Issue #262, Tenth Anniversary Month Double-Issue II • Oct. 11, 2018

“The Tale of the Scout and the Pachydormu,” by Gregory Norman Bossert

“The Crow Knight,” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

“Magic Potion Behind-the-Mountains,” by Jaymee Goh

“The Tragedy of Zayred the Splendid,” by Grace Seybold

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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

THE TALE OF THE SCOUT AND THE PACHYDORMU

by Gregory Norman Bossert

         Like you, I grew up with the telling of the Tale of the Scout and the Pachydormu. That telling, on the night of first new moon of winter, marked my years between toddler and twelve like tree rings.

         The warm spice smell of the Butter Punch, the weight of that punch on your tongue and in your throat, the sugar crunch of the cookies—the slumped star of their legs and heads, the soft meringue of their shell hiding a spoonful of jam or a candied nut or the startling crack of the one uncooked bean that appointed the finder the night’s Governor—the giggles and gasps as the night’s Governor was hefted overhead and passed hand to hand around the room, the soft-hard of flannel blankets quilting the floor, pillowcases still filled with last year’s smells and last year’s crumbs, the knock and groan of the radiators whose warmth grew more welcome as the night stretched out. And of course the soft solemn tones of ‘Uncle Willow’ reciting the Tale.

         Our ‘Uncle Willow’ was a woman named Anna, who worked at the Stationer’s on Main. Or so the older children believed; under the knitted cloche and beard of yarn and layer upon layer of sweater could have been any one—or two, so vast was that pile!—of the town’s grownups. The most bold of the children would try to trip her up, shouting “Oh, Uncle!’ after Anna on the street, or dropping envelopes labeled “For the Teller” on the floor of the Stationer’s and watching through the window to see if she would pick them up. She never once slipped, but there was something in the careful way she sorted the pens into their racks, the slow small smile she shared with parents passing on the street, that had convinced generations of twelve-year-olds that she was our ‘Willow’.

         Regardless of the true identity of the teller, the telling was always at the Bellamy’s on Filbert Street, in the parlor that stretched the length of the house. The furniture would be pushed to the walls, with Mr. Bellamy’s own chair set between the radiators at the back wall for ‘Uncle Willow’. The great cabinet of the radio was covered with a cloth to protect it from abuse and to protect us, I thought, from thoughts of the grim news it would carry on any other night, of the distant war and the closer, quieter decay. The rug that Mr. Bellamy had brought back from his trip to the West would be dragged from the center of the room to the foot of ‘Uncle Willow’s chair, providing an extra layer of padding for the youngsters, though the older children agreed the age-polished pine of the floor was preferable to the worn bristle of the rug, which could prick right through flannel.

         The Bellamys opened the house at noon for a potluck dinner. Every family with children who lived south of Main and west of the South Road was invited, and the crowd spilled down the steps to fill the yard, under tarps if it was raining and on them if there was snow on the ground. And then games—of running and tumbling and clapped rhythms for the children and of black and red backed cards for the parents—filled the little space of light before the dusk came down. And then the lighting of lamps and the spreading of blankets and goodnight hugs for the parents, timid or tearful from the youngest children, carefully casual from the older, but all with a quiver of anticipation.

         When the last of the parents had left with a wistful wave, and only ‘Uncle Willow’s keepers were left—the Bellamys, of course, and a handful of others—then out came a low table and then the Butter Punch and the pachydormu cookies, then the discovery of the hidden bean that appointed the night’s Governor and the passing of the night’s Governor around the room, then the moment when we realized that ‘Uncle Willow’ had arrived and was in ‘his’ chair, that arrival missed despite another year of vows from the older children that this time they’d be watching. Then the sorting of blankets and pillows, the colors gone soft and muddled in the lamp light and a couple always gone missing under furniture or bunched up inside another. Then one last round of Butter Punch, small cups for us and a round bowl, as white as bone and as wide as two hands, for ‘Uncle Willow”, over which was grated a spice whose scent vibrated the air like distant bells ringing.

         Then ‘Uncle Willow’ would stroke ‘his’ beard until the room grew silent. Then the telling of the Tale of the Scout and the Pachydormu...

* * *

THE GOVERNOR and how he slept

         In the far West there was a province of great prosperity whose Governor slept no more than one hour a night.

         Why this was, no one could say with certainty. But many of the uncertain said the cause might be the stress of the responsibility of his office, or perhaps the great altitude of his bed in the tower-top chamber his office afforded him, or perhaps the slightest scent, carried on a wind from the West that stalked those heights, of the distant unbound sea.

         The Governor himself said the cause of his sleeplessness was the heavy tread of those great underground beasts, whose name he could not recall, whose steady migration from the land of the Founders in the far East drove the deep tectonic forces that raised mountains and awoke the choirlike groans that one hears in the deepest sinkholes. But the Governor suffered from a forgetfulness born of his affliction, along with a tendency toward the seeing of visions, the hearing of voices, a difficulty in making decisions, and the occasional frothing fit.

         There were some, both in government and the broader public, who feared these afflictions had left the Governor unfit for office. But the process by which the Governor was appointed—that bean that gave all an equal chance and thus avoided dispute, dissension, and decay—provided no mechanism for un-appointing.

         All the doctors agreed that the lack of regular dreaming, in particular, was doing great harm to the Governor’s mind; some thought that this, alas, would lead to his death, and others thought that this, alas, would not. And so great efforts were taken to give the Governor a good night’s sleep.

         At first, the traditional remedies were attempted. Poppy and passionflower were stuffed in his pillow and his ears filled with hops. Bags of doves were place underneath his bed. Sheets were laid of finest flax and rabbit-fur felt, of summer-spun spidersilk and bright patterned flannel. Toddies were heated from the liquors of the most somnolent of regions, dusted with turmeric and willow, swirled with egg or cream or rich ripe butter from the deepest cellars.

         When these measures failed, Experts were summoned from every corner of the province.

THE EXPERTS and what they tried

         The Poet Laureate was fetched from his retirement in a lighthouse on the far shore of the Founder Mer to compose a song of eighty-six interlocked stanzas like steps on a stairway spiraling down into a cool dim quiet. But on the forty-seventh stanza of its recitation, the Governor squinted into the space over the Poet’s shoulder and said, “listen, any deeper and we shall hear the words those beasts sing as they pass” and demanded that the previous stanzas be read in reverse; “back to the surface,” he said.

         The Dean of the University’s Department of Mesmery constructed an array of lanterns and cleverly cut pages to project hypnotic patterns onto the ceiling of the Governor’s chamber, and a network of tubes that piped a wordless drone from a choir in the Great Hall at the base of the tower and sent the sound swirling around the room. When the Governor was deemed sufficiently susceptible to suggestion, a signal was given and the choir’s song was replaced by the voice of a well-loved actor, who read an affirmative text with the repeated refrain, “The Governor is the exemplar of most excellent repose.”

         The Governor frequently repeated the phrase in the weeks that followed but in one of his fits of forgetfulness could not recall that he himself was that same Governor. During those weeks he spent his nights writing missives to the Governor of his fancy—a child, he thought, in the far East, from a different place entirely, and perhaps a different time—for advice on his own condition. As those letters were addressed to “The Governor”, they were one by one dutifully delivered back to him unopened. He grew despondent, and after a few more weeks the lanterns were quietly dismantled.

         A choreographer from a famed ballet in the East brought her entire troupe, who gently passed the Governor from hand to hand overhead with a rocking motion inspired by the motion of moonlight on the slow creeks of the Governor’s childhood home. For a while this approach showed great promise; the Governor slept for stretches of three or four hours at a time. Fresh dancers were brought in from every company in the province to help, and on one night the waiters of the Café Circady, known for the skill with which they balanced their high-held trays, took a shift. But partway through the fifteenth night, the Governor sat up and said, “And here we reach the sea. I dare go no further for fear of being lost.” After that he would not venture back into the dancers’ hands.

         And so it went, from shadow puppets to mechanical mattress, butter baths to aeolian emersion. After a full year of such attempts, the Experts and Advisors and provincial Officials gathered around the Council table in Great Hall of the Governor’s tower and concluded that every idea within the province, from the Eastern border to Western sea, from the deepest thinkers to the highest seats of learning, from the reasonable to the ridiculous, had been attempted, and all had failed.

         From the entrance to the Great Hall the Scout said, “Which is why, while you sat here in comfort and sought within the province, I have gone without.”

THE SCOUT and where she had been

         The Scout was the commander, and sole member, of the Province’s armed forces. The province was not, and had never been, at war; her responsibility was to survey the landscape—settled or wild—and the creatures—human or otherwise—that inhabited it. “Not so much the armed forces as the legged,” she liked to say. Her legs were long in bone and thick with muscle, wired tight by tendons. Her skin was a dark made darker by years in the landscape, and every inch was marked like a map with contour lines tattooed in the method of the far North, in which slivers of white gold were inlayed under the skin to catch the light Annotations and legends around these contours called out points of interest, history, or danger. Standing in the entrance with the sun wrapped around her, dark in her dark and brilliant against her gold, with a rumble of distant cries from the city echoing her quiet, she was a catalogue of contrasts.

         She crossed the Hall, navigating the clutter of the Experts’ equipment, and rested her pack on the Council table and beside it her long glass and her short glass, her stout steel blade, and the leather satchel that held the powders with which she spoke the language of rockets. She stood for a moment, to take account of the people seated around the table, and the table itself, and the way her own shadow fell across it.

         Then she said, “I have gone in search of the Pachydormu.”

         One of the experts, a noted collector of folklore, said, “I have read tales of such a beast.” He gave his beard a stroke or two to prime his memory, then said, “Yes, Mybek and Tidman provides a description in their Illustrated Rituals of the Outer Lands.” He recited,

“‘In form, the Pachydormu is most like a tortoise, albeit a tortoise the size of two great Western wagons yoked together. Like a tortoise, it bears a shell on its back, but this shell is soft, some say like a bag full of the finest down, some say like the surface of slow moving water. Its legs are like the trunks of trees. Its heads—’

         “They say ‘heads’ for the beast has two of them, side by side,” the collector of folklore interrupted himself to explain.

‘—its heads are each the size of an entire ox, tusked and wrinkled like the elephant, great-eyed like the whale, shagged like the bison. One head sleeps as the other wakes, and thus the Pachydormu is capable of constant motion. It is said that the rocking of its slow stride, along with the exceptional softness of its shell, places anyone who lays upon its back into the deepest slumber, and the strange impulses within the beast’s two heads, the one asleep and the one awake, induce within the sleeper the most wondrous of dreams.’”

         The Chairman of the Geographic Society, a master cartographer who had never ventured further than the Garden of Succulents on the outskirts of the city, shook his halo fringe of hair dismissively and harrumphed, “If the Pachydormu is anything more than legend, the idea comes too late. It would take a good six months to find it in the Outer Lands, and another six months for the creature to reach us here.”

         The Scout smiled and said, “It is well, then, that I went in search of it a full year ago.”

         The quiet commotion from without—the sound of a crowd shouting in fear or delight—that had followed the Scout into the Great Hall had grown loud, punctuated by the shrill whistles of the police and honking of carriage horns and a steady approaching tread that rattled all the Experts’ equipment.

         The Experts and Advisors and provincial Officials leapt up from the table, the Chairman of the Geographic Society last and with heavily pantomimed reluctance. They crushed together in the entryway of the Great Hall, in time to see the crowd in the plaza outside scatter to make space for the arrival of the Pachydormu.

THE KEEPER and what the Keeper charged

         The beast was exactly as the account had described. Its size was perhaps closer to two cottages than two wagons, but, as the folklorist commented to no one in particular, wagons, like all things, had been larger in the old days. And no account could have done justice to its color: the yellow of old porcelain broken by veins of brown and gold, like autumn leaves glimpsed under sunset snow.

         Its two great heads were heavy with pale hair like cobweb or treemoss. One hung close to the ground, eyes rolling under shut lids. The eyes of the waking head were as large as waiters’ trays held high overhead. Like the sea, they took whatever color the viewer imagined.

         Balanced atop the waking head—spinning on one pointed toe while sweeping first one hand and then the other at the crowd—was what seemed at first a beautiful youth clad in riotous colors. The Experts stood debating the gender, provenance, and purpose of the figure, until the Scout came up behind them.

         “The Keeper of the Pachydormu is, I suspect, older than the beast itself,” she said.

         The Pachydormu came to a stop before the Experts and lowered its waking head. The Keeper leapt down with a flourish.

         Nothing about the Keeper was any more obvious when seen up close. What had seemed motley was in fact the Keeper’s own skin, covered every inch in bright fantastical tattoos. A wrapping of silk concealed only what was needed to preserve ambiguity. The Keeper’s eyes were the same no-and-all color of the Pachydormu’s.

         The Keeper bowed to the assembled Experts, winked a greeting at the Scout. The Experts stood in silence, some with mouths agape, some shuffling their feet in awkward silence, some muttering observations on the beast or its Keeper to their colleagues. The Pachydormu’s waking head tilted like a bird’s to look down on them. The sleeping head rumbled a slow snore. Its breath smelled of spiced pastries in foreign shops or last year’s fallen leaves.

         Finally, the Poet Laureate cleared his throat and said, “We—”

         The Keeper spoke over him in a clear high voice. “I have heard tell of a province in the far West whose Governor sleeps no more than one hour a night.”

         “Why, I myself suffer from this very affliction,” said a voice from the Great Hall. The Governor came forward through the press, the Scout gently nudging stunned Experts and Advisors aside to clear a path. For the last few weeks the Governor had fancied himself, or rather herself, a lady of the high ranges of the South, and the copper sequins cladding the red velvet of her traditional garb jingled as she walked.

         The Governor stopped before the Keeper and looked up at the waking head of the Pachydormu, then down at the sleeping head. Her eyes went yet wider in their kohl frames.

         “Those great underground beasts who migrate from the East...” The Governor trailed off with a quaver.

         “Are distant cousins, to be sure,” the Keeper said, “but the Pachydormu comes from the West, from the unbound sea, with no companion save myself. It sings no songs, but were it to do so, they would be lullabies.”

         The Governor, eyes still wide, reached a jeweled hand toward the great shaggy heap of sleeping head.

         The Keeper caught the Governor’s hand. “Have care, your Honor. Such is the soporific power of the Pachydormu that even a touch can set one dazed and staggering. A step or two on the shell itself is enough to send the most anxiously awake—be they a dutiful official, a steadfast scout, an entire audience of excited children!—into the deepest slumber. It is only with long experience, and the chewing of certain beans known to me, that I can steer the beast.”

         The Governor raised her free hand to her cheek and said, quietly but with a great and rare lucidity, “I would very much like to ride upon the back of this noble animal.”

         The Keeper studied the Governor for a moment, then said, “And so you shall, your Honor.”

         And to the Experts gathered in the entrance to the Great Hall and the Citizens in the square, the Keeper declared, “Three circuits a night, from the Main Gate to the South Road, the Founder’s Gate in the East to the far Western Bridge, and three nights of those circuits; nine trips into the warm deep dark, a sleep as soft and sweet as the meringues for which the bakers of your city are renown, nine dreams of wonder and elucidation, and by the grace of the Pachydormu, your Governor shall return in finest fettle, fantastic and fabulous!”

         The crowd cheered.

         The Chairman of the Geographic Society had been muttering with the collector of folklore. He now stepped forward with a ponderous frown and asked, “And what exactly do you expect in return for this ‘service’?”

         The Keeper smiled and bowed to the chairman as if this had been the greatest compliment. “I do have an expectation, which I shall describe to you exactly, and which I believe you shall find to be if not reasonable at the very least feasible.”

         The chairman’s frown grew yet heavier.

         The Keeper turned back to the Governor, “At the end of the three nights of three circuits, your Worship, I will ask you to pick which of the nine dreams has most touched your heart—” The Keeper tapped the Governor’s breast; the sequins rang like bells. “—and I will add it to my account of the tale of Pachydormu.” That, with a sweep of a hand over the Keeper tattoos that ran riotous from head to toe.

         The noted collector of folklore leaned forward to better study the tattoos; his eyes grew as wide as the Governor’s. “Would that I could record a description of these fabulous images. Such a book they would make.”

         “Not all stories are meant for the page, or even for words,” the Keeper said. “Skin grows, it slips and slides, it tears and heals.”

         “There are other ways to tell a tale,” said the Scout, who spoke the language of rockets.

         The Governor added, “A tale for which I feel I have been chosen!” She raised her arms toward the Pachydormu, all of her adornments jangling in enthusiasm.

         “A deal, then!” the Keeper cried. And before the Chairman of the Geographic Society could comment, the Keeper leapt up onto the waking head of the Pachydormu and announced to the crowd, “Citizens! This very evening, at the moment the sun touches the horizon, your Governor shall lie down upon the back of Pachydormu to enjoy a journey into the most excellent repose, the most wondrous dreams!”

         The Citizens cheered. The Experts muttered amongst themselves or jotted down notes for future papers. The Governor swept off her embroidered cap and clutched it to her chest, grinning like a child. The Pachydormu’s sleeping head grumbled and shook its shag. The Keeper leaned down from the Pachydorum’s waking head and beckoned to the Scout.

         “My true and most observant friend,” the Keeper said. “You know the bean that I chew to stave off the power of the Pachydormu, that seed of the fruit known as káva, kahawa, kape, or the like. And I am sure you know where to find these beans in this city, strange to me but as known to you as is your own skin.” The Keeper gently tapped the Scout’s gold-annotated arm with a finger as bright as a parrot’s feather.

         “I do,” said the Scout.

THE KEEPER and what the Keeper mistook

         Late that evening, as the midsummer sun drooped below the tops of the trees toward the horizon, the Scout returned to the plaza in front of the Governor’s Great Hall. In one hand she carried a small sack of caife from the Northern marches, and with the other she lifted her long glass to survey the preparations for the Governor’s excursion upon the Pachydormu.

         A set of wooden steps had been raised in the center of the square, as tall as the Pachydormu, and from the top of these steps protruded a plank long enough to reach the center of the beast’s back. The entire structure was decorated with blue silk banners, along with the odd stuffed fish or sucker-studded tentacle, recycled from a scheme to decorate the Governor’s chamber as a deep sea refuge.

         The Governor stood on the plank, dressed now in a flannel robe and fuzzy slippers, waving to the crowd with a look of somewhat befuddled excitement. The crowd wore bed clothes and nightgowns, striped stockings and long tasseled sleeping caps; many had brought blankets and pillows with the intention of spending the night in the plaza to cheer the Pachydormu and its passenger as they passed on their three great loops around the city.

         The Scout struggled through the crowd, stepping over picnic baskets and under mugs held high in toasts, around gaggles of seated elders and through clumps of giggling children, as the sun sunk ever lower. When she was within a few dozen paces of the steps, she whistled, and when the Keeper—perched high on the waking head of the Pachydormu—looked her way, she waved her sack of caife over her head.

         The Keeper waved a small bottle full of beans back at her with a grin and a shrug.

         These were not the toasted brown of the coife seed, not the pale kahv of the East or the mild green kave of the southern mountains. Somehow, the Keeper had acquired a very different sort of bean entirely. Rattling in the vial, unmistakable through the Scout’s long glass, were the fat black beans of the far West, the very same whose finding appointed the Governor. Even one as vigorous as the Scout dared consume no more than a dusting shaved from a single bean and tempered by butter and brandy.

         The Keeper, slender as a youth, had filled a delicate palm with the dozens of the beans.

         The Scout shouted a warning, but her words were submerged in the churn of the crowd’s excitement. She waved her arms overhead. The long black lines of her limbs, traced with gold, caught the eye of the Keeper, but the Keeper must have mistaken her sign, that crossing/uncrossing ‘X’ for stop, as a signal to go. With another grin for the grimacing Scout and a twirl for the crowd, the Keeper tossed the beans back and bit down.

         The Scout got her long glass up to her eye in time to see the look of bewonderment fill the Keeper’s eyes, a shifting of focus as if the Keeper saw through to another world entirely.

         And then the Keeper’s head went back and the Keeper’s legs went out and the Keeper tumbled from the waking head of the Pachydormu to land atop the sleeping head.

         With a groan, and a shake of its shaggy locks that sent the Keeper tumbling to the ground and the Experts scuttling back into the entrance to the Great Hall, the sleeping head awoke.

         The hitherto waking head blinked twice, sighed, and drooped into slumber. The newly awoken head delicately snuffled the prone form of the Keeper, then craned up to loose a cry with solemn conclusivity of a cathedral choir’s “amen”.

         The startled Governor teetered for a second on the edge of the plank, then fell... to land, with a sound like a dozen pillows being fluffed, flat onto the back of the Pachydormu. Through her long glass, the Scout saw the Governor rise up on one elbow. Then a look of absolute contentment flooded the Governor’s face, and she lay back down to sink nose-deep into the soft shell of the Pachydormu.

         The Pachydormu shook its newly waken head thrice and slowly turned, setting the crowd shrieking with terror or delight in accordance to their wont. And then it swung its legs, that were indeed like tree trunks, step by step, Westward, away from the Great Hall and toward the distant unbound sea.

THE EXPERTS and how they managed

         The Scout first made her way through the crowd to where the Keeper lay on the paving. The Keeper’s fall from the formerly waking head of the Pachydormu, broken as it had been by the previously sleeping head, had done no apparent harm. The tattooed tale of the Pachydormu’s dreams was unmarred by bruise or blemish; the delicate curves of the Keeper’s skull were unbroken. But the Keeper did not respond to the Scout’s questions, nor her cautious search for damage, and even through her short glass she could find no reflection of the chaos in the plaza within the Keeper’s far-focused eyes.

