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The snow began early in the morning, skies soft and grey and heavy, most of Kirkwall just beginning to stir. The vendors grumbled and the Hightown nobles retired to their crackling fires and mulled wine, but the apprentices crowded around the narrow windows, jostling each other to get a wistful look at the lazily falling flakes.
The enchanters sighed in dismay, their lessons ignored, but there was nothing to be done. The apprentices were still children, first and foremost.
A short trek to the Viscount's Keep had cloaked Meredith in the white stuff, melting flakes clinging to the embossed steel of her armour and the few rogue strands of her hair. Any of the apprentices would have given one of their extremities to be so anointed, but the knight-commander scowled deeply, stomping the caked snow off her boots as she stepped into Templar Hall.
"Fine weather, isn't it?" Orsino asked in passing, and earned himself an ice-melting glower in return.
Around the supper table, the senior enchanters reminisced about snows past, whilst outside the Circle's walls the stuff piled up on awnings and rooftops and grew grey and slushy on the streets. "It should be pretty," Donte sighed, his rheumy eyes drooping at the corners. "It should be... well, magical."
But there was nothing magical about a Kirkwall snowfall, nothing pretty about the biting winds and plummeting temperatures and the rash of wintertime illnesses that always followed. And there was nothing pleasant about Meredith's ever-increasing sullenness, or the way it twisted the ever-present thorn in Orsino's side.
"Are you going to tell me what's wrong?" he finally asks, some time after the flakes have stopped falling. Hightown is still grey and sickly-looking, the ice-slick streets nearly deserted.
"No."
"I happen to enjoy the snow," Orsino says after a beat, leaning back in his chair, ignoring the squeal of protest the old gears made. "It may get ugly here in the city, but on the coast..."
"Sod your coast."
"Come with me. I'll show you."
"Sod your coast and sod the snow." It is the most he's heard Meredith swear in months. She flinches, then pinches the bridge of her nose between fingers. "I'm going crazy, aren't I. Everything irritates me. Everything frustrates me. Yesterday I shouted a templar down just for calling me 'Ser' instead of 'Knight-Commander'. This is what it's like to go mad, isn't it?"
"I wouldn't know," he responds dryly.
"I... we... used to love the winter. Snow looked so beautiful glistening in Amelia's hair..."
One of the Formari had a knack for sculpting in miniature. Around his painstakingly-formed scene of two young girls building a snowman, Orsino had a glass globe crafted.
When Meredith shakes it, tiny crystalline flakes spin and tumble.
"More of your magic to try and placate me, I presume?" she frowns, although the frown doesn't quite reach her eyes.
"You're welcome." Orsino kisses her on the swell of her cheek, catching the tear just as it falls.