Issue #274 • Mar. 28, 2019

“Undercurrents,” by Charles Payseur

“I Am Destiny,” by Emily McIntyre

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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UNDERCURRENTS

by Charles Payseur

         The river runs, cutting sideways across the rocky ground, aiming for the cliffs and the caves there, the chance at freedom. Rory sights down the barrel of the gun, the latest from Lutea, a rifle that can shoot a flea off a dog at two hundred yards. He doesn’t even have to look to aim, the water within him drawing his hands like the needle of a compass. Below, Dev and Nora are in pursuit, horses abandoned, pistols drawn but next to useless at this range. Rory inhales, closes his eyes, and pictures a stone older than hate, smooth with promise and the pressed lips of an endless stream of supplicants. He exhales, squeezes the trigger.

         He imagines the scene in three parts, a triptych of carved wood. The first panel—the river running, waving lines to represent motion, speed, desperation. The second—the stillness of Rory’s perch, the sharp angles of his body. The last—an empty landscape, rocks and shrubs and a small pool of something liquid not yet swallowed by the dry earth.

* * *

         A lie about rivers: When the first human stepped upon the fresh earth and saw only a dry desert, they opened a vein in their arm, and from their blood the first river flowed, infusing their life into the land, giving it its shape and luster. And the river, forever grateful, pledged its eternal fealty to them, promising its service forever and ever.

* * *

         Dev and Nora find him after they’ve done a search of the caves.

         “Nothing,” Nora spits. Dust and sand streak her skin, halo her head in a way that almost glows in the setting sun. Later, they will talk. Later, she will mouth a prayer for the water she let slip into the ground and he’ll ask her if he’s done the right thing and her only answer will be silence, like the echo of smoke after a gun fires.

         “You must have hit nem,” Dev says. “There’s signs of water loss. Ne’s not going far.”

         Rory nods. The bullets are Lutean-made, salt and iron and whatever special magic they use to make them potent against rivers. Even clipped, the bullet will prevent the river from transforming, will lock nem in nir humanoid body until ne can find enough untainted water to filter out the taint of it.

         “We’d better go find out how it happened,” Nora says. Her eyes lingers on Rory’s longer than they should, but Dev is already past them, walking back toward Tinholm.

         It takes a while to hood the horses, sand-blinded as they are—a nasty trick for the river to pull, but then, this fight stopped being fair a long time ago. It takes longer still to lead them back into town where Konrad and Nels are waiting.

         Konrad’s face is a storm cloud, a flushed white-gray, dry and hot, full of lightning without rain. Nels’ head is still wet from the attack, and their shoulder is bandaged.

         “Quite the weapon,” Rory says, handing the rifle back to Nels, who gives a crooked smile.

         “Ne made the cliffs,” Nora says. Konrad smolders.

         “That a problem?” Nels asks. They’re fresh from Lutea; a Speaker, same rank as Konrad, though the two don’t get along at all. Nels is city born and bred while Konrad is local, schooled in the capital and returned to act as Voice of the Empire. The difference, for all that the empire supposedly sees all its citizens as equals, is obvious in the way Nels speaks, in the way they carry themself through Tinholm like it’s an unsavory bit of mud they don’t want to get stuck to their boot.

         “There used to be a series of underground rivers that webbed the area,” Konrad says without looking at Nels. “It makes dowsing there difficult.”

         “Ne won’t stay there long, though,” Dev says, puffing out his chest and addressing Nels directly. Standing out might mean a ticket out of Tinholm and to someplace with a bit more action—something Dev is always going on about. “There’s no fresh water in the cliffs, and Rory hit nem. Without an infusion, ne won’t last a week, and will be weakening. I’m sure if we organize a search tomorrow, we’ll have no problem finding nem.”

         Nels nods slowly, jaw working as if chewing on the information, though more likely it’s just sore from the attack. “Sounds like a plan,” they say. “Though I suppose it means our young hopefuls here will have to wait another day.”

         They sweep a hand at the gathered children, all of them between six and ten years old. Rory’s gaze falls on Liam, milling among them, and his chest tightens.

         “Another day won’t kill them,” Konrad says, and the silence that follows is as loud as thunder.

* * *

         A lie about rivers: When the first human gave their life blood to create the rivers, to create the living world, they entrusted a part of their magic to the water, to bring to the plants and the animals, so that all could live happily under their dominion. But the rivers, greedy for a power of their own, began to steal the magic, hoarding it, causing droughts and famine and hardship for the children of the first human.

* * *

         Dev sits on the bench in the room they all share as Dowsers, eyes on the ceiling, head leaned back like he’s got words oozing up his throat that he’s trying to keep down. Rory and Nora stand at their lockers, finished with changing, exchanging glances like whispering during a sermon.

         “Have you heard about the uprising in Raildeep?” Dev asks, finally. When no one answers immediately he goes on. “They say that the mill overseeing the new shipyard was destroyed. That twenty dowsers and nearly a hundred soldiers were killed. They say...”

         “Raildeep’s a long way from here,” Nora says, slamming her locker a bit harder than necessary.

         “They say that it was humans that did it,” Dev says, not even flinching at the noise.

         Rory thinks of his fathers. How, before the Empire’s policy on rivers became so extreme, they would take him down to Margo’s banks and let him play in her shallows. How he could feel her all around him and never feared the deeper waters, knew that she wouldn’t let him drown. And he remembers the feeling of water filling his lungs—a different river, a different world it seems—the dark spots growing in his vision as he refuses to close his eyes, refuses to look away from what’s coming.

         “What, you thought that rivers were the only ones willing to fight?” Nora asks.

         Rory’s breath catches in his throat and he almost puts a hand on her shoulder, like he could pull her back from the cliff she’s dancing along. Instead he forces himself to inhale deeply. She knows what she’s doing.

         “It’s just, I never thought we could get called to put down human threats,” Dev says. The possibility of a posting to the city must be stirring in his chest, dredging his depths, clouding his thoughts.

         “We get called to enforce the law,” Nora says. “Like always.”

         Dev nods but doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t have to. The law. Rory sees the children in his mind again, Liam and the others waiting under the weight of the law. Nora leaves, drawing Rory in her wake, leaving Dev still staring at the ceiling, alone.

* * *

         A lie about rivers: Rivers have always demanded worship. Concessions. They have blocked trade, fishing, irrigation. Have flooded, have killed, have ruined lives. They have leveraged their stolen magic into power over humans, and exploited humanity’s good nature for too long.

* * *

         Rory’s father Declan serves tea as Nels tells stories of Lutea, the bistros and the theaters and the schools. They don’t mention the wheels, the great cogs forever turning, fueling the joy that Nels describes. Not that Tinholm is much different, with its three wheels along the river. Her name is Margo, Rory reminds himself, mind drifting. Nora gives his hand a squeeze, anchors him to the present.

         “And do they have Tribute Days in the capital, then?” Liam asks from their place on the couch next to Rory’s father Heath, who flinches at the question.

         Heath, who works in one of the wheelhouses as an engineer, amid the grease and metal, teetered between relief and despair after hearing what happened at the Tribute. Declan settles next to them, tea served, and Rory aches to see the hollow looks in his fathers’ eyes. They both lean toward Liam, as if by their collective will they can protect them from what Nels might say—and from what will happen tomorrow, or the next day.

         “Every year,” Nels says, blowing on his tea.

         Which might mean to say that Tinholm is lucky, visited only every five from an official Voice to carry out the ceremony. Or it might mean something else, though what Rory isn’t sure. He’s heard stories, though, that in the city there are ways to getting out of Tribute, ways of paying to make sure your children aren’t among those called. Not that Declan and Heath could afford it. Not that Konrad would let them, even if they could—not when it was their family that had tended the water shrine before Tinholm had been taken into the empire. Not when there were still whispers they had never given up the old beliefs. And not when Rory had stopped returning Konrad’s affections and started going out with Nora. And people claimed rivers were petty and vengeful.

         For a while no one talks, the tea a convenient excuse to sit in quiet. Rory takes his mug, feels a small vibration from it, just the slightest of tickles. As a Dowser he’s connected to all waters, and he looks over the surface of the tea at Liam, whose open mouth belies the questions they want to ask. But the weight of their fathers’ presence silences them.