         The Scout carried the Keeper through the still-swirling spectators in the plaza to the entrance of the Great Hall and handed the still figure to a pair of the Governor’s staff.

         “Give what aid and comfort you can,” she said. “We owe the Keeper that and more, for, however this ends, our Governor has as promised been delivered a sleep ‘fabulous’ and ‘fantastic’.

         The Scout then turned to the Experts, Advisors, and Officials. “It seems I am to return to my task of tracking the Pachydormu. Your work, however, is as turned around as the beast itself. The Governor sleeps at last. How shall we wake him up?”

         In the first few months of the Pachydormu’s slow progress Westward, the Experts’ campaign to pluck the Governor from his repose on the back of the beast was as vigorous, and as unsuccessful, as had been their attempts to lure him asleep. Fisherman from the Founder Mer flicked their hooks, gauchos from the Eastern steppes plied their lassoes. Aerialists dangled down from their balloons, flocks of specially trained starlings, fed a strengthening diet of kale-meal and kava, strained upwards.

         A Trapeze Artist, suspended from the pillars of the Western Bridge that marked that edge of the city, managed to catch hold of the belt to the Governor’s robe. She bravely refused to let go, the belt refused to snap, and the Pachydormu, of course, refused to acknowledge any hindrance; after a few minutes of this tug of war, the pillars of the bridge themselves gave way, sending the acrobat tumbling into the river, clutching one of the belt’s silk tassels as a souvenir.

         A Baker’s Apprentice, working on his own initiative and wearing layered rubber boots insulated with the meringue for which the city was famous, made it thirteen long steps across the Pachydorumu’s shell before collapsing on top of Governor. He lay slumped there for a week before the starlings lifted him to safety. He slept for another day in hospital and woke with tears of joy at the dream he had had. For the rest of his life he failed to find the words to describe that dream; his self-rejected efforts were collected into a small volume that met with great acclaim in the East.

         Attempts to stop, or divert, the Pachydormu’s steady path Westward proved as fruitless. The beast ignored the coercions of Teamsters, snuffled disdainfully at the proffered treats of Trainers, went around or over or, most often, straight through any obstacle placed in its path.

         A small group of Experts applied themselves instead to waking the Keeper, whose experience with the Pachydormu, they argued, would surely be of value. This position was largely discredited by the majority, and regardless, the bean-induced coma which held the Keeper proved as impenetrable as the Governor’s shell-bound slumber.

         In the months that followed, as the Pachydormu made its way beyond the Garden of Succulents on the far side of bridge and up into to the western hills, the Experts spent less and less time on the problem of the Governor’s rescue and more and more time attempting to manage the problems of province as a whole. It seemed that the Governor, however impeded by his insomnia, had been more useful than any of them had understood.

THE SCOUT and how she told tales

         Long after the last Expert retired in defeat back to the capitol, the Scout continued to track the Pachydormu. Though its pace was steady and its stride was long, the beast was slow enough that she could keep up, as long as she limited herself to a few hours of sleep at a time; the irony of this was not lost on her. With her short glass she studied her maps for hints toward the creature’s path and its droppings, which looked like snowballs and smelled of lavender, for clues to its nature. And with her long glass, she studied Governor.

         To say that the Governor slept deeply was not just a fanciful turn of phrase. So soft was the shell of the Pachydormu that the Governor had sunk until his nose barely protruded above the surface. It was only by making a considered prediction of the Pachydormu’s path, then forging ahead of it and climbing a treacherous tree branch or crumbling cliff edge that the Scout could look down upon the Governor’s face. Whenever this opportunity arose, she took careful note of the nature of the Governor’s smile, how his throat trembled in silent sleepspeech, how his eyes twitched under the lids.

         And once a week she pulled her vials of powders from their pouch, prepared her fuses, her flint and steel, and summarized her findings in the language of rockets.

         The Scout was the only true master of the language of rockets in the West; indeed, she was unmatched across the entire continent. But thanks to the mandates of an antiquated law whose repeal had been blocked over the decades by a coalition of those who feared attack by unknown powers across the sea and those with investments in gunpowder factories, every child of the province studied in school how to read the flashes of light, the bursts of color, the twirling trail of sparks, the whistling, sizzling music of the propellant, the punctuating thump and rumble of detonation.

         And so the children of the hill towns of the West, the wide-scattered farmhouses of the plains, the lighthouses of the Founder Mer, shouted shrill translations from rooftops and tree to their parents below, who transcribed the Scout’s reports to paper, which was passed in turn by courier or post or telegraph along the ever-longer path back to the capitol.

         And some households, under that same mandate, had dusty stockpiles of ready-made rockets with useful phrases, and so at times the Scout received a message back in reply; though, due to the limitations of the pre-prepared vocabulary and the decay of the chemicals, these replies were often vague.

         The Scout’s ninth message read, “The Town of Lambsford - Parade to welcome the Governor - Mayor’s son attempted Baker’s feat - Shoes filled with sugarmice -” (A specialty of that town; not the soft candy of the East but a small, crisp cookie formed with four drooping legs.) “Son tripped before reaching Pachydormu - Broke nose - tooth - two ribs - Mayor ordered arrest of Pachydormu and myself - Seven constables still asleep - Two in hospital - No further incidents - Governor smiles.” The reply read, “Delivery - you - Transom Ford.” When the Scout reached the Inn at the ford, she found a package containing káva, meringues, and a first edition chapbook of the Baker’s Assistant’s initial attempts to capture his dream.

         The Scout’s fifteenth message read, “The Forest of Tambourin - Falling leaves cover Governor each afternoon - But Pachydormu faces into breeze each evening - Leaves fly up like swallows - Governor in dream follows.” The Scout was fond of Autumn, and she had visited the Forest so many times she had the details of its terroir annotated over her heart. As a result, the rockets of these weeks were particularly lovely. Even those who had ignored or long-since forgotten their lessons stood outside on the those nights to see the beauty of the Scout’s messages? rising up in the Western sky, to recall a phrase or two from childhood.

         There was no reply that night, but the following week she saw, reflected on the still waters of the Founder Mer, “Pirate King - to the light house - still afloat in a rum bucket.” The rocket stockpiles in the lake region had, apparently, been chosen with few specific scenarios in mind. “Pirate King” surely meant the swaggering, motley-tattooed Keeper. The “lighthouse” was presumably some safe place. The rest was baffling, until the Scout realized that the pale peach-yellow half palm of “rum bucket” might have faded from its original coral, in which case the phrase read “still passed out drunk.” The Keeper’s coma, apparently, was as persistent as the pace of the Pachydormu.

         The Scout’s twenty-ninth message read, “Have crossed the Great Western Divide - Distant scent of the Sea - Pachydormu stopped head high five minutes to breathe - Governor shifts as if teetering on edge.”

         “Since - Governor - gone away - DANGER NO BRAKES!” came the reply; the final rocket in that message had been common equipment on the wagons that had brought the Founders from the far East.

         At first the Scout took this as concern over the Pachydormu’s descent down from the mountains.

         But then she thought of those clever devices that limited the speed of factory flywheels to prevent them from spinning out of control and tearing down the works, and she thought of the Experts and their tendency for elaboration over wisdom, and of the Officials and their enthusiasm for expansion, and of the Citizens and their love of spectacle, and she pondered the fate of the province.

THE PACHYDORMU and where it was going

         It was midsummer’s eve when the Scout reached the end of her task. For the preceding three days they had traveled over heath and moor. The flatness of the terrain and the lack of trees had prevented her from glimpsing more than the Governor’s hair, which had grown long enough to float like a mane over the back of the Pachydormu. And so the Scout was scouting for a better vantage point, a mile or two in advance of the creature’s slow progress, when suddenly the ground fell away before her, low cliffs dropping to a pebbled strand, and she realized what she had taken for peat blued by haze and distance was in fact the unbound sea.

         Ever since they had come down from the high mountains, the Pachydormu’s path had been due west, as straight as the rays of the setting sun. And so the Scout did not bother to backtrack; the beast would make its way to her. Instead she sat on the edge of the cliff and read the Baker’s Assistant’s book, which had become a sort of fourth member of the expedition. She had reached that point in the third section that famously ends “Sleep well, my love. Dream well,” when a sudden sharp breeze riffled the pages, with a thump that rumbled in her chest like fireworks and the smell of fresh snow-melt.

         How the Pachydormu could so surprise the Scout was a mystery she never solved. Perhaps the year of little sleep was finally catching up with her, just as had the beast itself. Perhaps the Baker’s Assistant’s book, with its strange swirl of words and worlds, had drawn her into a waking dream.

         The creature’s great legs swung over her—from underneath, with its treetrunk legs and mottled skin, it looked exactly like the Forest of Tambourin in Autumn—and then without pause it went over the cliff.

         The Scout’s packs had been scattered by the Pachydormu’s passing. It took her a few precious moments to find her long glass, miraculously unbroken. Then she leaped to the edge of the cliff and looked down.

         The Pachydormu was just stepping into the waves. The sleeping head floated, its nostrils just clear of the surface, its snores foaming the water. The waking head raised up, as it had done in the plaza a year before, and gave one long cry. And then the Pachydormu began to swim.

         The Scout feared at first that the beast would submerge and the Governor drown. But the shell stayed clear of the water. Through the long glass, the Scout watched the Governor’s face, the ripple of his eyelids like moonlight on water, the floating spray of his hair, the shapes his lips formed; not the language of rockets, nor any other that she knew. But the job of a Scout is to read the unknown.

         The Scout watched through the long glass until she could no longer distinguish the Governor from the shell of the Pachydormu, and longer yet, until she could no longer distinguish the Pachydormu from the sea itself.

         She had just enough powder left for one last rocket, her fifty-second. A green star, four yellow starbursts around a pulsing red palm, four yellow starbursts around a cloud of sliver sparks, a deep chest-thump, a spiraling white arrow that crackled like laughter through a spherical peony of perfect blue: “Governor - Still alive - Still asleep - The unbound sea.”

         There was no reply.

THE SCOUT and what she knew

         A year later, after many adventures, the Scout returned to the city, and to the ground of the capitol, and to the Governor’s tower.

         She found no Citizens in the city, no Officials on the grounds of the capitol, no assembled Experts in the Governor’s tower.

         That tower still stood, though war and weather had left great gaps in its masonry. The Scout stood in the center of the Great Hall, where just one year before she had announced the arrival of the Pachydormu, and surveyed the changes.

         The paraphernalia of the Experts—the writing desks and gear-packed cabinets, the tangled marionettes and brass-bound optics—had become home to mice and beetles and tiny birds. It was the city in miniature, with neighborhoods of moldering paper and broken glasswork all carefully maintained by wax and spittle and well-spun web. Ants and roaches rushed to their duties down streets of streets of copper cable and satin ribbon. The table around which the Council had met formed a sort of park in the center, so mottled by moss and mold, so etched by in-blown rain and the busy feet of vermin that it was indistinguishable from the ornate woven rug from the East that lay at the foot of the Governor’s plush padded chair. A brass tube dangled from the ceiling over all this, just as the Governor’s tower hung over the old city outside. The Scout thought the old city had never been so lovingly fit to its landscape as was this one, in decay or otherwise.

         “So which then is the replica?” the Scout asked a spider that glittered brown and gold in a beam of sunlight.

         As if in reply, from the tower of the brass tube came the slow susurration of someone snoring.

         The lift no longer worked, so she climbed the two hundred and twelve steps to the Governor’s chamber at the very top of the tower. On the second to last step her foot found something that rattled against the tread. It was a bean, dried black and hard as stone. The Scout laughed and popped it into her mouth to suck on like a pebble.

         At the top of the steps was a door. The Scout pushed it open; it groaned on its hinges and let loose a swirl of air that held a distant scent of the sea.

         The far wall of the Governor’s chamber had crumbled away, and some of the floor with it. Hanging halfway over the precipice was the Governor’s bed, and in that bed lay the Keeper of the Pachydormu. The Keeper’s chest rose and fell so subtly that only the keen sight of the Scout would notice. Whether due to an unearthly vitality or the perfect repose of the bean-induced coma, the Keeper was entirely unchanged.

         The Scout shifted the bean in her cheek and laughed again. “Well, here’s a sleeping beauty,” she said. “The Pirate King in the lighthouse.”

         She shed, one by one, the packs and pouches she carried: her hard-dried food and her sloshing water, her travel papers and her collected curios, her long glass and her short glass, her chipped flint and her stout steel blade, the empty vials that had held the powders with which she had spoken the language of rockets. And she shed, one by one, her heavy rain-starched cloak, her muddy boots, her kilt and blouse, and all her much mended underlayers. Then she sat on the edge of the bed and sighed.

         This was not the sigh of one who, reaching the end of a long journey, discovers the trip was in vain.

         This was not the sigh of one who, in the midst of a great effort, sets down her burden for a moment’s rest.

         The sigh the Scout sighed was the sigh of one who, having just awoken, looks forward to a long awaited day.

         With one long finger the Scout traced the silver contour lines of her body. That terrain had been somewhat eroded by travel and travail, a new gully here, a gentle slope of scree there, and whenever the Scout had found a practitioner of the far Northern method of tattoo along her way she had added new legends and annotations. Being a Scout, she was pleased to find that since the last update her landscape had already changed.

         And then with one long finger she traced the tattoos on the Keeper’s pale skin, the catalogue of the dreams of those who slept on the Pachydormu that the Keeper had collected in payment, starting with an image of the Pachydormu itself rising from the sea, which covered the Keeper’s left foot and made those toes into four mighty legs and the beast’s great sleeping head. The other head looked up to the cliffs of the Keeper’s ankle and beyond.

         As she moved up the Keeper’s body, the shifting of her weight set the bed rocking on the edge of the precipice. And as she stopped to study the details of a dream, that rocking died away again.

         When she reached the Keeper’s face she pulled back her lips in a smile to reveal the single hard bean clenched between her teeth, as if she meant to appoint the Keeper as Governor or to claim that honor herself.

         “Ah, but who should carry whom around the room?” she asked the Keeper’s quiet face.

         She traced the last of the tattoos, a lake of butter yellow that filled the hollow of the Keeper’s collarbone and spilled over the edge of the shoulder, filled with floating children who drifted in the shade of a vast shaggy tree. Then she ground the bean between her teeth, which were as strong as stone beneath the landscape of her face.

         The Scout gasped, once. The scent of the bean on her breath vibrated the air like distant bells ringing.

         “I know what the Governor dreams,” the Scout said. “And I will tell you what it is, and thus seal the bargain between us.”

         She set one hand on each side of the Keeper’s head, which set the bed to rocking again, and leaned down close to the Keeper’s lips.

         She said, “I will tell it to you in the language of rockets.”

* * *

         Like you, I know no more than that of the Tale of the Scout and the Pachydormu. No child has ever heard the dream of the Governor, or anything else past that point. Sleep takes us all, one by one from youngest to oldest, before the end of the telling.

         In fact, everything beyond the description of the Scout’s sigh is conjecture, assembled from years of recollections from the eldest and most stubborn children, salvaged word by word from the inescapable haze of the Butter Punch and the afternoon games and the rattling radiators and the ever slower ever softer voice of ‘Uncle Willow’.

         In my twelfth year, through the long procession of Winter and the creeping Spring and the rolling Summer and the promise of Autumn, I wondered about the true end of the Tale. Night after night I lay awake, comparing the competing reconstructions of the story from our neighborhood and from the accounts of the children who lived north of Main or east of the South Road, who had their own ‘Uncle Willows’ but whose tales of the Tale agreed with ours up to those last uncertain words. I fumbled for another precious word or two among own muddled memories, which went no further than the dropping of the Scout’s packs and pouches. I peered through the cracked pane of those words at the mysteries within: what had happened to the city, all the Experts, Advisors, Officials, and Citizens? Where was the Pachydormu bound? Why did the Scout climb out on that barely balanced bed instead of pulling it in to safety? What was the dream of the Governor?

         And there was a mystery on the near side of that cracked pane: how did ‘Uncle Willow’, who drank the same Butter Punch, who sat closest to the lure of the radiators, who was bundled in ‘his’ sweaters as soundly as we were in our flannel blankets, how did ‘Uncle Willow’ stay awake through ‘his’ own telling, when we children, with all of our energy and enthusiasm and anticipation, could not?

         As the year proceeded, I became more and more convinced that the solution to this last puzzle lay in that grating of spice upon ‘Uncle Willow’s wide white bowl of punch. Surely this spice came of the same bean that had appointed the Governor, that had laid the Keeper on that perilous bed, that had been ground between the Scout’s teeth in those last, least certain words.

         Toward the tailing end of Autumn, I bought any number of unneeded pencils and paperclips at the Stationer’s on Main, trying to smell that spice on Anna’s breath as she counted out my change. I even went so far as to ask her for recipes—a school assignment, I explained—in hopes of hearing some ingredient beyond those in my family’s cupboards. She obliged with accounts of squash pie and cherry soup, written out in neat script as I watched and handed over with that same slow small smile she usually kept for passing parents. I was left with a growling stomach and a giddy thrill in my limbs but with no unfamiliar items, no clue toward that unknown spice.

         And so this year, the day of the first new moon of winter, after the potluck dinner while the children ran through dustings of snow and the adults squinted at their red and black backed cards, I snuck through the Bellamy’s long parlor and down the short hallway into the kitchen. The table there was covered with cookies cooling on sheets of parchment, the counter was crowded with the unlikely ingredients for the Butter Punch that was steeping on the stove, the cupboards held every familiar spice from my family’s kitchen... but nothing more.

         A creak of floorboards and a murmur of conversation from the hallway heralded the return of the cooks. I slipped out the kitchen door into the screened porch that served the Bellamys as a cool retreat in Summer and as a mudroom in Winter. Half-blind with disappointment, I slumped onto a chair heaped with coats and kicked my heels against something that swung between the chair’s legs. That something made a musical thump-rattle-slap that I could turn into a steady rhythm by timing my kicks. After a minute or two of this I leaned forward to see what it was and discovered the leather book satchel that Anna wore over her shoulder on her way to and from the Stationer’s on Main.

         I stopped kicking, stopped breathing, sat still and listened to the voices from the kitchen. They had settled into a rhythm of their own, occupied with the cooking, I thought, and unlikely to head this way. I pulled the satchel out from under my legs and sat it on my lap, unbuckled the straps that held it shut, lifted the flap. The smell of leather and lavender hand cream and old books and new ink spilled out, but no scent vibrated the air like distant bells ringing. In the main pocket of the satchel I found all the items those smells promised: books and papers, jars of powders, lotions, and inks, a miniature atlas, a pair of reading glasses, a tiny set of binoculars. These same items explained the thump and the slap. But what of the rattle?

         Pockets along the front of the satchel held a variety of pens, all of fine quality, solidly screwed together and disinclined to make any noise no matter how vigorously shaken. The satchel itself, though, persisted in rattling, and eventually I found a hidden pocket, and in that pocket a small green glass vial, and in that vial a few fat black beans.

         When I unscrewed the top of the vial, the scent was so strong I clamped my palm over the top for fear it would carry through the door and the conversation and the steam and smoke of the kitchen to alert the cooks to my trespass.

         And then, when it was clear that I was yet undiscovered, I slipped a single fat black bean from the vial to my jacket. I restored the lid to the vial, the vial to the hidden pocket, and the satchel to its spot under the chair. I crept across the porch and out the rear door into the snow.

         The bean seemed to weigh down my jacket throughout the remaining games of the afternoon, making me slide and stumble in a way I feared would reveal my secret, or at least reveal the fact that I had a secret. I wrapped it in a bit of tissue and tucked it into my sock, where it felt less of a burden. I was still convinced that I—and everyone else—could smell it, and I was nervous and distracted through the start of the festivities.

         My mother studied me at arm’s length during the farewells and I thought I was discovered, but then she smiled and smoothed back my hair and kissed me on the cheek and said she’d always remember me like this, like rockets, “all aglow”.

         That glow seemed to fill me—I imagined my skin shining through with it head to toe, like the golden filigree of the Scout’s tattoos or the Keeper’s riotous colors—and I threw my arms around her and whispered, “Tonight I will learn the end of the Tale of the Scout and the Pachydormu.”

         A look came over her then, that was not quite sadness or hope or loss or certainty; like the eye of the Pachydormu it could seem any color because it held them all. It was the look she got when the radio told of the distant war and the quiet decay and she’d reach without looking to take my father’s hand in hers, then touch the center of my back where I lay on the floor with one outstretched toe. It was, I thought, a look that grownups shared with each other.

         “Do you remember the Baker’s Apprentice,” she asked, “who awoke from the wonderful dreams of the Pachydormu, but could never quite capture them again?”

         I nodded.

         “When you get older, you learn...” She paused, and smoothed my hair back down again. I felt older in that moment, solemn. “You learn that there are things you will never learn. And you learn that that’s okay.”

         She hugged me again, and whispered, “Sleep well, my love. Dream well.”

         And then the youngsters swept in the door, shrieking with laughter, and out came the first round of Butter Punch and the turtle cookies and little Leebeth Jandotter knocked a baby tooth out on the bean and was carried around the room as the night’s Governor and then I found my blanket—green it is, with a pattern of golden acorns along one edge—and then there was ‘Uncle Willow’ appearing like magic in ‘his’ chair and then the second round of Butter Punch and then, with the first words of the Tale of the Governor and the Pachydormu, I fished the bean from my sock and slipped it into my mouth.

         The flavor exploded in my mouth like the sip of aquavit I’d once had from my father’s glass, so fierce at first I almost spit it straight out again. My attempts to grind it between my teeth failed with a crack that earned curious glances from children around me. “Teeth as strong as stone,” I thought, and despaired.

