Title: How Far a Snowflake Falls
Characters: Kalm; Cain/Glitch
Note: Written for the LJ community "Demilo's Wagon" way back in 2008. This was a holiday fic exchange.

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How Far a Snowflake Falls

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It never starts easily, but it starts often enough in confusion and haste. It started, a day unforgettable, a day of snow—a day of change as far as love stories are told.

I woke to find it ready, in a quiet world drenched in paleness. The stillness of night had not been so still: it had brought us snow. I woke and saw it, that day, one I thought would be wasted.

After sunsrise, before breakfast, that ambiguous time, the hours lost, but morning I knew by the rising scents, the noise of the kitchen staff, and the constant talk of them. Listening well, I came to know the mood of the house, a festive one, at first, the ease of snowfall eased the will of words. The sky was tumbling down, to play with the phrase, and there the cooks, the round women in their white caps, their arms white with flour from elbow to fingertip, their cheeks ruddy, their eyes flashing merrily—and all the maids passing, and all the valets in red coats—and all the mice upon the hearth, frolicking from their enemies the cats—all a perpetual dance, liveliness and happiness. A contented sigh fell from me: home, home, home—I thought—this was what I knew of home. How I'd come to be there, the slippery shadow of a viewer among the dazzling feet of royalty, the ermine fluff of the queen herself, this puzzle I'd often reflected upon. It was too late in the season now, and too gone was my mood, that I could not think of it again, the moment it began—when there was a world beyond the rock walls of the palace—and drifts of soft, tangible cold, and a world of ice and snow waiting to be explored.

Amid Mrs Guthrie's carol in smooth soprano, I in the mudroom beyond the first kitchen, an old folk song accompanied my dress, just a scarf against my peoples' common winter raiment.

'Going out again, are you, Mr Kalm?' Imelda, the girl of all work—handmaiden, baster, needleworker, baker—beautiful green eyes and gentleness unsolicited. 'Into the snows, I see. H'mm, be it that you have fun, but be it that you be careful, too. Don't tread the ice, it won't be nearly thick enough just yet.'

'I won't,' this answer was easy to give. Ice didn't interest me as much as animal footprints and feral drifts whose tops blew a fine alabaster mist into the wilderness.

Imelda waved me to stay a moment longer, as she dashed down the staircase, to the kitchen stove, and from this plucked a morsel from a fresh batch, a gift to me bestowed. 'Take it. The first ones of the morn. But there'll be more when you get back, if you're not gone so long, that is. Out with ya now, and mind what I've said about the ice. Wouldn't want to trouble Mr Cain in having to rescue you—be ye corpse or be ye yet with a bit of life.'

She smiled as I did, and pulled ajar the heavy back door, leaving me to embrace the open world. I saluted with a nod, the warm yeast roll left in the bottom of a pocket, and she patted my shoulder. Out in the open field beyond the hibernating gardens, beyond the gatekeeper's stubby house, and near the odd stone hut of the groundskeeper, I reflected on my idleness there in the silent wilds, with Imelda and the household busy behind me, with tasks and work. Before the fall of the sorceress and the rise of the true queen, in captivity I never had a thought beyond living the next hour, the next day. And now an annual had gone by, and I had seen fifteen of them. The pressures of adulthood, so Raw told me, were coming too quickly. 'You cannot be idle always,' were part of his words; 'but you must also have time again to be a boy, have fun, and know, through the paths you construct, what office you mean to take, where one of your many talents will eventually lead. One day, Kalm, you will know.'

I collapsed, face and body, into the first bank of snow I came to, not knowing, either, what occupation in this place I would do. Below its edges of ice, the nearby stream trickled, cold and true. The pine boughs housed chickadees merry in greeting. Mistletoe and northern holly bobbed in thrushes gleeful. In my outstretched palm, the snow fell against the dark leather glove, one snowflake an individual, each something significant when part of the whole. This place of solemn beauty brought me an ache of stillness, remembering Raw's words, that I was to be someone else one day, something else—have an occupation, a life on the outside: an individual snowflake falling into the ocean of snowflakes drowned.

For a while, I could daydream away the rules. I'd rather be a woodsman forever, live there in the quiet, the solitude, the wide fields under a wide sky, after so long confined to spaces too small for one of my kind.

