There was too much summer in Winter when she met the other queens. Blackberry wine burned her stomach as Summer and Autumn approached, pale in the blue light of her palace. Summer shivered in her cotton dress, her sandaled feet ankle deep in snow. Winter understood the bitter touch of ice. Her wife was dead. The winter would not end by her choice.
“Come to wrest power away from me, sisters?” Winter welcomed the hollowness the summer berries carved inside of her.
“The winter months have long passed and Spring is due her right to rule in turn,” Autumn said beneath the carved arches.
Winter laughed, gesturing to her ice palace around them. Windows of interlocking snowflakes, her crown of icicles, tapestries spun from frozen threads. All of her nice things. The rooms that her wife, Nadine, spent time in. The statues of her, carved in ice. Her face was already fading from Winter’s mind.
“You speak of turns like we’re children? You would take everything I’ve built this season and leave me with a puff of frost amongst the dew.”
“We want to help,” Autumn said. “We were sorry to hear of her death.”
A flash of a memory burned Winter’s mind before she managed to freeze it back out. Dark skin against the snow. The warmth of her kiss. Rage bubbled up hard and cold. “You were against us from the very beginning.”
(more…)