Issue #292 • Dec. 5, 2019

“Nameless in the Winged Court,” by Rowenna Miller

“The Petals of the Godflower,” by Kyle Kirrin

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NAMELESS IN THE WINGED COURT

by Rowenna Miller

         The day I was married they gave me wings and took my name.

         “Floret?” The king of the flower people was hardly taller than me, but the way he held his shoulders and his great wings, regal and imposing, made me feel smaller still. “What sort of name is that?”

         The question was more accusation than inquiry, but I answered meekly, still in awe of people like him; like me. “I came from a flower, and I am little. Little to them, at least. There was no one like you—like us. I was no bigger than their thumbs.”

         The king recoiled. “Their thumbs! As though you were insignificant, measured against the thumbs of giant oafs. Who named you?”

         “My mother.”

         “Mother?” His great moths’ wings quivered. “She was not your mother. She may have... raised you from a seedling, I grant you that. But not—no. To call her your mother, it is not natural.”

         That was their great condemnation, I learned swiftly enough. They took pity on me and allowed me to stay after hearing my dear friend the swallow’s tale, that I had been born in the northlands from the flower of a strange seed and raised by a giantess, that I had lost my home and found shelter as the servant of a field mouse. That I had run away because the field mouse pledged me to be married to a mole. “Unnatural,” they murmured in disgust, all of the beautiful flower-people gathered around the swallow as he sang the story of how he had brought me to the Winged Court.

         “It is not right you should be called by a name given you by a giant. Of course,” the king mused, further incensed, “she called you by what you were to her, merely a little flower, as though she were the center of the world.”

         “I don’t mind.”

         “It doesn’t matter if you mind,” the king explained, in patient tones simmering underneath with resentment. “It is insulting. If I called a cat a whore in the language of the dogs, she would not mind—but it is still an insult. And none of my princesses will bear insulting names.”

         “Very well,” I said, unsure what he meant. I began to understand that staying meant marrying him; that I did not fit into their court in any other way. I had not been honor-bound to a flower in my childhood; I had not been fitted with wings at my adolescence. I was not of use here, so I could be naught but decoration. Decoration for the king.

         “I shall rename you,” he said, voice full of light and resounding, calling those in the court lounging on nearby zinnia petals to perk up their ears, and in a rush of wings they gathered around. “I shall name you Mayja.”

         Silently, I formed the word. Mayja. The soft, hushed sound at the front of it, like mother, like mouse, like mole. And as he repeated it—Mayja, Mayja—I heard “mine, mine, mine.”

         I didn’t like it, not really. It was not an ugly word, not like toad or mud. But it did not roll easily from my tongue the way it danced on the king’s.

         But I accepted it, as though it were a gift.

* * *

         The wedding, I came to realize in a swift shock, was to take place immediately. One of the flower-people, a fair-haired woman with orange and black wings like sharply cut paper, helped me to get ready. I had on, still, the gown the field mouse had made for me. I had thought it pretty, woven of intricate spider-silk lace. But the winged woman sniffed at it and motioned for me to take it off. “Please save it,” I asked, not quite sure why.

         She gave me a gossamer gown of shimmering gray-white, loosely bound at the shoulders and skimming over my body. The field mouse would have thought it indecent. It was a garment of ethereal beauty, like dew and the sheen of petals, and I tried to think myself worthy of it.

         The sun was still high in the sky when she brought me back to the king, and its rays bathed the fields of flowers in pure light. I soaked it into my very marrow, delighting in warmth, in light, in air, after being trapped underground in the field mouse’s burrow for so long. I could belong here, I thought then.

         I didn’t realize until the king began to speak and we were surrounded by beautiful flower women, also in gowns of sheer iridescence, that I was not to be his only bride. I blushed, feeling very naïve and young and foolish, all the things the field mouse had told me that I was. I had imagined the ending of a story like those my mother—she was my mother, whatever the king might say—had told me. A man and a woman, happy, ever after—but no. The king had married before, seven times, if the retinue around us reflected his household. He would likely, I realized as he took my hand and bound it up with his, marry again.

         The rest of the court looked on, not with the joy I had always imagined of weddings but with curiosity or indifference. I felt small, then, even smaller than each of those flower-people. They wore their shimmering tunics and gowns with ease, gracefully hovering over the curves and hillocks of the flowers, toes brushing the petals below. I was heavy, heavy and graceless as I stood rooted to the petal as firmly as if it were the ground.

         Even as the king recited the words of an old rhyme, a blessing and a covenant, I felt it in their eyes, even in his—unnatural.

         The king placed a circlet of silvery pearls over my hair, marking me as one of his wives, and with that, he finished officiating his own wedding. Cheers rippled through the court, a ritual of happiness, and then true mirth followed as honey wine, and lavender cakes, and liqueurs of brambleberry and dandelion and pear, and tarts, each made of a whole cherry, were brought out in a grand feast.

         The king and I did not feast. Instead he brought me to his chamber, at the center of spreading stalks of irises branching above us in arches and, above those, domes of purple and white flowers. His palace, he told me. “And here we confirm our covenant,” he said simply, and removed his tunic.

