Issue #105, Fourth Anniversary Double-Issue • Oct. 4, 2012

“Three Little Foxes,” by Richard Parks

“Cursed Motives,” by Marissa Lingen

“Luck Fish,” by Peta Freestone

“Unsilenced,” by Karalynn Lee

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

THREE LITTLE FOXES

by Richard Parks

        With the sun now set and a magnificent full moon, glittering like winter frost, on the rise, the ghosts stirred in Lord Noritomo’s garden.

        “Lord Yamada, is it not exactly as I have said?”

        I kept my eyes on the ghosts. “It is exactly as you have said, Noritomo-sama. What you have not said is why it’s a problem. Could you enlighten me?

        The question took Lord Noritomo off guard. Of course I understood why, in general, it was an undesirable thing to have a haunted garden, but if there was a specific reason why he didn’t want them there, that might make their reasons for being present more evident. The facts were already quite clear—at night, two ghosts, by appearance both female, entered through the north gate of Noritomo’s mansion and proceeded through the estate to the central garden. There they were joined by yet another ghost, similar in form and dress to the first two. No one had yet ascertained the origin of the third, though she did usually appear between two outbuildings on the western side of the compound. There in the garden, the first two ghosts would play a game of Go while the latecomer watched. They did not speak, but the click of the stones on the phantom board could be clearly heard. It was this sound, Noritomo informed me, that had alerted his servants to their presence in the first place.

        “Lord Yamada, are you joking?” Noritomo said. “I was planning a moon-viewing party for this very night. The Crown Prince himself was planning to attend! It was humiliating, but I had no choice but to cancel. How can I bring noble guests to a garden full of ghosts? And what if this goes on? Servants talk, as you well know. I’ll get a reputation for being unlucky.”

        I was forced to admit that he had a reasonable concern. For a courtier like Noritomo, reputation was everything. Whatever effects the ghosts did or did not intend, their very presence was, to say the least, indelicate. Yet there was, as always, more to the matter, but now I did not think I would learn what that something might be from Lord Noritomo himself.

        “Forgive me,” I said, “but I must ask this—can you think of any reason these ghosts would have to wish you ill? Do you recognize any of them?”

        For my own part I did not, nor did I expect to do so. Except for the fact that onibi hovered near them like phantom lanterns and their figures were somewhat translucent, they could have been any three young women of the nobility. Their kimonos were appropriate to the season and they wore their hair long, tied with ribbons to hang straight down their backs. For spirits, they made a rather fetching and elegant scene.

        Noritomo gave me a sharp glance, but he consented to take a closer look. “They appear to be pretty young women,” he said finally, “and it’s true that I do have an interest in pretty young women. But I swear to you I have never seen any of them before, alive or otherwise. I know of no grudge they could possibly have against me.”

        “Which might explain their lack of interest in anything beyond the garden.” I detected nothing furtive in Noritomo’s manner. If he was lying, he was a very good liar, even by the standards of a courtier.

        “Lord Yamada, I have ghosts in my garden! Can you help me or not?”

        I considered the matter in light of what my observations had told me. “I think so. If all else fails, the ghosts can be exorcised. I have a friend skilled in these matters, and I will summon him. Yet it won’t be easy—there’s a complication.”

        “Which is?”

        “These are not human ghosts, Noritomo-sama. Unless I’m badly mistaken—and I am not—they are fox spirits.”

        Noritomo gasped. “Lord Buddha protect me!”

        “The Buddha is merciful. But while we’re waiting, I think I need to speak to your servants. The more I understand, the more chance I can render the Buddha some assistance on your behalf.”

* * *

        Lord Noritomo’s mansion was a typical shingon style compound, with one central building housing the main hall and two separate wings joined to the central structure by covered walkways. These were left open now, it being early summer, but could be completely enclosed in winter. Lord Noritomo’s principal wife had passed away five years earlier, and he had yet to remarry. Her old apartments in the west wing were now occupied by Noritomo’s two young sons and their nurse, a stout woman of middle years named Mai. Apartments in the east wing not reserved for Lord Noritomo himself were assigned to his Master of the Wardrobe, an older man named Junko, and his daughter, Mariko. The balance of Noritomo’s personal attendants resided in several rooms in the east wing near their master, where they were always on call.

        The following afternoon, Lord Noritomo informed me that he had business elsewhere in the Capital which would occupy him for some days, and I took the opportunity, with his permission, of examining the buildings and grounds and asking questions of his staff and servants. The nurse, Mai, seemed determined to speak whether I asked or not.

        “It was little Toshi who spotted them first,” she said, almost before I could ask the question. I found her in the garden, keeping a close eye on the boys as they looked for frogs in the koi pond. Toshi was the elder, about eight years old. The youngest, Hiroi, was perhaps six.

        “Is that so?” I asked the boy, and he looked up at me and nodded, looking very serious.

        “I saw the pretty ladies,” he said.

        “You were out of bed, weren’t you?” Mai asked.

        He nodded. “I had to pee. When I went outside, I saw them in the garden. I was going to go talk to them, but Mai-san found me.”

        “Frightened me half out of my wits!” she said. “What if you’d gone out there and they’d taken you away? The Master would have cut off poor Mai’s head.”

        “They didn’t seem bad,” Toshi said, looking doubtful.

        “They might not be so, but foxes don’t think the way humans do,” I said. “Ghost foxes, especially so. And they love to play tricks on humans. The wise man knows when to be careful.”

        “You mind what Yamada-sama is telling you,” Mai said.

        “Did you see them any other time, Mai-san?” I asked.

        “Just that once, but now that I know they are out there, I can always tell. I hear the stones. Then one of them plays a flute, and they leave.”

        I frowned. Lord Noritomo hadn’t mentioned a flute. “Which one plays? The one watching the game?”

        “I don’t know. I never go out to see. The sound of the flute is faint but I can hear it plainly.”

        “But the spirits never come any closer to the house?”

        “No, and praise the gods for that. I would die of fright, I am sure,” Mai said.

        “I’ll try not to let it come to that,” I said. “Do you know if Junko-san is around? I need to speak to him.”

        “I believe he is on an errand for the Master. He should return soon.”

        When Mai took her charges back into the mansion I lingered in the garden. Beyond the koi pond there was a stone lantern and grassy spot where the garden’s creator had placed a large flat stone, perfect for a small gathering of friends to place a Go board or a wine tray. There were no marks on the ground to indicate anyone had been there in some time, which was no more or less than I expected to see.

        I considered the matter. I knew I would have to summon the priest Kenji; I had an obligation to my patron to protect his interests, and one way or another the ghosts would have to leave. Yet there was simply too much about the situation that struck me as strange, to say the least. Why would fox spirits come to a place with no—so far as I could ascertain—special lure or meaning for them, simply to play a game of Go? There were legends, of course, of farmers and such who were lured to spy on fox spirits at play, only to realize too late that the game, far from taking an hour or two, had taken hundreds of years and time had passed around them unnoticed. I knew this was nonsense, but that still left the question of why they were here, if not for mischief.

        Two foxes enter by the northern gate. One does not.

        The northern gate, whether for a compound or a city, was called the Demon’s Gate, because it was considered most vulnerable to entry by evil spirits. Evil or no, it made sense that the fox spirits would enter from that direction.

        So where is the third fox spirit coming from?

        Or, more to the point, what was different about her? She had appeared to be dressed the same as the first two ghosts. Other than the direction of her arrival and the fact that she arrived separately, she could have been one more seed in a pod with the other two. Perhaps it didn’t matter. I knew that it was possible that her apparent differences didn’t matter, but I didn’t believe it. I took note of the sun’s descent, sought out one of Lord Noritomo’s couriers, and sent a message to . After that I settled myself on the veranda to wait.

        Kenji arrived just before sundown and was escorted to me by Mai-san, who immediately bowed and excused herself. Kenji yawned and scratched himself before sitting down near to me on the veranda. He looked, as he often did, a little worse for wear, though his head was freshly shaven, and judging from his relative lack of aroma, he had bathed recently.

        “I hope my message didn’t interrupt anything,” I said.

        He grunted. “Frankly, I welcomed the interruption. Sometimes a good time can be too good and too much. So. We have ghosts to deal with, yes?”

        For a priest of the Eightfold Path, Kenji knew quite a bit about good times and overindulgence, so I accepted his judgment without inquiring any further.

        “Yes. The ghosts will be arriving soon, if past behavior is any indication. I want you to watch with me.”

        “Watch? Honestly, Lord Yamada... I’m starting to find your reluctance to exorcise a spirit at first opportunity somewhat frustrating.”

        Whatever Kenji’s failings as a priest or a person, one could never doubt his faith, or rather his absolute certainty that he understood the way the world worked, in both its physical and spiritual aspects. While it was true that he expected to be well paid for an exorcism, that was not the heart of the matter. To Kenji, a ghost was a lost soul, and a fox spirit doubly so. Exorcising a spirit from the earthly plane so that it could return to the wheel of death and rebirth and continue its journey toward transcendence was an act of kindness, in his view. I was never so sure about that, or indeed much of anything else. I sometimes envied Kenji his certainties, since I had so few.

        “Kenji-san, understanding is a blessing. You already have yours. I’m still searching for mine, and at the moment I’m more interested in why the spirits are here rather than where they will go. Exorcism will remain an option but not my first one.”

        Kenji just shrugged. “As you wish. So. Aside from ghosts, what am I looking for?”

        “Anything—about the ghosts themselves, I mean—that doesn’t make sense to you.”

        We didn’t have to wait very long. As soon as the sun was well down and a glorious near-full moon was on the rise, the two fox spirits appeared from the direction of the north gate. They moved with stately grace to the flat rock and seated themselves. They didn’t set up the Go board, it was suddenly just there, and they began to play. The click of the stones on the board was clearly audible.

        “They’re being fairly loud,” Kenji said. “I mean, one can make a great deal of noise playing Go. But one doesn’t have to.”

        “So you’re saying that they want to be heard,” I said.

        “Lord Yamada, as you well know, fox spirits, as with a living fox, are secretive creatures. Calling attention to themselves, unless they’re up to mischief, seems a bit odd.”

        “And yet they’ve repeated their game here for weeks without, so far as I can tell, showing any interest in working harm to the people living here.”

        “You mentioned three. I see only two.”

        “It shouldn’t be long now.”

        Nor was it. The third fox spirit appeared, walking between two of the outbuildings as it took a straight path to the game. In so doing, it passed relatively close to the veranda where Kenji and I sat, and I got a closer look than I had when Lord Noritomo and I had watched them from the bottom of the garden. I waited until the third spirit had joined the game as spectator.

        “I need a closer look.” I stepped down from the veranda; Kenji followed close behind.

        Kenji’s voice was a harsh whisper. “What if they see you?”

        “Do you really think they don’t know we’re here?” I asked.

        Kenji let out a breath. “It did seem unlikely.”

        “I don’t expect them to bolt or attack unless we get too close for their comfort. It needn’t come to that. Yet.”

        I advanced only as far as the pond, keeping it between me and the spirits. Looking across, what I had at first suspected was quite obvious, that their similarities went much farther than merely the way they were dressed. “They’re sisters,” I said.

        Kenji frowned. “Lord Yamada, a fox is a shapeshifter, and so is a fox spirit. They can appear to be anything they want.”

        “True, but when a fox is simply appearing to be human without impersonating a particular human, they have a preferred form that they take, and I’ve known that to be true since my first meeting with one. So why would these fox spirits appear to be sisters when no one here recognizes those sisters?”

        “With all respect, we don’t yet know for certain what they are up to.”

        “Also true. If their appearance is a subterfuge, I’m almost eager for the trick to be played, just to see the reasons behind this particular manifestation.”

        “I would not be so keen,” Kenji said. “You may have rid yourself of your demon of drink, but your demon of curiosity has not lost a bit of its influence.”

        It was true that my demon of drink, as Kenji had phrased it, was weakened and diminished, but I wasn’t convinced that I’d rid myself of it. I knew the time was coming when I would have to test myself against it once again. As for my “demon of curiosity,” it had kept me in this impermanent world at times when I couldn’t think of any other reason to continue, so I was inclined to grant it all the leeway it required. I was about to say as much when ghostly music interrupted me.

        “Do you hear that?”

        The sound was faint, but distinctive. After a moment, Kenji nodded. “A bamboo flute. Being played very softly.”

        That alone was a curious thing. The music of the flute tended to have many sharp notes and piercing whistles. Yet this was so faint as to be difficult to hear and I couldn’t make out the precise tune, even though I did not believe that whoever was playing the flute was not very far away. I could see that Mai had been mistaken—none of the fox spirits was playing the instrument. The musician was nowhere in sight.

        “The hour is late,” Kenji said. “Perhaps the person does not wish to disturb the house.”

        “Or they only want to be heard by someone with keen hearing indeed. Look.”

        It was clear that all three of the fox spirits heard the music. They interrupted their game to look toward the mansion—something they had not done at any other point that evening. One fox spirit then left the group. It was the latecomer, the spectator. She glided back toward the outbuildings and vanished from sight. In a moment or two, the Go board had disappeared, and the remaining fox spirits gracefully withdrew toward the north gate and faded from sight.

        “Let’s go,” I said.

        We quickly skirted the pond and followed in the direction the spectator fox spirit had gone. I didn’t really expect to catch up to her, but there had to be some significance to the direction, and unless she picked up her pace, there was at least a chance that I could see her go... where? It was strange that she did not arrive or depart with the others. The fox spirits, as I had already realized, were very similar to each other, and so I chose to concentrate on how they were different, and this one particular spirit was the most different of all.

        We rounded the corner of the mansion and were heading toward the outbuildings when a faint sound caught my attention. It was the sound of a shoji screen being closed. I glanced back toward the mansion, but there were several doors there leading off the veranda, and there was no way to tell which one of them had just closed. We no longer heard any music.

        “Odd....” Kenji said.

        “What is?” I asked, picking up the pace to make up for my hesitation, but Kenji had already stopped.

        “She’s gone.”

        “That’s—”

        I’d started to say “impossible,” but of course it wasn’t. A fox spirit could certainly vanish from sight if its need was great, but the others had seen no need to disappear before they reached the gate, even though they knew they were being watched. Yet, as I looked beyond the last outbuilding toward the nearly bowshot-length expanse of grassy earth that separated the last storehouse from the fence, I saw nothing.

        Now Kenji and I both scratched our heads, though in his case it was probably because of a recent case of lice. “Where did she go?” I asked.

        Kenji closed his eyes and held up a hand for silence. I kept still as he muttered under his breath; every now and then I could make out a word or two of a sutra. After a while, he fell silent and opened his eyes again.

        “Well?” I asked.

        “Faint... but certain. She didn’t go anywhere, Lord Yamada. She’s still here.”

* * *

        I met Kenji at the mansion late the next afternoon. By now I realized that I needed to be a bit more thorough in my inquiries. Lord Noritomo had not yet returned, but as he had instructed, a servant girl named Asako met us in the central chamber. She appeared to be about eight years old and was a somber child, apparently taking her duties as our escort very seriously. As we followed her into the east wing of the mansion, I asked the first question I wanted answered, “Asako-chan, does anyone here play the bamboo flute?”

        Her countenance brightened just a little. “Oh, yes, Yamada-sama. We have several very accomplished flute players. The Master, for one.”

        I was not surprised. Noritomo was a courtier after all, and no courtier was considered accomplished without being able to play at least one musical instrument with passable skill. According to Asako, Noritomo was better than just “passable.”

        “Who else?”

        The girl pondered. “There’s Lady Mai, of course. There’s Hideki, our Stablemaster—he’s quite good. I play... a little. But the best of all is Master Junko.”

        “Lord Noritomo’s Master of the Wardrobe?”