         “Thank you again for tending my shoulder,” Nels says, suddenly. “It’s feeling much better.”

         Declan bows his head. “It would have been better still if I could have gotten to you right away, but the wound wasn’t too serious. I hope there’s not much pain.”

         Nels grins. “Not pain so much as embarrassment,” he says. “I must be getting old. Time was, even a faulty restraint wouldn’t have found me so off guard.”

         Rory purses his lips. Nels must be in his late thirties—not old, even by the standards of those in the room. His fathers are both in their sixties, old enough to remember the time before Tinholm joined the empire fifty years before. Which was long before the real troubles began, when the wheels and the guns poured out from the capital like a flood. Rory only remembers flashes from before that—back when he was supposed to take over as tender of the shrine.

         “Still, you must be some sort of healer,” Nels says. “You ever consider moving to the capital? I’m sure there’s a lot you could teach people.”

         “My first lesson would be that this is nothing,” Declan says, gesturing at Nels’ bandaged shoulder. “Your injury was mostly superficial—I imagine the river had more interest in escape than really hurting you. Before...well, before I could have healed almost anything. I once helped my mother reattach a severed arm. What I can do these days...well, it doesn’t compare.”

         “Then I’m glad I wasn’t more seriously injured,” Nels says with a laugh, as if it were a grand joke. “Some reason you’ve lost your potency, though? If you could really do what you claim—now that’s something the hospitals in the capital would pay almost anything for.”

         Declan’s gaze drifts to the window, though it’s dark outside. Rory knows what he’s looking at. Beyond the glass, beyond the street, is where Margo winds through Tinholm.

         “Most of our healing is derived from water,” Declan says. “The magic of water. Something about the magic, though...it really only works well when the water is freely given. Which hasn’t happened in a long time.”

         Nels gives a weak smile and downs the rest of their tea before standing. “Well, I’m grateful all the same. If you’ll excuse me, I fear your Voice has a few questions as to what exactly happened today. Good night, and thanks for the tea.”

         The weight of what is unsaid presses down on all of them, the way their eyes shift to the door as if expecting a heavy boot to kick it in. Now they all share Liam’s expression, mouths half open, something in their eyes pleading with each other, but they don’t speak. Instead Rory and Nora see Nels to the door, watch them disappear into the night. Then, with Declan and Heath’s help, they move the bench and the rug it sits on, pull up the loose floorboards, and descend the hidden stairs into the hollow below. The stone, so perfectly smooth, is waiting for them. They have a busy night ahead.

* * *

         A lie about rivers: A river can never die, it’s water never fully lost. The different faces they wear are only masks to trick men into lowering their defences, to keep humanity subservient and weak.

* * *

         The horses wear goggles today, ridiculous bulky things that make them look like locomotive engineers transformed into animals. The air is dry and the sun beats down with the rhythm of summer, every summer since the troubles began, where the heat blasts everything not irrigated by Margo, not fed by the energies she provides the town and farms. Balance, the empire calls it. Security from the whims of nature and rivers. There are other words for it.

         Rory rides beside Konrad and wishes he had been sent out with Nels and Nora and Dev instead. Being alone with Konrad reminds Rory too much of when he first graduated and was made a full dowser, when Konrad’s advances became obvious because they were no longer forbidden. Their relationship, such as it was, didn’t last long, and Rory feels a sort of clinging resentment behind Konrad’s glances now.

         “Was Liam disappointed with the delay?” Konrad asks as they scan the cliffs, Rory letting the feel of water guide him without consciously thinking about it. “Or was there a celebration at your home last night?”

         “My sibling looks forward to serving the empire,” Rory says, the expected answer. “Though I think they have more aptitude as a builder than a dowser.”

         It’s an old argument, and a true one, though of course every family with a child chosen for Tribute makes a similar claim—anything to get out of having to participate.

         “They say that dowsing often runs in families,” Konrad says. “You were lucky enough to make it through, after all.”

         Rory bites his bottom lip, tastes blood. And he remembers again, more vividly. Water, water and the need to breathe so bad that he takes it into himself, into his lungs. His parents taught him that water gave people life, gave them spirit. And that there are moments still when humans and rivers can touch in ways that go beyond skin, that reach back to that original, liquid state. Elrin, the river they have brought for Tribute. Rory. They know each other even as their names dissolve, as they feel the hunger and fear, the uncertainty and stress. Their waters mingle as Rory drowns.

         “I...” He’s spared having to say anything as the river breaks from cover and runs. There’s the faint whine of Konrad’s gun as it’s unholstered, but Rory doesn’t hesitate, urges his horse into a run. The river is stumbling, tripping over nemself in an effort to flee. Gale. Nir name is Gale. Like all rivers, the knowledge of name, of identity, comes in the connection between them, the moisture of even this blasted air. Rory knows Gale, and Gale knows Rory.

         There is no attack—the bullet would have made it impossible for Gale to shift back to liquid, even for a moment. Rory doesn’t even draw his weapon, just rides up on Gale’s flank, cutting nem off from the cliffs, offering nem the option of surrender or further resistance. Ne drops to nir knees, glaring up at him, or maybe beyond him, at the sky, devoid of clouds and any hope of rain.

         “Had enough of running?” Konrad asks as his horse walks him near.

         “I’ve had enough of hiding,” Gale answers, lips cracked, hands raised. Rory dismounts and puts the salt iron restraints back on Gale’s wrists.

* * *

         A lie about rivers: Rivers need borders, need banks and dams, or they will run to nothing. They erode the landscape, flood, recede, go dry. They are fickle, and need a strong hand to guide them and keep them on course, to maintain their promise to humanity.

* * *

         Rory waits beside Nels in the main wheelhouse, where there are cells capable of holding rivers. Around them, dour-faced members of the militia stand, uniforms clean and pressed. The town transforms around Tribute time, the chosen families shrinking to nothing while everyone else grows large, backs straight, voices loud in exaltation of the Empire. Inside, Declan administers fresh water—just enough to purify Gale and make nem able to participate in the Tribute, which has been pushed off another day. Konrad looms nearby, arms crossed, watching Declan work, eyes fierce.

         “Care for a breath of fresh air?” Nels asks Rory, nodding toward the stairs that lead up to the roof.

         Rory shrugs and follows, unable to swallow the knot of worry at seeing his father so close to Konrad’s scrutiny. Declan, once at the heart of the community as healer, as tender to Margo’s shrine, now relies on Heath and Rory to keep them all fed and clothed. Rory doubts very much it was luck of the draw that put Liam in the current Tribute—what better way to wipe away resistance than to force families who respected the water to choose between complicity or death?

         The roof of the main wheelhouse is the tallest place in town—the first act of the Empire was to convince its people of the benefits of its new edicts, its new technologies and advancements. Stepping into the fresh spray of the great wheel, Rory breathes deep, feeling traitor for how refreshing it is to experience the wet air.

         “It’s quite a town,” Nels says as they look out at the buildings trying to push beyond the strictly planned design of the capital.

         Rory has no illusions, knows that Tinholm exists for its mines and for the farms that funnel food and materials into Lutea to be transformed into metal of wheels, bullets for guns, and the full bellies of soldiers. Grain to keep everyone else just hungry enough to believe more would come after the next campaign, the next river chained. But it is home, and Rory can’t help but love it.

         “It could be,” Rory says, gaze catching on the river that bisects the town. Margo. Always Margo. Buoys anchor her in her bed, all linked from the main wheelhouse north and south to the smaller wheels that provide energy to the homesteads and farms beyond the city center. They bob in the water as it flows, pushing the great wheels that, in turn, power the buoys and the rest of town, a cycle twisted back on itself—an unbroken chain.

         Nels’ eyebrows arch and he laughs. “I wish I could have shown you Lutea before...all this. I wish I could have shown you the theaters and the universities, the students debating in the street. The art. There was a band of rivers once, that played in the Great Hall. A long time ago. You know what Lutea originally meant? The music of water. Or, if you listen to certain unpopular scholars, the harmony of water.”

         “And what’s the sentence for listening to unpopular scholars?” Rory asks.