         He was beautiful. I could almost forgive him his other seven wives. His arms and legs lithe and finely muscled, his back and shoulders thick and sinewy from flight, all under bronzed skin. He waited, and I realized I was to undress as well.

         I shook as I untied the gown at the shoulders, let it drop about my ankles. I was white, milky and pale, like winter; not the color of summer like him, like his court. Pink touched my breasts, my lips, my fingertips, but I was the color of cold everywhere else.

         “You are like a lily,” he said, pride in his voice. Pride in me? In his lily-wife? “My Majya. My lily.” Pride, I ascertained, as he laid confident hands on the softness of my waist, in what was his.

         And he took what was his, not cruel but not gently either, burying himself deep in me even as I caught my breath in surprise and fleeting pain.

* * *

         Afterward he left me, a lily cocooned in layers of waxy iris petals. I did not know if I should stay or leave, but the lady who had readied me for the wedding returned, the tall flower-woman with sharp-edged wings. She carried a pair of moths’ wings. They were pure white, soft as snow and iridescent.

         I tentatively reached out toward the edge of one wing and laid a single, reticent finger on the soft whiteness. “They’re warm,” I said, hand retreating.

         “They have to be removed while the creature is still alive, or they can’t be affixed properly.”

         I recoiled, horrified. “I—some living moth was killed for these?”

         The lady-in-waiting preened the edges of the wings. “True beauties, these. Fit for a queen, even if you’ll never be able to fly as well as someone who grew into them.” Cold in her voice, cold like winter.

         “I did not ask for wings!”

         “You didn’t ask, but you were given them just the same. A gift. From the king.” She waited. “Shall I tell him you’re not pleased by his gift?”

         I heard warning there, but I didn’t heed it. “I couldn’t take another’s life so I could have—I do not need them!”

         She swept from the chamber, stalks of the irises rustling as her orange and black wings brushed past. I shook. I had known butterflies, in the summer; had shared the nectar of clover and morning glories with them. And moths, silent in the night, tossing the light of the moon back toward its illumined face. They were gentle, nervous, but oh, they danced. They danced like sunlight on water.

         The king came in next, his patience strained. “If you are to be one of us, you must have wings. We are the Winged Court.”

         “I didn’t know,” I begged quietly.

         “This one is dead already,” he said. Not cruel, not even callous. Just the fact. It was dead. Whether I wanted the wings or not, the moth who had given them was gone. “And you must decide, and quickly, or the wings will not be serviceable any longer.” He unfurled his own wings, huge wings of spring-willow green with deep-set yellow orbs like great eyes at their centers. They stared at me, and I looked away.

         I traced the curve of one wing again, feeling the snowy down under my fingers, the minute structures that had borne a life between them.

         Mistaking my reverence for reticence, the king sighed in frustration. “What would you have us do, give up flight for the sake of a few moths? They live but a short season as it is.”

         Not knowing what else to do, I conceded, and the lady-in-waiting returned with her brilliance of orange wings and several other maids. The king nodded once, and they bade me lie flat on my face on a moss-covered plank of bark at the center of the room.

         I thought I had known pain in the winter, wind scouring my skin raw and bare feet in deepening snow, toes half-frozen, icy rain slicing my face and leaving deep welts.

         I hadn’t known pain.

         Furrows of agony where they carved my back, where they rooted the wings into muscle; jolts of shuddering energy as they forced what had been moth to blend to my body, to become one. Radiating, shearing, thick waves of pain, and then nothing.

* * *

         But when I woke, I had wings.

* * *

         I can fly now, a little. I still cannot use them well, not like the flower-people who have had them from childhood. I shiver to think—the babies fresh-born in unfurling buds, the small children who are yet wingless, pattering over the petals on their tiny feet, paddling in the ponds created at the base of the tulips when it rains—that they will face that ordeal. But they will have wings, and unlike me, their bodies will adapt to flight.

         My shoulders are too thin and my back too weak to support me long, the muscles underused and underdeveloped. Worse, my legs have grown muscled and heavy from long days running in the fields and working in the field mouse’s home, from the long subterranean walks to and from the mole’s house. Bearing my own weight strains my wings, strains my back. I must flutter twice as fast to keep aloft.

         But I can fly even if I am alone, most of the time. The flower-people are busy with their work, and the other princesses are not friendly. They sit in the garden, and dress one another’s hair, and sing lilting songs in silvery voices. I try to join them, but they ignore me. I do not know their songs. I cannot dress hair prettily the way they do. There is a complicated game they play, of wrestling the king’s attention toward them, and they do not like that he visits me in my iris blossom room, that spends some mornings showing me the flowers he is most pleased with.

         And so, I fly. I fly, most often, to visit my friend the swallow who lives above the garden, overlooking it. I cannot bear to tell him how it aches, how it burns after I’ve pulled myself to his height. It pleases him so, to see me fly.

