Translator's Note

[An unauthorised translationDabos has authorised translations in general, suggesting that manuscripts be submitted directly to the publisher Gallimard rather than asking for her permission or blessing.

This is an amateur effort, though I intend to finish this project with all the care and attention of my professional translations — if at a slower pace.

]

The following text is my own translation of the original material, including at some places paraphrases or turns of phrase that may be not be found in the original though retaining — if not always the literal meaning of a passage — the particular genre and taste evoked in the original work.

This translation had its start in 2017 after the book was suggested to me by a friend. I'll keep working on and refining the translation as I have the time and motivation. If you enjoy the book as I did, let me know. If you can't wait for the next chapter to be translated, bug me about it; that is the best way to motivate me to keep at it.

Corrections and comments can be directed to tobiasseeley@fastmail.com.

[TEXT FOLLOWS]

Prologue

Pieces

In the beginning, we were one.

But God judged us improper in this state, so he tasked himself with dividing us. God enjoyed himself greatly with us, then God tired and forgot us. God could be so cruel in his indifference that he terrified me. God knew how to be gentle, also, and I loved him as I've never loved anybody.

I think that we might have been able to live happily in a way, God, me, and the others, without this cursed book. It disgusts me. I knew what link attached me to it in the most nauseating of ways, but that horror came later, much later. I didn't understand immediately, I was too ignorant.

I loved God, yes, but I hated this book that he would open for any little thing. To him it was enormously amusing. When God was content, he wrote. When he was angry, he wrote. And one day, when God was in particularly bad humour, he made an enormous mistake.

God broke the world into pieces.

The fiancés

Ch 01: The Archivist

It is often said that old hauntsdwelling, buildings, haunts, homes

have character. On Anima, the ark where objects come to life, old haunts have the tendency to develop a frightening character.

The building housing the Family Archives, for example, was constantly in a bad mood. It passed the days in crackling, creaking, leaking and sighing to express its discontent. It did not like the currents of air that slammed unclosed doors in summer. It did not like the rains that dirtied its gutters in autumn. It did not like the humidity that invaded its walls in winter. It did not like the weeds that mounted invasion of its courtyard each spring.

But, on top of everything, the Archives building did not like visitors who have no respect for visiting hours.

This is undoubtedly why, on this early September morning, the building crackled, creaked, leaked and sighed even more than normal. It felt someone coming even though it was still far too early to consult the archives. This visitor was not at the main entrance, on the front steps, like a respectable visitor. No, the visitor entered the place like a thief, directly into the cloakroom of the Archives.

A nose emerged from the middle of a mirrored armoire.

The nose continued to advance. Soon followed in turn by a pair of glasses, a brow, a forehead, a mouth, a chin, cheeks, eyes, hair, a neck, and a pair of ears. Suspended in the middle of the mirror — to the shoulders — the face looked right, then left. The bend of a knee followed in turn, a little lower, and pulled behind it a body which extracted itself entirely from the mirrored armoire, as it would have a from a bathtub. Out of the mirror, the silhouette was hardly more than an old, worn overcoat, a pair of grey glasses, a long tricolour scarf.

And under this mass, was Ophélie.

Around Ophélie, the coat room protested with all of its armoires, furious at this intrusion that flouted Archives rules. The furniture squeaked at the hinges and stamped their feet. The coat hangers hit one another loudly as though a poltergeist was pushing them against one another.

This show of anger didn't intimidate Ophélie in the slightest. She was accustomed to the Archives' sensitivity.

‘Calm down’, she murmured, ‘it's all right.’

Immediately, the furniture calmed itself and the hangers were quiet. The building had recognised her.

Ophélie exited the coat-room and closed the door. On the panel, was written:

Hands in her pockets, her long scarf trailing behind, Ophélie passed in front of a succession of labelled cabinets: birth certificates, death registry, register of kin-marriage exemptions, and so on. She slowly pushed the consultation room door open. Deserted. The shutters were closed, but they let several rays of sunlight through which fell upon a row of desks in half-shadow. The song of a blackbird, in the garden, seemed to make the streaming light even more luminous. It was so cold in the Archives that it made one want to open all the windows to let in the warmer air from outdoors.

Ophélie stood immobile for a moment in the doorway. She observed the rays of sunlight which crept across the wood floor as the sun rose. She breathed deeply the smell of old furniture and cold paper.

This odour, which had saturated her childhood, soon Ophélie would smell it no more.

She guided her feet slowly towards the archivist's lodge. The private apartment was hidden by a simple curtain. Despite the early hour, from inside came the strong aroma of coffee. Ophélie coughed into her scarf to announce her presence, but an old opera tune covered the sound. So, she entered past the curtain. She didn't have to search far to find the archivist, the one room serving the role of office, kitchen, lounge, bedroom and reading room all at once. He was seated on the bed, his nose in a gazette.

He was an old man with dishevelled white hair. He had an eyeglass pinched under one eyelid, which made one eye enormous. He wore gloves and a poorly ironed white shirt under his vest.

Ophélie coughed again, but because of the phonograph he did not hear it. Absorbed in his reading, he hummed along to the opera's tune, and not very well. And then there was the bubbling of the coffee-pot, the gurgles of the tea kettle and all the habitual sounds of the building which housed the Archives.

Ophélie took in the peculiar atmosphere that reigned in this place: the old man's missed notes; the nascent light of the day filtering through the curtains; the rustling of pages turned with the utmost care; the odour of coffee and, a note below, the naphthalene smell of a gas burner. In one corner of the room, there was a chessboard whose pieces moved all on their own, as though two invisible players faced off. This gave Ophélie a strong desire most of all to touch nothing, to leave things as they were, to go back the way she came, for fear of ruining this familiar scene.

Still, she would have to break the spell. She approached the bed and tapped the shoulder of the archivist.

‘Ohmigaawd!’, he exclaimed, his whole body jumping. ‘You couldn't say something before scaring people like that?’

‘I tried’, retorted Ophélie.

She picked up the magnifying glass that had rolled onto the carpet, and gave it to him. Then she took off the coat that enveloped her head to toe, unwrapped her interminable scarf and deposed it all on the back of a chair. What remained was a small frame, a few badly-fastened, heavy bangs, the two rectangle lenses of her glasses and a look that would have better fit an elderly lady.

‘You've come through the wardrobe again, haven't you?’, groaned the archivist, cleaning the glass with his sleeve. ‘This fixation on mirror-walking at all hours! You know very well that my room is allergic to surprise visits. One of these days you'll get a well-deserved rafter to the head.’

His low voice caused his superb moustache to tremble all the way to his ears. He lifted himself laboriously from the bed and picked the coffee-pot, murmuring in a patois that only he spoke anymore on Anima. Working in the archives, the old man lived completely in the past. Even the gazette he had been rifling through dated from at least a half-century or more.

‘A sip of coffee, girl?’

The archivist was not a very sociable man, but each time his eyes fell on Ophélie, as happened at this moment, they shone like the moon. He had always had a weak spot for his niece, no doubt because, of all the family, she was the most like him. Just as old-fashioned, just as solitary, and just as reserved. Ophélie nodded. Her throat was too tight to talk just now. Her great-uncle filled a steaming cup for each of them.

‘I had a short telephone call with your mother, yesterday evening’, he mumbled through his moustache. ‘She was so excited that I couldn't catch half of her chattering. But I got the essential. It seems you are to go through hell after all.’

Ophélie acquiesced without a word. Her great-uncle bunched his eyebrows.

‘Don't give me that look, please. Your mother has found you a gentleman, there is nothing more to say about that.’

He handed her a cup and sat down heavily on his bed, making the bedsprings all squeak.

‘Set yourself down. We need to talk serious. Godparent to god-daughter.’

Ophélie pulled a chair towards the bed. She fixed her gaze on her great-uncle and his flamboyant moustache with a feeling of unreality. She got the impression of contemplating, through him, a page of her life that had been torn out just under her nose.

‘I have a feeling I know why you're squinting at me’, he declared. ‘Except that this time the answer is no.’

Your sad shoulders, your morose glasses, your sighs unhappy as rocks you put those back in the cupboard.’ He brandished thumb and index finger, covered in white hairs. ‘Two cousins already you’ve rejected! They were as ugly as pepper grinders and as vulgar as chamber pots, I grant you that, but it's the whole family that you insulted with each refusal. And worse yet, I've made myself your accomplice in sabotaging these arrangements.’ He sighed into his moustache. ’I know you like you my own creation. You are more accommodating than a dressing room, never speaking above others, never throwing tantrums, but soon as someone mentions a husband to you, you're worse than an anvil! And see, it's about your age, whether the gentleman please you or not. If you don't get in line, you'll end up shut out of the family, and that, that I don't want.

Nose in her cup of coffee, Ophélie decided that it was high time that she spoke up.

‘You have no need to be worried, uncle mine. I have not come to ask you to oppose this marriage.’

At the same moment, the phonograph needle caught in a scratch. The looped echo of the soprano filled the room. ‘If I… If I… If I… If I… If I…’

Her great-uncle didn't get up to free the needle from its rut. He was too taken aback.

‘What babbling is this? You don't want me to intervene?’

‘No. The only favour I came to ask today is access to the archives.’

‘My archives?’

“If I… If I… If I… If I…”, stuttered the record player. Her great-uncle lifted an eyebrow, sceptically, his fingers rummaging through his moustache.

‘You don't expect me to plead your cause to your mother?’

‘That wouldn't be worth it.’

‘Nor that I bend your weakling of a father's will?’

‘I will marry the man that has been chosen for me. It's not any more complicated than that.’

The record player's needle jumped and went its merry way as the soprano proclaimed triumphantly, ‘If I love you, watch yourself!’

Ophélie pushed her glasses back up onto her nose and withstood her godfather's glare without blinking. Her eyes were as dark as his were light.

‘About time’, exhaled the old man, relieved. ‘Spit it out, tell me who it is.’

Ophélie rose from her seat to remove their cups. She wanted to run them under water but the sink was already full to the brim with dirty plates. Normally, Ophélie didn't like housework, but this morning she unbuttoned her gloves rolled up her sleeves and did the dishes.

‘You don't know him’, she said finally.

Her murmur drowned in the sound of the water. Her great-uncle stopped the phonograph and moved closer to the sink.

‘I did not catch that, girlie.’or: My girl

Ophélie turned off the tapUS, faucet

for a moment. She had a soft voice and a poor elocution; she often had to repeat herself.

‘You don't know him.’

‘You forget who you are addressing!’ snickered the old man crossing his arms. Perhaps I never get my nose out of the Archives, but I know the genealogical tree better than anyone. There isn’t one of your most distant cousins, from the valley to the Great Lakes, of whose existence I am ignorant.

‘You don't know him’, insisted Ophélie.

She rubbed a plate with a sponge, her gaze nowhere. Touching these dishes without protective gloves made her climb back in time despite herself. She could have described, in the tiniest detail everything that her great-uncle had eaten on these plates since he got them. Habitually, like any good professional, Ophélie did not handle other people's stuff without her gloves, but her great-uncle had taught her to read right here in this apartment. She knew each utensil personally, like the back of her hand.

‘This man is not part of the family’, she announced finally. ‘He's from the Pole.’

A long silence followed, only perturbed by the gurgling of the gutters. Ophélie wiped her hands off on her robe and looked at her godfather over her rectangle glasses. He had suddenly shrunk into himself, as though twenty more years had just fallen on his shoulders. His moustache fell like two flags at half-mast.

‘What is this mess?’ he exhaled, his voice bland.

‘I don't know any more’, said Ophélie softly, ‘except that, according to Mum he's a good catch. I don't know his name, nor would I recognise his face.’

Her great-uncle retrieved his snuff box from under a pillow, stuffed a pinch of tobacco in each nostril and sneezed into a kerchief. It was his way of elucidating ideas.

‘There must be some error…’

‘That's what I'd like to believe as well, uncle, but it would seem that there are none.’

Ophélie let a plate escape her hand, breaking it in two in the sink. She handed the pieces to her uncle; he pushed them one against the other and the pieces came together again. He placed it on the draining board.

Her great-uncle was a remarkable Animist. He knew how to patch up absolutely everything with his hands, and the most improbable objects obeyed him like puppies.

‘There must be some kind of error’, he said. ‘Archivist that I am, I've never heard talk of a mixing so contra nature. The less the Animists engage with those foreigners, the better they are. Full stop.’

‘And still, this mariage will happen’, murmured Ophélie, resuming the dishes.

‘What needle's got you pricked, you and your mum?’ exclaimed her great-uncle, aghast. ‘Of all the arks, the Pole is the one with the worst reputation. They have powers that mess with your head! They aren't even really a family, they are pack-groups that tear at one another! Do you know the stories told about them?’

Ophélie broke another plate. In his fit of anger, her great-uncle didn't realise the impact his words had on her. He would have been hard-pressed to anyhow: Ophélie was endowed with a moonish face; her emotions rarely came to the surface.

No, I don't know what they say and I'm not interested in hearing it.’ she said simply, ‘I need serious documentation. So, the only thing I want, if you please, is access to the archives.

Her great-uncle reconstituted the other plate and placed it on the drain board. The room set itself to cracking and groaning at the joists; the archivist's bad mood swept through the whole building.

‘I don't know you anymore! You made such a fuss about your cousins and now that they stick a barbarian at the end of your bed, look at you giving up!’

Ophélie froze, the sponge in one hand and a cup in the other, and closed her eyes. Immersed in the obscurity of her eyelids, she looked deep into herself.

Giving up? To give up you have to accept a situation, and to accept a situation you have to know the why and the how. But Ophélie didn't know anything about anything. A few hours before she hadn't even known she was engaged. She got the impression of going headlong into an abyss, of losing all control. When she risked a thought towards the future, it was the unknown to the end of sight. Dumbstruck, incredulous, off-balance, yes, she was all that, like a patient diagnosed with an incurable disease. But she wasn't resigned to her fate.

‘No, I'm not dreaming this mess’, said her great-uncle. ‘And then, what would he be doing in the area, this foreigner? And where do his interests lie in all this. With all due respect, my girl, you are not the most advantageous apple in our family tree. What I mean is, it's just a museum that you keep, not a goldmine!’

Ophélie let a cup fall. It wasn't because of ill will or emotion, this clumsiness was pathological. Objects slipped constantly through her fingers. Her great-uncle was accustomed to reconstituting everything in her wake« derrière elle »

.

‘I don't think you understand’, articulated Ophélie rigidly. ‘He's not coming to live here, I'm to follow him to the Pole.’

This time it was her great-uncle who broke the dish he was occupied with fixing. He cursed in his old patois.

A bright light came in now by the lodge's window. It clarified the atmosphere like pure water and left glints of light on the bed frame, the lip of the carafe and the horn of the phonograph. Ophélie did not understand what all this light was doing here. It rung false in the middle of this conversation. It made the snows of the Pole so distant, so unreal, that she didn't really believe in them anymore.

She took off her glasses, wiped them on her coveralls, then set them back on her nose, reflexively, as though it would help her see more clearly. The glass, which had gone clear when removed, regained quickly its grey tint. This old pair of glasses was a part of her : the colour that it took came from her mood.

‘I still think that mother forgot to mention the most important part. It was the Doyennes that engaged me to this man. For now, only they have the details of the marriage contract.’

‘The Doyennes?’ coughed her great-uncle.

His face was distorted, and all the wrinkles along with. He finally understood the trap his grand-niece found herself in.

‘A diplomatic marriage’, he breathed blandly.

Swallowing a curse he shoved two new pinches of tobacco in his nose and sneezed so much he had to put his dentures back in place.

‘My dear girl, if the Doyennes are involved in it, no recourse is thinkable. But why?’, he asked, twirling his moustache. ‘Why you? Why there?’

Ophélie washed her hands at the faucet and re-buttoned her gloves. She had broken enough of the dishes for today.

‘It would seem that this man's family contacted the Doyennes directly to arrange the marriage. I don’t know the reasons that made them choose me over another. I’d like to believe it’s a misunderstanding, really.’

‘And your mother?’

‘Overjoyed’, whispered Ophélie bitterly. ‘They promised her a good match for me, that’s more than she ever could have hoped.’

In the shadow of her hair and her glasses she squeezed her lips together. ‘It's not in my power to push away this offer. I will follow my future spouse where honour and duty oblige. But it will go no further’, she concluded pulling on her gloves with a determined gesture, ‘this marriage is not close to being consummated.’

Her great-uncle gave a pained look.

‘No, my girl, no, forget that. Look at you… You are tall as a stool, you weigh no more than a bolster… It is of little importance what you think of him, I suggest you never put your will in opposition to that of your husband. You'll get your bones broken.’

Ophélie turned the handle of the phonograph to get the plate moving again and clumsily posed the needle in the first groove of the disc. The little operatic air rung out again from the horn.

She stared off absently, hands behind her back, and said nothing more.

Ophélie was like this. In the sort of situation where any other young girl would have cried, howled, yelled, begged, she contented herself generally with silent observation. Her cousins poked fun at times by saying she was somewhat simple.

‘Listen’, murmured her great-uncle scratching his poorly shaven throat, ‘no need to be dramatic either. I've undoubtedly been excessive when I told you about that family anyway. Maybe your gentleman will be pleasant.’

Ophélie looked at her uncle attentively. The intense light of the sun seemed to accentuate the lines of his face and deepen each wrinkle. With a pang of shock, she suddenly realised that this man, that she had always considered solid as a rock and insensible to the passage of time, was today a tired, old man. And she'd grown, too, despite herself.

She forced a smile.

‘What I need is some good archival reading« Ce qu'il me faut, c'est une bonne documentation. » ; « documentation » here reads more like a process than an object, so reading seems the best direct translation. Still, I'd like something that includes the same visual irony as holding up a product label and saying, ‘finally, some good reading!’ I am not at all satisfied with ‘archival reading’.

.’

Her great-uncle's eyes found a little of their spark.

‘Put your jacket back on, girl, we're headed downstairs!’

Ch 02: The Rupture

Her great-uncle rushed down the mouth of a stair, dimly lit by low lamps. Hands in her coat, nose in her scarf, Ophélie descended after him. The temperature fell from step to step. Her eyes were still adjusted to the sunlight: she got the impression of immersing herself in glacial, black water.

She jumped when her uncle's surly voice reverberated in echoes against the walls.

‘I still can't get a hold of the idea that you're going to leave. The Pole is really the other side of the world!’

He stopped on the stair to turn towards Ophélie. She still wasn't accustomed to the darkness; she ran right into him.

‘Say, you are pretty good at mirror-walking. Couldn't you make one of your little trips from the Pole to here, sometimes?’

‘I can't, uncle, mirror-walking only works over short distances. It's a pipe dream to think of travelling the space between two arks.’

Her great-uncle swore in his old patoisor: ‘in his old, incomprehensible accent’

and continued his descent. Ophélie felt guilty for not being as talented as he had thought she was.

‘I'll try to come see you often’, she promised in a quiet voice.

‘When do you leave, exactly?’

‘In December, if I believe the Doyennes about it.’

Her great-uncle swore again. Ophélie was glad she didn't understand any of his patois.

‘And who will take your place in the museum?’ he mumbled. ‘No one assesses antiques like you do!’

To this Ophélie found no response. To be taken from her family, that was already a tear in herself, but to be taken from her museum, the only place where she felt fully herself, that would be to lose her identity. Ophélie wasn't good at anything but reading. If that was taken from her, there would be nothing left but her clumsiness. She didn't know how to keep a house, or make conversation, nor accomplish even the smallest household task without hurting herself.

‘Apparently, I'm not that irreplaceable’, she murmured into her scarf.

At the first underground floor, her great-uncle exchanged his regular pair of gloves for clean ones. By the light of the electric lamps, he ___ the records **, laid out generation after generation under the cold, vaulted caves. His breath was visible as he exhaled from below his moustache.

‘Alright, these are the family Archives, so don’t expect any miracles. I know that already one or two of our ancestors have set foot in the Great North, but that was a jolly good while back.’

Ophélie wiped a drop that hung off her nose. It could not be much more than ten degrees here. She wondered if her husband’s house would be even colder than this archive room.

‘I would like to see Augustus’, she said.

It was evidently a figure of speech. Augustus had died long before Ophélie’s birth. ‘See Augustus’ meant see his sketches.

Augustus had been the great explorer of the family, a legend in his own right. In school, geography was taught using his travel sketchbooks. He had never written a line – having never mastered his alphabet – but his drawings were a mine of information.

When her great-uncle did not respond, immersed in his records, Ophélie believed that he had not heard her. She pulled on the scarf that enveloped her face and repeated, louder, ‘I would like to see Augustus.’

‘Augustus?’ he murmured without looking at her, ‘Not interesting. Thrice nothing. Just some old scribbles.’

Ophélie raised her eyebrows. Her great-uncle never denigrated his Archives.

‘Oh, come on. Is it really that bad?’

With a sigh, her great-uncle emerged from the drawer open in front of him. The eyeglass that he had screwed in under an eyebrow made one eye appear twice as large as the other.

‘Third row, on your left, bottom shelf. Don’t break anything, please, and put on clean gloves.’

Ophélie walked along the cabinets and knelt at the place indicated. All the originals of Augustus’ sketchbooks were here, classed by ark. She found three under ‘Al-Ondalouse’, seven under ‘Cité’ and nearly twenty under ‘Sérinissime’I need to look into these headings and decide whether to leave them in French or translate them better. Eg, « Pôle » should probable « Pole »

. Under ‘Pôle’ she found just one. Ophélie could not permit herself to be maladroite with documents of such value. She placed it on the consultation pulpit and cautiously turned the pages of drawings.

Pale plains, blossoming with rock, a fjord taken prisoner by ice, forests of great pines, houses covered over by the snow… These landscapes were austere, yes, but less impressive than the impression Ophélie had made herself of the Pôle. She even found them quite beautiful, in a certain fashion. She wondered where her fiancé lived, in among all that white. By this pebble-bordered river? In this fishing harbour lost under the night? On this plain invaded by tundra? This ark seemed so poor, so savage! How then could her fiancé be such a catch?

Ophélie came upon a drawing that she did not understand: it resembled a beehive suspended in the sky. Probably an unfinished sketch.

She turned some more pages and saw a hunting portrait. A man posed proudly in front of an immense pile of firs. Fists on his hips, he had pulled back his sleeves to show his powerfully muscled arms, tattooed to the elbows. He had a hard look about him and fair hair.

Ophélie’s glasses turned blue when she realised that the pile of furs, behind him, was in fact a single fur: that of a dead wolf. It was the size of a bear. She turned the page. This time the hunter was in the middle of a group. They posed together in front of a pile of antlers. Elk antlers, no doubt, except the skulls were the size of a man. The hunters each had the same hard look, the same light hair, the same tattoos on their arms, but no weapons, as though they had killed the animals with their hands.

Ophélie flipped through the sketchbook and found the same hunters posing in front of other carcasses, walruses, mammoth and bears, all of an impossible size.

Ophélie closed the book slowly and returned it to its place. Beasts… These animals struck of gigantism, she had already seen some of them in picture books for children, but that had nothing to do with Augustus’ sketches. Her little museum had not prepared her for that life. What shocked her more than anything was the hunters’ look. A brutal, arrogant look, accustomed to the sight of blood. Ophélie hoped that her fiancé would not have that look.

‘So’, asked her great-uncle when she came back towards him.

‘I understand your reticence better’, she said.

He continued his research with even more intensity.

‘I will find you something else’, he muttered, ‘those sketches, they are one hundred and fifty years old. And they don’t show everything!

That is exactly what worried Ophélie: what Augustus did not show. She said nothing about it, however, and shrugged her shoulders. Someone other than her uncle would have been shocked at her nonchalance and might have confounded it with a certain weakness of character. Ophélie seemed so placid, behind the rectangles of her glasses and her half-closed eyelids, that it was almost impossible to guess that waves of emotion crashed in her chest.

The drawings of the hunt had frightened her. Ophélie wondered if it was that which she was really here, in the Archives, to find.

A puff of air whispered at her ankles, tugging gently at her dress. This breeze came from the mouth of the stair which descended to the second below-ground floor. Ophélie looked a moment at the chain-barred passage where hung the warning panel: Prohibited to the public.

There was always a current of air that hung around in these archive rooms, but Ophélie could not stop herself from interpreting this one as an invitation. The second below-ground needed her, now. She pulled at her great-uncles coat, lost in his reports, sitting on a stool.

‘Would you allow me to descend?’

‘You know that I don’t normally have the right’, he said with a rustling of his moustache. ‘That is the private collection of Artemis, only archivists have access there. She honours us with her trust, we musn't abuse it.’

‘I don’t intend to read with my bare hands, I assure you’, promised Ophélie showing him her gloves. ‘And then, I am not asking as your great-niece, I am asking as manager of the family museum.’

‘Yes, yes, I know the refrain’, he sighed, ‘and it’s my fault too, I’ve rubbed off too much on you.’

Ophélie unhooked the chain and descended the stairs, but the lamps did not turn themselves on.

‘Light please’, asked Ophélie, plunged into obscurity.

She had to repeat herself several times. The Archives building disapproved of this renewed infringement of the rules. Finally, reservedly, it lit the lamps; Ophélie had to be content with the low, flickering light.

Her great-uncle’s voice echoed from wall to wall all the way to the second below-ground floor.

‘Touch only with your eyes, alright? Your clumsiness scares me as much as smallpox!’

Hands deep in her pockets, Ophélie advanced into the rib-vaulted room. She passed under a pediment engraved with the archivists’ motto: Artemis, we are the respectful guardians of your memory. Well under the protection of their glass cases, the Reliquaries extended out of sight.

If she seemed sometimes like an ill-grown adolescent, with her long, untamed hair, her clumsiness, and — hidden behind her glasses — her timidity, Ophélie was a different person in the presence of history. All of her cousins prized their tea houses, their promenades by the river, their visits to the zoo, and their ballrooms. For Ophélie the second floor below-ground in the Archives was the most fascinating place in the world. It was here that, under the protection of their glass cases, the common heritage of all the family was jealously conserved. Here lay the documents from the first generation of the ark. Here ended up the tomorrows of the year zero. Here Ophélie came closest to the Rupture.

