We carry the bride’s coffin on our backs, hastily constructed by our frail hands from what was once her litter. The starving season is a killer, even for brides brought from afar to marry kings and princes, dowries of gold and spices carried with them through the streets of hollow wasting faces. The bride’s hand maidens walk ahead of us, adorned in white, the color of weddings in their country, but to us, it has always been the color of mourning, the color of death, the color of the snow that comes to take our children. We step in tandem, careful not to drop the corpse, even as the air itself turns bitter and blue in the cold, and still yet we walk northward, to where tears freeze as you weep, and your heart stutters, for the air is fractal.

As we enter our country, hungry eyes take in the sight of the dowry, they come at us at once, a horde of thieving hands. We do not want to hurt them. We kill them all.

One by one we pack the brutalized bodies into boxes of yew, one by one we add them to our procession, all the more to add to the dowry. We march on, the women of us veil their faces, the men of us mask theirs, those who are neither paint their faces, in the end none of us look human, all ghoulish faces swimming in coats of fur carrying coffins to the king.

Halfway to the king, the hand maidens begin to sing out in chorus, they sing in their language, it is all soft consonants and dancing vowels. When their voices grow tired, blood seeping from their throats in the dryness of the chill, making a mockery of their rouged lips, we add to the throng of night sounds. Our language is harsh, our folk songs were made to scare away crows from our carrion, our poems are vicious, made to sharpen the tongues of our youth, lest they be left in battle without a blade. Though, as time wears on, we resort to ballads made for breaking, for if we do not have rage we must be granted our melancholy.

One among us sings of Olga who lost her love to the river spirit, so that whenever she went to the well, her love’s eternally young face would stare back, held under the water by night blooming flowers. Some among us argue that the story ends in Olga breaking beneath the water, cutting her lover from the vines to give her proper burial, others say that the river spirit took them both to the depths forever. It does not matter, we decide, all that matters is that Olga lost her love, and that will never change.

The hand maidens grow quiet after the story of Olga, scared of the melancholy that is bred in cold, dark places. Their dresses have grown dark and sullen, unfit for the winter storms, one by one they fall to the winter haze, their bodies slowly decaying in the freezing aether. We build them boxes as well, but here in this dark, frozen forest, nothing grows but strange luminescent trees. This is the wood we use to bury our dead, we call it ghost wood for how it glows blue like the souls in our myths. Tight round each of the boxes we take strips of their dresses and tie bows, the rest of the dresses we leave to the hungering forest, a sacrifice of funerary garments enough to assure our safe passage. Goddess save our souls, for we wander through this azure forest alone and we are losing the path. This is a cold like none other, a cold that we have never seen, it is the cold of the drowning, the dead.

We sleep in snow banks, our lashes perpetually heavy with ice, our eyelids heavier with sleep. Some of us begin to go pale, where once skin lay, now there is paleness, so light it is nearly translucent, cold, so cold, to the touch, like a slab of marble in a grand palace we will never see. Their eyes begin to glow blue, like the veins of the trees around us, their teeth grow sharp and jagged as icicles and thrice as deadly. They are no longer among us, these new things, they no longer answer to the names our people gave them, now they come at the beck and call of the whispering wind. Among ourselves, we begin to argue over what to call these creatures we will become, we ask ourselves if it is a blessing or a sentencing to become like our fallen fellows. We come to no conclusion, though for one, the new spirits do not seem to freeze as we do in the harsh winter chill, and warmth has become more than food, more than water to us, would that a great column of fire were to burn before us, we would all throw ourselves in even if only for a single second of sweet blessed heat.

We leave the winter spirits to the forest, our final tithe, and when we pass into the capital the soldiers must carry our bodies to the great hearth at the center of town and lay us there until we may move again. One among us never leaves the hearth, forever still and silent next to the flames, one hand dipping in to feel the warmth, that is until the soldiers throw him in, as if the hearth were some great pyre.

When we ascend the steps of the king and kneel before him, he notes how very few of us survived the journey. He steps forward taking from us the boxes of gold and spices, taking handfuls of powders we have never seen, inhaling them as if they were life itself. Through each of the carefully bound boxes the king pulls every piece of finery left to salvage, he does this with his own royal hands, impartial. To each of us he throws a golden bangle from the bare necks of the handmaidens, before burning them in his own fire.

After the ashes are all scattered, choking us all in its haze, he takes the long dead bride into his arms, holding her frozen body close. The king holds himself there, arms around his dead bride for several hours, so that the royal artist may paint her clutched there as if she had once breathed in the king’s arms. Once the artist took the final stroke she wrapped the portrait of the king and the dead bride in silk, standing from her stool as she walked through an archway, we had nothing to do but follow her. We are not alone, the king too follows, his face a storm on the horizon, through slate coloured hallways we wander, nothing but the whipping of the wind outside sounding through the corridors. Darker it gets as we round the edge of a small alcove, we walk through a door at the end of the alcove, leading us into a chamber whose ceiling arches up, high enough to cut the gods. All around the chamber a hundred portraits hang, each of them of a bride or groom in wedding white, all of them dead, hanging limply in the arms of our king, whose face grows less and less melancholic as the portraits go on, until the final portrait on a hook, the bride we carried. Next to the still undry portrait, still more hooks hang as if more are to come. The artist stares out at all the works that must be hers, her face as impartial as the sea. Next to the artist the king drifts to the first portrait, reaching out and stroking the face of the dead groom, his own distraught visage spilling tears of blood onto the dead man, his voice echoing through the room;

I will give everything and it will never be enough

– E. (Emmanuelle) M. Nikolaev