         “As you were meant to be,” he trills, chest feathers fluffing up with pride. I don’t ask, I don’t wonder aloud, but if this was how I was meant to be, why did I have to steal a moths’ wings?

         “But you will not stay here for long,” I say. “When winter is over, you will fly back, won’t you?”

         “I suppose I must,” the swallow coos, seeing the fear in me that I try to hide, the fear of being abandoned and alone here. “But you! You are among your own kind, now. I will return in the fall and we shall have merry things to talk of, shan’t we?”

         When I am not visiting the swallow, I wander among the garden’s flowers, ever blooming, ever dying, ever blooming again. Each flower-person prunes and coaxes and cares for their flower, their tunics matching the colors of the petals as though woven of the same fibers. I have no flower. Though the king still calls me his lily, there is another woman, lithe and summer-colored with lavender wings, who watches over the lilies that bloom with fragrant spices in their scent.

         I have a room in the palace of the king, near the top of a spire of irises, bathed always in sheer purple light. He comes to me often, the king, sometimes to find the pink hidden in the whiteness of his lily wife; sometimes merely to speak to me.

         “It has not ceased blooming,” I say one day. He reclines next to me, his shimmering golden tunic on the floor.

         “The iris?” he asks languidly, drawing a lithe hand across my pale stomach, my pale breasts.

         “None of the flowers,” I say. “They bloom and fade and die and bloom again.”

         “It is the special practice of the flower people, to make it so. It is why we bind ourselves to the flowers,” he says. “For if they faded and died and did not bloom again, we would fade and die, as well.”

         Though I do not argue, as he searches me with his agile hands, as I turn my body toward his to satiate what he desires, I think how I had lived in a place of fading and dying and, yet, I had not died.

* * *

         My back grows stronger and I can fly further afield. Never beyond the garden, never into the wilds, for I do not trust my wings that far. I fell once, muscles spasming, into the upturned cup of a tulip and, wings drenched with rainwater collected in the bottom, nearly drowned before a winged man in a red-and-black tunic hauled me out. When I relayed the story, the king sent him an acorn full of honey wine to thank him.

         At the edge of the garden, though, I can see a broad plateau of green and a forest beyond, a forest unlike the one I had come from. Thick and green and redolent with heady scents. Wild and tumultuous with vines and brambles, not like this neatly pared garden. And I can see, from the borderlands, that the flowers in the forest fade and die and do not bloom again, at least not right away. Orange trumpets and pink bells and minute white starlights, I see them bloom, each in turn, and fade, and die.

         The swallow swoops down next to me. “It’s quite nearly time,” he says, “for me to fly back. I could stay,” he adds with a chirp.

         “You can’t.” I laugh. “It would be unnatural.”

         “I would miss summer in the northlands. As lovely as the summer country is, it is never fresh,” he hums. “The northlands bloom fresh and the air is different. I can’t explain it.”

         I know what he means, though I can explain it no better than he can. Or, perhaps, we are merely nostalgic.

         Before he leaves, I ask him a favor. I have not ridden on his back since our journey south, and it feels foolish to ask him to bear my weight with my own wings firmly affixed to my back. But I want to see the wildlands beyond the garden, the break in the soil where the tended coddled flowers end and the choking grip of the wild begins. I want to see the forest.

         He tilts his head, not sure what to make of this request, but does not ask me why I want to leave the perfection of the summer garden. I do not have a sash any longer—the lady-in-waiting threw away my spider-silk dress—but my legs are still strong enough to grip him under his wings, and he rises with me, higher than my own wings will bear me.

         We soar and I am free, drinking in the sun, the warmth, the light, the air, and then we dip toward the meadow and I am entranced by it. It is green like the pond in summer, tangled like the field in autumn, and there is a ripe sense of danger, like winter.

         And there, among the knot of seed-pods and grasses and a vine as thick as a snake, I spot a flower-woman. Small like me, and dressed in petals as blue as the sky, sitting beneath a cheerful wild rose, its blooms haphazard and scattering in the wind. I grip the swallow more tightly lest I fall and plummet to the earth.

         He has not seen her, but he feels my excitement as command and dips lower, and now she sees me. She wrinkles her brow in confusion—no, I see, in concern. She wants to run from me; her body is drawn and taut and ready to spring. But she does not. Not yet. And I see, as she turns to hide beneath her rose bower, that she does not have wings.

* * *

         The swallow delivers me back the iris palace, and before dawn the next morning, while the sky is threaded gold on gray, he begins the long journey back to the northlands.

         Without my friend, I am lonely, unsure how to spend the long days between the king’s visits to my dusky chamber. I try to help care for the flowers, but the people bound to each are protective, unwilling to accept another’s help. I try to learn to braid hair and sing the silver-bright songs the other wives sing, but even as my fingers grow more agile and I learn to harmonize simple descants, I still feel outside; other.

         I slip most days to the edge of the garden and look out over the wilds. No one seems to care, though the sharp-winged lady-in-waiting sometimes watches me with narrowed eyes. I want, very badly, to find the wild-dwelling flower-woman. Her wild rose bower looked like the shelter I built myself in the summer after I lost my home and my giantess mother, where I drank dew and nectar and watched the dance of the moths against the moonlight.

