Issue #339 • Sep. 23, 2021

“In Case You’re the One to Devour a Star,” by Tamara Jerée

“A Bird in the Window,” by Kate Francia

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IN CASE YOU’RE THE ONE TO DEVOUR A STAR

by Tamara Jerée

        I’m upfront at our first meeting in the courtyard. If Lilist is going to reject me because of my shortened lifespan—and she has all the right to, as the others I’ve met before her—I’d rather she do it sooner. Before I begin imagining what the future could be.

        “I’m not really first-mother material,” I say, looking down into my tea. Has she already noticed the starry scent of dragon feathers clinging to my robes? Does she think the tremble in my hands is due to nerves or the fatigue of harnessing fire all day?

        She places her cup back into its saucer. This is it, I think, but she smiles and says, “What a relief.”

        Women who are destined to be first mothers want to make families with other aristocrats. Occasionally, one will decide they want the comfortable pace of life that comes with marrying a craftswoman from the flatlands. “No one wants to make a family with a fire keeper,” I say because in my months of seeking a partner, this is the resounding impression I’ve internalized.

        I have loved life in the monastery. I was born there and never wanted any other life. For most of us, the fire is all the warmth we need; the companionship with fellow fire keepers all the relationships we’d want. Among us, there is no strangeness in looking skyward and dreaming of outer worlds.

        My hands are clattering the teacup against its saucer. It’s nerves now, I’m sure. I set it on the table between us. She’s not staring at the cup or my hands. Her gaze is locked on mine.

        “I might want to, Olin.”

        I have talked to wild dragons and seen them eclipse the moon. I have caught the fire of their breath in my hands and taken its power into myself. Yet suddenly I feel fear speeding my heart as I face this woman who could have anything else but claims she wants to have a family with a fire keeper. People in Vel do not remarry. Choosing a fire keeper as a partner means spending most of one’s marriage always knowing that time is against them; that one day very soon, they’ll be alone.

        She reaches across the table and strokes the swath of scar tissue on the back of my hand. “It’s an old injury,” I tell her automatically, as if her touch was a question. “From when I was young. The first time I tried to hold a dragon’s breath. My control slipped.”

        Her voice is soft when she speaks, as if anything louder could aggravate my old wound. “Is it common? Burns like this?”

        “All of us have a story. Most of us, more than one.” A pause. Perhaps Lilist, a poet, is more inclined than most to listen to the stories of someone like me. “Am I the first fire keeper you’ve ever talked to?”

        “There aren’t many of you compared to us. Most don’t choose your life.”

        From the mouths of some, this may have been an insult. With her, it’s an observation. She keeps stroking my scar, and I watch the trace of her fingers.

        “I think your work is fascinating—what I know of it, anyway,” she says next, and I’m so hypnotized by the delicate pressure of her fingertips that I almost miss what she’s said.

        Two first mothers glide by our table—I can tell they’re firsts by their embroidered silk capes and measured strides, the crystals braided into their long hair. They glimpse Lilist’s hand on mine, blink, bend their heads towards each other. I have not left the monastery in weeks, not since the last rejection. I wonder what I look like to them in my muted colors, with my long but singed hair. Foolish of you to grow it out, my teacher had admonished. You can throw off your cloak if it catches fire, but long hair is an unnecessary hazard. The short hair, though—it gives us away as fire keepers when we come down from the mountain. That’s what the first woman I talked to said.

        Lilist watches the two retreating first mothers, then fully grasps my hand. “Let’s walk,” she says.

        I cling to her like she is living fire.

* * *

        Lilist and I marry against the advice of her parents and sister, when I have, at best, five years left to live.

        “What will you do when I’m gone?” I ask her when we’re secure in the dark of our room one night. Lilist’s bed is piled with beaded and embroidered cushions and wide enough to fit two more people. If not for her weight against me, I would have felt insecure in its opulence. “People say life feels colder after their fire keeper dies.” Her head is pillowed on my chest, and I know she must hear how my heart races.

        I cannot see Lilist’s face. Eventually she says, “Then you will just have to show me how to tend the fires as you do.”

        She finds my hand again like at that first meeting, and I offer to share the final piece of my life with her.

        When I travel to the monastery for the first time after our marriage, I bring Lilist with me. She has traded her silk gown and velvet cape for wool and furs at my advice, and only a jeweled broach, hairpin, and rings betray her status. The wind in the mountains is harsh without the shelter of the monastery’s walls and the heat of dragon breath. Thankfully, though, there is a well-traveled path. When I tell her of it, Lilist insists on bringing her horses, saying that I might be fit enough to scale mountains on my own strength but that she is not used to the exertion. So we ride.