         Nels’ grin could cut iron. “Same as the sentence for being an unpopular scholar. Or for giving aid to a river. Or for any of a hundred other things.”

         “Well, if the sentence is all the same...” Rory lets his voice trail off, drowned by the noise of the wheel, the hum of the energy feeding Tinholm.

         Behind them a door opens. Neither of them turn.

         “The river should be well enough for Tribute tomorrow,” Konrad says.

         “I’ll see my father home, then,” Rory says. “Unless you need me for anything else.”

         Konrad hums, his voice blending into that of the wheel, but eventually he shakes his head. “You’re dismissed.”

* * *

         A lie about rivers: A river does not feel pain like a human. Does not love like a human. Is not a human. They lack a vital spark, without which their water can never thicken into blood.

* * *

         “What happens?” Liam asks after Rory’s fathers have gone to bed, when it’s just them, Rory, and Nora in the small space under the floor, where water carved stairs and walls from stone to make a chamber large enough to keep certain memories alive. Before Margo was chained. Back when she thought this would only be a temporary situation. Around them, hung on the walls, are wood panels they have carved. Declan, mainly, but Heath and Rory as well, and even Liam has carved one or two. Depicting the stories they’re not allowed to tell anymore, the beliefs they’re not allowed to have. At their feet, bits of metal litter the rock, make walking difficult. “When you’re taken for Tribute?”

         “It hurts,” Nora says, before Rory can think of an easier way to think of it. “No matter what they tell you, it hurts. The weight on your chest as you struggle, the feeling of water rushing into your lungs, the burn of your brain screaming for air—it all hurts.”

         Liam shudders, but doesn’t turn away. Rory tries to remember what he had felt, before Tribute, when a Speaker from the capital had come, river in tow, to drown twenty children and see who came back touched by the water, able to dowse. He had been part of the very first Tribute in Tinholm, part of that reminder, that binding, where the entire town was tainted by a bullet fired from the capital—it poisoned them still, fifteen years later.

         “Some try to trick the testers, to go limp and play dead,” Rory says finally. “But there’s no point. The connection is only made at the end, after the life has started to fade. It’s like...like it leaves enough space for the water to come in. If you try to pretend, they’ll know. There are tests they have, to see if you can really feel it. And if they find that you’re faking, they’ll just do it again. Only...I’ve never seen anyone come back after a second time.”

         “But...what’s it like?” Liam asks. They nudge a large metal screw with their foot. “To have that connection. To be a dowser.”

         “Like you’ve lost a part of yourself,” Nora says, “but gained something else. Not worse, not better, but different.”

         “It’s like you’re broken in two,” Rory says. “The you on the surface that’s the same as always, that people see and feel that they know. And then the you that’s below the surface, hidden. Maybe it’s shallow, or deep. Calm, or raging. But it’s part of something larger, a current that flows through and connects everything. An undercurrent that pulls at you constantly.”

         They’re all quiet for a time, in the glow of a single candle that flickers light across the wooden scenes around them.

         “What should I do?” they ask.

         “When it all starts,” Rory says, “you’ll know what to do—what you can.”

         After Liam goes to sleep Rory and Nora stay below, voices hushed, lips brushing, hands busy to the rhythm playing within them, through them, until there is nothing but warmth and the taste of water.

* * *

         A lie about rivers: The price humans pay for safety is Tribute. To create those who can hunt the rivers, who can bring the order of the empire forward, to the benefit of all. Without dowswers, rivers would run free. And when rivers run free, everyone suffers.

* * *

         Rory didn’t sleep much. And now his father Heath is at work in the northern wheelhouse, and his father Declan has gone to the main wheelhouse to make sure Gale is healthy enough to perform. Liam and the rest of the Tribute are gathered by the southern wheelhouse, where the ceremony will be performed, and no doubt Nora and Dev are with them. All morning, a stream of people to the door, heads hooded, eyes dark. All morning, handing out wooden triptychs, stories that still need to be remembered. Stories now scattered through the town, hidden inside walls or in locked drawers.

         Which leaves Rory, staring out across Margo’s waters. And Konrad, who announces himself with stiff cough.

         “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Konrad asks.

         Rory looks up at the sky, which is beginning to cloud. Maybe there will be rain. His hand clenches, and he realizes it’s gripping the handle of his gun. He’s been trained to think of it as an extension of himself. A poisonous tool that’s been grafted into his being. He takes in the scene again. The darkening sky, the water sweeping past, the buoys bobbing, pulsing with the power of the wheelhouses—the power of the Lutean Empire.

         “It could be,” Rory says.

         Konrad draws nearer. “I’ve been hearing some troubling rumors. About your family. About their loyalty.”

         A wind snakes up Rory’s back, making him shiver even in the heat. Fear rises as bile in the back of his throat. Doubt kills surer than bullets, Nora likes to say. Rory just nods. If Konrad knew about what is happening, there’s no way they’d be having this conversation in the open air, with a thousand ways for it to go wrong for him.

         The truth is a triptych of images carved in wood. The first panel—Heath and Liam working on something in the secret of the space beneath their home, parts stolen from the wheelhouse strewn about. The second—Rory and Nora finding Gale in the dead of night, giving nem water enough to hide a device inside nir body, where only someone trained to look, like Declan, could see it. The last—

         “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about my family much longer,” Rory says.

         The smile that spreads on Konrad’s lips is predatory, like the big cats that used to stalk the cliffs before the rains stopped and drove them off and away. Or maybe it just drove them into town so they could learn to wear clothes and carry a gun and speak with the Voice of empire. Konrad must think Rory is talking about Liam, that whatever happens today will either break their parents or tie them too closely to the empire to ever consider resisting. But Konrad sees only the surface of the situation, the water calmly flowing by. He doesn’t see beneath, to the currents hidden there, building their way up.

         “And will I have to worry about you?” Konrad asks. He wets his lips with his tongue.

         Rory is saved from having to answer by the main wheelhouse exploding.

* * *

         A truth about people: They often finds ways to surprise you.

* * *

         The heat of the explosion from the wheelhouse—hearing the roar and seeing the shock bloom on Konrad’s face—is like seeing that first breath after a body’s been pulled the from the river, that first spark of hope that maybe, this once, death has passed over and life will go on. It’s a fragile thing, like the whole world has slowed, waiting for that moment. And then everything speeds up again, and Rory knows his time has come.

         Konrad is already past him and stands on the edge of the river, pistol in hand. There is screaming now, over the cackle of the fire and the moan of the wind. The sound of the water along the banks, though, has stopped. Konrad watches the wheelhouse, the devastation, but Rory keeps his eyes instead on the buoys in the water, how one by one they still. Somewhere far away there is another boom, and Rory follows Konrad’s gaze north, where a fireball is lifting into the sky, brighter than the sun.

         “No,” Konrad whispers, and he must feel the sudden surge as Margo stretches, as the buoys drain of the magic being pumped into them by the wheels. Konrad begins to mutter, points his gun at the water’s surface. It won’t be as effective as shooting a river in a humanoid body, but a poison is still poison.

         Rory hits directly between Konrad’s shoulder blades, snapping his head back and sending him sprawling into Margo’s waters, his gun tumbling to the ground. There’s not even a scream as he disappears, as he slips under the suddenly calm mirror of the water. There is no thrashing, no struggle that Rory can see, but he doesn’t stay to watch, already running south.

         The fighting is done before Rory arrives, most of the Tribute children fled and Dev restrained and unconscious with a bullet wound to the shoulder. Bodies litter the riverbank, militia and Tribute alike, lifeless reminders that there’s no going back now.

         “Shouldn’t be a minute,” Liam says, hand shaking as they keep Dev’s pistol pointed at the ground.

         Nora, Declan, and Gale come running out a moment later, and they all take cover as the final explosion tears a hole through the roof of the wheelhouse and the last of the wheels screeches to a halt. They hold their breath—they don’t have much time before more of the militia responds.

         The final buoys go dark, and for the first time in fifteen years Rory watches as Margo pulls herself from her banks, all that water sucking into a giant humanoid form, a woman who by human standards would be in her middle years, skin blue, eyes closed, face pointed up at the sky, which suddenly fills with the sound with thunder.

