A Snowy Goodeland
The dock was far away from the revelry of the Moonset celebrations, and that was exactly what Margot needed.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to spend time with her family, but sometimes it got to be just… too much. There were too many people. There was too much noise. There was too much otherness.
That last one was the worst.
Margot wrapped the blanket she’d pilfered from the house around her shoulders and exhaled a slow breath.
It clouded in front of her, a little puff of fog that briefly obscured her view of the ice-crusted lake.
The sound of instruments and squealing children's laughter were a faint song in the frozen night, and the scent of bonfire smoke clung to every breath she took.
It’d been nice to be a part of the celebration for a while. She’d played with her cousins, ate her fill, and made her offering to the fire when her turn came. But she never lasted longer than a couple hours at events like Moonset. Lately it felt like that timeline had shrunk.
Noni Tula said it was a normal part of becoming a teenager, that sense that she just didn’t belong, but Margot wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t just otherness.
It was a slow strangulation.
She sniffed, eyes stinging, and drew a corner of the blanket up to her lips.
Snow had begun to fall from the dense clouds overhead.
She watched as the flakes spiralled in the air before they landed on the frozen water.
They fell on her, too, until the top of her head and blanket-covered shoulders were dusted white.
It didn’t surprise her when soft footsteps crunched the snow behind her. Alric was good about giving her space, but he never let her stew for long. It was like he had a sixth sense for when she needed company.
The lanky teen quietly dusted off the other folding chair that sat at the end of the dock.
Dressed in a smart black coat with green gloves and a matching scarf, he would’ve blended in with the adults if not for the softness of his cheeks.
Even that was changing every day, though.
Sometimes she imagined that he grew an inch every night, trading his baby fat for height.
She hated him for it. Just a little.
Growing up seemed so effortless for him and all the others, while for her it was a constant battle.
The healers said she probably wouldn’t get any taller than she was, and putting on weight was almost impossible, which meant she wasn’t developing like her cousins.
While her cousin Ruby had blossomed into a curvy, vivacious young woman practically overnight, Margot was stuck with knobby knees, no breasts, and being asked for parental permission to get into PG-13 movies rather than out on dates.
Everyone around her was changing while she remained as she’d always been: stuck.
“Here,” he said, holding out a steaming paper cup.
Margot exposed as little of her hand as possible to accept it. Unlike her cousin, she hadn’t thought to bring her gloves or hat out with her.
“Thanks,” she whispered. Her fingers burned a little when she wrapped them around the cup, but it was a good kind of burn.
Bringing it up to her lips, she took a small sip of the spiced cider.
Sweetness washed over her tongue, shortly followed by the spice of the cinnamon stick he’d thoughtfully included.
Alric made himself comfortable in his chair. One thing she liked about him was that he never rushed into speaking. Her cousin was perfectly at ease with silence, just as she was.
Even though they’d only lived together for a short time, she’d come to think of him as something like a brother. It was rare that they didn’t share the same opinion, and their habits were strikingly similar. But Alric had a quiet confidence that she lacked.
More importantly, perhaps, he had the freedom to act on it.
Margot took another sip of her cider, trying to wash the thought down. Glancing at her cousin out of the corner of her eye, she noted his faraway expression as he gazed out at the still lake.
“Nice night,” she noted, turning her own eyes back to the snow.
Alric hummed. “Storm’s coming in.”
“How’d you know that?”
“I can taste it,” he answered, sounding very sure of himself. “Also, Sophie mentioned it earlier.”
Margot snorted into her cider. “Some nose you’ve got there.”
“Don’t be rude. I brought you cider.”
“I already said thank you, didn’t I? What more do you want?”
Alric crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair. It creaked a little under his weight. “You coming back to the party?”
“Probably not,” she admitted.
She braced herself for questions, but he didn’t ask why. Maybe he didn’t need to.
“I don’t want to go back either,” he sighed.
It was perhaps a little hypocritical of her, but Margot replied, “You should. Grandma wants to introduce you to everyone, remember? It’s important that you start—”
“Developing relationships,” he finished with her. “I know. But I’ve been doing nothing but talk to old people for hours. I need a break.”
She could hardly blame him for that. Margot wasn’t particularly envious of Alric usurping her place as Sophie’s heir on a good day, but she was especially glad about it when she saw just how much handshaking and polite nodding it required.
“You can stay out here with me,” she generously offered.
She caught Alric’s smile out of the corner of her eye. “I appreciate it. I know how much you like your alone time.”
Margot wasn’t sure if she liked it so much as she needed it. With a family as big and tangled as theirs, and with her problems as… unique as they were, sometimes the only way to tolerate it all was to run away.
She took another long sip of her cooling cider as she waffled over whether she ought to say something to him or not. In the end, it was the cider itself that prompted her to climb the barrier of her self-consciousness.
Taking a deep breath, she haltingly admitted, “Yeah, well… Having you around is pretty much the same as when I’m alone, so I don’t mind too much.”
Alric’s head turned to look at her. For such a young man, he had very a serious face. It was another thing they shared — that thing in them that people seemed to recognize as being too old, too knowledgeable, and too sad for their age.
Margot silently held out the cup.
Her cousin accepted it slowly and brought it to his mouth for a sip. Breath puffing from his lips, he said, “You aren’t too bad to have around either, you know.”
Figuring now was as good a time as any to ask him for the thing she’d been agonizing over, she muttered, “Can you do me a favor?”
She could almost feel Alric’s focus honing in on her like the beam of a spotlight. He was always so calm that his bursts of intensity sometimes took her by surprise. “What do you need?”
“It’s nothing important,” she quickly assured him. Her voice was slightly muffled as she pulled the blanket back up to her lips.
“Tell me.”
Fighting the urge to take it all back and tell him to forget about it, she forced herself to explain, “So, the first day of my apprenticeship is Monday and… I was wondering if you could drive me there. And— and there’s a welcome breakfast for family if you wanted to maybe stay for a bit.”
Alric’s dark brows furrowed as he digested her request. “Isn’t Sophie going to drive you? Or Tula?”
“Noni’s flying out to visit her family that day, and Grandma…” Margot trailed off, something in her seizing. When she continued, her voice was soft and small. “I don’t want her to see how nervous I am.”
“Oh.” He was quiet for a long moment, his expression contemplative. “And you want me at this breakfast thing?”
“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” she rushed to assure him. “It’s just a stupid welcome party. There’ll be some speeches and all the other apprentices there with their families and—”
And they’ll all be ten years older than me at a minimum. And they’ll have their loved ones there to really celebrate them rather than worry about them. And I really, really don’t want to sit through it all alone.
“—it’s really not important,” she finished, looking anywhere but at him.
Alric crossed his ankles in front of him. Offering her the cider once again, he quietly replied, “Well, if it’s not important then I should definitely go. If we don’t show up for the stupid shit, then what’s the point of family?”
Margot swallowed hard. She wasn’t sure when her throat started hurting, but it smarted something terrible just then.
Delicately extracting the cup from his fingers, she used the need for another drink as an excuse to hide just how much his casual acceptance meant to her. Looking down at the snow whispering across the frozen water in little white swirls, she mumbled into the paper lip, “Cool. Right. Yeah.”
Beside her, Alric tilted his head back onto the folding chair. They were quiet for a while as they listened to the creak and pop of the ice below the jubilant party sounds.
In a quiet, content voice, her cousin noted, “Really is a nice night, huh?”
“Yeah,” she answered, hugging the cup close. “It really is.”