        “Are you more used to riding dragons?” Lilist asks as we begin our journey, and I can’t help my laugh.

        “Is that what you all think down there in the city?”

        “Fire keepers do have a reputation for being...”

        “Daredevil fanatics?” I suggest.

        I intended it as a joke, but she says, “I’m sorry. There are so many rumors. I should know better than to put stock in any of it.”

        “If any of us could tame and ride a dragon, we’d have mighty spirits indeed. What would stop any of us from going off to the stars with them, visiting other worlds?”

        Lilist falls quiet in that thoughtful way she has. When she speaks again, she says, “Tell me if I am out of line for asking, if these are secrets of your order, but— Where do the dragons come from? Why are they here?”

        These are the questions the highest of our order have asked since the first contact with dragons. I tell Lilist this, that we haven’t yet learned their tongue but can interpret the vague outline of their will through sharing fire. They say they have come from another star system. They say their star went out, devoured by one of their kind, and their world became intolerably cold. We cannot yet interpret from their account why the devourer did this.

        “The most concrete thing we have learned from them is the star map,” I finish.

        Nightfall brings a clear sky. I locate the halfway alcove and we make camp, watering and feeding the horses and ourselves. With the mundane tasks done, I withdraw the flask of fire I keep next to my heart. Lilist still marvels at how the flame dances without fuel, how its container is merely warm to the touch.

        “Do you have a bit of parchment?” I ask, because of course she, a poet, would have thought to bring parchment on a trip into the mountains.

        She nods and fetches a roll from her things. I spread it flat on the stone.

        “The star map looks best at night,” I explain. “It’s beautiful. I want to show you.”

        I have never worked fire outside of the company of the other fire keepers, much less in front of someone uninitiated into our world of heat and smoke. Most people, still wary of the dragons and the ones who associate with them, do not want to witness one of us working fire, but Lilist’s eyes are bright in the darkness as she watches me unstop the flask and inhale the flames.

        I have missed the burn in my throat, my mouth, my lungs. I am careful to avoid looking too closely at Lilist as I sink into the ritual. Although I do this for her, I cannot allow myself to think of her. A trace of anxiety can ignite a flare, set off an eruption that would swallow us all in flame, and so I imagine that I am alone while I brew the fire. Despite the wind, I’m sweating. Suddenly, I need to shrug out of my cloak. It falls heavy at my feet, and I gaze past Lilist up into the stars and let the dragon’s memory become my own. I exhale the smoke, as my training has disciplined me, and let the fire inside grow. Many apprentices, at this stage, will expel the fire before it can brew its magic, but I know the point at which my body will blister and ash, and I’ve learned to banish the fear of that possibility.

        Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that Lilist has drawn her furs tighter around her, is staring at me with something I don’t have the space to name if I’m going to control the fire. The horses are whinnying, snorting, pawing at the ground. Lilist thinks to go to them and soothe them.

        Spark. That is the way we’re all taught to recognize when the fire has brewed the magic to its peak. Ironic, when you have an entire inferno coursing through you, that you’d recognize anything so nuanced as a spark, but it makes intuitive sense. I feel it as a prickle along my spine. I seize it and visualize its shape. I kneel to the paper and blow a tame lick of flame. The parchment catches, crisps, and blackens as the flames dance over its surface. I exhale smoke once more and breathe the fire back into the flask. By the time I’ve wiped my brow and gulped down the clear air, the parchment has fully ashed and the map has set. I beckon Lilist over to see.

        Some of the ash has crystalized into a spattering of starry flecks burned into the stone at our feet. Through them, a gossamer trail charts a course. I point up at our stars and show Lilist where they are on the scale of this map, where the tiny galaxy spirals out to represent stars we can’t see with our own eyes. I show her the course the dragons took through the eternal night, and she sits back and looks at me and then at the map again.

        “I feel so small,” she says. “Everything feels so small.”

        I don’t expect her to say this. “For us, the dragons make us feel connected to the potential of all the other worlds they’ve visited on their way to us. Their fire grounds us in our bodies and to the earth in the way nothing else has ever done or could do. None of us would ever give up the pain of fire, because it brings so many gifts,” I say. I need her to see how beautiful this is, why I do not hate my scars, why the wildest among us devote ourselves to this life. Sometimes one is born with a spark to draw the terrifying unknown to themselves and confront it and at least gain contentment by knowing the depth of the mystery.

        “I understand, Olin,” she says in the too-fast way of someone who doesn’t truly understand. She strokes the scar on my hand as she looks back to the star map.

