Issue #307 • Jul. 2, 2020

“Buttercream and Broken Wings,” by Aimee Ogden

“Seven Dreams of a Valley,” by Prashanth Srivatsa

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BUTTERCREAM AND BROKEN WINGS

by Aimee Ogden

        Willowbright flitted from shadow to shadow in the trees, watching the gravediggers mutter and complain as they threw dirt into the gaping wound in the churchyard. The old widow, who had often left small beer and salt herring on her windowsill for Willowbright, lay lifeless at the bottom of the hole. Now that she’d finally gone beneath the stones in the churchyard, Willowbright had been left alone, unserved by human hands.

        Autumn had arrived like an unwelcome guest, altogether too early, stealing the last of the summer-fruits, and with no gift of greeting in hand. Favored fey might overwinter on the largesse of the Queen at court—if they shared with Her some glimmer of glory stolen from their own human patrons. Without Buttercream and Broken Wings, Willowbright had no such thing to trade upon.

        The old woman had no human mourners, so Willowbright stayed; if not to mourn, then to mark her passing at least. By the time Buttercream and Broken Wings’s grave had been covered over and the gravediggers sat atop the new wound in the earth to pass a cup between them, the moon had pressed its thumbprint deep into the sky. Willowbright wrapped her arms around her hollow stomach.

        She didn’t need and could only bear so much human want and whim. Just one wide-eyed child or hopeful housewife, to offer her what little she required and could not, by the rules of such things, take for herself. A relief, in some ways; a worry in others. Without their gifts, she could not survive forever. She frowned down at the gravediggers, one of whom now straggled out of the cemetery, one of whom had paused to relieve himself beside the fresh-turned dirt. Clever hands and fast wings alone wouldn’t feed and warm her the long winter through.

        The Court, Willowbright knew, laughed behind their wings at her and her far-between patrons. But she was the one who should be laughing, not those who were forever flitting to the petulant stomp of an oversized foot or the crook of a great clumsy finger.

        Starlight prickled her wings as she lifted her nose and tested the air. The phlox embroidering the tree-roots below offered dankly scented nectar; not far, a patch of wood-sorrel could provide stolid sustenance. Willowbright craved something more substantial than nectar and sweeter than sorrel. She stirred her wings and set off deeper into human holdings.

        She skimmed low over the squatty cottages and mossy fences, hiding when a crow’s shadow slid coldly over her, then again from a pair of wild fairies. She watched them pass from the cover of an oak bower as they flew by, naked but for mud and berry-stains. Faint light limned their well-patched wings, where they had carved out shimmering scales and fed a length of batskin or spidersilk to the hungry gap, and bone chips chattered where they hung from the ragged margins. When one threw back her head and laughed, silhouetted by tallow-fat moonlight, she looked almost like one of the Good Folk. Were they looking Willowbright’s way? She waited, breath stilled and wings trembling, until the wind had swept away their raucous cackles.

        The evening’s cool breeze let her glide for a few easy minutes, scanning the terrain below. Taking an egg from the friary’s coops would have appealed, if she were able to help herself to human food without spoiling it. Unless clearly abandoned or freely offered, it was no good to her. Perhaps the wreckage of a meat pie, or a child’s splattered porridge?

        Or then again perhaps something better! An acorn cap of milk and a slice of buttercake, sitting upon a tree-stump out where the goat-keeper’s fence nestled up against the forest, as if attending upon her arrival. Too good to be true. But when Willowbright cast a suspicious eye around, she found no living thing but trees and stars and moon and, at a distance, the humped backs of sleeping goats.

        Sometimes the townspeople left offerings for fairy favor. If the goat-keeper desired hers, Willowbright would mark his fence to warn the Good Folk not to pluck his herd for paintbrushes or pillow-stuffing. It would wear off after a week, but then, a meal, even such a very fine one, would wear off long before that. He could feed her again if he wanted more. The goat-keeper would make a serviceable patron; though she preferred cow’s butter to goat’s, both far outpaced winter starvation.

        She alit on the stump and lifted the acorn cap. Not milk but sweet cream, petal-silken, and it cooled the fire at Willowbright’s core. She gulped it all, lest it was no offering and the touch of fey lips should sour it.

        A human girl crouched opposite her. “Hello,” she whispered. “Please don’t fly away.”

        Willowbright stayed but kept her wings unfurled. She’d take flight if the girl tried to grab at her. Besides, fine wingmanship made a good impression on susceptible humans, especially the young. Which this one seemed to be—Willowbright had little practice gauging human ages, but this looked like more than a child and less than a woman grown. A pretty thing, whatever her age. Poppyjoy had several human admirers of her own but only the miller and his wife, and a pair of old men from the friary—and one of those had dreadful pockmarks. The Queen, of course, had six, most of them pretty youths. Like this one.

        Willowbright lifted one hand, giving the woman-child an opening to elaborate on her invitation. Fairy speech was beyond human ken, but hopefully this creature wasn’t too dull to recognize a polite overture to conversation.

        “Oh—thank you.” The girl settled to her haunches in the grass, which brought her face nearly level with the stump. Her clothes were homespun and her feet bare but unstained with grass or mud. Not the goat-keeper’s girl, then. “I hope you don’t mind it’s only the half of the buttercake. I ate the rest. I’m sorry.”

        Willowbright shrugged and broke a crumb off the cake, intimating magnanimity, deeply desiring the girl to get on with it.

        The girl’s hands crushed deep valleys into her apron hem. “My stepsister is—plain.” The word ugly shimmered beneath the too-bright surface there. “My stepmother is worried she’ll never marry while I’m under the same roof. It wouldn’t be seemly to marry off the younger one first.”

        Willowbright’s lips twisted. Trite, but easy enough. A goose that lay a dowry’s worth of emerald eggs, perhaps, to buy a suitable suitor. Boring, though not old-man-with-pox-scars boring. Willowbright had that within her power. She flicked her fingers: go on.