         But then I thought: the Scout had not given up, had she, during those long years on the trail of the Pachydormu? And had she not held the bean in her mouth for some while, as she studied the Keeper’s tattooed catalogue of dreams? So I sucked on the bean throughout the telling, its flavor filling my head and spilling down into my limbs.

         And when ‘Uncle Willow’ said, “Then she ground the bean between her teeth, which were as strong as stone beneath the landscape of her face,” and all the children except myself had succumbed to the spell of sleep and lay curled in their flannel...

         At that moment I bite down again on the bean and it bursts with a groan like all the radiators in the world and everything goes the yellow of the Butter Punch and then the bone white of ‘Uncle Willow’s bowl and I feel like I am flying up into the air like a rocket and the same time I am sinking into a blackness as soft and rich as meringue.

         And now I swing here with my heart going thump-rattle-slap and I wonder: do I really want to know? Or do I want to stay here in this moment, never quite knowing?

         And I wonder: do I even have a choice? What is this warm deep dark, after all, this gentle rocking? Is it the Scout above me in my bed, barely balanced on the edge of the precipice? Or is it the swell of the sea, the steady stroke beneath me of the Pachydormu?

Copyright © 2018 Gregory Norman Bossert.

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Gregory Norman Bossert is an author, filmmaker, and musician, based just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. He started writing in 2009 on a dare from film designer Iain McCaig and has no intention of stopping anytime soon. His story “The Telling” in BCS #109 won the 2013 World Fantasy Award; other stories have appeared everywhere from Asimov’s Science Fiction to the Saturday Evening Post. When not writing, he works for Industrial Light & Magic, currently on the upcoming Captain Marvel film. More information is available on his blog GregoryNormanBossert.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE CROW KNIGHT

by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

         Years after their friendship had ended, Ser Maerwynn heard tales of the evil Queen Loreen: her curse of silence on the centaurs; her demand that each stone used to build the townspeople’s homes be paid for in daily drops of blood; and finally, the murder of her husband, William the Well-Read, who had grown to love her as much as Ser Maerwynn had loved her.

         Ser Maerwynn—Wynn—had left the Land of Mu for the edge of the Beyond for many reasons, only one of which she had told to the then-Lady Loreen, not yet a queen but the daughter, still, of her hated king father. None of those reasons were because Wynn no longer loved Loreen. Even later, as Wynn lay with her half-evil wife in her stone hut in the Silent Woods, she dreamt of her friend, the only woman who had ever truly broken her heart.

* * *

         Wynn’s father lost his life not to the beast he slayed but to the bandits’ ambush on the returning carriages as they weaved celebratorily through the winter-bare banyo trees. Half the king’s men murdered in one evening; for years the banyo trees whispered of the bloodbath each night evening when the first beams of moonlight coaxed the trees’ mouths to open in their trunks. In her awkward childhood, Wynn once snuck to the edge of the forest at sundown. This was before her friendship with Lady Loreen; before her lack of grace and classroom skill convinced the king’s leftover knights to train her in the way of the sword. That childhood night Wynn stepped one foot over the invisible line that separated the civilized Mu from the wild woods.

         “We saw your father’s death,” a banyo whispered. “When those bandits sliced open his belly, nothing there but empty space.”

         “Come closer, little girl,” another said. “Place a finger on our tongue and we’ll tell you if that man was truly your father or if chivalry forced him to care for an ugly child that no one else wanted.”

         Wynn turned and ran until she reached the palace, where the entrance guards hurried her through and placated her with a sour candy they’d hidden in their armor. They were the youngest of the King’s Order, unskilled at child care. A year into her adolescence, during her training, they taught her to funnel her rage through the memory of the banyos’ taunting words.

         On Wynn’s thirteenth birthday, the king granted her knighthood before tossing her into his labyrinth, where she confronted the hot breath of death in the form of the king’s ugliest beast: a bear twice her size with black holes for eyes. She imagined the red of her father’s blood—never blue—as she killed the thing with her bare hands and dragged the carcass before the king father’s throne. He begged to know how she’d done it.

         “Thing’s blind,” she said.

         As punishment the king father assigned her to guard his only daughter, the difficult Loreen. The first night Ser Maerwynn stood guard at the Lady Loreen’s door, she caught her sneaking out the her window, climbing down a banyo that had grown up to the second floor. Wynn watched her go; Loreen saw her seeing her. Neither said a word, not even in the morning when Wynn let the Lady Loreen’s handmaiden in to serve her breakfast in bed, not even when her king father asked Ser Wynn how her first night of duty had gone. He bristled when she refused to admit that Lady Loreen had misbehaved.

         For this small courtesy, Loreen slipped leftover biscuits into Ser Wynn’s clutched fingers as they made their way back up the tower stairs after breakfast. Ser Wynn was not fed at the noble’s table with the noble people; unlike the best of the king father’s knights, she was forced to slurp sludgy pudding in her brief rests. Three times a day the kitchen granted her a goblet of water. Each evening one of the sneakier servants offered her one thimbleful of wine. The biscuit that Loreen slipped her as reward for her silence flaked on her tongue, a cloud of sugar and flour and butter.

         She did not thank the Lady Loreen. Instead she asked her where she went at night.

         “Around,” Loreen said.

         “How do you get away with it?” Wynn asked.

         “I’m the king’s daughter,” she said. “I get away with anything.”

         On one of her rests, Wynn checked the banyo tree; Loreen had taken an ax to its mouth, destroying its ability to tattle on her evening disappearances. It was then that Wynn knew that the Lady Loreen held inside her a rage like that she herself had experienced in her fight with the king father’s bear. The kind of rage that she knew would burn her up if she let it.

* * *

         By Lady Loreen’s marrying age, Ser Maerwynn and she spent every spare moment with one another. They shared everything: dresses Wynn snuck into in the privacy in Loreen’s bedroom (though they stretched against her broad body), the secret desire to accomplish more than their roles allowed (for Loreen, an eventual marriage to a bore of a noble man and for Wynn, forever-service under the King who had disliked her from birth), and the thunderstorm-colored crow that began to follow them wherever they went.

         They had heard the legend: crows attached themselves to people or pairs of people, traveling from one unlucky soul’s shoulder to the other. The crows instilled a sense of certain gloom in whomever their claws touched; their presence brought forth an obsessive worry about what moment that touch might come. Loreen and Wynn’s crow hovered silent in their room most of the time, but as legend predicted, its presence invited a tight expectancy into the girls’ chests. When the crow rested on Loreen’s window, she and Wynn were sometimes able to ignore it, to gossip and laugh as though they were still children. But when it hovered unignorably in the air, they dwelled, thoughts circling in them, on their pre-written lives: lady and knight, lady and knight, lady and knight.

         On rare nights, when the crow shrieked and darted from one of them to the next, touching down on their shoulders, their arms, the tops of their heads—whatever bare skin it could find—they could do nothing more than curl into balls or hide beneath the bed until the shrieking ceased. The crow left no marks, but Loreen dug her own fingernails into her skin. “It should hurt more,” she repeated to herself. Though Wynn’s steel armor protected her from the crow’s touch, she removed her helmet during the crow’s fits in order to divert its attention from Loreen. After one of these fits, Wynn tried to kill the crow with her blade. The metal bounced off its body.

         Lady Loreen was sure the king father had sent the crow. But Wynn knew better: the birds followed no orders, no logic, but their own. No one in the palace, even the knights who had half-raised Ser Wynn, mentioned the crow’s existence when the girls were around; it was easier to ignore than to ask if there was anything they could do to help, or to ask if they had helped, unknowingly or otherwise, to call it there.

         Because of the crow, the girls appreciated more the light they found in one another. They snuck together into the field across from the palace and ran late-nights through moon-blooming lion’s-head flowers, named for their furry golden petals. They dared the crow to keep up with them as they dove naked of armor and finery in the river that ran at the poor edge of town. They dared one another to pluck its feathers. While Wynn winced each time she pulled at the crow, Loreen yanked its feathers with a gleeful abandon. She smiled with her mouth full of black, like ink. She held the flame of her candle to them and screamed when they did not light. These actions had no effect on the crow; it never seemed balder or weaker in any way.

         Some nights the crow followed Lady Loreen into her bed. On those nights Ser Wynn abandoned her door-post and guarded instead Lady Loreen’s prone body, upon which the crow slept. Ser Wynn knew the nightmares that came with this heaviness; she felt them herself when the crow followed her to sleep instead, down in her basement bed: a layer of straw covered with leftover cloth from the royal tailors.

         The king father never learned of these, the Lady Loreen’s indiscretions, but Wynn often practiced what she would say to him should he discover that she stayed some nights so close to his daughter; she would tell him that not all the evils of this world entered through the door, that not all the threats to his daughter could be fought with shield and sword. But Wynn did wonder: what, if anything, would kill the crow? Because they were tired, Ser Wynn and Lady Loreen.

         Wynn received her answer at a dinner ceremony one stormy evening; outside, wind bells warned of devastation. The king father did not halt his announcement for the weather’s sake. His guests, a smattering of lords and widowed kings from all the Lands, were served at long tables made from the wood of banyo trunks strung together—mouths wide-open and facing upwards for goblets to set inside—and scarfed down a seemingly endless supply of river fish and rabbit, peas and long green beans on beds of lettuce. Some of the men were bearded and brawny; others were as thin as the garden poles used to stake the very peas they ate. None of them would appeal to Lady Loreen, who sat at the high table, yet Wynn had the sneaking suspicion that’s why they were gathered there. Wynn stood beyond the table, hands resting on her sword hilt.

         Halfway through dinner the king father stood and rang his own bell; Wynn strained to hear him over the wind’s howling.

         “I have asked you all here, as you may have suspected, because my daughter, the beautiful Lady Loreen, has come of marrying age.”

         Lady Loreen rolled her eyes at Wynn, allowing the rabbit meat she chewed to hang down her chin.

         “You may also have noticed that my beautiful daughter does not come without her...beasts.”

         A small murmur moved through the crowd. The crow hovered above Lady Loreen; the king’s words confirmed what had long been mere rumor: the sole Lady of the Kingdom of Mu was afflicted.

         “I have been told by some that this creature, this terrible bird, is impossible to kill. Those who told me as much, I have let free from my castle. I have searched the Land of Mu right up to the Beyond, to find some way to rid her of its presence,” the king father said. Wynn raised her eyebrows at Loreen; they had known nothing of this search. “I have heard of only one solution. At the farthest reaches of the woods, guarded by the Mother Bird herself, is a knife, forged by purest light, kept in purest dark. This blade is the only thing in all the world capable of killing this beast.” The king father paused and raised his goblet. “I will grant the hand of my fair daughter to the man who fetches this for me. I will drink this beast’s blood at their wedding.” He drained the goblet dry.

         Wynn expected her rage, her king father-related fire, to erupt outwardly, for her to take the knife from her plate and plunge it into her father’s hand. But Lady Loreen held her composure.

         After the dinner Ser Wynn escorted the Lady Loreen back to her quarters. Wynn grabbed her arm as she tried to disappear silent through the door. “Wait, don’t you want to talk?”

         The crow flew up the hall toward them, sluggish in the well-fed air. It tried to land on Wynn’s shoulder, but she hit it away and shoved herself into Loreen’s bedroom, slamming the door behind her. The crow would find its way in, but for now they were alone.

         “What is there to talk about?” Loreen’s eyes flashed. “My king father will sell me to the bravest bidder. That’s always been my fate, hasn’t it? At least I’ll be rid of this crow.”

         “But there has to be some other way,” Wynn said. Loreen shrugged her dress from her shoulders and let it float into a pile on the floor. She crawled naked underneath her blankets. Wynn was used to her friend’s nudity; fearless Loreen, whose lithe body made Wynn’s stomach flip with jealousy. Wynn stepped, armor clanking, over the dress and stood beside Loreen’s bedside. “Isn’t there another way?”

         Loreen ran her fingers along the edge of her blanket. “We could kill him,” she said. “My father. Take a knife to his throat in the night.”

         Wynn frowned. “But he’s your—”

         Loreen laughed. “I’m joking.” She reached out to touch Wynn’s hand. “Of course, there’s one other way.”

         “Me?” Ser Wynn said. She thought about it; it made sense. “Yes, I could go. I could find the knife. I could—”

         “Win my hand?” Lady Loreen said.

         “No,” Wynn said. “Of course not. We talked about that.”

         Indeed they had, during one of their first years together, two unsure girls years away from their first romantic experiences. Lady Loreen handed Ser Wynn a bracelet she’d braided from blades of grass. She helped Wynn remove her gauntlet and let her hand linger too long on Wynn’s bared wrist as she tied the bracelet in place. I know what kind of woman you will be, Loreen said. I am not that kind of woman. But I will keep this secret, the one you don’t even know yet.

         Wynn had known, from the moment Lady Loreen had touched her wrist. But the focused feeling, extinguished as soon as it ignited, did not linger in her. She let that distant possibility free. She needed this friendship more.

         “Can you imagine what your father would say?” Wynn grinned. “No, I could go. I could find the blade, fight the Mother Bird, kill our crow. Declare the king father’s contest unfair to you and ask instead for your freedom, whatever way you want it.”

         “I want to be queen without marriage,” Lady Loreen said.

         “I would demand it of him,” Wynn said. “Your freedom.”

         “Instead of taking my hand, you could be my hand. My own best knight.” Lady Loreen sat up in bed. “Let’s toast to it.”

         Ser Wynn located a half-drunk bottle of champagne Lady Loreen had stowed beneath her bed and filled two dirtied flutes full.

         They clinked their glasses. “To the Queen Loreen and her best knight!” Lady Loreen said. Ser Wynn nodded. They giggled as the bubbles traveled down their throats. Loreen helped Wynn out of her armor until she wore only her gambeson. They lay side by side; the moment Loreen’s head hit the pillow she was out. Wynn laughed to see her sleep so easily. They woke before morning’s first light to a sinking feeling in their guts; the crow had found its way inside and perched at their feet.

         “If you go now,” Loreen said, “you’ll have a head start.”

         “I don’t want to leave you,” Wynn said. “You’re my only friend.”

         “What do you think the crow will do when we separate?” Loreen said.

         “Follow one of us,” Wynn said. “It’ll be too far for it to travel back-and-forth.”

         “Which one of us?” Loreen said.

         Wynn did not respond.

         Lady Loreen helped Ser Wynn back into her formal armor, packed a knapsack for her long journey, and snuck her down into the palace yard. The winds had done their damage; several carts had toppled in the night, and the banyo tree below Lady Loreen’s tower was now bent into the shape of a lady mid-curtsy. In a fenced-in pasture outside the palace gates, Loreen bribed a centaur into letting Wynn ride him. Wynn bade Loreen goodbye, knowing full-well that she would not see her for a very long time.

         Wynn stopped at the beginning of the first banyo forest and crawled off the centaur.

         “What a long and arduous journey you’ve got ahead of you,” the centaur said. “Are you aching to join your father in the death-place?”

         “Don’t talk about my father,” Wynn said. She tightened the muscles of her belly for the banyo insults ahead.

         While Loreen had intended for Wynn to ride the centaur through the forest, Wynn would travel by foot. She hadn’t had the heart to tell Loreen that she intended to play by the king father’s rules. As he’d told the other suitors, the journey must not be taken by mount. Wynn shooed the centaur away and toed the forest line as she had as a child. The sun would rise in an hour; moonlight still sifted down through the leaves.

         “The great knight is here,” a banyo said. “Look at her in her fancy armor, as though all that steel will make up for bad blood.”

         “Be quiet,” Wynn said as she crossed into the woods. “Or I’ll cut off your mouths, like Loreen did to your palace friend.”

         The banyo trees quieted, as they always did, once the sun rose and their mouths closed. In the light they looked like any other trees. Wynn was grateful for the silence.

         The crow followed her the whole first day, circling her head. She swatted the crow. Black feathers floated to form a trail behind them. Wynn imagined Loreen following it, following her, imagined them running away into the woods where the king father would not command either of them. A few times Wynn tricked herself into believing that she heard footsteps, that she saw a flash of someone hiding when she turned to face the way she had come. But the crow’s continual presence on her shoulder told the truth: Loreen was safe in the palace. If the crow would follow Wynn forever, Loreen was better off without her.

         At nightfall she pitched her tent in the middle of a circle of banyos. They would tease her mercilessly once they woke, but what choice did she have? She took off her armor—a lengthy process despite that she left on her breastplate—and lay waiting for sleep to take her. She expected to hear the trees’ whispers. When she was met only with stunning silence and the flap of the crow’s wings as it beat against the top of the tent, she shivered. It was more troubling, this quiet. What game were the trees playing? Or was it fear that kept them from speaking?

         She did not dare to ask. Eventually sleep dragged her into an abyss filled with nightmares of her father: fighting dragons, fighting bandits. Wynn’s mother had fled after Wynn’s birth, having assisted in the breaking of Wynn’s father’s knight vow of celibacy. It was good that her mother had done so, for her mother’s own sake. On Loreen’s fifteenth birthday, Wynn had broken down while watching Loreen’s mother litter Loreen’s bed with gifts and bring them both juice and spicy sausage and the sweetest jam on the softest bread. Once her mother had left the room, Loreen explained that Wynn’s mother would have had no choice but to flee the kingdom: the king father killed the lovers of his knights, strung them up by their necks in the courtyard. When Loreen was ten, she’d walked right into one of the bodies.

         “What did you do?” Wynn asked, stomach clenching.

         “I moved it out of my way,” Loreen said.

         Then, six months later, with Lady Loreen’s own mother sentenced to death, whereupon she too fled, they gained that in common: missing mothers, and fathers who failed them in their ways too brave or cruel.

         In the banyo forest Ser Wynn woke covered in sweat, though a breeze blew through the trees and into the open flaps of her tent. She searched for the crow, expecting to see it darting erratically, but it slept still beside her. She rolled over and hugged herself, comforted by the familiar shape of its sleeping form, head nestled into the feathers of its chest.

         “I’d be alone without you, crow,” she whispered, low enough not to wake it.

         Still, her stomach sank when it did not reply.

* * *

         When morning finally reared its subtle head, the sun lighting shadows on the dirt-worn path, Wynn rolled up her blanket and folded her tent and shoved them into the pack. The pack itself was an old, common magic: not bottomless but larger than it looked to outside eyes. Wynn breakfasted on dried sausage and plum. The taste left an emptiness in her chest, made her want to laugh though there was no one but the crow to laugh with. It perched on a tree and watched as she gathered herself and rose to begin again on her journey.

         She wasn’t two steps beyond outside sight of her camping area when she stumbled on the paralyzed man.

         The man was completely undistinguished, coiled in as best a circle a person could make, his floppy mat of brown hair covering his eyes. She pressed her fingers to his wrist then his neck. His pulse beat, though it was weak. She looked about to see if the man had a crow of his own that might be keeping him from moving, but she saw nothing around them but the silent banyo trees. She heard nothing but the rustle of leaves blown on the ground.

         “Are you awake?” she said to him. She did not call him Sir; she would never call a man Sir unless she had to, unless he was a knight like herself and her Code of Honor required it. Unless the king father was watching.

         He did not open his eyes, but he groaned through his lips. She leaned closer.

         “Berries,” he whispered. “Berries.”

         She knew enough to know that this was what he needed to be well again; either that, or his last request before he succumbed to whatever poison coursed in his blood. She rushed into the wood in search of a berry bush. She found no bushes, but she did spot a few berries scattered throughout the fallen leaves: two kinds, blue and black. She brought them both to the man.

         “Blue or black?” she said.

         “Black,” he groaned. “Black.”

         She slipped one between his lips and massaged his throat until he swallowed. He lay still for a time, then finally his eyes opened and he moved his lips with greater range. “More,” he said. “I need more berries.”

         She gathered more and fed them to him one by one. With each berry his condition improved, until he could move his arms, his legs. He sat unspeaking as he regained control of his lungs. Once he breathed easier, he thanked her.

         “What happened to you?” she said.

         “I’ve been living in these woods,” he said. “I’m in exile from Mu. I’ve been surviving off these berries for some time, the blue ones. I have this book—it was in my pack, but the pack was stolen by some rather unhelpful bandits—and it hadn’t yet led me wrong. But the blue berries look almost identical to the black berries in a certain light, and if you eat a black berry without the blue in your system it paralyzes you...”

         “But I fed you the black ones,” Wynn said, panic rising in her chest. The crow swooped closer.

         “Yes, and I owe you my life. See, it’s all very confusing, but one black berry will paralyze, another ten or so will de-paralyze you. It’s a tricky plant, one of the trickiest there is. They don’t grow here, either. The birds carry them in from miles away.”

         “The birds?” Wynn looked around, but the only bird she saw was her own. “I haven’t seen many birds.”

         “And you won’t.” He felt around him on the ground with both hands. He moved some leaves aside. There underneath them were several shards of broken glass and a twisted wire frame. He groaned, this time more audibly, and placed the broken spectacles as best he could on his face.

         “And why not?” Wynn said. “Why won’t we see any birds?”

         “She captures them,” he said. He poked his finger through the glassless frames. “She who lives at the edge of this wood.”

         “Who?” Wynn said, but he wasn’t listening. His shoulders had slumped, and he sighed heavily as he struggled to stand. He reached out to steady himself on a tree but missed.

         “I’m so sorry,” he said. “But I am blind without these. Do you have any spectacles in that pack of yours?”

         “I’m afraid not.”

         “Well, I hate to ask this, since I already owe you so much, but can you escort me wherever you are going? I cannot go back to Mu, and I need to find someone who can make me another pair.”

