Ice as blue as crystal oceans spanned the garden pools. Shadows of fish darted beneath the unyielding frost before they dove to find food that had long since become their brethren. In the spring, the ice would thaw and flood the surrounding hyacinths, carrying all the remaining fish to the top. They would mouth at the algae forming on the surface and the rice crumbs Lacrimosa and her handmaidens would toss into the ponds while they drank their tea.
Sometimes, they would make a game of it. The garden was shaped into steppes, each tier cut with a pond that flowed into the identical pond on the steppe below it. Lacrimosa would send one crumb at a time down the current, and she and her handmaidens would follow it like a group of giggling schoolchildren, waiting for a fish to nibble it.
Most crumbs reached the bottom, but a few had been pulled in, leaving only ripples rushing along the surface. They had all been astonished the first time it had happened, and that was the day Lacrimosa's mother, the retired queen Izebel, had found them. Her ice-pick eyes had narrowed. Froze them in the pondweed, their sandals drinking in mud.
Her mouth had pinched like a fine stitch, and she had said, "What nonsense have you gotten up to?"
"We were only playing with the fish," Lacrimosa said, bundling her skirts in white-knuckled handfuls. "No harm came to them."
"Harm comes to those who take time out of their day they don't have," her mother shot back. She glared at the water and mumbled, pieces of hair falling out of their pins as she turned on her heels and continued on her morning walk. "I expect your reports to be done by the end of the day, and if not, there'll be a switching."
It had been an empty threat but one that still held meaning in Lacrimosa's mind. As a child, her mother's swats had been worse than those of her nursemaid's and of her father's. Whatever compelled that woman's arm had bruised Lacrimosa's ass many times before. Just the idea of her mother switching her at nineteen had driven her into a frenzy.
She hadn't sent a crumb down the pools in months. Granted, winter had set in early and shook the golden leaves off the trees, leaving behind skeletons. Biting wind had replaced pleasant breezes and sent all the courtiers scurrying back to their roaring hearths.
Izebel, before she had left for the summer castle, had caught Lacrimosa in the dining hall and sat beside her. Her long nails clacked on the wood, scratching the varnish as she drummed them. She demanded attention, but Lacrimosa refused to concede. "When I was a young girl, we used to have a beggar woman who would come up to our gate and ask for bread. One year, the weather had turned cold before its time, and she told us it was because a demon had escaped from hell," she had said. She plucked a piece of apple from the tureen in front of Lacrimosa and stared until Lacrimosa turned, meeting her steel-cut gaze. "I don't want to leave you alone this winter, but you need to learn how it is to be on your own. This winter will be a good time for you to learn. One always learns in the face of severe adversity."
That had been their last conversation since the end of the harvest. Now, the Giving of Plenty was drawing near, and that meant the days had grown shorter until near perpetual night had claimed the northern half of the kingdom. Lacrimosa missed the sun, and her handmaidens had expressed the same sentiments while braiding her hair and painting her face.
When Lacrimosa departed in the morning, they lit both fireplaces, trying to coax warmth from the negligible flames licking the kerosene-slick logs. Lacrimosa would come back to find them huddled together in front of one of the hearths, twisting each other's hair in mock fashions of the courts. They tittered like birds when she came in, pretending they hadn't been poking fun at those teased mountains of hair piled on top of Lord Hembrough's head or the pompadour swoop careening toward Lord Tadfin's hooked nose. Lacrimosa never punished them for it.
After all, Izebel had always distanced herself and her daughter from influenced fashion. Izebel believed in a pure bloodline, and she used to say that if you wear enough foreign powder, it will begin poisoning your blood. Those wild theories had eventually infected Izebel with an incurable paranoia that Count Reimdall had noticed and watched for years. He had begged Izebel to retire and pass the crown to Lacrimosa, his incessant pleas another burden on Izebel's frail shoulders. The count was one of Izebel's most trusted advisors, but Lacrimosa suspected he had convinced her in more ways than she wanted to know about. He had followed her like a dog to the summer castle, leaving Nettles the title of Head Advisor.