        “Yes, Yamada-sama.”

        “I have not spoken to him as of yet. I think I need to do so.”

        “Master Junko left this morning on an errand, and we don’t expect him back before this afternoon. His daughter, Mariko, is here, of course.”

        “Then I will speak to her first, if that is not inconvenient.”

        Asako hesitated. “Lord Noritomo’s instructions were clear, but I must tell you that Mariko-san’s health is delicate, poor thing, and I know that she was not feeling well this morning.”

        “I would hate to be a source of pain to the girl, but this may be important,” I said. “If she will see me, I promise to be as brief as possible.”

        Asako bowed. “Of course. If you’ll wait here, gentlemen, I will see if she is in a fit state to receive visitors.”

        Asako pattered down the corridor and disappeared around a corner, leaving Kenji and me alone. “What is your feeling?” I asked. “I know you’ve been trying to catch the scent, so to speak.”

        “There’s something here,” Kenji said. “But it is faint.”

        “Concealing itself?”

        Kenji shrugged. “That is one thing that puzzles me. I’m not sensing any malice, anxiety or deception, any of which I would expect for an evil spirit in hiding, especially if it knew it was being hunted. What I sense I can only describe as an aura of melancholy. It is indeed strange.”

        Asako soon returned. “This way, gentlemen.”

        Kenji and I followed her to a room on a leftward corridor branching off the end of the main corridor. She kneeled beside the sliding screen that served as its door and moved it aside.

        Like most of the gentry, Mariko slept almost nude on a long cushion covered with the layers of her voluminous kimono as the bed covering, and this she had gathered about her as she kneeled there. She had put on a kimono that would normally serve as an inner layer of a complete outfit and covered that with a red Chinese-style jacket to receive us. She appeared to be about fourteen, fairly thin, with long black hair tied back with a green ribbon. She was a pretty girl but obviously of delicate constitution, as Asako had indicated.

        The room was small, as one would expect for an attendant of her station, so Kenji and I bowed a greeting and kneeled out in the corridor before the open door.

        “Forgive this intrusion,” I said. “I am on an errand for Lord Noritomo, and I need to ask you a few questions. Were you aware that Lord Noritomo’s garden is being haunted?”

        She bowed in return. “Lady Mai told me. I don’t know how I can assist in this matter, but I will try to answer your questions.”

        “Thank you. My associate and I heard flute music out in the garden last night. Is it your father’s habit to practice in the evening?”

        “I think he has done so, from time to time. I cannot say if he did so last evening. I’m afraid I was very tired and retired early.”

        “Young lady,” Kenji said softly. “I think you are very weary still.”

        She smiled then, faintly, and, like any well-bred woman, raised a sleeve of her kimono to cover her mouth. “I would say I am used to it, for even sleep does not help for long.”

        “Yet it seems wise, so I will not detain you farther,” I said.

        We took our leave then, and Asako bade us wait outside while she assisted Mariko with her bedclothes.

        “Anything?” I asked Kenji. While I prided myself on my ability to both detect actual foxes and their illusory tricks, in Mariko’s case I simply wasn’t sure.

        “There’s something about her, certainly, some sort of presence,” Kenji said, looking thoughtful. “I could say a fox, but if I were a follower of the Way of the Gods, I’d strongly suspect the presence of a kami of death.”

        I kept my voice low. “Is it that serious? The girl will die?”

        “It means only that her condition is very grave,” Kenji said. “She may die. But it is not a certainty.”

        When Asako returned, she led us back to the veranda, where Lord Noritomo’s servants had prepared a meal for us. Asako was about to withdraw, but I stopped her.

        “Has Mariko’s health always been delicate?”

        “Yes,” Asako said. “But it’s a curious thing... for almost a year we thought she was getting better. She even started to assist her father in his duties, but over the last several days she has gotten steadily weaker. She is inside during the day, but she’s taken to sleeping in one of the storerooms at night.”

        “Why?” I asked.

        Kenji scowled. “I suspect that she’s worried that her condition is something that might spread to the rest of the household. Or worse, that she will die in the night and her corpse bring ritual impurity into her master’s house. Isn’t that right, Asako-chan?”

        The girl nodded reluctantly. “It is very worrying, but there is no arguing with her on the matter. She always thinks of others. I....” Asako hesitated but then added, “I like her.”

        “I will say a prayer for on her behalf,” Kenji said.

        Asako bowed. “I would be in your debt, sir,” she said, and then she did withdraw.

        When she was gone, I gave Kenji a hard glance. “Since what time have you been offering your services without payment?” I asked.

        “Lord Yamada, I merely know the value of my skills. That does not mean I am incapable of the virtue of charity.”

        “Not incapable but not eager, in my experience.”

        Kenji glared at me. “You’re trying to distract me from the matter at hand, Lord Yamada. I know what you’re thinking, but the location of Mariko’s sleeping quarters could be a coincidence.”

        “You could be right,” I said.

        But he wasn’t. I knew that Mariko’s sleeping arrangements and the appearance of the fox spirit were no coincidence. What I didn’t know was precisely what it meant or what needed to be done about it. The situation was already delicate; a new level of uncertainty was not what I wanted. Yet I remained constantly amazed at my ability to acquire exactly what I did not want.

* * *

        Junko arrived shortly after we had finished our mid-day meal. He was an older man, perhaps near Lord Noritomo’s age of fifty. His hair was almost completely gray, but he moved like a younger man, and his bearing was dignified. We met on the veranda near the rear of the mansion, and when I asked my first question, he was quick to answer.

        “I often play the flute in the evenings, Lord Yamada, though I try not to disturb anyone. Since my wife died, it’s been one of my few joys, aside from Mariko.”

        I knew what it was like, to lose someone you loved, and more, knew the risk of losing your only child as well. I shoved the thought down deep where I hoped I could not find it again, though I knew better. I got back to the business at hand.

        “Pardon me if this a painful memory, but Lady Mai tells me that your wife died giving birth to Mariko. It may have nothing to do with current events, but I’ve learned that it’s best to understand as much as possible about the people affected by... a spiritual intrusion. Can you tell me what happened?”

        Junko let out a slow breath. “After fourteen years, one would think the pain would fade, but no, I still feel it. My wife breathed her last just as Mariko cried for the first time. The birth was difficult, and my dear Momiji was always of delicate constitution, which I’m afraid Mariko has inherited. For a while I feared I had lost them both.”

        “You must care for your daughter a great deal,” I said.

        He met my gaze squarely. “More than anything, aside from my duty to my lord.”

        “Well said. It is my understanding that your daughter sleeps outside her rooms, at times.” It was more than an understanding. Mariko had confirmed it, and Kenji and I had examined her sleeping quarters ourselves before Junko’s arrival.

        He sighed. “We have to make allowances. As I said, her health is frail, and I agree with whatever relieves her worry.”

        “Still, your music must give her some comfort. I imagine she can hear you; the storage room isn’t far from the veranda.”

        “She hasn’t said,” Junko replied, “though I imagine she does, sometimes.”

        “Thank you, Master Junko. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

        “I hope you’ll be able to bring some reassurance to Lord Noritomo, though my personal view is that the foxes are no threat. If they wished to cause harm, they would certainly have done so before now.”

        “I tend to agree. Yet I do not believe that is the answer Lord Noritomo expects or will accept.”

        “I fear you are correct,” he said, then bowed and took his leave. I sat down on the edge of the veranda.

        Kenji had remained silent through my conversation with Junko, and now he spoke. “What do you think, Lord Yamada?”

        “I think he was honest with me, for the most part, but I also think he knows more than he said. I am also quite certain that he is afraid, though not of the foxes.”

        “Why didn’t you challenge him?”

        “Because I am just a man, and I can’t always tell when someone is being deceptive. But I think I know a way to find out. I will require your assistance.”

        Kenji smiled. “If I am right to suspect the nature of my assistance, I must tell you now that it will require payment. I am your friend, but my charitable impulses, such as they are, do not extend to you.”

        I smiled too. “That’s one thing I do appreciate about you, Kenji-san. Whatever your other failings—which, to be blunt, are many—you are an honest man.”

* * *

        The moon was waning and not so glorious as it had been two nights before. Even so, I took a moment to appreciate it. I had found an inconspicuous place to rest near the veranda on the north side of the house, closest to the outbuildings. I would see the foxes when they first arrived and the third when she joined her sisters, but that was not why I was there. I waited, still and silent, as the night progressed. Finally I heard the whisper of a sliding screen. A dark shadow emerged from the mansion, crept across the veranda, and stepped down to the stone that led to the yard. He was raising the flute to his lips when I interrupted.

        “That’s a rather unusual flute, Master Junko.” I rose from the shadows.

        Junko froze there for a moment like a wooden statue, then slowly lowered the flute. He regained his composure quickly. “It belonged to my wife,” he said. “I used to play it for her when she was ill. It is a well-made instrument, but otherwise unremarkable.”

        “I meant rather the effect that it has. You were playing for your wife when she passed, weren’t you?”

        He frowned. “Yes. She found the music comforting. How did you know?”

        “An educated guess. Or did you never pause to consider why the music affects that fox spirit in the way that it does?”

        “Fox spirit? What has this to do with them? I play for my daughter now; it helps her sleep. I-I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Lord Yamada.”

        I smiled. “Yes, you do. You’ve known for some time that Mariko is possessed by a fox spirit.”

        Junko licked his lips. “I swear that I did not. If... if that is true, the creature must be exorcised at once!”

        “Oh, there’s no need of that. The spirit left of its own accord. That’s it out there in the garden, watching its sisters’ game. I think the real problem is that it is eager to leave, and you can’t allow that to happen.”

        I had seen the same look that I saw now in Master Junko’s eyes once before—in a raccoon-dog caught in a hunter’s snare. Up until now my suppositions had proven correct, but I was entering less predictable waters. It was time for Master Junko to supply what I was missing.

        “Master Junko, matters simply cannot remain as they are, for both Lord Noritomo’s sake and Mariko’s as well. The time has come to tell me how this came about.”

        Master Junko visibly slumped as if his age had suddenly caught up to him. He looked tired and beaten. “It started with my wife, Momiji. I discovered the nature of her condition quite by accident. I would have summoned a priest then and there, but she begged me not to. She said the fox spirit had saved her life, lending her its strength when she had contacted a fever when she was eighteen. She said she would have died.”

        Master Junko seemed to be telling the truth as he understood it, but there was an aspect to such possessions that I don’t think he understood, then or now.

        “What happened when Mariko was born?”

        “I had often played the flute for Momiji, as I said. She was an excellent musician, but I was better. It was... strange. When she was in labor, she begged me to play for her, but as we got closer to the delivery, she begged me to stop. Her voice was so strange... I stopped playing just as Mariko was born, and in that instant—”

        “Momiji died?”

        He nodded, for a moment unable to speak.

        I spoke for him. “I don’t think it was Momiji who told you to stop playing. It was the fox spirit. Momiji had a powerful attachment to your music, and apparently so did the fox spirit, whether for its own sake or by the fact that she had subsumed part of Momiji’s identity. The fox spirit knew that Momiji was dying and that it was time to leave. That’s why it told you to stop.”

        “I-I think I guessed as much, myself... later. At the time, I wasn’t thinking at all. My wife was dead, and Mariko was born blue! The attendants did what they knew to do, but she wasn’t breathing. I was nearly out of my mind, and I didn’t know what to do.”

        “So you started playing again.”

        He nodded. “As soon as I did, Mariko coughed, and then she began breathing. It was only later I realized that it was because I had called the spirit back, only now it was in Mariko. It kept her alive.”

        “So you keep it trapped. It roams free for a bit when Mariko sleeps, but you call it back every night.”

        “For fourteen years. I had to, Lord Yamada. I lost my wife. I can’t lose my daughter too!”

        “You’re going to, unless you let that fox spirit go.”

        “I just told you—”

        “And I’m telling you that there’s more to the situation than you understand. In order to take possession, a fox spirit needs a host in a weakened physical and spiritual state. That was Momiji at one point in her life, and your daughter at her birth. If necessary, the fox spirit lends it strength to its host.”

        “I know that, Lord Yamada! Did I not just say that Momiji survived her first illness because of the fox spirit?”

        “And she died at her second illness for the same reason.”

        For a moment Master Junko just stared at me. “I-I don’t understand.”

        “When the fox spirit takes possession, the host is in a weakened state. Not dying, not fading—weakened. A temporary condition that, if the host survives, will pass. The host will grow stronger. Sooner or later, she will be stronger than the fox spirit possessing her. At that time the situation begins to reverse. The fox spirit will take strength from the host, as it did once with Momiji and is doing now with Mariko. It’s killing her.”

        “Nonsense! If that were true, why is it trying to get away?”

        “I didn’t say it meant to kill her, I’m saying that’s what’s happening. Fox spirits often possess humans. Sometimes for malicious reasons but, as often as not, out of curiosity or mischief and never for very long. Your music has bound this one, and it still does. Wasn’t Mariko, for a time, getting stronger?”

        “But I—oh.”

        “It’s the presence of Mariko’s fox spirit that calls to her sisters; that’s why they come here. She wants to rejoin them now. For Mariko’s sake, you have to let her.”

        Junko glanced at the garden. “The game is nearly done. I-I want to believe you, Lord Yamada, but this is the only thing I know to do. Please don’t try to stop me.”

        No, you don’t want to believe me, because in so doing you accept your part in Momiji’s death. I suppose we will just have to let events run their course, I thought.

        “I wouldn’t presume,” I said. “In fact, I would like to hear you play.”

        Junko looked suspicious, but when he raised the flute to his lips again, I merely stood where I was, watching the fox spirits as the game ended. Junko played the notes very softly. I thought I had heard the tune before, but I wasn’t certain, even as close as I was to him now.

        I saw the fox spirit turn away from her sisters and glide in our direction. It came to the within a few paces of the outbuilding where Mariko lay sleeping.

        There it stopped. I don’t think any human being can read the emotions of a fox spirit with complete confidence, but I was almost sure that the creature was confused. I glanced back at the other two and was a little surprised to see that they had not yet departed. In fact, they now stood on either side of the stone, facing in our direction. They appeared agitated.

        “She-she’s not obeying me!”

        “What was that tune you were playing? I think I’ve heard it before.”

        “‘The Last Snow,’” he said. “It’s from Mutsu province... oh, why isn’t it working?!”

        I just nodded. “I’ve been to Mutsu, years ago. The song is just an old folk tune, yes?”

        Junko refused to be distracted. He lowered the flute. “Lord Yamada, what have you done?”

        “My associate, Kenji, is watching over your daughter. As soon as the fox spirit left Mariko, Kenji placed a spirit ward on your sleeping daughter’s forehead, per my instructions. The fox spirit cannot return.”

        Junko gasped and shoved the flute into his sash. He hadn’t taken two steps before I grabbed him from behind.

        “You will not interfere,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.

        “Let me go!”

        I did let him go. In truth I didn’t have a lot of choice. He was surprisingly strong and burning with a fire of pure desperation.

        “Kenji!” I shouted. “He’s coming!
     I could have saved my breath, for in another moment Kenji came half-running, half-flying out the door, propelled by Master Junko. He fell hard just a few paces from me and he did not get up right away, but when he had his breath back he just shook his head.

        “I’m sorry, Lord Yamada. I couldn’t hold him. He ripped my spirit ward off his daughter.”

        “That’s all right, Kenji-san,” I said. “We did what we needed to do.”

        “But the fox spirit will take her over again!”

        “No, I don’t think so.” I held up Master Junko’s flute.

        The fox spirit stood where it was, only now it glanced back toward its sisters, and I spoke to it directly.

        “It’s time for you to rejoin your family. No one will compel you to stay.”