         Rain. The town will need it, with the loss of the irrigation, with what will happen next. And Margo gives it, shrinking from the release; smiles when she opens her eyes and looks down and she sees Gale. The two embrace.

         “Sorry to cut short the reunion,” comes a voice from behind them, and they all turn to see Nels running toward them, Heath just behind.

         “They’ve already responded to the main wheelhouse,” Nels says. “I’ve stashed horses for you near the cliffs. It should give you enough of a head start to get away. They’ll be looking for you, but without fresh dowsers it will take them too long to follow. I’ve got friends who will find you and help figure out where to go from there.”

         “What about you?” Rory asks. “Won’t they know your part in all this?”

         “I’ve got connections it’s hard to ignore,” they say. “Plus, someone’s going to half-drown me and leave me for dead. I’ll be fine.”

         It almost seems too easy, unreal. And yet, watching Margo surround Nels’ head with a bubble of water—watching their bright smile even as they slip from consciousness—Rory can feel the effort of it, the weight of it, which none of them would have been able to carry alone. None of this has been easy, but together they are a current building, a wave crashing. Together—

         The sky opens and the rain falls, helping to conceal their escape. They run, humans and rivers—they run for a future that seems almost real.

Copyright © 2019 Charles Payseur

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Charles Payseur is an avid reader, writer, and reviewer of all things speculative. His fiction and poetry have appeared at Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, The Book Smugglers, and many more. He runs Quick Sip Reviews and can be found drunkenly reviewing Goosebumps on his Patreon. You can find him gushing about short fiction (and occasionally his cats) on Twitter as @ClowderofTwo.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

I AM DESTINY

by Emily McIntyre

         I’m drowning in my thoughts while I polish the broad front steps of Arlee citadel—laying down my daily deposit of Hearth magic with repetitive gestures and whispered chanting—when a woman in black at the head of a silent army levitates into Arlee, the seven thick gates in the town downhill crumbling open before her followers with seven muted explosions. My master’s soldiers, all war-magic adepts, come running and shouting; without even looking at them she lifts a hand, and the earth itself shivers and sends them flying in groaning heaps of breastplates and greaves and shattered blades.

         Through my hearth connection I can feel the walls, the ground, even the roses writhing under the press of her strong magic. I slam my own walls closed as the breath leaves my throat, and I scramble inside the gate because it is clear that whoever she is, she plans to march right through it and confront the Duke. For once I’m glad I’m just a servant girl, even if I don’t have a father to match with the newt in my belly, which I clutch to stare up at her as she floats by. As if she feels my gaze she looks down, and the entire world stops for a moment.

         She’s wearing my face.

         I’d know it anywhere, I’ve seen it enough in early-morning puddles and buckets of water and in the countless mirrors I polish every day in the fancy part of the castle. Dark eyes, darker than most, with bushy dark eyebrows and spiky black lashes. Pale skin, blotchy along cheekbones that are sharper than the fashion; nose flared in shock and pink around the nostrils.

         We stare at each other while seconds drip by. Shock gives way to anger gives way to curiosity in her face, and once she almost opens her lips to say something. I, however, feel only resignation and a small sense of hope. Whatever difficult choices are ahead of me, somehow they just got harder, and grew possibilities. How, I don’t know, but I know within me that it’s the truth.

         Finally I nod and get up to walk away, and she lets me go. No one will be punishing me for leaving my task. They have other things to think about right now, like the high-pitched sing-song of this sorceress’s voice that I can feel mounting in my bones. It echoes through the castle as I begin to climb the stair to my room on a blind hunt for enough quiet to think.

         “Racard, Duke of Arlee,” the voice pierces through years and memories and floor after floor of stone, penetrating the very bones of me, your reckoning is here! Where are you, Racard, Racard, Racard?” A pause, a manic giggle, a crash as something breaks. “Racard, I’ll break your things... come out come out come out!” Her voice grows beyond the human range, high and low, like the wind whistling through the ancient pines and shivering my bones.

         It is a regrettable quirk in our Duke that he likes to play hide and seek from his expensive whores, and if they aren’t around he will make do with us the servants, even the homely ones. As a child I liked the game, until I grew both bored with it and tired of the way I inevitably was the first to find my master and then would be made to huddle too close to him, smelling his sour breath and feeling his arm around me in the pulsing dark, until someone else found us which always took much longer than it should have. Later I would pretend to play but hide myself, in the library with a book, and use my Hearth magic to track the game’s progress so I could be the second or third to his hiding spot.

         The Duchess never played, preferring to sit in the airy morning room and drink pot after pot of rose hip tea and look out at the raw Lux winter, perhaps missing the sunny land she was born in. Her long fingers, chapped and reddened in the winter around the nails no matter how much oil her maid rubbed into them, would lie still in the rustling silks of her lap. Shoulders slightly hunched, she would faintly smile when, with a great crow of excitement that would leak through the halls and entries of the palace, the Duke was found by some unlucky bastard who got the shit scared out of him when Master leaped from his hiding place and shouted in his ear. I would watch her sometimes, under the pretense of dusting the room, trying to ignore the way her shoulder would twist to hide her face from me, or the way that her back grew stiffer when she heard my footsteps enter the room. She is more interesting than my master, but she is a closed book I can’t read, or won’t read—I don’t lack the power, only the heart. We have a long history, Milady and I, and I still feel the bile of shame rise in my throat when she looks at me full on with her blue accusing eyes. She is not one to forget a grudge, and I am not one to forget a debt.

         Now, though, through the Hearth connection I have with every stone and cinder in this ancient heap, I can feel her standing under the family coat of arms in the great gallery, waiting with almost no surprise for doom to blast through the doors, and I can feel my master hiding in the bread pantry down in the pastry kitchen. And then—and then I can feel the sorceress prying into my thoughts, snaking past everything I care about to extract the image of the Duke’s two feet planted on the stones under a rack holding stale bread for the servant dinner.

         Her laugh of triumph shakes my skull like a gong. I try to close myself to her but it is more like she loses interest in me and leaves. When she does this I find I am on the stairs still but sprawled across several of the pearly-brown flags, with my belly sagging down between two of them and my cheek pressed against another, where it is worn from centuries of footsteps. My heart is thudding hard in my chest and the baby writhes inside of me.

         She invaded me. She took my thoughts from me. Hate rises, hot and surprising like bile, and fascination for her power. I do not reach back along that thread of connection between us. I use the strength of my emotion to shutter my soul-windows, damp the lanterns, close the doors. This invader can invade the castle, I don’t care, but she can’t invade my soul. I am not property, no matter what it says in the Great Charter. I am my own.

         My nails have bit into my palms. I loosen them. The stairs lead in a tight corkscrew up to the east servant’s tower, where I have slept since I was ten. I have my own room there, which I obtained after much planning and, I’ll be honest, a lot of Dream magic carefully employed on the then-steward of the castle, an old man by the name of Trim who had a secret passion for beekeeping.

         The door of my room has a harsh creak when I open it that sets my teeth on edge. I never oil the door because I want to know if someone is entering my room. The room is made of cold grey stone and wedge-shaped like all the others in this floor, pressed against the side of the tower like a cell. There is a wooden bar lock and I shove it home now; the thud it makes against my palm brings me a tiny flush of reassurance. Below I can feel—faintly, because I am so shielded—the terror of the Duke as the sorceress reaches a strong arm into the pantry and drags him out by the neck and dangles him like a puppy and laughs at him.

         I reach under the wooden frame of my bed and pull out a basket of nuts and apples that I keep there, and I sit cross-legged on the colorful throw the cook knit for me when I was sixteen, and eat, and ponder. I had two paths before today, and I didn’t like either of them. Both of them required a man to acknowledge me, and one of those men I hated—he hated me too—and the other I’d always loved but he cared no more about me than about his pet cat whom he sometimes forgot to feed.

         Now, suddenly, there is a third path. An unknown path. Why do I share a face with this woman? And why had she come here? What does it mean to me—a lowly servant with far more power than is good for her—and to the small creature growing in my belly waiting to suck up my power at its birth? It seems impossible it could mean nothing.

