The Empress Who Counted Snow

The Empress Mireva, eighty-one years upon a throne she had taken at nineteen and never once set down, kept a private ledger that no chancellor had ever seen, and in it she counted snow.

She had counted it for sixty-two winters. The habit had the look of an old woman's harmless eccentricity, and she cultivated that appearance with the same care she brought to everything, for an empress who has survived four conspiracies and two regencies learns that a thing dismissed as eccentricity is a thing left unguarded. But the ledger was not harmless and it was not eccentric. It was the most important document in the empire, and it recorded, in her own dwindling hand, every fall of snow upon the capital from the first of each winter to the last — because the Empress Mireva believed, with a certainty that had outlasted her beauty, her husbands, her children, and very nearly her mind, that she would die on the day the last snow of winter melted from the roofs of her city and no more came.

A wandering seer had told her so, in the year of her coronation, when she was nineteen and frightened and newly terrible. The woman had been brought before her as a curiosity and had looked at the young Empress for a long time and said, without flattery, that she would reign longer than any monarch in the chronicles, that she would bury everyone she loved and most of those she hated, and that she would not die in war or by poison or in her bed of age, but on the morning the winter let go of the world — when the last of the snow ran off the eaves and the thaw was complete and nothing white remained. Then the seer had been taken away and, in the manner of those times, was never heard of again, and the young Empress had told no one, and had ruled for sixty-two years, and had watched, every spring, with a terror she let no living soul observe, as the snow thinned and greyed and dwindled on the rooftops of her capital — and had survived, every spring, because the cold had always, at the last possible moment, sent down one more fall.