        Master Junko threw open the door. “I lost—Lord Yamada! No!”

        I snapped the flute in half across my knee. Junko’s scream drowned out the faint whistle and much louder crack of the flute coming apart. He dove toward me, nearly incoherent in rage. Kenji managed to trip him as he hurtled past, and Junko went sprawling, though he quickly scrambled back to his feet.

        “I’ll kill—”

        “Father?”

        That small, quiet voice stopped him as suddenly as if he’d been smashed in the forehead by a mallet. Mariko leaned against the doorway, looking both pale and confused, but very much conscious, alive, and mobile.

        “Daughter....”

        In an instant, Master Junko had forgotten all about me and the fox spirits as well. I glanced back toward the north gate just in time to see them—all three of them—vanish. I did not think they would be returning. Master Junko held his daughter as if he was afraid she would turn to mist at any moment and blow away.

        “Master Junko, I think your daughter would like to breathe now. Mariko-chan, how are you feeling?”

        “Strange,” she said, as soon as her father loosened his grip a bit. “Almost like I’m missing something, though I can’t imagine what that would be.” She covered a yawn. “I think I will sleep in my room tonight,” she said. “It’s noisy out here.”

        “I think that would be a good idea,” I said. “Master Junko, perhaps your daughter could use your assistance...?”

        Master Junko looked like a criminal who’d just been granted pardon moments before his scheduled execution. I think he would have fallen at my feet then, if Mariko hadn’t needed him to lean against. She was a little shaky at first, but by the time they reached the veranda, she barely needed any help at all, except on the step up.

        I watched them go with such envy in my heart that I thought it would overwhelm me. I tried to imagine what it would be like, to have a child who knew who you were and how much you loved them, and loved you in return. I could not, and I understood that, for my son’s sake, I would never know any of those things. At that moment I considered Master Junko the most blessed man in the world.

        Kenji rubbed his shoulder, brushed himself off, and slowly got back to his feet. “You know, Lord Yamada, you might have been wrong. What if the girl had died?”

        “That would have been unfortunate, but she was going to die anyway as things stood, and eventually Lord Noritomo would have been rid of the fox spirits without our assistance. This way, I knew there was at least a chance that Mariko was still strong enough to live on her own. I took that chance.”

        “You do realize that, had Mariko died, Master Junko would have dedicated the rest of his life to seeing you dead also?”

        “I took that chance as well.”

        “Then your luck still holds. Now, about my fee—”

        “Lord Noritomo will return tomorrow, I am told. We will settle the matter then. Though I think I shall be forced to part with at least some of my portion, considering an unfortunate result of my actions tonight.”

        Kenji frowned. “Unfortunate...? Lord Yamada, the fox spirits are gone, I am quite sure the death kami is also gone, and Mariko is getting stronger by the minute!”

        “Yes, and it would be appropriate of you to say a prayer of thanksgiving for all three. I said only that there was an unfortunate result, not that all results were unfortunate.”

        “Your precision of speech does elude me at times. So. To what unfortunate result do you refer?”

        “Remember when I was speaking of your certainties and how much I envy them? I still do envy them but a little less so at this moment, now that I have found a certainty of my own.”

        Kenji scowled. “What is it?”

        “I am certain,” I said, “that I owe Master Junko a new flute.”

Copyright © 2012 Richard Parks

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Richard Parks lives in Mississippi with his wife and a varying number of cats. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in numerous anthologies including Year’s Best Fantasy and Fantasy: The Best of the Year. His fourth story collection, Yamada Monogatari: Demon Hunter, is due out in February of 2013 from Prime Books. PS Publishing will be bringing out his novel featuring Lord Yamada, To Break the Demon Gate, also early in 2013.

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CURSED MOTIVES

by Marissa Lingen

        Being shipwrecked was a great deal more civilized than Safy had imagined. She had her favorite and her second favorite hat, her lute and her fiddle both when she had feared the circumstances would make her choose between them, and an astonishing variety of fruit preserves. She had the captain’s books to peruse and the first mate’s instruments to play with. She could sleep in her little cabin on the stubbornly unmoving ship or out under the trees in a hammock, depending on her mood and the weather. She had, in fact, nearly everything a young imperial princess could ask for except for functional transportation.

        Safy’s lady-in-waiting Tib, who was also her bodyguard and also-also her tutor, claimed that they were not shipwrecked at all, because the crew would presently effect a repair of those parts of the ship currently unsatisfactory for their nautical progress, namely the motivator that used magic to propel the ship in the desired direction; therefore they were merely delayed. Safy was used to Tib talking that way. It reminded her of her cousin Tur, who would never be the Imperial heir because the Electors found him too pompous. This was not like Safy, who would almost definitely never be the Imperial heir because the Electors found her too frivolous.

        The only thing that was really unsatisfactory about the situation, Safy reflected, was that she had no opportunities to use her great gift, which was the laying of curses. It seemed rude to complain about that, since the entertainment, the company, the scenery, and the food were first-rate.

        “I expected there would be more crabs eating dead sailors’ flesh,” said Safy, chewing idly as she and Tib sat on the deck looking out at the clear blue tropical waters and the sandy shores, “instead of sailors eating dead crabs’ flesh. It makes you wonder what else they’ve gotten wrong about shipwrecks.”

        “I remind your Imperial Highness that we are not shipwrecked,” said Tib, “and also that sailors consider too much talk of drowned flesh unlucky.”

        “I didn’t say they had to drown,” said Safy. She flung the bits of crab exoskeleton away from her into the ocean. “They could burn to death for all the crabs care. Or die of plague. I’m told a great many ships wreck because their crews get the plague and there aren’t enough people to crew them, or else because something catches fire that oughtn’t.”

        She contemplated these options with a certain grisly satisfaction but eventually had to put them aside. The crew was jolly and let her do a great many interesting things, and she would certainly hate to lose any of them to fire or plague, even the ones who still called her Imperial Highness or Imperial Princess Safida as Tib demanded, instead of Safy as she herself demanded. Most of them listened to Safy—possibly, she thought, because Tib was always demanding things and Safy mostly went along peering interestedly and asking questions but hardly ever favors.

        “Who has been telling you anything at all about shipwrecks?” Tib demanded, reinforcing Safy’s opinion, to her private delight.

        “Everyone really,” said Safy. “It’s all they talk about at my uncle’s court. Surely you’ve heard them.”

        “Imperial Highness, were you not a princess, you would be a baggage,” said Tib.

        Safy, who had not worn stockings for nearly ten days, nodded at the truth of this statement and went to wade in the sparkling blue waters with no fuss at all.

        A great many people thought Safy was frivolous, not just the Electors, but in fact what she was—she felt rather certain—was level-headed. Which would have been a good trait in an Empress if they’d only given her a chance, but she didn’t much mind. The thing about being level-headed, as Safy considered herself to be, was that it involved refusing to fuss over things that did not require fuss.

        The little lifeboat that appeared that afternoon with two foreigners in it, who were nearly dying of thirst: that was an example of another thing that did not require fuss. Interest, to be sure, and a certain poking of her very brown Imperial nose into matters. But definitely not fuss.

        “What are you doing now?” she asked the cook, who was feeding the nearly-dead foreigners broth very slowly. She could see that was what he was doing, but why mattered.

        “They need to take it slowly or their bodies will cramp up and throw it all up, and then they’ll be worse than when we started,” said the cook.

        “Have you done this before?” asked Safy.

        The cook snorted. “A time or two. Skip along, Saf. There’s nothing you can do here. By nightfall they might be able to have a little bread in milk if you can get any milk out of the goat. Come help then.”

        “All right,” said Safy. It was a very comfortable kind of shipwreck, she reflected, when you didn’t even have to kill the goat. She hoped it would remain that way.

        As a Parelian, Safy knew better than to assume that anyone was a foreigner based on the color of their skin. Not all of her uncle’s subjects were as dark-skinned as she was herself. The warm golden color the foreigners had was about the same as several of their own sailors, or as people she knew from the Imperial court. But their features were different than any of her uncle’s subjects’, their noses flatter and their eyes folded differently. She sat just outside the cabin where the cook had put them, so she could observe carefully and wait for them to wake up.

        When they did, they were both very weak, but one of them could talk, and none of the sailors could understand a word he said. Safy had been taught several diplomatic tongues, not to mention a few academic ones like Old Liran that were no longer in use. She tried a mountain dialect of Cherivan. She tried the form of sea Sirrovan that hadn’t been used by their sailors for three hundred years. There was not even the slightest flicker of recognition.

        One of the foreigners was trying to ask for something, but no one could figure out what it was. It was apparently not food, water, another blanket, or help getting up to relieve himself. Safy suggested that he could be asking for Tib to entertain him with a little song or sprightly dance.

        Tib sniffed. “Your Imperial Highness should feel perfectly welcome to practice your music lessons for these poor unfortunates.”

        “Maybe later,” said Safy. “First I’ll teach them to talk.”

        She sat patiently in the room pointing at things and saying what they were, stool and table and blanket and man and Safy. The more alert one blinked at her and said nothing. She was about to wander off when the second one awoke and started shouting at his companion. Safy stood at the foot of the bed and watched them both with interest.

        The weaker one soon lost energy to shout, but he kept importuning his companion in broken tones until the sailors came to see what the commotion was about, and Tib hustled Safy behind her.

        “I’m fine!” Safy protested.

        Tib shook her finger at the foreigners. “Don’t you dare threaten Her Imperial Highness, do you understand me?  If I can’t understand what you’re saying, I can’t understand whether it’s a threat, and I have to treat it like a threat!  Do you understand me?”  She didn’t sound violent, just annoyed, and Safy nudged her way back around Tib to stare at the foreigners.

        They stared back, cowed. Much to Safy’s surprise, the man who had not said “wall” or “door” back to her had his hands raised in a placating, defensive posture and was murmuring something soothing. She walked over to his bed, her head cocked curiously. He made exaggerated motions of stroking the air beside her gently but not touching her.

        “Do you know, Tib, I think he’s trying to tell you he won’t hurt me.”

        “Jolly for him,” Tib muttered, folding her arms and filling the doorway with tiny, impeccable menace.

        “Look, they’ve stopped yelling.”  Safy peered at the weaker foreigner. “I’m not sure this one could do any yelling. He looks done in. Do you think the cook—”

        “The cook can bring in the goat milk you were supposed to get, you little—Imperial Highness,” said the cook, nudging past Tib with two battered tin mugs in his broad, scarred hands. “There now. You can stay while they drink it, and then you’ll be giving those foreign persons a rest. Perhaps we’ll make more headway with them when they’ve had more rest and can concentrate.”

        “This one looks like he’s concentrating plenty,” said Safy, looking down at the weaker one. His eyes were closed, but his lips were still moving. “Hey, you!  There’s goat milk, lovely goat milk!”

        The cook held the mug against the weak foreigner’s lips, and his eyes came open. He drank it down with no demur. “Well, they’re from somewhere with goats, right enough,” said the cook. “Now out with you, princess.”

        “The other one’s still drinking,” Safy objected, and the stronger foreigner did look to be savoring his goat milk somewhat more slowly. “I shall tell them a story.”

        “Please yourself, but they’ll want rest,” said the cook.

        “I’ll make sure they get it,” Tib told him softly.

        Safy perched on the stool between the beds. “Now, what story shall I tell you?  I suppose it doesn’t matter if you’ve already heard it, because you can’t understand a word of it anyway. Still, I’d rather it was something about me because then at least it’ll be new to you and not just the Ash Maiden or the tales of the Blue Prince again.

        “Do you know when I first came to the attention of my uncle the Emperor?” Safy asked the foreigners. “No, of course you don’t, how would you.”  The weaker one made the polite listening face, which showed he had manners, to be listening when he couldn’t understand a word. The stronger one muttered something, but since Safy couldn’t understand what it was, she chose to believe it was encouragement.

        “Well. I was eight years old, and I overheard my mother saying to my Uncle Phel—not my uncle the Emperor, you know, but a different uncle—that not everyone was cursed with self-awareness. Even at that age, I knew that self-awareness was no bad thing, not from the way Mother said it. So you can probably guess what comes next, I imagine.”

        She waited politely. Of course they didn’t answer, but as long as they were going to show interest, she would observe the forms as well. “I went around cursing my uncle the Emperor’s courtiers with self-awareness. When he finally figured out it was me, the court buzzed for days. And my mother—well, she was exasperated at first. She said I was always too literal.

        “Then my father said that no one had managed to make it into anything other than a figure of speech before, so she ought to be proud that I’d worked something like that into curse structure at such a young age. So then of course she was, and the Emperor was, and he asked me a lot of questions about how I’d done it.

        “People have always asked me a lot of questions, actually. Until you.”

        The stronger foreigner smiled in the blank and uneasy way of people who have no idea what is going on before them but wish to get the best out of it, with which Safy was familiar from the rest of her daily life. The weaker one appeared to be asleep. His lips were still moving, but she could make no more sense of him sleeping than waking.

        That night Safy couldn’t sleep. She crept from her cabin to look at the stars and see whether the sailors on night duty were some of her favorites who would let her try her hand at fishing off the side of the boat or climbing in the rigging in the dark.

        Instead, she heard Tib’s voice coming from the captain’s cabin. “I don’t know what her young imperial highness and I can do,” Tib was saying, “but I will think it over. Neither of us has ever repaired a motive device, and most of what the princess knows....”

        “I am well aware of the imperial focus on curses,” said the captain wearily. “I’m only glad you’ve managed to keep her from deploying any of them on us.”

        Safy had to stifle a squeak of indignation at that. She never used serious curses against people she liked, and even if she had, she wouldn’t be stupid and use them against the crew, whom she needed if she ever wanted to eat anything but mangoes and crabs again.

        “She is a good-hearted child,” said Tib, “when she remembers to think things through.”

        Safy wasn’t sure whether she should feel complimented or insulted by that.

        “So there was nothing in your training about this kind of foreigner?  You really don’t have any idea who they are?” said the captain, apparently returning to an earlier topic.

        “Truly, not the faintest,” said Tib. “Probably traders from the Western Archipelago?  There are all sorts of islands there we’ve never even heard of. It makes sense they wouldn’t have heard of us either. Or perhaps their ship had an interpreter.”

        Safy listened a bit more to make sure there was nothing else interesting about herself or the foreigners, but there was not. She snuck back to her cabin, thinking furiously about proving to the captain that her curses were not mean and bad—or at least, being honest with herself, did not have to be.

        In the morning, she shooed away all comers. Tib clucked her tongue worriedly, but she had no excuse to fear for Safy’s safety, and even a tutor, bodyguard, and lady-in-waiting had to give her imperial charge a little privacy now and then.

        It was just before lunch when she emerged, carrying her little sewing bag and smiling secretly to herself. She fetched the captain from where he was scowling over some carven thing—probably magic—and led him and Tib to the cabin where they had stashed the foreigners.

        The weaker of the two foreigners was sitting up in bed, watching the stronger take a turn around the room with his arm draped over the cook for support. He did not look so pleased with his companion’s progress as Safy might have expected. The stronger foreigner’s round face was too creased with concentration to express much of anything else.

        “Get him seated, will you?” she asked the cook, then remembered to add, “Please.”  The cook maneuvered the foreigner into his bed. Safy nodded in satisfaction.

        “Yesterday I told them a story,” she said. “You remember.”  Tib nodded along that she did remember. “It was about my uncle the Emperor and how I came to his notice. I don’t tell it much, because mostly people have already heard it.”

        The captain shifted on his feet. Safy recognized the signs of a man who was used to knowing what came next and took pity on him. “Well, it got me thinking. If I could curse my uncle’s courtiers with self-awareness, wouldn’t an awareness of other people in some ways be considered a curse, too?  I thought it would.”

