Winter Garden

Mama is gone already. Earlier than usual, even. She leaves every morning well before dawn for her job at the royal food warehouse; when she finally comes home at night, she is too tired to do more than kiss her girls and go to bed.

Vera reheats the kasha for her sister, sweetening it with a big dollop of honey, and takes it to her. Sitting together on the bed, they eat breakfast in silence.

“Today, again?” Olga finally says, scraping the bowl for the last speck of food.

“Today,” Vera confirms. It is the same thing she has said to her sister every Friday since their papa was taken away. She has no words to add to it; Olga knows this. Hope is a fragile thing, easily broken if handled too much. So, saying no more, they dress for work and leave the building together.

Outside, winter is gnashing its teeth.

Vera lifts her collar upward and walks briskly forward, her body angled into the wind. Snowflakes scald her cheeks. On the frozen river, she sees scores of fishermen hunched around holes in the ice. At the corner, she and Olga go their separate ways.

Moments later, Vera hears the distant roar of a dragon and sees a black carriage turning onto this street, its color vivid amid the falling snow and the white stone of their walled kingdom. She dives into the shadowy snowbank beneath a crystal tree.

Someone is being arrested; someone’s family is being ruined, and all Vera can think is, Thank God it is not my family this time. She waits until the carriage is gone and gets back to her feet. In the slicing snow, she takes the trolley across town to a place that has become as familiar to her as her own arm.

At the entrance to the Great Hall of Justice, she pauses just long enough to square her shoulders. She opens the huge stone door and goes inside. The first thing she sees is a queue of woolen-clad women wearing felt boots and clapping their mittened hands together to keep warm. They move forward, always forward; people in line, waiting for their turn.

The next two hours pass in a gray blur, until at last Vera is at the front of the line. She gathers her courage and straightens as she walks up to the gleaming marble desk where a goblin sits in a tall chair, his face as pale and shapeless as melting wax, his golden eyes opening and closing like those of a serpent.

“Name,” he says.

She answers in as even a voice as she can.

“Your husband?” he says, his voice a hiss in the quiet.

“Father. ”

“Give me your papers. ”

She slides her papers across the cold desk, watching his slim, hairy hand close over them. It takes courage to stand there while he studies her paperwork. What if he has her name on a list? Or if they’ve been waiting for her? It is dangerous to keep coming here, or so her mother tells her. But Vera cannot stop. Coming here is the only hope she has now.

He hands her papers back to her. “The case is being studied,” he says, and then yells, “Next. ”

She stumbles away from the window quickly, hearing an old woman come up beside her and ask about her husband.

It is good news. Her father is alive. He has not been sentenced and sent to the Barrens . . . or worse. Soon, the Black Knight will realize his error. He will learn that her father is no traitor.

She flips her collar up and goes back out into the cold. If she hurries, she can be to work by noon.

Friday after Friday, Vera goes to see the goblin. Each time the answer is the same. “The case is being studied. Next. ”

And then her mother tells her they must move.

“There is nothing to be done about it, Vera,” her mother says, sitting slumped in a chair at the kitchen table. The past year has taken a toll on her, left its mark in wrinkles. She smokes a cheap cigarette and seems hardly to care that ashes flutter to the wood floor. “My wages at the storehouse have been cut. We cannot pay the bills here anymore. ”

Vera would like to argue with her mother as she used to, but there is not enough money for firewood at night and they are cold.

“Where will we go?” Vera asks. Beside her she hears Olga whine.

“My mother offered. ”

Vera is actually surprised by this. Even Olga looks up.

“We don’t even know her,” Vera says.

Her mother takes another long drag on the cigarette and exhales the thin blue smoke. “My parents did not approve of your father. Now that he is gone . . . ”

“He’s not gone,” Vera says, deciding right then that she will never like this grandmother, let alone love her.