Snow Prayers

[owned_by_a_cat]

Title:         Snow Prayers
Series:      Dornost Saga
Pairing:     Macalla / Aslan
Location:   Dornost

Author's Note:  I always enjoy getting the first glimpse of a new journey for my characters, and never more so when the character is Macalla.  The endless war is over, she's sacrificed everything she is and owns to keep her vow and now she's at a loose end.  Thank goodness that Aslan's there for her.

The side of the bed where Macalla had lain was empty and cold.  Aslan sat up a little groggily and looked around the room in some confusion.  The hearth log had almost burned down, but the red-golden glow of the embers still shed a little light around the chamber.  Macalla was not there.  He rolled out of bed and lit a candle at the embers.  Shielding the flame carefully from the draught, he surveyed the room.  Macalla's sword was propped against the wall next to her pillow, easily to hand, with the knives beside the bed, where she had placed them the previous evening.  But her clothes were gone, as were her boots.

Aslan frowned.  Boots but no weapons?  He could imagine Macalla going about without boots, but never unarmed.  Alarmed, he reached for his tunic.  Then he yanked on his leggings and boots, grabbed his sword, and opened the door.  The light outside was unusual, soft and diffuse.  It reminded him of the thick fog they had passed through on their way to Galdaran.  But as he stepped out of the house he stopped and stared.  The ground, the trees, and every surface were a bright, blinding white.  He had never seen anything like it.  Carefully Aslan stretched out a hand and touched the nearest tree stump.  His fingers slid into the white mass as if he had stuck them into a mound of sand, but the mass was cold and wet, the grains larger than sand grains, melting against his skin as he looked at them.  And more of the same material was falling from the sky.

It's not ice when it falls, it's soft and fluffy.  Aslan smiled at the memory.  This then, had to be snow.  But where in this shadowless world was Macalla?  He took a few careful steps into the white mass, noting the prints his boots left and noting also that the snow covering the area around the hut was unmarked.  Slowly Aslan moved towards the trees.  It was eerily still.  And suddenly he saw it: a figure kneeling in the middle of a small clearing amongst the trees, all powdered over with snow.  Aslan walked towards his wife, shivering in the chilly air.  Macalla's hair, hands, and shoulders were thick with snow.  Her eyes were closed, and her face was pale.  She was barely breathing.  Aslan stopped a few paces away, struck by how beautiful she looked, and how unearthly.  But then he shivered and he remembered Macalla's lecture on the symptoms and effects of hypothermia.  He stepped forward and brushed the snow off Macalla's hair.

"Macalla," he said gently, "Time to come out of it, love." She didn't move and he shook her a little.  "Macalla, wake up."

Her eyelids flickered, opened slowly.  She smiled sleepily before her lashes swept down again.

"Macalla!  Wake up!" His tone was sharper now, and Macalla reacted.  Her chest and shoulders rose on a deeper breath and her eyes opened again.  But her mind was clearly elsewhere and Aslan was done waiting.  He bent, scooped her up into his arms, and walked back towards the hut, his boots sliding in the snow.

When he set Macalla on her feet beside the bed, her knees buckled and she sat down heavily.  Aslan closed the door, then added wood to the embers, while Macalla sat on the edge of the bed, looking around her in an entirely bemused fashion.  Shaking his head at his wife's incomprehensible behaviour, Aslan moved back to the bed and touched her face and hands.  She was cold as ice and so pale that her storm-grey eyes looked enormous and almost black.  Not being too gentle about it, Aslan stripped her boots and damp clothes off Macalla and wrapped a blanket around her.  She neither helped, nor hindered him, but continued to look about her, as if she had never seen him or her surroundings before.

"Macalla, talk to me!"  Aslan implored her, while he poured wine into a cup and held his dagger into the flames of the fire to heat it. "Whatever made you take off into the night without even a knife to hand?"

His tone was sufficiently exasperated to draw a reaction from Macalla.  "First snow," she said quietly, hugging the blanket closer around herself for warmth. "I cannot pray to the Just and Glorious while I'm bristling with weapons."

Aslan considered that.  He came to the bed, stirring the wine in the cup with the heated blade of his knife to warm it, and sat down beside Macalla.

"Granted," he said as he handed her the hot wine.  "But you cannot expect the Just and Glorious to watch your back, so next time, make sure you wake me ere you go."  He slipped his arm around her shoulders as he spoke and pulled another blanket over her legs.

Macalla sipped the hot wine and the colour slowly returned to her face.  "You looked so peaceful," she said eventually quietly, "and I had not planned to be gone long."  She frowned a little in concentration.  "How long was I gone?"

Long enough to be all covered by snow.  How did you even know that the weather had changed?

"Aslan, I was born in Dornost! I knew all day yesterday that it would snow.  And I woke as soon as it started."

"Do you always say prayers the first time it snows?"

"Yes. It's a ritual that's older than Dornost."  She paused, then looked up at him and smiled despite the tears in her eyes.  "And I was still here, to do it one last time."

Aslan tightened his arm around Macalla's shoulders. "If you want to reconsider-"

"No." Macalla's fingers found his and held tightly.  "Maybe that's why I was gone so long. It was all blue and peaceful.  Finished."

"Macalla, you could have died out there."

"Yes.  But instead they woke you in time to find me.  So you see: the Just and Glorious are watching my back."  Her voice was as serene as her smile and, for the first time since they had left the Altan's fortress, the shadow was gone from her face.