        “Well you might,” said Tib, rather loudly, and then blushed. “Do go on.”

        Safy rummaged in her bag. “So I made something. Now, hold this,” she said to the stronger of the foreigners. She passed him her spindle, and he held it solemnly, with the air of one who is offering dubious assistance.

        “Princess, what are you doing?” Tib gasped from the doorway.

        “Just a moment more,” said Safy. “There!”  She took the spindle back from the foreigner and smiled at him. “Now your friend’s turn.”

        “I—I understand,” said the foreigner. “What did she do, the child?  What did she give me?”

        “The child is an imperial princess,” said Tib, “and there will be no impertinence offered.”

        “That’s all very well, but—”

        Safy passed the spindle to the weaker foreigner, who closed his hands around it obediently.

        “Thank you, child,” he said. “You’ve no idea how annoying it is to be shut up with people who don’t have the first notion what you’re saying, except for the likes of him.”

        Safy regarded the first foreigner with renewed curiosity. “What’s he like, then?”

        “Trouble,” he said darkly.

        “People say that about me all the time.”

        Despite himself, the weaker foreigner smiled. “I expect they do, lass.”

        “Princess,” said Tib wearily. “The lass is an imperial princess. Not that anyone including herself can manage to keep the fact in their minds for more than five seconds consecutively.”

        “A real imperial princess. Well,” said the weaker foreigner. “You may wish you had not told my companion that.”

        “Oh, shut up,” said the stronger one, and he could say it louder and with more strength.

        “I’m sure we’ll all want to know what on earth you mean by that,” said Safy, “but it’s a bit awkward interrogating people if you don’t know their names. You see that, don’t you?”

        The stronger one was Phenole, and the weaker one was Konkiu, and they each wished, if at all possible, to be housed in separate quarters. The captain frowned.

        “Now look,” he said. “You have had a first-rate imperial curse put on you, and that may make you feel that you are in the lap of luxury. But we’re shipwrecked. We simply don’t have the resources to give half-drowned foreigners whatever they like.”

        “We were exiled from our own people,” said Phenole, “and it was all his fault.”

        “We were exiled from our own people for good reason,” said Konkiu, “and he didn’t have the sense to see it.”

        Safy sat in a chair and leaned her elbows on the end of Konkiu’s bed, prepared to listen to their story.

        “Er, thank you, Imperial Highness,” said the captain. “Your curses are much appreciated, but I think we can handle the rest without you.”

        “Oh, I’m fine right here,” said Safy, putting her chin in her hands and regarding Konkiu.

        “I would really rather prefer, Imperial Highness—”

        To Safy’s surprise, it was Tib who came to her rescue. “I would think it would only be good sense to let her hear. She may need to deploy her talents further for the good of all of us—limitedly, of course, dear.”

        “Of course,” agreed Safy. “Unlimited curses are stupid.”

        Safy could see too much of the whites of their eyes, the captain and the cook and the foreigners all together, but no one tried to make her leave.

        Konkiu took a deep breath and began. Though his voice was weak, they stayed quiet enough that they could all hear him easily. “I was a junior officer in the fleet of our Glorious Republic. I worked closely with the admiral of the fleet. And I found that he was—he was not only bent on war, but he was willing to lie to our own people to make that happen. He has told them so many lies about your aggression, about deaths that never happened, and he—”

        “He wants what is best for the Glorious Republic,” said Phenole loudly. “You are a fool for interfering.”

        “What Glorious Republic?” asked Safy. “What makes it so glorious?”

        Phenole shook his head. “Your ignorance will soon be remedied, as the ignorance of all your people will.”

        “We have only recently discovered your continents,” said Konkiu. “Our great leaders determined that it would be best if we studied you in secret at first, and—the admiralty was using that delay, that secrecy, as an excuse to spread propaganda and misinformation.”

        “And this one,” said Phenole, loudly enough that Safy felt sure the sailors out on the shore could hear him, “this one has to rail at the admiral himself, in person, and drag me into it.”

        “You were the source of my information!” Konkiu protested. “Without you, I knew nothing.”

        “Without me you are nothing!” said Phenole. “And this is the thanks I get. Confrontation. Exile. Disgrace. A little rowboat without a motivator!  Nearly death, if you had any say in it, and even if the savages here—”

        “We’re shipwrecked, not savages,” Safy objected.

        Phenole sneered. “Even if these shipwrecked savages manage to get home and properly conquered by our armies, we probably won’t be accepted back into the ranks—certainly not at the rank I rightfully earned.”

        “I see the problem,” said the captain gravely, “and I am sorry to both of you for your misfortunes.”

        “I regret that I will be able to do nothing to prevent this war, from where I am,” said Konkiu. “I am deeply sorry. Your people will almost certainly suffer needlessly, and now that I know that my own officers were lying, I feel sure that you are a peaceful people, filled with joy and love and beauty.”

        Tib had to leave the cabin suddenly. Safy wondered why, but the foreigners were a more immediate problem. “Do you mean you would like it if you could get back to your own ship?” she asked.

        Konkiu sighed. “I could do nothing further there to prevent this war, but if I was on the mainland with your people....”

        “Would you do the same?”  She cocked her head at Phenole.

        “In a heartbeat. I would explain to them again how it was all this idiot and none of my doing, and that I would never allow him to be privy to such sensitive information again. I might be demoted, but it would be worth it to share in the triumph of our Glorious Republic.”

        “Rather,” said Safy, trying to sound more impressed than she felt. “I’ll just curse your ship off course so you can row back to it, then?  How’s that?”

        “Safy!” said Tib, having returned just in time to hear this.

        “Well, if they’re trying to make war on us anyway,” protested Safy. “I hardly think anybody could object to me cursing a ship that wanted to attack us.”

        “An Imperial Princess uses her curses sparingly,” said Tib, but the narrow-eyed look she gave Safy was more skeptical than remonstrative. Safy knew that Tib doubted her affection for the arrogant Phenole very much—even more so since she had just met him—and could not see how such a curse would help Safy or anyone she did care about. Safy smiled. Let her wonder.

        She retired to her cabin, humming, and contemplated how to make the curse reach a sailing ship in motion, one she had never seen. It was one of the advantages of curses over ordinary spells, that they could go over the water, of course, but they still had to be structured carefully: the anchor point, the draw, the target described with the most care of all, the shape and extent.... Safy shook her head in disgust at Tib saying that a curse should not be unlimited. Of course it should not!  If nothing else, the energy that that would require would leave people without magic for miles around, and no member of the imperial family would do that for any but the most dire of reasons. Tib really could stop treating her like a child.

        No, the question was how to work with the natural forces, to make the curse flow with the forces of nature and with the people using magic around it. Certainly one could curse a ship to stand still in the ocean, but the disruption it would cause would be very hard to predict and manage. Safy could do better, she felt sure. She even had an idea of how.

        When she finished attaching the foreign ship’s curse to a coconut shell, Safy pondered her next move, which she expected she would have about a day to complete. For this she approached the captain, who was brooding again. She felt it would be good to take him out of himself.

        “How far could we go, do you think, without the motivator?”

        The captain sighed. “As far as you like, Imperial Highness, but it’s not just how far that matters, it’s in what direction. If we just sailed around aimlessly, it wouldn’t do us much good, and we haven’t the same kind of equipment old-fashioned people used to have before they understood about using magic for navigation.”

        “But—oh, say, out there a mile or two offshore of the point. Could we get to that point pretty accurately without a motivator?”

        “Certainly, at that distance the inaccuracies would not add up to anything insurmountable, and sail power would be more than enough, particularly on a fine day—no chance of getting becalmed at that distance and in these waters.”

        “Well then.”  Safy smiled. “Have the sailors make ready, Captain. I’ll handle our motivator problems and the foreigners all at once.”

        “That’s awfully kind of you, Imperial Highness, but do you think you could be a bit more... ah, forthcoming?  Perhaps?”

        “No, that’s all right, Captain. Trust me.”

        From the ashen look about his lips, she did not think he was listening very well. Grown-ups often did not.

        The next morning she filled her best knapsack and handed it to Phenole. “Here you are,” she said. “Take one of the rowboats. We won’t mind. Try to catch up to your ship. They ought to be passing by downwind about a mile out, in the afternoon—you can even make up the distance and make it sooner if you work at it.”

        He looked at her suspiciously. “How?”

        Safy smiled. It was always nicest when she didn’t have to lie. “Remember how I cursed you to understanding, so you could speak our language?  Well, I put another curse on the knapsack and you, so that you would get what you want. It’s one of the things we learn very early, the curse of getting what you want.”

        “You have strange and primitive notions of magic, child,” said Phenole, “but I suppose I thank you. It could hardly be worse than huddling here in the wreckage.”

        Safy privately felt that the ship looked lovely, particularly as the captain was, at her advice, having the sailors prepare it for departure even without motive devices. But she gave Phenole another sunny smile and waved as he rowed away.

        “All right, we can go now,” she told the captain about an hour later.

        “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.

        But they had not to get very far from shore before they could see the foreign ship sinking, its crew scrambling into lifeboats as best they could. Safy stood next to Konkiu at the rail. “Do you like it?” she said. “That’s one of mine. I sent it with Phenole.”

        “You cursed child!” said Konkiu.

        “Cursing,” Safy corrected. “Not cursed.”  She twisted her fingers around the deck railing, swinging gently against it. “I thought you didn’t like your old crew. I thought you wanted their plots thwarted.”

        “Not to the point of killing them all!”

        “I haven’t killed them all,” said Safy. “Look, they’re getting in the little boats. They’ll find the island just as we did. Plenty of mangoes and crabs.”

        “And what of Phenole?”

        Safy squirmed. One of the reasons cursing people with getting what they wanted got taught so early is that it was a classic, and known to be nasty. “I gave him what he wanted,” she said in her youngest voice, and it sounded false even to her.

        Konkiu turned away in disgust.

        “Look,” she said to his back. “You didn’t want your people to fight us. Now they won’t. They’ll have a jolly time eating crabs. I did. And maybe they’ll let Phenole stay with them, and maybe they’ll forgive him in time. He might have wanted quite a lot of things. Most people do. It’s why the curse gets so involved.”

        “You are a thoroughly unnatural child,” he said, without turning around.

        Safy laughed despite herself. “Unnatural?  Of course I am. I’m an Imperial Princess. Do your Imperial Princesses come out ordinary?”

        He was not going to speak to her. She shrugged and found the captain standing down the rail, staring out at the sea and the wreck of the foreign ship.

        “Send our sailors down to dive,” said Safy. “I cursed them with their motive device falling straight through their hull to the bottom of the sea. We can pick it up and use it.”

        The captain blanched, and Safy realized that that was his worst nightmare, far worse than being shipwrecked with an importunate member of the Imperial family.

        “Don’t worry,” she said kindly. “I’d never do it to us.”

        “Thank you, my—uh—your—uh—Imperial Highness,” said the captain.

        Safy sighed. He was likely to be tedious for the rest of the trip. She hoped the rest of the crew wouldn’t follow suit. “Don’t mention it to the sailors, all right?”

        “No, Imperial Highness,” said the captain. “Of course not.”

        “It wouldn’t do to worry them,” she said. “They’ve had enough to think of.” He nodded fervently along with her.

        Safy skipped along the deck, looking out at the waves and thinking of all her Imperial uncle would have to say to the stories she would tell him of how she had saved their ship, and sunk an enemy one too, with just two cleverly applied curses.

Copyright © 2012 Marissa Lingen

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Marissa Lingen lives in the Minneapolis area with two large men and one small dog. Her work has appeared in Analog, Baen’s Universe, Nature, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaeless Skies, among others.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

LUCK FISH

by Peta Freestone

        Rain only falls once a year. Each time it does, Masozi and the other children scramble on their hands and knees in the mud, snatching up handfuls of fish as the slick-scaled creatures wriggle up through the ground. The Fishers toss their catch into tight-woven baskets where each fingerling flips and writhes until its life stutters to a halt under a hundred other tiny bodies.

        Anyone who has seen enough Rain Days to be a Builder is out beyond the village, molding bricks from the precious mud. The older Fishers—girls with fresh budded breasts and boys with dark-smudged upper lips like Masozi—help the little ones, teaching them to corner their catch under the thatched eaves of mudbrick huts.

        Today is Rain Day. None of the villagers knew it when they rolled from their bed mats this morning, but all of them know it now. Clouds roll over the edge of the sky and towards the village, their undersides full as if swollen with child. The adults prepare their brick molds. The children fetch their catch baskets. All stand in the shelter of the doorways, waiting for the clouds to cover the sun and turn the air moist and mineral fresh. Each breath comes quiet and careful, eyes turn to the ground, gazes swing back and forth along the streets as if watching the rick-rock of a baby’s cloth cradle. Everyone wants to see the first raindrop stain the hard-packed dirt. It is said that to see the first drop brings love; to find the first fish brings luck.

        Right down to the youngest of Fishers—who wait expectantly next to catch baskets almost as tall as they—the whole village knows the story by heart. The rain fish are a gift from the three moons. Before sun’s anger dried up the oceans, the three sisters of the night sky took the last fish eggs from the seabed. Worried for the people, the moons hid the roe under dry ground where their day brother would not find them.

        Ever since, from Masozi’s village to the settlements beneath the Broken Mountains beyond the horizon, the people have relied on the rain fish to survive the longest months of the hot season. When brother sun has burned every blade of green from the savannah and the goats are too poke-ribbed to bear kids or give milk, it is the dried fish that keep the people alive.

        This is why each Rain Day, with the smell of wet filling their noses and coating their tongues, every Fisher works to fill their family’s catch baskets, lugging the full vessels straight to the drying sheds. But only on Rain Day. After that, vengeful sun returns to the plain, bloating up the bellies of the dead fish and of any villager who dares eat them.

        Masozi waits on the front stoop of his best friend Themba’s hut, beneath the carved mud brick lintel. The village leader, straight-backed even after a lifetime of herding and building, walks up and down the rows of dwellings. She carries a clay jar of thumb-deep water, the liquid thick with silt from the near-empty village well. As she did with each Fisher before them, she pauses in front of Themba and Masozi and proffers the vessel of opaque fluid.

        Solemnly, the two friends dip fingertips cross-hatched with basket weaving scars into the bucket. They paint the moisture first over the fish and moon carvings of the doorway, then in a stripe across each other’s forehead. The old woman continues to the next hut and the two Fishers resume their shoulder-to-shoulder stance, Masozi looking left up the street, Themba scouring their right. Cloud shadows lumber into the village like the giant grey herd creatures from a children’s song.

        When the leader is three huts away, Themba whispers excitedly: “Sozi, we should just tip the water on the ground. We could have fresh fish all year!”

        Masozi sighs. Typical Themba. Always blurting crazy ideas before her head has caught up with her tongue, as if she was the only one who could think new thoughts. He nods at the carvings on the doorway. “You’re not a sky sister, little lion.” Then he widens his eyes in mock awe. “Or do silver scales appear every time you piss in the dust?”

        Themba harrumphs, elbows him in the ribs and looks back to her side of the street.

        Rain Day has started like this—half with ceremony and half with banter—since Masozi’s third and Themba’s first. Back then, Themba was as small and timid as a dune mouse. Compared with Masozi’s near-man growth, she’s still short. Pale, too, especially where the ochre-red water stains her face. But these moons he thinks she is as brave as any of the village boys, as brave as the lion for which he’s called her for as long as he can remember. He doesn’t tell her that, though. He says the name is for her ruff of tangled hair, snub nose and cat-like yellow eyes.

        “There!” Themba whispers, careful not to draw anyone else’s attention. “Sozi, my man, look!”