The Rupture, this was her professional obsession. She dreamed sometimes that she was running after the line of a horizon that uncovered itself to her. Night after night, she went further and further, but it was a world without end, without rupture, round and smooth like an apple; this first world whose objects she collected in her museum, sewing machines, combustion engines, cylinder presses, metronomes… Ophélie felt no inclination for the boys her age, but she could spend hours face to face with a barometer from the old world.

She stopped a moment in front of an old parchment protected under glass. It was the founding text of the ark, which had connected Artémis and her descendants to Anima. The next Reliquary contained the first drafts of their legal arsenal. Here were already found the laws that had attributed decisive power over the whole community to the family mothers and matriarchs. Under the case of the third Reliquaryperhaps « Relic », but I prefer « Reliquary ». My mind has changed. This should definitely be Relic.

, a codex « dictated, described, &c. » the fundamental duties of Artémis towards her descendants: make sure that all eat to their fill, have a roof for shelter, receive an education, learn to make good use of their power. In capital letters, a clause specifies that she may neither abandon her family or leave her ark. Was this Artémis who herself dictated this order of conduct to herself in order to not relax over the centuries?

Ophélie walked along from Reliquary to Reliquary. As she immersed herself in the past she felt a great calm descend on her. She lost sight of her future a little. She forgot that she had been fiancéedProperly spelled ‘fiancéd’, the extra ‘e’ is in order to agree with the feminine subject, ‘she’.

against her will, she forgot the hunter’s looks, she forgot that she was being soon being sent to live far from all that she loved.

Most often the Reliquaries were documents of great value, such as the maps of the new world or the birth certificate of the first child of Artémis, the eldest of all the Animists. For others, nevertheless, it was banal objects of everyday life: scissors that snipped away at hair that was not there; an enormous pair of pince-nez that changed colours; a little story book whose pages turned all by themselves. They were not all from the same period, but Artémis wanted them all to be part of her collection in a symbolic capacity. Symbolic of what? Even she no longer remembered.

Ophélie’s steps brought her instinctually towards a glass case on which she respectfully placed her hand. A registry lay there, decomposing, and its ink had been faded by time. It was the census of the men and women who had rallied to the family spirit to found a new society. In fact, this was only an impersonal list of last names and numbers, but not of just anyone: of those who had survived the Rupture. These people were witnesses to the end of the old world.

It was a moment before Ophélie understood, with a little shock in her chest, what the call was that had brought her to her great-uncles archives, in the second below-ground floor, before this old registry. It was not the simple need to gather information — it was to get back to the sources. Her ancient ancestors had attended the dislocation of their universe. Did they just let themselves die for all that? No, they invented another life.

Ophélie pushed the strands of hair that curled at her forehead behind her ears, to clear her face. Her glasses cleared up on the end of her nose, dispersing the greyish tint that had been accumulating for hours. She was going through her own Rupture. She still felt the fear in her stomach, but she now knew what she remained for her to do. She had to take the challenge.

On her shoulders, the scarf began to wriggle.

‘Finally, you wake up’, Ophélie teased it.

The scarf rolled gently the length of her coat, changed position, repositioned its rings about her neck and stopped moving. It was a very old scarf, which spent its time sleeping.

‘We are about to go back up’, Ophélie told it. ‘I found what I was looking for.’

As she prepared to return the way she had come, she came upon the most dusty, enigmatic and disturbing Reliquary of Artémis’ whole collection. She could not leave without saying goodbye. She turned a handle and the two slabs of the protective dome slid, each in the opposite direction. She laid her gloved palm in the binding of a book, the Book, and was filled with the same frustration that she had felt the first time, at the first touch. She could read no trace of any emotion, nor thought, nor intention. Of any origin. And this was not just because of the gloves — whose special weave formed a barrier between the gifts of a reader and the world of objects. No, Ophélie had already felt the Book once barehanded like other readers before her, but it refused to reveal itself to her, simple as that.

She took it in her arms, caressed the binding, ruffled through the supple pages between her fingers. They were entirely covered in strange arabesques, a script long forgotten. Never in her life had Ophélie handled anything like even close to such a phenomenon. Was this just a book, after all? It had neither the consistency of vellum nor that of cloth. It was terrible to admit, but it resembled human skin, drained of blood. A skin doted that benefited from exceptional longevity.

Ophélie asked herself the ritual questions, that she shared with numerous generations of archivists and archaeologists. What story did this strange document tell? Why did Artémis want it to be part of her private collection? And what did the engraved message on the pedestal of the Reliquary mean: Do not try to destroy this Book regardless of circumstances?

Ophélie would take all these interrogations with herself, to the other end of the world — where are neither archives, nor museum, nor obligation of remembrance. Nothing that concerned her, at any rate.

Her great-uncle’s voice resonated along the length of the stair and reflected long under the low vault of the second below-ground, in a ghostly echo.

‘Come back up here! I have found you a little something!’

Ophélie put her palm on the Book one last time and closed the dome again. She had said her goodbyes to the past in good and due form.

Now, make way for the future.

Ch 03: The Journal

Saturday, 19 June. Rodolphe and I have arrived well. The Pole reveals itself very differently than all of my expectations. I think that I have never had as much vertigo in my life. Mme the ambassador has kindly received us in her domain, where an eternal summer night reigns. I am dazzled by so many marvels! The people here are courteous, thoughtful, and their powers surpass understanding.

‘May I interrupt you in your occupation, my cousin?’

Ophélie started, and her glasses with her. Immersed in the travel log« journal de bord » should be something like ship's log, travel journals, captain's log.

of the ancestor Adélaïde, she had not seen this little lump of a man come, bowler hat in hand, smile a spread out between his conspicuous ears. The puny man was certainly not much more than fifty. With an ample twirl of his arm, he indicated a band of joyous comrades who burst out laughing in front of an old typewriter, not far away.

‘My cousins and I, we were wondering if you would accord us permission to read some of the trinkets in your majestic museum.’

Ophélie could not suppress a frowning brow. She was not under any pretension about knowing personally every member of the family who pushed past the turnstile at the entrance of the Museum of Primitive History, but she was certain of never having any business with these characters. Which branch of the family tree did they come from? The hatters’ corporation? The tailors’ caste? The confectioners’ tribe? In any case, they reeked of farce to a nose-wrinkling degree.

‘I’ll be with you in just a moment’, she said, setting down her cup of tea.

Her suspicions narrowed when she went to meet Mr Bowler Hat’s troupe. There were far too many smiles in the air.

‘Voilà, the singular piece of the museum’, trilled one of the troupe with an eloquent look towards Ophélie.

The irony missed, for her, a little subtlety. She knew she was not attractive, with her messed up plait that spit dark wings over her jaw, her training scarf, her old brocade dress, her mismatch boots, and the incurable awkwardness that never left her. She had not washed her hair in a week, and was dressed in the first clothes that fell into her hands, without any attention to their matching or not.

This evening, for the first time, Ophélie would meet her fiancé. He came from the Pole specially to present himself to the family. He would stay several weeks, then he would take Ophélie to the Great North. With a little luck, he would find her so repugnant that he would renounce their union on the spot.

‘Don’t touch that’, she said to a great oaf whose fingers neared a ballistic galvanometer.

‘What are you muttering, cousin’, he guffawed, ‘speak up, I didn’t understand you.’

‘Don’t touch this galvanometer’, she said, pushing her voice. ‘I will show you some samples reserved for reading.’

The great oaf shrugged his shoulders.

‘Oh, I only wanted to see how this mess works. Of course, I don’t know how to read.’

The contrary would have shocked Ophélie. Reading objects was not a common ability among the Animists. It manifested itself sometimes at puberty, in the form of imprecise intuitions at the tips of the fingers, but it declined in a few months if it was not quickly taken charge of by a teacher. Her great-uncle had played this role for Ophélie; after all, their branch worked n the preservation of family heritage. Visit the past of objects at the slightest contact? Rare were the Animists that wished to encumber themselves with such a burden, all the more if it was not their occupation.

Ophélie shot a glance at Bowler Hat who, snickering, touched his companions’ fitted coats. He could read, probably for not much longer. He wanted to play with his hands as long as he could.

‘That is not the problem, cousin’, observed Ophélie calmly, returning to the great oaf. ‘If you want to handle a part of the collection, you must wear gloves like mine.’

Since the latest family decree on heritage conservation, it was prohibited to interact with the Archives barehanded without special authorisation. Just touching an object was to contaminate it with one’s own state of mind, adding another stratum to its history. Too many people had soiled rare exemplars with their emotions and thoughts.

Ophélie went over to her key drawer. She opened it wide: the drawer stayed in her hand and its contents fell all over the tile floor in a joyous cacophony. Ophélie heard laughing behind her back as she bent to gather the keys. Bowler Hat came to her aid with a sardonic grin.

‘We mustn’t mock our devoted cousin. She will put a little reading at my disposition to cultivate me!’

His smile became carnivorous.

‘I want something spicy’, he said to Ophélie, ‘you wouldn’t have a weapon? Some war stuff, you know.’

Ophélie put the drawer back and took the key she needed. The ancient wars of the old world made fantasies for the youth who knew only the little family quarrels. This callow troupe was looking only for amusement. Ophélie was indifferent to mockeries of her person, but she did not tolerate someone showing such little consideration for her museum, especially today.

However, she was determined to remain professional to the end.

‘If you would follow me.’ she said, key in hand.

‘Give me your samples’, intoned Bowler Hat, in a caricature of reverence.

She took them to the rotunda reserved for flying machines of the first world, the most popular section of the collection. Ornithopters, amphibious aeroplanes, mechanical birds, steam-powered helicopters, quadruplanes, and water planes were suspended on cables like great dragonflies. The whole troupe burst out even more at the sight of these antiquities, waving their arms like geese. Bowler Hat, who had been chewing a sweet, stuck it to the hull of a glider.

Ophélie watched him do it without blinking. That was the last straw. He wanted to cause a sensation? Well alright, they would laugh.

She had them take a mezzanine stair, and then walk the length of some glass-fronted shelves. Ophélie slipped the key into the crack of one shelf, opened the glass and took in a handkerchief a miniscule marble of lead that she handed to Bowler Hat.

‘An excellent introductory material to cultivate oneself on the wars of the old world’, she assured him in a flat voice.

He burst into laughter, seizing the marble with his bare hands.

‘What is this, then? An automaton’s dropping?’

His smile disappeared as he went back into the past of the object, on the tips of his fingers. He became pale and immobile, as though time had crystallised around him. Seeing his head, at first his merry companions elbowed him, then they began to worry when he did not react.

‘You gave him a dirty trick!’ panicked one of them.

‘It is a piece very much appreciated by historians’, refuted Ophélie in a professional tone.

Bowler Hat went from pale to grey.

‘This is not… what I… asked for’, he articulated with difficulty.

With her handkerchief, Ophélie recovered the lead and put it back on its scarlet cushion.

‘You wanted a weapon isn’t that right? I gave you the projectile from a cartridge that, in its time, perforated the stomach of a trooper. That’s what it is, war, she concluded, pushing her glasses back up her nose. Men who killed, and men who were killed.

As Bowler Hat held his stomach with a nauseated air, she calmed a little. The lesson was harsh, she was conscient of that. This boy had come with heroic epics in mind, and read a weapon, that was like staring one’s own death in the face.

‘It will pass’, she told him. ‘I suggest that you go get some fresh air.’

The troupe left, not without shooting her several bad looks over their shoulders. One of them called her ‘badly dressed’ and another a ‘sac of four-eyed potatoes’. Ophélie hoped her fiancé would have the same thoughts soon.

Armed with a spatula, she attacked the chewy sweet that Bowler Hat had stuck to the glider.

‘I owed you a little revenge’, she whispered affectionately caressing the flank of the machine, as she would of an old horse.

‘My dear, I looked everywhere for you.’

Ophélie turned. Skirt hitched up, umbrella pinched under her arm, a magnificent young lady was walking in her direction, clacking her little white boots on the tiling. It was Agathe, her elder sister, as pink, as stylish, as stunning as the younger was brown, unkempt, and withdrawn. Day and night.

‘But what are you still doing here?’

Ophélie tried to get rid of the chewy sweet but it stuck to her gloves.

‘I’ll remind you that I work at the museum until six o’clock.’

Agathe took her hands in her own theatrically. She grimaced just as quick. She had just crushed the chewy sweet onto her own pretty gloves.

‘Not anymore, stupid’, she said, getting irritated as she shook her hand. ‘Mum said that you should worry only about your preparations. Oh, little sister!’ she sobbed, pushing against her. ‘You must be so excited.’

‘Uuh’, was the only sound Ophélie exhale.

Agathe detached herself to judge her from top to bottom.

‘Name of a kettle, have you looked at yourself in a mirror? You can not show yourself decently in such a state. What will they think of us?’

‘That, that’s the least of my worries’, declared Ophélie moving over to her counter.

‘Really, such is not the case for your parentage, little egoist. Let’s get that straight from this second!’

With a sigh, Ophélie took out her old sac and gathered her personal effects. If her sister felt invested with a sacred mission, she would not let her work in peace. She had no other choice but to close the museum. While Ophélie took all her time to arrange her affairs, with a stone in the pit of her stomach, Agathe stamped about impatiently. She sat down on the counter, her little, white boots moving about under her laced trousers.

‘I’ve got a titbit for you, good dirt! Your mysterious intended seems to finally have a name!’

For her trouble, Ophélie pulled her head from her bag. A few hours before their official presentation, it was high time! Her future in-laws must have made special recommendations to benefit from such complete discretion. The Doyennes had been silent as tombs all autumn, divulging no information on the subject of her fiancé, to the point that it became ridiculous. Ophélie’s mother, thoroughly vexed at not being let in on the secret, had not calmed down for two months.

‘So?’ she asked as Agathe savoured her subtle reaction.

‘Mr Thorn!’

Ophélie shivered under the folds of her scarf. Thorn? She was already allergic to that name. It sounded hard on her tongue. Abrupt. Almost aggressive. A hunter’s name.

‘I also know that this dear sir will not be long your elder, little sister. Your groom will be nothing of a senile, old man, unable to honour his bride. And I’ve saved the best for last’, added Agatha without taking a breath, ‘you won’t wind up lost in some forgotten, little hole. Believe me, the Doyennes have not been mocking us. Mr Thorn apparently has an aunt as beautiful as she is influential, who assures him an excellent situation at the Pole’s court. You will lead the life of a princess!’

Her eyes bright, Agathe triumphed. Ophélie, on the other hand, was devastated. Thorn, a man of the court? She would actually have preferred a hunter. The more she learned about her future husband, the more he made her want to run for her life.

‘And who are your sources?’

Agathe straightened her shoulder, where lively red curls were getting away. Her cherry lips folded into a satisfied smile.

‘They’re solid! My brother-in-law Gérard took these titbits from his great-grandmother, who got them herself from a close cousin, who is the twin sister of one of the Doyennes.’

With the manners of a little girl, she clapped her hands in excitement and leapt back onto her low boots.

‘You’ve got yourself quite a ring on your finger, my dear. That a man in that position and rank would ask for your hand, it’s unheard of! Come on, hurry up and get that rat’s nest cleaned up. We don’t have much more time before Mr Thorn arrives. We have to make you presentable!

‘Go on ahead’, murmured Ophélie, closing the clasps of her bag. ‘I have to finish one last formality.’

Her sister walked away in a few gracious steps.

‘I’ll reserve us a fiacre!’

Ophélie stood immobile a long while, behind her counter. The brutal silence which had fallen over the place after Agathe’s exit almost made her ears hurt. She opened her ancestor’s journal at random and with her eyes followed the fine, nervous writing — almost a century old — that she now knew by heart.

Tuesday, 6 July. I seem I am obliged to moderate my enthusiasm somewhat. Madame the ambassador has gone on a trip, leaving us in the hands of her innumerable invitees. I have the impression that we have been completely forgotten. We spend our days playing cards and on promenades in the gardens. My brother is accommodating himself better to this lazy life than I, he is already besotted with a duchess. I will need to call him back to reason, we are here for purely professional reasons.

Ophélie was disoriented. The journal and Agathe’s bits of gossip did not fit at all with Augustus’ sketches. The Pole now seemed to her like an excessively refined place. Was Thorn a card-player? This was a man of the court; surely, he played cards. He probably had nothing else to do with his days.

Ophélie put up the travel journal in a felt cover and shoved it to the bottom of her bag. Behind the welcome counter, she opened the flap of a writing case to pull out the inventory registry.

From time to time, Ophélie had forgotten museum keys in their locks, lost important administrative documents or even broken unique pieces but if there was one job that she had never neglected it was taking inventory.

Ophélie was an excellent reader, one of the best of her generation. She could decrypt the lives of machines, stratus after stratus, century after century, following the string of hands that had touched them, used them, cared for them, broken them, repaired them. This aptitude had permitted her to enrich the descriptions of each piece in the collection with an attention to detail, so far unequalled. Where her predecessors limited themselves to dissecting the past of a former proprietor, of two at a pinch, Ophélie went back to the birth of the object in the hands of its fabricator.

This inventory register, it was something of her personal novel. Tradition dictated that she should put it in the hands of her successor in person, a custom that she had never expected to invoke so early in her life, but nobody had responded to the call for candidates yet. So, she slid a note to the attention of whomever would take her place at the museum. She put the registry back in the writing case and locked the flap with a turn of a key.

With slowed movements, she leaned on the counter with both hands. She forced herself to breathe deeply, to accept the inevitable. This time, it was really finished. Tomorrow, she would not open her museum like every morning. Tomorrow, she would depend until forever on a man whose name she will end up by taking.

Madame Thorn. Might as well start getting used to it.

Ophélie grabbed her bag. She contemplated her museum for the last time. The sun traversed the glass of the rotunda in a cascade of light, gilding the antiquities and projecting their disarticulated shadows in the tiling. Never had she found the place so beautiful.

Ophélie left the keys in the caretakers’ room. She had even passed under the marquee — whose glass was buried under a coat of dead leaves — before her sister shouted across at her from the fiacre door.

‘Get in! We are going to Orfèvre Street.’

The driver cracked his whip, granted, no horse was hitched to his carriage. The tyres rattled into motion, and the vehicle began to tumble along the river, guided only by the volition of its master, from up on his perch.

Through the back window, Ophélie observed the spectacle of the roadside with a new acuity. This valley where she had been born, seemed to uncover itself as the fiacre traversed it. Its half-timbered façades, its market places, its pleasant factories were already beginning to become strange. The whole city was telling her that here was no longer home. In the red light of the end of autumn, people led their everyday lives. A nurse guided her pram, turning red under the appreciative whistles of the workmen perched high on some scaffolding. Young schoolchildren munched on warm chestnuts on their way home. A deliveryman trotted along a pavement with a packet under his arm. All these men, all these women were Ophélie’s family and she didn’t know half of them.

The hot breath of a tramway overtook their cab in a rush of bells. When it disappeared, Ophélie contemplated the mountain, criss-crossed with switchbacks, which overlooked their Valley. It was the first snows, up there. The summit had disappeared in a cap of dim grey; even the Observatory of Artemis was no longer distinguishable. Crushed under that cold mass of rocks and clouds, crushed under the law of a whole family, Ophélie had never felt so insignificant.

Agathe’s fingers snapped under her nose.

‘Alright, stink bug, let’s see you quickly. Your whole outfit needs seeing to. You need new clothes, slippers, hats, lingerie, lots of lingerie…’

‘I like my dresses’, cut in Ophélie.

‘Oh, do be quiet, you dress like our grandmother. Name of a hair roller, don’t tell me that you are still wearing that pair of dirty, old gloves’, said Agathe in revulsion, taking her sister’s gloved hands in her own. ‘Mum ordered you a whole shipment from Julien’s!’

‘They don’t make reader’s gloves at the Pole, I need to be economical.’

Agathe was unmoved by this kind of argument. Coquetries and elegance justified all the wastes in the world.

‘Snap out of it, good heavens. You are going to straighten that back, pull in that stomach, show off that blouse a little, powder that nose, blush those cheeks and, for pity’s sake, change the colour of your glasses, that’s a dreary grey! Now, for your hair’, sighed Agathe, holding up the brownish braid with the tips of her fingernails, ‘if it were me, I would shave all this to start over entirely; unfortunately, we no longer have the time. Come along, quickly, we’ve arrived!’

Ophélie followed on leaden heels. At every skirt, at every corset, to every necklace that was presented to her, she responded with a shake of the head. The seamstress, whose Animist fingers fashioned the materials with neither thread nor needle, cried angrily about it. After two nervous breakdowns and a dozen shopkeepers, Agathe had only succeeded in convincing her little sister to replace her mismatched ankle boots.

At the hair salon, Ophélie put hardly any more heart into the task. She would hear nothing of powder, or waxing, or curling irons, or of ribbons in the latest fashion.

‘I have patience with you’, fulminated Agathe, moving her heavy locks — as well as possible — to uncover the nape of her neck. ‘You think I don’t know all that you are feeling? I was seventeen when they engaged me to Charles, and Mum was two years younger when she married Papa. You see what we have become: splendid wives, satisfied mothers, accomplished women! You have been overprotected by your great-uncle, it’s not a service he’s done you.’

With a blurry look, Ophélie contemplated her face in the hairdresser’s mirror in front of her, while her sister struggled with her knots. Without her rebellious locks and her glasses — set on the table with the brushes — she felt naked.

In the mirror, she saw the ginger shape of Agathe stick her chin on the top of her head.

‘Ophélie’, she murmured softly, ‘with a bit of effort, you could please.’

‘So? Please who?’

‘But of course, Mr Thorn, simpleton!’, teased Agathe, administering a tap at the back of her neck. ‘Charm is the best arm woman has been offered, you must use it without scruple. It takes a nothing, an inspired glance, an emphatic smile, to put a man on his knees. Look at Charles, I do what I want with him.

Ophélie planted her eyes in those of her reflection, pupils with a hint of chocolate aroma. Without her glasses, she saw poorly, but she made out the melancholic oval of her face, the paleness of her cheeks, her white neck which beat under her collar, the shadow of a nose without character and the too-thin lips that did not like to speak. She tried a timid smile, but it rang so false that she swallowed it whole. Did she have charm? What value would it have? In the eyes of a man? Would that be the look that Thorn would give her, tonight?

The idea seemed so grotesque to her that she would have laughed with her whole heart if her situation was not so morose as to make her want to cry.

‘Have you finished torturing me?’ she asked her sister who pulled at her hair without restraint.

‘Almost.’

Agathe turned towards the manager of the salon to reclaim her pins. This moment of inattention was all that Ophélie needed. Quickly, she put her glasses back on, grabbed her bag, and plunged head first into the hairdresser’s mirror — hardly large enough for her. Her bust emerged from the wall mirror in her room, several neighbourhoods away, but she could not continue forward anymore. From the other side of the mirror, Agathe had grabbed her by the ankles to pull her back to Orfèvres Street. Ophélie dropped her bag and took hold of the wallpaper-covered wall, struggling with all her force against her sister’s grip.

Without warning, she fell all the way into her room, knocking over a stool and the flowerpot which was on it. A little rattled, she contemplated stupidly the unshod foot that stuck out under her dress; one boot from her new pair had stayed with Agathe on Orfèvres Street. Her sister could not pass through mirrors, which left her a respite.

Ophélie recovered her bag from the carpet, limped over to a massive wooden trunk, at the foot of the bunk beds, and sat down there. She pushed up her glasses on her nose and observed the little room encumbered with trunks and hat boxes. This disorder was not its normal disorder. The room that had seen her grow up already felt her depart.

She carefully took out her ancestor Adélaïde’s journal and turned the pages — pensive.

Sunday 18 July. Still no news of Mme the Ambassador. The women here are charming, and I believe that none of my cousins on Anima are their equal in grace and beauty, but I sometimes feel ill-at-ease. I get the impression that they never stop making insinuations about how I hold myself, my manners, and my manner of speaking. Or even how I hold my head?

‘Why are you back so early?’

Ophélie raised her nose towards the upper bunk. She had not recognised the two patent leather shoes that stuck out from the mattress; this pair of thin legs belonged to Hector, the little brother that she shared the room with.

She closed the travel journal.

‘I fled Agathe.’

‘Why?’

‘Just some lady stuff. Does Mr Tell-me-why want details?’

‘Uh, no.’

Ophélie arched her eyebrows; her brother was going soft. The patent leather shoes disappeared from the bunk above. They were soon replaced by lips bearded in marmalade, a trumpet nose, a bowl cut, and two placid eyes. Hector had the same look as Ophélie, minus the glasses: imperturbable in any circumstances. He held a slice of bread, the jam streaming onto his fingers.

‘Weren’t you told not to eat in our room?’ murmured Ophélie.

Hector shrugged his shoulders and pointed at the travel journal laying on her dress.

‘Why do you keep toting around that journal? You know it by heart.’

Hector was like this. He always asked questions, and all of his questions began with “why”.

‘To reassure myself, I suppose’, murmured Ophélie.

In fact, Adélaïde had become familiar over the weeks, almost intimate. End yet, Ophélie felt disappointed every time she ended up at the last page.

Monday 2 August. I am so relieved! Mme the Ambassador has returned from the trip. Rodolphe has finally signed his contract with a notary of Lord Farouk. I am not allowed to write any more about it, professional confidence obliged, but we will meet their family spirit tomorrow. If my brother gives a convincing performance, we will become rich.

The journal ends with these words. Adélaïde had not judged it necessary to enter into the details, nor to transcribe the following events. What contract had she and her brother signed with the family spirit Farouk? Did they return rich from the Pole? It would seem not, that would be su…

‘Why don’t you read it with your hands?’ asked Hector crunching the slice between his teeth, chewing with phlegm. ‘If I could, I would.’

‘I don’t have the right, and you know it.’

Truthfully, Ophélie had been tempted to pull off her gloves and pierce her ancestor’s little secrets, but she was too professional to contaminate this document with her own anxiety. Her great-uncle would be very disappointed if she gave in to that impulse.

