les jours tristes

***

Bernadetta sat, shoulders and neck hunched, like a turtle desperately trying to get back into its shell. Unfortunately for her, in this case the shell was a whole fifteen-minute walk away and the turtle stranded on horseback, stretching the metaphor to its breaking point.

Beside her, Marianne was speaking to the horse in low, soothing tones.

"She can tell you're nervous, and that makes her nervous too,” she explained to Bernadetta. “You don't have to worry. She won't let you fall."

She put a hand on Bernadetta’s knee.

Slowly, Bernadetta unfolded in her saddle like a flower in the sun.

***

Annette enters the School of Sorcery like a whirlwind, four feet ten inches of restless energy that she pours full tilt into everything she sets out to do.

Slow and steady, Mercedes draws on the memory of another girl who could never just stop and matches her step by step, meeting frustration with patience, failure with encouragement, long evenings of work-until-you-drop with cookies and a blanket.

Sooner or later, she knows, Annie will storm ahead and leave her, slow and steady, in her wake.

But whenever she starts to fall behind Annie slows down to match her, step by step.

This is the most important thing Hilda can learn from her brother, according to every weapon instructor she’s ever had: how to let inertia carry her swings so it does most of the work for her.

This is the most important thing Hilda can learn from her brother, according to her: hope, when it comes from others, is a slow-acting poison; success a bear trap closing over your leg; disappointment its inevitable end.

Thankfully, she’s getting pretty good with inertia.

***