         Wynn frowned. “Where I’m going won’t be much help, I’m afraid.” She told him of her mission; he did not seem a threat, despite his banishment from Mu.

         “Well, that’s perfect,” he said. “You’re looking for the bird-woman. I know these woods by memory. I can tell you which way to go, if you’ll make sure I don’t run into every tree along the way. There are several outliers who live out there. One of them will surely be able to help me.”

         Ser Wynn considered it; it was not in her to leave a man to die for no good reason. Besides, she did not think she could handle days of traveling on her own.

         “Which is the best way to go?” she said. He held out his hand. She held it, though she had held no one’s hand in her life but her father’s and Lady Loreen’s. His skin was clammy against hers; the tops of his hands winter rough. But she held on regardless as he navigated them vocally through the woods.

         “Last night the banyo trees did not speak,” she said as they walked the path. “Why is that?”

         The man, he said his name was William, shrugged. “Deeper into the forest, the trees are different. The Silent Wood. Perhaps the trees are trying to fool those who venture here. Perhaps the bird-woman has bewitched them into silence to fool them herself. After all, it is to her benefit to dissuade people from finding her.”

         “And why is that?” Wynn said.

         “Wouldn’t you hide away if the only people who sought you desired something from you?”

         “I’ve worked my whole life to protect the Lady Loreen,” Wynn said. “The only people in my life are the people who want something from me.”

         “Well, I’m sorry to be another of those people,” he said.

         Wynn squeezed his hand; she didn’t know what else to do. “Don’t apologize. I’m happy to help.”

         They walked along the path, the crow never far from Wynn’s shoulder, then ventured off the path, earlier than Wynn had thought they would, at William’s behest—a shortcut, and not the kind that would get you killed, he promised. Wynn thought about what it would mean to hide herself away in the woods; what it would mean to leave the company of those who loved her only as much as she could help them. Her whole life Loreen had been the only exception. But there was also a nagging thought: Lady Loreen could have begged her king father to release Ser Wynn from service. It had not been part of their discussions; those had always been about her serving beside Lady Loreen from queenship to deathbed. Out in the woods, it seemed clearer that forever-service, no matter whom she served, wasn’t the freedom she sought.

         Then again she had not asked for freedom. She shook her head and continued on until the sun dipped below the horizon and they stopped to make camp for the night.

         William was no help with the tent. He leaned against a trunk as Wynn smoothed the thick leather sides over the triangle frame. When she finished, she led him inside. The crow swooped in with them and perched at the top.

         As Wynn made fire from her ever-burning log, William napped. She woke him once she’d warmed the dried sausage and bread. He scarfed his down. She watched him dust the crumbs off his trousers pants.

         “We may run out of food,” she said. “I didn’t bring enough for two.”

         “We could catch and cook your crow,” William said.

         Wynn’s breath caught; she hadn’t been sure William had noticed the crow, with his broken vision. “You’re welcome to try. We’ve tried time and time again.”

         William leaned in toward the fire, warming his hands. “Then I’m right? That’s Lady Loreen’s crow? The one you’re searching for the blade to kill?”

         Wynn pressed her lips together.

         “I’ve read something about these crows,” William said. “They sometimes attach themselves to people in pairs, yes? But this one’s followed you, instead of sticking to her. What do you think that means?”

         Wynn’s stomach churned; she’d eaten too quickly. She pressed on her belly with both hands. Inside the tent the crow let out one long shriek. Wynn concentrated on her heart’s beating; it quickened a step, an uneven dancer.

         “I haven’t a clue,” she said.

         William yawned and lifted his hands above his head. His back cracked. “I don’t know how much more of this walking I can stand.” He removed one shoe; underneath the leather his skin was bloodied, raw. He massaged around the wounds. Wynn studied his feet. Thin skin for a man who has been living out here a long while. William rose and bid her goodnight then disappeared into the tent.

         Wynn waited by the fire until it burned down, then waited again until she heard William’s deep-sleep snoring. The bird, too, had fallen into itself. She lay as far away from William as she could manage without pressing herself too far into the side of the tent. His snores were a background white noise to block out the wind. She fell asleep to them, thinking how strange life becomes, how like a family this scene might seem to someone from the outside, someone who might happen upon us in the night.

         She dreamt of that person: a woman with twigs for hair that fell to her broad shoulders. The woman sliced zipped open the tent with long claw-like nails and peered upon them through her mask made of leaves, the shape of a bird with a long beak for a nose. “I can take care of that for you,” she whispered. What? Ser Wynn said in her sleep, though she did not open her eyes. “Your bird.” The crow woke, then, and flew straight to the woman’s hair, where it nestled in her branches. “All I ask—”

         Wynn woke with a start; the banyo trees were shrieking. She jumped out of her sleeping bag bedroll and pulled her helmet over her head—she’d slept in her breastplate but no more steel than that, and it would not be enough to fend off any real threat—and stumbled into the dark, sword outstretched.

         William stood before three women covered head-to-toe in thick brown leather. They carried curved staffs each topped with a single claw. Ser Wynn towered over them, but at the edge of Mu people were rarely what they seemed at first glance—her father had told her that; bedtime stories meant to keep her within the town border—so Wynn did not attack.

         “Are these the bandits who robbed you?” she whispered to William.

         “Don’t know,” he whispered back. “Can’t see.”

         “Ser Maerwynn, it can be no other.” The woman in the middle stepped forward. “We don’t want to fight you.”

         “I don’t want to fight you either,” Wynn said.

         “If you come with us, we will not kill you.”

         “Where will you take me?” Wynn said.

         “She has heard that you are looking for her. She would very much like to meet you.” The woman in the middle held out a beckoning hand.

         Wynn shivered. “What choice do I have?” she said. “Leave William out of it and we’ll call it a bargain deal.”

         The woman waved her hand. “We have no interest in fools on murder errands from the mortal king.”

         Wynn glared at William, her anger redirected. “A murder errand?”

         “Wait, let me explain.” William reached out for her arm, but she jerked it away. “I couldn’t do it. He sent a messenger. If I brought him both your head and the blade, he’d let me back in. But I couldn’t—”

         “You tricked me,” Wynn said. This, then, was one of the things her father had warned her about: a stranger in the woods was never just a stranger. She understood the forest now. But then she was part of the forest too, here on the border of Mu and the Beyond; she would be one of these puzzles: not what she seemed at first glance.

         Wynn stepped toward the women, leaving her pack, her tent, her crow to catch up later. Two of them took hold of her arms while the third led the way. They walked her, like a prisoner, through the trees. Then, when they were far enough away that William could no longer see them—not even if he had been lying, too, about his vision—they veered left into the thickening woods. Their bodies melted into the dirt, three pools of blood and brown feathers. Their staffs clattered to the ground. New bodies rose from the muck until three giant birds—not crows but some type that Wynn had never seen—stood before her. Wynn tried to run, but they hooked their claws around her arms and legs and lifted her through the trees and into the air. They flew her right to the bird-woman’s stone door.

* * *

         The bird-woman was just as Wynn’s dream had showed her to be: a nest of wiry bark-colored hair, tangled so heavily that Wynn would not have been surprised had a few birds made it their home. She did not wear a mask, but her nose was long and thin. She ushered Wynn inside but instructed the other birds to remain on the other side of the door.

         Wynn’s crow had followed her there, but the bird-woman locked her front door and closed all the windows. The crow crashed against the glass, giving Wynn a splitting headache, until the bird-woman leaned over and stared into its black eyes through the glass. It quieted on the window ledge.

         The bird-woman handed Wynn a glass of tea already-steeped. The steam rose up and tickled Wynn’s chin.

         “For your headache,” the bird-woman said.

         Wynn sipped the tea; it tasted like freshly-upturned dirt. She did not dare spit it out.

         “You must be wondering how I knew you were coming,” the bird-woman said, sprawling into her chair. She draped her arms across its back. “They always wonder that.”

         Wynn shrugged. “Of course,” she said, because it seemed to be what the bird-woman wanted to hear.

         When the bird-woman laughed, it was like wind bells firing. “But I can’t reveal all my secrets!”

         Wynn shrugged again.

         “Be careful.” The bird-woman sat up stiff in her chair. “Your shoulders will stick like that.” For a moment Wynn felt as though she could indeed not move the muscles in her shoulders, but the feeling subsided quickly. “Anyway, you’re here for a certain blade. Word travels quickly when the carriers of it are not relegated to the ground.”

         Outside Wynn heard the flapping of the three messengers’ wings. She wondered where the bird-woman got her nickname. From the look of her? Her sway over the feathered?

         “You think you want to help your friend, the Lady Loreen, but I can’t help but notice that the bird followed you instead of sticking with her. You must know what that means. It must kill you to know you’re the weaker party.”

         Wynn stood, knocking the tea to the ground. The liquid flowed over the stone, into the cracks between.

         “I am no such thing,” she said, no strength to the words.

         “Is it a duel to the death for your honor, then?” The bird-woman moved her hand through the air; a mild wind blew through the hut and cracked the window open. The crow hopped inside, but it did not come to Wynn’s shoulders.

         Wynn steadied her breath and sat again. “Of course not,” she said.

         “What a well-trained soldier you are. Weakness is an opportunity, Maerwynn, to become strong.”

         “You’re wrong,” she said. “I’m not weak.”

         The bird-woman shook her head. “I’m right. But you don’t have to be weak anymore.”

         The bird-woman leaned forward, and in her eyes kindness shone through. Wynn relaxed her shoulders and breathed in once, twice, three times. It would be nice to be strong, to be free from the crushing weight of the crow.

         “Show me,” she said. For Maerwynn had her own plan: she would earn the bird-woman’s trust. Then, when the bird-woman showed her the blade that would kill the crow, Maerwynn would betray that trust.

* * *

         The bird-woman agreed to teach Wynn everything she knew about strength: how to let go of the past and the lingering ache of parental shortcomings, how to control the birds, how to make demands of them and of yourself.

         “I keep my crow hidden here.” She touched the lid of a woven basket. “When others come, I take care of them too.”

         Wynn leaned over the basket, squinting in an attempt to see through the tiny weave holes. The bird-woman pulled the basket closer.

         “We’ll work on yours.” She gestured to the crow at the window. Here in the bird-woman’s hut, the crow spent most of its time at the window. Wynn wondered if it liked the feel of the forest air.

         “Sing to it,” the bird-woman said.

         Wynn cleared her throat and started a bawdy chant the leftover knights had taught her.

         The bird-woman covered her ears. “A song, girl, a song!”

         Wynn shook her head. “I don’t know any songs.”

         The bird-woman taught her one. Her voice moved across her lips in a cloud that sounded like Wynn’s first biscuit had tasted: sugar and butter and flour. Wynn licked her own lips and remembered her father’s singing voice, his surprising falsetto. She remembered the soft of the hands that had held her: her father’s, Loreen’s, William’s in the woods as she led him. She did not care, with the bird-woman’s melody filling her belly full, that all three of those people were not perfect.

         When the bird-woman stopped, the hut settled back around Wynn.

         “Now you try,” the bird-woman said.

         Though Wynn’s voice was not as trained, she succeeded in commanding the crow’s attention for one brief moment when her performance met the gilded memory of the bird-woman’s note. When she finished the song, she tried again, to no avail.

         That night, sleeping in the pantry, she heard a different song in her dream. This one reminded her of the good dreams she’d had as a child, before she understood the implications of her father’s death, before she dreamed only nightmares. She rose from the pallet the bird-woman had made for her on the floor of the hut and found her crow wide-awake at the window. She bent to meet it at its level. She sang the dream-song, a memory of good things.

         The bird’s head lolled against its chest.

         Wynn sang of loss; she sang of recalling those she had cared about without letting them pull her with them into their graves or their own Silent Woods. She sang of missing Loreen.

         Her voice cracked. The crow’s head shot up, and its eyes shot open. It shrieked once, twice. Wynn’s heart hammered.

         “Sing something else,” the bird-woman said from her bed.

         The crow hopped from foot to foot, looking as though it might at any moment spring at Wynn, claws extended, in one of the fits that Wynn had not experienced since leaving the palace.

         “Do it,” the bird-woman said. “Something else, anything else.”

         Wynn’s mouth was dry. Her body ached, finally remembering the long trip she’d taken, two days of walking and a rough voyage through the air in the claws of beast-birds. Wynn opened her mouth and sang, not the song the bird-woman had tried to teach her the day before but the chant, only she made it melodic; that rhyme of women and wine and winning a princess’ heart.

         The crow quieted. Wynn sank to the floor and held her throbbing head in her hands. She didn’t budge until the bird-woman nudged a cup of tea against her arm.

         “Some song.” The bird-woman laughed until Wynn couldn’t help but do the same.

         Over that afternoon, Wynn succeeded twice more in getting her own crow to sleep, then to rise from sleep, then to sing. She spent the four days afterward learning different bird-songs, repeating affirmations that would bring her closer to the self her father might have hoped she’d become: the kind of woman who demanded of the world rather than accepting the world’s demands.

         When she woke on the seventh morning, Wynn did not feel the crow’s presence, though when she looked out the window she saw it perched on the branch of a nearby tree. Wynn waited for the bird-woman to wake.

         “I want to thank you,” she said from the foot of the bird-woman’s bed.

         The bird-woman rubbed the sleep from her eyes and shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “There is so much more you must learn. This peace? It is temporary. You will need to know what to do when the darkness returns. That crow? You will never be rid of it, not even if you outshine your friend, not even if you learn all my tricks and then some.”

         “The blade—” Wynn said without thinking.

         “I have a blade.” The bird-woman wrapped her down blanket around her shoulders as she stood before Wynn like royalty in a bright white cape. “It will not kill the crow who follows you. I’m sorry, Wynn, but there is no cure.”

         “But the Lady Loreen,” Wynn said. “You knew that’s why I was coming here. You said you knew.”

         “And I did.” The bird-woman pressed her hands against Wynn’s shoulders. Wynn shrugged her off. “That doesn’t mean your mission was a good one. You want to help your Lady Loreen? Stay here in the woods. I have dreamt of terrible things in Mu. I have dreamt of many paths.”

         “What things? What paths?” Wynn backed into the stone wall. “Is Loreen all right?”

         “She is.” The bird-woman rubbed her head. “She will be if you stay. No man will win the king’s contest. This bird will no longer plague her. She will not marry. She will not become the Queen of Mu. Her cousin will take the throne.”

         “Being queen is all she’s ever wanted.”

         “If she becomes queen, married or unmarried, Mu will fall.”

         “But she is my friend,” Wynn said. “She is my dearest friend.”

         “Let her stay your friend,” she said. “If you return, you will betray her, sooner or later. Her anger is a fire and your betrayal will be fuel.”

         Wynn looked around the hut she had made a temporary home. Her stomach turned. The woods had worked their magic on her once again, tricking her into trusting its inhabitants.

         “I don’t believe you. I would never betray her. I need that blade. And that is all I need.”

         The bird-woman pursed her lips. “I cannot give you that.”

         “Then you cannot help me.” Wynn drew her sword, but before she had a chance to threaten the bird-woman, the woman whistled her lilting tune. Birds burst through the cracked windows and covered Wynn’s body. They dug their claws into her skin. They cawed in her ears until her ears rang with silence. She struggled to move her arms. The claws dug in further. Blood wept down her body. She collapsed onto the floor. She closed her eyes. If this is death, she thought, it is worse than I have ever imagined.

* * *

         In the morning Wynn opened her eyes like any other morning. Her surroundings were less than ordinary. Instead of the palace, instead of the woods, instead of the bird-woman’s stone hut, she lay on a dirt floor in a straw-roofed dwelling with no windows and no door. All around her were wicker baskets with closed lids. Her skin ached and itched. When she examined her body, she saw hundreds of cuts, marks of bird claw and bird beak.

         She rose as best as she was able and tried to find an exit in the clay wall, each movement of her fingers stretching the cuts on her hands. She was stuck in here, as caught as the bird in the wicker basket. Her crow was nowhere to be found. Wynn missed the familiar sight of it. But it was a blessing as well as a discomfort, for she did not feel the normal sinking feeling in her gut, that normal tightness in her chest. Instead she felt a desperate urge to get out of the hut, out of the forest, to return home to Lady Loreen

         She opened one of the baskets’ lids. Inside, a dark mass. She reached in and grabbed what she could; when she pulled her hand out again, she held a sleeping bird in her palm. It did not wake or move but its lungs, their soft breath barely visible upon the feathers of its chest.

         She dropped the bird back into the basket, part out of shock, part out of the memory of claws and beaks, claws and beaks. She closed the lid and held her weight against it. After she calmed, after she realized the bird was not going to attack her, she checked the others. All birds. So this, then, was where the birds of the forest had gone. Captured. Kept in baskets like root vegetables, like unliving things to be contained. What would the bird-woman do with her? Was she meant for a basketcontainer too? Or did the bird-woman possess some darker power. Wynn recalled the women who had fetched her. She had not heard or seen them since.

         She had to get out of there.

* * *

         The bird-woman brought Wynn nuts and seeds and water. She entered the hut through a door that appeared then disappeared into the clay.

         “You will have to give in sooner or later,” the bird-woman said. “I could use a woman like you around here, Ser Maerwynn.” The bird-woman smoothed salve onto Wynn’s wounds. “I’m sorry for how harsh I was. I have my own insistent birds, you know. More than one. I took the first one down, imprisoned it, tamed it. But they keep coming. That’s the secret. You can’t kill them. You can’t scare them away. You can only bewitch them into submission. Savor the brief freedom.”

         Freedom. The word tasted sweet on Wynn’s tongue as she repeated it to herself. “Let me go,” Wynn said. “Let me go back to Lady Loreen.”

         “I cannot.” The bird-woman frowned. “I loved Mu, once upon a time. I will not see it reduced to dust.”

         “I won’t betray her.” The salve stung as it seeped into Wynn’s blood. “Please.”

         “You may not think of it as betrayal,” she said. “But she will. I cannot let you go back.” The bird-woman rose and left through that door of her own creation.

* * *

         The bird-woman’s future appearances left Wynn with no idea of the time of day save whatever she saw out the brief door: a tiny slip of sun. Morning or afternoon, then. Her visits ran on a cycle. Wynn studied them for six days. She practiced the bird-woman’s waking-song, from the time she woke to the time she slept. On the seventh day, when the bird-woman opened her door, Wynn sang the birds to rise. She did not have to command them to attack; they rushed the bird-woman as she stepped in, cawing their terrible insistent noises. The bird-woman covered her ears and crouched as low to the ground as she was able, belting the calming songs in her shaking voice. Wynn ran through the dark cloud and into the light.

         But the blade. If she did not leave now, the bird-woman might find her and imprison her once more. She would have to leave the blade. She cursed circumstance and ran from the bird-woman’s hut, back into the woods, her crow rising from the trees where it had hidden and trailing her like a shadow.

         Wynn ran without thinking, without looking but at the path that unfolded beneath her. She collided head-first with the scrawniest of trees.

         “You’re alive!” the tree said. But it was no tree; as Wynn gathered herself and regained control of her dizzied legs, she saw that it was William she had run into. He’d gained a sword since she’d last seen him.

         Rage turned her stomach, but she had no time for rage. She pushed past him and continued on the trail. William followed behind, able to keep pace with her due only to the new limp in her step.

         “Stop following me,” she said, breathless.

         “I want to apologize,” he said.

         “You’re a liar,” she said.

         “You’re right.” William, to his credit, spoke steadily despite their quickening pace. “You shouldn’t have trusted me. I ate a banyo leaf, whose paralysis wears off in an hour’s time, knowing that you would soon come up the trail.”

         “And your spectacles, I see, are still gone.”

         “I have not needed spectacles to see since I was a boy, when I learned the spell to fix my eyesight.”

         “Were you coming to kill me with that sword?”

         “I was coming to save you.”

         Wynn laughed so hard she had to stop. “You were coming to save me?” She wiped at the humor-tears that had formed in the corners of her eyes. “Even if I believed you—you, going to save me?”

         William furrowed his brow. “I’m not without my strengths.”

         “And the bandits you met before me? The ones who robbed you? How well did you defend yourself from them?”

         “You met the same and only bandits I have ever encountered here. They stole nothing from me. It was another part of my ruse. Those women have wreaked havoc on these woods for over twenty years. And they are under the bird-woman’s command. There is nothing they do that she has not asked them to do.”

         Wynn’s chest ached. “Then the bird-woman killed my father?” She thought of how she’d left the bird-woman covered in her shrieking birds. She did not feel sorry for what she had done. “She told me the blade would not kill the crow.” As though it understood, the crow cawed shrilly from above. “I guess this forest is full of liars.”

         William pursed his lips. “From now on I want to be honest with you, Ser Wynn.” From his pocket he pulled another blade, this one smaller and shining and silver and covered in runes, the handle shaped at its end like the head of a vulture.

         Wynn grabbed the blade and studied it under the sunlight. “This is the one?” Wynn had thought she would feel something inside her when she finally found it; heroes always spoke of how right their prizes felt once they finally touched them, as though these objects had been waiting on them all along. But Wynn felt the same. Her ankle hurt. Her skin burned. She was tired and wanted only for a warm bed in which to sleep for weeks.

         “It’s yours,” William said. “But listen: I used to be the librarian at the Great Library. The king asked me to find a way to kill his daughter’s crow. I searched and searched but found only this old legend about a blade in the woods. This legend—it was disproven. It was tested long ago, before the blade was under the bird-woman’s care. Several experiments. It will not kill these birds. I told the king as much. He banished me for what he called my lies and hired a librarian more willing to overlook the truth. The bird-woman was right. There is no way to kill the crow.”