Under her feet, a high-pitched voice came through from the floor below.

‘This guest room, it’s a veritable catastrophe! It should befit a man of the court, it should have had some pomp, decorum! What poor opinion will Mr Thorn have of us? We will make up for it with the meal this evening. Roseline, march over to the caterers and tell them about my hen-houses, I’m putting you in charge of the operation! And you, my poor friend, set an example, would you? One doesn’t marry one’s daughter off every day!’

‘Mum’, commented Hector placidly.

‘Mum’, confirmed Ophélie in the same tone.

That did not give her any desire to go downstairs. As she looked at the flowered stains of the window, the setting sun fell on her cheeks, her nose, her glasses. Through a sunset-purpled corridor of clouds, the moon already lay upon the mauve canvas of the sky like a china plate.

Ophélie contemplated the slope of the valley, yellowed by autumn, which dominated their home, then the passing fiacres in the road, then her little sisters who played at hoops in the courtyard, among the dead leaves. They sang nursery rhymes, got into tussles, pulled each other’s braids, passing from laughs to tears and from tears to laughs with a dis-concerting ease. They were the echoes of Ophélie at the same age, with their charming smiles, their burning babblings, and their red-blond hair, which shone in the evening light.

A wave of nostalgia brutally took over. Ophélie’s eyes grew wide, her lips drew narrow, her impermeable mask was cracking. She would have liked to gallop after sisters, put holes in her skirts without a care, and throw pebbles in Aunt Roseline's garden. How far that time seemed, this evening…

‘Why do you have to leave? It’s going to be a pain finding myself all alone with these pests.’

Ophélie turned to Hector. He had not moved from his upper bunk, occupied with licking his fingers clean, but he had noticed her looking at the window. Under the phlegmatic cover, the tone was accusing.

‘It’s not my fault, you know.’

‘Why didn’t you want to marry our cousins, then?’

The question stung. It’s true, Hector was right, she would not be here if she had married the first come.

‘Regrets don’t help anything’, she murmured.

‘Hey!’ warned Hector.

He wiped his mouth with a sleeve and flattened himself on the bed. A violent burst of air wished through Ophélie’s dresses. Hair let down and forehead shining, her mother had just erupted into the room like a tornado. Cousin Bertrand followed behind.

‘I am putting the little ones in here, since they have given their room to their sister’s fiancé. These trunks take up all the space, I can’t cope! Bring me down the one from the store room and be careful, it’s fragi…’

Her mother interrupted herself, mouth open, when she perceived Ophélie’s silhouette which stood out against the setting sun.

‘By the ancestors, I thought you were with Agathe!’

She pressed her lips together in indignation, seeing her made-up like an old lady and her feather duster scarf. The expected metamorphosis had not happened.

Her mother’s hand flew to her ample bosom.

‘You want to be the end of me! After all the trouble I’ve gone through for you! For what are you punishing me, my daughter?

Ophélie blinked behind her glasses. She had always been saddled with this poor taste, why should she change her dressing habits now?

‘Do you even know what time it is?’ her mother began to panic, her painted nails plastered to her mouth. ‘We have to go up to the airfield in less than an hour! Where did your sister go? And I, who look a fright, good heavens, we’ll never get be there on time.’

She took a powdering brush from her corsage, stamped a pink cloud on her nose, retied her red-blond bun with an expert hand, and pointed her red nail at Ophélie.

‘I want you presentable before the clock strikes the hour. The same goes for you, filthy boy. You reek of dried jelly, Hector!’

Their mother remembered Bernard who was still standing there, arms crossed.

‘And this trunk, is it for today or tomorrow?’

In a whirlwind of dress, the storm left the room as it had come.

Ch 04: The Bear

A dense rain had fallen at the same time as the evening. It sounded like hail on the fifty metres tall, grated-metal structure of the dirigible hangar. Erected on a neighbouring plain, this base was the most modern of the valley. Specially conceived to welcome long-haulers, it benefited from steam heating and was equipped with its own hydrogen factory. Its immense doors were wide open on their rails, exposing its entrails of wrought-iron, brick, and cables, where numerous labourers in raincoats were active.

Outside, the length of the merchants’ quay, street lamps spit out a light hampered by the humidity. Soaked to the bone, a porter checked the protective tarpaulins covering the postal crates waiting to be loaded. He grimaced when he came upon a forest of umbrellas, right in the middle of the quay. Under the umbrellas stood men in frock coats, women in garlands, and children carefully brushed. They all waited there, silent and impassive, searching the clouds.

‘Excuse me, good cousins, may I help you with something?’ he asked.

Ophélie’s mother, whose red umbrella dominated all the others, indicated the clock around which they had set up camp. Everything was enormous about this woman, her bustled dress, her frog necklace, her beehive hairdo, and — dominating all — her feathered hat.

‘Tell me if the clock is on-time, would you. We’ve spent a good forty minutes already looking and waiting for the dirigible coming from the Pole!’

‘Late, as usual’ said the porter, resigned, with a large smile. ‘Are you waiting for a delivery of furs?’

‘No, son. We await a visitor.’

The porter squinted at the crow’s beak of a nose that had responded. This nose belonged to a lady of extremely advanced age. She was dressed entirely in black, from the mantilla that bordered her white hair to the taffeta of her bibbed dress. The elegant silver trimmings of her outfit witnessed to her status of Doyenne, mother among mothers.

The porter removed his hat in respect.

‘An envoy from the Pole, dear mother? Are you certain that there is no mistake about this person? I have worked on the quays since I was a boy and I have never seen a man from the North come all the way here for anything but business. They don’t involve themselves with just anyone, these people!’

He pinched his hat in conclusion and went back to his cases. Ophélie followed him with her gloomy eyes, then noticed him look at her boots. What use was it, putting on a new pair? They were already covered in mud.

‘Chin up, and avoid getting water on you’ breathed Agathe with whom she shared a lemon-yellow umbrella. ‘And smile, you are ridiculously morose. Mr Thorn won’t be breaking in the bed with a face like that.’

Her sister had not forgiven her escapade through the mirror, it was in her voice, but Ophélie was hardly listening. She concentrated on the sound of the rain, which covered the panicked fluttering in her chest.

‘It’s alright, why don’t you let her breathe’, said Hector, irritated.

Ophélie shot a thankful look at her brother, but he was already occupied, jumping in puddles with his little sisters and his cousins. They incarnated childhood which she would have liked to relive one last time this evening. Without a worry, they had all come to attend, not the arrival of her fiancé, but that of the dirigible. It was a rare spectacle for them, a veritable festival.

‘Agathe is right’, her mother declared, under her enormous red umbrella. ‘My daughter will breathe when she is told and in the way she is told. Isn’t that right, my dear?’

This question, purely protocol, was reserved for Ophélie’s father, who spluttered a vague formulaic assent. This poor man, grey and thinning, prematurely ageing, had been ground down by his wife’s authority. Ophélie couldn’t recall ever having seen him respond no. With her eyes, she searched for her old godfather among the crowd of uncles, aunts, cousins, and nephews. She found him, brooding just off from the umbrellas — retreated into his sea-blue raincoat, all the way to his moustache. She expected no miracle from him, but the sympathetic look he addressed her from afar did some good.

Ophélie had mud for a head and jam for a stomach. Her heart hammered at the bottom of her throat. She would have liked this wait under the rain to never end.

‘There!’

‘It’s him.’

‘Not too early…’

Ophélie raised her eyes to the clouds, stomach in knots. A sombre mass, like the silhouette of a whale, pierced the indistinct mass and detached itself from the canvas of the night, emitting a sinister creaking. Whirling of the propellers became deafening. Children yelled with joy. Laced petticoats whipped about. Ophélie and Agathe’s lemon-yellow umbrella flew off into the sky. Coming over the landing zone, the dirigible released its lines. The labourers grabbed hold of and pulled on them with all their weight to help the aerostat descend. They grabbed, by the tens, onto manual guidance rails, helped it pull into the large hangar and moored it to the floor. A gangway was set up for debarking. Holding cases and postal bags with a firm grip, members of the crew debarked.

The whole family pressed together in front of the hangar like a swarm. Only Ophélie stayed in back, dripping under the cold rain, her long brown hair plastered to her cheeks. The water trickled on the surface of her glasses. She saw before her only an indistinct mass of dresses, jackets, and umbrellas.

And over the brouhaha, the overpowering voice of her mother dominated.

‘But, let him pass, you all, make room! My dear, my very dear mister Thorn, welcome to Anima. Well now, have you come without an escort? By the ancestors, Ophélie! Where has she run off to, that moon-head? Agathe, go bring us your sister quickly. What an appalling time, my poor sir, if you had but arrived an hour earlier, we might have welcomed you without this downpour. Someone give him an umbrella!

Nailed in place, Ophélie couldn’t move. He was here. The man who was on the cusp of destroying her life was here. She did not want to see him or speak to him.

Agathe grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her across through the family in her wake. Dazed by the noise and the rain, half conscious, Ophélie passed from face to face until her gaze fell upon the chest of a polar bear. Stupefied, she did not react when the bear murmured an icy “good evening”, all the way up there, far above her head.

‘The presentations have been made!’ said her mother, breathlessly, in the middle of the polite applause. ‘To your fiacres! Let’s not go catching our deaths.’

Ophélie let herself be pushed into a vehicle. The whip cracked in the air and the carriage began to bump along. A lamp was lit that projected a reddish glare on the passengers. The downpour seemed to beat down furiously on the window panes. Trapped against the fiacre door, Ophélie concentrated on that pulsation of water, long enough to recover her head and get out of her drowsiness. She realised, bit by bit, that others were talking around her animatedly. It was her mother who was making conversation enough for ten. Was he here too, the bear?

Ophélie pushed her rain-flecked glasses beck up. She saw first the enormous beehive hairdo which her mother pushed against the fiacre seat, then the raven’s nose of the Doyenne just before her and finally, from the other site, the bear. He looked obstinately out the side window, responding from time to time to her mother’s babbling with a tired nod, without taking the trouble to exchange a look with anyone.

Relieved to not be under his gaze, Ophélie examined her fiancé more attentively. Contrary to her first impression, Thorn was not a bear, even if he did have the appearance of one. An ample white fur, bristling with fangs and claws, covered his shoulders. He was not so corpulent, actually. His arms, crossed on his chest, were as sharp as swords. Still, as meagre as he was, he had the stature of a giant. The crown of his head pressed against the roof of the fiacre and obliged him to crook his neck. Even higher perched than cousin Bertrand, and that was no small statement.

‘By the ancestors’, said Ophélie, astounded. ‘All that will be my husband?’

Thorn carried on his knees a neat suitcase that clashed with his tawny-hide clothing and gave him a little touch of civilisation. Ophélie observed him only furtively. She did not dare stare at him insistently, for fear that he feel that attention and turn brusquely towards her. In two short glances, however, she got an idea of his face, and what she glimpsed there gave her goose bumps. The pale eyes, the sharp nose, the light beard, a scar across his temple, this whole profile was full of disdain. A disdain that was addressed at her and all of her family.

Surprised, she realised that this man too was marrying against his will.

‘I have a gift for Madame Artémis.’

Ophélie jumped. Her mother shut up brusquely. Even the Doyenne, who was asleep, opened her eyes halfway. Thorn had articulated the sentence begrudgingly, as though speaking to them costed him. He pronounced each consonant with a hardness, that was the accent of the North.

‘A present for Artémis?’ stammered her mother, shaken. ‘But of course, sir!’ she recovered. ‘It would be a singular honour to introduce you to our family spirit. You probably know her observatory by reputation, isn’t that so? If that is all that you desire, what if I take us there tomorrow?’

‘Now.’

Thorn’s response had cracked as dryly as the driver’s whip. Her mother went white.

‘That is to say, Mr Thorn, that it would be bad form to disturb Artémis this evening. She does not receive any more after nightfall, you understand. End then‘And then’ (?)

’, she said, importantly and with an amiable smile, ‘we have planned a small meal for you…’

Ophélie’s eyes flew from her mother to her fiancé. A “small meal”, that was a quaint euphemism. She had requisitioned uncle Hubert’s harvest barn for her Pantagruelian banquet, orchestrated the bleeding of three pigs, put in an order for sparklers at the chemist, wrapped several kilos of sugared almonds, organised a costume ball until dawn. Roseline, aunt and godmother to Ophélie, was in the process of finishing the preparations at that exact moment.

‘That will have to wait’, declared Thorn. ‘Anyway, I am not hungry.’

‘I understand, son’, approved the Doyenne suddenly, with a wrinkled smile. ‘What must be, must be.’

Ophélie squinted behind her glasses. She, on the other hand, did not understand. What was this all about, this behaviour? Thorn was showing himself to be so ill-mannered that he made her seem like a model of good manners. With a fist, he knocked on the glass rectangle, behind him, which separated the driver from his passengers. The vehicle braked short.

‘Sir?’ asked the driver, whose nose was flat against the window.

‘To Madame Artémis’, ordered Thorn with his hard accent.

Through the rear glass, the driver looked quizzically at Ophélie’s mother. Stupor had rendered her pale as death and given her lip a light tremble.

‘Take us to the Observatory’, she said finally, teeth gritted.

Gripping tightly the armrest of the seat, Ophélie felt the vehicle execute a turnabout to climb the slope that a moment before it had been descending. Outside, the manœuvre met cries of protest; it was the rest of the family’s carriages.

‘What pin ‘as stuck you?’ shouted Aunt Mathilde through a window, at the top of her voice.

Ophélie’s mother lowered her window.

‘We are going up to the Observatory’, she said.

‘What now?’ said Uncle Hector, insulted. ‘At this hour? And the dinner? And the celebrations? We’re famished, the rest of us!’

‘Eat without us, celebrate on your own and go to sleep!’ her mother declared.

She closed the window again to cut short the scandal and signalled to the driver, who had again pressed his hesitant face against the rear glass, that he could continue his course. Ophélie bit into her scarf to keep from keep from smiling. This man from the North had just mortally wounded her mother; on balance, he had surpassed her hopes.

While their carriage set itself on route under the sideways looks of the family, outside, Thorn leaned against the window, concentrated only on the rain. He no longer seemed disposed to pursuing the conversation with the mother, and even less to involve himself with the daughter. His eyes, sharp as metal shards, did not even an instant touch on the mademoiselle he was supposed to be courting.

In a satisfied gesture, Ophélie pulled back a soaked lock that was sticking to her nose. If Thorn did not judge it necessary to make any efforts to please, there was some chance that he did not hope for any in return. The way things were going, the engagement would be broken off before midnight.

Mouth pinched, the mother did not trouble herself anymore with breaking the silence; her eyes flashed with anger in the penumbra of the fiacre. The Doyenne blew out the lantern and fell back asleep with a sigh, enveloped in her great black mantilla. The route would be a long one.

The fiacre took a badly paved route in the mountainside, which took hairpin turns sharp as needlepoints. Queasy from the bumping, Ophélie concentrated on the landscape. She was at first on the wrong side of the carriage and met only uneven rock where the first snows were showing. A turn later, her view fell off and disappeared. The rain had stopped, pushed by a west wind. This clarity had blown a dust of stars between the clouds, but below, in the hollow of the Valley, the sky was still reddish in the twilight. The forests of chestnut and larch had given way to pins which resin-y smell invaded the coach.

Under the penumbra, Ophélie posed a freer attention on the silhouette of Thorn, broken into three. The night lent a bluish tint to his closed eyelids; Ophélie noticed another scar that broke through his eyebrow and shot, in a white splinter, onto his cheek. Could this man really be a hunter then? He was without a doubt a little thin, but she found on him the same hard look as in Augustus’ sketches. Rocked by the jolting carriage, she would have thought him asleep, but for the contrary wrinkle in his brow and the nervous tapping of his fingers on the suitcase. She turned when Thorn’s eyelids suddenly let through a spark of grey.

The coach had stopped.

‘The Observatory’, he announced.

Ch 05: The Observatory

Only twice in her life, had Ophélie had the chance to meet her family’s spirit.

She did not recall the first, on the occasion of her baptism. She had not been more than a mass of crying swaddling blankets that had watered the Doyenne with tears and urine.

The second time, however, had pressed a vivid impression into her memory. At fifteen years old, she had won the reading competition organised by the Company of the Sciences, thanks to a shirt button: it had taken her more than three centuries back and given up its owner’s escapades to the smallest details. Artémis had given her the grand prise in person, her first pair of reader’s gloves. These same gloves, worn to the thread, whose seams she chewed at while descending from the fiacre.

An icy wind whipped at her coat, Ophélie stood immobile, breath held, blown away by the formidable vault of the white dome from which a long telescope stuck out into the night. Artémis’ observatory was not only a centre of research in astronomy, meteorology and geological mechanics, it was also an architectural marvel. Set in a setting of mountainous faces, the palace had some ten edifices protecting the large instruments: from the meridian circle to the equatorial mount, passing by the astrograph and the magnetics wing. The pediment of the main building, with its great black and gold sundial, towered over the Valley, where glittered the night lights of the sprawling village.

This spectacle was even more impressive than Ophélie’s memory.

She offered her arm to the Doyenne who struggling down the carriage step. Certainly, that was the duty of the man, but Thorn had requisitioned the seats of the coach to open his case. Eyes encased under severe eyebrows, he acted at his own convenience, without troubling himself in the slightest with the women whose guest of honour he was.

On the observatory terrace, a shocked savant ran after his top hat which rolled between two columns.

‘Excuse me, wise father!’ Ophélie’s mother interrupted, holding in one hand her magnificently feathered hat. ‘Do you work here?’

‘Absolutely.’

The man had abandoned his top hat to turn towards her a large forehead, at which whipped a tuft of hair.

‘A magnificent wind, isn’t it?’ he exalted. ‘Absolutely magnificent! It cleared up the sky for us in a half hour.’

Suddenly, he wrinkled his eyebrows. Enlarged by his monocle, his suspicious eye ricocheted between the three women, then on the coach, parked in front of the main entrance, where the immense shadow of Thorn worked at emptying his case.

‘What is it? What do you want?’

‘An audience, son’, intervened the Doyenne.

She leaned with all her weight on Ophélie’s arm.

‘Impossible. Absolutely impossible. Come back tomorrow.’

The erudite brandished his cane toward the night, pointing at the clouds which swept away in like spider webs.

‘The first nocturnal clearing in a week. Artémis is overwhelmed, absolutely overwhelmed.’

‘This won’t take long.’

Thorn had let out this promise as he extricated himself from the coach, a strongbox under his arm. The savant pushed back in vain the tuft of hair that played in front of his eyes.

‘Even so, it would only take a fraction of a second, I’ll tell you again, it’s absolutely impossible. We are in the middle of inventory. Fourth re-edition of the Astronomiae instauratae mechanica catalogue. It absolutely has priority.

Six, exulted Ophélie, to herself. She had never heard so many absolutely’s in a row.

Thorn swallowed, in two long paces, the steps of the stair and straightened to his full height before the savant, who immediately took a step back. The wind ruffled the pale locks of the great spectre and pulled at the laces of his furs, uncovering the butt of a pistol in his belt. Thorn’s arm straightened. This brusque movement gave the savant a start, but it was simple pocket watch that was brandished under his nose.

‘Ten minutes, and not one more. Where can I find Madame Artémis?’

The old man designated the main dome with his cane; a slit opened it like a money box.

‘At her telescope.’

Thorn set his heels marching on the marble, without a look behind, with out thanks. Red with humiliation under her great feathered hat, her mother did not calm down. And she took it out on Ophélie when she slipped on a patch of ice, without pulling the Doyenne down, too.

‘And you, will you never manage this clumsiness, then? You cover me in shame!’

Ophélie searched blindly for her glasses on the hard floor. When she put them back on, her mother’s wide dress appeared in triple. The lenses were cracked.

‘And this man who does not wait for us’, grumbled her mother, grabbing her skirts. ‘Mr Thorn, slow the pace!’

His little case under his arm, Thorn entered the observatory vestibule, turning a deaf ear. He advanced with a martial step, and opened all the doors that came before his hand without knocking once. His stature outweighed the ballet of savants that moved about the corridors commentating loudly about the constellation maps.

Ophélie followed the movement, nose in her scarf. She saw no more of Thorn than a silhouette broken into pieces. He held himself so tall in his rugged furs that from behind he seemed to take himself for a polar bear.

Frankly, she savoured the situation. The attitude of this man was so outrageous that it almost seemed too good to be true. As Thorn ascended a spiral staircase, Ophélie again offered her arm to the Doyenne to help her climb the steps.

‘May I ask you a question?’ she whispered to her.

‘You may, girl’, smiled the Doyenne.

A savant who descended the steps bumped into them like a tornado, without apologising. He pulled his hair, yelling like a damned soul than he had never been wrong in his calculations and that this was not the night that would start.

‘How many affronts to our family does she have to take before taking the engagement into question?’ asked Ophélie.

Her question fell cold. The Doyenne took her hand from the arm that was offered. She rearranged the black mantilla on her head, so that it sat just above her beak of a nose and wrinkled smile.

‘What are you complaining about? This young man seems entirely charming to me.’

Perplexed, Ophélie contemplated the black and shrivelled shape of the Doyenne who rose laboriously from one step to the next. So even she was making fun?

Thorn’s agitated voice resonated in the rotunda which he had just entered.

‘Madame, your brother sends me before you.’

Ophélie did not want to miss this interview with Artémis. She hurried to pass through the metal door, where the sign still hung saying: DO NOT DISTURB: OBSERVATION UNDERWAY.

She batted her eyelids behind her broken glasses as she pushed into darkness. She heard something like a shaking of wings in front of her; that was her mother, more and more irritated, who had pulled out a fan to refresh her mind. As for Thorn, she could not distinguish his claw-decorated furs until the wall lamps turned on, degree by degree.

‘My brother? Which one then.’

This harsh murmur, which evoked more the grinding of a millstone than a woman’s voice, had echoed throughout the metallic construction of the building. She looked for its source. She followed the walkway that rose in a spiral around the cupola, then came back down the length of the copper cannon whose length took up almost six times its width. She found Artémis bent over the ls of the telescope.

She saw her split into three pieces. She ought to see to her glasses as soon as possible.

The family spirit pulled herself slowly from the starry spectacle, extracted each of her limbs, each of her joints till she exceeded even Thorn — in height. Artémis looked intensely for a moment at this stranger who had just interrupted her contemplation of the sky and who did not even blink under the weight of her gaze.

A few years had passed since she was fifteen, but Ophélie felt just as uncomposeddiscomposed? destabilised? by Artémis’ appearance as the day she had given her first prize.

or: ‘lacking in composure’

.

Not that she was ugly for, in fact, there was something awesome about her beauty. Her red hair came off her neck in a haphazard twist that ran over the slabs of marble, around her bare ankles, like a river of molten lava. The graceful curve of her body eclipsed the most beautiful adolescents on the ark. Her skin, a flesh so white and so supple that she seemed like liquid seen from afar, flowed over the perfect lines of her face. As fate would have it, Artémis was disdainful of this supernatural brilliance with which nature had seen fit to adorn her, and of which so many coquettes envied her. As such, she only had men’s clothes made in her size. Tonight, she wore a red-velvet frock coat and simple breeches that left her calves bare.

It wasn’t her mannish manners either that put Ophélie ill at ease, an insignificant inconvenience in the face of all that splendour. No, it was something else. Artémis was beautiful, but it was a cold beauty, indifferent, almost inhuman.

The crack of her eyes, showing but a glimpse of two yellow irises, expressed nothing while she stared long at Thorn. Nor anger, nor ennui, nor curiosity. Just waiting.

At the end of a silence that seemed to last an eternity, she cracked a smile empty of all emotion, neither good nor evil. A smile that had nothing of a smile but the shape.

‘You have the accent and manners of the North. You are of Farouk’s descendance.’

Artémis leaned back in a long, graceful movement; marble gushed from the slab like a fountain to offer her a seat. Of all the Animists that people the ark, nobody was capable of such a miracle, not even the lineage of smiths who twisted metal with a simple push of the thumb.

‘And what does he want of me, my dear brother?’ she asked in her very rough voice.

The Doyenne moved forward a step, raised her black robe to curtsy her and responded.

‘The marriage, good Artémis, don’t you remember?’

Artémis’ yellow eyes rolled towards the old woman in black, then towards the plumed hat of the mother, who fanned herself feverishly, before falling directly on Ophélie. The latter shivered, her wet hair sticking to her cheeks like algae. Artémis, of whom she saw only a blurry and segmented image, was her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.

And there was certainly another great or two.

In all evidence, her grandparent did not recognise her. The family spirit never recognised anyone. She had not since long ago bothered with memorising the faces of all her descendants, faces too ephemeral for this goddess without age. Ophélie sometimes wondered if Artémis had been close to her children, long ago. This was not a very maternal creature; she never left her observatory to mingle with her progeniture and she had long ago delegated all her responsibilities to the Doyennes. It was not entirely her fault, nevertheless, if Artémis had such little memory. Nothing stuck concretely in her head, events flowed passed without persisting. This predisposition to forgetfulness was without a doubt a response to her immortality, a safety shut-off to avoid floundering in folly or despair. Artémis knew nothing of the past; she lived in an eternal present. None know what her life had been like before founding her own dynasty on Anima, several centuries back. For the family, she was there, she had always been there, she always would be there.

And so it was for every ark and every family spirit.

With a nervous movement, Ophélie pushed her broken glasses back up her nose. Sometimes, despite everything, she asked herself this question: who were the family spirits really, and where did they come from? That the blood of such a phenomenon as Artémis ran in her own veins seemed hardly believable, yet, run it did, propagating its animism to the entire line without ever running out.

‘Yes, I remember’ Artémis finally acquiesced. ‘What is your name, my daughter?’

‘Ophélie.’

There was a disdainful snort. Ophélie looked at Thorn. He turned his back to her, as stiff as a great, stuffed bear. She could not, as such, see the expression on his face, but she did not doubt that the snort had come from him. Her thin voice visibly had not pleased him.