        “Make me ugly,” the girl said quietly. She wiped away the miniature mountains she’d creased into her apron. “Make me so ugly they forget to hate me. So ugly they forget I’m there. My time will come, I know. But for now let me be too far beneath them for me to be trouble.”

        A spark caught the easy tinder of Willowbright’s attention and took flame. Now that was more interesting than any number of gem-shitting geese. But then interesting alone didn’t polish Willowbright’s wings. She cocked her head and put her hands out. Well?

        The girl gnawed her lip. “My firstborn.”

        No. Willowbright didn’t work on credit. Nor did she care to deal with the obligatory attempt to worm out of the bargain by the time such a child arrived.

        “A ring of gold.” The girl touched her apron pocket, then jerked her hands back to her lap, as if she thought Willowbright would snatch it if she knew its hiding place. That wasn’t the way of things. Didn’t the girl know anything? “It was my mother’s.”

        Willowbright didn’t care if the ring belonged to the humans’ own father-God; she shook her head again. Gold’s sparkle lured the eye, but it was so heavy. Let Poppyjoy and Swallowmoon weigh themselves down beneath earthmetal’s pull; she had something simpler in mind. She held her hands cupped in front of her, then moved them to her mouth, miming tearing, gnawing, chewing.

        “Food?” The girl’s face creased. “You want—food? That’s all?”

        Willowbright nodded, glittering all the brighter for her satisfaction. Hardly a grand gift, but glory had never yet filled her belly.

        “You shall have it, then.” She thumbed the hidden ring. “I promise.”

        So they were agreed and bound. Willowbright pointed at the ground: wait here.

        One nanny goat lay at a distance from the herd, its knobbled knees tucked under its chin. Its slash-pupiled eyes fluttered beneath long lashes when Willowbright stroked its hide, but it didn’t wake, not even when she dug her hands into the hoary flesh below the neck, not when she tore the hide clean free. Not even then, and never again.

        The girl stared when Willowbright dropped the goathide on her lap—stared, but did flinch. Willowbright gestured to her shoulders, then to the goathide: put it on!

        The girl grasped the edge of the hide and whirled it over her back. Where it met her body, the goatskin became as her own. For a moment her eyes peered out through the ragged holes where the goat’s had been, pupils huge and dark instead of barred. Then its features settled into place, its face imposed upon hers.

        Still recognizable but undeniably altered: her smooth skin gone rough and blotchy, glossy braids flat and stringy, bright eyes dull. Asymmetry disrupted the even lines of her nose and cheeks, put crooked the straight-laid paths of her teeth. Her hand fluttered to her chest, where she found the secret line of false flesh over true, and flensed it back over her scalp and neck. For a moment her face was fully her own again. Then she withdrew once more inside the goatskin, and her lopsided mouth twisted. “Thank you. Thank you.” She knelt down and pressed her forehead to the ground. “Three times I thank you, daughter of the Fey Forest.”

        Willowbright fluttered her wings modestly when the girl rose with a line of fresh dirt on her scabrous forehead. A good bit of magic, by her judgment, and it would last until it had served its purpose. In the meantime... She swept a dainty hand over the crumbled buttercake and empty acorn cap.

        The girl nodded. “Yes. Of course. Come to the cottage just west of town, the brewster’s house with the field of heather behind it. I’ll set out cream and sugar for you every night so long as I live under my stepmother’s roof.”

        A fine arrangement, sweetened all the more by the adulation that poured off the girl. Willowbright curtsied, and wondered why any fey creature would choose to scrape a wild living off the forest floor when humans were so eager to wait upon them. They weren’t all so bad, if you chose carefully and bargained well.

* * *

        Winter dragged its corpse-white body through the valley, pulling down trees and flattening roofs. The abandoned wasps’ nest where Willowbright made her papery home fell to a hailstorm; it split open on the roots below, where the phlox would crawl carelessly over it come summer.

        She didn’t bother asking the Court for help. With only one human vassal, she hadn’t the status to be afforded housing in the abandoned badger sett where the Queen kept Her rooms. And while the Queen might listen sympathetically to her sorrows, Willowbright could not abide the looks from behind lowered lashes and fluttering fans that she’d get from Saltfrost and Echo and Poppyjoy.

        So she found a scrap of poplar fluff, and made herself a little capelet, and huddled in the nests of sleeping ground squirrels and hibernating hedgehogs when the winds cut sleet-sharp through her. Sometimes hunger’s claws scraped her up from shallow sleep, but the cold—the cold gnawed her bones and left lingering marks.

        And when daylight shone blinding-bright upon the snow, at least Willowbright could still visit the brewster’s cottage, to find her thimble of buttercream or crisp oatcake. She never saw the goatskin girl, but gratitude slipped down her throat as sweetly as the cream. The reverence due a fairy in all her glory might not be so readily supplied to one in Willowbright’s undignified state. The poplar-wool encumbered her wings and made a drunken stutter of her elegant arcs.

        No matter. She let frost feather her wings until she was a shimmer upon the sky. On fresh-fallen snow she was invisible, and she left no footprints to follow when she went down to the brewster’s cottage.

        Until the day when she crossed the whispering fields of heather to find two fairies already on the brewster’s sill, guzzling her cream and devouring her saffron bun. No one of consequence, no one of the Court. Two nameless slips of glimmer and glow, and they dared—! Willowbright shrieked and shot from snow to sill with a single wing-snap.

        The other two scattered in a flurry of crumbs. Before she could decide which to pursue, both had passed beyond her reach. They disappeared on a swirl of laughter, headed toward the village, to dance on the baker’s bread till it failed to rise or sour the dairyman’s milk. If a fairy couldn’t enjoy human food, some satisfaction could be had in seeing that no mortal mouth took pleasure in it either.

        That these two could barge unwanted into Willowbright’s bargain meant that the rules that bound such things had begun to unwind. Her magic had served its purpose and come to its end.