         Wynn sang a song to call the crow into her open palm. Once it nestled there, she placed the crow into the dirt at her feet. She sang a calming song. She did not hesitate; if she hesitated, she knew, she would never be able to kill her closest companion, closer to her even than Lady Loreen. She plunged the knife at the bird as she had done with other blades several times before.

         The knife glanced off its feathers and sent Wynn falling into the dirt. She sprawled there as the crow woke with a cry and soared above her, still half-stunned from Wynn’s songs.

         William knelt beside her. “If you take this blade to Mu, if you present it to the king, he will have you killed, just as he originally intended.”

         “Then not all I have heard in these woods was a lie.” Wynn lowered her head as far as it would fall upon her chest, her arms bent at her sides like folded wings.

         William placed a hand upon her back. “If you want to save your friend and yourself,” he said, “stay in these woods. The crow is fondest of you. It will remain yours.”

         “Because I’m weak.”

         “No.” William removed his hand from her. “Because you’re strong. These crows are attracted to the strongest of us. Because you provide a worthy adversary. Because you will put up a fight.”

         Wynn wanted to scream, to pound the ground in front of her. “That’s centaur shit,” she said. “I don’t want to leave my only friend. I don’t want this stupid bird following me.” She picked up a rock from the ground and hurled it at the crow, who dodged the projectile and darted at Wynn’s head. Wynn waved her hands around, the memory of the flock bursting through her, the scars still stinging, but the crow was quicker than her. Finally she re-folded herself and dry-heaved, losing then coming back to her breath.

         When she could once more breathe, she rose. The crow stilled in the trees above her, satisfied with its tantrum, with the pain it had caused Wynn.

         “You didn’t help me,” Wynn said. She stomped her foot. “What if this had been the time it killed me? Why has no one ever helped me when it attacks?”

         William knitted his eyebrows. “No one can help you, Wynn. The same goes for Lady Loreen. It was wrong of her to ask you to come here.”

         “But I wanted to help.”

         “Then she didn’t need to ask, did she?”

         Wynn frowned. Her head throbbed. She massaged her temples and tried to banish her confusion like the king father had banished this man.

         “There’s no time for this,” she said at last, the edge returned to her voice. “I told her I’d return to her. And that’s what I’ll do. Don’t worry about me.”

         William unsheathed his sword and presented that too to her.

         “You’ll want this, too,” he said. “What’s a knight without her weapon?”

         And it was her weapon, the very same that she had carried out into these woods. He must have stolen it when he stole the blade. Wynn had been so distracted that she hadn’t recognized her own blade.

         She took the sword, heavy in her grip.

* * *

         William led her back to Mu. At the edge of the city, the centaur that Lady Loreen had stolen for her waited. It had eaten a border line in the grass; green rimmed its mouth. When Wynn and William emerged from the Silent Wood, the centaur spit its mouthful of grass at their feet.

         “I thought I was in the clear,” the centaur said. “Forever free. Thought for sure you’d die in there. But I see you might be worth the breath you steal from the air.” The creature bowed to Ser Wynn, inviting her to climb astride. Once upon the great beast’s back, she allowed herself to slump forward. William did not follow.

         Back at the palace, the leftover knights guarding the entrance tried to talk her back into the woods.

         “I know what I’m doing,” she said. “Let me through.”

         They agreed to sneak her in as long as she did not let herself be seen by the king. But Wynn went right to the king father. She presented him with the blade.

         “I see William failed once more in his duties,” the king father said.

         The crow landed on Wynn’s shoulder. She spoke through the fear.

         “This blade will not kill this crow.” She cupped the bird into her palm. She pushed the blade’s tip into the crow’s chest, cooing a sleeping song all the while. The crow dozed as the blade failed to enter its skin.

         The king father eyed the crow. “I see.” He breathed heavy on his throne. “I think I know what the problem is. It’s been you all along, hasn’t it?”

         “Yes and no,” Ser Wynn said. “You cannot kill me. If you kill me, the crow will stay with your daughter, forever. But I can take this particular crow with me. I can leave, never to return.” Here Wynn understood that she held the power; she could give the king father what he wanted. She could ask for something in return.

         She had thought, all through her journey home, that she would ask for Lady Loreen to be made queen, without marriage, without the guidance of any man. But standing before the king father, the bird-woman’s warning returned to her. The bird-woman had lied to Wynn, but not everything she’d said had proved untrue. And Wynn knew Loreen better than anyone else in the world. When Wynn had heard the prophecy, she had not balked at Loreen’s evil but at the prediction that Wynn would betray her.

         Wynn swallowed hard. “But there may be other crows who come for her. Bigger crows. More insistent crows. Crows that cling to you as well. My going will not stop them. But there is someone who knows a thing or two. And what he does not know he can find more quickly than anyone else would be able to. That man is William. He helped me find this blade. In exchange for my service, in exchange for my leaving, I ask only that you allow him once more to enter Mu. Allow him to take his old post back.”

         “For this you will leave?” The king father gripped the armrest of his throne. “You’ll take that crow with you?”

         “Yes.”

         The king father waved his hand. “William the Well-Read’s banishment is no longer to be enforced. Instead, Ser Maerwynn will take his place. She is to be led from the city of Mu and left in the woods, an exchange.” The king father smirked.

         “May I say goodbye?” Wynn asked, bowing before the king father. “To Lady Loreen, I mean.”

         “I suppose that would be acceptable.” The king father ordered two leftover knights to escort Wynn to Lady Loreen’s room—and then out of Mu forevermore.

* * *

         Lady Loreen lay propped sick in her bed. When Ser Wynn broke the news to her that she would be leaving, Loreen hurled the plates left on her bedside table at the wall. The clay shattered around Wynn’s feet.

         “I’ll kill him,” Loreen said.

         “Don’t be angry.” Wynn walked across the room and leaned over Lady Loreen. Wynn held Loreen’s cheek in her hand. “It’s the only way. He would have killed me.”

         Lady Loreen grabbed Wynn’s wrist. Panic entered her eyes. “Please, Wynn.”

         Wynn’s chest ached. But this ache could be temporary, the way of every difficult journey.

         “I have to go,” Wynn said. “Let me go.”

         Loreen did not let her go. Wynn pried Loreen’s insistent fingers from her wrist, where she’d dug the nails in, drawing blood. Finally Loreen pulled back her hand and held it over her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

         Wynn knew. She’d known since she first saw that tree with its mouth hacked off. Loreen had so much anger in her and did not wish to let it go, to banish her own misery.

         “Stay a little while,” Loreen said. “A night or two.”

         Wynn nodded. “I’ll stay a little while.”

         Loreen relaxed at this news and burrowed into her blankets. Wynn climbed in beside her. Loreen rested her head on Wynn’s chest and breathed steadier as she stole Wynn’s warmth.

         “What will I do without you?” Loreen said.

         Wynn waited until Loreen’s breath deepened before readjusting her. She crawled from the bed and padded as lightly as she was able across Lady Loreen’s bedroom, the bedroom that had been the only private space Wynn had ever known—and even then she had only shared it. Despite the cuts scabbing all over her body, she thought of that hut in the woods in which she had been trapped, how the quiet that greeted her each morning was total and in its totality brought Wynn peace.

         She thought of her final untied thread: revenge for her father’s death. She was owed that hut; the spoils of murder.

         She wandered from the castle despite her heavy heart. At the border of Mu, Wynn told William the Well-Read of Loreen’s hatred for her father. “Together, I think you two could see him gone from Mu.” She thought only a moment of that terrible way he might one day leave—I’ll kill him, Loreen had said—but she did not think William would let that happen. For how little she knew him, she trusted him.

         As he started his journey back to Mu, Wynn walked away from it, back into the woods, her silent crow trailing her all the way to the bird-woman’s hut.

         Wynn heard the hut before she saw it, a cacophony of bird shrieks. Hand at her hilt, Wynn knocked at the bird-woman’s door. The bird-woman did not answer. Wynn turned the knob and peered inside; the blankets the bird-woman had arranged for her still lay upon the floor. Birds nested in every cranny, singing their terrible songs. Beneath a lump of sheets on the bed, the bird-woman whimpered in her sleep.

         Wynn’s chest ached for her. This was no way to die. Every woman deserved dignity, murderer or not.

         Wynn scared the birds away using the bird-woman’s own tricks. It took a day’s work and then some to rid all the birds from the hut. She took quarterly breaks to heat then pour warm broth down the bird-woman’s throat. For herself, she ate bowls of berries and dried meat the bird-woman had cured. She took her meals outside, beneath a canopy of flapping wings. They did not bother her. Her own crow dozed in its own tree. It did not bother her much either.

         When finally she’d cleared the hut, Ser Wynn knelt at the bird-woman’s bedside. She placed cool rags on her forehead and sung healing songs, songs that her father had sung to her. When the bird-woman could finally talk, she looked up and smiled to see Ser Wynn.

         “Don’t smile at me,” Wynn said. “I’m only healing you so that the fight is fair.”

         “You came all the way back to fight?” the bird-woman said.

         Wynn wiped the sweat from the bird-woman’s forehead and exchanged the now-warm rag she’d set there with a fresh cool one from a bowl of water. “You ordered the bandits to kill my father,” Wynn said. “Do you remember that?”

         The bird-woman placed a shaking hand on Wynn’s at her forehead. “No,” she said. “That’s all wrong.”

         Wynn had experienced enough of forest-truth: to never know which words were lies. No easy answers like in the palace, where each assignment came with a script. Wasn’t that what she had chosen when she fled back into the woods?

         “Those bandits robbed your father, it’s true,” the bird-woman said. “And I punished them for that. They had been robbers before, but they’d never taken lives. They’d never killed the king’s own men. I couldn’t have such lawlessness in my forest. I couldn’t have murderers living next door. I turned them into birds, enchanted them to do my bidding.” Her eyes fluttered closed. “But I had nothing to do with your father’s death.”

         Wynn looked at the woman, her hair like twigs, her body broken. The rage in Wynn’s belly had gone without her willing it to go. She did not know if the bird-woman told the truth, but she believed that she did, and that was somehow more important.

         “I believe you.” Wynn’s aching chest calmed. Her father had died a long time ago. There was nothing she could do about that.

         “Will you stay and learn from me?” the bird-woman said. She let go of Wynn’s hand.

         “If you will learn from me as well,” Wynn said. “You cannot lock me up because I disagree with what you think is best. You cannot lock me up for any reason.”

         The bird-woman nodded, slow and steady. Wynn thought of the truths the bird-woman had told. Wynn told of her own truth: she had returned to Lady Loreen. If the bird-woman’s visions were correct, then the future for Mu she’d feared would come to pass.

         “I know,” the bird-woman said. “We cannot change what we see out here. But that doesn’t stop me from trying.”

         “Have you seen anything of me?” Wynn asked, though was not sure she wanted to know.

         “I have seen you with my eyes,” the bird-woman said, drifting again into sleep. “That’s enough to know who you’ll become to me.”

* * *

         Nothing in the Silent Woods was immediate: Wynn’s full grasp of her lessons, the control she gained over her crow and all the birds who came after, her love for the bird-woman or the bird-woman’s love for her.

         The word from Mu: Lady Loreen had married William the Well-Read. They had grown close as he taught her how to control her latest affliction: a small crow that brought tears instead of fear. Using the library map collection, William had located a wealth of treasure. He’d bought the king father’s retirement and his own place on the throne, which he gifted to his rightful Queen Loreen. The queen issued her decree: all banished from Mu would now be allowed to return. Ser Wynn did not return.

         Wynn thought at first that these events were not too bad. But then came more news, the picture of the future Wynn had influenced snapping into place. Loreen had finally learned how Wynn had bargained for William to be allowed back into Mu. Though she had nearly gained what she had always wanted—a lone place on her throne, even if it had required a husband—her anger erupted. Not only had Wynn not returned to Mu once her banishment was lifted, but she had asked for the pardoning of a strange man instead of what she had promised: her best friend’s queenship. Lady Loreen stole the centaurs’ voices and hid them in her palace. She demanded a blood tax of her citizens; each morning they would leave a drop in a bowl on their door. She murdered King William and changed his moniker in the history books: the Well-Read no longer; the Liar forevermore.

         This news hurt. Some days, when her original crow slipped into a rare fit, Wynn found it difficult to rise from bed, to tend the garden she kept with the bird-woman—Queen of the Birds and the Silent Woods, no longer silent, no longer fearful of its most-feared inhabitant. But after a while she returned to herself long enough to sing the songs of the bird-woman, of her father, of her own creation. The calming songs of the people she had cared most for in her lifetime, and these songs pierced through Wynn’s dark clouds like the strongest blade.

Copyright © 2018 Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies both literary and speculative including Clarkesworld, Fairy Tale Review, Lightspeed, and numerous times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She has been a finalist for the Nebula Award and for Selected Shorts’ Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Award. Her audio fiction-jazz collaborative album, Strange Monsters, explored the theme of women living unconventional lives. She’s been reprinted in French and Polish, for numerous podcasts, and on io9. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program and created and curates the annual Art & Words Collaborative Show in Fort Worth, Texas. She is active on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle and on her website www.bonniejostufflebeam.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

MAGIC POTION BEHIND-THE-MOUNTAINS

by Jaymee Goh

         When the magistrate arrives in Immen, the first thing he does is summon Grandmother Seung, druidess of Yang Village Behind-the-Mountains, to ask for her magic potion. (This is, of course, after putting into order the work his predecessor left behind, after examining the roster of his new officers, after a good night’s rest. The magistrate understands the perfect order of things.)

         He is not thrilled about being assigned to this northern district, snowed-in for half the year and too close to the tundra for his comfort. The land of Yaoha is known for its pristine snows, but there are reasons why the capital is not in the mountains. When he thinks about how the elder brother called the Adjudicator told him about his new assignment, he feels blood rising in his cheeks and he pictures the smug smile on the Adjudicator’s face at having disrupted a younger brother’s promising military career. The Adjudicator claimed that the northern district needed someone savvy enough to understand the delicate politics on the border, and a court-raised official would be perfect. The magistrate is a middling scion of the royal family, but he doesn’t think he deserves to be sent away like that. He has never hurt anyone, least of all any of his brothers.

         At least he is far away from the scheming of the capital, the whispers in the echoing hallways, the watching dragons set into the columns of every corridor. He does miss his father’s concubines, who are chatty and amusing, and he has written to them and his mother every day. But the countryside is so green outside his window, with the smells of springtime flowers and the utter quiet of the wood, that he thinks perhaps this assignment will be fine; it is just a year. Hao-Er, his bodyguard and his most loyal and trustworthy friend for years, is with him, so he has good company.

         And he has a good opinion of Immen district thus far: on his way to his posting, he saw a cart driver lift half a tree trunk off the road. The road, a fairly busy one between two towns, had been blocked by a hoary hardwood tree felled from its roadside sentrypoint in last night’s thunderstorm. Single travelers could move around it, but larger carts could not. Someone had been dispatched back to one of the towns to get axes, so the cart drivers could clear the road and get firewood out of the inconvenience. The magistrate had quietly stepped out of his carriage to stand at the edges of the crowd, just in time to watch the cart driver, at the cheering encouragement of the others, squat and lift the root base. The tree moved minutely, and inch by inch it began to pivot.

         The other cart drivers, not wanting to be outdone, each began taking turns trying to move the tree; some acquitted themselves admirably by moving it an inch or two, but most could not even budge it on their own. Even Hao-Er took a go at it, and he came back to the magistrate’s side, huffing. “That tree is no joke, your honor. I wager it weighs as much as ten sledgehammers.”

         So the one cart driver lifted it again while the others laid long planks under it so all could help move it out of the way. The axes arrived just as they had most of it off the road. Congratulating each other, some remained behind to chop the trunk down to size while most bid each other a good day and moved on.

         The magistrate had asked his driver quietly what he thought, to which the driver replied, “Oh, that man is from Behind-the-Mountains.”

         The magistrate discussed this with Hao-Er at length as they continued with their journey. There had been rumors for years about the villagers Behind-the-Mountains, in the pass leading to the tundra: they fly across snow effortlessly, as winter is their element; they can make birds give up their eggs in singing contests; they are such fierce fighters that even the neighboring kingdom of Idara would rather leave them be than force them to abide by Idaran laws, whenever their borders grow larger enough to include them. They do not even need oxen to plow their fields. The magistrate has always thought these to be fanciful tales. The cart driver might be a fluke... but he might not be. The magistrate is not a very powerful man, but he has made it this far by not dismissing small people’s talk.

         “This could be what you need to rise up, Fanyu,” Hao-Er said in a low murmur that nonetheless trembled with excitement. “If you find out the secret behind the strength of the people Behind-the-Mountains, to bring to your own armies, imagine what you could get from the Khan. Or, if you saved it for your own use, wait for the perfect moment to strike down your rivals.”

         They had shared a moment in the sunset of the day, brimming with possibility.

         The magistrate had made further inquiries along the way and listened intently to what people had to say. (He did this chiefly to understand the people and their concerns better, he tells himself.) And one name peppered the conversations, over and over: Grandmother Seung, maker of the best magic potion in Yang Village Behind-the-Mountains. By the time he arrived in Immen, he made up his mind to summon her.

* * *

         Grandmother Seung is not a very prepossessing woman. She ties her hair in a loose bun at the nape of her neck and wears thick clothes even with the approaching summer. Her skin is spotted, constellations across tanned skin. She hunches over, and she squints as she takes in her surroundings; from the snow and fading eyesight, the magistrate supposes.

         She does not look terribly impressed with the yamen he has been given for official and personal use, but the magistrate doesn’t blame her; he isn’t impressed with the yamen either. The bedrooms are cramped, the records room is neglected, and the office is sparse. His desk is barely large enough to hold the scrolls he needs to read through, his inkpot, brushes, and a tea tray. Behind him, a round window looks out into the garden, but the view is obscured by a bamboo grove. Thus, the collar of his inner robe that sits high on the back of his neck barely gets the sunlight needed for the faint illumination of the characters that signal his rank. But he is here to serve the town, not rule it with spectacle.

         He pulls a chair out for her and serves her tea himself. She does not look impressed with the tea either, even though it is very fine tea. He knows it is not too hot; he can feel through the silk of his sleeve that it is the right temperature.

         She frowns at the fall of his sleeves, and he finds her staring at the hems that touch the floor. Perhaps it’s given him away too much; only members of the royal family wear sleeves that allow them distance from the material world. But perhaps she does not know, since she is so far away from court. There is often a lot about the royal family that peasants do not know.

         “Do you know why I’ve summoned you?” he asks, easing himself back into his seat.

         Grandmother Seung cackles. “Clearly you want your fortune told.” Her accent is odd; it is hard to tell what she is saying by how she rolls her tongue.

         He allows himself a small laugh. “Funny, but no. Grandmother Seung, I am told that you are a druidess of renown, that you hold the secret to giving men great strength.”

         “Is it a secret?” She sounds skeptical, and one eyebrow, balding with age, raises. He decides she’s trying to discern his intentions.

         “I do not know. If it isn’t, then would you share what it is that makes your village so strong?” Surely she could not fault curiosity.

         “We work hard every day and eat the best food, of course,” she replies, so matter-of-factly that it makes the magistrate frown. Her answer, he thinks, comes too easily. He wonders if he is mis-hearing her, if she is saying something completely different and he just does not know it. But through the tongue-rolls and throaty swallowing of the words, the words are all there, all recognizable.

         “Grandmother, I’ve seen the people of your village perform feats of strength that no military man can do unless they have trained to become champions.”

         Her lips thin, and her brows furrow. “We have a special recipe from our mountain, if that is what you are referring to,” she replies.

         He smiles. “Yes, that is what most people do talk about.”

         She pauses, then says, “Yes, it’s just a magic potion.”

         “Yes, that, exactly.”

         She frowns again, then proceeds to squint at him again, as if trying to see through him. “Your honor, it’s just a way of cooking meat.”

         “If the way you cook meat is so special, then I wish to know how you do it.” To show his goodwill and sincerity, he stands and walks around the table to serve her more tea.

         She continues squinting at him in a way that makes her more judgmental than he hopes she is. She does this for a long time, rubbing a bony finger on her sharp chin. He is starting to feel faint and realizes he has been holding his breath. Finally, she visibly relaxes, eyes crinkling. She sips the tea, and she says, “Fine. I will teach you how to make magic potion.”

         He bows to her as low as he can, feeling a small thrill of triumph at being deemed worthy.

         “But you must come to me in Yang Village.” Conditions to teaching him, of course. He had expected the conditions. He had not expected it to be effortless. But he is not expecting what she says next. “You must help me gather the herbs, with your own hands. You will learn how to cut the meat and wield the knife to slaughter the wild boars for it. The magic potion will not have its potency unless you understand with your own senses how to make it.”

         He is slightly appalled. “You mean, with my hands?” Underneath his slightly-panicked question, he is saying, touch things, with my bare hands? Get them dirty? Off the battlefield? It would not matter so much for combat; the blood of an enemy is a purifier. But dirt...

         She squints at him some more, in that terrible judgmental way.

         “Of course, Grandmother,” he says. “I will send word ahead—”

         She shakes her head, which stops him. “You must come every day. I begin work at dawn, and do not stop until the sun has reached its highest peak. If you cannot commit to it, then it is no point.”

         The magistrate performs some quick mental calculations. If he leaves before dawn, he can be there to perform the work. Then at midday, he can return to the yamen and perform his duties. This won’t be a problem at all. No one wants to see the magistrate in the morning anyway; that is when everyone is working. And what is a little sleep lost if it means learning the secret to great strength?