‘Ophélie’, said Artémis, ‘I present my felicitations for your marriage and I thank you for this alliance which will reinforce cordial relations between my brother and myself.

It was a circumstantial formula, without enthusiasm, pronounced solely for of protocol. Thorn made his way towards Artémis and offered her his case of lacquered wood. Approaching so closely to this sublime creature, capable of turning the heads of a procession of old erudites, left him entirely unfazed.

‘From Lord Farouk.’

Ophélie consulted her mother with a glance through her glasses. Was she expected to give an homage to her in-laws’ family spirit, the day of her arrival in the Pole? At the stupefied look that her mother made, with her coloured lips, she understood that she was asking herself the same question.

Artémis accepted the offering with a nonchalant gesture. Her face, till now emotionless, contracted lightly, as she probed, with a light touch, the contents of the case.

‘Why?’ asked Artémis, across her half-closed eyelids.

‘I do not know what the box contains’, Thorn informed her, bowing very stiffly. ‘And I have no other message to give you.’

The family spirit caressed the lacquered wood with a thoughtful hand, posed her yellow eyes again on Ophélie, seemed about to tell her something, then shrugged her shoulders with indifference.

‘You may go, all of you. I have work.’

Thorn had not waited for a blessing to turn his heels, watch in hand, and re-descend the stairs with his nervous step. The three women hastily took leave of Artémis and hurried to follow him, for fear that he push the rudeness all the way to taking the coach without them.

‘By the ancestors, I refuse to cede my daughter to this boor!’

The mother had exploded in furious murmurings, right in the middle of a planetarium where a flock of savants discussed the next passage of the comet. Thorn did not hear it. His ill-groomed bear furs had already left the dark room where the globe’s mechanics droned like cogs of a clock.

Ophélie’s heart jumped in her chest, shaking with hope, but the Doyenne relieved her of all her illusions with a simple smile.

‘An accord had been made between two families, girl. There is no one aside from Farouk and Artémis who can go back on it — without causing a diplomatic incident.’

Her mother’s great beehive came undone under her great hat and her pointed nose reddened despite the layers of makeup.

‘Yes, but all the same, my magnificent meal!’

Ophélie scowled into her scarf, following the ballet of stars under the vault of the planetarium with her eyes. From the behaviour of her fiancé, her mother, and the Doyenne, she could not decide who was the tensest.

‘If, by any chance, you asked my opinion…’ she murmured.

The Doyenne cut her off with a smile, ‘Nobody asked your opinion.’

Under other circumstances, Ophélie would not have insisted. She held too much to her tranquillity to debate, argue, make known her position, but this evening it was the rest of her existence that was in question.

‘I give it all the same’, she said. ‘Mr Thorn has no more desire to chain himself to me than I to him. I think you must have made a mistake somewhere.’

The Doyenne stopped short. Her twisted, arthritic silhouette straightened slowly, growing again and again, as she turned towards her. Under the interlacing wrinkles, the kindly smile had disappeared. The faded blue iris, on the edge of blindness, planted themselves in her glasses with such a coldness that Ophélie was dumbfounded. Ophélie’s mother herself fell apart, watching this transformation. This was no longer an old, shrivelled woman who stood before them, in this whirlwind of overexcited savants. It was the incarnation of supreme authority on Anima. A dignified representative of the Matriarchal Counsel. A mother among mothers.

‘There is no mistake’, said the Doyenne in a glacial voice. ‘Mr Thorn submitted an official request to marry an Animist. Among all the young girls to marry, you are the one we have chosen.’

‘It seems that Mr Thorn doesn’t much appreciate your choice’, Ophélie observed calmly.

‘He will have to be satisfied with it. The families have spoken.’

‘Why me?’ insisted Ophélie without worrying about the catastrophic face her mother was making. ‘Am I being punished?’

This was her true conviction. Ophélie had refused too many propositions, too many arrangements. She was dissonant among all her cousins who were already mothers of the family, and this false note was displeasing. The Doyennes were using this alliance to make an example.

The old lady sunk her pale gaze past her glasses, past the broken lenses. When she was not hunched up into herself, she was taller than Ophélie.

‘We are giving you a last chance. Do honour to our family, child. If you fail in this task, if you prevent this marriage, I promise you will never again set foot on Anima.’

Ch 06: The Kitchen

Ophélie ran at the speed of the wind. She crossed rivers, split forests, flew over towns, passed through mountains, but the line of the horizon stayed out of reach. Sometimes, she wound up on the surface of an immense sea, and the landscape was long liquid, but she always ended up finding a shore. This was not Anima. This was not even an ark. This world was in one piece. It was intact, without break, round like a ball. The old world before the Tearing.

Suddenly, Ophélie saw a vertical arrow, that crossed the horizon like a lightning strike. She did nor remember ever having seen it before, this arrow. She ran towards it, curious, more rapid than the wind. The closer she approached, the less it looked like an arrow. Come to think about it, it was more a sort of tower. Or a statue.

No, it was a man.

Ophélie wanted to slow down, change direction, retrace her steps, but an irresistible force pulled despite her, towards this man. The old world had disappeared. There was no more horizon, just Ophélie who fell towards this immense, skinny man, who obstinately turned his back to her.

Ophélie opened her eyes wide, head on the pillow, hair deployed around her like savage vegetation. She sneezed. Her nose had the sonority of an obstructed trumpet. Breathing from her mouth, she contemplated the slats of Hector’s mattress bottom, just above her own. She wondered if her brother was still asleep, up there, or if he had come down the wooden ladder. She did not have the slightest idea what time it was.

Ophélie pulled herself onto an elbow and took a myopic look around the room where beds had been improvised on the floor, in a mess of drapes and bolsters. Her little sisters were gone. A cold wind brushed through the embrasure and rustled the curtains. The sun was already out; the children must have left for school.

Ophélie noticed that the old house cat had curled up between her splayed feet at the end of the bed. She plunged back under her patchwork quilt and sneezed again. She had an impression of having cotton in her throat, ears, and eyes. She was accustomed to it, she caught colds with the first draft of air. Her hand grasped at the night-stand, searching for her glasses. The cracked lenses had already begun to repair themselves, what it would take them several hours before completely healing. Ophélie placed them on her nose. An object repaired itself more quickly if it felt useful, it was a simple question of psychology.

She stretched her arms out on the quilt, little pressed to pull herself from the bed. Ophélie had found it difficult to find sleep after returning to the house. She knew she was not the only one. From the moment he had turned in, with a grunt in guise of ‘good night’. Thorn had not stopped pacing the upstairs room and making the floor creak its length and breadth. Ophélie had tired before him and finished by sinking into sleep.

Nestled in her pillow, she forced herself to untangle the thread of emotions that knotted itself in her stomach. The Doyenne’s glacial words resonated in her head: ‘If you fail in this task, if you prevent this marriage, I promise you will never again set foot on Anima.’

Banishment was worse than death. Ophélie’s entire world turned around this ark; if she was thrown out, she would never have any family to turn to. She had to marry that bear, she did not have a choice.

A marriage of convenience always had a finality, even more so when it reinforced diplomatic relations between two arks. It could the introduction of new blood to avoid the degenerations connected to a too-high degree of consanguinity. It could be a strategic alliance to benefit business and commerce. It could also be, though this remained exceptional, a marriage of love born from a romantic travel poem.

Ophélie had examined it from all angles, but the most important part escaped her. This man, who seemed repulsed by everything here, what profit did he sincerely hope to take from this marriage?

She dove into her chequered handkerchief and blew her nose hard. She felt relieved. Thorn was a hardly civilised nutcase, who towered two heads above her and whose long nervous hands seemed practised with weapons. But at least, he did not like her. And he would not like her any more at the end of the summer, when the traditional delay between engagement and marriage would be passed.

Ophélie blew her nose again, then pushed back her covers. A furious mewing rumbled under the patchwork quilt when she pushed it; she had forgotten the cat. She considered in the wall mirror, not without a certain satisfaction, her dizzy face, her crooked glasses, her red nose, her unkempt hair. Thorn would never want to put her in his bed. She had felt his disapproval, she was not the woman he was looking for. Their respective families could oblige them to marry, they would see to it together that this union would remain a façade.

Ophélie tied an old dressing gown around her nightshirtor: ‘nightie’

. If it was up to her, she would remain and laze about in bed until noon, but her mother had planned a crazy schedule for the days to come, before the grand departure. Lunch on the grass, in the family park. Tea with the grandmothers: Sidonie and Antoinette. A walk the length of the river. Appetizers at her Uncle Benjamin and his new wife’s place. Evening at the theatre, then dinner and dancing. Ophélie got indigestion just thinking about it. She would have preferred a less frantic rhythm to properly say her goodbyes to her mother ark.

The wood creaked under her feet when she descended the stairs. The house seemed too calm to her.

She soon realised that everyone had gathered in the kitchen; a muffled conversation reached her through the little windowed door. Silence fell as soon as she pushed it.

She was at the convergence of everyone’s looks. Her mother’s inquiring look, posted next to the gas stove. Her father’s nervous look, half slumped on the table. Her aunt Roseline's outraged look, her long nose stuck in a glass of tea. Her great-uncle’s pondering look, over the gazette he was thumbing through, back to the window.

In all, it was only Thorn, occupied with stuffing a pipe on his stool, who was not the least bit interested with her. His silver-blond hair, savagely combed back, his poorly shaved chin, his thinness, his poor-quality tunic and the dagger in his boot, evoked a vagabond more than a man of the court. He did not seem in his place among the kitchen’s hot kettles and the smell of jams.

‘Good morning’, croaked Ophélie.

An uncomfortable silence accompanied her to the table. She had known more cheerful mornings. Ophélie pushed her broken glasses back up her nose with a finger, by pure habit, and filled a bowl full of hot chocolate. The flow of milk in the porcelain, the protest of the tiles when she pulled out her chair, the scraping of her butter knife on the bread, the whistling of stuffy noses… She got the impression that each sound that she made, even the most miniscule, took enormous proportions.

She jumped when her mother’s voice resonated again.

‘Mister Thorn, you haven’t eaten a thing since you arrived among us. Would a sip of coffee and buttered bread tempt you?’

The tone had changed. It was neither heated nor sharp. Polite, just what was needed. Her mother must have spent the night thinking on the Doyenne’s words and calming her nerves. Ophélie interrogated her with her eyes, but her mother was evasive, mimed watching her oven.

Something was not right: an air of conspiracy floated in the air. Ophélie looked to her uncle, but he was seething under his moustache. Then she turned to the hesitant, balding head of her father, and pressed him with her eyes.

As she expected, he gave in.

‘Daughter, there has been… a slight change of plans.’

He had inserted his ‘slight change of plans’ between his thumb and index.

Ophélie’s heart beat in her ears and, for the length of a mad second, she believed that the engagement had been called off. Her father threw a glance over his shoulder, towards Thorn, as though he hoped for a contradiction. The man on his stool presented nothing more than a whittled profile, forehead determined, teeth chewing the horn of his pipe. His long legs quivered with impatience. If he did not so much resemble a bear, stripped of his furs, Ophélie found in him at present the attitude of a peregrine falcon, nervous and agitated, on the point of taking flight.

She looked back to her father when he softly tapped her hand.

‘I know that your mother hatched an impossible schedule for the week…’ He was interrupted by the furious cough of his wife, bent over the gas stove, then he continued with a sigh.

‘Mr Thorn was explaining just now that some obligations await him at the Pole. Obligations of prime importance, you see? So, he cannot waste time on grand receptions, various amusements and…’

Exasperated, Thorn cut him off by clapping the cover of his pocket watch.

‘We leave today, the dirigible leaves at four o’clock on the dot.’

The blood left Ophélie’s cheeks. Today. Four o’clock. Her brothers, her sisters, her nephews and nieces would not be back from school. She would not be able to say goodbye. She would never see them grow up.

‘Then return to your ark, sir, as duty requires. I will not keep you here.’

Her lips had moved on their own. It had only been a whisper, hardly audible, half covered by her cold, but it had the effect of a thunderclap in the kitchen. Her father distorted, her mother struck her with a look, Aunt Roseline choked on her tea, and the great-uncle her uncle took refuge in fit of sneezes. Ophélie was looking at none of them. Her attention was concentrated on Thorn who, for the first time since their meeting, looked her over, face to face, top to bottom. His interminable legs had pulled him off his stool, like the release on a spring. She saw him in triple, because of her broken lenses. Three tall silhouettes, six eyes sharp as razors, and thirty clenched fingers. That was a lot for a single guy, even an immense one…

Ophélie expected an explosion. The response was just a loud murmur.

‘Is that a rejection?’

‘Of course not’, intruded her mother, inflating her enormous chest, she has no say in this, mister Thorn, she will accompany you wherever you like.’

‘And me, my say, do I then have nothing to say?’

This question, thrown out in a bitter voice, came from Roseline who stared at the empty bottom of her teacup with a venomous air.

Roseline was Ophélie’s aunt, but she was above all her godmother, and as such, the one designated as her chaperon. Widowed and without children, her situation naturally predisposed her to accompanying her godchild at the Pole until her marriage. This was a woman of ripe age, with teeth like a horse, lean as a sack of bones, nervous as a lamb chop. She wore her hair in a bun, like Ophélie’s mother, but hers resembled a pincushion.

‘No more than I’, grumbled her great-uncle through his moustache, crinkling his gazette. ‘In any case, nobody in this family asks my opinion anymore!’

The mother put her fists on her enormous waistline.

‘Oh, you two, this is neither the time nor the place.’

‘It’s just that this has all happened a little faster than we imagined it at first’, her father intervened, addressing the fiancés, ‘The girl is intimidated, it’ll pass.’

Neither Ophélie nor Thorn accorded them the slightest attention. They looked at each other, each measuring the other, her sitting in front of her hot chocolate, him standing at his immeasurablyI'd considered using unmeasurably, which is not good English but I like the slight quirkiness of it and the hyperbolic edge to it; immeasurably feels too factual

tall height. Ophélie did not want to back down to the metallic eyes of that man, but upon reflection, she did not judge it intelligent to provoke him. In her situation, the most reasonable was again to stay quiet. In any case, she did not have a choice.

She lowered her head and buttered another slice of bread. With Thorn sat back down on his stool, enveloped in a cloud of smoke, each one breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Ready your things’, he said simply.

For him, the case was closed. Not for Ophélie. Under the shadow of her hair, she promised to make his existence as difficult as he was making hers.

Thorn’s eyes, grey and cold like the blade of a knife, hit her again.

‘Ophélie’, he added without a smile.

In that dour mouth, hardened by the accent of the North, it seemed that her name cut his tongue. Nauseated, Ophélie folded her napkin, then left the table. She re-climbed the stairs quietly and closed herself in her room. Back against the door panel, she did not move, did not blink, did not cry, but internally she screamed. The walls of her room, sensitive to the anger of their owner, set themselves to trembling as though covered in nervous chills.

Ophélie was shaken by a spectacular sneeze. The charm was broken immediately, and the walls became perfectly immobile again. Without even running a comb through her hair, Ophélie pulled on the darkest of her dresses, a corseted antiquity, grey and austere. She sat on the bed and, while she shoved her bare feet into her ankle boots, her scarf crawled, slid, and slithered up to her neck like a snake.

Someone knocked at the door.

‘Coww onn inn’ mumbled Ophélie with a stuffy nose.

Her great-uncle pushed his moustache across the jamb of the door.

‘May I, my girl?’

She nodded behind her handkerchief. Her great-uncle’s shoes made a path through the mess of curtains, eiderdowns, and pillows. He motioned at a chair to approach, which it did, docilely playing its legs, and let himself fall onto it.

‘My dear girl, he sighed, this gentleman, he’s really the last husband I would have wanted for you.’

‘I know.’

‘You’re going to have to be courageous. The Doyennes have spoken.’

’The Doyennes have spoken’, repeated Ophélie.

But they won’t have the last word, she added to herself, even if she did not have the slightest idea of what she was hoping,or: ‘hoping by saying that’, ‘hoping for saying that’.

saying that.

To Ophélie’s great surprise, her great-uncle began to laugh. He looked at the wall mirror.

‘Do you remember your first crossing? We ended up thinking that you would stay like that forever, your leg kicking over here, and the rest struggling in my sister’s mirror! That was the longest night of our lives, you gave us. You weren’t yet thirteen.’

‘I still have residual effects’, sighed Ophélie, contemplating her hands, broken into pieces by her shattered glasses.

The look that her great-uncle addressed her had suddenly become serious.

‘Precisely. And that hasn’t stopped you from starting again and getting caught again until you finally get it. Mirror Walkers are rare in the family, girl, do you know why?’

Ophélie raised her eyes behind her glasses. She had never raised the question with her godfather, everything she knew, she got from him.

‘Because it is a slightly different form of reading?’ she suggested.

Her great-uncle twitched his moustache and opened his golden eyes wide under the wings of his eyebrows.

‘Nothing like that! Reading an object, that requires oneIf I'm going to fix this, I may need to go through and regularise Great-uncle's speech in order to get him saying ‘you’ instead of ‘one’.

to forget oneself a little to leave room for the past of another. Passing through mirrors, it requires confronting one’s self. It takes guts, y’know, to look yourself straight in the mirror, see yourself as you are, and dive into your own reflection. Those that hide their face, that lie to themselves, those that see themselves better than they are, they can never do itBecause Eussian not Rnglish.

. So, believe me, that doesn’t grow on trees!’

Ophélie was taken by this unexpected declaration. She had always passed through mirrors intuitively, she did not find it particularly courageous. Then her great-uncle pointed at the old tricoloured scarf, worn through the years, which lay lazily across her shoulders.

‘That’s your first golem, right?’

‘Yea.’

‘The same one that almost deprives us forever of your company.’

Ophélie acquiesced, after a moment. She forgot sometimes that this scarf, that she always trained in her wake, had once tried to strangle her.

‘And despite that, you never stopped wearing it’, articulated her great-uncle each word with a tap on his thigh.

‘I can see that you’re clearly trying to tell me something’, said Ophélie quietly. ‘The problem is that I don’t understand what.’

He breathed a gruff grunt.

‘You don’t look like much, my girl. You hide behind your hair, behind your glasses, behind your mumbling. Of all your mother’s offspring, you are the one who’s never shed a tear, you’ve never complained, and yet I can promise you that you’re the one that has collected the most bruises.

‘You exaggerate, uncle.’

‘Since your birth, you haven’t stopped getting yourself hurt, getting things wrong, getting your face marked up, getting your fingers pinched, getting yourself lost…’ he continued on, gesticulating grandly. ‘I can’t even tell you how scared we were, we thought for a long time that one of your constant blunders would end up getting you! “Ms. Walks-into-walls” we used to call you. Listen well, my girl…’ Her great-uncle kneeled down painfully at the foot of the bed where Ophélie was still slouched, her feet drowning in the bottom of her unlaced boots. He took her elbows and shook them, as though to punctuate each syllable into her memory. ‘Yours is the strongest personality of the family, little one. Forget what I said last time. I tell you that your husband’s will is going to break on yours.’

Ch 07: The Medal

The cigar-shaped shadow of the dirigible sped over the pastures and the waterways like a solitary cloud. Through the slanted window, Ophélie searched the landscape, hoping to perceive one last time from afar the guard tower where her family waved their scarves. Her head was still spinning. Only a few minutes after take-off, while the dirigible turned a corner, she had left the starboard promenade in a hurry to find the toilet. By the time she returned, she no longer saw any more of the Valley than a distant region of shadow at the foot of the mountain.

She couldn’t have imagined a worse goodbye.

‘An airsick mountain girl! Your mother was right, you never miss an opportunity to stand out…’

Ophélie pulled her eyes from the windowed bay to look at the Maps room, so-called because the planispheres mounted to the wall that traced the shattered geography of all the arks. At the other end of the room, Aunt Roseline's bottle-green dress detached itself from the honey velvet of the carpets and armchairs. She inspected the cartographic representations with a severe look. Ophélie took a moment to notice that it wasn’t the arks that she was studying so, but the quality of the print. Professional interest: Aunt Roseline worked in paper restoration.

She came back towards Ophélie in small, nervous steps, sat herself down in a neighbouring armchair, and set her horse-like teeth to munching on the cookies that they had been served. Nauseated, Ophélie looked away. The two women were alone in the room. Aside from them, Thorn, and the crew, there were no other passengers on board the dirigible.

‘Did you see Thorn’s face when you started bringing back your meal all over the dirigible?’

‘I was a little distracted at that particular moment, Aunt.’

Ophélie examined her godmother over the rectangles of her glasses. She was just as stiff, dry, and yellowish as Ophélie’s mother was ample, smooth, and rosy. Ophélie did not very well know this aunt who was to be her chaperone for the coming months and it seemed bizarre to find herself alone with her. Ordinarily, they saw each other little and hardly spoke to one another. The widow had only ever lived for her old papers, just as Ophélie had only ever lived for her museum. That hadn’t left them much place to become intimate.

‘He was mortified with shame’, declared Aunt Roseline in a harsh voice. ‘That, my little lady, that is a spectacle I would never like to see again. You hold in yourself the honour of the family.’

Outside, the shadow of the dirigible fell on the water of the Great Lakes, shimmering like mercury. The late afternoon light faded in the Map room. The honey velvet of the décor became less gilded, more beige. Around them, the aerostat creaked through all its frame and droned with all its propellers. For Ophélie took in all these sounds, the light rocking under her feet, and she felt better. It was just something to get used to.

From her sleeve, she took out a polka-dotted handkerchief and sneezed once, twice, thrice. Here eyes watered behind her glasses. Her nausea was gone, not her cold.

‘Poor man’, she chided herself. ‘If he fears ridicule, he’s marrying the wrong person.’

Aunt Roseline’s skin went a pale yellow. She shot a crazed look over the little room, trembling at the thought of discovering the bearskin in one of the armchairs.

‘By the ancestors, don’t say such things’, she whispered.

‘He frightens you?’ said Ophélie, surprised.

She, too, had been frightened of Thorn, sure, but that was before meeting him. Once the unknown had a face, she no longer feared it.

‘He gives me the chills’, sighed her aunt, readjusting her miniscule bun. ‘Did you see those scars? I suspect he’s prone to violence when he’s in a bad mood. I suggest you make yourself forgettable after the little scene this morning. Force yourself to make a good impression, we’ll have to live with him, me for the next eight months, you for the rest of your life.’

Letting her gaze fall over the grand observation window, Ophélie’s breath was taken away. The flamboyant autumn forests, gilded by the sun, battered by the wind, had just given way abruptly to a wall of rock that fell away into in a sea of mist. The dirigible pulled away and Anima appeared completely encircled by a belt of clouds, suspended in the air. The further they went, the more it resembled a bit of earth and gas that an invisible shovel had ripped from her garden. So that’s what it’s like, an ark seen from afar? That tiny mote lost in the middle of the sky? Who could imagine that lakes, prairies, cities, woods, fields, mountains, and valleys stretched over this ridiculous bit of rock.

Her hand against the window, Ophélie engraved this vision in her memory as the ark disappeared, erased by the curtain of clouds. She did not know when she would be coming back.

‘You should have grabbed brought a back-up pair. We look poor!’

Ophélie turned to her aunt who gave her with a disapproving look. It took her a moment to realise that she was making allusion to her glasses.

‘They’ve nearly finished repairing’, Ophélie reassured her. ‘By tomorrow, they’ll be back to normal.’

She took them off to breathe on the lenses. Aside from a little crack in the corner of her vision, she wasn’t really bothered and no longer saw everything in triplicate.

Outside, there was nothing but an unending sky where the first stars began to shine. When the lights turned on, the windows turned into mirrors and it was no longer possible to see anything. Ophélie felt the need to attach her gaze to something. She approached the maps on the wall. They were veritable works of art, realised by illustrious geographers; the twenty-one major arks and the one-hundred-eighty-six minor arks were all represented with scrupulous attention to detail. Ophélie travelled in time like some walked across a room, but she had a poor knowledge of geography. It took her a moment to find Anima and even longer to find the Pole. She compared them to each other and was stunned by their difference in proportion: The Pole was almost three times as large as Anima. With it’s internal sea, its springs, and its lakes, it evoked a great tub filled with water.

However, nothing fascinated her more than the central planisphere, which gave a global view of the Core of the world and the fixed orbits of the arks around it. The Core of the world was the largest vestige of the original Earth: it was nothing more than a mass of volcanos, continuously struck by lightning, definitively uninhabitable. It was enveloped by the sea of Clouds, a compact mass of vapour that the sun never penetrated, but this map did not represent it for reasons of readability. Still, it did trace the aerial corridors that allowed dirigibles to circulate easily from one ark to the others.

Ophélie closed her eyes and tried to imagine this map in relief, as one might see it from the Moon. Skipping stones, suspended above a grand, an immense, perpetual storm… When you think about it, this new world was a true miracle.

A bell resounded in the Map room.

‘Supper’, interpreted Aunt Roseline with a sigh. ‘Do you think you can handle yourself at the table without covering us in ridicule?’

‘You mean without vomiting? That depends on the menu.’

When Ophélie and her godmother pushed open the door of the dining room, the thought for an instant that they had made a mistake. The buffet was not set up; and a half-darkness floated between the papered walls.

A cordial voice chimed out just as they were beginning to back out:

‘This way, ladies!’

White uniform, red epaulettes, and doubled sleeve buttons, a man came to meet them.

‘Captain Bartholomé, at your service!’ he exclaimed emphatically.

He cracked a large smile, where several gold teeth sparkled, and wiped at his braids.

‘In fact, I am but the second, but let’s not split hairs. I hope that you will forgive us, we’ve begun the hors-d’œuvre. Take a seat with us, ladies, a touch of femininity will be welcome!’

The captain-in-second designated the end of the room. Between a long, louvred screen and the beautiful bayed windows, a little table caught the last light of the sunset on the starboard promenade. Ophélie noticed there, without difficulty, the tall, thin silhouette that she hoped not to find there. Thorn sat straight-backed. She saw of him only an interminable vertebral column under his travel tunic, pale, dishevelled hair, and elbows that moved with the rhythm of the silverware without thinking an instant of interrupting it for them.