        Then she would see the girl again soon, goatskin or not. Snippets of soul were like entrails; tug at one bit and the rest tumbled after. She scooped the remainder of the sodden saffron crumbs into her cape, where they left sun-colored stains.

        At the forest’s edge she stopped short. A wild fairy grinned at her amid a tumble of dead lives and dirt-smeared snow, with her arm crooked around a squirrel’s throat. Red lines scored her face and her already tatter-patched wings had taken more damage from the beast’s small sharp claws—but the fight was over. Willowbright was there only long enough to witness the shine leaving the squirrel’s eyes.

        “Like what you see, tameling?” The wild fairy’s chest heaved when she dropped the squirrel. She licked blood, her own or the beast’s, from her knuckles. “Always more where it came from.” She bent and tore the squirrel’s pelt from its body.

        Willowbright stared at the steam that rose up off muscle and sinew. The wild fairy shook out the pelt, then looped it around neck. It skewed her wings, but she showed no concern as she hefted the carcass over one shoulder. “Only the Queen may slay the creatures of the forest,” Willowbright said, her voice aquiver. When the wild fairy looked at her, her tongue tripped thickly. “Only the Queen may wear their pelts.”

        A snort. “Suit yourself, tameling, and I’ll suit me—both of us as we like.”

        “If you had a human, you would get what you need...” Willowbright stumbled on the half-truth. “And you wouldn’t need to risk breaking the Court’s laws. The Queen could order your wings torn off for this.”

        “She could order my wings torn off for not liking the color of my eyes.” The wild fairy’s laugh was thunder in the snow. “Why not build yourself an iron cage in the alewife’s kitchen, tameling, if you like it so well?”

        “Stop calling me tame!” Willowbright shrilled, but the wild fairy only shrugged the squirrel higher upon her back and disappeared deeper and darker into the woods.

* * *

        Willowbright hated to venture from her borrowed shelter of nests and dens; the wind cut like bramble-swords through her cape. Still, she visited the stump at forest’s edge each time the ice moon rose. And on the third night, her patience paid.

        The girl hunched on the stump, a creature of gooseflesh and not goatskin now. Willowbright alit upon her trembling knee. The girl had flung the goatskin—only a hide, now—over her thighs, and Willowbright knelt to pull a flap of bristly flesh over herself.

        “It’s you,” the girl said, and the slit of her smile echoed the moon above. A feverish glow brightened her eyes; it would be a shame if a winter grippe snatched her from Willowbright’s reach. “I need your help again. Please.”

        Willowbright stroked the goatskin, asking a question with the cut of her eyes. But the girl shook her head. “Not this time. It doesn’t matter anymore what she thinks. Not if you can help me.” A convulsion of her fingers twisted them deeper into the goatskin, yanking it clear of Willowbright’s legs. “I went to the pond to bathe, three nights ago.”

        She would have had to cut the ice to get to clear water. Willowbright drew the cape tighter, to suppress a shiver.

        She also would have left the goatskin upon the shore.

        “The margrave’s second son saw me there.” The girl fingered her wrists, where her cuffs did not cover snow-pale skin. “He wrapped me in his houppelande and he called me a swan-maiden, an angel.”

        They’d stumbled into familiar territory here. Willowbright knew the steps of this dance—the staid pavan of hearthfire and happy ending. A wedding gown and dowry set to a wealthy father-in-law’s standards. Perhaps she would have to conjure up the damnable emerald-egg goose after all.

        “He’s only a second son. But rich enough—or his father is—that he’ll get what he wants. And what he wants is me. My stepmother can’t tell him no, or she’ll find out how fast the knights of his march take their custom elsewhere.” Now Willowbright reconsidered the girl’s febrile gleam: not illness and not love, but the fervor of well-crafted calculation. “He wishes to see me again. His family will be there.” Her mouth twisted, and she fingered a hole in her sleeve. “When they see me like this, they won’t take me for an angel. I need a gown that glows bright as the sun, to wear to the margravine’s Twelfth-Day masque. And a mount, to carry me to the winter residence.”

        Twelfth-Day... Willowbright pointed at the moon overhead: tonight?

        “Yes. Now. Can you do it?” The girl’s breath rattled, as she remembered the courtesy due a fairy. “Please?”

        Willowbright pursed her mouth and waited.

        “I... I can give you...” Restless hands stretched the goatskin. “If I marry the margrave’s son—”

        Willowbright jumped up. Pretty promises were worth less than the breath it took to spill them. She cocked her wings and gave them a flick, as if she might take off. A pause long enough for the silly girl to use her brain.

        “Wait!” The girl leaned over Willowbright, and her golden head eclipsed the moon. “I know you don’t want silver or jewels. Tell me what would please you. If it’s in my power, I’ll give it.”

        Willowbright didn’t hesitate. She shivered, chafed her arms, pointed at the girl.

        “Warmth.” With the moon in her hair, Willowbright couldn’t read the girl’s face. “Take it. Take what warmth you can wring from my life. If you can do this thing for me.”

        It was agreed, then. Willowbright fluttered off the girl’s lap and looked about. A gown that shone like the sun—that she couldn’t contrive. But one that shimmered like the moon? She tore a moonbeam free of its moorings and shook it out to test its drape. Two more slender shafts that slipped between the clouds made slippers, and a few threads of starlight bound the thing together. Finally, a fistful of snow cast into the girl’s hair melted into a pearl-studded net.

        The girl’s expression didn’t change, but the fire in her eyes kindled anew. The goatskin fell into the snow as she shed her cheap homespun. As she slipped into Willowbright’s creations, Willowbright focused on the matter of transportation. A mount, the girl had said, as if a maiden alone could simply ride sidesaddle up to the estate house in the dead of winter! She dug in the snow until she produced an acorn cap and two pebbles. They vibrated in her palm, listening to the new names she whispered.

