Snow ✓

The Landing

The sun was high, the day abnormally warm for autumn. Grimy from cleaning out the stable in preparation for winter, Mat stood at the window with a cup of water in hand, watching Snow nuzzle a speckled horse named Gretchen out in the field. It was laundry day, and she had yet to take the dirty clothes to the washbasin, giving Gran something to gripe about as she kneaded dough for an apple pie on the kitchen counter.

"I have a mind to stable her with those that brutes she'd rather frolic with than pretending to be a respectably clean human."

Mat sidled up to the counter where a bowl of apples coated in sugar and cinnamon sat, waiting to be made into a pie, nabbed a slice and plopped it in his mouth. "She has better table manners. Smells better, too," he said and plucked up another slice.

"Quite the romantic, you are," she said and blew a loose strand of hair away from her face. "You wouldn't be so eager if you two weren't sharing a bed."

"No one's eager," he said languidly. The old woman had gotten up early, seen them in bed together and made a stink about it all through breakfast. "And it wasn't like that," he said, not for the first time.

"The hell it wasn't."

He gave her a pointed look, too tired to continue trying to combat her imagination.

"Don't give me that look. You want to get fancy with the birds and the bees and make a little honey, you get out there and raise your own house. I will not play nanny to another wight."

She went on grumbling theories about the fertility of a girl who doesn't bleed as Mat took another apple slice.

"Stop that," she said, batting his hand away. "There won't be enough left for a pie."

He made a show of plopping it on his tongue before moving back to the window.

Snow's hands fell away from the horse's long face and she inclined hers to the sky, looking up and over the cottage.

A familiar buzzing struck up between his ears.

Moving about agitatedly, Gretchen bobbed her head before dashing toward the stable.

The buzzing was swelling to a monstrous roar and a shadow was falling fast across the field. Mat flung open the door and when he looked up, the cup fell from his hand. The airship was so low that he could make out the seams automated machines this world had never known had sown on its underbelly. Propellers at its flank kicked up a windstorm and a yawning rumble seemed to signify its powering down.

It's landing.

"Snow!"

Cast in shadow, Snow's white dress billowed and the scarf wrapped around her head unraveled, releasing tendrils that snapped at the air like snakes. If Snow had heard him, she gave no indication, her head still inclined toward the ship.

Mat took off for the field screaming her name, but his voice was whisked away by the wind and smothered by the buzzing that rattled so loudly in his head that he feared it'd crack his skull. He hopped the fence and grabbed her—a vision of terror as sap oozed thick and dark from her nose and ears, her eyes listless saucers.

"Come on," he screamed and yanked on her arm.

She swayed at his tug like a rag doll and he all but dragged her to the fence, thinking it would be faster than going around, but after he climbed through the rungs, still pulling, she simply stood there, her body resting against the timber as if it was an insurmountable obstacle. Feeling every second as it slipped through his fingers, Mat slapped her.