‘My goodness, what are you doing?’ said Bartholomé, scandalised.

Ophélie had not quite sat down in a chair, next to her aunt, when he took her by the waist, made her take to dancelike steps and sat her down with authority at the side of the last person that she wanted to visit up close.

‘At the table, we must alternate men and women.’

Nose plunged in her plate, Ophélie felt completely submerged in the shadow of Thorn, who sat two heads taller, very straight in his chair. She buttered her radishes without much appetite. A little man across from her greeted her with an amiable inclination, stretching a smile between his pepper-coloured sideburns. For the space of several seconds, only the clacking of silverware filled the silence around the table. They chewed raw vegetables, drank wine, passed butter from hand to hand. Ophélie spilled the salt cellar she was passing to her Aunt on her napkin.

The captain-in-second, on whom the silence weighed visibly, turned like a weather vane at Ophélie’s side.

‘How do you feel, my dear child? Is that blasted nausea past?’

Ophélie wiped her mouth with a napkin. Why was this man talking to her as though she was ten years old?

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘I’m sorry?’, he interjected with a loud laugh, ‘You have a quite small voice, young lady.’

‘Yes, thank you’, articulated Ophélie, pushing on her vocal cords.

‘Don’t hesitate to mention any discomfort to our ship’s doctor. He is a master in his domain.’

The man with the pepper-coloured sideburns, across from her, signalled a polite modesty. That must be him, the doctor.

Another silence fell over the table, which Bartholomé perturbed by tapping on his cutlery with agitated fingers. Ophélie wiped her nose to hide her irritation. The bubbly eyes of the second did not stop moving from her to Thorn, and then falling back from Thorn to her. He must really be bored stiff to try finding a distraction among them.

‘Well then, do tell, you are not very talkative!’ he chuckled, ‘I had understood that you were travelling together, no? Two ladies from Anima and a man of the Pole… it is rather rare, such an assortment!

Ophélie hazarded a prudent look towards the Thorn’s long, lean hands, who cut his radishes in silence. So, did the crew know nothing of what had motivated their meeting? She decided to align herself with his attitude. She settled for making a polite smile, without dissimulating the misunderstanding.

Her aunt did not take it take things the same way.

‘These young folks are to be married, sir!’ she exclaimed, outraged. ‘Are you ignorant of this, then?’

To Ophélie’s right, Thorn’s hands tightened around their cutlery. From where she was sitting, she could see a vein rising in his wrist. At the head of the table, Bartholomé’s gold teeth sparkled.

‘I’m so sorry, madam, in fact I did not know. ‘Mr Thorn, see here, you ought to have told me what this charming child is to you! What do I look like now, see?

Like someone who is enjoying the situation, replied Ophélie in her head.

Bartholomé’s exultation did not last long, however. His smile weakened as soon as he saw Thorn’s face. Aunt Roseline paled seeing it in turn. Ophélie, herself, did not see it. She would have had to lean back and unscrew her head from her shoulders to see that high. In any case, she could pretty easily guess what sat above her. Two eyes, cutting as razors and a severe fold disguised as a mouth. Thorn did not like being made into a spectacle, they had at least that in common.

The ship’s doctor must have perceived the unease, for he set it upon himself to make a diversion.

‘I am very intrigued by your family’s little talents’, he said, addressing Aunt Roseline. ‘Your influence over the most trifling of objects is quite thoroughly fascinating! Please excuse my indiscretion, but might I dare ask you what your skill is, madam?’

Aunt Roseline patted her mouth with her napkin.

‘Paper. I smooth it, I patch it up, I restore it.’

She grabbed the wine menu, tore it up without ceremony and re-welded the edges with a simple swipe of her finger.

‘That is very interesting’, commented the doctor, polishing the points if his moustache as a server presented the soup.

‘Indeed’, boasted the aunt. ‘I have saved from decomposition archives of great historical value. Genealogists, restorers, conservators, our branch of the family is at the service of the Artémis’s memory.

‘Is this equally true for you?’, asked Bartholomé, turning his sparkling smile towards Ophélie.

She did not have the leisure of the rectifying response: “It was, sir.” Her aunt charged herself with responding in her place, between two spoons of soup:

‘My niece is an excellent reader.’

‘A reader?’ repeated the captain-in-second and the ship’s doctor as one, dumbstruck.

‘I kept a museum’, explained Ophélie curtly.

She begged her aunt with her eyes not to insist. She did not want to talk about things which belonged to her old life, especially in the company of Thorn’s long fingers contracted around their soup spoon. The vision of the scarves waving goodbye at the guard tower haunted her. She wanted to finish her cream and vegetable soup and go sleep.

Unfortunately, Aunt Roseline was sculpted from the same wood as her mother. They weren’t sisters for nothing. She was still going to impress Thorn.

‘No, no, no, it’s much more than that, don’t be so modest! Sirs, my niece can communicate empathically with objects, travelling into their past and assess them extremely accurately.

‘That seems rather fun!’ replied Bartholomé enthusiastically. ‘Would you allow us a little demonstration, dear child?’ He pulled a pulled a chain from his neat uniform. Ophélie thought at first that it was a watch, but she was wrong. ‘This gold medal is my good luck charm. The man who gave it to me told me that it belonged to an emperor of the ancient world. I would love to know more about it!’

‘I cannot.’

Ophélie pulled a long, brown hair from her soup. Try as she might to pull all she could of her curls onto her neck with needles, ties, or hair slides, they went everywhere.

Bartholomé was vexed.

‘You cannot?’

‘Deontology prohibits me, sir. It is not the object’s past that I retrace, it is that of its owner. I will violate your personal life.’

‘That is the ethical code of the readers’, confirmed Aunt Roseline uncovering her horse teeth. ‘A private reading is only authorised with the consent of the owner.’

Ophélie turned her glasses towards her godmother, but she held at all costs that her niece distinguished herself in the eyes of her intended. In fact, the gnarled hands slowly set down their silverware on the tablecloth and stopped moving. Thorn was paying attention. Or perhaps he was no longer hungry.

‘In that case, I give you permission’, he said, in a very predictable fashion. ‘I want to know my emperor!’

He handed her the old medallion, gold like his braids and his teeth. Ophélie examined it first with her glasses. One thing was certain, this trinket did not date back to the ancient world. Pressured to get it over with, she unbuttoned her gloves. As soon as she closed her fingers around the medallion, flashes flew through the opening of her eyelids. Ophélie let herself drown, not yet interpreting the mass of sensations that poured into her, from more recent to more ancient. A reading always unfolded in the opposite direction from the hands on a clock.

Promises in the air, murmured to pretty girl in the street. It’s so dull up here, alone facing this immensity. A young wife and the kiddos are waiting for him at home. They are far away, they hardly exist anymore. The voyages follow one another without leaving a mark. Women, too. The boredom is stronger than the regrets. Suddenly, there is a white flash in a black cape. It’s a knife. It’s for Ophélie, this knife, a husband wants vengeance. The blade hits the medallion, in the pocket of the uniform, and diverts it from its mortal trajectory. Ophélie is bored again. A three-of-a-kind, kings, in the middle of theses flashes of fury, is worth a nice medallion. Ophélie felt herself grow younger. The instructor set her up in the chair with a kind smile. He gave her a gift. It shines, it’s pretty.

‘So?’ asked the captain-in-second amusedly.

Ophélie slid her gloves back on and handed him back his luck charm.

‘You’ve been had’, she murmured. ‘It’s a merit medallion. A simple child’s reward.’

Bartholomé’s gold teeth disappeared with his smile.

‘Excuse me? You must not have read attentively, mademoiselle.’

‘It is a medallion for children’, insisted Ophélie. ‘It is not made of gold and it is not even fifty years old. This man, who you beat at cards, lied to you.’

Aunt Roseline coughed nervously; this wasn’t the exploit that she had hoped for her niece. The ship’s doctor took a sudden passionate interest in the bottom of his plate. Thorn’s hand put back his pocket watch with a gesture full of ennui.

When the captain-in-second seemed to shrink at this revelation, Ophélie had pity on him.

‘It is no less an excellent luck charm. This medallion has already saved you from that jealous husband.’

‘Ophélie!’ gasped Roseline.

The rest of the meal continued in silence. When they stood up from the table, Thorn was the first to leave, without even muttering a formulated politeness.

The next day, Ophélie walked the length and width of the dirigible’s nacelle. Nose in her scarf, she wandered the starboard and port promenades, took tea in the salon, visited discretely, with Bartholomé’s permission, the bridge, the navigation cabin or the radio room. Most often, she killed time watching the landscape. Sometimes, there was only an intensely blue sky as far as the eye could see, where a hardly few clouds sprouted. Sometimes, it was a humid fog that sputtered against all the window. Sometimes, it was the bell towers of a city when they flew over an ark.

Ophélie got used to tables without tablecloths, cabins without passengers, armchairs without occupants. Nobody ever came aboard. Stops were rare; the dirigible never touched down. The trip was no shorter for it though, as they took several detours to drop off postal packages and sacks of letters over the arks.

If Ophélie trained her scarf around pretty much everywhere, Thorn never put the tip of his muzzle outside of his cabin. She did not see him either at breakfast, or diner, or tea, or supper. It was like this for several days.

When the corridors began to grow cold and the portholes were covered in frost, Aunt Roseline decreed that it was high time for her niece to have a real conversation with her fiancé.

‘If you don’t break the ice now, if will be too late later’, she warned one evening, arms thrust into a muff, as they were walking together on the deck.

The glass bays were radiant in the light of the setting sun. Outside it must have been terribly cold. Debris of the ancient world, too small to form arks, were covered in ice and sparkled like a river of diamonds in the sky.

‘What does it matter whether Thorn and I like each other or not?’ sighed Ophélie, neck-deep in her coat. ‘We are going to marry, isn’t that the only thing that matters?’

‘Gosh! In my time, I was a far more romantic young debutante than you.’

‘You are my chaperon’, Ophélie reminded her, ‘Your role is to watchUK? ; US, add ‘and make sure’ or ‘to be sure’

that nothing indecent happens to me, not throw me into this man’s arms.’

‘Indecent, indecent… there’s not much risk of anything in that department’, grumbled Aunt Roseline. ‘I didn’t truly have the impression that you had inspired an indomitable desire in Mr Thorn. In fact, I believe I have never seen a man take so many precautions to avoid bumping into a woman.

Ophélie couldn’t hold back a hint of a smile, which fortunately her aunt did not see.

‘You will invite him for a cup of tea’, decreed her aunt, suddenly with a determined look. ‘A cup of linden tea. Linden calms the nerves, it does.’

‘Aunt, that man that has put it upon himself to marry me, not the inverse. I won’t be courting him.’

‘I am not asking you to make any passes, I just want us to have a breathable atmosphere for the time to come. You are going to make an effort to be amiable with him!’

Ophélie saw her shadow grow longer, distort, and disappear at her feet as the sun’s ruddy disk disappeared in the haze on the other side of the windows. Her darkened glasses adapted to the changing lighting and lightened a little. They were completely repaired at present.

‘I’ll think about it, aunt.’

Roseline put a finger on Ophélie chin, obliging her to face her. Like most of the women in her family, her aunt was taller than she. With her fur toque and her too-long teeth, she didn’t look so much like a horse now — more like a marmot.

‘You must try your best, you hear me?’

Evening had fallen behind the promenade’s windows. Ophélie was cold outside and inside, regardless of the scarf that tightened its hold around her shoulders. Inside, she knew that her aunt was not wrong. They still knew nothing of the life that awaited them at the Pole.

She had better set aside the griefs she was nourishing against Thorn, long enough for an audience.

Ch 08: The Warning

The curt knocks on the metal door echoed the length of the passageway. The half-shadow pressed around Ophélie and her little, steaming platter. It was not true obscurity; by the light of the lamps she could make out the striped wallpapering, the cabin numbers, the flower vases on the consoles.

Ophélie let a few heartbeats pass, waited for a sound on the other side of the door, but only the purring of the propellers broke the silence, in the background. She pinched the platter awkwardly with one glove and knocked again twice. Nobody opened the door to her.

She would just have to leave and come back later.

Platter in her hands, Ophélie pivoted on her heels cautiously. She immediately took a step back. Her back hit the door she had just been knocking on; the cup spilled a little of its tea.

Standing at his full altitude, Thorn let an incisive look fall on her. Far from softening his angular features, the lamps deepened the scars and amplified the thorny shadow of his furs on the walls of the corridor.

Ophélie judged decidedly that he was much too tall for her.

‘What do you want?’

He had articulated the question in a flat voice, without warmth. His Northern accent pressed rudely on each consonant.

Ophélie handed him the platter.

‘My aunt would like me to serve you some tea.’

Her godmother would have disapproved of this frankness, but Ophélie was a bad liar. Straight as a stalagmite, arms hanging, Thorn did not move a finger to take the cup that was offered to him. One wondered whether, under everything, Thorn wasn’t more idiot than disdainful.

‘It’s an infusion of linden’, she said. ‘Apparently it re—’

‘Do you always speak so low?’ he cut her off abruptly.

‘It’s at pain, if you are understood at all.’

Ophélie observed a silent moment, then spoke even lower:

‘Always.’

Thorn wrinkled his forehead and seemed to search for something worthy of interest in this little bit of woman, behind the heavy brown locks, behind the rectangular lenses, behind the old muffler. Ophélie realised, after an interminable face-to-face, that he wanted to enter his cabin. She took a step to the side with her tisane.

Thorn had to fold his extended silhouette to be able to pass under the frame of the door.

Ophélie stayed at the doorway, encumbered with her platter. Thorn’s cabin, as all the others in the dirigible, was cramped. An upholstered couch that transformed into a bed, a baggage rack, a straight circulation corridor, a small table with a stationary set at the end of the room, and that was it. Ophélie had trouble moving about in her lodgings, it was almost miraculous that Thorn could enter in his own room without knocking into everything.

He pulled the cord of a ceiling lamp, poured his furs out over the couch, and pressed both his hands on the work table. It was covered in notebooks and pads covered in notes. Bent over this strange paperwork, his back bent in two, Thorn moved no more than an ear. Ophélie wondered whether he was thinking or reading. He seemed to have entirely forgotten her in the hall, but neither had he closed the door behind him.

It was not in Ophélie’s nature to harass a man with questions, and so she waited the most patiently in the world in front of his cabin, frozen to the bone, exhaling clouds with each breath. She observed attentively the knotted muscles in his neck, the bony fists that stuck out of his sleeves, the sharp shoulder blades under his tunic, the long, nervous legs. This man was entirely rigid, as though ill-at-ease in this too-tall and too-skinny body, which seemed electrified into a perpetual tension.

‘Still there?’ he mumbled, without deigning to turn around.

Ophélie noticed that he would not touch the tisane. To relieve her hands, she drank it herself. The warm liquid did her some good.

‘Am I distracting you?’ she murmured, taking a sip from the cup.

‘You will not survive.’

Ophélie’s heart skipped a beat. She could do nothing other than spit the tea back into its cup. It was that or swallow it all backwards.

Thorn obstinately presented her his back. She would have given a lot to look him in the face and verify that he was not making fun of her.

‘What is it that you think I will not survive?’ she asked.

‘The Pole. The court. The engagement. You should return to your mother’s skirts while you still have the chance.’

Disconcerted, Ophélie understood none of his threats, thinly disguised.

‘Are you rejecting me?’

Thorn’s shoulders contracted. He half-turned his frighteningly tall silhouette and sent a negligent look in her direction. Ophélie wondered if the fold of his mouth was a smile or a grimace.

‘Rejecting’, he creaked. ‘You have a sugar-coated view of our customs.’

‘I don’t follow’, breathed Ophélie.

‘This marriage disgusts me as much as you, don’t doubt that, but I am engaged with your family in the name of my own. I am not in a position to unmake my oath without paying the price, and it is high.’

Ophélie took the time to assimilate his words.

‘I am not any more in such a position, sir, if that is what you hope of me. In renouncing this marriage without an acceptable motivation, I would be dishonouring my family. I would be banished without any form of process.

Thorn wrinkled his eyebrows again, one of which was split in two by his scar. The response was not one she would have wanted to hear.

‘Your customs are suppleror: ‘more flexible’ ; « Vos mœurs sont plus souples que les nôtres »

than ours’, he contradicted her with a condescending look. ‘I smelled out the nest in which you grew up. There is no comparison with the world that is preparing to welcome you.

Ophélie tightened her fingers around her teacup. This man was prone to manoeuvres of intimidation, and that bothered her. He did not want her, she had understood that perfectly well, and she did not hold it against him. But that he would expect the woman whose hand he had asked in marriage, that she assume the responsibility for a rupture, that was just cowardly.

‘You are making this out to be worse than it is’, she accused him in a whisper. ‘What profit would our families hope to gain from our union if I am not to push through and accomplish it. You lend me an importance I do not have…’

She let a moment of silence pass before finishing, spying for Thorn’s reaction:

‘…or you are hiding something essential from me.’

His metallic eyes became more piercing. This time, Thorn did not look at her over his shoulder but from high and far away. He looked at her with vigilance, rather, scratching his poorly shaved jaw all the while. He raised an eyebrow when he perceived that Ophélie’s scarf, which fell to the floor, twitched in the air like a disgruntled cat’s tail.

‘The more I observe you, the more I am comforted in my first impression’, he muttered. ‘Too sickly, too numb, too pampered… You are not forged for the place I am leading you. If you follow me, you will not make it through the winter. It is up to you.’

Ophélie held the look he pressed against her. A look of iron. A look of challenge. Her great-uncle’s words resounded in her memory, and she heard herself respond:

‘You do not know me, sir.’

She set down the cup of tea on the platter and, slowly, with poised gestures, she closed the door between them.

Several days went by again without Ophélie bumping into Thorn whether in the dining room or taking a detour in one of a hallway. The exchange that they had just had left her perplexed for a long time. To avoid troubling her aunt, she had lied to her: Thorn had been too occupied to receive her, they had notor: ‘not even’

spoken. While her godmother already began devising new romantic strategies, Ophélie chewed on the stitching of her glove. What chessboard had the Doyennes placed them on? Were the dangers Thorn evoked real or was he just trying to frighten her in the hope she would return home? Was her position at the court as assured as her family believed?

Persecuted by her aunt, Ophélie needed some isolation. She closed herself in the dirigible’s toilet, took off her glasses, set her forehead against the frost-covered porthole, and didn’t take it off again for a long moment, her breath a thicker and thicker curtain covering the window. She saw nothing of the outside, because of the snow that encrusted the porthole, but she new it was already night. The sun, repulsed by the Polar winter had not shown itself anymore for three days.

Suddenly, the electric lightbulb fluttered feverishly, and the floor began to roll under Ophélie’s feet. She left the toilet. Around her, the dirigible creaked, groaned, popped as it carried out the landing manoeuvres through tempest of snow.

‘This is unbelievable, you’re not ready?’ exclaimed Aunt Roseline, rushing down the corridor, wrapped in several layers of furs. ‘Go grab your things quickly and, if you don’t want to freeze on the gangway, cover up!’

Ophélie bundled herself in two coats, a great woollen cap, mittens over her gloves, and wrapped her a few more turns of her interminable scarf. By the end, she was so tightly bundled that she could no longer cross her arms.

When she re-joined the rest of the crew at the entry of the dirigible, their luggage was being unloaded outside.

An icy, cutting wind came through the entryway and covered the wooden floor with white snow. The temperature was so low, in this room, that Ophélie’s eyes began to tear up.

Impassable under his wind-battered bearskin, Thorn’s long silhouette stepped forward without hesitation in the snowstorm. When Ophélie took her turn on the gangway, she had the impression of swallowing ice by the lungful. The icy crust that covered her glasses blinded her, and the gangway cables slid under her mittens. Each step cost her; it seemed that her toes were petrifying in place, at the bottoms of her boots. Somewhere behind her, muffled by the chilling wind, her aunt’s voice cried out to her to watch where she stepped. Ophélie did not need anymore. She slipped just then and somehow grabbed back onto the security cables, one leg swinging into the air. She did not know what distance still separated the gangway from the floor, and she did not want to know.

‘Come down slowly’, recommended a crew member, taking her elbow. ‘There!’

Ophélie regained solid grounded more dead than alive. The wind blew at her jackets, at her dress, at her hair, and her cap flew off. Tangled up in her mittens, she tried to knock the packed snow off her glasses, but it was stuck like glue. Ophélie had to take them off her nose to see. Wherever she set her troubled gaze, she saw only bits of night and snow. She had lost Thorn and her aunt.

‘Your hand!’ a man yelled to her.

Disoriented, she threw her arm out at random and was immediately pulled onto a sledge that she had not seen.

‘Hold on, miss.’

She grabbed onto a bar as her whole body, stiffening with cold, was jolted by shaking. A whip cracked above her, again and again, inspiring more and more haste in the team of dogs. Through the crack of her eyelids, Ophélie thought she could make out trails of light interwoven among the shadows. Lampposts. The sledges cut straight through a village, throwing off white waves on pavementsUS, sidewalks

and doorways. It seemed to Ophélie like this icy track had no end, when the pace finally slowed, leaving her intoxicated from the speed and the wind on her pile of furs.

The dogs passed under a massive drawbridge.

Ch 09: The Gamekeeper

‘This way!’ yelled a man waving a lantern.

Shivering, hair in the wind, Ophélie threw herself out of the sledge and found herself ankle-deep in the powder. The snow flowed over the edges of her low boots like cream. She had only a vague idea of where they were. A straight courtyard caught between two ramparts. It no longer snowed, but the wind was cutting.

‘A good trip, my lord?’ asked the man with the lantern, coming to meet them. ‘Didn’t think you’d be gone so long, we’d started to worry. Say, that’s quite an arrival!’

He shoved the lamp in front of Ophélie’s dazed face. She saw of him but a blurred flash through her glasses. He had a much more pronounced accent than Thorn; she could hardly understand him.

‘Goodness, what a sack of bones! Not very solid on her feet, that one. I hope she won’t die on us. Still, he could have given us a girl with a thicker skin…

Ophélie was stunned. When the man put out his hand towards her with the obvious intention to touch her, he received a swift blow to the head. It was Aunt Roseline’s umbrella.

‘Don’t put your paws on my niece and mind your language, vulgar character!’ she said indignantly under her mass of furs. ‘And you, Mr Thorn, you could say something!’

But Thorn abstained from saying anything at all. He was already some distance away, his immense bear fur in relief against the luminous rectangle of a doorway.

Warmth. Light. Carpets.

The contrast with the tempest outside was almost aggressive. Half-blinded, Ophélie walked across the long vestibule and moved instinctually to a wood stove that set her cheeks ablaze.

She was beginning to understand why Thorn thought she would not survive the winter. This cold was incomparable to the cold of her mountain. Ophélie struggled to breath: her nose, her throat, her lungs burned inside her.

She jumped in her skin when a woman’s voice, even stronger than her mother’s, exploded in her back.

‘Nice breeze, isn’t it? Take off your furs then, my good lord, look they’re already soaked. Your business went well? And some company for madam, you have brought something after all? Time must feel long for her up there!’

The woman had apparently not noticed the little, trembling creature huddling near the wood stove. At her side, Ophélie had trouble understanding her, because of her accent which, too, was very strong. “Company for madam”? Since Thorn did not respond, true to himself, the woman distanced herself as discretely as her clogs would allow.

‘I’ll go help my husband.’

Ophélie slowly took in her environment. As the snow melted on her glasses, strange shapes grew clearer around her. Trophies of animals, open mouths, and fixed eyes, jutted from the walls the length of the immense hunting gallery. Judging by their monstrous size, Beasts. A moose’s antlers, that dominated the space above the entryway, was the size of a tree.

At the end of the lodging, Thorn’s shadow stood tall in front of a vast fireplace. He had set his carpet bag at his feel, ready to take it up again at the first chance.

Ophélie left the little stove for that fireplace, which she judged more attractive. Soaked with water, her ankle boots squelched with each step. Her dress, too, had drunk the snow and seemed ballasted with lead. Ophélie lifted it a little and realised that what she had taken for a rug was in reality an immense grey fur. The sight sent a chill up her spine. What animal could be so monstrous alive that it might cover so much a distance once dead?

Thorn had lodged his iron gaze in the fire in the fireplace; he paid no attention when Ophélie approached. His arms crossed the iron on his chest like sabres, and his long, nervous legs shook with a contained impatience, as though they could not stand to be still. He consulted his pocket watch with a rapid click of the cover. Tic toc.

Hands held out to the flames, Ophélie wondered what had become of her aunt. She should not have left her alone with the lantern man. Turning an ear, it seemed she could hear protestations on the subject of their baggage.

She waited until her teeth had stopped clacking to address Thorn.

‘I admit I don’t really understand these people…’

Ophélie thought, with his tenacious silence, that Thorn would not respond to her, but eventually he unclenched his jaws.

‘In the presence of others and as long as I have decided so, you will be two companions that I’ve brought from abroad to amuse my aunt. If you want to make this easier for me, watch your language, and particularly your chaperone's. And don’t stand at the same level as I am’, he added with an exasperated sigh, ‘That will arouse suspicions.’

Ophélie took two steps back, regretfully pulling herself away from the fireplace. Thorn was going to so much trouble to avoid letting slip about the marriage, it was almost concerning. Besides, she was troubled by the bizarre relation that connected him to this couple. They called him lord and, beneath the apparent familiarity they showed him, hid a certain deference. On Anima, one was always someone’s cousin and one did not encumber oneself with ceremony. Here, a sort of inviolable hierarchy floated in the air, the nature of which Ophélie could not quite grasp.

‘Do you live here?’ she asked in a hardly audible breath, from her retreated position.

‘No’, he condescended to reply again after a silence. ‘This is the game warden’s lodgings.’

This reassured Ophélie. She did not like the morbid smell of the Beast trophies, hardly covered by the smell of the fire in the fireplace.

‘We’re going to spend the night here?’