        When they understood, she flung them into the air. Instead of an acorn cap, a carriage and team struck the ground, great wheels creaking, and in place of pebbles, a driver and footman caught themselves in the ankle-deep snow. She’d left too much gray in their complexions, but no one would look at a servant too closely tonight.

        “Oh,” the girl gasped, spinning in a luminescent swirl. “Thank you. It’s wonderful. It will last all night?”

        Adequate, yes, though Willowbright for one wouldn’t have sold her life’s warmth for it. She pointed to the moon again, traced its path toward the horizon, then indicated the treetops to the east, where the sun would crest in ten hours’ time. Under the sun’s unforgiving eye, night’s magic would quickly burn away.

        She shot up in front of the girl’s face, though, when the girl lifted her hem and stepped toward the carriage. Wait, Willowbright signaled, palms out. When the girl nodded, Willowbright mimed scooping a double handful of snow. The girl obeyed, and Willowbright flew beneath her hands and pressed them over her eyes. When the girl lowered them, a silver mask clung to her fine features. Almost. Willowbright snapped a pair of icicles from an overhanging branch and affixed them at the girl’s temples. There, they curled into a goat’s stubborn little horns, and her masquerade was complete.

        The girl touched her face, where the white brocade lay flush. “I wish I had my mother’s ring,” she whispered.

        But there could be no turning back now. Willowbright ushered her forward, and the girl stepped into the carriage with the footman’s assistance. Before the door closed, Willowbright glimpsed her hard bright face, with lips clamped together so tightly that Willowbright couldn’t tell whether the girl was smiling or crying.

* * *

        After that, Willowbright didn’t see the girl again. Because the margrave’s middle son had swept her off into the velvet-cushioned rooms of the estate house? Or because she’d failed to win her coveted morganatic marriage and had gotten cast out of her stepmother’s house for her ambition? The offerings of cake and cream had ceased, so the cause mattered little. Willowbright eked out her days on acorn paste, but sweet stolen warmth blunted the season’s hungry edge. For a while, she managed to tempt a plump boy into trade. But his slippery little brain forgot often as not that he had bargained bread crusts for Willowbright’s proffered sweets. His attention endured a few weeks before his gifts lapsed altogether. The broken agreement wrung Willowbright magic-dry. But the food held long enough for her to scrape survival out from beneath frost and ice.

        The frozen forest melted grudgingly into spring, bringing sunshine and sweet nectar, and Willowbright wept for joy when summer offered up its fruits. When the first wild strawberries crawled out from their tangle of vines, she gorged herself silly. After a day curled around her stretched belly, she spent a more prudent afternoon lining her new home in a sycamore hollow with fresh leaves.

        Once strawberry days gave way to summer heat, Willowbright flew farther afield, where the blackberry brambles clawed skyward. Her cape, stained pollen-yellow now, held three blackberries. In a few trips Willowbright could carry enough food to last the week.

        If she wore the cape at Court, she would be laughed out of the sett, out of the very forest. Not even human patronage could save her from that. So she didn’t wear the cape to Court. She did not, in fact, attend Court at all, except when it was required for the moon’s turn and the Midsummer Hunt. When she did go, she learned not to shiver in the unfriendly shadows at the margins of the Queen’s glow.

        Little fruit remained at the bushes’ tops, where sun-brushed berries ripened first,. but unripe berries gleamed ruby-red where sunlight sliced through the thorns. Willowbright crept beneath the brambles, wings tucked close. Sour fruit wasn’t worth the trouble to carry, not if it would empty her belly as soon as fill it. She squinted into the deeper darkness.

        A murmur of fairy voices wafted from the shadows.

        Surprise twitched her wings. She shimmied deeper into the bush. Closer to the ground, the sickly sweetness of rotting berries filled her mouth. She landed and slipped in the fruit-muck that littered the soil. The voices had faded, but a dull animal moan reached out to grip her heart. Some unfortunate creature might’ve crawled into the brush to hide or nurse its wounds. Willowbright might able to aid it, if it would serve her for a spell.

        A dark shuddering shape solidified from the restive shadows. Willowbright could nearly make out the long limbs of a fox—or a squirrel’s hunched back? Then the twisting lines and curves resolved into not one body but three.

        One wild fairy sprawled on her back in the fallen fruits. Stains and dripping juice mottled the hard planes of her body. Another rocked back and forth upon the first one’s face, patchwork wings tilting drunkenly for balance. The third rutted against her, pelvis to pelvis, one hand bracing herself and the other working wetly between their tangled legs.

        The moan rolled to a shrill peak and crashed into raucous laughter on the other side. The fairy in the middle arched her back, levered upward by the spasms of her wings. The one astride her mouth slipped and tumbled over backward. Without getting up, she lifted a liquor-limp berry to her lips and sucked its soft pulp.

        Willowbright’s foot crushed more fallen fruit when she took a tottering step forward. Her hand squeezed her own breastbone; her mouth had gone salt-dry.

        The wild fairy on her back was watching her, the same wild fairy she’d met before. “Well?” she said. “Have you decided yet, tameling?”

        The fairy held out a hand and beckoned.

        Willowbright’s wings refused to work. A fat drop of black juice rolled off the wild fairy’s fingers, and the soil drank it up where it struck. The fairy between her legs groaned like a storm-shaken tree and bent to suck the juice that ran down her lover’s jaw.

        The pink flash of her tongue shattered Willowbright’s frozen limbs. She fled the blackberry bramble, heedless of the thorns that nipped her arms, and her wings didn’t stop beating until she dropped into her leaf-lined home. For a long while after, her heart kept the same frantic rhythm. When she closed her eyes, the wild fairy’s lips were against her ear, whispering of sinew and stolen light.

* * *

        On a cloudy late-summer day, Willowbright clutched a dandelion-stem bridle and crept closer to the butterfly she’d marked as her desired mount. It lapped at a woundwort, heedless of Willowbright where she wove between dancing wildflowers. Two flicks of her wings lifted her to the level of the flower, and she readied the slippery bridle to throw.