        Out in the street, a damp spot no bigger than a goat’s eye stains the dust. Within a moment it vanishes, sucked down into the hungry dirt. Masozi wonders if the first drop finds a fish egg or if it gets lost on its way. What if other drops are faster, stronger? Will they win the race?

        Other Fishers shout from several huts up, where they think they’ve seen their own first drops. Then comes the flood. Masozi and Themba grin at each other. As one, they leap out into the street, throw their heads back and open their mouths to the downpour. Each fat drop tastes of the sky.

        Across the way, three girls laugh and shriek as the rain soaks their shifts of finely spun goat’s wool. Masozi should only have eyes for the ground, for the first rain fish, but he finds himself watching the tallest girl. All the boys in the village know her name but wish they had more than that. Manyara.

        She is one Rain Day older than Masozi but the distance between them is greater. A girl like Manyara will have her choice of a husband. She’ll choose a boy with many brothers and sisters, one from a big family that fills more catch baskets each Rain Day than they could ever need. A family with enough Builders to keep everyone comfortably shaded from the dry season sun. Why would Manyara ever look at him?

        The thought doesn’t stop him watching, wishing. Manyara holds her arms above her head and twirls in the rain, her footsteps light and sure even on the mud-slick street. Her skin is the color of far off sandstone cliffs at dawn, banded light and dark by the sun’s defeat at hem and cuffs. In between their grabs for slippery fish, the other boy Fishers sneak glances at the curve of her breasts, her nipples outlined where her dress plasters her body. But it is the copper bands encircling her throat that Masozi’s eyes are drawn to. The metal rings make most of the village girls’ necks seem short and stocky. On Manyara, they only heighten her grace.

        Masozi starts at a yank on his sleeve. Fist balled at her hip, Themba points to the ground with her other hand. Her mouth moves, but he can’t hear any words over the rain. Puddles pool at their feet but there isn’t a hint of movement. Masozi gives Themba a distracted smile and lets his attention drift back to Manyara.

        Themba shouts at him, pointing to the red mud again. Sure enough, like the first star waking at dusk, a single fish wriggles up between Themba’s toes.

        Masozi swoops. Luck fish!

        “Hey!” Themba lunges at him.

        He dances out of the way and bites off the squirming fish’s head, chews once, twice and swallows. “Too slow!”

        “Thief!” Themba stamps a heel in the mud, rain flowing down her face. “That’s my fish. My luck.”

        Masozi holds the twitching carcass above his head, out of Themba’s reach. “Make your own luck this year, little lion.” He takes another bite and tries to grin, but it’s all he can do not to cringe as a single fish scale cuts into the gum between his two front teeth.

        More and more fish nose their way up through the mud and flip-flop around until they find a puddle. Fishers up and down the streets fill their baskets with birdlike darting movements. Themba joins them. There isn’t much time. The fish will stop waking when the rain stops falling.

        Masozi gnaws his luck fish and does his best to fill his catch basket with his free hand. When he swallows the tail, he chances another look at Manyara. She stares straight back at him, eyes a brighter green than the first shoots after Rain Day.

* * *

        Masozi is glad he had the luck fish last Rain Day. He still feels bad for Themba but she’ll have more chances. He won’t though, as this will be his last year as a Fisher. He’s sure of it. His grandmother will name him a Builder and send him to the Moon Festival beyond the border of his village’s land. He’s old enough to dance in the group of other newly named men until a girl with four neck circlets chooses him for a husband. Old enough to have kissed Manyara for hours behind her family’s fish-drying sheds. Just like he is kissing her now.

        Here in the dust, with the delicious tang of dried fish floating about them, Masozi sits with his back against a warm mud brick wall. Manyara straddles his lap. She is soothing cactus pulp on Masozi’s sunburned skin, like his life was a bristle-bush husk before she noticed him, spiked and dry.

        Before last Rain Day, he had thought any dreams of Manyara to be folly. He wasn’t the tallest or the strongest among the near-men, and it was just him and his father since his mother’s family had abandoned them after her death. What did he have to offer? A one-room hut, one crumbling fish-drying shed, a mere handful of frayed catch-baskets, and only one Fisher to fill them. Taunts from Masozi’s childhood used to honk and squawk in his head whenever he thought about it. But now that Manyara’s arms loop around him, her breath sweet from the honeygrass pods she chews, the painful memories flee as fast as giant traveler geese winging south after Rain Day.

        As they kiss, Masozi runs his hand over Manyara’s shoulder and up to her neck like he has done on a hundred days before. His fingertips count the copper circlets resting in the hollow of her collarbone. Each metal ring is smaller and higher than the last and is engraved with a symbol marking the major events in a girl’s life. First Rain Day—a cloud half covering the sun. First fish caught single-handedly—a catch basket. First woman’s blood—Chausiku, the nearest of the three sister moons.

        Masozi’s fingers touch a fourth circlet, its curve interrupted by the sharp lines of an etched mud brick. He jerks his mouth away from Manyara’s. “What’s that?” he asks, hating the panic that weaves between his words.

        Manyara drops her hands from about him. “You know what it is. Mother named me a Builder.”

        “Already? Why didn’t you tell me?  How can you sit there and say that, as if,” he sucks in a breath, “as if you just finished weaving a basket?”

        Manyara pouts. “Don’t be angry. It’s not my fault.”

        Masozi rubs his thumb over the fourth copper ring. It burns like an ember in the sunset light. There is just enough room for him to hook his first finger underneath the metal band, made that way in case Manyara is still growing. He tugs at the circlet, pulling her face close to his again. “Will you choose me?”

        “How many times do I have to tell you?”

        “But what if Grandmother sends me to a different Festival to the one your mother chooses? Or if I hurt my ankle and I can’t dance.”  Masozi doesn’t want to ask the final question, but Rain Day is overdue, so this may be his last chance. “What if I’m still a Fisher this year?”

        Manyara’s face stills. “I will wait for you.”

        Masozi steadies his breathing and straightens his back. These doubts are foolish—the cawing fears of a child. There will be no room for such things when he is making bricks with his own moulds.

* * *

        In the dimness of the hut he shares with his father, Masozi holds his hands in front of him, palms up and empty. “Father, please. It’s my time. Themba’s brother has been named a Builder, and I have fished as many Rain Days as he.”

        “You are not Themba’s brother.” Masozi’s father’s presence dominates the hut even from where he sits on the swept earth floor, peeling the thorns from a branch to fashion a new goat switch, his bad leg splayed out to the side.

        “But Father, I—”

        His father looks up. “Enough. We need the fish.”

        “But if I were a Builder I’d put up more drying sheds. Then we’d have more fish than we can wave a switch at.”

        “You and which village? Who will fish for us while you build and I’m away with the herd?”

        “Manyara will choose me. She’ll give me children. We’ll loan fish from the big families. Pay them back in the following cycles. Everything will flow like rain.”

        Masozi’s father rubs at the scars that ripple down his leg like a snake trail in the sand. “When we have enough goats, I will ask your grandmother to name you. Not before.”

        The words make Masozi’s throat tighten. Not replying feels the same as choking on fish bones, but he says nothing. Instead, he pushes aside the heavy goat’s wool door-cover and steps into the searing heat.

        He works his way along the rows of huts, moving quickly between the shadows. Even though it is late in the day, the sun still bites. Within minutes he finds himself behind Manyara’s family’s fish-drying shed. He slumps down in the shade to wait for her, closing his eyes against the slanting rays of sunset.

        When Masozi wakes, it is dark. Chausiku has risen, casting just enough light to make the shadows darker than the plain. Manyara hasn’t come. Masozi swallows down the worry that writhes in his belly. There are many reasons why she might not have been able to meet him today. He will see her tomorrow, he is sure.

        On the way home, he passes by Themba’s hut. The door-cover is rolled up to let the cool night air inside. Themba sits on the stoop, making sure the last of her family’s goat cheese for the season doesn’t burn on the outdoor cooking hearth. “Hey Sozi,” she calls, smiling almost shyly, firelight dancing over her face.

        Masozi waves and jogs over to her. “Have you seen Manyara?”

        Themba’s smile flattens. Her eyebrows arch up as if they’re fuzzy tree grubs and Masozi has shaken their branch. When she talks, she mimics a deep, male voice, “Hey Themba, how goes it? Sorry we haven’t seen each other much this season, Father has kept me busy with the herd, and—”

        “Ach, Themb, don’t be like that. You know how it is with me and Manyara. You should get used to it.”

        A funny little laugh bubbles from Themba’s lips, and she lowers her eyes to the slabs of cooking cheese. “I’ll get used to it when Rain Day comes every time I bleed.”

        Masozi juts his chin. “She’s going to choose me when I’m named a Builder, you know.”

        “Sure, Sozi. Sure.”

        “What do you mean by that?”

        “Manyara left with my brother two nights ago. Mother named him a Builder. That girl’s a jackal. She’ll have her teeth into the most beautiful man as soon as she gets to the Festival.” The cheese sizzles and hisses as Themba flips it over. “I mean, the way she looked at Zuberi when she found out he was named? Eh.”

        Masozi’s legs wobble. The fish bones are in his throat again, and his flesh stands up in prickle lizard bumps. “What?”

        “Are your ears broken or something? My brother. Manyara. Jackal-girl got her fourth ring. Let it go, my man.”

        Masozi scowls. “Don’t call me that.”

        “What?”

        “Man. I’m not a man, yet.”

        “Close enough,” she says with a shrug. “And I’ve always called you that.”

        “You shouldn’t.” Stiffly, Masozi pushes himself to his feet, not yet trusting his legs. Is this the weakness his father feels? “I’m not your man. Never was.”

        Themba flinches, looks down at the ground, draws in the dust with her big toe.

        Masozi walks away.

* * *

        After his father’s shadow melts into the night, driving the herd towards the hope of the last grass in the shadow of the Broken Mountains, Masozi dons his cloak. The stores basket in the corner of the hut is almost empty, but he snatches up two handfuls all the same and wraps the dried rain fish in the ceremonial Moon Festival skirt that his father had worn when Masozi’s mother chose him. He balances the load by tying on a water skin and drapes the makeshift pack across his shoulder blades. Then he steals into the dry cold of the desert night.

        The second moon sets before he even reaches the border of the village lands. Cracked plains earth gives way to sand beneath his feet. When the third moon sets, he hunkers down on what will at sunrise be the shady side of a dune.

        Halfway through his fourth night on foot, Masozi spots campfire light. Drum beats and whistles, shrieks and laughter carry to him on the wind. He creeps closer, peering through a copse of dead thorn-bush. Relief washes over him like precious rain when he sees so many men still dancing. Girls cluster together, giggling and pointing as they prepare to make their choice.

        Masozi picks out Manyara at the edge of the group, standing half a head taller than the others. Themba’s brother waits behind her wearing his ceremonial skirt and jewelry, string upon string of ochred stone beads looped around his upper arms and across his bare chest. Masozi wonders why a newly named man wouldn’t dance. Perhaps his heart is still with a Fisher in the village, just the same as Manyara’s.

        But as Masozi watches, Manyara turns her back on the drums and the sprays of sand sent flying by stomping feet. She reaches up and fondles one of the many strings of Themba’s brother’s stone beads, dark red against her palm. He puts his hands around her waist and picks her up. She wraps her legs around the small of his back and tips her head back with laughter, setting the copper circlets around her neck tinkling.

        Mazosi feels the warmth leave his body as if a giant bloodworm, like the ones at the bottom of the village well, has burrowed under his skin and begun to suck the life from him. If he doesn’t do something, he will be a husk again soon. All the moons are up now, adding to the campfire light. But he still has the shelter of the bushes, so he drops his belongings and shrugs out of his cloak. He shakes the last of the dried fish from his father’s skirt and wraps it around his waist, tying it off with its simple string of beads.

        Shortly after he enters the camp, a strong arm blocks his way.

        “What do you think you’re doing, boy?” The voice doesn’t come from the muscled Builder but from the old woman beside him.

        Masozi doesn’t need to study the weathered face. The leader of his village is unmistakable. “I’ve come to dance,” he manages.

        The village leader’s features pinch together, her face a worn and wrinkled goat hide. “I know your father,” her voice rasps like an asp shedding its skin, but there’s stone beneath. She pokes him in the chest with a bony finger. “You’re no Builder. Boys do not dance the Festival.”

        Heat floods Masozi’s cheeks as he realizes others in the camp are watching. How pathetic they must think him, standing here with only one string of faded beads, shrinking back under the gaze of the village leader, never having learned from his mother how to address her properly. Then Manyara sees him. She untangles herself from Themba’s brother and runs across the main circle of sand toward them. Like birds returning after Rain Day, Masozi’s spirits soar.

        “Masozi! What are you doing here?”

        “What are you doing with him? You said you’d choose me!”

        “What did you expect me to do? You haven’t been named.”

        “But you said you love me.”

        “I have to look after my family. Zuberi has five brothers and sisters. I—”

        Masozi doesn’t hear her words. His blood thrums in his ears, louder than the Festival drums in the distance. Manyara is soothing Themba’s brother, just like she used to soothe him. Reeling, he flinches away from the harsh camp light and the harsher stares and slinks back into the night. When he chances a look over his shoulder, Manyara is only a faceless shadow.

        The way home seems longer. His feet drag and his head feels dried out, the same as his now-empty water skin. He doesn’t realize when the moonlight vanishes. Doesn’t see the clouds until he trips on the remains of an ancient grazing animal—its bone and twisted horns long turned to rock—and realizes there’s no light but for the stars near the horizon.

        A drop of water falls on his foot. No, he thinks, it can’t be. He looks to the sky directly above. Another drop splashes his upturned cheek. No, it’s too early. He has no baskets, no drying sheds. He stumbles into a jog.

        Thunder growls at his heels like a pack of black-muzzled plains dogs on the hunt, teeth snapping lightning white all around him. It sets him to running, blind running. He sprints across the saltpans as the rain falls, feet slapping in the puddles and squishing little silver bodies back into the deepening mud.

* * *

        Night is the only refuge during the hot season and, in the months since Rain Day, Masozi’s only refuge from his shame. He sits on his front stoop with a knife in his hand. The blade shines in the moonlight. With only a handful of dead fish left on the ground by the time he returned from the Moon Festival, and now that the goat udders have run dry for the year, he and his father are out of food.

        He studies the blade; imagines jerking it across the milky throat of his father’s best animal. It’s almost like he can hear the beast’s gurgled squeal before it goes limp, feel the sticky blood run over his hands as he collects the precious liquid in an ochre stained pot.

        The chirping of night insects falls silent around him. He looks up. A figure approaches from the village center. Themba has avoided him since last Rain Day, but now she heads straight toward him, dragging a basket that Masozi guesses weighs as much as she does.

        When she reaches him, she steadies the basket in the dirt. Then she steps forward and slaps Masozi across the face. Hard. “Stupid boy.”

        Masozi touches his cheek, blinks once, twice.

        Themba points to the basket. “Don’t think this means we’re friends.” She shakes her head. “Not that it matters. I’m leaving.”

        He gapes up at her.

        She looks moonward, as if asking the three sisters whether their brother has burned out Masozi’s brains. “Now that they have Manyara, and my youngest sister is ready to fish, my family doesn’t need me. I’m starting for the Broken Mountains tomorrow.”

        “What for?”

        “Stone. I’m going to build an extra well. If the water doesn’t bring fish, it will at least keep the grass alive and the goats fed.” Turning on her heel, she starts back to the village with chin held high. There’s no break to her stride, no glance over her shoulder.

        Masozi scowls after her. Some friend Themba is, to talk like that. Who is she to say who’s stupid, what with all her crazy ideas? And how was any of this his fault?  If not for Themba’s brother, Manyara would have come back home to him. Or if his father had just had enough faith in him to have him named Builder, he would have danced and Manyara would have chosen him. But in the light of Chausiku, he knows these are lies.