Lacrimosa hadn't minded Reimdall's departure. Nettles was much easier to talk to, and while he revered court fashions as if each was a new god, he understood the need for change within the kingdom. New trade alliances needed to be forged since Izebel had destroyed many of the foreign contracts after her husband's death.
To Izebel, foreign had always meant frivolous.
Lacrimosa couldn't say she entirely disagreed. She saw styles fly in the window and out, replaced by styles from two or three seasons ago in a variety of colors. The handmaidens reeked of jealousy when Lacrimosa caught them parodying, but she couldn't bring herself to deny them their gossip. That was what they lived, thrived upon, and it would be cruel to sew their mouths for nothing more than a harmless joke told under the crackling of the fires.
She had a fondness for her handmaidens. An "overfondness" her mother would say but her mother had disappeared into the opaque gray of the horizon.
When Lacrimosa thought of her independence, a small, secret smile would cross her face. It would come when she was listening to letters read aloud by Nettles, or when she was writing reports on the storage granaries, or when she couldn't stand the castle's stormy walls anymore and took a brisk walk out near the icy pools. She would sit on the bench and watch the fish swim to the top only to knock their searching mouths against the frost and disappear back into the insulated depths.
What she wouldn't give for their simplicity.
She stretched out on the bench now, her woolen robe bunching beneath her. In the mornings before court, she wore a shift and a robe, but she had put on another layer for protection against the nipping wind. She knew she would have to trod back inside soon, so her handmaidens could suit her for court, but when she could lay on her back and watch the clouds drift over the fortress, she seized the opportunity with white-knuckled fists.
Too often the castle walls spun just outside the realm of her vision. They pressed in from every side, and the chandeliers glittering from the ceiling seemed to swing precariously as if they were about to fall and crush her in her woolen robe and itchy stockings.
She craved wide open sky and fields that stretched farther than she could ever hope to travel. Gods, how much she longed to travel. Perhaps she would prioritize trade and arrange meetings with other kingdoms. That would be grand, she thought, smiling that secret smile.
With vigor, she stood from the bench and blew a kiss to the frozen pond. She hurried down the flagstone path flushed with decaying leaves, her flats treading the dew left on their curled bodies.
She flung past the door, running straight into Nettles. She laughed, cheeks stained red, as he stumbled back. "What in the gods' names are you doing out so early, my queen?" he asked after he recovered.
"Trade," she said breathlessly. She grabbed his elbow and hauled him towards her chambers, her chest heaving with excitement. "Let's trade. We didn't do well with our harvest this year, and we have the long term granaries, but we have enough textile and dye than we know what to do with. We have something of value, Nettles, and we're not doing anything with it, and… and what must it be like in other countries? Might there be sun and harbors that aren't frozen all the way to the ocean floor?"
She was rambling, but she couldn't stop. Her mind reeled with possibilities; first, trade then war pacts then a marriage alliance. Wasn't that the trend nowadays? Izebel had always pushed a marriage alliance, but the suitors she had brought from two select countries had not caught Lacrimosa's eye. One had been a princess by the name of Jo who had fiery red hair and an attitude worse than a bull's; the other had been two twin princes, their duochromatic eyes as unnerving as their sharp, toothy smirks. Lacrimosa had told her mother that the twin princes were most likely Fae, but Izebel hadn't wanted to hear it.
Could she find someone for her through trade? She wasn't rough-looking, and she'd had plenty of lovers in the past. Is three plenty? she wondered. That seemed like quite enough, but Nettles had had at least four that she knew of. Nettles who was a year younger than her, grumpier than a stormy sky, and handsome as a careful carving. She wished she saw something in him, but for the past two years, she'd realized her preference for women had grown into a yearning. No longer did she indulge her handmaidens in picking out the gorgeous men at the ceremonial balls, instead she found herself admiring the curves of a woman's figure. Women were Lacrimosa's weakness, and she loved that such fair, glowing creatures were so abundant in the world. In her castle. In her bed.
