec on a long-ago night, when he'd known what he wanted but was so unsure of how to say it, to ask.
But
I want to stay with you
. "Does it--the cold--bother you? Because I could have someone build a fire or bring you some blankets or…"

"I don't feel it." He wondered what it would feel like to walk through the pretend desert Michael had created, what he would find on the other side. Who he would think about if he looked up at the fake sky.

"Oh." Michael was silent for a moment and then he moved a little closer, looked out at the gardens. "Which one is your favorite? I like--" He pointed at the one filled with flowers. "And Alec, he liked--" He broke off and when David finally looked at him Michael was watching him.

"I used to wish that--" Michael said, and David shook his head. He didn't want to know about Michael and Alec, didn't want to hear their story. Not now. Not ever. He knew that if he did he wouldn't be able to bear it. Michael nodded and there was understanding in his eyes. After that they didn't talk. They just looked out the window together, at all the perfect worlds laid out before them.

Michael came to see him every day. Every day he'd come and David would wait, a long while at first and then less as loneliness bloomed inside him, before he would turn away from the window and see Michael sitting there, a hesitant smile on his face.

At first Michael only asked if David needed anything, if he'd slept well. Polite questions, soft questions, and the first time David answered him the smile that lit Michael's face cast rainbows around the room, the ice that had coated everything cracking and yielding to the sun because David had never seen anything as lovely as Michael's smile. That day he let Michael take him to the gardens, walked through one laid out with trellises of climbing flowers and soft blue grass blowing in a wind that wasn't real.

After that Michael asked other questions. Nothing about David's life before, a kindness David resented and desperately needed, but he was endlessly curious about everything else. What colors did David like? What sort of foods did he dream of eating? If Michael showed him a map of the city, would David tell him what he thought of Michael's plan for a new harbor? And when David said he sang Michael didn't ask him to sing for him. He sang for David instead, created rhythm and words with his voice and smiled far away when he was done. "I always wanted to be a singer," he said. "That's how I met--" He broke off and cleared his throat, then reached over and touched David's hand.

"I didn't mean to--" he said. "I just--when I'm around you, I can't think," and he meant it. David moved him past thought, past reason. It was there in his voice and it was easy to lean in close, to watch Michael's eyes flutter closed. The power of it was heady in him, rising dark and singing through his body. It was all he had now.

Michael's mouth was smooth and warm and tasted faintly of roses. David bit down because he knew he could and the rose taste faded into something warmer, flavored hot and metallic-tinged, and Michael moaned, mouth opening wider under his. The walls frosted over and when they parted their breath came out as soft white clouds, mingling over and around them to fall freezing to the ground.

David put a hand on Michael's chest, over his heart, and watched Michael's breath catch. He curled his fingers and pictured cold stabbing through skin, past bone, into the soft flesh underneath. So easy. Such a little thing, a heart. So easy to break.

He moved his hand lower, heard Michael's breath start again, race rapid, form his name in wonder and heat and more than a hint of fear, and let loose the roaring darkness inside him.

Michael called him David but only when they were alone. In public he called him by names David didn't know but was told were his own, a long lyrical line of them that he learned to respond to only when he turned them into song, a string of words running together in his mind.

He told Michael that once as they lay curled together, sated and empty and tired of feeling alone, and Michael had laughed and kissed him, said, "But it's who you are."

Everyone else called him "Your Highness," and bowed low whenever he walked by. Only Michael's eyes were allowed on him although sometimes, when he was sitting by Michael's side during his morning meetings, he would feel Judith looking at him.

"David is--it's like a secret," Michael said one night, the two of them lying in Michael's bed. It was a lovely bed, carved and tall and piled high with the softest blankets David had ever felt. "It sounds like one, don't you think? Something private. Something only we share." He kissed him and David opened his mouth, swallowed down words there was no point in saying. Michael gasped and arched into him, skin prickling with cold.

David called Michael by name when he came, sometimes, when the roaring inside him was a scream, when Michael was shivering and pleading and staring at him with dazed almost frightened eyes. The rest of the time he never called him anything, just closed his eyes or opened his mouth or smiled. Michael never noticed. He knew who he was and it was who he wanted to be.

Michael never mentioned Alec to him, never again tried to tell him their story or get David to share his own, and David was grateful for that. He wanted his memories to be his, hoarded them tightly inside himself, the one tiny place he could go and feel free. And Alec and Michael--all he knew was that it had ended and that itself was too much, rubbed a raw place inside him that roared every time Michael smiled. He didn't know how Michael had found Alec and then given him up. He never could have done that.

If he'd had a choice, a real choice, he never would have.

Michael was proud of who David was. Of what he could do. The first time he told someone, David sitting by his side in a banquet room that spanned so far he couldn't see the end of it, David had been shocked, hearing everything he could do--had done--laid out, Michael's voice lilting as he talked of land that David had ruined, of how he could cloud the skies if he chose.

After a while, he grew used to it. He would listen to the stories of what he could do, what he'd done, and let his mind drift away. Sometimes he would see Judith watching him, a frown creasing her forehead as she looked at his fingers lying still and quiet within Michael's, being held but never holding.

***

Michael wanted him to be happy.

"I'm going to make you happy," he'd told him, not the first time David woke up to find Michael smiling at him but the second, the third, the fourth. He said it every time after that and eventually David said, "I am," and "You do." They were just words and they were easy enough to say.

Sometimes it frightened him, how everything inside him seemed hollowed out, gone.

And then one morning, standing silently while the maid who wasn't one watched the dressers hovering around him, a thought came to him. As it bloomed it was like a flame inside him. The tan door and Gladys living behind it. She would still be there. She might--he stopped the thought before he could finish it.

The maid who wasn't one was watching him with flat eyes, and when he smiled at her she looked right through him. He could see Judith all over her.