        He leans forward and slices through the thong on the cover of the basket. Hundreds of sunken eyes stare accusingly up at him.

        It is more fish than Masozi has ever collected in a single Rain Day. He should be relieved—no goat would have to die this season. But Themba’s receding shadow cuts into him in a way no knife ever has.

        He drops the blade and begins to cry. Wrapping his arms around his knees, he pulls his chin to his chest. Tears run down his nose to drip into the dust. If it were daytime, he would see the ground between his feet turn damp and dark, but in the moonlight he doesn’t notice—until a speck of silver glints up at him.

        It makes him stop still, eyes wide. A tiny head wriggles free. Out pops a fin, and another, until the fish flips from the dirt. For a moment, he hesitates. Then he reaches down, cups the fish in his hands and runs after Themba.

        He catches up to her just before she pulls aside the door-cover to her hut. His sides heave from the run so he doesn’t talk. He simply holds out the fish. Its mouth opens and closes, gasping for air just like him.

        As if it were Rain Day, they stand together on the stoop, both staring at the dying miracle in Masozi’s palm. Finally, the fish stills.

        Themba eases his hand away, her touch gentle. “Take it,” she says. “I make my own luck.”

        Masozi’s thoughts race over each other. “I’ll dry it for you. Keep it here until you get back. In case you change your mind.”

        Themba smiles, lion yellow eyes reflecting Chausiku’s light.

        It’s the best smile Masozi has ever seen.

Copyright © 2012 Peta Freestone

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Peta Freestone is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop (San Diego, 2011) and edits Scape (scapezine.com), the magazine of YA speculative fiction. She can crack a whip with more snap than Indiana Jones, has had a memento mori moment with an unearthed skull in the jungle, and will submit her PhD in 2013. Other than “Luck Fish,” her work has appeared in the Penguin Books anthology Things a Map Won’t Show You. She can be hunted down on Twitter via the cryptic handle: @PetaFreestone.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

UNSILENCED

by Karalynn Lee

        Veillen moved through the marble and alabaster halls of the palace as softly as any spirit: as though it was she who had died, she thought resentfully, instead of her father. But the One-Eyed Emperor’s body had been placed within its tomb with all the proper rituals a full moon ago, and his daughter, in turn, was trapped in the palace.

        My lady empress, the courtiers and servants murmured when she passed them in the hallways, and they would make obeisance, but their eyes were full of bright hard smiles, and the echoes of their laughter would come to her once she turned the corner. They would give her an appellation soon, either the Ghost Empress or the Silent Empress. Veillen possessed the dry, utter certainty that more than her father’s memory remained, and it was his presence that still ruled here, as heavy as his jeweled crown.

        Veillen never wore it, and she rarely attended court in any case. It was always crowded with petitioners, those who rode or walked or crawled to court to have their grievances addressed. Their raw needs and greed could never be dealt with reasonably, and it took guardsmen to make them leave as they had come, unsatisfied. He had had only one eye, her father, and they said that all it saw was justice. How could she compare?

        Then there were the lords and ladies, dressed in their fine damasks and samite, who dueled with sly oiled barbs as well as with swords. They offered their witticisms to her, like velvet-sheathed blades. The velvet, they collected again, blood-spotted. She preferred the way they had ignored her when she was only the over-tall girl who drifted in to lean silently in the corner, then left again to no one’s notice. The title of heir had meant little then; no one had expected the One-Eyed Emperor to ever die, and she had just been the unpretty daughter of a celebrated beauty—the only woman to hold his interest through and past pregnancy, and so the only one to bear an acknowledged child.

        Those unacknowledged were forming their own factions, she knew. Arabris held the loyalty of the guards in his gauntleted fist, while Misren offered sweet promises to the nobles. And Iridru, another one of her half-brothers, had been kind to her as a child, but she was wary of him now. As of late, his eyes followed her too closely wherever she went....

        As though that thought had summoned him, she found him pacing alongside her now. His stride matched hers so precisely that she hadn’t realized he had joined her. She stopped, and Iridru did as well.

        “Why are you following me?” she demanded. They were of a height, which let her glare straight at him, but his eyes were as mild and green as ever.

        He hitched up one shoulder in a half-shrug. “I wanted to talk to you. I’ve seen so little of you since Father died.”

        It had been even longer; they’d been childhood friends, but then he’d left to serve as regent in some distant territory, returning only recently for the funeral. Surely he didn’t think he could slide back into that old intimacy, especially now that she was empress. She chose her words to remind him of this. “It’s no casual pastime, ruling.”

        “But that’s the point. You’re never in court.”  He leaned against the wall opposite her.

        She felt trapped, and it made her voice sharp. “And I can only rule from there?  My power extends nowhere else?”

        “Veillen.”  He touched her arm softly, as though gentling a restless mare; despite herself, she felt the tension leave her. “You have to exercise rule over the court as well—that’s where the nobles are. And they’re frightened. They think you’re drawing power to yourself quietly, and it worries them that you have no visible counselors. How much would it cost you to reassure them?”

        Now she understood which side of the board he was playing on. “And you’d like to be one of those counselors,” she said dryly.

        He offered her a faint smile. “I’m already acting like one, aren’t I?”

        She couldn’t help a laugh, more out of relief than mirth. She was glad he was allying himself with her, unlike her other half-brothers. “I’ll be glad of your advice,” she said. “But can we talk later?  I’m on my way elsewhere.”

        “Where to?”  He took her hand and set it upon his arm, ready to escort her.

        She said reluctantly, “The Basilisk’s garden.”  There had been a message, a summons she could not ignore, even though it had been meant for her father and not for her.

        Iridru’s brows furrowed as his arm dropped. “I always thought that place would dissolve away once Father was gone,” he murmured. “But of course not.”

        “Of course not,” she said. “Considering its maker. I’ll see you later?”

        When he nodded, Veillen stepped past him, and this time he made no move to follow her. Mention of the Basilisk did that to men.

        The garden had once frightened her too, but it had unexpectedly become her refuge. Her father had come here often, meaning that no one else dared, and even now when he was dead (she had seen the body, wrapped in steel and gold, before the entrance to the tomb was closed), she was its only visitor.

        It had inhabitants of a sort, though. The entrance was guarded by a lion, snarling and set in an eternal crouch. She ran her fingers through the coarse threads of its mane as she passed it. To one side a wide-eyed gazelle gathered itself to bolt, and a grave, elegant bird with a slender long neck and great white wings slowed its descent to the pond’s edge. Within the waters, she knew, was a luminescent eel with long whiskers, always curling just to the left.

        And deeper inside, when the sense of wonder had dimmed, there was a dun wyvern. It had lived in the great desert to the south, her father had told her, and it still reared back, its barbed tail raised overhead, in the same readiness to strike the man who had found it. When she asked him how he had ever conquered the desert when creatures like these walked the sands, he had looked at her with the same amused half-smile he wore in court and said, “You only need take the borders of a place to call it yours. Consider the god, Veillen.”  The God of Horizons never ruled within his realm; merely bounded it.

        Is that how you claimed me as your daughter? she wondered now. You surrounded every part of my life and yet never actually bothered yourself with me.

        She followed the inward curve of the pond and passed under a tree whose branches looked more like roots, in which a black-and-ruby spider forever paused in the midst of weaving a silken cage about itself. Just beyond stood the Basilisk.

        No matter how many layers of the emperor’s footsteps were pressed upon the paths, this was the Basilisk’s garden. Every creature reminded her of it. Even today he bore in his hands a dusky moth, traceries of silver edging its wings in the outline of bold predator’s eyes. He balanced it upon the softly furred petal of an orchid and said, “I brought it from the southern islands for the emperor.”

        “The emperor is dead,” she said.

        “I know.”

        She didn’t know what reaction she had expected, but she thought there should at least be one, and he had none at all.

        “You traveled the world for him,” she marveled. “How did he win your loyalty?

        “It was a bargain we made,” he said. “Nothing more. And it is done now.”

        “So you are bound to nothing at all, then....”

        His sardonic gaze flicked up to her then moved away, as though there were nothing of interest to be found. “Once before, there was a woman.”

        “She died,” Veillen said with certainty, then flushed when she realized that her words had been cruel.

        He only said, “Yes. But before that, she met the One-Eyed Emperor. She was his consort until she died bearing you.”

        “My mother left you for him?”  Veillen tried to shape her mind around the idea.

        “Few women can resist an emperor,” he murmured.

        “Yet you are a mage—”  Emperors rose and fell with each generation. But there had only ever been and only ever would be four mages. They had walked to each end of the world to find the God of Horizons and ask for his favor. And in finding him, it was said, they had also moved past the borders of mortal lifetimes and powers.

        “Fittingly, there are limits to our power,” he said. “One of the other mages tried to compel love, and failed. And I could not capture your mother’s heart, no matter how much I wished to. Instead I seek to fashion a reminder of her. That is the hold that your father had over me.”

        “He had something of hers?”  She wondered whether it was in her father’s rooms, somewhere she could find it, or if she had inadvertently buried it with him.

        “I wanted the last full sight of her. Only he could give me that. And to give me that image, he gave me his eye.”

        She flinched. “You could see her through it?”

        “I bargained with the eastmage. That is her gift, that of sight. Mine could do no more than keep the eye from rotting, or capture the image once the eastmage called it forth.”

        Frost settled across her bones. “What did you do with his eye afterward?”

        “I had no need of it then, and he wanted it. It is set in the crown.”

        Something deep within her stilled and she thought she would fall, because the world was tilting. But there was solid stone beneath her, and she set one foot upon it, then another, and then she was running back to the palace, heedless of everything but reaching her rooms. There were doors in her way; she flung them aside and halted only to snatch the crown up.

        The cold black gem at the front was no opal but indeed an eye. It watched her, the way it had been watching her all this time: the ghost whose breath brushed the back of her neck wherever she went in the palace.

        The Basilisk entered, and she turned to him.

        “He’s been watching me all this time?”  She had to whisper her outrage; it was too large to voice.

        “He is dead,” the Basilisk said.

        “His eye is not!”

        “Do you want me to release it?”

        She thought of it finally beginning to rot while still set in the crown, and she gagged. “No.”  But she turned the crown away so that whatever fragment of her father still lived and could see through that eye could not look at her, and held it there, as though it could turn on its own.

        How could her father have borne it?  To stand still while the Basilisk reached toward his face and seized everything that eye had gazed upon.... Yet see what he had gained for it. There was no one who did not fear the Basilisk, and her father had commanded that fear.

        She swallowed and said, “If I were to give you one of my eyes, would you serve me?”

        “I do not want your eye,” he said, “and I would not serve you as I did him”; and she felt both disappointment and relief.

        “What of the other mages, then?” she asked. “You said you went to the eastmage. Would she...?”

        “There is a village in the Merros Valley,” he said. “There, the eastmage searches the clouds to tell the farmers what day dawns fair for a wedding, or when to hurry the harvest. She finds lost sheep and spindles. Her life contents her.”

        “The northmage?”

        “The northmage is mad,” he said softly. “She tried to achieve her heart’s desire by command, and could not bear that in doing so she had forever put it beyond her reach.”

        “They say she is a prophetess. Is that changed by her madness?  If she could still tell me of portents—”

        “It is what she says that then becomes real,” he said sharply. “Her voice is a compulsion. Now she only babbles nonsense, or sings meaningless rhymes, and occasionally she makes swallows fly backwards or raises a city of buildings without doors. It is a difficult gift she was given. It is nothing you want harnessed to you, held by a broken mind.”

        “I suppose the southmage wouldn’t help me either.”

        He shook his head. “He renounced his power.”

        She let out an impatient breath. “So there is nothing I can offer any of the mages—”

        “You have your mother’s voice,” he said.

        Veillen stared at him. “You want my voice.”

        “I want hers. Yours sounds the same.”

        “If her body hadn’t been burnt, you would have asked for it,” she said, sickened by the realization.

        There was a new edge to his voice, an avidness in his gaze. “What would you have besides my service?  My path lies elsewhere, but I can bring you anything upon this earth.”

        There were too many possible answers, and none at all. He could not give her a lifetime’s worth of affection and guidance from her father, or respect and obedience from the people she supposedly ruled—

        She realized it then. Her voice is a compulsion, he had said. “I will give you my voice, if you will give me that of the northmage.”

        The Basilisk stood silent for a moment, as still as any of his captives. Then he turned and left the room. It took her a long moment to realize that he had not trapped the air around her; she drew in a breath raggedly, and forced her fingers to unclench from the crown.

* * *

        They walked to each corner of the earth, four of them, and looked into the eyes of the God of Horizons, and saw all: the world in full, unfolded.

        “Let me stay here,” said the man who stood at the westernmost point of the earth.

        And the god would not permit him, but let him keep henceforth whatever pieces might give him solace once he had to turn his back upon that place.

* * *

        There was a window set in the wall that showed the next room. The woman who wove stories knew there had to be something there to see, so she danced through the archway and searched the corners with her feet. They were all as bare as the heart of the fourth river-king. He had hoarded silver instead of his queen’s love, so she had borne no child but the hawk-master’s. The woman imagined making love to such a man, his hair like feathers, her limbs spreading like wings, the high cry of pleasure. She tried a falcon’s scream and it didn’t sound right within walls. Too many echoes.

        “Under a cloudless sky,” she decided. So his shadow could be seen, rising to meet him as he dove. She wandered back to the first room. “There are stairs here—”  And there were; they rose and fell like the ocean’s surface but brought her to the shore. No, outside. She stepped into and out of a puddle, then stared at the wet ground and wondered what she could use to paint shadows upon it. Smeared ash?

        “Lea,” said someone who wasn’t her, and she flung out her arms and spun in a circle and a half to see who it was.

        “You spoke my name,” she said, pleased. She forgot it sometimes, for the simple joy of re-learning it. A man stood before her with unnatural stillness, and she went to him and placed a finger on his throat to be certain of the pulse of his blood. Living things should move. But she knew him now; he was the one who took away motion. He came and went as he willed; he had come again. She drew away to look at him. His hair and garments were damp, his skin slick and glossy. Perhaps she’d come to the ocean after all, but the only blue she saw was the clear sky above. Nothing swam there.

        He followed her gaze upward, then frowned and looked at her again. “I’ve come to trade,” he said.

        She began to sing a market song. He stepped forward and touched the tips of his fingers to her lips. She quieted. He was stilling her again, she thought without resentment, then asked, “Shall we trade names, then?  Thion and Lea, Lea and Thion.”

        “No. I want your voice.”

        She tilted her head and looked at him curiously. “Gerelis the harper traded black pearls for his lady’s love. She gave one to a hummingbird in return for its egg. It never hatched, but it grew transparent, and if she breathed upon it, she could see Gerelis wherever he was. She watched him play for the emperor, where the court minstrel was so jealous he took one of Gerelis’s harp-strings and stole his voice with it. Murderer, but even worse, thief.”  She blinked and smiled. “He should have used one from his own harp. Will you give me a harp-string?”

        Thion shook his head. “I’ll give you whatever you desire. What do you want?”

        Something slammed into her, and she staggered back and tripped.

        He knelt beside her. “Lea?”

        “I wanted something once,” she whispered, staring into the darkness that had felled her.

        “Yes.”

        “I had it!  I had it....”  Her teeth worried at her lower lip. “Why wasn’t I happy?  I had it.”

        “You can’t force someone’s love and keep it,” he said, and his voice was tight with emotion for once.

        She reached up to him and rubbed at the tenseness between shoulders and neck, so that she might loosen it. Maybe he was like one of those injured animals who did not move so as to avoid the attention of a predator. She searched for a wound. “Has it stopped bleeding?”