         “Yes. Yes, I will do this.”

         He must sound like conviction, because she nods so satisfiedly that it feels gratifying. “Tomorrow.” She leaves the yamen, stooped and tottering.

         Hao-Er enters the magistrate’s office to ask how the appointment went.

         “Get me rags, Hao-Er,” the magistrate says, his consternation alleviated somewhat by the Hao-Er’s expression. “Apparently, I’m going to root around in the dirt.”

* * *

         The spring days of the magistrate pass thus: he and Hao-Er travel to Grandmother Seung’s cottage in the middle of the Yang Village. The snows of the mountain pass have recently melted, and the streams are clean and clear. The village is not far from the town, just an hour’s hike away. The magistrate would like to have left Hao-Er back in the town, partly so he can handle any emergency that comes up, partly to avoid the embarrassment of having an audience to watch his inevitable mistakes. If Hao-Er had not been a friend, the magistrate would have ordered him to stay in town.

         But Hao-Er keeps a discreet distance away as Grandmother Seung and the magistrate clamber all over the hills, she with a spade, he with a small knife. (Not even a dignified dagger; no, she insists on a puny kitchen knife.) The springtime rains softened the earth, preparing it for new seedlings, new life. The magistrate has been in the muds before but never quite so caked with it for such protracted periods of time.

         She makes him remember the herbs and their uses. Danggui to strengthen the heart and liver. Yuzhu for the blood and bone. Gancao for good digestion, huangqi for the spleen. Dangshan, like danggui, for energy. Chuanxiong for the head. Guipi to keep away sadness, bajiao to keep warm in winter. She makes him remember their shapes, their smells, their leaves, their flowers and fruits.

         “And don’t forget the guoji,” she calls to him as he picks at the berry bush on a ledge below her.

         “What is it for?” he shouts his question.

         “To make it delicious!” she shouts back, ripping another root out and sending pellets of dirt skittering down the hillside onto his head.

         On some mornings Grandmother Seung sends the magistrate mushroom-hunting, to get him out of her hair. He is a bit annoyed when this happens, because he thinks of how much more sleep he could have had otherwise or how much more work he could have done. But the mushroom-hunting gives him time to explore the mountain pass area and meet the farmers that would otherwise have had no time to visit the yamen. Most of the time, they also know some of the best places to find mushrooms. (Ro-yin the childless widower has a mushroom crop at the back of his house. When the magistrate has no luck in the wild, Ro-yin will give him some in exchange for long chats.)

         He finds himself occasionally with an entourage of children. They do not know what a school is, nor writing. When the magistrate explains reading, they exclaim, “oh, like when Grandmother Seung tells us to look at the sky so we can tell the weather!” Sometimes he exchanges long-suffering glances with Hao-Er; other times he agrees amenably and shows them his way of reading.

         When he returns to the yamen, he rests before embarking on the paperwork. He follows up on the work of his predecessor. He meets with the farmers and the merchants. He adjudicates petty conflicts and the very few criminal cases. He investigates cases of theft and cheating; he arbitrates between bickering neighbors and couples.

         The people Behind-the-Mountains, it turns out, do have their own form of oxen. The yaks lumber across the grassy plains of the mountains, placid amid the more energetic goats. Their feet are surer in this landscape and their hides hardier. The magistrate buys one out of curiosity, to learn how to ride it the way the villagers do. He only rides out when Grandmother Seung has set him on an errand or to herb-hunt out of her sight.

         When he is with her, he gallantly invites her to ride. “Being Grandmother, you must have so many burdens. Let this grandson ease one such burden,” he says with a straight face while Hao-Er behind her covers his mouth to hide his mirth. He does not say it to mock her, but he wants to tease her, to remind her of his status, to remind her of hers.

         “You are a good son and your mother must be proud,” she replies, climbing onto the yak’s back with more grace than he has yet to muster.

         As the days pass, he finds himself more and more sincere in this sentiment. Sometimes he finds himself forgetting that it is the magic potion he wants from her.

* * *

         The summer days of the magistrate pass thus: first, on more familiar ground, hunting for the wild boar across the bright green mountain paths, the towering forests. He and Hao-Er spend a lot of time reliving their younger days when they hunted with abandon across the forests by the Xingyang Basin. The young men their age join them, showing them the tricks of using boar piss to mask their presence or enrage the boars into attacking bushes and trees.

         The grown men of the villages have their own hunts: for great game like deer and bears, for small game like rabbits and foxes. The children have their littler hunts for littler game like snails and frogs. Parents hunt for their straying children. Married couples hunt for gifts for each other; summer lovers hunt for each other. The magistrate wisely stays out of such hunts, but Grandmother Seung does not: she has firm ideas about matchmaking and appropriate gifts. Old-fashioned ones, the magistrate thinks, secretly agreeing with the lovers who argue their case. One young couple, Tamli and Kuo, is especially vociferous; they leave the village to prove their point.

         On less familiar ground, the magistrate learns the art of slaughtering wild boar, skinning it, cutting its edible meats from its inedible parts. The people of the Yang Village, especially the women, have ways with the butcher’s knives. Some use the back end of the chopping knife to break the bone thunderously; others slice the meat off along the muscle lines as if they know the geography of the animal body like they know their mountain trails.

         Grandmother Seung makes him learn it all. “To grow strength, you must understand where strength comes from. We eat the animal and take it into ourselves, building our bodies with its own.” She says all this while drawing the kitchen knife along the bone, separating the meat with practiced ease. The magistrate, beside her in her small kitchen, tries to mimic her moves. Hao-Er does not have much success either. The women watching through the cottage window grin and laugh at their urban incompetence. “The meat, the blood, the bones of the animal,” continues Grandmother Seung, “all serve a function within our bodies.”

         This is where the magistrate finds himself frowning in confusion at her accent. When she says “blood,” it sounds like fortune. When she says “bones,” it sounds like foundation. Whenever he learns of such dissonances between highland and lowland words, he points it out to Hao-Er.

         “Makes them sound rather superstitious, doesn’t it?” Hao-Er suggests.

         “Makes me wonder what we are missing,” the magistrate replies, but he is too busy (and, honestly, too tired) to ponder this. The days are longer, with fewer hours at night to sleep in. The paperwork mounting in his office does not get any less complicated. The district is abuzz with activity of holy days, summer frolics, festivals. There are more parties here than he has ever heard of in any other district.

         One day, when he returns to the yamen, he finds a letter from the court. An elder brother, chiding him on the reports of his work and his lackadaisical attitude towards his responsibilities. It is dismaying to hear that you spend your mornings roaming the countryside instead of tending to your duties. Although your work is satisfactory, consider how much more you could accomplish in your personal studies if you spent more time in proper actions, the letter says, in curt calligraphy. Remember that Immen is a precarious holding of ours, and the advisers of our father, the great Khan, smell in the wind the movements of Idara to re-take Immen for itself. Do not let yourself be distracted!

         The magistrate refrains from explaining himself. Not because babbling about a magic potion could jeopardize in his future career at court. Yaohan gentry do not take well to talk of magic. That would be gauche. But the magistrate firmly believes that this pursuit will pay off. He will learn the secret magic potion, and he will be vindicated.

* * *

         The autumnal days of the magistrate pass thus: finally, finally, learning how to brew the magic potion. In the mornings, Grandmother Seung presents to him an herb for him to smell and taste, by itself or in boiled water, so he can recognize its presence elsewhere. The magistrate’s tongue is fine-tuned from the rich dishes served at court, so he feels reasonably ready to deal with this aspect of the potion.

         He is less so when it comes to the actual preparation of the magic potion. He has cooked before; he has been camp overseer in the military, which involved rudimentary cooking. It takes him a while to understand Grandmother Seung’s fussiness over his cooking; she makes him taste, over and over, the exact herbs and their presence in the pot, so that he understands the perfect balance he must create between their flavors in order to make the potion efficacious.

         Because he is learning, he fails a lot of the time, and thus he calls to the villagers to partake in his mistakes. Grandmother Seung demands that he serve them himself. The laying-out of the bowls and the spoons is part of the ritual of the magic potion, she says. The magistrate supposes so, but this is the more grueling part of his education, because she is so particular. “You must twist your wrist just so. No, not like that,” Grandmother Seung scolds him. “Like this. This angle, and then sweep your arm this way. No, do it slower, or you will spill. No, faster, you must be able to feed many people at once!”

         He thinks he will go mad. What does it matter what exact angle his wrist must be turned at? But she scowls at him; opens her mouth to start repeating herself about the need to be present, for the awareness of his intentions in the potion, and if he cannot be aware of his own body’s workings in this last crucial stage of the magic potion, then how will he rein and discipline his mind for the task?

         The villagers don’t mind. They take turns sitting at the modest table the magistrate sets up in front of Grandmother Seung’s house. The magistrate asks them about their day and their harvests. Boh-ying’s grains are coming along well. The twins have orchards of peach trees bowed with fruit. Sulin pulls noodles in the compound outside her parents’ house, which the magistrate finds mesmerizing. He and Hao-Er are careful to spend a few minutes watching the noodle-stretching; any more, and their attention drifts to the pretty noodle-maker, any less, and she complains that they don’t truly appreciate her craft.

         But the magic potion is not perfect. He knows this because he can taste the difference between Grandmother Seung’s and his, and his is always unbalanced, always overcompensating for one ingredient or another, always underwhelming. He must perfect it soon, sooner than later, because the missives he receives from the capital grow subtly dire: Idara is planning an incursion into Yaoha, looking to reclaim some of its tundra land. Which is ridiculous, of course—the tundra belongs to Yaoha by natural birthright. Theirs is the land of the snows, while Idara’s peoples barely build in the north. Nobody in Yaoha is quite sure why Idara wants the tundra, but then, Yaoha doesn’t want the tundra either yet holds onto it for the principle of the thing.

         When the magistrate contacts the commander of the military post at the northern border of Idara and Yaoha, he learns where the conjectured first strike will take place: Yang Village Behind-the-Mountains. Why here? he wonders. Why in winter? Surely the Idarans have pursued due intelligence and know of the reputation of the Yang Village. But perhaps that is the point: if Idara can conquer this one village, they can re-take the tundra for themselves.

         He writes missives to the capital: Please send reinforcements. Please consider the value of the mountain pass Behind-the-Mountains. Please remember our heritage of the snows.

         Grandmother Seung is the first to notice his long face, but only because she is the first to see him every day. Everyone who comes to eat sees his worry etched across his brow even though he smiles in welcome, asks gently about their health, ladles soup into their bowls just so. Grandmother Seung is also the first to snap at him. “Ah Fanyu, what is your problem?” she demands. He lets her use of his given name pass. “This village has passed from Idara to Yaoha and back three times in my lifetime.”

         He bows. “Yaoha is not passing Yang Village to Idara. Idara is planning to take it by force.”

         “Hrmph!” Grandmother Seung stumps to the corner and pulls out a chain of garlic. “Well, I can’t say I like it much when Idara takes over. Their soldiers are rude. Go and get me some more chaihui.”

* * *

         The winter days of the magistrate pass thus: he coordinates with the military commander the defenses of the tundra border. He trains in the barracks with the soldiers, reinforcing memory of movement into his muscles through the cold. He visits with all the villages Behind-the-Mountain; brings to them soldiers to guard them and buys dried herbs from them: danggui, yuzhu, gancao, dangshan, huangqi, chuanxiong, guipi, bajiao.

         They are all very curious to know how well he cooks, because they have heard of his visits to Grandmother Seung of Yang Village. He is convinced there is some secret conspiracy between the grandmothers and grandfathers of the villages; one by one, they make him cook his version of the magic potion: Grandmother Wongyi from Zhen Village, Grandmother Yuneng of Twan Village, Grandfather Hurnen from Neem Village. They gather with all the elders in the village to sit in obvious judgment, making parties out of the occasions. He has given up on making the potion perfect and throws in mala. “Don’t rely on it to hide the real taste of the magic potion,” Grandmother Seung warns him. “You might as well make something else entirely.”

         Hao-Er is even more alert than before, because the magistrate receives word that Idara knows a scion of the royal family is in Immen. The Khan is related to the Idaran Emperor in a family tree complicated by bloodlines and bad blood, so there is no telling what Idara will do. The magistrate supposes that it is just as well that he has stopped wearing his robes of rank. He may not be an important member of the family, but first blood spilled from a royal would well precipitate the war the Idarans want. He carries his sword regularly, which feels lighter in his hands than he remembers. He wears the boots that anonymously showed up at his yamen one day.

         The days grow shorter. Too short, he thinks, working by candlelight until Hao-Er sleepily reminds him that candleclocks are meant to keep time, not to be constantly lit. He stops writing letters to the capital.

* * *

         A blustery morning. The magistrate and Hao-Er are play-fighting to serve Sulin soup when the guard dogs bark at too high a pitch. Everyone but Grandmother Seung jumps up and starts running for a weapon. Hao-Er tries to hold Sulin back, but the she slips under his arm to race across the road to her house. She bursts out wielding a bamboo staff from her noodle-stretching array and a kitchen knife. Her parents are close behind her.

         The magistrate runs to the ledge where the soldiers have begun to sortie. There are arrows flying up to them, lost in tree branches. There are jars of boiling pitch crashing on the trees, on flaming arrows, splashing and hissing across the snows as they light on fire. The magistrate runs to help Ro-yin fight off an armored warrior. Ro-yin is light on his feet and dances around the swinging mace, but he has no reach. The magistrate cuts down one man, then another.

         Someone leads wild boars into the fray. The magistrate barely registers them screeching past him; he focuses on Idaran colors, purple and blazing red in the winter white. His feet find purchase in the ledges easily as he knocks soldiers off. In the distance, he sees Boh-ying pummel one fellow into the reddening snow and a young couple fighting back to back.

         “Fanyu!” Hao-Er’s shout pierces through falling snow.

         The magistrate flies up the ledges into a copse of trees where Hao-Er is backed up against a rockface facing off an enemy soldier. Hao-Er wins easily and when he sees the magistrate, he huffs, “there you are.”

         “So you weren’t in trouble?” the magistrate yells.

         “No, I thought you were dead!” Hao-Er’s sword clashes against a new opponent.

         “What about secrets don’t you understand?” The magistrate ducks, and slices, still angry. He kicks up a long branch towards Hao-Er, who grabs the end.

         “Excuse me for being worried!” They shove down the next battery of men with the branch together.

         “There he is!” someone beyond the trees shouts. “Get him!”

         Whether to kill or kidnap him, the magistrate doesn’t wait around to find out. He and Hao-Er run for higher ground, scrambling up a tree as a sounder of boars roar past them. A fresh wave of Idarans emerge just as they touch their feet to the ground again, prompting a new race for their lives. Towards them from the other direction, a fury of villagers charge with expertly wielded pitchforks, hoes, and machetes, so they stop short and turn to engage, no longer outnumbered.

         Despite this, the magistrate finds himself cordoned off from the rest, up against a tall warrior whose colors are slightly different: the colors of a champion. He spares a moment to be smug about warranting a special elite fighter to get him, then strikes first. Blow-by-blow, they weave back and forth between the trees, bark and branches flying.

         But a blow to his head and he slips and finds himself on his back, his enemy’s sword high above him descending. A flash from firelight in the snow: a puny kitchen knife. He flings it into that thin line between Armour plates, slowing the descent of the sword, giving him time to swing himself back up—and win.

         Why did it feel easy? Was it the magic potion? He has no time to answer, running off to the next fray.

* * *

         The magistrate wakes up to the now-familiar ceiling of the yamen and finds Grandmother Seung at his bedside. He almost leaps up in indignation, but his head is too sore. He didn’t have it looked at after the battle was over, too busy tending the wounded and taking an informal census. Boh-ying’s house was burned down in the attack, so the magistrate made arrangements to have it rebuilt while Boh-ying stays with relatives. Sulin had to bully the magistrate and Hao-Er off the mountain back to the yamen.

         “Yuzhu. That’s the problem with your meat stew. Not enough yuzhu, and chuanxiong. That is why your skull is so soft, and why you are so stupid.”

         Her accent is odd, but he is not that stupid to miss how she says ‘meat stew’ so slowly, so he is unable to miss her meaning, this time. Though her tongue still curls around the words, the emphasis on one syllable over another changes its meaning entirely. She has never said “magic potion.” No one in the whole region has ever said “magic potion.” Perhaps the only worse thing is the undertone of affection and amusement in her soft grumbling voice. He stares at her, feeling the low bile of horrified embarrassment rising in his craw.

         “But you have learned enough of it that you are now as strong as us, hm? Sit up, sit up and eat.”

         He doubts he has learned as much as he should have. If he had, he would have humbled himself long before to have this realization. He wants to make some excuse for his obliviousness, or some apology for his ambition. He stutters. He swallows. He racks his brain for something to say in the face of this congenial old woman, who balances rice, soup, and meat in a spoon. He wants to fold the down-stuffed blankets over his head and hide his face forever. But he bravely sits up to let her shove into his mouth.

         “You young people, you think you know everything. I’m so ashamed to have such a student.” And she goes on for a while as she keeps feeding him.

         He’s never heard so many words out of her before, and he indulges in the idea that she was actually worried about him. When she is done, she makes a big production of clearing the dishes, ignoring his reasonable suggestion to call in the servants, and leaves in a flurry of instructions.

         Hao-Er comes in with an armful of letters. The magistrate is aghast. “How long was I asleep?”

         “Two days. You haven’t been sleeping very much recently, remember, and your head wound was infected.”

         The magistrate grunts in reply, then gestures to the scrolls. “Anything interesting?”

         “Reports from Commander Wuozhi, merchant petitions, and oh, a letter from the Khan.”

         The magistrate takes the letter first. His royal father is giving him permission to give up his post before the end of his term in the face of Idara pushing against the borders and re-claiming the Immen district. Let them have the tundra for now, the letter advises, until it reverts back to us. Return to your place at your father’s side.

         Hao-Er brings him tea. The warmth of the teacup against the magistrate’s skin radiates across his hand. The noonday sun rises across the white, light snow. He stays in bed the rest of the day, thinking.

         The next few attacks come in quick succession, and the magistrate keeps busy writing reports and addressing constituents anxious for reassurance that they will not be abandoned. Commander Wuozhi and Hao-Er pore over maps with him alongside representatives from the various villages Behind-the-Mountains, to determine the best strategies for dealing with the attacks.

         Despite the danger, Immen is in high spirits. In the town, everyone cheerfully salutes the magistrate. Every so often he passes men loitering, as they are wont to do, regaling each other with extremely exaggerated anecdotes of the battle on Yang Village Behind-the-Mountains. Little children re-enact the fight, boys and girls yelling as they knock their sticks together or throw snowballs.

         The attacks stop when deep winter arrives. Traveling through the mountain passes becomes difficult, and most villages are snowed in, some almost completely buried. Yaohans, as a general rule, like snow, and are not intimidated by it, but the magistrate panics the first time he rides his yak up to find the villages and doesn’t see the little sturdy huts he has come to expect. The chimneys smoking out of holes through the snowy ground allay his fears, so he turns back to wait out the deep winter.

         On a rare visit to the town, Sulin admits to the magistrate that the villagers often build tunnels in the snows. It gives them something to do and a way to visit each other. She tells him and Hao-Er this with only the slightest bit of expectation in her voice.

         So, one crisp day, with a small lantern, the magistrate finds the tunnel from the foothill into Yang Village Behind-the-Mountain. He traverses the veritable labyrinth, its walls packed tight and touched up with freezing water, chimney holes through the ceiling for fresh air and window holes through the walls for easy neighbor identification. At last, he knocks on Grandmother Seung’s door. He hears her stumping across the ground before she reaches the door to creak it open.

         “Ah Fanyu, it’s so early,” she complains. “Winter is for old people to sleep in, you know.” She squints at him, as if judging him wanting for waking her up.

         The magistrate smiles, because there’s no way to tell the time of day. “Being Grandmother, you have the right to such luxury. Young people are to serve the old.”

         She hmphs at him but lets him in as she goes back to bed in the smallest corner of her house. The magistrate stokes the fire and hangs furs and cotton-stuffed blankets along the walls. He cuts the meat and puts the stew to boil. He sweeps the floor and tidies the tables. When her friends come over to visit, he sets up the chairs.

         The meal is peaceful, the conversation good, and everyone goes home satisfied and full of winter cheer. They praise his meat stew and carefully do not mention magic potions, though it is now clear on their faces that everyone is in on the joke; has been all this while. The magistrate remains, drinking tea with Grandmother Seung.

         “When do you plan to return to the capital?” she asks. “When does the Khan expect you home?”

         He coughs. “I shall not leave, for at least another year.” As he serves Grandmother Seung a fresh cup, he says, a little jocularly, “I hope this grandson can wipe away his shame and earn your regard.”

         And regard him she does, perhaps seeing his truth and the anxiety behind his words. He cannot remember the last time he has ever wanted someone’s approval this much. She sips the tea and smiles satisfiedly. “You are a good grandson, and this grandmother will be proud if you stay.”

         Above, the pristine snows fall.

Copyright © 2018 Jaymee Goh

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Jaymee Goh is a writer of fiction, poetry, and academese from Malaysia who moved to Canada for tertiary education. A graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop 2016, she is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Riverside, working on affect, multiculturalism, and whiteness in steampunk. Her creative work has been published in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Interfictions Online. Her non-fiction has appeared in Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution and Science Fiction Studies. She co-edited The Sea is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia (Rosarium) and maintains a blog exploring steampunk and postcolonialism called Silver Goggles (silver-goggles.blogspot.com).