To have Raw's luck, Raw's affability with others, his congenial deportment, his ability to know the hearts of others—I could not expect so much. A position within the court would be ideal, though not as a consultant, a secretary, an intermediary of some sort—that was not for me. Speech I found to be unnecessary, troublesome, and the less I talked the better the resonance of those around me. And making speeches would be left to others it suited, like the queen's brother, Prince Ambrose, who could pen an oration that would have nations standing still and holding their breath with wonder and awe, though he often forgot a whole sentence, a paragraph, but if he did the problem was always intellectually solved. I hadn't the philanthropic interests of Prince Consort Ahamo, for his goodness was absolute. He was aware of the pains of the realm, and it was in this pain that I met my downfall: What he saw every day I could not deal with for an hour, let alone all the days hence. Princess DG's leadership reached a level none but her could ever reach, with a power none could replicate. I lacked an interest in the same jurisprudence that enabled Mr Cain to continue his position with the police. And no one could mimic Princess Azkadellia, slow to recover from all her annuals of possession, whose sessions of healing came not from masters of holistic pursuits, but from viewers, the people she had tortured too long. We became her advocates, together fighting the coarse evil adhering so sharply, poignantly—and, for a long while, inextricably. Then the viewers went less frequently to her side when she ailed, until the numbers diminished, and time saw them disperse—back to their homes, their grottos, their forests here and there, far and wide. In the vacancy left behind, I was there with Raw—until I felt I was not the one whose healing she required; she was beyond my skill, and far beyond my means. Such nurturing could only be found through the self, through independent thought, a heart's recess from the travailing darkness—and from the concern and praise and adoration from another. In this void rose the triumphant guardian, the champion of Azkadellia's bruises and scrapes upon the soul, as only Raw could do. Where love walked, healing was sure to grow.

Voices, a dialogue softened by the guise of my mind's preponderance, love and all its trails, its beauties, its inability to accept recompense for what it gave, voices touched by all these things curved from the surrounding trunks of trees, out of the myriad calls of birds looking for food. In recognising cadences, a duo of laughter, I remembered that others had fallen in love, too. Some of them once. Some of them over again. Some for the first time. On a path round the high stone walls of the palace, topped with blocky balustrades and guard towers narrow and steeply peaked, I saw a wool newmarket of soft, dark blue against the snow, the smooth tan rocks, the figure in it willowy and graceful; and beside Ambrose a wide-brimmed hat, a coat whose faded colour was lost entirely in the falling snow.

Ambrose kicked his knees up high to traipse through the snow, in the lead for once, with Wyatt Cain in the back swath. 'It is amusing, Wyatt, isn't it? Here it is, the deadest dead of winter that my memory can find, and I'm being sent to the north, where it's colder, where winter is the life inside the dead of things.'

'Your sister gets odd notions.'

'I'm an ambassador,' Ambrose sounded fatalistic: this was not a new argument, 'and it's my job.'

'It's your job to do what she tells you to do.'

Ambrose stopped, spun around, and executed it all in a moment almost too quick for Wyatt. The two of them collided, albeit gently, a sensitive uncertainty passing, fast as light and as readable as words.

'There is no other option.' Ambrose handled statements, the grand master of this delicate craft. In the ears of any other lover, meek or demure, everything that Wyatt Cain wasn't, Ambrose would've commanded the lay of things to be. His decrees were indisputable. His proclamations undeniable. Though he kept his emotions from a flippancy, a nostalgic, childish flight into the whimsical, Ambrose could show his ferocity and avarice in private, should it be given to none other than Wyatt. 'I am sorry, Wyatt—I am, I am, I am… If she had asked me to go to the moons, I would've gone. But a moon would've been easier. It would've meant not being so far from you, as far as space and light reach, don't you see? If I were on the moon at least I'd be part of its light. You know the kind I mean? The moonbeam that comes in your bedroom window and sits itself for hours on the edge of your bed. That's the moonbeam I would be, if I were being sent to one of the moons. But I'm not. She's sending me to Emmorton. Emmorton.' He repeated it with a nod, a final nod, and from this he pivoted round, knees high again as through the snow he went.

For a while, Wyatt watched on, the black and silver curls of Ambrose becoming even more silver as flakes fell upon it, the ringlets as some yet unnamed hedge, soft to the touch but unyielding to the wind. Wyatt sighed and threw up his hands.

'What in the name of Mombi's uncle makes Emmorton so important, anyway?'

Ambrose drew to a halt, half a smirk given in derision, but his great brown eyes lit with the embers of fancy. 'Nothing that's really worth being separated from you for six months. But,' unaffected by the thought, as he so chose, for this was not the time he would win against his sister's need of him, 'it's six months, and I must go, as I have to—for the bettering of the nation, for the bettering of the world community. And you must stay here, for the bettering of the realm. I fear the law would suffer if you were removed from it, please hear my sarcasm.'

'I heard it—I even agree with it. Ambrose, if she wasn't sending you away so soon, I could get a transfer…' After dashing through the snow, Wyatt grabbed Ambrose's elbow and spun them together. 'When are you leaving, anyway?'

Ambrose reached for the end of Wyatt's chin, a touch into a caress, a caress into a kiss, broken by the nearness of the end. 'Tomorrow.' He listened to the gruff exhale from Wyatt, and started on his way—again leaving Wyatt to endure a moment of anger alone.

'Is it okay if I dislike your sister just a little bit right now?'

Ambrose finally laughed, and through his laughter Wyatt knew everything would be as it should be. He'd find a way to be with Ambrose, if everything the two of them had discovered in the last annual—the healing, redemption, concern, the influx of power, light, and love—if all of that had to change, they would change it together.

I set back into the snow, the birds continuing, the clouds continuing, and the suns nearing their morning acclivity.

Change left an impression on me, a saraband of the macabre, a whisper of the unknown. It left me shuddering as twilight came, as I lay there deep in thought, deep in my bank of snow.