         The king finds me at the edge of the garden one evening. “What interest have you in the wilds?” he asks. “Lira told me you come here to look at the wildlands. Why?” It is accusation, and, tangled in it, fear.

         “I do not know,” I say, truthfully. “It is different.”

         “It is dangerous and wild,” he chides, “and out there, flowers die and do not bloom again until a long season passes. It is not comfortable, not predictable, not like the Court.”

         Even in these summer country wilds, there is no winter, but I do not argue with him. He walks with me back to the iris palace, and we pass a pair of flower-boys jumping rope with a skein of thick grass. I smile at them, and the king looks away. “I like watching the children play,” I say, hoping this is less offensive a pastime than gazing over the wilds. “We don’t have any children in the palace.”

         He whirls on me then, anger brimming in his eyes and his great moths’ wing orbs quivering at me as well. “Do not speak of that,” he hisses, gripping my wrist in his, hauling me into the roots of the iris where the stalks grow tight together. He presses me against one, my wings crumpling, aching.

         “I—I am sorry,” I breathe.

         “My damned wives can’t go to seed and you—I had hoped you were from outside, different, a wild lily, that you would give me seeds to plant. But you are useless as the others.”

         He drops my arm and it burns where he touched me, and I feel his shame seeping into me. I tremble, on the verge of tears, and he takes my hand again, softer, gentler, though I stiffen just the same.

         “I thought you knew. Everyone knows. Everyone talks.”

         “No one talks to me.”

         He doesn’t question this, and he lets me run back to my chamber.

* * *

         The days are too long, and finally, I make up my mind. I will go to the wilds. My wings can bear me, I think, I hope. And the king—he will not approve if he catches me, but he visits me less often than before anyway. I am a disappointment.

         I leave in the pearly gray before dawn, when the dew is still thick on the leaves and the flower-people haven’t woken to sip their morning nectar and stretch their wings on the unfurled petals of their plants. I discover that I can fly far afield before I tire, and, when I see the rose bower below, I slowly descend to it.

         The flower-woman, the wingless one, is there, reclining under the bower, nibbling on a blossom of clover. She jolts upright with a start.

         “Wait!” I call.

         “You are one of them? The Winged Court?” She watches me, tense, questioning. I bear wings. But I am not the color of summer. I am not graceful.

         “I live with them now. I came from the northlands.”

         “The northlands!” She gapes. “But you live with them, now.” Accusation glazes thick in her voice.

         “I did not have anywhere else to go,” I said, “when winter came to the northlands. There are no others like me—like us—there. I did not know there was anyone here in the wilds,” I add.

         “We are all from the wilds.” She almost laughs. “They did not tell you that? They did not tell you how they tamed the flowers and brought them under their power? How they learned the secrets of the wings?”

         “They tell me little enough.”

         She softens then. “What is your name? I’m Tansy.”

         “They call me Majya.”

         “They do!” She shakes her head, her cropped hair brushing faintly pointed ears. “And what do you call yourself?”

         I haven’t said it in months, the word that used to be my name. “Once, I was called Floret,” I say, and it sticks to my tongue and feels strange in my mouth. It’s not my name any longer. Perhaps it never was.

         “That’s no better.” She grins. Her smile is impish and clever, revealing dimples set deep in each sun-brown cheek. “What should I call you, then?”

         “I—I suppose I don’t know.”

         She raises a pert brow but doesn’t press me. Instead, she tugs a rose petal free from its moorings above her and ties it into a band around her dark brown hair, watching me all the while. “Why did you leave the garden? No one leaves the garden.”

         I am not sure why, but I tell her everything—the agony of the wings and the cold dismissal of the other wives; the king’s visits and his anger with me. That my swallow friend had left.

         She shakes her head with each part of the story. After a long while, she speaks. “Come, I’ll show you where the clover are full of nectar and there are strawberries as big as your head.”

         So I stay, until the evening shadows lengthen and I know I cannot return to the palace tonight, not with bats and owls patrolling the skies. The rose bower is comfortable, with moss beneath the curving thorned vines and a sweet scent floating between the blooms. Tansy hands me a ripe indigo berry. Tomorrow I will decide where to go. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will decide what I should be called.

Copyright © 2019 Rowenna Miller

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Rowenna Miller lives in the Midwest with her husband, two daughters, and two orange cats, where she enjoys trespassing while hiking, perfecting her pie crust recipe, and hand sewing historical clothing. She is the author of Torn, Fray, and the forthcoming Rule. Find her online at rowennamiller.com or on Twitter as @RowennaM.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE PETALS OF THE GODFLOWER

by Kyle Kirrin

         My mother smiles as my brother kills himself. She cheers as he jerks his birth knife sideways; she claps as he opens his throat.

         Mother sings in the old tongue, swaying along with the rest of the village—their palms raised to the looming pistil of the Godflower—as the priests move in, wading through the deep snow, their white robes turning red beneath my brother’s spray.