Whereas Thorn had obstinately presented her his chiselled profile, this reflection began to turn towards her with the look of a falcon. The astonishment had in one movement relaxed the severe lines of his face.

‘The night? What hour do you think it to be, then?’

‘Manifestly far earlier than I had thought’, deduced Ophélie, half-speaking.

The penumbra that weighed on the sky interfered with her internal clock. She was tired, and she was cold, but she said nothing of it to Thorn. She did not want to show weakness in front of this man who judged her too delicate.

There was suddenly a thunderclap in the vestibule.

‘Vandals!’ came the enraged voice of Aunt Roseline. ‘Clumsy fools! Louts!’

Ophélie noticed Thorn tense up. Purple with anger under her fur hat, her aunt made a fanfaring entry into the trophy gallery, the warden’s wife close on her heels. Ophélie this time had the chance to see what this woman looked like; she was a creature as pink and podgy as a baby doll, with a golden braid rolled around her forehead like a crown.

‘What’s the grand idea, dropping in on honest folk« chez les braves »

in such a state?’ she protested. ‘Taking yourself for aor: ‘the’

duchess, you are.’

Roseline noticed Ophélie in front of the fireplace. She took her immediately as a witness, brandishing her umbrella as a sword.

‘They’ve ruined my beautiful— my magnificent sewing machine!’ she said, outraged. And how am I going to hem our dresses? How am I going to repair tears? I specialise in paper, not fabric.’

‘Like everyone, of course’, returned the woman disdainfully. ‘With needle and thread, my good lady!’

Ophélie tried to question Thorn with her eyes to find out what attitude to adopt, but he seemed uninterested by the petty quarrels, as he was resolutely turned towards the chimney. She guessed, by the way he held himself tall, that he disapproved of her aunt Roseline's indiscretion.

‘It’s intolerable’, exhaled the latter, I’ll have you know that you… that you…’

Ophélie placed a hand on her arm to make her think.

‘Calm yourself, aunt, it’s not that bad.’

The warden’s wife rolled her light eyes from the aunt to the niece. She set an eloquent look on her untamed hair, her cadaver-ish tone and her ridiculous get-up that dripped like a damp rag.

‘I was expecting something more exotic. May Lady Berenilde have patience.’

‘Go find your husband’, declared Thorn, abruptly. ‘Have him harness his dogs. We still need to cross the woods, I don’t want to waste any more time.’

Aunt Roseline unclenched her long, horse-like teeth to ask who Aunt Berenilde was, but Ophélie dissuaded her of it with a look.

‘Would you not prefer to take a dirigible, my lord?’ said the warden’s wife.

Ophélie would have hoped liked a “yes” — she liked the idea of the dirigible better than the frozen woods — but Thorn, irritated, responded, ‘There will be no correspondence before Thursday. I don’t have any time to lose.’

‘Very good, my lord’, said the woman, bowing.

Clutching onto her umbrella, Aunt Roseline was scandalised.

‘And what about us, Mr Thorn, will no one ask our opinion? I would prefer to sleep in a hotel and wait until this snow melts a little.’

Thorn took up his suitcase, without looking at Ophélie or her godmother.

‘It will not melt.’

They went out by a great covered terrace, not far from which a forest rustled. Her breath taken away by the cold, Ophélie could see the landscape better now than during the descent. Serrated by the tops of the pine trees covered in snow, the sky was an almost phosphorescent indigo and turned a light blue just above the ramparts that separated the forest from the neighbouring town. The sun hid itself, sure, but it was not far off. It held itself just there, almost visible, on the horizon.

Wrapped under her scarp, her nose in a kerchief, Ophélie jumped when she saw the sledge team that was being harnessed for them. With their furs ruffled by the wind, the wolf-dogs were as imposing as horses. It was one thing to see Beasts in Augustus’s notebook; it was another to discover them in flesh and blood. Aunt Roseline nearly fainted at the sight.

Boots planted in the snow, his face set, Thorn slid on a pair of sledding gloves. He had swapped his white bear skins for a grey pelisse, less wide and less heavy, that clung tight to the iron beanpole of a body. He listened, not very attentively, to the oral report of the game warden complaining about poachers.

Once again, Ophélie wondered who Thorn was to these people. Did the forest belong to him then, to have right to this by-the-book report?

‘And our trunks?’ Aunt Roseline cut them off, between two clacks of her teeth. ‘Are you not loading them on the sledges?’

‘They would slow us down, madam’, said the game warden chewing a plugUK ; US (dialect) ‘with a chaw in’, ‘sucking on snuff’

. ‘Don’t worry though, we’ll have them sent to Dame Berenilde’s place soon.’

Aunt Roseline did not understand immediately, because of the accent and the because of the quid. She had to make him repeat his sentence three times.

‘A woman cannot travel without the essentials!’ she said obstinately. ‘And Mr Thorn, of course he keeps it, his own little briefcase, right?’

‘That is not at all the same thing’, breathed the game warden, very shocked.

Thorn clicked his tongue in annoyanceor, annoyedly

.

‘Where is it?’ he asked, ostensibly ignoring Roseline.

Waving a hand, the game warden pointed vaguely beyond the trees.

‘It’s hanging around the edge of the lake, my lord.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Aunt Roseline impatiently.

Head in her scarf, Ophélie, too, did not understand. She did not understand any of it. The cold made her skull hurt and made it hard to hold onto thoughts clearly.

All of a sudden, the whirling shadows of the trees broke into pieces and a vast, overwhelming, crystalline night rolled out its starry cloak as far as the eye can see. Ophélie's eyes dilated behind her glasses. She sat up in the sledge and, as the freezing breath of the cold wind flew through her hair, the sight stunned her.

She was still wading through the cotton when the teams set themselves en route under the night, inflating her skirts with curtains of air. Huddled at the bottom of the sledge, jolted and bumped around like a rag doll, she used her mittens to keep her hair from whipping her nose. In front of her, Thorn drove their sledge; his immense shadow, leaning forward, cut the wind like an arrow. The muffled bells of the sledge behind, which carried the gamekeeper and Aunt Roseline, followed them discretely in the obscurity. Around them naked tree branches clawed at the landscape, lacerated the snow and spat out, here and there, scraps of sky. Buffeted in every direction, fighting against the viscous tiredness that numbed her, Ophélie got impression that this race had no end.

Suspended in the middle of the night, with its towers drowning in the Milky Way, a formidable citadelle floated above the forest without anything attaching it to the rest of the world. It was an incredible spectacle, an enormous beehive disowned by the land, a tortured knot of dungeons, bridges, crenelations, stairways, flying buttresses and chimneys. Jealously guarded by a frozen ring of moats, whose long paths were frozen in the air, the snow-covered city stuck out above and below this line. A constellation of windows and street lamps, her thousand-and-one lights were reflected in the mirror of a lake. The highest tower harpooned the crescent moon.

Inaccessible, estimated Ophélie, delighting at the sight. Was this then what Augustus had drawn in his sketchbook?

At the front of the sledge, Thorn threw a look over his shoulder. Through the fair locks that whipped at his face, his eye was more lively than usual.

‘Hold tight!’

Confused, Ophélie gripped wildly at whatever fell under her hands. A blast of air, like a torrent, took her breath away, as the enormous dogs and the sled took to the current and tore away from the snow. Her godmother's hysterical cries fled into the skies. As for Ophélie, she couldn't make the slightest sound. She felt her heart pound as though it would break into pieces. The higher they rose into the sky, the faster they went and the heavier the weight in the pit of her stomach. They described a great curve which seemed to her as unending as her aunt's cries. In a bouquet of sparks, the runners settled joltinglyI'd had ‘unsoftly’ earlier, noted as an example of the slightly quirky or whimsical style I'd wanted to introduce; this in contrast to the subject matter and characterisation, and probably to the original author's style.

on the ice of the moats. Ophélie spilled brutally over the planks of the sledge; she almost fell overboard. Finally, the dogs halted their racing and the team came to a stop before a colossal portcullis.

‘The SkytadelI'm unsure about this translation. I like « Skytadel » but I'm not sure I'm in love with it. I'm tempted to leave it as « Citacielle » but the pun is lost.
Heck yeah, ‘Skytadel’ sounds awkward, let's hear you do better— please?

’, announced Thorn laconically, stepping down.

He did not look back to verify that his fiancée was actually still there.

Ch 10: The Skytadel

Ophélie craned her neck, unable to tear her regard from the monumental city that stood tall — to the stars.

Perched on a wall, a round way enlaced the fortress around the waste and slithered a spiral all the way to the top. The Skytadel was much more bizarre than it was beautiful. Turrets of all sorts — some swollen, some slight or twisted — spat smoke from all their chimneys. Arched stairs stepped maladroitly over empty space and definitely did not look worth risking. Windows — grand or paned — gilded the night in a pallet of poorly sorted colours.

‘I thought I would die…’ a voice behind Ophélie complained.

‘Careful, madam. Cobbled as you are this floor is an ice rink.’

Supported by the gamekeeper, and failing to do so, Aunt Roseline tried to find her balance on the surface of the moat. Under the lantern-light, her face seemed even more yellow than normal.

Ophélie in turn placed a prudent foot outside of her sledge and checked the purchase her boots had on the ice. Immediately she fell backwards.

Thorn's notched boots adhered perfectly to the thin shell of ice while he untied his dogs to attach them to the game warden's team.

‘Will that be all, my lord?’, asked the latter, wrapping his fingers around his wrists.

‘Yes.’

With one flick of the reins, the team left without a sound, jumped into a column of air and disappeared into the night with its lantern like a shooting star. Aground on the ice, Ophélie's gaze followed it with the feeling that the sledge took with it any hope of going back(on this)

. She did not understand how it was physically possible for a sled hitched to a team of dogs could fly like that.

‘Help me.’

The tall, stiff body of Thorn had inclined behind his empty sledge and apparently expected Ophélie to do the same. She slid over to him more or less successfullyTant bien que mal :: Je n'aime pas du tout cette traduction. Maybe: ‘somewhat successfully’?

. He indicated a stake (that) he had just planted in the snow.

‘Push your foot against it. On my signal, push as hard as you can.’

She acquiesced, little sure of herself. It was barely if she felt her toes at all against the stake. When Thorn gave the signal, she braced herself with all her weight against the sledge. The vehicle which moves so easily behind the great wolf-dogs, seemed stuck in the ice since they had detached the beasts. Ophélie was relieved to see the runners give under their force.

‘Again’, demanded Thorn in a flat tone while he placed more stakes.

‘Will someone explain to me finally what all this fuss means?’ formalised Aunt Roseline as she watched them going about. ‘Why has no one come to greet us in a right and due fashion? Why are we being treated with such little regard? And why do I get the impression that your family has not been informed of our coming?’

She gesticulated in her brown furs, fighting to find her balance. The look that Thorn shot at her petrified her in place. Her eyes shone like two dagger-shardsThis is slightly editorialised to use the idiomatic English: ‘eyes like daggers’.

in the bluish obscurity of the night.

‘Because’, whispered he through his teeth. ‘A little discretion, madame, would that skin you?’

His ill-tempered« maussade »

shape descended again towards Ophélie and gave her sign to push. Repeating again and again the motions, they made their way into the vast hanger whose immense doors — loosely« mollement » ; half-heartedly, loosely, barely

tied down with chains — creakedWR suggests « to grate » (intransitive), which seems like a good word which I just can't see putting into that sentence.

in the wind. Thorn lifted his pelisseA loose over-jacket associated with cavalry soldiers for over three hundred years, appearing first in the 17^th century.

, opening a bag that hung across his chest« qu'il portait en bandoulière »

, and pulled out a keyring. The padlock opened, the chains slid. Rows of sledges, the same as theirs, were lined up in the dark. A ramp was stored inside. Thorn parked their vehicle in the depot without needing anymore of Ophélie's coöperationUK, co‑operation; US, cooperation; the New Yorker, coöperation

. He recovered his suitcase and signalled them follow him to the back of the hangar.

‘You don't want us to enter through the front door’, commented Aunt Roseline.

Thorn laid the full weight of his gaze on the two women, one at a time.

‘Starting from right now’, said he with a storm-full voice, ‘you will follow me without discussion, without hesitation, without dragging your feet, without a sound.’

Aunt Roseline pinched her lips. Ophélie kept her thoughts for herself since, at any rate, Thorn was not asking for a response. They passed into the interior of the citadel like spies, but he had his reasons. Whether they were good or bad, that was another thing.

Thorn slid open a heavy wooden door. Hardly had they entered the dark room, into a strong animal odour, when there was an movement in the dark. A kennel. Behind the bars of the box, massive paws scratch, enormous noses sniffed, wide muzzles whined. The dogs where so big that Ophélie would have believed she was in a stables. Thorn whistled between his teeth to calmcurb/kerb

their enthusiasm. He bent himself into a cast-iron goods liftfreight elevator

, waited for the women to enter, pulled the grille closed and began to turn a crank. With a metallic sound, the lift gained altitude and climbed from landing to landing. Ice crystals began to form clouds around them as the temperature rose.

The heat that flowed in Ophélie's veins soon turned into torture. It scalded her cheeks and covered her glasses in condensationor, steam

. Her godmother stifled a gasp when the goods lift stopped brusquely. Thorn folded the lift's accordion grille, swinging his long neck around from one side of the storey to the other.

‘Go right. Hurry.’

This storey looked singularly like a sordid side-street, with its half-unseated paving stones, rarely-braved pavementsUS, sidewalks

, ageing advertisements on the walls, and dense fog. There floated in the air a vague smell of bakery and spices that woke Ophélie's stomach.

Suitcase in hand, Thorn had them walk abandoned neighbourhoods, hidden passages, and dilapidated stairways. Twice, he pushed them back into the dark of an alleyway at the passage of a fiacre or the faraway sound of laughter. He led Ophélie then by the wrist to make her move faster. Each of his long steps counted double for her.

She observed by the light of the lampposts Thorn's set jaw, his very pale eye, and – way up there – his determined forehead. Once again, she asked herself how legitimate her place at the court could be for him to act like this. His long, nervous fingers released her arm when they infiltrated the backyard of a house in terrible shape. A cat which rooted around in the garbage skittered off at their sight. After a last wary look, Thorn pushed the two women behind a door which he closed right behind them and then locked with two turns of the key.

Aunt Roseline hiccoughed with astonishment. Ophélie's eyes widened behind her glasses. Flamboyant in the declining daylight, a rustic« champêtre » rustic, bucolic, rural (WR)

park displayed around them its autumn foliage. No more night. No more snow. No more Skytadel. By an invraisemblable sleight of hand, they had come out somewhere else. Ophélie turned on her heels. The door that they had just breached stood, absurdly, in the middle of the grass.

As Thorn seemed to breath more at ease, they understood that his prohibitions were lifted.

‘It's extraordinary’, stammered Aunt Roseline, whose long, dry face was dilated with admiration. ‘Where are we?’

Suitcase in hand, Thorn was just as quickly en route between the rows of elm and poplar.

‘In the domain of my aunt. Please hold your questions for later and don't tarry any longer’, added he in a cutting voice as Roseline began to pursue the thought.

The followed Thorn along the well-travelled park alley, two stair-like streams running alongside. The aunt unbuttonedThis is not quite right. I am thinking of toggles, not buttons.

her fur-jacket, charmed by the warm breeze.

‘Extraordinary’, repeated she with a smile that unveiled her long teeth. ‘Quite simply extraordinary…’

Ophélie wiped her noseWith a handkerchief: perhaps ‘handkerchiefed her nose’ ?

, more reserved. Her hair and her clothes had not stopped raining melted snow, she spread puddles all along as she walked.I'm not satisfied with this phrasing.

She observed the grass under her feet, then the coursing, shimmering water, then the foliage flapping in the wind, then the sky reddened by the twilight. She could not quiet a nagging sensation. The sun was not in its place here. The lawn was far too green. The reddish trees dropped no leaves. She could hear neither birds singing nor insects buzzing.

Ophélie recalled Adélaïde the ancestor's travel log.

Mme the ambassador has kindly received us in her domain, where an eternal summer night reigns. I am dazzled by so many marvels! The people here are courteous, thoughtful, and their powers surpass understanding.

‘Don't take off your furs, Aunt.’ murmured Ophélie. ‘I think this park is false.’

‘False?’ repeated Roseline, dumbfoundedThe other suggested translation was speechless which is obviously not the case since she's repeating words.

.

Thorn half turned. Ophélie caught but a glimpse of his sharpI'd like a more descriptive word for this

, badly-shaved profile, but the look that he poured from his side betrayed a hint of surprise.

A large dwelling began to appear, almost traced in filigree behind the lacedoily, lace, &c

of branches. It appeared all together, well-cut against the red field of the sunset, when the alleyI'm using alley or park alley here as a synonym for path.

exchanged bucolic« champêtre » rustic, bucolic, rural (WR)

woods for neat, symmetrical gardens. It was a manor house covered in ivy, done up in slate and topped in weathercocksUS, ‘topped with weather vanes’

I don't much like “topped in/with” here, but I don't have a better option at the moment

.

On the stone porch, above its concave steps, stood an old woman. Hands crossed on her black apron, a shawl across her shoulders, she seemed to have been watching for them the whole time. She looked them over as soon as they had climbed the steps, wrinkles spreading around a radiant smile.

‘Thorn, mon petit, how glad I am to see you again.’« mon petit » could be translated differently.

Despite the fatigue, despite the cold, despite the doubts, Ophélie couldn't hide her amusement. To her eyes, Thorn was anything but “petit”. She frowned, on the other hand, when he deflected the elderly woman's advances without restraint.

‘Thorn, Thorn, so you won't even kiss your grandmother?’ the woman exclaimed sadly.

‘Stop that’, he whistled.« siffla-t-il »; ‘whistled’ doesn't feel quite right.. perhaps ‘hissed’?

He plunged into the manor's entrance hall, leaving the other three at the threshold.

‘How heartless!’ coughed Roseline, who seemed to have forgotten all idea of reconciliation.toute politique de rapprochement

But the grandmother had already found another victim. Her fingers kneaded Ophélie's cheeks as though measuring her freshness, nearly knocking off her glasses.

‘So here is the new blood that comes to the Dragon's aid’, she said with a dreamy smile.or a ‘dreaming smile’.

‘Excuse me?’ muttered Ophélie.

She had not understood a single word of the greeting.

‘You have a good face’, smiled the old woman. ‘Very innocent.’

Ophélie imagined that she must seem stupefied. The grandmother's wrinkled hands were covered in strange tattoos. The same tattoos as on the hunter's arms, as on Augustus' sketches.

‘Pardon me, madame, I am dripping on you’, said Ophélie, pulling her hair soaked hair back.

‘By our illustrious ancestors, you're shivering, poor child. Come in, come in quick, mesdames. We'll not tarry in serving dinner.’Does Berenilde's mother (Thorn's grandmother) use little frankicisms and slightly archaïc turns of phrase? That might fit her character pretty well. I haven't really done character studies that might better help me decide that.

Ch 11: The Dragons

Up to her neck in the steaming wateror: ‘Immersed in the steaming water, …’

, Ophélie came back to life.

Normally, she did not like to use someone else's bath — reading these intimate little spaces could be embarrassing — but she took full advantage of this one. Her toes, which the cold had turned hard as rock, had finally found reassuring colour under the water. Numbed by the hot vapours, Ophélie let her gaze wander along the enamelled edge of the bathtub, along the tin boiler, along the tapestry's fleur-de-lys friezes. Each piece of furniture was a true work of art.

‘I am both reässured and worried, my girlor: ‘my dear’

.’

Ophélie turned her fogged-over glasses towards the fabric screen where Aunt Roseline's shadow gesticulated like in a children's theatre. She pinned her little bun, put on her pearls, re-powdered her nose.

‘Reässured’, her aunt's shadow continued, ‘because this ark is not as lacking in hospitality as I feared. Never have I seen a houes so well kept and, even if her accent attacks my ears a little, the venerable grandmother is a peachêtre une crème > to be a peach

.

Roseline pulled aside the screen to lean over Ophélie's bath. Her blond hair, pulled by four pins, smelled strong of eau de toiletteie, perfume

. She had wedged her narrow body into a beautiful dark green dress. The grandmother had made a gift of it to make up for her sewing machine, broken at the gamekeeper's.

‘But I am worried, because the man you are preparing to marry is a philistineor: ‘a boor’.

’, she whispered.

Ophélie slid her heavy dripping locks off her shoulders and looked at her knees, aflower with soap like two pink bubbles. She wondered a moment whether she should tell her godmother about Thorn's warnings.

‘Get out of there’ said Aunt Roseline, snapping her fingers. ‘You're getting wrinkled as a prune.’

When Ophélie pulled herself from the bath's hot water, the air snapped cold over her whole body. Her first reflex was to put on her reader's gloves. She then wrapped up gladly in the white towel that her godmother held out and dried off in front of the hearth.or: ‘rubbed herself dry in front of the chimney’.

Thorn's grandmother had set several dresses at their disposal. Laid out on the large canopied bed, like languid women, each rivalled the others in grace and elegance. Without an ear for Roseline's protestations, Ophélie chose the darkest of them: a pearl gray outfit, cinctured at the waist and buttoned to the chin. She sat her glasses on her nose and darkened the glass. When she saw herself awkwardly stiff in the mirror with her braided hair on her heck, she missed her regular unkemptness.« son négliger lui manqua »

She held her hand out to her still-cold scarf, which rolled its tricoloured rings up to its familiar place around her neck its fringe sweeping the floor.

‘My poor niece, you are irredeemably lacking in taste’, barked an irritated Roseline.

Someone knocked a the door. A young girl in a white pinafore and bonnet curtsied respectfully« s'inclina respectueusement » ; Is this a bow or a curtsy? The anglophone world expects a curtsy here as does the francophone, in my experience. I don't generally think of a curtsy as a type of bow so much as the feminine equivalent of the traditionally masculine bow.

.

‘Dinner is served, if the ladies would follow me.’

Ophélie observed the pretty face and its constellation of birthmarks. She tried, without success, to guess how she was related to Thorn. If she was a sister, she did not look like him at all.

‘Thank you, madamoiselle’, she responded, giving the ceremonial salutation.

The young girl seemed so startled that Ophélie thought she had committed a faux pas. Should she have called her cousin rather than madamoiselle, out of sensitivity?

‘I think she is a servant’, her aunt whispered in her ear as they descended the velvet-carpeted stairs. ‘I had heard of it, but it's the first time in my life I've seen one with my own eyes.’

Ophélie knew nothing of it. She had read a maid's scissors, in the museum, but she thought that those professions had disappeared with the old world.

The young girl brought them into a vast dining room. The atmosphere there was darker than the corridors with its wood panelling, its coffered ceilingsee this Wikipedia article.

, its chiaroscuro paintings and its sleeping windows which let hints of the night outside through between two lead screens. The chandeliers barely dissipated the penumbra the length of the table, and lay fragile golden sparkles on the laid silver.

In the middle of all these shadows, a luminous creature throned at the head of the table in a sculpted armchair.

‘My sweet child’, she welcomed Ophélie with a sensual voice. ‘Approach, then, that I may admire you.’

Ophélie offered her hand maladroitly to the delicate fingers that were held towards her. The woman they belonged to was so beautiful she took one's breath away. Her supple, voluptuous body caused her taffeta blue dress with its bands of cream ribbon to tremble with every movement. The milky skin of her neck sprung from the corsage, encircled by a blond cloud. An airy smile floated on her soft face, without age; it was impossible to look away once one had set one's eyes on that face.US, ‘once you had set your eyes on her’

Ophélie had to tear herself from it, despite it all, to contemplate the satin-covered arm that she had been given. The embroidered tulle of her undersleeve let through by transparence an interlacing of tattoos, the same ones that the grandmother wore on her own arms as well as the hunters in Augustus' sketches.

‘I'm afraid I'm too normal to be /admired/‌’, murmured Ophélie impulsively.

The woman's smile grew, which carved a dimple in the milk of her skin.

‘You aren't short on frankness, in any case. That's a change, isn't it, Mama?’

The Northern accent, which had such hard inflections in Thorn's mouth, rolled sensuously on the tongue of this woman and gave her even more charm.

Two chairs further down, the grandmother acquiesced with a big smile.

‘What did I tell you, my daughter. This young person is splendidly candid.’

‘I forget my duties’, apologies the beautiful lady. ‘I have bot introduced myself to you two! Berenilde, Thorn's aunt. I love him like a son and I am persuaded that I will soon love you like my own daughter. So you may address me like a mother. Take a seat my dear child, and you too, madame Roseline.

It was when Ophélie sat down in front of her bowl of soup that she noticed Thorn's presence, seated across from her at the table. He had been so fully melted into the ambiant penumbra that she had not noticed him.

He was unrecognisable.

His mane, short and pale, no longer frolicked about like weeds. He had shaved the beard that ate at his cheeks, so that only a goatee in the shape of an anchor remained. The oversized pelisse had gone, making space for a tight, night-blue vest with a high collar, out of which escaped the ample sleeves of a perfectly white shirtor ‘chemise’.

. These clothes stiffened his already thin, tall body, but this way Thorn looked more like a gentleman than a wild animal. The chain of his pocket watch and his shirt cuffs shone with the light of the oil lamps« chandelle » ; lighting method cheaper than wax candles which burnt mutton or beef lard and had a flax or hemp wick. I think it may also refer to candles, but given the location I think animal fats are the more likely source of oil.

.

His face, long and sharp, was not any kinder« aimable » ; It is unclear (to me) whether this means that Thorn doesn't look any “nicer”, “kinder”, “more likeable”, “friendlier”, &c.

for it. He kept his eyelids resolutely low and looked only at his winter squash soup« soupe au potiron » ; this could alternately be called ‘pumpkin soup’ but winter squash better suits for several reasons.

. He seemed to count silently the number of round trips between his bowl« sa cuillère et ses lèvres » ; I believe this to be a conceptual mistake, where the number of there-and-backs is counted from lifting the soup from his bowl to depositing it in his mouth, since the original term used is literally translated ‘spoon’ rather than ‘bowl’ and I don't see how it makes sense to ‘count the number of trips from and to between the spoon and his lips’, despite this being a more literal translation.

and his lips.