        “There you are.”

        The butterfly twitched away into the air. Willowbright watched in dismay as it shriveled into the distance: it had been a fine blue argus, too, not some ill-tempered copper. An impatient flick of her wings spun her around, and she looked up to find the goatskin girl.

        The girl’s face was still moon-pale despite the summer heat. Weight had fallen away from her, like the snow that melted to leave behind hollows carved into the soil. Dark stains, not of berry juice, ringed her eyes, and her ragged-cropped hair hung nearly as stringy as when she’d sheltered beneath the goatskin. “I went home for my things,” she said. “My mother’s ring and my father’s cup. Do you know what she did, when she found out the margrave’s son wanted me?”

        No need to ask who she was. Willowbright’s wings scraped the air, as if begging her to flee. She shook her head at them, anchored by a dread sense of debt. The harness slithered from her hand and the grass devoured it whole.

        “The margrave’s son came through the villages, looking for the girl who’d won his heart.” The goatskin girl drew her hair back from her face. A stub shone florid red against behind her cheek, where her ear should have been. “She cut off my ears, so that the mask I’d left wouldn’t fit and mark me true. She rubbed ash on my face and told him I was a madwoman, when I raved and screamed and begged him to know me.”

        Willowbright spread her hands wide: half apology, half plea for explanation. Did the girl blame Willowbright for her stepmother’s monstrosity or her lover’s fickle eyes? There was nothing Willowbright could do about either of those.

        The girl took a step closer, so that her shadow swallowed up Willowbright. “Make it so that every time he touches a coin, from now to the day he dies, it burns his fingers. Make it so that each time he dances, it’s as if he does so on burning coals.” Veins rolled blue in her wrists when her fingers curled into claws. “Make it so her bones go as brittle as ice, so that she can’t bend a knee or stretch a hand without it shattering. Make her skin thin as lace, so that she can see every crack. So that they slice clean through.”

        All this would be too much to ask, even if she’d showed the proper deference. Magic so dark would leave marks on more than just its intended victims. Willowbright slashed downward with one hand, an unmistakable gesture of abnegation.

        “Yes.” The goatskin girl’s shout shook the air, and Willowbright’s wings jerked to keep her aloft. “You promised me safety. You promised me a margrave’s son. You owe me this and more besides!”

        The imputation against Willowbright’s sworn word was too much. She shook out her wings to leave this presumptuous mortal behind.

        A great weight struck her and bore her groundward. When she crashed into the dirt, air fled her lungs. She kicked frantically, held fast by a terrible weight..

        The press solidified: not only weight but grip. Willowbright shrieked for breath and blinked her streaming eyes. The goatskin girl’s dark shape loomed. “You’ll not deny me as easily as that,” she said.

        Willowbright folded around herself and dug her teeth into the girl’s knuckles. Blood ran hot over her chin, but the girl didn’t let go, didn’t even flinch. She spread her palm to force Willowbright flatter into the struggle-torn grass and reached into her pocket with her free hand.

        Through tear-spangled eyes, Willowbright saw the flash of the iron nail. She screamed when it tore through her wing and pinned her to the ground. She strained against it with all her might, but that was only enough to pinch her vision with jagged bursts of light. Lymph and broken scales made sparkling mud of the dirt.

        “Take his sight,” said the goatskin girl. Though she sat back on her heels, taking the weight off Willowbright’s body, her voice stayed close and harsh and her sour-milk breath spilled into Willowbright’s face. Willowbright pulled weakly against her own pain. “Make it so everything she eats tastes of ash and burnt hair.”

        Willowbright turned her head to retch. Her fingers brushed the sap-sticky surface of the dandelion harness.

        The goatskin girl was still deep in her litany. “Let ravens peck out his eyes. Let worms and maggots chew her flesh while she sleeps.”

        The dandelion stem pulled taut in Willowbright’s hand—it had fallen about a slender sapling. She twisted it around her hand and closed her eyes, and tears washed hot down her cheeks.

        She pulled.

        Her wing split with a scream of splintered veins and ruined scales. It hardly pushed air, but Willowbright wrung a frantic lopsided flight from it anyway. Leaves and grass whipped her face until the screams of the goatskin girl fell away behind her, until she was alone with the thunder of her breath and the lightning of her pain.

        This time, when she fell, there was no weight but her own to bring her down. She breathed dirt as much as air, and gagged. A cough cleared her mouth but her vision stayed filmy with sweat and filth and tears.

        One breath, two. Her dizzy world steadied, with pain and grief holding her down in gravity’s place. A passing breeze pulled a shudder from her. She thought of getting up and could not muster the will. At least the Court could not see her now.

        Then hands fell on her once more.

        Small hands this time, fairy hands, but strong and insistent. A moment’s struggle, and they pulled Willowbright flat, slammed her shoulders to the ground. None other than the wild fairy, her wild fairy, straddled her waist. “Hold her,” she said, and pulled spidersilk from a skein to thread a thorn-needle.

        “No,” Willowbright wailed. Three more wildlings pressed her down, one gripping each leg, another pulling both arms overhead. Black wings, bat wings, wings patched with pitch and rags, filled her vision and cut sharp shapes out of the sky above. “Oh, no—”

        “Be still,” the wild fairy said. “It will be over soon. You’ll fly again, tameling.” The needle kissed Willowbright’s tattered wing, and her vision split into empty darkness.

* * *

        Daylight returned in dappled patches. By old instinct, she lurched to her feet with a flicker of her wings and sobbed at the bright pain the movement woke. A blanket of leaves had fallen by her feet. No other sign of the wild fairies marked the meadow.

        She bent her neck and spread her reluctant wing wide, to see the damage, to see how they had marked her as one of their own—

        Spidersilk gray hemmed a spread of molten-gold feathers. When she turned, sunlight poured through the fine silken vane. She reached behind herself to stroke the barbs and choked wetly on a laugh.