         The apple is tart in my mouth; juices run down the back of my throat and my saliva wells until I have to swallow again, and again. In my hand the apple feels heavy and perfectly round, skin a waxy silk against my calloused fingers. It comes from the back orchard beyond the corn fields, where blackberries the size of my thumb grow wild in a thicket of thorns and also there is a small bobcat that makes its home at night. The orchard is largely forgotten and most of the fruit falls unnoticed to melt into vinegary puffs amongst the long grass until the snow covers everything in a blanket of secrets. I go there sometimes and talk to the lithe wild cat and sometimes it will let me scratch it under the ruff in the muscular curve of its neck. I often wonder if I have a bit of beast magic since otherwise it would probably take my face off with a single slash of its claws. Speaking of taking faces off, what if the sorceress decides to kill me because I share her face? Or what if she takes me as a slave, or a servant? Or a lover or forces me to stand in for her somewhere—the thoughts spin out of control in me and I feel tension rising in mounting waves that shiver to my fingertips.

         Outside through the papered window I hear the soft thock of a bird striking the tower side and the flutter of its wings as it recovers. The shock in my consciousness is enough to break my downward spiral. I sit still for a moment with a half-chewed bite of apple on my tongue. There’s no way to know the sorceress’s mind without using my power, so I must use my power. The way seems clear now, at least for one step.

         I lay my hand on my taut belly and whisper reassurance to the imp inside me and stretch out on my bed. Now after a lifetime of training I need no herbs or smoke to slip into my trance: I merely relax every part of my body, begin a slow inventory of what I hear in my surroundings, and count backwards, skipping every fifth number, from six hundred and forty one. This reality fades and the Dreamworld seeps in, washing my senses with fresh colors and sounds and the awareness of every soul within reach (which for me is, as near as I can figure, a circle of a half day’s ride around me) and its hopes, fears, plans, and secret desires. It is like a flock of crows rising from the fields with harsh voices except that the sound is inside of me, filling me up until I feel like I might explode.

         But this isn’t my first Dream. This isn’t the madness of my childhood after I Received from the Duchess’s mother, when they thought I might go insane before I mastered my power and sent me to a Dreamer named Straam several days away for training so I wouldn’t tear the castle down one nightmare ripple at a time (he took my virginity on a hillside under a cherry tree and gave me both tools to master my power and recurring nightmares of the faded blue eyes tattooed on his eyelids and how they frayed around the edges and how when he mounted me, they closed and fluttered until he fell away and took with him too much of me). This isn’t the fevered Dreaming of my first flowering, when it seemed my cunt called out to every breath, every blunt object, every man and girl around me, and the lust I spread around me brought more lambs, more children, more kittens underfoot with each year until I began to learn to deaden myself and put up the walls.

         No, this is the Dream of experience. With relative ease I shut my inner ears to the cries around me and search for the woman who wears my face. I assume she’s with the Duke, who is belling out his terror to the heavens for anyone who cares to listen, but I can’t feel her. If anything, I feel a gap where she should be, based on where everyone else is oriented with terror and curiosity. In my years of walking the hidden roads of Dreams I have never felt this before.

         She isn’t there. I feel no presence to whisper to; no despair to cradle in my arms. There is no fountain of need and desire to manipulate. I’m going to have to see her in-person to learn what happens next.

         The cautious part of me, the part that’s always terrified by the unpredictability of my power, the part of me that wakes in the night and lies frozen until the first threads of dawn confirm another day has appeared, the part that is relieved that childbirth will likely halve my force, whispers that I should stay in my room and wait for her to leave. Maybe she will forget my face. Whatever doom she is dispensing is not mine; I have enough of my own.

         Truthfully, my doom was sealed the day the Duke’s mother died and I Received all her power instead of her grandson Elever. We were both about eight then. There were many places we’d rather have been than in the sickroom, standing in the close air that smelled of urine and old sweat. Back then Elever and I were occasional playmates, but not that day. I still remember the paper-thin skin, spattered with age-freckles, on the old woman’s arms that lay on the coverlet as still as if she’d already died, and I remember the darting pale blue intelligent eyes sunk into her face. My duties included sponging her cheeks and forehead with fresh water and changing the bedpans.

         The Predictor had suggested Elever do it instead—he’d been born with little power and could barely Dream a nightmare to a baby, though in my opinion he’d gotten the best card in the deck just by coming into the world a Duke’s son and getting all the candies and cakes whenever he wanted—but he’d refused in a huff and left the room. I remember too how the Duke’s lady stood in the corner, hidden partly in shadow, as the imperious old Duchess felt her way toward the dividing line between Life and Death with as much defiance as she’d lived firmly in Life’s maze. The floor was marked with lines and names, two of them. The old woman had Dream magic and Hearth magic. The closest line on the floor had Elever’s name written on it and two curved lines for his toes. The next line had a carefully chalked crown for the Duchess. If no one got in the way, they’d Receive based on how close they were and their affinities. The old lady was strong, almost a real Dreamer, so it was a good thing for Elever, and for Milady who’d not been strong in the first place and then had shared her power with her son when he was born.

         We servants don’t get so careful around deathbeds as the nobility, I guess because we don’t have time for it all, nor can we pay the Predictor. And I think because we are more caught up in the drama on the bed, the life fading away before our eyes. Sure, we might jostle a little for position—everyone wants to Receive! It’s the only way to increase the magic you were born with, and in this world you need magic, money, or birth to rise in station! Are there any other kinds of worlds?—but with my master’s family, death is a morbid, precise business full of whispered arguments and infinitesimal measurements and ghoulish waiting for death.

         This time, all the precision, all the intention, didn’t matter because the old woman died before anyone expected her to, with an impish look on her wizened face as if she did it on purpose. I swear she stuck out her tongue at the Duchess in the shadows as she stiffened, let out a low gurgle in her throat, and sighed surrender. I had been freshening her pillow, lifting her fluffy grey head and slipping a new white cushion underneath, and I felt her sag into my hands while panic sparked in my throat and shocked through my blood. I’ll always associate the pungent aroma of the lavender that was crisping and burning in a standing basin in the corner with what happened next.

         Magic like a swarm of bees with stingers pumping hot poison struck me and pierced me through my skin into my blood and the inner parts of me. With my eyes I could see a stream of tiny bright yellow sparks flowing from the old woman to me, and with my ears I could hear a hum that started low and grew to a scream—ah but that was me screaming, and the Duchess who had leapt across the room and struck me in the face was screaming too, and the magic was screaming through my bones—higher and higher pitched while pressure built inside me until I thought I might explode into sparkly bits from here to Daviton, half a day’s ride away.

         The scent of singing lavender burned my nostrils. I was still screaming but I forgot how to breathe, and the screams exhaled from me as whispers in the air of that room which no longer was filled with shadows but pulsated with light like I’d never seen before, white-yellow light that penetrated every corner and froze Milady’s face forever in my eyes, froze it with horror and awe and resentment and fear in every line of it.

         Suddenly I could feel every person in the massive castle. I could feel the castle itself, aging, settling on its bones with weariness and stories long forgotten. I could feel the birds like small worlds darting through the air outside, and I could feel the trees in the orchard and the animals in the great barn. I could sense the needs, the wants, the fears, the desires, of every being as far as I could imagine. I was eight years old, mainly concerned with whether my secret tansy flower in the horses’ exercise yard would get trampled, and suddenly I could taste the remembrance of the cook’s cunt in the mouth of a guard who had always teased me for my black eyes. I knew that my mother had just collapsed in a closet under a perfectly folded stack of linen and was hiccupping with tearful remembrance of my father, dead some four years. My awareness caught the whisper of jealousy in the heart of Lettie, the gardener, over the leather belt her friend Sra wore.

         Until now my small Hearthlove had been good for nurturing the carrot row in the garden and stirring soups into velvety richness. It was convenient for the daughter of the cellerer and a laundry maid, who had at best to hope in her lifetime for the position of chambermaid, and it had only been a peripheral aspect of my awareness, like the color of my hair or the size of my feet. Now with the Dreamvision and the Hearthlove pulsing through me in terrifying power, I could barely remember my own shape and location. I faded from myself in the ocean of everyone else.