‘I don't quite understand you, Thorn!’ observed Berenilde, a wine cup in her hand. ‘I, who hoped that a touch of femininity in your existence would make you more loquacious.’

When he looked up, it was not has aunt that his gaze snapped to like a cracked whip, but Ophélie. A defiant light still shone in the leaden sky of his pupils. His two scars — one at the temple, the other at the eyebrow — seemed to swear at« juraient presque sur la nouvelle symétrie » ; ‘on’ or ‘at’, or something different.

the newfound symmetry of his well-combed, well-shaven face.

Slowly he turned to Berenilde.

‘I killed a man.’

He had said it in a nonchalant tone, like small-talk, between two swallows of soup. Ophélie's glasses went pale. Beside here, Roseline choked, almost fainting. Berenilde set her wine cup down on the laced cloth in a calm movement.

‘Where? When?’

Ophélie, rather, would have asked ‘Who? Why?’

‘At the airfield, before I left for Anima’, responded Thorn's posed voice. ‘A disgrace that some mal-intentioned individual sent hurriedly at my heels. I precipitated my departure somewhat in consequence.’

‘You did well.’

Ophélie crisped in her chair. Now then– that was it? “You're a murderer, great, pass the salt…”

Berenilde noticed her stiffness. In a graceful movement, she set her tattooed hand on her glove.

‘You must think us frightening’, she whispered. ‘I see that my dear nephew, true to himself, has not taken the time to give you the full picture.’

‘Give us the whole picture of what?’ Roseline was offended, ‘It is out of the question that my god-daughter marry a criminal!’

Berenilde turned her clear, untroubled eyes on her.

‘This has little to do with crime, madame. We must defend ourselves from our rivals. I fear that many nobles at court look on this alliance between our two families very unfavourably. What makes some stronger, weakens the position of others’, she smiled and spoke calmly. ‘The slightest of changes in the balance of powers provokes intrigue, rumour,This word is not present in the original, but is implied by « intrigue » and the immediately following play on words. Fits the anglophone set of three style better. The French word is plural in both words « les intrigues et les meurtres », whereas I translate this in the abstract singular in both cases and in the added case of ‘rumour’.

and murder in the halls.« meurtres du couloir » ; play on bruit du couloir > ‘rumours’.

’

Ophélie was shocked. So that was the court than? In her ignorance, she had imagined kings and queens who passed their time philosophising and playing cards.

Aunt Roseline, too, seemed flabbergasted.

‘By the ancestors! You mean that those are current practice? People simply go about killing one another and that's it?’

‘It's a touch more complicated’, responded Berenilde patiently.

Men in tailcoats and white plastrons entered the dining discretely. Without saying a word, they took the soup bowls, served fish, and disappeared with three exaggerated bows. No one at the table judged it worthwhile to introduce them to Ophélie. Then all these people who lived here were not family? Was that what servants were, currents of air with no identity?

‘You see’, continued Berenilde, setting her chin on her interlaced fingers, ‘our way of life is somewhat different than yours on Anima. There are families who have of our spirit — Farouk —'s favourThis is a rather strange construction, but it would certainly be pronounced: ‘our spirit, Farouk's’ rather than ‘our spirit's, Farouk’, ‘our spirit's, Farouk's’ or any thing else of the sort. I could avoid it by going with ‘the favour of our spirit, Farouk’ but it doesn't quite feel natural. The way I have written it certainly looks strange on the page, but fit's far better when read aloud.

, those who no longer have it, and those who never have.’

‘Families?’I don't like that the quotation marks are also italicised.

Ophélie said in a murmur.

‘Yes, my child. Our family tree is more torturous than yours. Since the creation of the ark, it was split into several branches, distinct each from the others. Branches which did not mix with the others without reticence… or without killing each other.

‘How very charming’, commented Aunt Roseline with two dabs of a napkin at her mouth.

Ophélie picked at her salmon with apprehension. She was incapable of eating fish without a bone lodging itself in her throat. She looked at Thorn surreptitiously, mal à l'aise to feel him right in front of her, but he accorded more attention to his plate than all the gathered guests. He chewed his fish with a cross« maussade »

look, as though swallowing his food disgusted him. Not surprising that he was so skinny… His legs were so long that, despite the width of the table, Ophélie had to scoot her boots under her chair to avoid stepping on his feet.

She pushed her glasses up on her nose and observed, discretely this time, the wizened« silhouette ratatinée » ; or: ‘withered, wrinkled, shrivelled’

silhouette of his grandmother, at his side, who ate her salmon with gusto.

What had she said, back then, when greeting them? “So here is the new blood that comes to the Dragons' aid.”

‘The Dragons’, breathed Ophélie suddenly, ‘that's the name of your family?’

Berenilde raised her neatly-plucked eyebrows and glanced at Thorn with shocked expression.

‘Have you explained nothing to them? What exactly did you do with your time during the trip?’

She shook her pretty blond curls, half-annoyed, half-amused, then she tossed Ophélie a bubbly glance.« œillade pétillante » ; or: ‘wink’

‘Yes, my dear child, that is our family name. Three clans, of which ours is one, gravitate in the court. You will have understood, we do not appreciate each other very much. The clan of Dragons is powerful and feared, but few in number.grammar: ‘few in number’ or ‘small in number’?

You'll soon have met them all, my dear!’

A shiver shot down Ophélie's back, from her neck to below her kidneys. She had the sudden bad feeling about the role she had been brought to play in the clan. To bring in new blood? A breeding mother, so that's what they figured on making of her.

She looked Thorn straight in the face, his visage dry and disagreeable, his angular body, his disdainful glance avoiding her own, his harsh manners. At just the thought of being any closer to that man, Ophélie dropped her fork on the carpet. She started to bend over to pick it up, but an old man in tails rushed out from the shadow to hand her another.

‘Excuse me, madame’, intervened Roseline, again. ‘Are you insinuating that my niece's marriage might put her life in danger, on the imbecilic whims of such-and-such courtisan?’

Berenilde dissected her fish without a moment's break in her calm.

‘My poor friend, I'm afraid the attempt at intimidation to which Thorn was object is but one link in a long chain.’

Ophélie coughed into her napkin. This time was no different, she had almost swallowed a fish-bone.

‘Ridiculous!’ exclaimed Roseline, indicating her with a look. ‘This girl wouldn't harm a fly; what could anyone fear from her?’

Thorn raised his eyes to the ceiling, exasperated. As for Ophélie, she collected fish-bones along the edge of her plate. Under her distracted action, she listened, observed, reflected.

‘Madame Roseline’, said Berenilde in a silken voice, ‘you need to understand that an alliance made with a foreign ark is taken for a power grab in the Skytadel. How to explain this without shocking you too much?’ she murmured as she closed her great, clear eyes. ‘The women of your family are reputed for their fecundity.’

‘Our fecundity’, repeated Aunt Roseline, taken by surprise.

Ophélie pushed her glasses up again, which fell on her nose as soon as she bowed her head to eat.

There, it had been said.

She studied Thorn's expression across from her. Even if he avoided scrupulously her regard, she read on his face the same disgust as she felt, which did not fail to reässure heror: ‘which somehow reässured her’. The ‘somehow’ is an addition to avoid the awkward ‘did not fail to’ phrasing which seems convoluted and inelegant in English.

. She emptied her glass of water, slowly, to clear her throat. Should she announce now, in the middle of this family meal, that she had no intention to share this man's bed? It would doubtlessly not have the best effect.

And then, there was something else. Ophélie did not know precisely what, but Berenilde's eyebrows had balked, as though she had been obliged to look them in the eyes when explaining their reasons. A hesitation? Something unsaid? It was difficult to say, but Ophélie did not let it go: there was something else.

‘In the meantime, we know nothing of your situation’, Aunt Roseline finally muttered embarrassedly. ‘Madame Berenilde, I will need to bring it up with the family. That information could very well call into question the engagement.’

Berenilde's smile softened.

‘You know nothing of it, perhaps, madame Roseline, but such was not the Doyenne's case. They accepted our offer, knowing perfectly well the reasons. I am sorry if you have not been informed of all this, but we have been obliged to act under the strictest discretion to assure your protection. The fewer people who are aware of this marriage, the better we will be able to handle it. You are free, that goes without saying, to write your family if you doubt my word. Thorn will handle your letter personally.

The godmother had gone very white under her tight bun. She held her silverware with such a force that her fingers trembled. When she planted her fork in plate, she did seem to notice that a flan au caramel had replaced the salmon.

‘I refuse to allow my niece to be assassinated because of your own business!’

Her cry had climbed into the high notes, at the limit of hysteria. Ophélie was so moved by it that she forgot her own nervousness. At that precise instant she realised just how alone and abandoned she would have felt without that old grouchy aunt with her.

She lied to her, best she could:

‘Don't worry so much. If the Doyennes have given their blessing, they must not believe the peril to be too great for me.

‘A man is dead, thick-headed girl.’« nigaude » ; literally, ‘simpleton, nincompoop, ninny’. A ‘thick-headed’ or ‘dim-witted’ person.

Ophélie did not have a counterargument. She did not like the speech they were serving either, but loosing her cool would not change the situation in the least. She drilled her regard into Thorn's eyes, consisting of two straight slits, pressing him mutely to break his silence.

‘I have many enemies at court’, he said harshly. ‘Your niece is not the centre of the world.’« le nombril du monde » ; literally, ‘the world's bellybutton’.

Berenilde looked at him a moment, a little shocked at his intervention.

‘It is true that your position is already delicate to start with, independent of all nuptial considerations’, she acquiesced.

‘Clearly! If this great buffoon strangles everything that moves, I certainly imagine that friendships do not stack up at his door’, added Roseline.

‘Who wants some caramel?’ the grandmother hastened to suggest, taking the sauce boator: ‘gravy boat’, but filled with caramel apparently

in hand.

No one responded. Under the vacillating light of the oil lamps, a glint flashed through Berenilde's pupils and Thorn's jaw tightened. Ophélie bit her tongue. She understood that, if her aunt did not reign in her own, someone would shut her up one way or another.

‘Please excuse the outburst, /monsieur/‌’, she murmured then, bowing in front of Thorn. ‘Fatigue from the trip has left us somewhat thin-skinned.’

Aunt Roseline started to protest but Ophélie squished her foot under the table, keeping her own attention riveted on Thorn.

‘You are sorry, godmother, as am I. I realise know that all the precautions that you have taken to this point, monsieur, were only for our security, and I thank you for that.’

Thorn looked her over with a circonspect air, arching his brow, his spoon in the air. He took Ophélie's thanks for what they were, a simple façade of politeness.

She set down her napkin and invited Roseline, stupified, to stand from the table.

‘I think we have need of rest, my aunt and I.’

From her seat in the armed chair, Berenilde smiled appreciatively at Ophélie.

‘Night brings counsel’, she philosophised.

Ch 12: The Room

Ophélie scrutinised the dark, dishevelled, her eyes heavy with sleep. Something had woken her, but she did not know what. Sitting up in her bed, she contemplated the hazy contours of the room. Through the curtains of brocade of the canopy, she could hardly distinguish the paned window. Night paled on the misty rectangles« carreaux » ; four-sided panes

; it would soon be dawn.

Ophélie had found sleeping difficult. She had shared a room with her brother and sisters her whole life. It was strange to spend the night alone in a place she did not know. The conversation over dinner hadn't helped either.

She listened attentively to the silence in which the mantle clock kept its beat. What could possibly have woken her? Quiet knocks suddenly sounded from the door. So she had not dreamt it.

When she pushed back the quilt, Ophélie jumped at the cold.« eut le souffle coupé par le froid » ; I'm sure there's an idiomatic English translation for losing one's breath due to the shock of cold.

She slipped a woollen sweater over her nightshirt, walked right into a footstool on the carpet and turned the handle of the door. As soon as she had done so, an abrupt voice fell on her.

‘It's wasn't without warning.’

An immense dark coat, doleful as deathThere may be better adjectives, but I love the consonance here.

, barely distinguished itself from the corridor's penumbra. Without her glasses, Ophélie imagined Thorn more than she saw him. He really had his own way of starting conversations…

She shivered, still sleepy, in the glacial current of air at the door, while she gather her thoughts.

‘I can't go back nowor: ‘I can't go back on it now.’

’, she finally said.

‘It is too late, certainly. Now we will just have to deal with one another.’

Ophélie rubbed her eyes, as though it would help dissipate the myopic veil, but she continued to nothing of Thorn but his great, dark coat. It did not matter. His intonation left it quite clear how much this situation« perspective » ; Je ne suis pas du tout certain de l'usage ici. Il me semble en context vouloir dire qu'il n'aime pas la situation non plus, que c'est gênant et regrettable. Mais pourquoi « perspective » ?

was unsatisfying, which gave Ophélie considerable ease.

She thought she could see a suitcase hanging from his arm.

‘We're already leaving?’

‘I am’, the coat corrected. ‘You, you will stay with my aunt. My absence has already gone too long, I must return to my work.’

Ophélie suddenly realised that she still did not know what her fiancé did. Taking him for a hunter, she had forgotten to ask the question.

‘What does your work consist of?’

‘I work in administration’, he rushed, ‘but I did not come to exchange small talk, I am in a hurry.’

Ophélie open her eyelids halfway. She simply could not imagine Thorn as a bureaucrat.

‘I'm listening.’

Thorn pushed the door towards Ophélie with so suddenly that he crushed her toes. He turned the lock three times without shutting the door, to show her how it worked. He really took her for a half-wit.

‘Starting tonight, give the lock a double-turn each night; is that absolutely clear? Swallow nothing that isn't served at the table, and — please — watch that your inexhaustible chaperon moderates her self. It is not very smart to offend Dame Berenilde under her own roof.’

Though it was not good manners, Ophélie could not stifle a yawn.

‘Is that advice or a threat?’

The great, dark coat was silent for a moment heavy as lead.

‘My aunt is your best ally’, he finally said. ‘Never leave her protection, go nowhere without permission, and trust no one else.’

‘Doesn't “no one else” include you?’

Thorn snorted and shut the door in her face. He definitely did not have a sense of humour.

Ophélie went looking for her glasses, somewhere among the pillows, then set them by the window. She wiped at a square pane with her sleeve to defog it. Outside, dawn painted the sky in purple and laid its first traces on the pink clouds. The majestic autumn trees bathed in the mist. It was still too early for their foliage to shed their greys, but soon, when the sun had invaded the horizon, it would be a red-gold flame across the whole park.

The more Ophélie contemplated the færie-tale landscape, the more her conviction strengthened. This décor was a trompe-l'œil; an resoundingly successful, perfect reproduction of nature, but a reproduction all the same.

She lowered her eyes. Between the violet flowerbeds, Thorn, in his immense coat, grew small already on the path. This guy had succeeded in shaking out her sleepiness.

Ophélie clicked her teeth, then set her attention on the cold ashes in the chimney. She got the impression that she was in a wine-cellar. She pulled off her night-gloves, which kept her from reading hear and there in her sleep, then poured a pitcher into the dressing table's beautiful earthenware basin.

“And now?” she wondered, plunging her cheeks into the cold water. She did not feel like staying where she was. Thorn's warnings had done more to intrigue than frighten her. Her was a man who put a lot of effort into protecting a woman that he did not like…

And then there was that little something, that undefinable pause that Berenilde had betrayed at supper. It was no more than a detail, but it nagged at her.

Ophélie looked at her reddened nose and her eyebrows, pearled with water, in the dressing table mirror. Where they going to put her under surveillance? “Mirrors”, she decided suddenly. “If I am going to remain free to move about, I need to take stock of all the mirrors around.”

She found a velvet dressing gown in the wardrobeUK; US, ‘closet’

, but no slippers for her feet. She grimaced, sliding into her ankle boots, hardened by the humidity of the trip. Ophélie stepped out stealthily. She went along the storey's main hallway. The two guests occupied the lodgings of honour, here and there Berenilde's private apartments, and there were six other unoccupied bedrooms, which Ophélie visited one by one. She found one linen cupboardUK; US, ‘linen closet’

and two toiletsUK; US, ‘washrooms’ or ‘bathrooms’

, then went downstairs. On the ground floor, men in fitted coats and women in pinaforesor: ‘aprons’ ; I don't think I've ever heard the word pinafore used of someone present, though I've often heard it to talk about when a speaker or someone the speaker knew was a young girl.

were already active, despite the early hour. They polished the banisters, dusted the vases, lit the fires in the chimneys and spread throughout the place an odour of wax and wood, and coffee.

They greeted Ophélie affably when she made her little tour of the salons, the dining room, the billiard room, and the music room; but their politeness turned to annoyance when she invited herself into the kitchen, the laundry, and the pantry, too.

Ophélie made sure to find her reflection in each looking glass, each cheval's rectangle, each medallion's ellipse.a cheval mirror is a tall dressing mirror in which the whole body is reflected, also ‘standing mirror’, ‘upright mirror’; médaillon is an oval or rounded mirror, often framed in ornate gilt.

Walking through mirrors was not an experience all that different from reading, whatever her great-uncle may think, but it was certainly more enigmatic. A mirror keeps a memory of images, which are imprinted on its surface. By a little known process, certain readers could then create a passage between mirrors they had already been reflected in, but this only worked on mirrored glass, not on polished surfaces nor over long distances.

Half-heartedly, Ophélie tried to cross a hallway glass back to her childhood bedroom on Anima. Rather than taking a liquid consistency, the mirror remained solid under her fingers, as hard and cold as a mirror, as normal as can be. The destination was much too far; Ophélie new it, but she was disappointed just the same.

Taking the service stairs back up, Ophélie stumbled uponThis time she has just run aground on something — stumbled unexpectedly upon something in only the metaphorical sense; there's no reason to thing she's been physically clumsy here, as maladroit as it might be to go snooping around on a social level.

a wing of the manor left abandoned. The hallway and antechambers' furniture had been draped in white, like sleeping ghosts. The dust made her sneeze. Was this wing reserved for when other members of the clan came to visit Berenilde?

Ophélie opened a two-panelled door at the end of a gallery. The mouldy atmosphere of the long room did not prepare her for what waited on the other side. Hanging damask brocade, large sculpted bed, ceiling decorated with frescoes, never had Ophélie seen such a sumptuous bedroom. An entirely incomprehensible cosy warmth reigned here: no fire burned in the chimney and the neighbouring room was glacial. Her surprised grew when she noticed the hobby horses and tin soldiers on the carpet.

A child's room.

Curiosity pushed Ophélie toward the photographs framed on the walls. A couple and a baby in sepia tones were found in each of them.

‘You're up early.’

Ophélie turned to where Berenilde smiled at her from the opening of the two doors. She was already freshly dressed, in a loose satin robe, her hair graciously rolled above her neck. She held a set of embroidery frames.

‘I was looking for you, my little dear. Where have you got yourself lost?’

‘Who are these people, madam? People in your family?’

Berenilde's lips let show her pearly teeth. She approached Ophélie to look at the photographs with her. Now that she stood at her side, the difference in size between them was notable. Though not as tall as her nephew, Berenilde was taller than Ophélie by a head.

‘Certainly not!’ she laughed whole-heartedly, with her exquisite accent. These are the former owners of the manor. They have been dead for years.’

Ophélie thought it a little strange that Berenilde had inherited their land if they had not been family. She again observed the severe portraits. A shadow hollowed their eyes, from eyelid to eyebrows. Makeup? The photographs were not clean enough to be sure.

‘And the baby?’ she asked.

Berenilde's smile was a little more reserved, almost sad.

‘As long as that child lives, this room will live too. I could have had it draped, emptied, and boarded up, and it would still remain as faithful to the appearance you see. It's certainly better this way.’

‘Another trompe l'œil?’ Ophélie found the idea singular, but not all that much. The Animists rubbed off on their houses after all. She wanted to ask what power generated such illusions and what had come of the baby in these photographs, but Berenilde cut off her train of thought by suggesting she sit with her in the armchairs. A pink lamp cast a puddle of light on them.

‘Do you enjoy embroidery, Ophélie?’

‘I am too maladroite for it, madam.’

Berenilde set her embroidery frame on her knees, and her delicate hands, ornate with tattoos, pulled the needle with a serene gesture. She was as smooth as her nephew was angular.

‘Yesterday, you call yourself “normal”, today “maladroite”’, she chanted in a melodious tone. ‘And this thread of a voice that eclipses each of your words! I'll end up believing that you don't want people to like you, my dear child. You are either too modest, or you else are false.

Despite the cosy comfort and the elegant tapestries, Ophélie felt uncomfortable in the room. She got the impression of violating a sanctuary where the toys glared accusing eyes, from the mechanical monkeys to the disarticulated marionettes. There was nothing more unsettling than a child's room sanspronounced /sæːnz/; I've tried other formulations: ‘without a child’ or ‘without children’ seem the other obvious solutions but neither seems to fit the metre and prosody as I'd like (even if it is prose) and the confusion of plurals and singulars between the logic of the sentence (there is only one child implicated in the scene) and the more likely commonplace usage (‘room without a/the child’ feels too specific) remains to be solved by a forest-brain as mine is too much among the trees, or weeds even.

child.

‘No, madam, I really am very clumsy. A mirror accident with I was thirteen years old.’

Berenilde's needle stuck in the air.

‘A mirror accident? I admit I don't quit understand.’

‘I was stuck, caught in two places in the same time, for several hours’, murmured Ophélie. ‘My body has not obeyed quite faithfully since that day. I underwent rehabilitation, but the doctor expected that I might still have some episodes. Desynchronisations.’

A smile spread across Berenilde's beautiful face.

‘You are amusing! I like you.’

With her muddy shoes and unrestrained hair, Ophélie felt like the very picture of a little peasant next to this stunning lady of the world. With a movement, full of tenderness, Berenilde left her embroidery balanced on her knee and took Ophélie's gloved hands in her own.

‘I understand that you feel a little nervous, my young dear. All this is so new for you! Don't hesitate to tell me your worries, as you would your own mother.’

Ophélie did not mention that her mother was probable the last person in the world she would go to in confidence about her troubles. And rather than pouring her heart out, what she needed was concrete answers.

Berenilde let go of her hands almost as quickly, apologising.

‘I'm sorry, I forget sometimes that you are a reader.’

It took a moment for Ophélie to understand what had put her ill at ease.

‘I cannot read with my gloves on, madam. And even if I removed them, you could take my hand with no worry. I do not read living things, just objects.’

‘I'll keep that in mind.’

‘Your nephew told me that he works in administration. Who is his employer than?’

Berenilde's eyes grew, as brilliant and superb as precious stones. She let loose a crystalline laugh which filled the whole room.

‘Have I said something stupid, madam?’ gasped Ophélie.

‘Oh non, it's Thorn who is to blame’, joked Berenilde, laughing again. ‘I recognise him in the verbiage, as economic with words as he is with good manners!’ Raising a fold of her dress, she dried the corners of her eyes and became once again more serious. ‘Know that he doesn't work “in administration”, as you say. He is Lord Farouk's superintendent, the principal financial administrator of the Skytadel and all the provinces of the Pôle.

When Ophélie's glasses went blue, Berenilde acquiesced softly.

‘Yes, my dear. Your future husband is the most important accountant in the realm.’

Ophélie took a moment to digest this revelation. This dishevelled, unmannered oaf — a senior civil servant. It defied imagination. Why were they trying to marry a simpleton like herself to such a personality? As though in the end it wasn't Ophélie who was being punished, but Thorn.

‘I don't really see my place in the clan’, she admitted. ‘Setting aside having children, what do you expect from me?’

‘And how!’ exclaimed Berenilde.

Ophélie took refuge behind an impassible mask, a touch simple, but inside she was surprised by this reaction. It wasn't such an incongruous question, was it?

‘I kept a museum on Anima’, she explained in a low voice. ‘Am I expected to pick up my functions here, or something similar? I do not wish to live at your expense without giving something back.’

What Ophélie tried most to negotiate for was her autonomy. Berenilde threw her beautiful, clear gaze over the picture books on a shelf, dreamily.

‘A museum? Yes, I imagine that could be a distracting occupation. A woman's life can sometimes bore up here, heavy responsibilities are not conferred on us like where you are from. We'll talk about it again once your place in the court is sufficiently assured. You will have to be patient, my sweet child…’

If there was one thing that did not inspire patience in Ophélie, that was assimilating into the nobility. She really only knew what her ancestor's journal had taught her, “we spend our days playing cards and on promenades in the gardens”, and that did not interest her at all.

‘And how assure it, this place at court?’ she worried a little. ‘Should I participate in society lifeor: ‘do the needful’, ‘make niceties’, ‘play at society life’

and give hommage to your family spirit?’

Berenilde took up her embroidery again. A shadow had crept into the clear water of her regard. The needle which pierced the stretched fabric on the frame danced less. For a reason that escaped Ophélie, she had been hurt.

‘You will not see Lord Farouk but from afar, little one. As for society events, yes, but that will not be today. We will wait for your marriage at the end of the summer. Your Doyennes have demanded that the traditional year of engagement be scrupulously observed, in order to better know you. And, added Berenilde, with the hint of a furrowed brow, that will give us time to prepare you for the court.’

Inconvenienced by the overabundance of cushions, Ophélie pulled her body towards the edge of her armchair and contemplated the mess covered ends of her footwear which stuck out under her nightshirt.

Her doubts were confirmed, Berenilde would not give up the depths of her thoughts.There is a more idiomatic expression in English that isn't quite coming to mind a the moment. It suggests that there is a unrevealed layer of thought or reasoning which remains despite an otherwise open or forthcoming presentation.

She lifted her head and let her attention wander towards the windows. The first lights of the day dotted the foggy mist with golden arrows and sent shadows flowing from the feet of the trees.

‘This park, this room…’ whispered Ophélie. ‘So they are all optical illusions?’

Berenilde pulled the needle, as peaceful as a mountain lake.

‘Yes, my dear girl, but these are not my doing. The Dragons do not know how to knit illusions, that's rather a speciality of our rival clan.’

