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by K.C. Shaw
Fantasy, 14 pages.
Originally Published in Fictitious Force #6, 2009
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Willa had seen a lion once, his coat the color of the desert, his eyes glowing like a banked furnace of sunlight. Now, half a world away and most of her lifetime later, when the winter ground was stone-hard and the air smelled of cold, Willa remembered him.
She had already packed snow into a rough animal shape. She worked to form it into a lion, slowly; even with heavy wool mittens augmented by a warmth spell, her hands and feet never felt warm these days. And her gut was burning with the sickness in it, a pain that never quite ebbed. To distract herself, Willa concentrated on her sculpture: heavy squared muzzle, wide paws, tail curved around muscular haunches.
The short day was fading when she finished, and sunset gilded the snow with imagined warmth. Willa traced the last lock of the lion’s mane with the tip of her mitten, then turned her back abruptly and went inside. She was done. She would not think of the lion again until morning.
Instead, she thought of the real lion she had seen so long ago. He had stood up out of straw-colored grass, scarcely ten feet away from her. Willa remembered her fear and exhilaration, their echoes still vibrant even after so many years. She had cast a shielding spell, but the lion wasn’t hungry. He had sauntered away with a grace Willa had later tried to capture in a dance.
She huddled in bed, listening to the fire crackle, and remembered. She had used dance as part of her magic before it became fashionable; she had scandalized stuffy court magicians with her silk-clad dancing body and her raw magical power. Princes had pursued her, seduced her, lavished her with jewels.
The pain increased, as it usually did at night. Willa curled around it, trying to hold onto the vision of her youth and the memories of her triumphs. The pain won.
* * *
No new snow fell overnight, and when the sun was well up, Willa went out to look at her lion. It was a better likeness than she had hoped, and nearly the size of a pony.
She tugged her right mitten off and touched the lion’s back. She concentrated, and focused the currents of magic around her hand. Power she had once had to generate with frenzied dancing now pulsed through her whenever she demanded it, the legacy of decades of practice.
She let a piece of her own life slip down her arm, where it burned in her palm. She pushed and it melted into the snow. The lion moved its head slightly and stood up.
Willa had the lion pace around the yard, its paws silent in the snow, and smiled. She had done well — better than last year’s wolf. She went back into the house and got into bed, shivering.
Her shivering eased soon enough and she slipped into a half-sleep. Outside, she roamed through the hills, looking at the snowy landscape through the lion’s eyes.
* * *
Mostly, the lion was for her protection. In the dark days of winter when wolves came down from the peaks, hungry and desperate, the lion patrolled around the house. Wolves would not come near it, frightened of its shape as much as its scent of magic. And the lion could gather fallen wood for the fire, carrying it one piece at a time to the woodpile. Once the lion frightened a white fox away from its kill; Willa picked up the half-eaten rabbit in the lion’s jaws and brought it home. She made stew from it, the first meat she had eaten in months.
Years before, when she had retired to the mountains, she ventured into the peaks with a snow creature by her side — often a bear, sometimes a wolf or a slinking panther. She had breathed air that crackled into her lungs with cold, stood at the top of the world and gazed across the blue and white mountains beneath the deep blue sky. Her body could no longer make such a trip, but the snow lion could.
There was a limit to how far she could send it away from her, but it could withstand even the deepest freeze. Her body lay in bed filled with pain, but a part of her roamed through snow-hung pines and prowled through snowstorms that sent every living thing into hiding.
The depth of winter passed. The lion’s snow grew icy, but the life Willa had given it kept its features from blurring. The ice made the lion’s sight and hearing sharper, and gave it weight to leave deeper footprints.
One afternoon after the turn of the year, the lion padded down the slope below Willa’s house. Willa had hoped to find the year’s first greens struggling through the shallower snow beneath the trees. Instead, she found a man.
He was laden with a heavy pack and dressed in furs that muffled his face almost entirely. He leaned forward, his breathing labored as he climbed. Willa moved the lion in front of him.
He nearly stumbled into it. But when he did see it, instead of the fear Willa had expecte -- [End of Preview.]