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE TRAGEDY OF ZAYRED THE SPLENDID

by Grace Seybold

         “—and she said, well, that’s as may be, lad, but if you don’t recall what color it was, then I don’t see how I can help you!”

         Roars of laughter seemed to shake the hot taproom. The mule driver slapped the table, making the glasses jump, and repeated “I don’t see how I can help you!” in a way that made the barman sure he was going to be telling the story as his own at his next stop. A pair of mountain women, swathed in heavy wool blankets, their bow-cases leaning on the wall behind them, guffawed appreciatively and signaled that they were buying the storyteller’s next drink. The teller himself, a farmhand from over by Little Bhirrit on the border, basked in the attention. Nearly everyone was grinning at him, and he didn’t notice the one person who wasn’t.

         “Well, now, and did you figure it out?” the barman asked blandly, provoking a fresh round of laughter. One of the other farmers, a Cladist by her accent, started trying to tell a story about a sick rooster but was shouted down by her companion, who had plainly heard it far too often.

         “No, listen, listen,” one of the mountain women said. “Strange things may happen on your farms and in your towns, but it’s nothing to what you may see in the forests, in the depth of winter, far from light and hope. They say the ghost of Zayred the Splendid—”

         “Pigshit on your ghosts,” the mule driver interrupted. “Zayred the Splendid isn’t even dead.” The silent, unsmiling figure in the corner leaned forward, suddenly intent.

         “Killed by Cladists in the month of rains, I heard,” said the farmhand from Little Bhirrit. “They said there was a battle out in the Salt Country and she tried to hold a bridge by herself against a whole Cladist army, and she sang for six hours and held them all spellbound, while she waited for reinforcements from Devport to come, only they never did, and eventually her voice gave out and the spell broke and they killed her.” The listener in the corner twitched, but the expression that crossed her face was gone so quickly that no-one would have marked it.

         “And now her ghost roams the forests,” the mountain woman insisted.

         “Why would she haunt the forests if she was killed in the Salt Country?” the mule driver asked. “Anyway, she’s not dead, I tell you.” He thumped his glass down and glared around the table, daring them to contradict him.

         “If she were, there’d’ve been an announcement in the church,” the Cladist farmer pointed out. Her companion nodded. “They always announce victories.”

         “Did they announce when you broke a bucket over Cambry Farr’s head, Vesset?” the barman inquired, to general merriment. “That’s about as much of a battle as we’re likely to see anywhere nearby.”

         “Just as well, or they might stop us coming over the bridge to drink here,” Vesset’s companion pointed out. “Cladist beer is weak, watery stuff. It’s no wonder we’re losing the war.”

         “Ah, let them fight in the lowlands if they’ve a mind to,” the Little Bhirrit farmhand said, waving his hand airily. “Doesn’t change anything up here.”

         “You’re all lowlanders as far as we’re concerned,” the other mountain woman pointed out, her voice gruff as though with lack of use. “And none of you take ghosts near serious enough. Now what I heard is, there was an army, sure, but Zayred the Splendid wasn’t trying to stall for reinforcements, she was trying to get them to turn back and go home. Stop the war altogether, that’s what she wanted. You see, her lover was a Cladist, killed in an early skirmish, and even though she was the greatest of the Deviskiri war-bards, from that day on she thought only of making peace. Well, she held them in her grasp for awhile, but then she caught sight of a Cladist archer in the front rank of the army who was the very image of her dead lover, and she began to weep and couldn’t sing anymore, and that’s when they killed her.”

         “And now her ghost—” began the other mountain woman again, louder.

         “Wouldn’t be any archers in the front of a charge,” one of the mule driver’s guards opined. “That’s not sensible.”

         “Piss on your archers, and your ghosts, and all you lot,” the mule driver said angrily. “I tell you she isn’t dead.”

         The barman, sensing an ugly turn in the mood of the room, stepped out from behind the bar and started toward them, but a quiet voice cut through the babble: “Zayred the Splendid is dead, and I know it, for I was with her when she died.”

         The speaker stood up from her chair in the corner and glided forward into the light. She was small and dark and unremarkable, clad in a long grey cloak, her braid tied back with a grey ribbon. Neighbors glanced sidelong at each other, as though no-one was quite sure when she’d come in.

         “Zayred died of a fever, not a month past,” she said. “An ignominious death, in a peasant’s bed in an abandoned farmhouse. I watched over her for three days as she sweated and shook and wept, and I washed her face and tried to calm her, and I held her hands as she died. And when it was over I buried her, on the south face of an unnamed hill, and carved her name into an ash tree nearby as a marker. Your stories are lovely—” she offered an ironic bow to the mountain women, “—and I could wish they were true, but alas, not even war-bards always have deaths worth singing about.”

         With that she swept her cloak around her and walked smoothly to the door of the inn. All eyes watched her. She opened the door, sending a skirl of sleet across the threshold, and stepped out into the blizzard. The assembled crowd waited, more than one of them expecting her to pause in the doorway to make some last dramatic pronouncement, but she only drew her hood over her face against the wind and disappeared into the dark.

         But the story spread...

* * *

         “Well?” Zayred inquired.

         Meriri stamped the snow off her boots and bent down to pick at the laces. The heavy blanket flopped back over the doorway behind her, muting the sound of the wind. “You were right,” she said. “They’re telling tales about you already. Did you know you had a Cladist lover?”

         “Well, I did,” Zayred pointed out. “Remember that boy I used to meet on the roof of the assembly hall when we were students? He was a Cladist, I think. Not that I spent much time listening to him talk.”

         “All right, but did you know he was the reason you died?” Meriri kicked her boots into the corner, sending a pair of wooden skis clattering to the floor. The front room of the little cabin was full of old clutter; she couldn’t recall the last time either of them had skied. “Of a broken heart, more or less.”

         Zayred raised an eyebrow. “That’s what you’re telling them? Really?”

         “Of course not. It’s what they’re telling each other. I told them you died a peasant’s death, of sickness. I buried you. It was terribly sad.”

         “Thank you so much.”

         They smiled tightly at each other.

         “Is there any tea?” Meriri asked. “I’ve been drinking that disgusting upland beer all evening. I think they make it out of nettles, and I’m quite sure they don’t wash the cups.”

         “It’s in the crock. Help yourself.”

         Meriri knelt beside the fireplace and used the familiar foxhead-handle tongs to lift the lid of the stone crock that sat just behind the embers. Mugs were in the straw basket beside the hearth, warm in her hand, chipped in patterns familiar to her thumb. Deftly Meriri dipped a ladleful of steaming tea from the crock, filled the mug, covered the crock again, and hung the tongs and ladle back on their hooks. How many times had she made that series of movements? How many evenings had she sat here, in this cabin, and drunk Zayred’s tea?

         Zayred watched her, unspeaking. The voice of a war-bard was a weapon. Sometimes in the dark years Meriri had come back to the cabin to find Zayred unable to speak at all for fear that her voice would do unintended harm. Tonight, though, she merely seemed pensive. The light of the low fire flickered in her eyes.

         Meriri sat in the other chair, wrapping the quilt around her knees. “Your turn tomorrow,” she said. Zayred nodded. There was another silence, which Meriri unaccountably felt she needed to fill. “The tea’s good,” she said, and winced at how inane she sounded. She’d never been bothered by Zayred’s silences before, but then, she’d never fought a battle where she and Zayred weren’t on the same side.

* * *

         Around the fire the soldiers huddled, their backs to the pine forest and its tiny constant shivers of sound. The sparks made shapes in the rising air: a cone, a cloud, an upward spiral. It was that strange blue hour between sundown and dark that only comes in the mountains, when light still leaked around the base of the slope but all shadows were swallowed in the great shadow of the peak.

         Another joined them, short, stocky, beardless, with a signalman’s cap and the bandolier of flares and flags that were the tools of that trade. “Cold out,” he volunteered, rubbing his hands together before the flames. There were one or two grunts of acknowledgment. The signalman pulled out a brass flask from his jacket and offered it around. The mood of the squadron thawed noticeably.

         “You just get in?” one soldier asked, after taking a long draw from the flask.

         “That’s right. Sent up from Devport with a batch of new regimental codes. Seems some clever brat on the other side’s been breaking all the old ones and they’re worried about secrets going astray.”

         “Devport, is it?” One of the sergeants lifted an eyebrow. “City posting? Lucky man.”

         “I’m not in the city now,” the signalman pointed out. “Got sent up here with nothing but a satchel full of papers and orders to eat them if I got intercepted. And it’s not even a there-and-back; I’m supposed to stay up here and attach myself to the Third Azure Bees, which I can’t even find.”

         The sergeant raised the flask to him in an ironic toast. “Consider yourself attached. Gredder and I are all that’s left of the Threebees.”

         “Oh,” said the signalman. “Then this is—?”

         “Ah, the Nineteenth Argent Tortoises. They’re taking in remnants from all over. Though you’re from the farthest away, I should think. Devport, hah. Hot work down there lately, I hear.”

         “That’s what I hear!” crowed one of the soldiers, a patchy-faced fellow who looked like he’d been at more than one flask that evening. He elbowed those to either side of him as though he thought there was some remote chance they might have mistaken his meaning.

         “It’s not like that,” the signalman said with a rueful grin. “Not for a lowly flag-waver anyway. Besides, you’ve got women’s regiments up here, haven’t you?”

         The soldier made a rude noise with his lips, eliciting laughter. “There’s three companies of lady cannoneers overlooking the Drelsik Pass, but they’re not allowed to come visiting. And a couple of tweetlebirds with their personal guards, but—” He gave an exaggerated shudder. “Not like city living, I wouldn’t guess.”

         “But you’ve had a battle down there recently, I heard,” the sergeant persisted. “On the salt flats, they said. Some tweetlebird killed.”

         The signalman closed his eyes briefly. “Yes.”

         “You in that?”

         “No, but I turned out for the funeral after. Everyone did. Well, you have to, you know. There’s always a parade, everyone in their colors, drums and black horses and everything the Voice of the City could possibly think of to show how deeply she cares about whoever her incompetence has gotten killed this time.” The flask had come all the way around the circle now; the signalman tipped the last few drops into his mouth. “Everyone’s quite used to it.”

         “I think I might see why you drew an assignment to the mountains,” one of the other soldiers said dryly.

         “Yes, well. I didn’t say anything the whole city wasn’t saying. There were plenty of witnesses, everyone knows what happened.” The signalman blinked owlishly at the sergeant. “Everyone in Devport, anyway. Maybe they did manage to keep the real story from getting this far. Bad for morale, you know.”

         “Morale? What’s that? You seen any of that around here, lads?” the sergeant asked with exaggerated befuddlement, to general laughter. “Let’s have the story, then.”

         “Well, you know.” Now that he had their attention, the signalman suddenly seemed oddly hesitant. “She wasn’t like the others, this one, that’s the first important thing. Zayred the Splendid, her name was, but she didn’t choose it for herself. They gave it to her so she’d fit with all the others—Tam the Glorious, Meriri the Undying, Nerinisu the Bright—but she didn’t share their arrogance, their need to pull the strings of power. That’s why they never liked her, why they were jealous of her.” He gazed moodily into the flames. “That’s why they killed her.”

         “The other war-bards did?” someone asked, disbelieving.

         “It sounds absurd, I know, but it’s what happened. We were watching from the walls, we all saw. I was in one of the beacon towers, with a spyglass, so I had a better view than most. The Cladists came over the salt flats like the tide running in, all with their blue flags waving, like all those dried-up seabeds were covered in water again. And the gates of the city opened, and she emerged, Zayred the Splendid, all alone and afoot, clad all in black, with her silver circlet shining in the sun. She looked so small.” He fell silent, lost in memory.

         “I heard the tw—Zayred—died holding a bridge,” the sergeant said tentatively, when the silence had stretched for several moments. “They said she held off the Cladists for hours, and—”

         “No,” the signalman said. “No, that’s not how it went. She was—you can’t imagine what she was like. She wouldn’t have just held them to a standstill; she would have swept them all away. You’ve seen war-bards in battle?” he demanded abruptly, turning to the soldier with the patchy face.

         “Well—sure,” the soldier said, sounding entirely unsure. “They sing, and the ground shakes, or bridges collapse, or trees fall. Or they make you brave if you hear them, or if they’re on the other side they make you afraid. But it’s all a sort of trick, isn’t it?”

         The signalman smiled. “A sort of trick, yes. Like a mesmerist in a traveling carnival, making you believe things that aren’t so. But at the same time it’s real, it’s a true thing. All war-bards can do that while they’re singing, shape the world to their desires; but what Zayred sang gained permanence and persisted. That was her talent, what set her apart from all the others and fuelled their petty jealousies. What she sang became real, not just while she was singing it, but after. She could reshape the world.”

         “So what went wrong?” the sergeant asked, leaning forward.

         “The only thing that could have gone wrong,” the signalman said. “The other war-bards. She trusted them too much. There were four others in the city, and all of them hated her, all for their own reasons, which amounted to envy and resentment. And when she went out alone to stop the Cladist advance, they saw a chance to destroy her, and they made a—a silence around her. You could see it, a wave of air, kicking up the salt dust as it moved. The Cladists couldn’t hear her, and so she couldn’t reach them. And so their arrows struck her, a storm of them, and she died.”

         “Devport didn’t fall, though,” someone pointed out. “We’d have heard about that.”

         “Oh, no, the city survived. The other four war-bards fought as they always fight, and drove the Cladists back from the walls. A glorious victory, the Voice of the City proclaimed it. And she held a state funeral for Zayred the Splendid, like I said—not that there was much left of her to bury.” He spat into the fire, a minute sizzle. “But she was betrayed, that’s all there is to it. They wanted us to forget that.”

         “Bunch of bastards,” the patchy-faced soldier muttered.

         “All of them,” the sergeant agreed. “It’s always people like us that get the short end of it.”

         “But, I mean, there’s nothing that can be done now, is there?” someone else wanted to know. “I mean, those that killed her, how can they be tried for what they did, if it’s war-bards’ business?”

         “They can’t,” the signalman said glumly. “Not so long as the Voices rule their cities and make all the laws with an eye to keeping their kind above those laws. All we can do is tell the true story, and keep telling it. That’s all anyone can do.” He stood and stretched. “I’m for bed.”

         In the morning he was gone from the camp—sent with his codebook to the lady cannoneers at Drelsik, the sergeant said, though he didn’t sound entirely certain. In any case there was too much to do for anyone to worry about it much, since the Nineturtles were being sent through the pass to reinforce the forts at Karur, with a major offensive on the horizon, and there were more immediate concerns than a battle that was over and done with.

         But the story spread...

* * *

         “Oh, very well done,” Meriri snapped. “Now I’m involved too?”

         Zayred shrugged, not stopping her careful unpicking of the crown of braids wound around her head. The uniform, the cap, the equipment had all been sung fictions, and they faded away when she was out of sight, but it was easier to maintain that kind of thing when the silhouette was kept close to what people expected to see. During the dark years she’d kept her head shaved, the better to take on whatever persona was needed. Now she gloried in her hair.

         “You were involved as soon as you had me killed,” she said. “You know that.”

         “I didn’t—” Meriri stopped, and glared at her. “I was loyal to the Deviskiri,” she said instead. “I didn’t have you killed. You had me killed. In fact, you killed me yourself, as near as I can tell.”

         “You have to admit,” Zayred said, fingers working steadily, “calling yourself Meriri the Undying was asking for trouble.”

         “I admit nothing,” Meriri said with a tight grin, “and if this is death, it’s not what I was led to expect.”

         “Oh, well.” Half a dozen braids tumbled loose. Zayred tucked a fistful of pins into one of the pockets of her vest and started on the other side of her head. “I expected some sort of struggle, but not with you, so perhaps we’re even, there.”

         “Even? Hardly.” Meriri kicked moodily at the leg of her chair. It was solid; her boot was solid. The whole of the cabin was solid, stolid, thick-beamed, replete with memory. “Why am I haunting your home instead of mine? I ought to be back in Devport, if anywhere.”

         “Do you have unfinished business with anyone in Devport?” Zayred asked. Meriri looked sharply at her, but her tone was entirely innocent. Too innocent, Meriri thought sourly. They’d all been trained to control their voices in every smallest degree, lest some work they were shaping go catastrophically astray. Zayred didn’t express anything she didn’t mean to. None of them did.

         “Meriri,” Zayred said. “I’ll give this up if you will.”

         Meriri turned her face away. “What would that mean?” she asked.

         “I don’t know,” Zayred admitted. “Maybe we’d both lose. Maybe we’d both be set free to go on. Maybe—”

         Maybe you’re trying to trick me into conceding. Maybe you’re desperate. Meriri kept any sign of her thoughts from her expression. “You shouldn’t start something you’re not prepared to finish,” she said calmly. “I’ll play this out to the end.”

         “So be it,” Zayred said sadly.

* * *

         “There are stories spreading,” said Tam the Glorious. “Rumblings of discontent. Perhaps even of rebellion. It seems we have a martyr on our hands.”

         “Zayred the Splendid.” Perad the Mighty spat the words. “Will she plague us forever?” He stalked to the tall, narrow window and leaned on the stone sill, looking out over the city through the curtain of the lowlands’ first snow. Devport was an unlovely city most of the year, dusty and lacking in fountains, but winter always softened its edges and turned it more fair. Bells clanked in the harnesses of shaggy ponies and jangled for the shift-changes of the watchers in the towers on the wall; the rattle and bang of a squad of soldiers drilling in the square was a transitory drum-fill punctuating the steadier beat of watermills and forges. All around was the tuneless music of a city long at war.

         “She is dead,” Nerinisu the Bright pointed out dryly.

         “As I said, a martyr.” Tam, seated at the table, hands folded before her, sounded unconcerned at the prospect, but then, she seldom showed any feeling at all. Oldest of the Deviskiri war-bards and first-ranked of their number, she had held her position through three wars and the reigns of eleven Voices, and there was little that could sway her. “To the army, mostly. Strange. They generally view us with suspicion at best, superstitious as they are.”

         “They may have just seized on her as a convenience,” Lallarat the Farsighted offered. She in turn was the youngest in the room, but as Tam’s great-niece she had a certain status and generally spoke more freely than her rank might have made strictly appropriate. “If they’ve been looking for an excuse to rebel, any martyr might do as well as any other.”

         “She was always something of an icon to the common people,” Nerinisu said. “Their raised-up champion. The barefoot mountain girl ascended to the second-highest position in the land.” Even in private, she never referred to the Voices of the Cities with anything other than perfect respect. That all those present knew where the real power among the Deviskiri lay made no difference. “If this really is about Zayred herself, rather than, as you say, a convenience, I’m surprised we aren’t hearing more from that quarter.”

         “Which suggests there’s more at work here than merely the whims of the mob,” Tam said. “I agree. In that case, we should begin looking at the local commanders of the regions from which these stories seem to be emerging. They may not be personally responsible, or involved, necessarily, but if they’re at all competent they can’t help but be aware. A certain amount of discreet investigation focused on those quarters should furnish useful results. Agreed?”

         “It isn’t that simple.”

         All heads turned at the interruption, and Perad’s hand dropped to his dagger and Lallarat’s to her sling. The tower room had been not only locked with iron but also sealed by song, and no-one not of their number should even have been able to remember its existence for the duration of their gathering.

         Tam’s surprise showed only in a slight widening of her eyes. “Meriri.”

         “An imposter,” Perad said. “Meriri is dead.”

         “Just because I’m dead is no reason to exclude me from your meetings,” Meriri said. The stairwell door behind her was closed. Had she opened it without anyone noticing, or slid through it like smoke? Neither prospect made anyone especially comfortable. “I’m still a member of this council.”

         “Indeed you are not,” Tam said promptly. “However, in courtesy to your years among us, and your death in our service, the council will hear what you wish to say. What business do you bring us this morning, Meriri the Dead?”

         A visible shudder passed through her at the new epithet. She rallied quickly, though, and stepped forward to stand at the end of the table. “You were talking about Zayred,” she said. “About the stories. I can tell you—”

         “We don’t need more spies,” Perad said brusquely. “Particularly undead ones. If you intend to offer some trade of information for blood or souls, we’re not interested.”

         “You’re being rude, Perad,” Lallarat admonished him. “We don’t know for certain that she’s evil.” She eyed Meriri with interest. “And you can’t speak for all of us, in any event. Some of us have dealt with the dead before.”

         “And were warned not to do so again,” Tam murmured. “I agree with Perad. We can find out all we need to know by the usual means, without involving spirits of dubious moral standing.”

         “No, listen to me, listen,” Meriri pleaded. “It’s more complicated than you think. Zayred cursed us, dying. I’m trapped in this—this competition with her, this battle, for her legacy, for the hearts of the people. We take turns appearing to people, to whomever we choose, and tell stories—about her life, her death. About mine too, now, I suppose. I can tell them anything. But the stories spread through the world, through the farms and the regiments and the cities, and our strength waxes and wanes according to what they believe of us.” She raised a hand to one of the torches on the wall. The light was visible—dim, but visible—through her flesh. “I am losing.” She kept her voice even, with great effort. She had faded further in even the few minutes since she’d entered the room. It was grotesquely unfair that one’s terror of dying should not end when one was dead.

         “Well, and forgive me for asking,” Tam said, “but what does this have to do with us?”

         “Don’t you see, she’s cursed you too!” Meriri cried. “All of you. I’m sure of it. I was the first to die, I’m the first locked in this struggle—but the same will happen to all of you, whenever you should happen to fall. You killed her, we killed her, and she hates us for it.”

         The four living war-bards exchanged guarded looks. “Do you have any proof of this?” Nerinisu asked finally.

         “I’m here,” Meriri said. “What more do you need? What proof would you accept?”