A rival clan from which Berenilde had all the same inherited land, thought Ophélie in silence. Maybe she wasn't on such bad terms with them.

‘And your power, madam, what is it?’

‘What an indiscrete question!’ harrumphedor: ‘clapped Berenilde gently, almost offended.’

Berenilde gently without looking away from her embroidery. ‘Do you ask a lady her age? It seems to me your betrothed's place to teach you all that…’

As Ophélie made a disconcerted face, she gave a soft sigh and said:

‘Thorn is really incorrigible! I am guessing that leaves you to bathe in the fog without so much as thinking about satisfying your curiosity.’

‘Neither of us is very talkative’, observed Ophélie, choosing her words with care. ‘I fear, all the same, with all due respect, that at heart your nephew does not care much for me.’

Berenilde pulled a cigarette case from a pocket in her dress. Several instants later, she breathed a tongue of blue smoke between just-parted lips.

‘Thorn's heart…’ she whispered, rolling hard the r's ‘A myth? A desert isle? A lump of dessicated flesh? If it might console you, my dear child, I have never seen him enamoured of anyone.’

Ophélie remembered the inhabitual elegance with which he had spoken to her about his aunt.

‘He holds you in high regard.’

‘Yes’, derided Berenilde, tapping her cigarette case on the edge of a sweet boxUK; US, ‘candy box’

. ‘I love him like a mother and I believe that he nourishes for me a sincere affection, which touches me all the more since it is not a natural inclination for him. I have long despaired over finding him a wife, and I know he is angry with me for somewhat forcing his hand. Your glasses often change colour’, she suddenly noted with amusement. It's quite entertaining!’

‘The sun is rising, madam, they modulate with the luminosity.’

Ophélie observed Berenilde through the awful grey that had lain into the glasses and decided to furnish a more honest response:

‘As well as my mood. The truth is that I was wondering whether Thorn would have preferred a woman more like him. I'm afraid I'm quite the antipode to that desire.’

‘You are afraid, or you are relieved by it?’

Her long cigarette pinched between two fingers, Berenilde studied her guests expression as though she had found a particularly entertaining game.

‘Don't be on edge, Ophélie, it's not a trick question. You imagine that I don't know your emotions? You are forcibly tied to a man that you do not know and who is about as warm as an iceberg!’ She stubbed out her butt in the bottom of the sweet box, shaking her curls in a blonde waltz. ‘But I do not agree with you, my child. Thorn is a man of duty and I believe that he'd quite simply got himself the idea that he'd never marry. You are breaking his little habits, that's all.

‘And why did he not want to? Honour the family, by founding his own, isn't that normally what everyone aspires to?’

Ophélie pushed her glasses up her nose with a finger, sniggeringUK; US, ‘snickering’

on the inside. She, herself, was really saying that…

‘He could not’, contradicted Berenilde. ‘Why then did I go looking so far to find him a wife, without meaning any offense?’

‘Shall we serve you something, madam?’

It was an old man who had just interrupted them from the room's threshold, quite shocked to find them in this part of the manor. Berenilde negligently tossed her embroidery frame on the cushion of an armchair.

‘Tea and orange biscuitsUK; US, ‘cookies’

Have it brought to the little salon, we'll not be staying here. What were we saying, my dear?’ she asked, turning towards Ophélie with her great turquoise eyes.

‘That Thorn could not marry. I admit that I don't very well understand what could prevent a man from taking a wife it that is his desire.’

A ray of sunlight invited itself into the room and gave Berenilde's delicate neck a golden kiss. The small hairs that rolled on her neck caught the light.

‘Because he is a bastard.’

Ophélie blinked several times, shocked by the light beginning to hatch behind the windowpanes. Thorn was born of adultery?

‘His late father, my brother, had the weakness to frequent a woman of another clan’, Berenilde explained, ‘and malchance would have it that the slut's family, since, has fallen into disgrace.’

Her visage, a perfect oval, had deformed at the word slut. “It's more than distaste”, Ophélie recognised. “It's pure hate.” Berenilde held out her beautiful, tattooed hand so she could help her stand.Intentionally vague translation, because afaict it's vague in the original. Maybe I'm just ignorant.

‘It happened that Thorn was but a hair from being sent from the court at the same time as his harlot of a mother’, she continued, once more composed. ‘My very dear brother having had the rich idea of dying before having him officially recognised, I had to use all my influence to save his son from degenerationI'm quite unsure of this choice of translation, not because it doesn't match the original well but because it seems logically unsupported by the rest of the text. What does she mean by « déchéance » ? What I took it to mean is something along the lines of poverty or hardship, but the word « déchéance » is more frequently translated as ‘degradation, decline, degeneration in a physical or moral sense. It is also used in a legal sense to described losing one's rights, where it is translated ‘loss, forfeiture.

. I came out of it rather well, as you can judge for yourself.

Berenilde closed the double-panelled doors with a clack. Her pinched smile softened. From bitter, her look turned to sugar.

‘You keep examining the tattoos my mother and I have on our hands. Know, my little Ophélie, that these are the marks of the Dragons. It is a recognition that Thorn can never have. There is not a female of our clan who would agree to marry a bastard whose parent was expelled.’

Ophélie meditated on these words. On Anima, one could banish a member who had gravely harmed the family's honour, but from that to condemning a whole clan… Thorn was right, the customs here were anything but tender.réf à « Vos mœurs sont plus souples que les nôtres », see [fn:20]

The copper echo of the long pendulum clock began to sound somewhere far off. Immersed in her own thoughts, Berenilde suddenly seemed to come back to reality.

‘The croquet party at Comptesse Ingrid's! I nearly forgot completely.’

She leaned her long body over Ophélie, supple and velveted, to caress her cheek.

‘I'll not invite you to join us, you must still be tired from your trip. Take tea in the salon, and then rest in your room and use my valetry as you please!’

Ophélie watched Berenilde in her froufrou robe disappear down the gallery of ghostly drapes.

She wondered what a valetry could possibly be.

Ch 13: The Escapade

“Mama, papa”.

The goose quill stood a while suspended above the paper after scrawling those two words. Ophélie simply did not know what to add. She had never had the art, written or spoken, of expressing what she felt inside, of defining precisely how she felt.

Ophélie threw her gaze into the chimney's flames. She was sitting on the little salon's fur rug with a tapestry footstool for a writing desk. Nearby, her scarf was lazily rolled on the floor, like a tricolor serpent.

Ophélie turned back to her letter and pushed off a hair that had fallen on the page. It seemed even more difficult with her parents. Her mother had an invasive personality, which left litle room for anyone other than herself; she spoke, she exiged, she gestured, she did not listen. As for her father, he was but a weak echo of his wife, always giving reticent approval without looking up from his slippers.

What Ophélie's mother wanted in this letter was an expression of profound grattitude and the first juicy tales of court life that she could then repeat ad infinitum. Ophélie, however, would write neither. She would certainly not thank her family for sending her halfway around the world, to such a scandalising ark… As for juicy tales, she none to recount and that was really the least of her worries.

She went about her letter with all the usual questions. “How are you all? Have you found someone to take my place at the museum? Is Great-Uncle getting out of the archives at all? Are my little sisters doing well at school? Who is sharing the room with Hector now?”

Writing this last sentence, suddenly felt quite funny. She adored her brother, and the thought that he would grow up far away, the she would become a stranger to him, made her blood run cold. She decided that was enough questions.

She dipped her plumeor: ‘quill’

in the ink and had took a breath. Should she talk some about her fiancé and her time spent with him? She hadn'tI hesitate in nearly all situations to use contractions in all narrative contexts. The logic being that contractions are bel et bien a part of spoken English, but they should be avoided where they would lend too casual, or ambiguous a tone. This is not an academic piece, but the style is still both written (a broad category) and literary (a subset of the former). In this one example I do not feel that the the uncontracted form has the same meaning as the contracted form, to such point as to render the uncontracted form ungrammatical and impermissible. Whereas the contracted form is both common and formal — at least in spoken English.

*She had not the slightest breaks the prosody in an incomfortable way, and given that I will always think of my writing from the perspective of it being read aloud — parent to child⋅ren, sibling to sibling⋅s, reader to lover or friend — I try to keep the prosody harmonious, euphonous, or at least interesting.

the slightest of the person he was really: a badly groomed bear? an important civil servant? a vile murderer? a man of duty? a bastard, dishonoured from birth? It was too many facets for a single man and she did not know, really, which one she would soon be marrying.

“We arrived yesterday, the trip went well”, she wrote slowly instead. With this, she did not lie, but she left out the essential: Thorn's warning on the dirigible; there being hidden away in Berenilde's manor; the clan feuds.

And then, there was the door at the end of the park, through which they had arrived the night before. Ophélie had gone back and found it locked. She had asked a servant for the key; they responded that they were not permitted to give it to her. Regardless of the servants' bows and Berenilde's silken manners, she felt a prisonner… and she was not certain she could write that.

‘Voilà!’ cried Aunt Roseline.

Ophélie turned. Sitting at a little desk, very straight in her chair, her godmother laid her plume on a bronze rest and folded the three sheets that she had just filled with ink.

‘You've already finished?’ said Ophélie, surprised.I could say something like ‘stammered Ophélie’ every time I need to translate « s'étonna Ophélie » but that would make her out to be far more maladroite than she is.

‘Oh my yes, I had all night and all day to think of what I was going to say. The Doyennes will hear all about this pickle, you can believe me.’

Holding her own plume suspended over the page too long, Ophélie set a starry inkspot right in the middle of a sentence. She blotted it with a paperor: ‘…with a piece of blotting paper…’

and stood up. She looked pensively at the delicate clock on the mantle which beat out the seconds with a crystalline tic-tac. Almost nine in the afternoon, and still no news of Berenilde or Thorn. Out the window, brown with the night, the park could no longer be seen; the lamplight and the chimney's fire reflected the little salon like in a mirror.

‘I doubt your letter will ever leave the Pole’ she murmured.

‘Why do you say such a thing?’ said a scandalised Roseline.

Ophélie held a finger over herie, ‘her own’

mouth to incite herie, ‘Aunt Roseline’

to speak less loudly. She approached the writing desk and turned her aunt's envelope in her hands.

‘You heard Dame Berenilde’, she whispered. ‘We are to give our letters to Mr Thorn. I am not so naïve as to think do so without being sure the content will not interfere with their plans.’

Aunt Roseline stood up brusquely from her seat and lowered onto Ophélie a sharp look, little bit stunned. The lamplight made her complexion even more yellow than it was naturally.

‘So we are truly alone, that's what you are telling me?’

Ophélie nodded her head. Yes, that was her personal conviction. Nobody would come looking for them; the Doyennes would not go back on their decision. They would have to play their cards right« il leur fallait /tirer leurs épingles du jeu/ », literally ‘they'd have to /pull their needles from the mechanism/’. « Jeu » has many contextual meanings: set (a set of strings), mechanism, game, action, play (a loose fitting has some play), but the idiomatic expression play one's cards right is the better option here.

, as complex as that would be.

‘And that doesn't frighten you?’ Aunt Roseline asked again with her eyes half closed, like those of an old cat.

Ophélie breathed onto her glasses and wiped them on her sleeve.

‘A bit’, she admitted. ‘Particularly what they're not telling us.’

Aunt Roseline pinched her lips; even so, her horsish teeth stuck out. She considered the envelope a moment, tore it in two and sat back down at the desk.

‘Very well’, she sighed, taking up her quillPeut-être que c'est mieux de n'utiliser qu'une seule traduction pour « plume »

. ‘I shall try to be more subtle, even if finesse isn't my forté.’The English word forté (strong suit, specialty) is not used in French, as evidenced here by the parallel construction of « n'est pas mon fort » isn't my forté. The French word is pronounced /fɔʀ/ when it does not end in ‘e’ (a little like the English word ‘four’ for those who do not read IPA).

When Ophélie took her own place before the footstool again, her aunt added in a dry tone:

‘I always thought you were like your father, without personality or will« volonté » ; I've quite forgotten the correct English equivalent.

. I'm beginning to realise I don't know you so well, my girl.’

Ophélie contemplated the inkspot on her letter for a long while. She could not say why, but those words had warmed her all of a sudden.

“I am happy that Aunt Roseline is here”, she wrote to her parents.

‘Night has fallen’, her godmother commented with a disapproving look towards the window. And our hosts have still not returned! I hope that will not completely forget us. The grandmother is charming, but she is a bit soft in the head all the same.’

‘They are subject to the rhythm of the court’, said Ophélie with a shrug of the shoulders.

She did not dare mention to the croquet party Berenilde had gone to. Her aunt would have found it scandalous that they played such a child's game.

‘The court’, Roseline breathed, scratching the paper with her quill. ‘A good word for a grotesque theatre scene where dagger blows are handed out in the wings. Aside from the lack of choice, I think we are better off here, well away from those nuts.’

Ophélie scrunched her eyebrows, caressing her scarf. On that point, she did not share her aunt's feeling. The idea of being deprived of her freedom of movement disgusted her. They put her in a cage to protect her at first, then one day it would become a prison. A woman shut up at home with no other vocation than to give her husband children, that's what they'd make of her if she did not take her future into her own hands today.

‘Do you need anything, my little dears?’

Ophélie and Roseline pulled their noses from their correspondance. Thorn's grandmother had opened the two-panelled doors so quietly they had not even heard her enter. She really evoked a tortoise with he bent back, her baggy neck and that wrinkled smile that split her face piece from piece.

‘No, thank you, madam’, responded Roseline, articulating loudly. ‘You're very kind.’

Ophélie and her aunt had noticed that while it was hard for them to understand the accent of the North, the inverse was also true. The grandmother sometimes seemed lost when they spoke too quickly.

‘I've just had my daughter on the telephone’, announced the old woman. ‘She asks that you excuser, but she has been kept late. She will be back tomorrow morning.’

The grandmother shook her head with an annoyed look.

‘I don't really don't like these society events« mondanités » ; I need to find a better, single translation for this rather than going over some version of ‘society events’, ‘fancy dealios’, or ‘high-falutin' get-togethers’.

she things she has to attend. It's unreasonable…’

Ophélie caught the worry in the tone of her voice. Did Berenilde also run risks in appearing at court?

‘And your grandson?’ she asked ‘When will he return?’

In reality, she was no in a hurry to see him again; also, the old woman's reply eased her mind considerably:

‘My foor child, he is such a serious boy! He is always working, watch in his hand, never long in one place. He hardly takes the time to eat! Of him, I'm afraid you'll hardly ever see more a gust of air.’

‘We have some letters to give him’, said Aunt Roseline. ‘We must in return have the address to give our family, so they can write us back.’

The old woman bobbed her head so very much that Ophélie wondered if she might end up pulling her head back into her shoulders like a tortoise into it's shell.

It was past noon, the next day, when Berenilde reëntered the manor and melted into her chaise longueUm, so this word is not [shez lounge] nor is it a even contain the /ʒ/ sound (for the IPA-illiterate, this is the sound the letter ‹s› makes in the word measure.

calling for coffee.

‘The shackles of court life, my little Ophélie’, she exclaimed when the latter came to greet her. ‘You do not know your happiness. Would you hand me that, if you please?’

Ophélie took a pretty little mirror from the table she designated and handed it to her, after almost dropping it on the ground. Berenilde sat up on her cushions and examined a little wrinkle with an anxious eye, barely visible, stamped into the powder on her forehead.

‘if I don't want to grow quite ugly, I will need to get some rest.’This is phrased in the French as if I don't want to grow ugly all of a sudden, I will need to get some rest.

A servant served her the glass of coffee she had called for, but she pushed it back with an disgusted air. Then she addressed Ophélie and Aunt Roseline with a tired smile.

‘I'm sorry, really sorry’, she said, sensually rolling her r's. ‘I did not think to be away so long. It did not drag on too long, I dare hope?’

The question was entirely formal. Berenilde took leave of them and shut herself in her room, which gave Aunt Roseline an indignant shock.

The following days came and went. Ophélie saw hardly any of her fiancé, caught Berenilde in passing between two absences, exchanged some niceties with the grandmother when she passed her in the corridors and passed most of her time with her aunt. Her existence slipped soon into a bleak routine, cadenced by solitary walks in the gardens, meals swallowed without a words spoken, long evenings reading in the salon or other ways to stave off boredom. The only notable event was the arrival of their luggage, one afternoon, which tranquillised Aunt Roseline a little. For herself, Ophélie took car to show a resigned face in every circumstance, to hold off suspicion when she spent too long lost in the park. One evening, she retired early to her room. When the chimes struck four times, she opened her eyes to the canopy of her bed. Ophélie decided the moment had come to get her legs moving.

She buttoned one of her old, out-of-fashion dresses and pulled on a black cape whose ample hood swalled her head to her glasses. She did not have the heart to wake the scarf, which dreamed at the end of her bed, rolled in a ball. Ophélie fell body and soul into her room's mirror, sprung out of the vestibule mirror and, ever so slowly, pulled open the entryway latch.

Outside, a false starry night overtook the park. Ophélie walked on the grass, mixing her shadow with the trees', crossed a stone bridge and jumped over the gutters. She came all the way to the little wooden door which cut Berenilde's domain off frmo the rest of the world.

Ophélie knelt and set her hand flat on the panel. She had taken advantage of each of her strolls in the park in preparation for this instant, whispering friendly words to the lock, breathing life into it, taming it day after day. Everything depended on how she handled herself. For the door to take her for its owner, she had to act like it.

‘Open up’, she whispered firmly.

A click. Ophélie took hold of the handle. The door, which stood in the middle of the grass with nothing in front or behind, opened onto a set of stairs. Enveloped in her hood, Ophélie closed the door, stepped into the little, badly paved court and took a last look behind her. It was hard to believe that this decrepit house hid a manor and its domain.

Ophélie pushed into the foul-smelling darkness of the little alleys lit just-perceptibly by streetlamps. A smile passed onto her lips. For the first time since what seemed like an eternity, she was free to go wherever her desire took her. It wasn't an escape, she just wanted to discover for herself the world she was preparing to live in. After all, it wasn't written on her forehead that she was Thorn's fiancée; why should she worry?

She melted into the shadow of the deserted streets. It was tangibly colder and more humid here than in the manor parc, but she was happy to breath some “real” air. With a look at the blocked up doors and boarded up windows of the neighbourhood, Ophélie wondered if each of these habitations sealed chateauxor: ‘chateaus’ ; the plural of chateau, pronounced: /ʃætoːz/

with gardens. At the bend of an alleyway, she was stopped by a strange sound. Behind a lamppost, a panel of white glass vibrated between two walls. That, that was a window; a real window. Ophélie opened it. A flury of snow flew into her mouth and nostrils, pushing her hood back. She turned, had a good cough, caught her breath and found purchase with both hands to lean herself outside. Half of her body in the air, Ophélie recognised the chaos« l'anarchie »

of sideways turrets, vertiginous archways and disordered ramparts which filled up the Skytadel's surface. Far below, the icy water of the moats sparkled. And farther still, out of reach, a forest of white pines shook in the wind. The cold was hardly bearable; Ophélie pushed back the heavy glass panel, shook off her coat and returned to the trail of her exploration. She disappeared into the shadow of an impasse just as a metal clicking came her direction, from the other end of the sidewalk. It was an old man, magnificently attired, with rings on each finger and pearles strung onto his beard. A silver cane marked his steps. A king, Ophélie would have thought. He had strangely shadowed eyes, like the people in the photograph in the child's room.

The old man approached. He passed in front of the cul-de-sac where Ophélie was hid, without remarking on her presence. He hummed, his eyes half awake. Those weren't shadows on his face, but tattoos; they covered his eyelids up to his eyebrows. At that precise moment, a firework blinded Ophélie. The tune the old man had been humming turned into a carnival concert. A crowd of happy masks amassed around her, blew confetti into he rhair and disappeared as brutally as they had come, while the old man continued on down the sidewalk.

Disconcerted, Ophélie shook her hair, looking for confetti, found none and watched the old man he walked off. A knitter« tricoteur d'illusions » ; technically « tricot » translates as knitting, while an illusion weaver would be rendered as something like « tisseur d'illusions ». The latter is certainly the more common form in English and, I think, in French; I use the less common form in keeping with the style of the original.

of illusions. Did he belong to the Dragon's rival clan? Ophélie decided that it was prudent to head back along her path. As she had no sense of direction, she did not find the route to Berenilde's manor. These nauseating alleys, covered in darkness, all looked alike.

She descended a stairway she did not recall having climbed, was torn between to avenues, and passed under an arch which stunk of sewer. Passing in front of posted advertisements, she slowed her pace.

There was really everything… Ophélie raised an eyebrow when she came upon a poster unlike the others.

She tore off the poster to examine it up close. She found herself nose to nose with her own face. The flyers had been fixed on a reflectives surface. Ophélie forgot the hourglasses and continued down the corridor of adverts. The posters were rarer and rarer whereas her reflection, to the contrary, began to multiply.

This was the entry to a gallery of mirros. Completely unhoped for: she only needed a mirror to regain her room. Ophélie walked softly among the other Ophélie's, hooded in their capes, their eyes a little disoriented behind her glasses. She began to follow the labyrinth, followed the maze of mirrors and soon discovered that the floor had changed. The paving stones of the street had given way to a nice, waxed wood« parquet ciré »

, the colour of a cello.

A peal of laughter caught Ophélie in place, and before she had the time to react, the tripe reflection of a couple encircled her. She did what she did best in the world: she did not speak, did not panic, and made no movement which might attract attention. The man and woman, magnificently dressed, brusheded past her without so much as noticing. They had wolves on their faces.

‘And your husand, my dear cousin?’, babbled the gentleman, covering her gloved hands in kisses.

‘My husband? He squandered our fortune on bridge, obviously!’

‘Let's see, in that case, if we can give him a little luck…’

On these words, the man pulled his companion further on. Ophélie stayed immobile an instant, still incredulous at having so easily gone unnoticed. A few more steps and the hall of mirrors opened on more galleries, more and more complex. Soon other reflections mixed with hers, drowning in the crowd of veiled women, officers in uniform, feathered hats, wigged sirs, porcelain masks, cups of champagne, outlandish dances. As cheerful waltz started to play, Ophélie realised that she was walking around a costume ball.

That was why she had gone unnoticed in her black cape. She might as well have been invisible.

Ophélie darkened her glasses, as a precaution, than pulled out the audacity to grab in passing, from a servant's tray, a fizzing cup to quench her thirst. She walked along the mirrors, ready to melt into her reflection at any moment, and looked over the ball, full of curiousity. She listened to conversations with both ears, but was quickly disenchanted. The people spoke little nothings, exchanging wit, playing at seduction each other. They touched on no truly serious subjects and some had too strong an accent for Ophélie to understand them well.

En truth, the outside world, they had been depriving her this whole time did not seem as threating as they had described. Much as she liked calm and tranquility, it was nice to see new faces, even masked as they were. Each mouthfull of champagne sparkled on her tongue. She realised, at the pleasure she took from being among these strangers, just how much oppressive atmosphere of the manor had weighed on her.

‘Mister ambassador!’ called a woman, right next to her.

She wore a sumptuous farthingale dress, and a gold and mother-of-pearl lorgnette« face-à-main » (binocle muni d'un manche) ; type of eyeglasses with a handle

. Leaning, back to a column, Ophélie could not help following the man who came in their direction with her eyes. Was this a descendant of the ambassador that her ancestor Adelaïde had cited so many times in herAdelaïde, c'est bien une femme ?

travel journals? A moth-eaten frock-coat, holey fingerless gloves, a hollow crush hat« gibus creux » ; or: ‘opera hat’, ‘gibus’

: his suit went insollently against the grain of the festive colours and show of the party. He went without mask, face uncovered. Ophélie ordinarily little sensetive to the masculine charm, had to at least recognise that this one was not lacking in it. That honest face, harmonious, rather youn, perfectly beardless, to pale maybe, semed to lead to the sky his eyes were so clear.

The ambassador bowed politely in front of the woman who had called for him.

‘Dame Olga’, she greeted him, uncovering her face.

When he had finished his bow, it gave a sideways look that passed through Ophélie's darkened glasses, far under her hood. She had better not do anything that might give away her intrusion.

The ambassador's look slid carelessly across her and came back to Dame Olga, who gently clacked a fan on his shoulder.

‘My little party doesn't entertain you? You stand along in your corner like a pained soul!’

‘I am bored’, he said directly.

Ophélie was shocked by his frankness. Dame Olga let loos a laugh which had a somewhat forced sound to it.

‘Surely, it is nothing like the receptions of Clairedelune! All this is a little too “tame” for you.’

She half-lowered her lorgnette, so as to look him directly in the eyes. The was adoration in the look she gave the ambassador.

‘Bye my knight’, she suggested in a cooing voice. ‘You will not be bored any more.’

Ophélie froze. That woman had the same eyelid tattoos as the old man she had seen earlier. She looked over the crowd of dancers around her. Did all these masks hide this distinctive mark?

‘Thank you, Dame Olga, but I can not stay’, declined the ambassador with an enigmatic smile.

‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, very intrigued. ‘Are you expected somewhere?’

‘In a way.’

‘There are far too many woman in your life!’ she scolded, laughing.

The ambassador's smile grew stronger. A beauty mark between his eyebrows have him a strange expression.

‘There will be yet another this evening.’

Ophélie did not find his face as honest as that, all things considered. She thought that maybe it was high time that she got back to her bed. She set down her cup of champagne on a dessert tray, made her way through the swishing dances, and headed into the hall of mirrors, ready to fall headling into the first mirror she saw.

A firm fist around her arm made her turn in her slippers. Disorriented among all the Ophélies that turned around her, she ended up squinting at the smile which handsome ambassador sent towards her.

‘I telling myself also that it is impossible for me not to recognise a woman's face’, he declared with the utmost tranquilly. ‘To whom do I have the honour, young lady?’

Ch 14: The Garden

Afterward

Hey, thanks for reading. This is a work-in-progress translation by Tobias Seeley; this page was built by Ben Isjammin using Tufte-CSS and darkmode.js.

Feel free to contact us at at firstlast@fastmail.com.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Footnotes