The Road to Hold-Above-the-Snow

The northern pass began, by the kingdom's old maps, twenty leagues above the upper market towns and ended, by no map's reckoning, at a small hooded gatehouse on the lower terrace of Hold-Above-the-Snow. Between the two there was no settlement larger than a way-station and no settlement smaller than a habitation, and Aelinna, who had been on the road for six days, had begun by the fifth to find that she could not, by the small soft signs of the country, tell whether she had left Krypton or whether Krypton had simply, in the small steady cooling of every evening, become a country she did not recognize. The horses' breath went out in front of them in a longer stream than it had at the third day's noon. The carriage wheels made the small high crisp sound on the road that wheels made only over half-frozen mud. The driver, who had been a quiet man at Vextar, had become a silent one by the third afternoon.

She had, in the smallest careful corner of her travelling case, a sealed letter under her mother's wax. She had, in the second corner, the bronze clock. She had, in the third, three folded pages of a copy she had made of Vesper's third letter, written out in her own hand in the small slow careful way she had been taught to copy a document she did not, in the original, want anyone else to see. She had, in the fourth corner, no letter from her father. She had not asked for one. She had not been offered one.

She had, by the fifth day, begun to understand that she had fewer guards than a princess should have.

She did not, in the small careful private way of her family, name the understanding. She watched the road. She watched the way the carriage was placed in the convoy. She counted the riders ahead of her at the noon halt. She counted the riders behind her at the evening halt. The count was four. By the small old conventions of the kingdom, it ought to have been twelve. Twelve had ridden out of Vextar; eight had been turned back, on instructions she had not seen, at the great inn at Crannet.

She had asked the captain of her column at the inn, in the small private way a princess asked a soldier a question she did not want to be heard asking.

"By whose order."

The captain had not, on the asking, met her eyes.

She had inclined her head once and had not asked another question. The captain had withdrawn. The eight riders had taken their dismissal without complaint. The four remaining had finished the trip with her without having, in any of the days since the inn, raised their voices.

A princess on a formal academy errand did not, by the convention, have her escort halved at the first border inn.

A princess of another kind might.

She did not, in any of the slow soft hours of the road, allow herself to reach any of the conclusions that the count was preparing for her. She filed it. She watched the country. She held, against the upper edge of the carriage seat where the cushion and the wall met, her gloved hand, and she did not, for any of the long hours of the climb above the upper market, take the glove off.

On the seventh morning the carriage came up the long terrace road and reached the lower gate of Hold-Above-the-Snow, and at the lower gate a second carriage was waiting.

She knew the carriage by its small careful absence of crest. She had seen it once, on the academy lawn, eleven years ago, on a morning when a small grey woman had ridden up from the upper city without ceremony and had been ushered into the inner library without any formal announcement at all. The carriage was, by every measure the kingdom kept of itself, the most untraceable rideable object in the queen's stables.

Aelinna stepped down from her own carriage at the lower gate. The Avarathan escort dismounted. The four Krypton riders stayed in their saddles. The Astronomer Royal stepped down from her own carriage at the same moment. She did not, in the stepping, lean on the small servant who had opened the door. She did not, in the moment of being on the snow, look at Aelinna directly. She looked, briefly, at the Avarathan escort. The Avarathan escort, by some small careful private signal Aelinna did not see, withdrew three paces. The astronomer turned.

She was, on second meeting, smaller than Aelinna remembered. She had grown smaller. She had been a small grey woman at fifty-eight; she was a smaller grey woman at sixty-nine. Her eyes had not changed. Her sentence-length had not changed.

"I have a seat in my carriage."

That was all she said.

Aelinna inclined her head. She walked the four paces between the two carriages. She climbed into the astronomer's carriage. The astronomer climbed in after her, with the small careful grace of an old woman who had been climbing into the same carriage for three decades, and the door closed behind them, and the carriage moved.

It was colder inside the astronomer's carriage than it had been outside.

That was the first thing Aelinna noticed. The interior was not heated. The cushions were a thin worsted cloth, neither lined nor wadded. The lamps were small and unlit. The two seats were narrow. The astronomer had brought a single grey blanket and had laid it across her own knees. She did not offer it. She did not, at any point in the next four hours of the ride into the upper terraces of Hold-Above-the-Snow, offer Aelinna anything. She sat across from her in the small dim cold interior, and she watched, in the small careful private way of an old astronomer, the way her foreign visitor handled the cold.

Aelinna handled it in silence.

She had been raised in a court that valued the small steady demonstration of self-discipline. She had been at the academy long enough to have absorbed Avarath's harder version of the same value. She did not, in the four hours, ask for the blanket. She did not, in the four hours, ask for a lamp.

On the second hour the astronomer spoke for the first time since the lower gate.

"You read the third letter."

Aelinna did not, for a small careful breath, answer. She found, in the answering, that her tongue had become slower than she had expected. The cold had, in the second hour, begun to do its work on the small soft places in her face the academy had not, in any of her years, trained against. She moved her tongue, slowly, behind her teeth, and she gave the answer the small clean shape it required.

Aelinna inclined her head. The economy of the answer was the answer.

The astronomer did not speak again until the third hour. When she spoke, in the third hour, she did not speak about stars.

The astronomer looked at her for a long count of breaths. She did not change the small soft set of her face. She did not nod. She did not, in any of the small private signs an old astronomer might have given, indicate that the count had told her anything she had not, by some other route, already begun to suspect. She turned her head, after a while, and looked out the small window at the long terrace road and the snow.

She did not ask why a princess had come north.

That was the thing Aelinna would, later, find herself remembering more clearly than the cold. The astronomer had asked the count of escorts. The astronomer had not asked the reason for the journey. The astronomer had taken the count and had set it aside with the small private satisfaction of a measurer who had received the only data she required.

The carriage ran on, through the small slow cooling of the third hour and into the harder cooling of the fourth, and at the fourth hour the carriage came up the long approach to the inner gates of Hold-Above-the-Snow, and the carriage stopped, and the astronomer set the grey blanket aside on the seat and rose and stepped down without offering her arm to anyone, and Aelinna stepped down after her.

The astronomer turned, briefly, on the inner court. She did not, even now, look at Aelinna directly.

Aelinna inclined her head.

The astronomer walked away across the inner court, in the small slow steady walk of a sixty-nine-year-old woman who had not, in any of the recent decades of her life, allowed her gait to be paced by anyone outside her own discipline. The Avarathan servants of the inner court took Aelinna's small case from the lower carriage and carried it without speaking up the inner staircase to the small chamber the queen's household had assigned to her. The chamber was small. The chamber was bare. The chamber had one window. The window faced east.

She stood at the window for a long time, with the small case at her feet, and she watched the small thin band of evening light begin to fail across the snowfields beyond the wall, and she did not, for any of the first quarter hour of the watching, move.

The astronomer had asked one question.

The astronomer had taken the answer.

The astronomer had not asked, in any of the four hours of the carriage ride, why a princess had come north — and that, by every reading Aelinna's bronze clock had taught her, was the answer.