Harrowing the Dragon (Short stories) by Patricia A. McKillip

Author:Patricia A. McKillip [McKillip, Patricia A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781101208502
Publisher: Ace Books; Berkley Publishing Group
Published: 2005-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

The Snow Queen

Neva entered late. She wore white satin that clung to her body like white clings to the calla lily. White peacock feathers sparkling with faux diamonds trailed down her long ivory hair. Her eyes were black as the night sky between the winter constellations. They swept the room, picked out a face here: Gerda’s—How sweet, Neva thought, to have kept that expression, like one’s first kiss treasured in tissue paper—and there: Kay’s. Her eyes were wide, very still. The young man with her said something witty. She did not hear. He tried again, his eyes growing anxious. She watched Kay tell another story; the women around him—doves, warblers, a couple of trumpeting swans—laughed again. He laughed with them, reluctant but irresistibly amused by himself. He lifted champagne to his lips; light leaped from the cut crystal. His pale hair shone like the silk of Neva’s dress; his lips were shaped cleanly as the swan’s wing. She waited, perfectly still. Lowering his glass, the amused smile tugging again at his lips, he saw her standing in the archway across the room.

To his eye she was alone; the importunate young lapdog beside her did not exist. So his look told her, as she drew at it with the immense and immeasurable pull of a wayward planet wandering too close to someone’s cold, bright, inconstant moon. The instant he would have moved, she did, crossing the room to join him before his brilliant, fluttering circle could scatter. Like him, she preferred an audience. She waited in her outer orbit, composed, mysterious, while he told another story. This one had a woman in it—Gerda—and something about angels or fish.

“And then,” he said, “we had an argument about the first word in the world.”

“Coffee,” guessed one woman, and he smiled appreciatively.

“No,” suggested another.

“It was for a crossword puzzle. The first word you learn to conjugate in Latin.”

“But we always speak French in bed,” a woman murmured. “My husband and I.”

Kay’s eyes slid to Neva. Her expression remained changeless; she offered no word. He said lightly, “No, no, ma chère, one conjugates a verb; one has conjugal relations with one’s spouse. Or not, as the case may be.”

“Do people still?” someone wondered. “How boring.”

“To conjugate,” Neva said suddenly in her dark, languid voice, “means to inflect a verb in an orderly fashion through all its tenses. As in: amo, amas, amat. I love, you love—”

“But that’s it!” Kay cried. “The answer to the puzzle. How could I have forgotten?”

“Love?” someone said perplexedly. Neva touched her brow delicately.

“I cannot,” she said, “remember the Latin word for dance.”

“You do it so well,” Kay said a moment later, as they glided onto the floor. So polished it was that the flames from the chandeliers seemed frozen underfoot, as if they danced on stars. “And no one studies Latin anymore.”

“I never tire of learning,” Neva said. Her gloved hand lay lightly on his shoulder, close to his neck. Even in winter his skin looked warm, burnished by tropical skies, endless sun.

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