         “There are ways to compel spirits,” Lallarat pointed out, bright-eyed, not quite looking at anyone.

         “About which, again, you were warned,” Tam said firmly. She turned back to Meriri. “But let us say for the moment that we accept your premise. What do you seek from us?”

         “Your help,” Meriri said. “Your self-interest, if you want to put it that way. It’s yourselves you’ll be helping as much as me. You won’t be able to stamp out these stories just by interrogating district commanders. We have to fight her on the ground she’s chosen.”

         “Rumor,” said Nerinisu, hands folded.

         “Stories, tales, these legends she’s spreading about herself. They can only be stopped by more stories. Better ones, more compelling ones. Or slander, or confusion—I don’t know. I don’t think it matters, really, so long as people stop remembering Zayred as she wants to be remembered.”

         “Her stories are largely true,” Tam commented. “That will make it harder, I should think. But not much.” She smiled. “Very well. We’ll make no bargain with you, Meriri the Dead; we owe you nothing, and we agree to nothing. But we may, of our own free will, choose to tell such stories as will help you. Now leave us.”

* * *

         “You told them everything,” Zayred said.

         Meriri took a deep breath, relaxing her shoulders and her chest, before turning to face her friend. “I did.” She spoke off-handedly, as though it had been a small matter, barely worth mentioning. She wasn’t about to tell Zayred what it had cost her, to humble herself before her former colleagues and see them reject her. Everyone whose respect had mattered to her now saw her as a mere spirit, an afterthought, at best a useful warning or a useful sacrifice. Meriri the Dead. She wouldn’t give Zayred the satisfaction of knowing how much this was already a victory.

         “Clever.” Zayred turned away, pacing the room restlessly, picking things up and putting them down again. “You were always clever, Meriri.”

         “You said I could speak to anyone I wanted,” Meriri said. She felt a little defensive, and a little angry that she did. “Those were your rules: speak to anyone, tell them any story. Well, I told them.”

         “I suppose you’ve enlisted them to help you? Spread tales on your behalf?”

         “It’s their own lives at stake, too,” Meriri pointed out. “Their own souls,” she amended.

         Zayred paused at that, as though struck by an unexpected thought. “I never told you that,” she said. “I never said the curse included anyone but you.”

         “Well, of course it would! It was obvious.”

         “Was it?” Zayred picked up a half-finished basket and started braiding a new lath into it, then set it down abruptly. “You didn’t even ask me. Didn’t you consider that this might have just been between you and me?”

         “Why would it have been?” Meriri asked, genuinely puzzled. “All of us were involved in—in what happened.”

         “But for them it wasn’t personal.” Zayred sighed. “It wasn’t personal for you either, was it? You really don’t see it as any different. I expected that kind of ruthlessness from Tam, or Yinniver, or Perad, but not from you. I thought we cared for each other. I thought—I thought you cared for me.”

         “I did,” Meriri said. “Zayred, I did. You know that.” How many evenings had they spent in this cabin? Drinking tea, watching the fire, shutting out the world that had turned so bleak and terrible in the years since they were students together. Somehow it had all gone wrong, and she couldn’t think where. She looked at her hands in the firelight: solid, real, true. Zayred’s were blurring a little at the edges.

* * *

         The ground was dark and sodden with centuries of rain. Water ran in rivulets over mud too saturated to take it in, and collected in little pools and depressions where footprints marked the ground, and overflowed again, always moving. Ledges and outcroppings of stone protruded here and there from the muck, the bones of the mountain exposed and visible. There was no life; anything trying to take root was washed away downslope, leaving only barren slips of mud. The sky wept.

         Zayred trudged upward, feet sinking into the dark hillside, muddy water pushing at her ankles. She’d never been in this place before, and the landscape was particularly unpleasant to her, a parody of a living mountain. She’d been raised in the highlands, before coming to the city and the College, and had returned there to build her cabin as soon as she was high enough in status to be permitted to choose her own work. She could have stayed there forever. Literally, she supposed, since she’d ended up there upon dying. Maybe that was her reward, if she’d earned one.

         Instead you chose this fight, Zayred reminded herself. You’ve gone too far along that track to turn back now. And even if you did, Meriri wouldn’t. It was her own fault, she knew. She’d known when she set the curse, putting her dying breath into its music and her last heartbeats into its rhythm, that Meriri was as stubborn as she was and wouldn’t concede the contest. But she had been so angry then, at the betrayal, at the loss of all the years she’d thought she had, at the stupid grinding war and the way the College kept it going. So she’d dragged Meriri down with her, and cursed them both, and now that pride was liable to destroy her.

         She didn’t even know, entirely, what destruction entailed for the dead. Others among the Deviskiri bards dealt more deeply with shades and spirits, but it had never been something she’d focused on; she preferred people and the light. She knew scraps of mystery only. Enough to set a death curse. Enough, in the end, barely, to find her way here.

         Now Zayred climbed, endlessly, through rain that beat down on her and drove into her face and blurred her sight. She was grateful it didn’t pass through her; she felt more solid here than she had in the cabin for the past few days. Meriri was winning, she knew. The other war-bards had turned the tide. No-one she could think of had their reach, their ability to spread their words to thousands; nor, indeed, their inventiveness. The stories spread throughout the Deviskiri host, and though they differed radically in content, their thrust was the same: Zayred the Splendid was a coward, or a traitor, or a figment, or a monster; Zayred the Splendid deserved to be reviled and ultimately forgotten. Despite herself, she admired Meriri’s cleverness. This was the only countermove Zayred could think of, her final throw; it was another escalation, and possibly a very bad idea, but the alternative was to fail and fade into nothing.

         The guardian of the place, when she came upon him at last, had the shape of a red cardinal, perched on an outcropping of stone above her head, the only pure color in that landscape of a thousand mucky browns and duns and greys.

         “So,” he said, in a voice at once soft and immensely powerful, like thunder heard far away across a range of hills.

         “I’ve come looking for you,” Zayred said, not because she thought he didn’t know that, but because one of her few scraps of knowledge of this mystery said that there were formalities to be observed when entering another’s domain.

         “This is hardly a place for you,” he said.

         “Don’t I have the right to be here?” Zayred asked, meeting his gaze steadily.

         “Frankly,” he said, “no.”

         “But I am dead,” she said.

         “That doesn’t mean you belong here. There are a hundred thousand places for the dead to go; this is one only, and not yours.”

         “Soon I’ll belong nowhere,” Zayred said. She let a note of pleading enter her voice—deliberate but not false.

         “And so you come to me,” he said. “You hold very loosely to the terms of your conjuration, Zayred the Faded.”

         “That is not my name,” Zayred protested, to no avail; now it was, now that he had said it. “And I keep my terms. Speak to anyone, tell them any story—those were my rules. You may not be human, but you are someone that can be spoken to. And any story—that does include the truth.”

         “And a plea for help.” He cocked his head to the side. “What makes you think I can help you?”

         “You are a power here,” she said.

         “But not in the living world.”

         “My adversary has all but won there already,” Zayred admitted. “My only chance is to shift the ground of battle. The dead outnumber the living many times over, and as yet they have taken no side. I don’t know, truly, whether being remembered among the dead will be enough to help me; I’m no longer certain what the conditions of my curse are. But I have no other hope.”

         “That is not so,” he said. She stared at him, realizing this was the first real answer he’d given her—if he was speaking the truth, which she had no way to know. “But your choices do grow more constrained.”

         “Will you help me?” she asked him directly.

         He spread his wings, fluffing out his feathers, unmindful of the rain, which didn’t seem to touch him. “Go home, Zayred the Faded. Go back to your own mountain. Go back to your own fate.”

         “Will you help me?” she asked again.

         “How many slain has your war sent to my home?” he asked, stepping to the edge of his outcropping. “How many to each of the hundred thousand domains of the dead? How many were your doing? How many your adversary’s? When you stood together, how terrible a force were you then?”

         “I don’t know,” Zayred cried. “I don’t know.”

         “Do you think you deserve my help?” he asked. “Do you think you deserve to be saved?”

         “I don’t know,” Zayred whispered. “I don’t know anything anymore.” The third time: “Will you help me? Please?”

         He was silent a long time, staring down at her, his black eyes fathomless. She met his gaze. She couldn’t say anything more; she was empty of words. It sometimes happened that way, though not for a long time now: that the words simply went from her, and she was left trapped, mouthless, deserted by the only power she’d ever had. Maybe this is my destruction now, she thought dizzily. Maybe she’s just now won. But it was a familiar silence; surely her final defeat would feel more new, and strange. This was the old anguish, that she knew so well.

         But always before, it had been Meriri who brought her back from it.

         The cardinal hopped from one foot to the other. “I will tell my peers your story,” he said at last. “I cannot say what they will do with it, or whether it will help you.”

         She tried to thank him, but nothing came.

         “Well, then,” he said, and spread his wings again and flew off in widening circles, red against the rain, a bright scrap in the windy sky until he was lost from sight.

* * *

         The cabin was as she’d left it that morning, or whatever morning it had been, a comforting squat shape of heavy beams and warm red roof tiles, nestled amid evergreens and the white glaze of the first snow of the season. Smoke curled from the chimney. It was always the first snow here, the edge of the season just tipping over into winter, when the garden was put to bed for the year and the shed was full of firewood and the rafters crowded with braids of garlic and hams and baskets of apples. It was always the very beginning of the season of rest. She was seized by a pang of sorrow: she could have rested. She’d chosen to keep fighting instead.

         Meriri was there, of course, when she opened the door and pushed aside the blanket that hung there to keep the drafts out. She sat huddled in one of the main room’s two chairs, knees drawn up against her chest, with one of Zayred’s quilts around her shoulders. There was a spill of liquid and broken pottery on the planks of the floor. “I broke one of your mugs,” Meriri said dully, not looking up. “I’m sorry.”

         “Your hair,” Zayred said, startled.

         “I know. It just—just happened.” Meriri ran her fingers distractedly through her hair, what was left of it, and more clumps came out in her hands. The skin on the back of her hands was cracked and dry, little flakes drifting off as she moved, settling on her lap like snow.

         Zayred kicked her boots off and dropped into the other chair. “Did I do this?”

         “How should I know?” Meriri grumbled. “Ask Lallarat. She’s the one who knows about the dead.”

         “I don’t think she’d speak to me.” Zayred’s hat and mittens followed her boots into the pile of clutter by the wall. “Well, not unless she had me bound in a circle, I suppose. And perhaps not then. Do you remember when she tried to sing up a thunderstorm and managed to get it entirely inside her protective symbol instead of outside?”

         Despite herself, Meriri giggled. The sound was hoarse, and it turned into a cough. Zayred stood swiftly and crossed to the fire, drew out another mug of tea, and handed it silently to Meriri when the coughing fit subsided. Meriri nodded thanks.

         Zayred didn’t speak, only poured another for herself; the fire was low, but the tea crock still radiated warmth to her hands. As always, the tea was a dark green color in the mug, just a shade more steeped than most people would like; she’d gotten used to it, carrying it around in a waterskin under her coat on campaigns, and now preferred it that way. She took a sip and froze, startled.

         “What’s wrong?” Meriri asked; of course she’d noticed.

         “It doesn’t—” Zayred frowned, took another tentative sip. “I can’t taste anything. It’s hot, but I can’t taste it.”

         “Well,” Meriri said dryly, “you are a ghost.”

         Zayred gave a brief, humorless laugh. “Zayred the Faded.”

         “And Meriri the Dead. Ah, Zayred, what have we come to?” Meriri set her cup on the floor beside her, her hands falling into her lap, open, empty. Her wristbones protruded against her papery skin.

         “I didn’t want this, you know.” Zayred shook her head. “I was angry. I’m still angry. But I didn’t want this.”

         “I don’t understand what you did want,” Meriri said with a sigh. “We were friends. We could have stayed friends. But you betrayed us, betrayed everyone.”

         “Is that what you think?” Zayred asked sadly.

         “Didn’t you? When you went out to treat with the Cladists—”

         “I wasn’t treating with them.”

         “You certainly weren’t fighting them!”

         “And you thought I was—what? Surrendering? Selling out Devport?” Zayred stared at her. “Meriri, couldn’t you hear me sing?”

         “You were far away,” Meriri said, which wasn’t an answer.

         “Meriri—”

         They looked at each other as though across a widening chasm: Zayred pale and wavering, the firelight through the edges of her flesh giving her an illusionary glow of vitality; Meriri bone-thin and weak, her strength being sapped away by the new attention and focus of whoever among the dead cared enough to reach out toward her.

         “Zayred, I didn’t kill you,” Meriri whispered. She reached out her hands, tentatively enclosing one of Zayred’s, carefully exerting no pressure lest she slide right through Zayred’s substance or break her own fingerbones. “Zayred—tell me what happened. What you really did. I’ll believe you.”

         “What’s the point?” Zayred asked bitterly.

         “The terms of your curse,” Meriri said. “To tell any story to anyone. Even the truth. Even to me. Zayred—tell me. Please.”

* * *

         “Zayred the Splendid, the bringer of peace, on the walls of the city, in the month of the rains.” She sang the words experimentally, running them up and down a five-tone scale. She was going to be a legend, if this day went as planned; there would be songs written about her forever.

         The army was coming. From where she stood at the summit of one of the wall’s great stone towers, she could see the haze on the horizon, men and women and horses, cannons and siege engines, a massive push to take Devport and its control of the coast. This far away, she couldn’t see any single person, only their dust. That was important, that they not be individuals to her; that was a key part of the work. If she saw who killed her, the curse would misfire and attach to that one person only.

         At least, that was what she understood, from snatched moments of reading in the College library, from the tangle of tales that were part of every war-bard’s instruction, from carefully phrased questions to Tioun the Wise and Lallarat the Farsighted and others who had made death magic their study. She hadn’t, and it would seem odd to everyone that she was doing so now, after so many years. She couldn’t afford to arouse their suspicions. No-one must know what she was doing, or they would stop her.

         It seemed incredible, when she thought about it, that anyone would want to stop her—didn’t they see what the war was doing to the world? Already two generations had grown up in its shadow; it had been grinding on for years before she ever came down the mountain to the College, and now there were students there young enough to be her daughters. It was no longer the desperate struggle of the dark years, when they had seemed constantly about to be overwhelmed, and every battle a fight for the survival of all Deviskiri. But in a way it had become something worse now; it had become normal. And the structure that had grown up around its continuance had put the war-bards, whose abilities were the major counterbalance to the Cladists’ superior numbers, at the center of power, and most of them seemed inclined to stay there.

         “Zayred the Splendid, breaker of tyrants, fearlessly watched as her death came to claim her—” That wasn’t quite right, either in sentiment or in meter, and anyway she couldn’t help laughing at herself, a little. There was no need to write her own songs; others would write songs of her in plenty, if she succeeded today. And if she failed, well, it wouldn’t matter, and she thought she might be just as glad not to hear what they wrote. More and more, the songs of the Deviskiri were ugly things.

         Ugliness had somehow become normal too, creeping in everywhere. The war had stood in place for years, while the war-bards took control of more and more of the government, and the government itself controlled less and less of the country. In the mountain villages and on the foggy coast and in the islands, weary locals made their own peace, slipping back and forth across the border to graze and hunt, buy and sell, court and marry. Meanwhile those same villages gave up their youths and their harvests to the war, grudgingly, sometimes at swordpoint, hiding what they could. So the center pushed harder, and the edges frayed, and if there was still to be a Deviskiri nation at all in another generation it would depend on things changing, changing massively, and soon.

         The stone stairs down through the tower were worn into a curve in the middle, part of the original city’s building, Zayred thought, as most of the north quarter was. There were old gates here that no-one now knew, long bricked over and buried; but the walls remembered their original shape. She sang, her voice echoing up the hollow structure, and reminded them, singing of the days when Devport was called Kehoin Andevirar and was the center of the salt trade across half the continent, and was full of bustle and energy and song—wasn’t that time glorious, she sang, when you were young, o city, and wouldn’t you like to remember it again, just for a little while—

         The walls trembled, and the gate appeared, shivering into existence in a wall marked with layers of modern repair. Zayred touched the stones in wordless thanks and slid the gate open on silent hinges—freshly oiled, by some servant centuries dead—and slipped out onto the salt plain.

         (Meriri on the wall above watched disbelievingly as the white-wrapped figure appeared. It was Zayred, just as Tam had said. Going out secretly, as the Cladists approached. Traitor, Tam had called her, and told Meriri to watch. It was absurd, it was unbelievable, and yet there she was.)

         The sun was high, the plain hot, the rains days late, and Zayred was grateful for the dust-veil bound across her face. This song, her last, would take everything she was; to have it spoiled by a coughing fit would be the height of ridiculousness. Zayred the Splendid, thwarted by frailty—no! She couldn’t let herself be distracted. She was going to die a hero, and her name would live forever.

         The army was closer now; she was starting to be able to make out shapes. Enough. Zayred planted her feet in the dust, and raised her arms, and began to sing.

         (Meriri saw Zayred take her battle stance. At her back, she could feel the others watching. They’d told her she should be the one to lead the song, knowing Zayred as well as she did. Meriri didn’t consider herself naive; she knew her friendship with Zayred put her under suspicion also, knew that this was a test of her own loyalty. So be it. Tam was right; Zayred had chosen her side. Meriri braced herself on the wall, and began to sing.)

         It wasn’t working. Zayred could feel the magic slicing out toward the army, and being diverted, and sliding harmlessly away. The notes rippled from her throat, the music of power, the beginning of her legend, and were met with a wall of silence, and vanished. She could see the dust roiling before her, shapes detaching from the main body of the army, cavalry thundering forward; the Cladists knew what a war-bard looked like, and were racing to stop her before she could attack, not knowing that she was somehow, inexplicably, already being stopped.

         It wasn’t the army; the Cladists had never had any access to Deviskiri magic. Without taking her gaze from the dust-cloud, Zayred turned her attention rearward, toward the city, and there it was. The Council had spotted her after all, seen what she was doing. But that was all right, she’d known they might. She just had to try harder.

         The thunder of hooves; cries in a foreign tongue. No time. Zayred could feel the Council’s magic faltering, about to break. She was the stronger, she always had been. She was going to win. She turned her head and looked back over her shoulder, triumphant.

         The foremost figure on the wall looked down at her, and it was the one person she’d never expected, the one friend she’d had through all the terrible years of the war, the one she’d let into her home, the one she’d trusted—and her song faltered, for a moment, just as the charge bore down.

         Spears pierced her, and she died. Meriri, she thought, at the end, this is your fault, and the wall of silence that had been set between her and the army, an impenetrable rampart before her, was open at her back, and her last breath flew to the walls of the city, and carried magic.

* * *

         “You’re telling me it was a mistake,” Meriri said. “You—all of this—you didn’t mean this?”

         Zayred looked away. “I was angry,” she said quietly. “I lost control. It wasn’t you I meant the curse for, not originally; it was a moment’s lapse, no more. And then you were here, and the curse had settled into this shape, and I thought, if it’s too late for anything else, if I’ve lost everything I meant to do, I can have revenge at least.” She bit her lip. “I’m sorry, Meriri. I truly am.”

         “You were trying to curse the war?”

         “I’d have settled for that,” Zayred said, with a shrug.

         “You’d—” Meriri ran her fingers through her thinning hair. Little flakes of skin rose from her scalp in a cloud, like snow. “I don’t understand.”

         “Not just the war,” Zayred said. “I thought, if it worked, if I bound my death to that—Meriri, I was the strongest of us. You know they always told me I could be the key to winning the war—I thought, if that was true, maybe I could be the key to stopping it. Not just for us, but for always.”

         “Not just the war,” Meriri echoed. “All war. That’s what you were doing? Trying to put a death curse on war itself?”

         Zayred smiled sadly. “It was a bit presumptuous, maybe.”

         “And I stopped you.” Meriri shook her head. “I wish I’d known. It would have been—even if you’d failed, it would have been a glorious failure.”

         “And an inevitable one, I think.” Zayred lifted her hand, studying her translucent fingers in the firelight. “I can see a little farther now, Meriri. Not much, but enough. It was always a doomed effort. You can’t just magic people into doing things differently. If I’d tried—” She laughed suddenly, sadly. “If I’d tried exactly what we’ve been doing, these past few—days—however long it’s been—and put all my efforts to convincing people instead, to changing their minds—”

         “If I’d helped you,” Meriri said.

         “If I’d asked you.”

         “If I’d thought of it.”

         “If either of us had.”

         “We might have been heroes, after all.”

         They looked at each other, the one skeletal, the other ethereal. Neither could be mistaken now for anything but a ghost.

         “How will they remember us now?” Meriri asked.

         “I don’t know,” Zayred said.

         There seemed nothing more to say. The room had darkened, while Zayred spoke; outside, snow was beginning to fall, quietly, flake on flake. They sat in their chairs, mugs of tea in hand, and watched the fire burn down.

.

Copyright © 2018 Grace Seybold

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Grace Seybold has lived in Montreal for the past fifteen years, where she spends most of her time dodging oncoming traffic. She works as a copy editor for McGill-Queen’s University Press. Her fiction has been published in ChiZine, AE, Star*Line, Machine of Death 2, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other places. Her name is pronounced “SIGH-bold”

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

COVER ART

“King of Ruins,” by Mats Minnhagen

Mats Minnhagen is a Swedish illustrator. He has worked with computer games, children’s books, and historical illustration, among other things. You can check out his work at http://www.minnhagen.com/. “King of Ruins” was the cover art for the Beneath Ceaseless Skies website in summer 2008 before the premiere issue.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2018 Firkin Press

This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.