         Brother staggers, then collapses into a snowdrift. The priests haul him out by his ankles and drag him across the square. They toss his body into the grave I refused to help him dig, then take to burying him.

         With the funeral finished, the others crowd my mother, and her face goes rapturous under their praise: Mother and her golden womb, Mother and her dutiful children, Mother and her ever-swollen belly, Mother and her many, many sacrifices.

         No one so much as glances my way, and for once in my life, I manage to feel grateful. Why spoil Mother’s joy by pointing out the lone exception, the nameless girl whose suicide is two weeks overdue, the wretch for whom twenty sun-pocked winters is not near enough, the selfish creature who can barely sleep at night because her every waking thought is haunted by the possibility that the Godflower is just a fucking plant.

* * *

         Brother’s sacrifice wasn’t notable—he was appreciated, but not loved, as is the lot of we children of the flower—so come daybreak, I’m not surprised that I’m the only one waiting for his body to bloom, squatting beside his grave as the snowfall gives him a second burial.

         The snow shifts, as if some small creature is stirring underneath. Then a dome forms, and the snow around it is melting and dribbling away.

         Brother’s flower lifts from beneath the snow and blooms like a small sunrise, glowing and warm already. It’s striking, and not unlike a sunflower, though its disk is packed with blue seeds and ringed by orange petals, all perched on a stalk that seems too thin to support its weight.

         The flower matures quickly—it goes from the size of an acorn to that of my fist within twenty minutes, and by then all the surrounding snow has warmed away. In an hour or two, it’ll stand shoulder-high and the ground will be fertile for fifty feet in every direction.

         “Hello, Brother,” I say.

         The flower shudders in response.

         I catch a whiff of rot. By tomorrow, the flower will have perfumed itself, will emanate some bright scent like mint or lime or cinnamon, something to mask the stink of the remains it’s feeding upon.

         “Do you find the terms of your martyrdom agreeable?” I say.

         The flower shudders again, then leans back to regard the sky.

         “Are you very much pleased with yourself? I hope you are. Mother says you should be very pleased. Killing yourself at sixteen, with four long winters to burn—you’re so fucking selfless. That’s what everyone keeps telling me, over and over. As if I didn’t see the point the first time.”

         The flower cocks sideways, dog-like, confused.

         “Did mother tell you she’s giving your birth knife to the child she’s carrying? Isn’t that a lovely thought? How many days do you think it’ll be before you’re just another boy we’ve forgotten?”

         Brother’s flower spins about stupidly, as if seeing the world for the first time. The heat it’s putting off is becoming oppressive, so I step back and plop down into a patch of thawing mud.

         “I’m sorry,” I say, quieter now, the anger giving way to guilt, just as it always does, just as it’s supposed to. “But you shouldn’t have gone so early. I didn’t even know you well enough to miss you.”

         I hear the priest before I see him kicking through the snow. He pauses at the edge of the flower’s range, where dirt meets ice. He’s got a pair of tillers over his right shoulder, and a bag of seeds dangles from the belt that cinches his robe. The priest is nearing forty at least, and I despise him for the silvery tint of his hair, doubly so for the wrinkles he’s been allowed to accrue.

         The flowers will not feed on consecrated flesh; such is the convenience of priesthood.

         I stand, smooth my skirts with muddy hands. “Strawberries.”

         “Strawberries?” he says.

         I look to the flower. “My brother loved strawberries.”

         “Loves,” the priest says, gentle in his reproach. “He hasn’t gone anywhere, child; he’s a part of the Godflower now. He’ll never leave us.” Then, a moment later: “And I think strawberries will do quite nicely. Would you like to help?” He offers me a tiller.

         I grab the tool with both hands but wait for him to begin; I want his tiller in the dirt before I lower mine.

         The priest raises a bushy eyebrow. “You’re holding that tool like a weapon,” he says, and he’s right—in fact, I’m already wondering just how deep the tines would bite if I put the tool to his temple. Deep enough, I imagine. He jabs his tiller into the ground and gets to work.

         “I’ve never used one,” I say, and mimic his grip, then his motions, while watching him out of the corner of my eye. I don’t think he’s here to kill me—only a corpse born of suicide will bloom; at least so say the priests—but I’m not about to take any chances.

         The priest nods. “You’re doing just fine. Tell me, child: have you taken a name for yourself?”

         “Of course not,” I say, feigning the indignity that is expected of me. “The Godflower does not name its petals.”

         He laughs, the easy laughter of a man unburdened by suicidal expectation. “Well, that is what you’re supposed to say. But being nameless does make conversation a bit difficult at times, don’t you think? Particularly in a home like yours, with so many children.”

         “It’s not my place to question the—”

         The priest interrupts me with a sigh. He clasps both palms atop the handle of his tiller and leans down onto it. “I called myself Chesma,” he says.

         My eyes alight at this heresy of his.