        He pulled her hands away, but there were fingerprints of mud left on his skin. “Lea, tell me.”

        She clapped her hands sharply once to banish the memory. Then she blew on her palms to scatter the dandelion-seeds of whatever might still be left. She suddenly felt unlonely. “Are you staying?”

        “I need to dry off somewhere inside. The rain just stopped now, very abruptly.”

        “Could it have forgotten?” she asked him, but he only sighed and repeated:

        “Inside.”

        His look was expectant, and she pondered it. “There’s a door behind you,” she said.

        He turned around. “Of course,” he murmured, and pushed it open. She followed him in. There were no other doors, and nothing at all in the room except for glass chimes hanging from the precise center of the ceiling, in a cascade that nearly reached the ground. “Will they break if I touch them?”

        “Let’s see.”  She stepped toward them, but he blocked her path and led her around instead, close to the wall.

        “Never mind.”  He cast off his cloak, and the movement flung off droplets of water that struck the chimes.

        The waterfall of sound seemed to reverberate until the walls too were trembling, although the chimes yielded only light, high notes. Then she saw a thread of green wend its way upward from a corner, just before the stones paving the floor broke open under the pressure of swiftly growing plants.

        A rising tree snagged Thion’s cloak and carried it away. He reached for it and was left with a lifted arm while it rose to a hopeless distance above him. Another sapling stretched upward and burst through the ceiling, and the two of them covered their heads from the shower of stone fragments. When she looked up again, the sky was open to her. And greenery was everywhere, vines clinging to the walls and twining along trunks in bold lines and palmprints, leaves like eager hands.

        “The sound-watered garden,” Thion said, brushing himself off as he surveyed the new plants.

        She cocked her head at him.

        “You told me the tale once, long ago.”  He sounded sad, but then he shook his head and said, “The stories you tell,” and turned to her. “There’s another cloak I can use somewhere, isn’t there?”

        “A northern wind once stole it from a maiden,” she conceded, “when it was in love with a knight and jealous of his lady. It was blown just outside.”

        The leaves rustled with a sudden violence, then grew quiescent. She touched one, rubbing the felt of its underside.

        Thion smiled crookedly, watching her. “You don’t even understand the power of your voice anymore. The emperor’s daughter grasped it all too quickly. She wants it.”

        “It was given to me past the northernmost border,” she said, grasping a fragment of memory.

        “Yes,” he said, “and you can give it away. What would you trade it for?”

        She thought of sunflowers silvered by moonlight and sea-dragon pearls, dreams locked in boxes and the emperor’s lost eye.... But these would only distract her for a while. She looked up and saw Thion’s gaze still steady upon her, unmoving as ever.

        “Stay,” she said at last.

        “That’s your price?”

        She nodded, smiling.

        He considered. “There is something—someone I would have with us, then. I would have to leave to bring her here, but if I promise to return with her then stay with you as long as you wish, would that be enough for you?”

        Two people to ease her loneliness!  “Yes,” she said eagerly.

        “You will need to speak.”

        She hummed a note—he leaned near—she never finished it. At first she wondered whether he had taken breath away instead, but after a moment she remembered how to inhale. The rasp of air sounded very loud.

        “I’m sorry,” he said, and because his hands were occupied by what he carried, he did not give her his customary embrace but kissed her forehead before turning and walking away. He knelt just after passing through the doorway, and with one hand picked up the cloak and swung it over his shoulders. Then he rose again and passed out of view.

        She tried to call him back. Nothing emerged. She ran after him but tripped on a vine, and impatiently she knew the garden had withered away centuries ago, but it was still there, pulling at her ankle. She yanked herself free. The stones were made of glass; she could see through them and find him, but they remained opaque and she had to grope for the door and stumble forward. Her foot fell upon the ground with a splash. She stepped out of the puddle. Something was wrong. His name buried itself into her throat and she clawed at it, but the only sound was that of her hoarse, strained gasping.

        She crumpled to the ground, hugged her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth. He had done it again, he had made things still, he had made the whole of the place unmoving and unchanging. Her mouth stretched in a howl and she tasted brine on her cheeks. The ocean had come to her, drowned her. She whimpered, but there was only silence.

* * *

        Where even the north reached no further, a woman wept.

        “How can I ever describe this?” she asked.

        The god gave her words that would always be true.

* * *

        When he came this time he didn’t bother with a message, although he could have left the morning dew on Veillen’s window untouched by sun to spell out his words, or simply frightened a servant into delivering his summons. He strode into her study while she was reading tax documents, and the sound of his footsteps was a welcome distraction. “Iridru,” she said, and turned to see the Basilisk.

        “I have your price,” he said, and he set a glass box atop her desk. Veillen could see through it to the dry words beneath. She touched its lid wonderingly, but he drew it away and said, “I must take your voice first.”

        She swallowed. “What must I do?”

        He said, “Speak.”  He closed his eyes. “Say, ‘Thion.’“

        She said it questioningly. He shook his head. “Thion,” she said, testing the syllables slowly. “Thion, Thion—”  It descended into a chant, and she knew that wasn’t what he wanted. She stopped and started over. “Thion.”  She made the word a name, someone she knew. “Thion.”

        “No. Not like that.”

        “How, then?”

        “The way you say Iridru’s name.”

        She hesitated, then said, softly, “Thion.”

        The word seemed to catch in the air, still reverberating, until the Basilisk reached out. He opened the box and carefully exchanged its contents with what he held. Then he turned to her and offered his cupped palm.

        As though it held water, she brought his hand to her lips and sipped from it.

        It poured down her throat like molten honey. She dropped to her knees and gagged as though she would retch, but although she clawed at her neck, there was only smooth skin and no thread of fire to grasp and tear away.

        She screamed, and the scream wasn’t hers.

        Veillen drew in a ragged breath then said her own name this time, to make sure it was still hers. This voice was higher, sweeter. She flinched.

        The Basilisk gave her a sardonic look, then turned to leave.

        “Basilisk,” she said, and he paused. The temptation rose in her to compel him to stay and serve her, but then, what need was there now?

        He waited.

        “What was she like?” a stranger asked with her mouth. “My mother?”

        “Not unlike you. She seemed gentle, and I never dreamed that she would trade herself for power.”

        “Go!” she said, and he went, but she knew that she had needed no force in her voice, magical or otherwise, to make him do so.

* * *

        Lea dreamed, in her waking hours, of a winter so cold it froze the blood in her veins, the breath in her lungs. There was a beauty in that silent, crystalline world. But she could find no dagger of ice to cut through her flesh and discover whether paths of frost ran through her wrist.

        She found a wall against her left palm. She threaded her way through a maze purely by its touch and, when its hardness yielded to felt, discovered a room where plants had replaced stone. Amidst the green a gleam in the dirt caught her eye: a broken rod of glass. It would do, she thought, and sank down to her knees to study its jagged end. There was no ceiling here, only a canopy of leaves through which sunlight came to the glass and scattered color. She leaned back against the trunk of a tree, watching stars wheel across the greenery with every movement of the rod, and her thoughts grew occupied by summer instead.

        In that warmth she came to remember, slowly, that here was the last place she had spoken. She found comfort in thinking that echoes might linger still in the mossy corners or tucked inside the curled tendrils of vines. So she stayed.

        The garden grew even without her voice to water it. She clapped her hands at first, or tapped the glass against stone, but she learned that her merest footsteps would do. Even their soft rhythm would, day after day, encourage the petals of a bud to unfurl.

        But in the hall of her thoughts she told each leaf a story: Beyim died in battle and his widow claimed his body, but they gave her a fox to bury. Soren sailed to the sunless isles and there became the first to speak with a basilisk, where there was no light for it to see him by. Cavray fashioned a labyrinth in the shape of a riddle and promised his son to the first to reach its center.

        Secretly, she told herself, Thion came back to the city-without-gates, to the woman who waited in the sound-watered garden.

        Any companionship would have done. But Thion knew her name. And who else would venture into a place that existed only in myth?

* * *

        The court emptied of whispers until the only one left was that of Veillen’s skirts. She paced across the floor to the dais, then mounted the steps and sat. The crown was settled atop her head. Father, do you see?

        She saw the nobles’ eyes upon her, as cold as jewels. Her half-brothers were here, but they stood as still and resentful as everyone else. No, not all of them. In Iridru’s face there was curiosity.

        “I have heard,” she said carefully to the wall opposite her, “that some believe the empire needs a different ruler.”

        Someone called out, “The empire needs an effective ruler.”

        Arabris laughed. Veillen said to him fiercely, “Be silent while I speak.”  His mouth stretched in surprise.

        It was as though she had spoken to everyone. They all quieted.

        Except Iridru. “What have you done with your voice?” he demanded.

        Veillen took a deep breath. “As my father did, I struck bargain with the Basilisk.”

        She could sense the sudden tension in the court. Not rebellion, but fear. She had waited to relish this, but she kept her gaze on Iridru. He had never reacted as all the other nobles had; surely not this time either.

        After the astonishment: anger. “You traded your voice for one that could cast a compulsion?”

        “Yes.”

        Some flinched. Iridru held steady. “You sully your rule.”

        She stared at him.

        Lower, as though he spoke to her without all the nobles in the hall, he said, “You disgrace yourself.”

        She would not be spoken to so. “I am empress,” she said. “You wanted an effective ruler?  Well, who can deny my commands now?”

        “You did this for your birthright?”  Iridru laughed, and it was not the gentle sound she had heard from him as a child. “My claim to the crown is stronger than yours. I have both the blood-right and the experience of governing. I wouldn’t have needed to lean upon a mage’s power, as you do—as the emperor did. I could have ruled better than he.”

        The court was drowned by the roar of assent.

        She was trembling. This was Iridru who brought this shame upon her, here before everyone. “You want to exceed even our father?” she said, and her words scythed through the noise. “Then you shall lose both eyes.”  She gestured sharply to the armsmen.

        They hesitated. Iridru’s mouth curled. Veillen looked directly at the guards and, feeling the power tense within her, said, “Blind him.”

        They caught his arms, but they had to walk him out backwards, for he refused to turn around. His gaze never wavered, and it seemed the hot irons had already been put to his eyes, for they burned on hers.

        The court was frozen. For a moment she wondered whether the Basilisk had come and rendered them thus. But it was only her. Veillen lifted her head and stepped down from the throne, terribly conscious of the need to maintain her royal dignity, yet hoping despite her grave pace that she could be away from here swiftly so she would not have to hear him scream.

* * *

        “Lea.”

        A leaf sprouted. She smiled and sprang up to turn and greet him. There was a woman standing next to him. Lea’s smile faded, but Thion did not notice.

        “Lea, what have you done?  This is beautiful.”

        Buds unfurled as he spoke.

        She could not answer, but she smiled as he walked about, as he reached up to touch a leaf or knelt to rub a petal, exclaiming and watering the garden even further. Finally Thion came to her and touched her as well, a brush of his hand against her shoulder, as though she were another wonder he had found there.

        The woman remained standing and said nothing at all. She was the most beautiful woman Lea had ever seen. Yet there was a paleness to her that was unsettling, like a face seen in the uncertainty of moonlight.

        Thion followed the direction of her gaze. “This is Risshen,” he said.

        But it was not, she knew. There was a story about a man who had gone into the shadow-realms to find his dead wife. When he emerged, he turned around to discover he had only brought her shadow, all that had ever been there. Thion, she thought, had not yet turned around.

        “We’ve come here to stay,” he said, to the accompaniment of unfurling tendrils. “Just as I promised.”

        Lea took his hands and pressed them between hers to offer him the warmth of welcome. She ignored the shadow-woman, hoping he would do the same, but he was as solicitous of her as though he were the host and she the only guest.

        The days that followed were as strange as any tale, although it might have seemed that the two of them did well enough. The garden was generous with its fruit, and he caught them meat with his own gift. Mealtimes were strained for her, for the shadow-woman had no need of sustenance and yet sat with them when they ate.

        He spoke to Lea sometimes, but she could not, so she didn’t bother responding. There was the other one, the one who stood still and silent except when he opened the box so she would say, “Thion,” but that was all she ever said.

        Lea wished, before certain dreamless nights, that she could take the box from him and force what it held into her own throat, so that she could say his name in a way that would make him look at her so: as though she were real.

* * *

        Veillen wouldn’t need a tomb; she was already being buried in papers. Tax accounts, census records, updated maps, and lists of appointments were scattered across her desk. But these were things already accomplished. The missives were what concerned her, demanding answer on her part to generals and ambassadors, about wars and treaties.

        For the first time, she felt confident in her responses. Her father had never bothered to train her in these matters, but her brothers had been involved for years. They came when summoned, obeying orders that weren’t given in her own voice, and answered her when she asked for advice.

        Misren had tried to mislead her in the beginning, but at his first suggestion, she’d said sharply, “Tell me what you think should be done,” and his face had twisted and his reply changed.

        With the last of her letters written, she sat back and said, “I appreciate your service. There is a place for you that isn’t the throne, you know.”

        Arabris gave her a sullen look—he still couldn’t interrupt her since she had silenced him at court—but nodded. Misren looked thoughtful. They both made obeisance to her, as was their new habit, before they left her study.

        Veillen slumped in her chair. They’d done so much and there was yet more to do, and all she wanted was for Iridru to come in and tease her into going for a ride outside and away from all these documents. But of course he wouldn’t come to her.

        She should face him. She seemed able to confront everyone else, these days. And it was the least she owed to him. She braced herself and went to his rooms.

        They were empty, and looked untouched for days.

        She whirled back into the hallway and startled a servant. “Where’s Iridru?” she demanded.

        The boy shrank against the wall. “I know the kitchens send a meal down to the dungeons twice a day....”

        The world narrowed. “They imprisoned him?”  He cowered, and she stopped herself from making a threatening gesture. It wasn’t his fault. What else would the guards have done with someone who had angered the empress enough to be blinded?

        She dismissed the servant and made her way to the dungeons.

        A guardsman was at the base of the stairs, carrying an untouched tray. He tried to move to one side, but she paused before him. “Who had Iridru brought here?”

        “The guards who... carried out his sentence. My lady empress, they didn’t think he would be safe, left alone in his rooms.”

        Fear cracked through her anger. “How is he?”

        He didn’t meet her eyes. “He refuses all food.”

        She swallowed. “Give me the tray and the key to his cell.”

        He obeyed, and she made her way to where Iridru was kept. He was sitting in a corner, head drooped, skin pale and cheeks gaunt in the torchlight. She let herself in and set down the tray.

        “Veillen. Why are you here?”  He sounded listless.

        Her breath caught and she clasped her hands together tight against her ribs. “How did you know it was me?”

        “How couldn’t I?”  His laugh was hollow. “I know the sound of your steps. I know the pattern of your breathing. I know the hesitation you shape with your hands when you search for words. But in truth, I didn’t know you at all, did I?”

        “I’m not who I thought I was.”  The answer sounded awkward even to her.

        “No,” and the amusement was no longer gentle.

        She said after a moment, “They say you won’t eat.”

        “A man eats for pleasure,” he said bitterly, “or to live. I want neither.”

        “I don’t want you to die.”  She knelt by his side, taking his hand and putting it against the curve of a bowl of soup. He took it but did nothing more.

        “For fear of guilt?” he asked.

        Why bother to hide anything from a blind man?  “Yes.”

        He threw the soup on her and rose. She sprang to her feet as well, scalded and dripping. There was a sudden sharp sting along her cheekbone where the bowl had hit her, and like flint striking steel it sparked fury.

        “Damn you!”

        He ignored her and stalked to the other side of the cell, but he misjudged the distance and kicked his foot into the wall. He swore, and she felt her own anger die within her.