         I think the worst of it at that moment was that I could feel how Milady hated me for taking the power meant for her son. I could sense she was pondering poisoning me and sending the magic to him that way and then was recoiling from herself in horror but still thinking about it. I felt the way her fancy shoes pinched her feet and how a large part of her just wanted to walk away from her Lord and his endless whims, his empty castle, and his stupid servants who took what wasn’t theirs, and go back to her people where the sun always shone and her nursemaid would make her turmeric milk whenever she wanted it. I could feel that, and I could feel Elever coming closer, drawn by the screams and his curiosity. I could feel the moment coming but I could do nothing about it.

         I could feel the cool door handle under his fingers and how his back muscles strained to open the heavy door into his grandmother’s room, and I saw myself through his eyes when he stepped in, glanced at his mother and then down at the servant girl who had stolen his inheritance. When he saw the final twinkling remnants of the magic in the air, I felt the longing leap into his throat and how he bit down on it so no one would see. Suddenly I realized he was accustomed to hiding how much he wanted more magic, and how badly he had wanted his grandmother’s Dream magic so he could be normal, so that it wasn’t only his birth that spoke for him but his power. And then I felt in my own stomach the stone that fell when he realized what had happened.

         I was defenseless then, my awareness spread over a hundred minds, my body sprawled on the floor with glowing tears tracing down my temples. Elever and his mother exchanged a ruthless glance that I felt like a sword in my belly, and they both took one step closer to me. Their hands twitched. I stared back at them through their eyes. And then all the other servants burst in the door, and Milady’s youngest sister, and the Duke, and everything was hate and loud voices and chaos and I found my body transported to my parent’s room and left there, bleeding magic in a glowing trail across the dull stone of the passageways, until they could figure out what to do with me.

         I never asked for Elever’s power. I didn’t want it; I only Received it because I was doing the tasks he refused to dirty his hands with. We all knew that, but everyone blamed me anyway. For some years, Elever was sent away to study at the University of Balmage, where I intuited he had a rough time, but I always doubted it could have been as rough as mine, growing up in the shadow of a mistress who hated me, leaking power over everyone I knew and feeling every emotion, dream, and desire that bubbled up within the castle; torn between loathing myself and fascination with the strange power that came from the twining of the old woman’s magic and my own. I never wondered if other Receivers suffered as I did; I only suffered.

         My training left me in worse shape than before, just not spreading the misery with every dog, stallion, and manservant. In between kissing me and convincing me for a time that I liked it, Straam the Dreamer taught me to lay a circle of string with certain enchantments around myself before sleeping so my Dreams wouldn’t leak out, how to narrow my focus to one or only a few people, and how to purge myself from everything once in a while using candles and juniper berries and a little bread. I tried to learn from him if he had suffered like me when he came into his power, but he wasn’t interested in sharing anything but his body parts and never mentioned his past or anything at all that would give me insight.

         Really it was only when I forced the beautiful horseboy Gerard to see me, when he began to sit next to me at Second Supper and share the best bits of his beef with me, and when he told me I was prettier than Ela the lady’s maid that I began to find some ease in my life. I was eighteen or so. I know I blossomed, began to shine like I really deserved his admiration and his love—first expressed through a stolen kiss here or there and then, when I pushed aside my memories with a hard fist and let him, through sweet nights in my little room together—and that was when Elever began to notice me as more than the blister in his foot, the thief in his house. That was when Elever took to spying me with his bright eyes. I could feel everything he thought about me, no matter how I tried to shut it out. I could feel the tortured lust mixed with grief and hate, the sidelong glances at his aging mother and the loneliness that struck him in the night when he pondered how he was the only son of a failing house with no chance in sight to gain the solace of the magic he really wanted.

         Somehow I was surprised when he came for me, though. It was late at night and the house was nearly silent; he found me in the library where I had disappeared some hours before. Servants are not supposed to know how to read; that knowledge is one of the things separating us from our masters and ensuring we remain safely where we belong. But it was not just the guilt of being caught with a history book in my hand and the scintillating past of the Empire of Tiranel in my mind that made me swallow hard and take a long breath when Elever appeared before me holding a candle—in the library!—and munching on a crust of bread. “What are you doing here?” he said, and it was a reasonable question. I bit my lip, looked down at the soft leather cover of the book in my hand and the gold-leaf that outlined in curly letters its title: Of the Founding of Tiranel the Winsome City. Looked down at the years of dreaming and yearning, and back up at my reality which was much less enjoyable to ponder. His presence beat toward me like a flush of heat.

         “I could report you for reading,” he said, and he took a step closer; I took a step away from him, and my back pressed against the stone of the inner wall. He smelled of his father’s brandy, and of sweet apple spices. Through my magic I could feel the blood pounding in his veins, in his breeches, in his throat. He saw me through hot eyes, and danger hovered over me like a raincloud. I knew whatever was happening was bad and that I had to escape. Just beyond him was the open center of the library, and not twenty paces away was the great door which—I could feel a draft—was open.

         “I’m sorry,” I said, and I tried to slip past him, but he gripped my upper arm with his fingers until they ground against the bone and I whimpered, folding in on myself with the pain of it. Something in it excited him. He pushed me back against the wall—hard so the breath jolted out of my chest—and held me there wriggling, his tongue caught between his teeth. I shoved with my heels against the wall, wrenched my shoulders. He was stronger than me, years on the training ground with a sword and cudgels.

         “You have to pay for your wrongdoing,” he said, and we both knew he didn’t mean the reading. I felt dread pool in my stomach like snow. It was happening; the storm that had started that day in his grandmother’s room was breaking now.

         I shook against his grip and it tightened until the hurt made me weak. Words tumbled from my mouth and my eyes prickled. “Elever, it’s not my fault! Please.” I knew now where this was going—it wasn’t my first time—and I felt soft tears falling onto my collarbone. His hungry gaze found them and watched the dark splotches they made on my uniform over the breast which I had so joyfully exposed to Gerard just hours earlier in the shed behind the milkbarn. The tears made him happy, in a savage way. It was sickening to feel both my terror and his joy in it, like swallowing a fishbone that sticks in the throat and chokes.

         He leaned against me, one hand braced against the stone above my head. “You’re a bad girl, Jane, you are,” he said, and ground through our clothing against the tender skin of my belly with his hard cock until I whimpered, and then let go of me. Of course I tried to run away from him then, and of course he seized me from behind and threw me onto the flagstones where, amidst the dust and glory of the library that had been my refuge, he raped me twice and then left me to sob alone and wish I’d never heard of Arlee, or magic, or sex. That night when Gerard came to my room I turned him away, and on that night began my gradual distance from the life I’d found in that castle, which was all I knew.

         Now, five months later, I am walking down the stairs of the north tower toward a sorceress who is impervious to my power; my belly pulls tight with the strain and sharp twinges arc in my hips and groin. I know Elever is stuck there with her like a butterfly on a pin, and his mother too in all her bitter courage. I know the Duke is there, and the majordomo, and any number of servants, inside and out, and guards too. My destiny pulls me forward, out of the swirl of memories that defines me. I find I am ready to meet it. I hurry down the stairs and through the servant’s hallways into the central maze of the place, familiar to me as my own thumbs.

         When I reach my goal it is as if they are all waiting for me, frozen in place. Not a word is spoken. They stand there looking at each other, then at the great doors which have been ripped from their hinges and now lie like broken game pieces in a shifting cloud of dust. They look at me walking with calm steps through the rubble and into the Great Hall that once hosted Spurl the Conqueror and that now is filled with Dream magic so strong nothing seems real, all flowing from the woman who levitates some three feet from the floor and waits for me, wearing my own face full of vengeance, and curiosity, and something softer, something like love.

         “There you are,” she says, in the voice that cuts through normalcy and strains at realms beyond, where the wind lives and the cries of the shrikes. “I was waiting for you.”