         “I was a child once myself,” he says. “We had our languages, as I imagine you do. Snap your fingers thrice for sister three, knock on the headboard five times for brother five. But we had names, too. Some we shared, most we didn’t. I kept mine close, thinking somehow that would help, that my secret would save me.” He purses cracked lips. “If I never told a soul, would I still have erred?”

         “Of course,” I say.

         “Again, the right answer. But do you know why?”

         I shrug, bored of his game. All the priests talk like this, dancing around their points as if nobody’s ever told them that their obfuscation makes them seem tiresome rather than wise.

         “It’s because these skins we wear are transient,” the priest says. “Our lives here are but a blink of the Godflower’s eye, and to name a thing is to give it permanence, to anchor it in memory.”

         “Mmm,” I say.

         He nods, caught up in his pontification. “When the Godflower sang to me for the very first time, it used the name I’d given myself, though I’d never spoken it aloud. And hearing that name in its voice...it sounded so false. It just dropped away, like a leaf, like it’d never fit me in the first place.”

         “Interesting,” I say, as I wonder how long he spent rehearsing this little speech. In any case, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he brought two tillers with him.

         He pauses, laughs again. “I’m boring you, aren’t I?”

         “Not at all,” I say, and the lie rings false.

         “All of this is just to say that none are above redemption.” He cups my chin in a callused hand and tilts my face up to his. “But you should know that the Godflower’s patience is waning. I hope to see you buried soon.”

         “Thank you, Father.”

         “When you’re ready, of course,” he adds, a little later.

* * *

         I linger at the edge of the flower fields, watching the other children glut themselves on pineapple and blueberry. Each child carries a birth knife at their hip, a constant reminder of what’s expected of them. But for now—for the youngest among them, at least—the knife is just a tool, a sharp blade with which to cut sticky fruit.

         Three of the children have shed their clothes, and they stand nude before the warmth of a flower that’s nursing a grove of kiwi trees. The children sprint for the snow beyond the flower’s reach, belly-flopping into the drifts, vanishing entirely as if into smoke.

         They emerge one at a time, laughing and shivering, and return to sunning themselves before the flower’s heat, the snow dropping from their skin and hair. It’s a game whose appeal I’ve never understood, where the winner is she who stays in the snow—and therefore suffers—longest.

         I skirt the fields, though it’d be faster to cut through them, because I don’t like the way the flowers spin to watch me, all of them at once.

         So I wander down the snow-choked street until I find a priest exiting our home, which isn’t unusual. I can already tell that Mother has birthed her child, given the wails sounding from inside.

         “All’s well?” I call out, my fingers brushing the handle of my birth knife.

         “A healthy child,” the priest says. “Another sister. The Godflower will be pleased.”

         “Wonderful,” I say, as I brush past him. I shut the door behind me before he has a chance to continue the conversation.

         Apart from the shrieks of the newest arrival, the house is quiet but creaky; still in that particular way that only occurs after a birth, when mother’s attention is moored to her latest born and the parade of child-hungry priests is still two months from dirtying our floors with their muddy feet.

         How I hated mopping their footprints from the floorboards even as they kept coming, so numerous that Mother had me wedge the front door open with a stray shoe. How I hated Mother for thanking each of them in turn, as if them fucking her were some sort of charity.

         How I hated her for not knowing which child had left that shoe behind.

* * *

         Someone slips into bed with me.

         I’m on my back, breathless, one hand digging beneath my pillow, grasping for my birth knife. Then I’m panicking as the blade thumps down into the long gap between wall and mattress.

         “Easy,” Brother says, and I relax, mostly. He wriggles close until our shoulders are touching. As the pounding of my blood subsides, the soft noises of the bunkroom creep in: twenty-three children snoring, whispering, giggling.

         “We need a signal,” I say.

         “A signal? For what?”

         “I could’ve killed you.”

         Brother sighs. “How many times do we need have to have this conversation? Nobody’s coming for you.”

         “I bet that’s easy to believe when you’ve got three winters left.”

         Brother looks away.

         Everyone knows he’s been courting suicide these last few weeks—we’ve all seen the way he’s been gorging himself, plumping his body for the Godflower’s consumption, and every child in this room has awoken to the sound of him dragging a whetstone across his birth knife—but he’s never come out and said it, so we pretend otherwise.

         “We could do it together,” Brother says, “if you’re afraid. The priests say the knives are so sharp that you barely feel it.”

         Heat floods my cheeks. “And how exactly would they know that, Brother?”

         “I—”

         “Did you happen across a priest who’d just slit his throat? Were those comforting words the last he sputtered? Or do you simply believe them because they’re convenient?”

         “The priests know things,” he says, like a child, and just like that, I’m ashamed. Ashamed of how pathetic I’ve made him sound; ashamed for sowing doubt when any day could be his last.

         But mostly, I’m ashamed that his faith hasn’t rubbed off on me. That I exist in a land made livable by magic but am so broken that I don’t even feel it, not really, not the way everybody else does.

