Wissa was laughing out loud now. She jumped up and embraced Belina, and while the prince watched, unable to move or defend his honor, the two women kissed. It was not the sort of kiss he liked to see them exchange. When he did see it, he understood that it was a challenge to his manhood, to the manhood of every one of the male puppets. The suitors and the winged angel didn’t seem to care. But he had been given too much pride, and the sight of them together almost gave him the courage to plot their deaths.
Almost.
But there was always something in Bitty Belina’s eyes that made him abandon such considerations before he carried them very far.
The long hours behind the wheel gave Sebastian much time to think, and he let his mind range across the spectrum of his life, through black moments and light moments, through happiness and defeat, never following any single avenue of memory to its end. Mostly, he remembered small triumphs and tragedies. Indeed, he had had no large triumphs to speak of-and the tragedies on the scale of jenny and Pertos and Ben Samuels were too huge for his investigation.
The land was endlessly white and the sky perpetually overcast. There was always falling snow, sometimes only a few flakes and other times impenetrable sheets that obscured the way and forced him to pull over and stop for the duration.
He came to know the puppets as well as he could know anyone, and he had his favorites among them. He liked the angel very much, though they said little to each other. Even in the dim light of the northern winter, those golden wings glinted and shone. They reminded Sebastian of people he had loved, though he could no longer summon forward any name but Bitty Belina’s to fit a golden image. He disliked the prince quite a bit. He was a snide, harshspeaking little fellow. He liked to tease Sebastian with the spiders, and when he had tired of that, he enjoyed jabbing his sword into the idoit’s thigh and simultaneously warning him against losing control of the truck. Sebastian’s leg was dotted with little gashes and tiny holes as large as the place where a nail might go in the hands of a martyr. He found that he liked Wissa, though that surprised him. She was the evil stepmother, and she should never be trusted. But when she spoke, it was softly, and she never taunted him like most of the others did. He didn’t Me either the first or the second suitor, for they treated him nastily, though not quite so crudely as the prince. The third suitor, the chubby one, was just the opposite. He spoke to Sebastian more than any of the others, though the idiot had noticed that the third suitor was the quietest among his comrades. They talked about the stars if the clouds parted, about the snow, about the Furnace and the others.
Belina, of course, he loved.
He had created her in the Furnace, forged her with his own hands and without anyone’s aid. It was as if this single act atoned for everything else that he had done wrong. In creating Bitty Belina, he had simultaneously erased his sin for killing Alvon Rudi and Pertos, for permitting Wolf to escape and murder Ben Samuels. And he had all but forgotten a girl named jenny and the recurring guilt that had chased him down the years of his life. Both because she was his creation and because she brought him this contentment without knowing it, he loved her. He was enchanted by her golden hair and her sparkling eyes, unaware that his creation might have other traits beyond the physical.
He had even begun to think that there was a certain. scriptlike quality to their new lives. Every day they drove down the windswept, snow-hidden highway, keeping between the markers on either berm, bucking the air currents. Every night he sat and watched the puppets talk and laugh in the rear of the truck where they had made their home. Every day it snowed, either hard or gently. Every night it snowed in his dreams too. There was a quality of sameness, of routine, that made life more stable and endurable. As far as Sebastian could see, the rest of their lives would consist of the northern highway, the cold and the snow and the sky like ashes and the occasional birds streaking across the flat bottom of the clouds.