Well, they would be abundant in her bed once she moved out of her head.
Nettles pinched her arm, and she slapped his hand away. "You're forgetting your place as my advisor, not my childhood friend," Lacrimosa said, but the statement lacked proper conviction.
"Didn't you hear me? I asked you what the hell happened when you were taking your walk," Nettles said, folding his arms over his chest. They halted in the middle of the hallway, halfway to Lacrimosa's quarters. "Zia said you were slow waking up and had the eyes of a dead man. Did the fresh air really breathe such life into you?"
"No, of course not," she said, "and please stop speaking like a poet. Your pretentious nonsense is better left unpublished."
Nettles stared at her, eyes narrowing. "I think I like you better when you're half dead. You're less snippy, I'll tell you that," he huffed.
"Queens are allowed to be snippy."
Nettles sighed and rubbed his temples, but Lacrimosa did not miss the small smile that crossed his lips. They had been like this since childhood, insulting and snapping at each other in good jest. For the most part.
She hardly remembered a time when she hadn't called him Nettles. Count Reimdall called him Lifang, his birth-given name, but when he was a small child, Lifang used to make bouquets of nettles and give them to Zia, Pashti, and sometimes even Lacrimosa, if the particular mood struck him. The bouquets, while symbolically a gift of friendship, stung like hell. No one knew if Nettles was simply immune to the needles, or if he ignored them just to torture the rest of his friends because if someone did not accept his bouquet, he would cry until his entire face turned red. The only ones immune to his heartbreaking sobs were Izebel and Reimdall, and Nettles had learned quickly he would receive a switching if he tried to guilt them.
Reimdall, truth be told, enjoyed punishing Nettles. The count had adopted Nettles on the boy's second birthday and raised him in the castle under a harsh, watchful eye. Since Reimdall left, Lacrimosa and Nettles had been thrown into the same boat; their parental figures had disappeared, leaving them scrambling. Neither of them had been on their own before, and it was both a welcome relief and a frightening intrusion on their daily routines they'd both had for years.
A month had gone since Izebel and the count departed, and Nettles and Lacrimosa had rekindled their childhood friendship.
Lacrimosa smiled, knitting her hands behind her back. "Trade," she said again. "That's our first priority."
"And what makes you so sure?" Nettles asked.
"We could form new alliances."
"Alliances that might not even stand the trials of time."
"Alliances that have a chance to stand the trials of your unending poetry, and I would like to try. My mother may come back and unravel what I've begun, but she passed the crown to me. I am in charge."
Nettles looked at her with a strange, melancholy look on his face. "No, she did not," he said. "She passed it to you because she wanted to saddle you with the busy work and horde the policymaking and riches for herself."
Lacrimosa remained quiet. She knew he was correct, but she did not have the heart to accept it. Her mother would never fully relinquish her power, and that frightened Lacrimosa to the core. One day, she would have to stand up to her mother, but hopefully, that day would not come soon. "She's gone now," Lacrimosa said.
"When she returns, she'll unravel whatever you've started."
The note of finality in Nettles' voice unsettled her, and she huffed like a toddler throwing a tantrum. "What can I start before she returns?" she asked rhetorically. "What can I do that she can't unravel or, better yet, will not wish to?"
Nettles laughed bitterly. "You ask a question no one can answer but the dame herself," he said. "Why do you not write her a letter?"
"She'll burn it," Lacrimosa said.
Silence stretched cold fingers between them, and both turned their gazes to the ground. Izebel would not answer the letter. She would not even read it. They had seen her light pieces of parchment on fire that held complaints from rural lords and merchants, claiming she needed a break from their insolence.
"Perhaps not," Nettles said.
"Perhaps so or else she'll come marching back. We don't need her barreling back here in a rage to demand we do things her way."
"We've always done things her way. Things won't change just because you're on the throne, Lacrimosa." Nettles met her gaze intently, and she nearly shrunk beneath it. "You might sit on the throne, but its strings belong to your mother."
She prayed that he was wrong.