         I so want to believe. I so want to let this life of mine go, knowing that a better one is around the corner. But what I can’t get past—what I know I’ll never get past, with a certainty that borders on the tenacity of Brother’s faith—is the priests’ insistence that I not make the most of this life first, just in case.

         “Forget it,” I say, and rest my head on his shoulder.

         “Maybe they don’t even know.”

         “Know what?”

         “Your birthday. Mother’s count could be off by a week or two, even a couple months, or...”

         I shake my head; it’s a lovely thought, but a laughable one, too. “Mother’s not the sort to forget a birthday. And I could feel it the morning I turned twenty. I don’t know how to describe it, not exactly, but something changed in the way the priests look at me. They know. I think everybody knows.”

         “I’m sorry,” he says.

         “For what?”

         “I don’t know.” He rubs his forehead. “What would it even mean if it weren’t true?”

         I scan the nearest bunks and find them occupied, so I pull the covers up over our heads. “It’d mean that the flowers aren’t really us. That we don’t reincarnate the way the priests promise.”

         “So we wouldn’t become part of the Godflower?” he says, his breath warming my face. “We wouldn’t bloom, we’d just...die? No afterlife, no love, no meaning, no nothing? Why would anyone want to believe to that?”

         “It doesn’t have anything to do with what people want to believe.”

         “Then what of the sacrifices?”

         “A means to an end,” I say. “The Godflower needs priests to grow, and more children means more priests, more mothers. But the Godflower chooses, what, one priest out of every twenty boys? One mother out of every fifty girls? Too many mouths to feed...unless you can find another way to utilize the children.”

         “So it’s a conspiracy,” Brother says, and I know I’ve lost him.

         “Maybe. Or it could just be that way back in the beginning, someone lied for their own benefit, and everything spiraled out of control from there. Our priests could have no idea they’re wrong—they could honestly believe that prodding us to suicide is in our best interest.

         “And if the priests have been misled, how would they ever find out? They can’t, right? Because that’s how the whole thing’s been arranged—it’s all a matter of faith, and nothing will ever be proven, and somehow that’s a good thing, as if we’d be worse off for knowing. How do you not find that possibility terrifying?”

         “Well, if I had to choose between conspiracy and magic, I’d prefer to believe in magic.”

         I sigh and yank the covers back down, roll away to face the wall. “So would I, if it were a choice. But it isn’t.”

* * *

         A priest asks me to fetch some water for the Godflower.

         He is obnoxiously insistent that only the purest water will do, so I’ve got a walking stick balanced across my shoulders, an empty bucket dangling from a notch on each end.

         I head out by way of a narrow footpath where the snow has been trampled into firmness, the sort of path that’s likely to fill in under even the slightest breath of wind. But the sun is high and the sky is clear, and today the razor-toothed peaks that ring our little village seem to hold a bit less menace than usual.

         Here the earth is flat until it’s nearly vertical, so I can already see the lake and the ironwood trees that frame it, their lavender blossoms bright against the snow.

         I keep to the very center of the trail, wary of stepping into the deep softness to either side. Eventually, I weave through a cluster of ironwoods and find that my path no longer exists. The going becomes tenuous and awkward, each step taken with the expectation that at any moment the snow’s going to give way and plunge me hip-deep into the cold. But it never happens, which seems a good omen.

         I step onto the lake’s frozen surface, and the ice groans beneath my weight. I shuffle towards the center, where the priests maintain a hole from which to dredge clean water. I kneel beside it, set a bucket down, and dip the other beneath the ice.

         There is a sound like that of breaking glass. Then icy water splashes the back of my neck. I turn, slowly, so slowly, to find a jagged hole in the ice where something’s broken through. Another crack, another splash. I see only white cloth, fluttering behind a dark tree trunk.

         A crack spiders out from the hole and runs between my legs. I know I should lie down, should disperse my weight and crawl out, but the ice is alive beneath me, and it feels like any movement at all will cause collapse.

         Crack. I’m falling, and it seems to take forever. The plunge should be gradual; feet knees hips and so on, but the water hits me all at once, a shock that’s got my lungs sucking water, pulling shards of ice deep into my chest.

         I break the surface, thrashing. But when I reach for the ice, it crumbles beneath my fingers. So it goes again and again, until the ice stays firm and I can lever myself up enough to catch my breath.

         From there, I hoist myself out inch by inch, praying to the Godflower that the ice holds. It does, and once I’m out, I drag myself across the glassy surface of the lake by my fingernails until I reach the shore.

         I crawl through trees that all look the same, my body a numb, foreign thing, until I tumble out of the snow and flop into a pile of mud. It’s warm, so warm that I rub it all over myself, and it burns, and I don’t care, because the pain’s better than feeling nothing.

         A flower bends down over me, its green petals emerald-bright. The branches sway overhead, dropping blossoms that smell like roses.

* * *

         By the time I’m strong enough to walk, my clothes are damp with sweat and my skin is red and angry, blistered where it pressed too close to the flower’s warmth.