         I nod, still adjusting to the feel of her blankness in my Dreamsense. She was waiting for me. Does this make me happy or scared? Scared, I think, because then I realize I have placed a protective hand on my belly. Startled, I remove it, but not fast enough. She sees, and Milady sees, and Elever sees, and the Duke sees, and each person draws a different conclusion and I don’t like anything I see on anyone’s face. Now. It’s happening now. My destiny and this child’s destiny are hurtling ahead and I can do nothing to stop it. I don’t even want to, because I have been waiting too long in the fear and the paralysis.

         “My name is Jane,” I say to her. Something passes between us. An acknowledgement. A sharing.

         “I am Timrys,” she answers, and I see with the corner of my vision the Duke’s eyes widen. He has heard of her. Perhaps from the Capitol, through the Dreamspeech the rulers share every week or so? Which would make sense because why would this woman be here if not for something larger than me, than this duchy? But he says nothing and the moment passes.

         Milady points at me, and in a voice like dead leaves she says, “She is only a servant.” When Timrys turns her fierce eyes on her she flinches but looks back in defiance. She adds, with a curious gesture of her finger toward me as if to tell everyone to notice what she’s saying because it’s important, “She is nothing, really, nothing at all. Nothing.”

         I knew what she thought of me—how could I not!—but somehow the words still wound me. The thread of connection between Tymris and me pulses and I feel her anger as she snaps her words into the room, “She wears my face. She bears her own child. She carries great power. She is hardly nothing. She is more than you—” here she turns her full attention on Milady and stares into her without mercy “—you who are too small even to murder for your son, too petty to act on your longing for that man you dream of kissing, too...” Tymris loses interest but I do not. I watch the woman whose silent bitterness clouded my life wither into herself, watch her chin lose its definition and redness appear around her eyes. Tymris’s defense of me is comforting. I take a step closer to her. Elever leers at me. I know what he’s thinking—he’s thinking that he put that babe in my belly and it is his to claim, and so am I. He may have put that babe in my belly, but I’m not his. I take another step toward Tymris.

         The duke has a line of drying blood straggling down his forehead and ending in the tired dimple of his left cheek. “Go away, Jane,” he says, but I can hardly hear him his voice is so quiet. I take another step toward Tymris. Toward my destiny.

         Tymris turns toward me and looks into my eyes. “Jane, what shall I do with these people?”

         She’s asking me. This sorceress, who holds all our lives in her broad palm, is looking at me with my own eyes and asking me what to do with my rapist, with the woman who has hated me my whole life, with the Duke who might as well not exist for all the protection he gave me. I take another step, and I am close enough to reach my hand and take the fabric of her dress—some leathery black material, streaked with poison green—in my fingers and rub it, if I wanted to. She really wants to know what I think. The world takes a waltz-step to the side, resettles in a new shape. Suddenly, I am a person of importance. I matter.

         I shrug, look at each of them, force them to meet my eyes. They wait, for the first time caring what words come from my mouth. Others in the room watch, an audience that matters not. I am their destiny. I taste the triumph, the solace, and I ponder what might be done with them, possibilities sparking in my mind.

         But Tymris grows impatient of waiting for my response. She makes a tiny motion with her hand, and Elever doubles over gasping for breath, his face draining of blood. “I want that child, Jane,” she says, and twists her wrist so that Elever falls on the ground making whimpering noises like a kicked puppy. “Is this one the father?”

         “I’m not sure,” I say, and then I realize what she has just said. Shock whips through my body. “No!” The child jumps and then freezes in me. I step away from her. No. This is not the destiny I choose.

         Blood pools in my face and I begin to shake with my own intensity. “You can’t have my child!” I say. Anger unfurls in my throat; dream magic arcs between us, and I reach into my connection with Arlee and amplify it. I will send her nightmares to cloud her waking eyes. I will fill her heart with the kind of fear I felt when Elever raped me. My magic flows in defiance toward her with such force that the air trembles.

         However, instead of crumbling like I expect she examines my magic and nods in approval. The single black feather in her headdress waves slowly in the air. “You’re strong. That’s good. You’ll have enough to spare when you birth my son.”

         No! No! This destiny is worse than the others! I shake my head, feeling a scream building in my throat. Why does she want my child? I earned this child, I treasured this child before it was even born—I risked everything to carry this child. I’m even sacrificing much of my magic for this child! My palms, open at my sides, shoot streams of midnight shimmer that converge at Tymris’s chest. To my right Milady faints. Maybe my magic is too much for her. But it’s not too much for Tymris. She smiles and my magic falters.

         “Many years ago an Emperor of Tiranel lay with me and gave me a son,” she says conversationally, as if we are alone in the room and she’s telling me a story. With a casual shrug she redirects my force to Elever and he begins to scream. It wasn’t meant for him; I cut it off with an effort and stand panting, the taste of cinnamon flooding my tongue. “I...” Her mouth twists as if she’d just eaten something bitter. “I lost the child.”

         “You can’t have mine,” I say through my teeth. I put both my hands on my belly. “This one is mine.”

         “I’ll give you Arlee,” she offers. “I’m conquering Tiranel. In six months when you’ve borne the child, there will be a new ruler of your land. Probably not me, I don’t like ruling, but I’ll look for someone you can work with.” She pauses and flicks some rock dust off her shoulder. I ponder her words with shock turning pinwheels in my chest. She just offered me Arlee, the entire duchy, as if she were offering me a bread roll in the kitchen. She’s trading me a territory with all its goods, wealth, servants, and prestige, for my son. She lay with an Emperor of Tiranel; I’ve never even seen one. A sense of smallness fills me up like water in a bucket.

         “No,” I say, a little too softly.

         Am I actually considering this? My heart beats in my throat.

         What does it even mean to be offered a duchy?

         How would I care for the sprawling mess of humanity, livestock, farmland, and strongholds that make up one of the richer duchies in the Empire?

         At least I can read, which is more than can be said of most people in the Empire.

         What’s the alternative?

         This sprig of a child has little chance at a better life than I did (and look how that turned out), but the most powerful woman I’ve ever met wants to give it that chance.

         Arlee.

         She is staring at me, watching me think. Maybe she can hear my thoughts. But I hardly notice her, for my Hearthsense is flooding me. I have always felt too much of Arlee. Now I can feel the slow pulse of the prize white stallion, Lothar, in the stall as he sates himself on Trina the top brood mare, and I can feel as if in myself the quickening that is happening in her womb. I sense the new life springing up in the orchard, the buds just beginning to whisper about summer and peaches dripping with juice. In a hamlet on the edge of Arlee a woman is baking a cake for her new husband; he approaches her with a whistle on his lips. Arlee. I have more love for it than the Duke, more than Elever ever did. I would rule it with more care than they have.

         “No,” I say again, even more softly.

         She quirks an eyebrow. “Jane, I am Tymris of the Isle of Thorns. I conquered the southern regions with one breath of my lungs. I am the most powerful magician alive, and I will give your son a better life than you could even dream of. I will train him, I will care for him—” her voice breaks a little “—I will love him, Jane.”

         I will love him too, I think. I will love him in a locked bedroom somewhere as Elever’s despised mistress, or in a dirty hut as Gerard’s wife. Or, I will love him from afar, I think, knowing he is safe and educated.

         Knowing someday he will walk in my door and will not recognize me.

         Knowing I can read any book I want to, turn the tables on Elever and his family, marry from outside Arlee or from within it, or not at all.

         Knowing... knowing that I am not so good as I hoped I would be. Knowing I am practical to the core of me, and knowing that a duchy for a child is a fair trade as far as I’m concerned. I hate myself as I nod to her, as I acquiesce, as I let fate wash over me without striving to change it, as I accept a gift I never dreamed would come to me and I give away the life I’m growing, all in a single movement.

         I hate myself but I love the startled look Milady gives me, the horror that fills Elever’s eyes, the blankness stretching like a puddle from the Duke. I love the rustle of surprise that spreads through the crowd of servants watching. Tymris nods. “Very well.” She takes my hand, lifts it high before all. She’s higher than me by three feet and the movement stretches my back until I squeak. She looks down, startled, and lowers my hand a bit. Her voice echoes through the Great Hall. “By right of conquest, I award this duchy, with all its goods, chattel, Charter, and moneys, to Jane, in exchange for her child. You all bear witness.”