        She found a pile of wet leaves at the top of the hill and crouched to wipe the mud from her face and arms and the pink petals of her dress. From here, she heard the cattle lowing, smelled bread browning in clever iron ovens. Human voices, too, so far away that their words melted into more animal bleating. Willowbright caught herself straining to hear them, and she let go the breath she’d held too long and tight.

        Then she turned and stumbled deeper into the forest, where the trees grew too thick for sunlight to spill in between, where the fruit fell sweet and rich and rotten. Where the Queen’s Court did not deign to venture, and where humans did not tread for fear of what the shadows hid. When she asked it of them, her wings answered with flight. There was pain—there might never be another such trip without it—but there was the sky, and it was still hers.

Copyright © 2020 Aimee Ogden

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Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes about sad astronauts, angry princesses, and dead gods. Her work has also appeared in Analog, Shimmer, Fireside, and multiple times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including “Never a Butterfly, Nor a Moth With Moon-Painted Wings” in BCS #300. With fellow BCS author Bennett North, she co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, which features fun and optimistic speculative fiction. Her novella Sun-daughters, Sea-daughters is forthcoming from Tor.com.

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SEVEN DREAMS OF A VALLEY

by Prashanth Srivatsa

        On the first night, the soldiers dragged Kalmashi to the fortress and locked her up in a cell. Iron-bound, with nothing but a pisspot and walls with memories. I have heard it said that when prisoners dream, it is only the walls that bear witness. And when the crimes are paid for and the prisoners are escorted out, with or without their heads, most of them forget. Only the walls remember. They endure through water, paint, spit, and the scribbles and scratches from fingernails. They are a catalogue of ruminations and regret.

        Except Kalmashi. On her, the walls had no effect. And that was what terrified me the most.

        They had trapped her with symbols and salt, and enveloped her in chains of ivory smeared in holy water. In whispers, she was a witch, an alchemist who had been flushed out of her smelly hole. But she carried no wand, and certainly no tools with which she could fashion any sort of sorcery upon us. Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop such whispers from floating out of the prison and down the city like a dreary mist.

        I was only a night watchman, with a wooden cane and pockets jingling with keys and old coins. My powers were limited to my ability to conjure forgotten songs from the depths of my memory, from the time when I wandered the plains of Palankor, bearing messages like an obedient runner. I whistled a particularly cheerful tune when they brought Kalmashi down and pushed her into the cell. The guards warned me from talking to her or, well, even looking at her. Eye contact was dangerous. Our eyes were, after all, a pathway to our minds.

        The moon refused to go away on that first night. It cast a luminous glow through the high window that was as small as a sparrow’s eye. The other guards and soldiers tied saffron threads on their wrists, blessed by the priests, and drank no water of the prison.

        Time, eventually, parched our throats. And thus, although it was forbidden, we all quenched our thirst by gazing at Kalmashi, at the sprawl of her silk sari, at her long, pointed nails, at the pinch of skin at her waist, and at her lips, coated in blood. I was immediately reminded of a song the local bards had sung in a distant town, of the shape of lips and the words that emerged from between them.

        Gazing at Kalmashi, however, took a toll on us. My eyes soon lost purpose and I fell asleep, sitting on that stool that had supported a century of watchmen’s bottoms such as mine.

        As I slept, I dreamed of a lush, green paradise. Kashmira...

        ...next to me stood a boy. Wrapped in a thick shawl, with a stick in his hand. I placed him at five, maybe six, summers old. Behind him, a jagged path wound like a scar between purple carpets of chrysanthemums, up the slope to meet the mountains. Oh, the mountains! All of them snow-capped and wondrous. Tall enough to hide the sun.

        I never asked the boy where we were. Or his name. His village was a colony of cottages and a brook running beside it. More goats than people. The women had their heads veiled, with glinting nose-rings. They fed and bathed me and guided me to the altar of stars, where they sanctified my presence among them and garbed me in a shawl made of goat hair brocaded in silver threads. After sundown, a bonfire was erected and set ablaze. The men and women gathered to dance to the beats of drums and horns and cymbals while I drank their milk of kesar and nuts. The boy returned, bearing a gift. A hand mirror, which he said I could use to awaken the dormant spirits around me in the time of my need. I nodded and offered him my cane in return. He refused and disappeared into the crowd, and I lost myself once again into the sway of the songs. They loved me more, for I knew what they sang, and I sang along with them until I memorized their language.

        The night was endless. They brought plates laden with rogan josh spiced and flavored with yoghurt, rice sweetened with cinnamon, saffron, and ghee, minced meatballs, lamb flavored in mawal flowers and cardamom, and mutton spiced in black pepper. Wine was passed all around, and rice ale, which had me teetering along the brookside after a few mugs. Moonlight washed over the valley, making the river sparkle. Once the festival ended, they gave me a bed to rest. It was only a small discomfort that I was not on my stool.

* * *

        On the second day, I woke with a start. The ministers and generals had arrived and demanded to interrogate Kalmashi. They came decked in necklaces and bracelets and veshtis brocaded in gold. Their sword hilts were embossed with rubies, while their armor gleamed even in the feeble firelight of the gaol.

        Laughter echoed through the vaults of the prison as they celebrated their victory of Kalmashi’s capture with crude jokes. I was hurried out to keep the conversation discreet. Later, I heard screams, certainly of a woman, coming from the bowels of the prison, while I waited with the other guards sharing a pipe. Nobody thought anything amiss. I was forced to shrug.

        When I returned to my post and to my beloved stool, I found Kalmashi lying amidst a heap of silk. Her hair was open and her face down, buried in her own bosom. The soldiers collected their piss in a flagon and splashed it on her face to make her stir.

        On the second night, I dreamed I was in Kashmira again...