         I strike out for the hazy brightness of the flower fields, towards a depression in the snow that I hope is the path. But there’s a shape standing against the snow, a figure dressed in white. They’re dragging a sled behind them, piled high with dark firewood. My legs go all wobbly—it’s a priest.

         And then it clicks: that cloth waving behind the irontree was a priest, waiting. A priest who tried to drown me. I take a long step back into the cover of the oasis.

         I could stay here, yes—but then what? Hide each time someone comes looking for water? Pilfer from the flower fields until I’m caught and hanged as a heretic? I gaze around at the mountains, so tall and terrible that no trader has risked their passes in nearly a decade. Never has the world seemed so small.

         So I call out, just a wordless yell that carries over the snow and reverberates around the valley. The priest waves, waits.

         I’m shivering by the time I reach him, my sweaty clothes gone stiff in the cold. But my knife’s heavy against my hip, which is no small comfort.

         “What...happened?” the priest says, just as forced as I expected.

         I must be a wonder to look at, between the frostbite and the sunburn, the frozen skirts and the exposed skin. “The ice gave way when I was getting water,” I say. “I lost both the buckets.”

         “But you made it out,” the priest says. “That’s what matters.” He upends his sled and the load of firewood topples into the snow. “Here, sit. The wood can wait.”

         The sled’s simple—just a few thin boards tied together to form a platform, with a wedge tacked onto the front to help it ride over the snow. I sit in the center and try not to scream.

         The priest shrugs his robe off and drapes it over my shoulders. It’s heavy, much heavier than I thought it’d be, and it smells like clove and old sweat. But it covers me entirely, so I slip my knife free beneath its smothering weight, just in case.

         “Thank you, Father,” I say.

         “Of course.” He’s got a harness on, and his first few steps are plodding as he pulls the sled into motion, but then he’s found an easy rhythm and I’m gliding over the snow.

         “Did you hear anything?” the priest says between breaths. “When you went under.”

         “Like what?”

         “Mmm,” he says, his voice dripping with disappointment. “You’d know it if you’d heard it.”

         Maybe that was what he was after: to force me into a moment of need so that the Godflower could save the day. I wonder if he thinks it a pity that I saved myself instead.

         But he wouldn’t see it that way, would he? He’d think the ice held because the Godflower willed it to hold. Oh, what I would give to see magic in the every day. Disbelieving is so lonely.

         And no doubt the priest thinks his act a service; thinks himself more savior than slayer. Because what is a body worth if you’re certain it’s transient? Because if he’s right—and if there’s a better life waiting for me on the other side—then he’s faultless, no matter how cruel his methods.

         “What does it mean?” I say. “That the Godflower didn’t sing to me. That it never has.”

         He shrugs. “Perhaps your test is simply greater than most.”

         “What do you mean?”

         “What weight would your sacrifice carry if you truly knew it would be rewarded?”

         “I’d still be dying,” I say. “Why isn’t that enough? Why can’t the Godflower just prove it’s what everyone claims it is?” I squeeze the handle of my knife, hard. “I just don’t see what the Godflower gets out of playing games with our lives.”

         “We all carry doubts, child. But doubt does not a monster make.”

         It seems to me that it’s certainty that turns men into monsters, though I bite my tongue.

         “The moment is coming,” he continues, “when you’ll have to choose your path. And I hope that when you do, you consider the example you’re setting for the other children. This body of yours belongs to the Godflower—to all of us—and we’ll need your bloom to get through the winter, and the next, and so on.”

         “I understand,” I say, my heart heavy, so very heavy. “A leap of faith.”

         “A leap of faith,” the priest says, nodding.

* * *

         In the end, it turns out that Brother was right—the knives really are sharp, so sharp that you can barely feel them bite, no matter how deeply they slip beneath the skin.

         At least I think that’s the case, because the priest didn’t scream when I drove the knife into his back. But maybe he did feel it and I just happened to hit a lung. A miracle either way, I suppose.

         In any case, I bury the priest shallow, so shallow that his head and hands and feet protrude from the snow and only a few inches of frozen dirt cover his chest. Then it’s my turn to wait.

         When tomorrow comes, we will see once and for all if the Godflower is willing to feed upon holy flesh. We will see if a murdered body blooms the same as that of a martyr. We will see just how many of our sacrifices are necessary.

         And I will face what comes with clear eyes. Not for me, but for the many children waiting to be born with a knife already at their throats.

Copyright © 2019 Kyle Kirrin

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Kyle Kirrin is a Baltimore-based writer and active SFWA member whose fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Podcastle, Daily Science Fiction, Metaphorosis, and elsewhere. He’s most often found shouting into the void as @KyleKirrin on Twitter.

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COVER ART

“Tower of the Winds,” by Alexey Shugurov

Alexey Shugurov is an artist from Dnipro, Ukraine. He has more than twenty years of experience in professional drawing and ten as a digital artist. He has worked in the game industry on a variety of casual and social games, and recently he has been working as a lead artist on a major social project. He mainly draws in fantasy and sci-fi styles, and he especially likes to draw the natural world. You can find his work at www.artstation.com/allius.

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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