         I turn to face them; Gerard in a corner with his mouth open, the cook eyeing me with jealousy and a shade of fear, the majordomo with his implacable calm, my mother like a wraith hardly grasping what just happened. Their eyes say, we bear witness, and say very little else. Now I feel my shoulders under my coarse uniform straighten; I let my power wash out over them for the first time without guilt, without shame, without limit. They can’t help but acquiesce. I can force anything to happen in Arlee. I realize that I always could. Now, suddenly, I will.

         I will be a fair ruler, I decide as I turn to look at the family behind me; I will be a fair ruler, which means I will treat them as they treated me. They will suffer as I suffered. Every night I cried myself to sleep will be a night Milady will weep in her bed. Every stab of fear that I felt when Elever looked at me, when he touched me, and when I thought of him, will be a knife in his mind. I examine the hold Tymris still has on him, and I break it. I can tell she lets me, a smile quirking her lips. She will let me do anything but keep my child, I think with bitterness and gratitude mingled on my lips like honey.

         The fifty or so servants in the hall are still staring at me, and I address them. “You will call me Milady,” I say, my chin high, and I wait for their startled nods. I flick my fingers at the door. “Now, there is work to be done. Go. Do it.”

         I don’t need to say I know exactly what work should be done and that I will punish the layabout. It’s understood. In quiet lines they leave the room, each to their own task. I can feel them threading through my castle like bees in a hive. My mother looks over her shoulder at me but I don’t stir in response. She never stirred in response when I looked at her in hope of reprieve, all these years.

         “Go with them and learn to dust the rooms,” I say to Elever’s mother, crouched where she fell at my feet, who looks at me as at a live snake. “And follow Gerard to begin learning to work in the hostlery,” I add to Elever. Let them fight over who fathered my babe. More misery to them. To the Duke, I say in pity, “You, you are useless. Do what you will.” I leave a bit of my senses with each person and I make sure they can feel my force vibrating in their souls. They know I’m looking over their shoulders; the pace of the work picks up. My power resonates in every chest. There is no thread of whispered gossip, not now. I am the new Duchess of Arlee, and I am above gossip.

         Tymris is still watching me, wearing a proud smile like a mother with a precocious child. I don’t like it but what can I do? When the room is finally empty and I’ve had a moment to master everyone, she leans down—still levitating!—and puts both hands on my belly. They feel hot and burn through the clothes on me to the child within which wiggles like a tadpole in a pond and then stills. Power flows from her into—not me—into the child! What kind of mastery is this? The only way to receive power is through birth and death, nothing in between.

         “What are you doing?” I pant; I have wrapped myself in my arms against the swirling heat that sank into me and now is searching out every part of the baby to fill it.

         She smiles; it’s a peaceful smile and incongruous on the face of one who just turned established magic on its head and conquered one of the Great Duchies with no bloodshed. “You’ll give the baby much of your strength of course, but I wanted to give him some of mine. I can always get more, and he needs some Other magic to be complete.”

         Wait. Other magic. I sink into myself, into my awareness of the child within me, and I probe the power churning in it. Dream magic is mine. Some of it—maybe half, who knows as it’s impossible to measure—will go to the child when he is born. Hearth magic, the same—he had my affinities it seems. But now there’s more. There’s Beast magic; far beyond the Hearthsense that tells me about stallions, this power can befriend and master any animal, great or small; can speak animal language. And it is taboo. I look up at her, startled, but then I feel his War magic take root and bloom in my belly; red-hot with rage and body-knowing. My womb convulses. I find myself on my hands and knees below her trying to retain my apple and nuts. Because it is not just Dream, and Hearth, and forbidden Beast, and War, but it is also the fifth—the deadly—branch of magic spreading through my son: Blood magic. Blood magic, with its intimate knowledge of life and death, its drawing strength from forbidden rituals, its practitioners’ instant death sentence in any country in the far-flung Empire of Tiranel.

         “You are a fool!” I gasp, and collapse further, cheek to the dusty marble, stretched out as if the floor could anchor me, could secure me from the horror within me. Everyone knows that magic wars with itself. Hearth and Dream is a serviceable combination, but I almost went mad. Throw a little War magic into the mix and fields a duchy over could begin to burn; the farmers will lynch me; they will kill my son. Maybe he could hide the Beast magic, but the Blood magic—Blood always tells, they say, and it can’t be hidden. All the great villains of the stories were Bloodmages. My son is a Bloodmage. My son... my son... her son... I gave him away, and I opened him up to this forbidden power which will destroy him.

         She is complacent, maybe a little defensive, standing with her arms folded over her breasts while she waits for me to process what just happened.

         I wanted a third option in my life, I did—I opened myself to it, I pushed it to being. I could have stayed in my room, I could have refused the magnificent gift of my duchy. I could have, and I didn’t. I think, as I relax to the floor and wonder if I should cry now, or laugh, or slip away into Dreams, that more than anything I am surprised by what the new destiny brought me.

         “Please go away,” I say to her quietly. I know she can hear me.

         “Yes, I must finish my campaign before our child comes,” she answers with a preoccupied nod.

         I suppose, I think. Our child. Campaign. What will happen to the Empire when Tymris is finished with it? Yet, given what I’ve received today, who am I to quarrel with my new liege?

         My duty as Duchess begins to trickle past the shock, and I ask, “Shall we give you food, drink, a bath?” It is now my domain to offer these things and watch others fulfill them.

         “I want nothing. I have done the work required here; you will hear from me in your Dreams.” She looks about as if content with her handiwork and floats out the door. I hear a startled gasp from the hall, where I can feel a several people slowly dusting and putting things to rights.

         She may not require food, drink, a bath, but, I realize with yet more surprise, I do. I slowly push myself up from the marble and I walk to the hallway to begin to gather my people to me. I will need to send the former duchess, her son, and her husband to somewhere within my domain where they can’t make trouble for me right now. I will need many things, including—I remember him with a start and a flush—Gerard, who can’t help but notice me now.

         My fingers rub the top of my rounding belly as I quietly order the transfer of my few belongings to Milady’s chambers, outline to the cook the meal I want to eat with not a glance at her trembling hands, and discuss rebuilding our gates with the majordomo who until now had seemed remote like a faraway noble in another land. Within me our son trembles and leaps, the magic settling into his bones and radiating through me. I haven’t lost him, I think in a consoling way to myself, I’ve given him another mother. And more magic, and many more problems, all of which I’ll have to help him solve in the future.

         I invite Gerard to eat with me. He can’t stop looking at me, at my belly—now released in a flowing gown my maid found for me in the back of Milady’s closet—and at my face which seems new and startling to him. Finally he summons the courage to ask his obvious question: “Is that mine?” pointing at my belly.

         I have restrained my Dreamsense but now I let a little of his emotion lap over to me. He is stunned, happy, and terrified. He hopes the child is his, and that I will marry him and elevate him. He hopes that I can’t tell where he was last night, and he hopes I will never find out that he has a babe in the hamlet of Dosho, with a girl who still lives with her brother. My lips thin.

         “It matters not,” I answer, and I take a bite of the stewed apples I have always loved but had previously only tasted when I was cleaning the pot. “The baby is mine and it is the conqueror’s.”

         I look at him, think of his hands smoothing to my spine, and I look away. “The baby is mine.”

Copyright © 2019 Emily McIntyre

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When Emily McIntyre isn’t devising magic systems and mouthing lines of dialogue to her computer screen, she’s probably assaulting a body bag in a Portland gym. A lifetime fantasy obsessive and martial artist, Emily has work published in Metaphorosis, Aquifer: The Florida Review, and other publications under the byline Talisen Fray. Read more at www.talisenfray.com.

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COVER ART

“Abandoned Fortress of Alphander” by Vicky J. Bawangun

Vicky J. Bawangun is a self-taught freelance illustrator and concept artist reside in Indonesia. He started his journey in digital art professionally in 2012. He works mostly on indie games projects and book covers, creating mostly fantasy and sci-fi environments, illustrations, and concepts. He gets a lot of inspirations from playing video games, watching movies, and even listening to music. You can see more of his artwork at his gallery on deviantArt.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2019 Firkin Press

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