        ...the boy had disappeared. Nobody knew where he had gone. Or if he had been taken. There had been rumors of dacoits hunting in the periphery of the village, with hideouts in the mountains. They said that the dacoits abducted young boys and sold them as slaves to the merchants, who would then carry them across the seas in great ships to assist them in their murky trades. Ivory, silk, spices and the medicines of Malabar. The colonizers were merciless. They did not care who the slaves prayed to, as long as their arms worked the boats and carried the timber.

        His mother was inconsolable. The other women wept with her, while the men sent runners and pigeons to the greater cities of the north. I offered to carry a letter myself, back to the empire of Palankor where I would spread the word. However, nobody in the village trusted Palankor to help any more than to make things worse. The villagers were better off by themselves, they remarked, and convinced me to stay the night and partake in their food and drinks. I asked them if the boy had a mirror like the one he had gifted me. No, they said. What I possessed was the last of them. I then sang to the valleyfolk the song of gratitude, taught to me by the minstrels of the southern ports, and promised them that their son would return.

* * *

        On the third day, they wrapped Kalmashi in a black flag and paraded her through the city in a cage dragged by a chariot. The people flung eggs and tomatoes on her and screamed ‘traitor! traitor!’. As I walked beside the cage, I watched the crowd for signs of my wife and daughters. I hadn’t been home in three days.

        On the third night...

        ...the boy who had disappeared returned as a man. He recounted his adventures on the sea and brought sketches of the fish he had caught whilst slaving to the high masters. His arms had sinewed from rowing the great galleys, while his back was scarred by whips. His tan amused the valleyfolk, while his aged mother pinched his cheek and arms for signs of possession.

        When the moon rose, he gathered his old friends and greeted me with a hug. We feasted on rogan josh and rice and toddy and prayed together at the altar of stars. With our bellies filled, he whispered to us of the victory of the country over the pale colonizers. It was the birth of a new empire.

        Before the men could erupt in cheer, he warned us to be cautious. That a plague was coming north, to haunt us for the sins of our forefathers and desiccate this land. That the new empire was dragging its own shadow upon the light that it promised. That freedom was an illusion, like a moon hovering in the skies on a stormy night. One never knew when it would disappear behind a cloud and never come out.

        I lay quiet on my back, watching the stars. A cold breeze swept down the mountains and bristled through the fields of chrysanthemum and created ripples in the waters. That night, we trekked up the hills to a hidden lake and bathed in that icy chillness until I lost all memory of warmth. I was reminded of the time when I was a child and father would take me to the temple of garlands, pour milk and honey on the idols, thanking them for the land we lived on and the folks we loved. And as we walked back, he would wrap his hand around my eyes, to stop me from peering into the altar of stars, and whisper to me of the curse on those who entered that shrine, who would never be reborn once they died.

        Shivering, I urged the men to pack their belongings, abandon the village, and come south. But the boy who had become a man laughed and said that he had never met anyone who, when a fire began to burn, advised to walk towards it instead of running away. Truth be told, the man did not intend to run, either. So, as we lay in the quiet of the lake, I sang them a song of endurance, taught to me by the warriors of the desert, to whom I would unfailingly go every year carrying letters from their families, smudged in tears.

* * *

        On the fourth day, one of the guards who was looking for a shave came up to me and requested me to lend him my mirror. I said I did not have any. But as it turned out, more famous than the stool of the watchmen was the mirror I had in my pocket, as old as my time in the prison. I watched Kalmashi scratch her arm in sleep, curled in shadow.

        On the fourth night...

        ...I was at a wedding. The man who was a former oarsman had met a girl in the woods bordering the valley, the daughter of a shaman who had been chased out of her home for meddling with a prophecy. The oarsman had admired her courage and her beliefs and had brought her home to his mother.

        The wedding was a splendid affair, with shamianas erected with fluttering canvases and people invited from all the villages in the valley. There was an air of anxiety over the state of affairs in the new empire but nothing that a plate of rice and rogan josh could not distract one from. Fireworks peppered the sky, and the valleyfolk danced along the brookside, dragging me into their midst till my ankles hurt.

        I did not bring a gift, and so I sang them all the songs I knew. From the distant plains to the coasts, deserts, and forests. I sang of joy, of unions and of longing. Until the bride walked up to me in tears, planted a kiss on my cheek, and whispered her name in my ear. When she parted, I found a tulip peeking out of my uniform pocket, and its fragrance filled the dream.

* * *

        On the fifth day, I went home to the arms of my wife and the voices of my daughters. I played with them and told them the stories of the high seas, of mischievous pirates and the coves they haunted. Before my return to the prison, I took my children to the altar of stars in the city and planted the tulip beneath the shrine.

        On the fifth night...

        ...fire consumed all I could see. I stood beside a burning wagon, surrounded by smoke and screams. The ground trembled beneath me and ashes drifted overhead, carried by the wind. The new empire’s cavalry chased the valleyfolk until the jagged path into the mountains was lit by a dotted line of fires. The brook flowing beside was littered with bodies floating on the water and a jetsam of belongings like driftwood. Cries of a united empire rent the air as the soldiers sought to reclaim the land they had lost centuries ago to the ancestors of the fleeing valleyfolk. Flags were planted and the altar of stars was razed, and on its ruins the soldiers laid the foundations of a temple of garlands.

        Like the old times, they said. When the empire was one.

        Among those who remained in the fields of chrysanthemums were the man who was once a slave and his family. The earth had turned grey with soot as I walked into what remained of their home. The shaman’s daughter was with child when she greeted me in an embrace and offered me a bowl of water and soup.

        The man had bought his way into the new empire’s stronghold by selling scarves, spices, and stories. He was a bard and a weaver, and he did not care much for either stars or garlands. When I walked with him, he told me of his plan to endure on these slopes till his last breath. He wanted no new home across the mountains, or to be a part of another’s household.