        She withdrew to the door. He whirled and called out mockingly, “Admitting defeat so easily?”

        The guard outside was stone-faced. “Another bowl of soup,” she told him.

        “My lady empress, I shouldn’t leave you unguarded—”

        “He won’t hurt me.”  She’d only realized it too late. “Go.”

        He fled. She returned to the cell, and Iridru stood and came closer until he was only a half-step away. The burnt craters where his eyes had once been still seemed to stare at her.

        “A pity I can’t see you drenched,” he mused. He reached out and plucked at the wet shoulder of her gown. “I took you riding once when you weren’t even ten. You fell off the horse and into a puddle, but you laughed instead of cursing me, do you remember?”

        Yes, she did not say.

        “And while you were heir, whenever you ducked into court it was with your hair done in hasty braids and the hem of your gown gray with dust, because you never remembered to lift it from the ground. You were beautiful then. But once you became empress, you were never less than immaculate.”

        She shifted away, wet fabric clinging uncomfortably to her skin. “You were watching me even then?”

        “Veillen,” he said, exasperated, “always I have loved you.”

        There were tentative footsteps. Veillen held her hand out, not even looking at the guard, and the bowl nestled into her palm. She sat down next to Iridru and handed it to him. “Eat.”

        Helplessly he set the bowl to his mouth and drank. When he was done, he laid it aside carefully instead of throwing it at her.

        “Thank you,” she said.

        “Why rage?  You’ll only tell me not to.”

        She fell quiet.

        “I miss your own voice,” he said, as though reminiscently. “You could have learned to use it to command, you know.”

        “How could I learn?  Father never bothered to teach me anything. I was never in his favor. I think he hated me because my birth killed my mother.”

        “Don’t be a fool,” he said wearily. “The emperor had no more interest in your mother than usual, except that she was a lure for the Basilisk. That is why he kept her, and you, her child.”

        She shook her head. “No, it can’t be. He never took another consort—”

        “What need did he have to forge alliances with noble houses, when he had already snared the greatest power of all?”

        “But why would my mother have stayed with him, if he didn’t love her?”

        “Your mother gained an emperor’s protection for her child.”  When she still didn’t comprehend, he said, “You were born seven months after she came to court, Veillen. I never would have dared love you otherwise.”

        And she understood for the first time that he did not mean in the way one loved a sister. Iridru, who had always been her only friend at court, hadn’t been driven by any sense of family loyalty at all, but by something else he had seen in her.

        She dug her nails into her palms and choked out, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

        He was quiet awhile. “You were already so distant from the court. It seemed that blood-link was all that kept you here. I didn’t want to break that.”

        “But then I could have dared—”  Her words broke away. How could she say that she loved him, when she had blinded him and cast him into the dungeons, all for a crown that wasn’t even hers?

        The crown.

        She jerked away when he reached for her and scrambled to her feet, running—not running away, she promised herself, but to her rooms and that wretched piece of regalia.

        The crown was where she’d left it. She snatched it up and pried at the eye, but it wouldn’t come out of its setting. Her fingers scrabbled over its surface. Finally, she threw the crown to the floor. The metal warped with a sharp sound and she scooped it up again. The setting had widened just enough for her to lever the eye out with her nail. Its chill bit at her palm, but she folded her hand over it and ran through the halls and back down to the dungeon. Her fingers were numb and she had to force them open.

        “Veillen?”  He was standing, trying to find her.

        She seized his shoulder to make him hold still. Then she breathed upon the eye and said to whatever spirit of the emperor dwelled within, “If you must see, see for him.”  Before even that brief warmth could fade, she braced one hand against the back of his head and used the other to push the eye into one of the hollow spaces of Iridru’s face.

        He screamed and caught her wrist in a crushing grip. She welcomed the pain, because it meant she could share it with him. She pressed relentlessly past the resistance, and then there was nowhere further left to push. They let go of each other.

        He bathed the eye with his tears. The look on his face—of discovery, of wonder—wrenched at her, because he never should have considered a single eye to be such a marvel, when he had once had two.

        “I’m sorry,” she breathed. “I can never give back everything you’ve lost.”

        His hands framed her face insistently when she would have turned away. His one-eyed gaze met hers and held it. “You are what I lost.”

        He lowered his head over hers and there was a moment of satin warmth against her lips, but then she slipped out of his hold and ran.

        He followed her, like always. He caught her elbow and wrenched her around. His calmness hadn’t returned to him with his sight; he was furious, the corners of his mouth tight and his jaw set.

        “Let go of me!”  His hand loosened and she jerked her arm away from him, but he trapped her with his body and set his palms deliberately on the wall on either side of her.

        “Why should I?” he demanded in a low voice.

        “Because I can’t stand to stay and look at you.”  One of her hands rose hesitantly and hovered before his face. He closed his eye—black, no longer green—and she touched the eyelid over it. “Here I will always see your father, who I thought was mine.”  Then her finger moved to the heavy scarring that outlined his empty eye, and he flinched. She said, “And here I will always see myself.”

        The silence was broken only by their harsh breaths. The minutes moved past them and her pulse grew less frantic, to the pace of a lament.

        When she ducked under one of his arms, he didn’t stop her. She took an unsteady step. He didn’t move, still braced against the wall. Only when she reached the bottom of the stairs did she look back to see him draw back a fist and slam it into the wall. He made no sound though.

        Neither did she, making her way up the steps. It hurt too much to try to cry or even breathe.

* * *

        In the city with a single door, living with a woman who was a memory’s shadow, Lea began to craft a new story. She told it in the hours of slanting dawn’s light to her plants, reciting it in her mind. There was no answering rustle of growth or bloom. But some seeds took longer to sprout than others.

* * *

        The sun that always rose blinded the woman as she faced past east. ”I would see,” she said.

* * *

        Veillen couldn’t do anything right; she nearly took a wrong turn to the stables, and then she fumbled while tacking a horse. A stableboy tried to help her, and she snapped at him to be gone. He retreated, and she realized that her words had, of course, been taken as a command.

        She couldn’t mount with one hand, so she uncovered her mouth to do so. She hadn’t known how an apology would solidify.

        The road from the palace and out of the city stretched out before her. There is a village in the Merros Valley. She thought she had read the name in one of the papers in her endless stacks of documents. It was an eastern taxing route, she remembered. The sun rose that way; she pointed her horse there.

        She passed a blur of people and places. Later, she remembered trading her jewels for stale bread and sleeping in a barn, circling the wood after a snake frightened her horse, and crossing over a bridge that sang with the wind. Her thoughts of the travel eastward were so relentless that when a villager told her she was in Merros, she almost rode on.

        Her horse was too tired to protest when she reined it in abruptly. “Merros, you said?  I’m looking for a mage.”

        He nodded, unsurprised. “The Seeress lives there.”  He pointed to an unassuming dwelling.

        A goat was grazing in the yard; it looked up at her approach, then trotted around back.

        The door opened and the eastmage stood before her, regarding her steadily. “There are stories in your eyes,” she said thoughtfully.

        Veillen waited. She would not let any word of hers influence the mage.

        “Stable your horse in the back and get in before the rain starts,” the mage said.

        Veillen settled her mount in the stall next to the goat, then returned to the house and stepped inside just as a wet wind licked her back. The eastmage handed her a mug of tea, which Veillen drank gratefully with both hands curled around its warmth.

        “So why are you here?” the Seeress asked.

        Veillen took a last swallow. “I need to find the northmage.”

        “I do not treat with emperors and empresses, unlike my brother-in-power.”

        “I’m not one,” Veillen said tersely. “I never truly was.”

        “Ah,” said the Seeress. “That’s different, then. But then why do you seek her?”

        “I have to return something of hers.”

        “Yes,” the Seeress said, “I thought you sounded like Lea. Thion’s grown crafty with his gift.”

        Veillen knew that name; had spoken it. She realized now who it was. It was strange to think of the Basilisk as a man with a name. Her father.

        “The two of them are together,” the Seeress said. “Wait an hour until the worst of the storm passes, and I’ll tell you where they are.”

        The winds outside didn’t sound as though they would howl their way elsewhere any time soon, but Veillen remembered who was speaking to her. So she stayed another hour, helping the eastmage put together a simple meal that warmed her belly. Afterward, she was unsurprised to hear the patter of the rain cease.

        She listened carefully to how she could reach the strange city in which the northmage dwelled. It was not merely a matter of following the lean of a compass needle.

        The Seeress looked to one side, then turned back to Veillen. “And head south to cross the river. It’ll take longer, but the northern bridge looks to have broken.”

        Veillen nodded and rose to leave.

        When she was on the threshold, the Seeress said, “In the court, I see a man hailed as the true heir to the emperor, with his single eye and strength of will.”

        “Thank you,” Veillen murmured. Iridru, her heart cried. But she turned resolutely in another direction, toward a river and, beyond it, a doorless city.

* * *

        Lea was startled to see a horse outside the building with the garden; inside, there was a girl. She looked travel-worn and pulled taut at the same time.

        “Are you the northmage?” the girl asked Lea.

        Lea thought through her names. This one had an echo, so she nodded.

        The girl leaned forward and breathed upon Lea’s face. Then, tentatively, she kissed her.

        Lea inhaled. She closed her eyes against dizziness—from magic or elation, she didn’t know. She kept her forehead pressed to the girl’s even as she opened her eyes again. There were words finally unfurling in her throat. She whispered, “Thank you.”

        The girl automatically mouthed the words to some courteous reply, but said nothing, of course.

        “Who are you?” she wondered aloud, just before Thion came up behind her.

        “Lea, what’s this?” he asked, then stopped.

        The girl’s eyes widened at the sight of him.

        “You know each other,” Lea said.

        It was Thion’s turn for surprise as he heard her speak. Then he smiled warmly. “I’m glad she returned your voice. She’s the one who wanted it from you: the empress.”

        The girl shook her head: no, that was not who she was. She pricked her finger upon a thorn, and crimson welled forth. She nodded to Thion, and frowning, he did the same.

        The girl pressed their fingertips together.

        “You’re of the same blood,” Lea said. She looked at him in wonder. “Thion, you have a child?”

        “She was raised by the emperor,” Thion said, pulling away. “She’s none of mine.”

        “That was Risshen’s doing,” Lea said. “It was Risshen who left you, and whom you cling so tightly to in shadow-form.”  Even now it stood behind him, unwavering yet not quite solid.

        He said nothing, lips pressed tightly together.

        “There once was a mage who loved a woman,” she said, beginning his story.

        Thion whirled on her. “There once was a mage who loved a man,” he countered fiercely, and she flinched. “Only the man had already chosen another woman. But the northmage could not let him go, and she bound him to her falsely. It drove her mad, knowing what she had done.”

        She could not help the ripple of sorrow that moved through her, listening to her own tale. “Can’t you hear yourself?” she asked. “All stories, spoken in all voices, have power.”

        “I let Risshen go,” he said. “I did nothing against the emperor. I even served him. This is a memory, Lea. Given shape and sound, but there is no substance and no will for me to bind.”

        “So what can it offer you but more sorrow?  You’re doing the same thing I did. If you want her so much still, why don’t you ask me to decree her back to life?”

        His expression was a dark warning. “She did not want me, alive.”

        “And this thing, as it is, doesn’t want you. It has no will.”

        “But it won’t leave me.”

        “It can’t leave you.”  She let the silence sit awhile, then said, “I don’t remember his name anymore. I let it go, since I’d already tried to claim too much of him.”

        Thion was as still as stone.

        Veillen made a gesture then stopped.

        “But you can speak,” Lea said, and Veillen’s hands slid down her throat, her eyes widening in surprise. Then she turned to Thion.

        “If my mother left you,” she said slowly, “I think it was because she feared this. That you would want her unchanging, never growing old, never bearing a child. That’s why she fled to the emperor. To have me.”

        He looked at her. “Risshen,” he whispered.

        Lea set her palms on his wet cheeks and turned him to face her. She said gently, “Let me lend you my voice the way she returned it—”  She leaned forward and laid her lips upon his with the same tenderness. “What will you say with it?” she whispered against his mouth.

        He let out a long sigh, and then his arms came around her. She leaned her head against the front of his shoulder and heard the word thrum through his chest.

        “Lea.”

* * *

        In the deep, deepest south, a man beheld the God of Horizons. He did not speak, and so it was the god who was moved to ask:

        “What do you desire?”

        “All I wanted was to be able to see past the border once,” he said. ”It is enough. Now no matter where I go, I will know that there is a beyond.”  And he turned away, giftless, the greatest of the mages.

* * *

        Veillen thought the two mages might have stayed in that embrace forever, if not for the soft fall of rain that began. This building had no roof, and so the water trickled down a stair of leaves and onto them.

        She looked toward the doorway, where the image of her mother had stood. It had already faded. Veillen had been distracted enough by the mages that she hadn’t seen her clearly—but that was how it should be, she thought.

        The two parted. “Will you bring the sun?” the Basilisk asked, but the northmage shook her head.

        “I won’t use my gift so lightly again. Or ever, perhaps.”

        A noise escaped Veillen. The northmage looked at her.

        Veillen took a breath. “There’s a man whose eyes I took....”

        “You would ask more of me?” Lea asked.

        She bowed her head, shamed.

        “You, who were so horrified by the emperor’s eye, took that of another man?” the Basilisk demanded.

        “I gave it to him,” she said.

        “What?”

        “I gave the emperor’s eye to Iridru. It’s not enough, I know. I was just so angry....”

        He sighed then. “We’ve all done foolish things,” he said. “At least he can see, and perhaps he’ll still retain some position in court—”

        “He’s the new emperor,” she said.

        She’d surprised him. “You gave up the crown?”

        “Yes. It’s his now.”

        “And you say it’s not enough,” he said, shaking his head. “You may be right. But if he feels anything for you as you do him—”  She lifted her head and he speared her with his gaze. “I heard how you said his name, that time.”

        She bit her lip.

        “If so,” he went on, more gently, “it’s not his eye he wants back.”

        She let those words balm her heart a little.

        “And I have other places to travel,” Lea said. “I’ve been wandering in and out of old legends for far too long. Your court has probably seen too much of mages, in any case.”

        “I understand,” Veillen said, and she did.

        “You can come with us a little ways,” Thion said.

        Veillen smiled for the first time. “I can find my way,” she said. “The eastmage told me the path here and back.”

        “She can tell you where to find me,” he said, “should you ever want to.”

        It was a welcome rather than a farewell. She smiled her own, and he and Lea left together.

        The rain was warm and gentle, and Veillen drank in the feel of it on her skin, letting it wash her thoughts away someplace distant. Iridru would have liked to see her like this, soaked and undignified, she thought. Perhaps he would someday. But the path of her future was free now. The things she had thought she wanted had turned out to be such narrow hopes. She’d not bind herself to any expectations now.

        She moved beyond her own borders and, unexpectedly, she found herself. That was a power in itself, she thought, and she smiled as she turned away from the empty garden.

        She left with a quiet step, near-silent, the way she had once tread the palace halls—but behind her, it was enough to make a flower bloom.

Copyright © 2012 Karalynn Lee

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Karalynn Lee grew up in Korea without being fluent in Korean. She now lives in Silicon Valley and has just a high enough geek knowledge score to pass as one in dim lighting and loud music. She is fond of both poetry and terrible action movies.

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COVER ART

“Lost Citadel,” by Jonas De Ro

Jonas De Ro is a Belgian digital artist specializing in concept art and photography. He also has experience in animation, visual effects, and sound design. He has worked on commercials and music videos and is currently a concept artist for the upcoming science-fiction movie Jupiter Ascending, directed by the Wachowski siblings (The Matrix). Visit his website to view a selection of his works.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2012 Firkin Press

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