A Daughter of Winter by A.L. Knorr

Author:A.L. Knorr [Knorr, A.L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Intellectually Promiscuous Press

Nineteen

Çifta

The clouds shifted and daylight moved rapidly into night.

What am I supposed to see? Çifta wondered as she floated high above Silverfall City.

Her host did not reply. It was silent but felt, like the presence of someone standing at the foot of one’s bed in the dark.

From this height, it was impossible to make out individuals or details. But it was apparent that time was speeding up. The sun and the moon traded places. Day became night and back again in dizzying succession. Fighting vertigo and a desperate wish for eyelids she could clench, Çifta focused on the clouds, which boiled like a tempest. With each passing day, they grew thicker, darker; pregnant with snow. Precipitation released from time to time with blasts that turned Silverfall into a blur, softening the edges of everything. As the cycles continued, the clouds thickened further. Weeks turned into months, but the clouds did not break, nor did they rest in the spewing of snow and sleet.

The people must be suffering with so little sunlight, Çifta thought. The winter must break soon, surely?

Winter has never broken, child, the ice told her. Sylifke secured her reign, and with it, the weather. Fae have been born beneath this gloominess, a whole generation that does not know the sunlight of their forefathers and mothers. The city is full of faelings who do not know that the sky can look any different.

They descended through clouds so thick and heavy it was like being swaddled in a wet woolen blanket. The flashing of days slowed, then ceased all together as they broke through the bottom of winter’s shroud. The tallest spires pierced the overhanging gloom as the sky spewed snow and ice. Pennants looked like shredded tissue, destroyed by the driving ice. Figures moved across a courtyard, swaddled with garments. Ponies kept their heads down against the wind, their eyes and foreheads enveloped with protective headgear. Lamps sat in windows and dangled from posts, but the illumination they provided was scant. Ropes had been installed along the outer walls of the buildings, strung from ring to ring, giving fae something to grasp if weather blinded the way.

What happened to the beautiful winter kingdom that Karinya reigned over? I do not recognize this place.

That is the power of an unseelie monarch, my child. It reflects her nature with constant darkness and cold. Look ahead.

A tall, slender tower loomed, lined with small, dimly lit windows. They swept in through a crack in a stained-glass window to a spiral staircase. The figure of a bare-headed Silverfae female made her way down the steps. The lighting was poor, but Çifta recognized her short cape as the kind the harvesters had worn. They emerged from the staircase into a long, well-lit corridor, and she looked up. In the better light, Çifta could see that the cape had changed color. No longer was it pale green, now it was a watery shade of yellow-brown.

We saw her working in the snowdrop grove.

Instead of a turban, the fae’s hair hung over one shoulder in a fat, white braid.

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