        To garnish our nostalgia, we sat beside the brook and ate meatballs laced with saffron and drank rice ale until we were cackling with laughter. When he left that night towards the soldier’s barracks, I promised him to keep his wife safe. She screamed in the agony of delivery when he was killed. I stood along with the midwives, singing a song of life taught to me by my mother.

* * *

        On the sixth day, I woke to the cheep of a sparrow fluttering over Kalmashi while she slept. Nobody in the prison could explain its presence. When she came to, the sparrow landed on her palm and nibbled at the scraps of groundnuts we had never given her. That noon, a letter arrived from the Emperor’s palace, flourished with a long list of crimes and the subsequent sentence. Kalmashi was impassive when the captain of the guards read her the statement. She blew hair out of her eyes, yawned, and returned to curl against the wall, staring at the stones and the memories they held.

        On the sixth night...

        ...I was trailing behind a girl herding sheep into an enclosure. She was of four summers, with eyes bluer than the purest of sapphires. She was wise enough to keep a distance from me, until I showed her the mirror her father had given me a long time ago. Much of the valley had been transformed - more cottages, wider roads, flags of the empire flapping against the breeze, wagons rolling down the dirt path cutting a scar through the forest, bridges over the brook, and people strange and familiar - at home and yet with a feeling of being lost.

        A new altar of stars had been erected at the foot of the hills, and the girl took me there. Her mother, the daughter of the shaman and wife of the oarsman, greeted me with tulips and milk and requested me to follow her up the slope. There, in a cave that bored into the heart of the mountain, was a camp, filled with crates, cooking pots, tents, and a horde of people wrapped in shawls and beards.

        They were the insurgents, she said. Time had slipped out of its stream and had fallen into a morass. The new empire had annexed them and demanded that they raise the flags and stand true to the colors of the empire. The ones who didn’t were whipped or cast into the river or had their homes snatched and given to the priests. I watched them work their swords on the whetting stone and shape helms out of copper.

        The girl came to me with a ring. A gift, she said, to make people remember you after you’re gone. It was carved in bronze, with a tulip engraved on it. I wore it, and it gleamed like a moon in the dark of the cave.

        Later when she squirmed on the cave floor in a fit, her mother and the men came running. They gave her water while the mother removed her iron pendant and placed it on the girl’s palm, closing her fingers over it. Once the fit passed and the girl slipped into a deep sleep, the mother wept, and I wept with her. What chance did this fragile army stand against the might of the empire, she asked me. I sang her a song, then, of courage, taught to me by the slaves of a galley, who hacked down their cruel masters on one moonless night and escaped with their lives and more. One of them was her husband, I told her.

* * *

        On the seventh morning, the Emperor rode down to the fortress to wring out a final word from Kalmashi. The priests, commanders, and ministers accompanied him while I retreated into shadows, dragging my stool with me. The other guards held wagers, while the soldiers drank to the health of the empire.

        Kalmashi, of course, did not say a word, unless a spit on the Emperor’s face could be counted as one. She was sentenced to be beheaded the following morning. No more sparrows, no more sleep. The guards gave her a last meal, and I was forced to sell the mirror to the cook in exchange for a spoonful of rogan josh stuffed between the stale rice.

        On the seventh night...

        ...I was surrounded by candles and herbs. The oarsman’s wife let out a last sigh in the presence of her trusted warriors, lying on a bed of leaves. Candlelight on her face made her seem like a painting. I laid a tulip at her feet, then sang a song of love taught to me by a beggar drunk on the streets of a forgotten town. Her daughter stood by the entrance to the cave, her figure masked in silhouette as she looked over the precipice at the valley below, at the flickering lights and the wagons rolling in from beyond the forests, always rolling. The remaining insurgents began to draw a plan for their days ahead after the mourning, but nothing I saw could overcome the vast resources deployed under the banners of the empire. I only had songs to offer, and a word of courage.

        That night, we cremated the shaman’s daughter and fanned the smoke out of the cave and into the cold mountain air. A blanket of silence hung inside, and nobody thought to speak. We sipped on our toddies and whispered our stories in private.

        The moon hung low in the sky, and the girl, standing at the mouth of the cave, jumped in an attempt to catch it. A moment later, she was squirming on the floor, her limbs scraping against stone, her head twitching from side to side. The women and men cried and ran to her, but we had burned the iron pendant with the mother’s corpse. I pushed through the insurgents, all the while removing the key dangling from my uniform. I placed it on her hand and wrapped her fingers around it and slowly brushed her hair. It’s all right, I whispered close to her ear. It’s all right.

        And like all nights in the valley, this too was endless.

* * *

        On the eighth morning, I woke to a nudge from one of the guards. In front of us was the empty cell where Kalmashi had been imprisoned, its gate left open with the lock dangling from its hook. I spotted a key plugged into the lock’s wards, its familiarity staggering me. The other keys—the ones of my home, my cupboards and of the chest that lay under my bed—were tied around the railing. I sensed a lightness near my waist where the keys had rested as far as memory took me back, and that lightness slowly rose to my head.

        Nobody who stood there missed the trail of tulip petals scattered on the floor, which led all the way out of the prison and up to the fortress where the Emperor slept.

Copyright © 2020 Prashanth Srivatsa

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Prashanth Srivatsa lives in Bengaluru, India, where he works as a valuation specialist. In shadows, he is either plotting extensive fantasy realms and tales or tries his hand at short fiction. His stories have appeared or will soon appear in AHF Magazine, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Shoreline of Infinity.

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COVER ART

“Grassy Ocean,” by Alexander Ostrowski

Alexander Ostrowski is a freelance creature designer and concept artist based in Germany. Since childhood, he spent far too much time thinking about dragons and looking for crabs on the beach. Fascinated by nature and biology, he still loves exploring the real world as well as imaginary ones and especially the lifeforms both have to offer. As a concept artist, he is mainly designing creatures for the entertainment industry. You can find his work online on Artstation and on Instagram @ostrowskialex.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

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