        Her gesture is kind, but for once, it doesn’t reassure me. Maybe that’s because of the sudden exhaustion that comes with working fire, or maybe it’s the memory of a lifetime defending our study to outsiders, but I feel an old weariness that threatens this precious moment. I grip the flask of fire with my free hand. An unconscious gesture. A comforting one.

        Lilist knows it well by now. She squeezes my hand, and I have her full attention. “It’s beautiful, Olin,” she says. “Your work is beautiful. Thank you for sharing this with me.”

        The weariness abates, and it comforts me that, soon, Lilist will see the monastery. When she does, I know she’ll understand.

* * *

        None of us in my lifetime have ever brought partners to the monastery. It is not forbidden, but it is rare; rare enough for one of us to marry, and rarer still for us to want to return in the company of an outsider. Uncertain of the etiquette, I sent a letter ahead of us, introducing Lilist and asking for my old teacher’s blessing. Her response was curt, in keeping with her usual manner, and confirmed that she wouldn’t stop someone from scaling the mountain if it was in their heart to do so.

        “She didn’t say yes,” Lilist had pointed out, pacing with the letter in hand. “I wouldn’t want to be an imposition.”

        “It’s a yes.”

        “How do you know?”

        “I know her.”

        And so we’d gone. Certain that everyone would adore Lilist as much as I, I hadn’t worried—not until the familiar shape of the monastery’s buildings came into view.

        Those walking the upper paths have already seen us approaching on Lilist’s great mares, and a small gathering, all drab cloaks and close-cropped hair, welcomes us. In the time I’ve been gone for the wedding, some of the youngest already have new burns or have earned their own flasks of fire strung around their necks. I embrace each person there, and if they have their own fire, it warms my chest as we touch. When I reach my old teacher, she smiles her usual tight, controlled smile and remarks that my hair is growing ever longer.

        In the silence that follows, I turn back to Lilist, still sitting high on her horse. Silhouetted against the sun, she appears more imposing than I ever remember her being. I go to her to help her down, and she moves as if to hold her skirts out of the way, then remembers herself. Except for this trip, I’ve never seen Lilist in trousers.

        An entirely different kind of heat, the uncomfortable kind, rises in my face as I turn to introduce my wife to the people who, in any way that matters, have been my only family. They kiss her cheeks and compliment her pretty jewels, glittering things that ceased to catch my attention the longer I spent in Vel. Suddenly, I see her again as I saw her that first day, as they must see her—a cautious aristocrat too pampered by life to see its mysteries.

        My teacher does not kiss her cheeks as the others have done, only looks at me and says, “She must be cleansed with smoke before she comes any farther,” then retreats in the direction of the sanctuary, leaving me standing amid the silent stares of my peers.

* * *

        The ceremonial smoke clings to Lilist’s hair and clothes, and I love the smell on her. With ash smeared across the bridge of her nose, she looks like one of us, a new initiate. I show her the monastery grounds, carefully avoiding the sanctuary and my teacher and the dragon who sleeps there during the day. Everyone is eager to tell her the history of not only our modest quarters but the entire mountain, and the youngest of us clamor after her, asking for stories of Vel. I stand back and admire how they dote on her.

        The night will be clear again, and I suggest that we stay up and watch the dragon’s lunar flight. The night-lights are brightest at the top of our mountain, and on a full moon like tonight, the lunar eclipse brought on by the span of the dragon’s wings is even more stunning. So we huddle in the courtyard with the others in the too-cold night on the iced-over snow. Lilist shivers against me, and we all hush when we sense midnight. The ground shakes. I know how to brace for it but, in my familiarity, I have neglected to warn Lilist. I steady her before the next shake and whisper an apology. My teacher appears from the dark mouth of the sanctuary, striding easily towards us over the trembling ground. She acknowledges us all with a nod, and we wait.

        Lilist grips my hand when the dragon’s head emerges from the cover of the sanctuary. Each step makes the mountain below us tremble, but we are staring up, lost in the dewy glisten of the dragon’s silver feathers and the opal glint of their horns. Their great head lowers to us and they turn one colorless eye to Lilist, who watches, steadily, in return. The dragon’s mouth parts, and Lilist stumbles back against me in alarm, but only a warm smoky breath washes over us, insulating against the chill for a few precious seconds. The others try to suppress giggles and fail as Lilist sags against me. My teacher smiles a real smile.

        From their perch atop the rocky point of the sanctuary, the dragon summons the currents that will buoy them into the night sky. They circle above us, a low, fast shadow. As they circle higher, we can track their progress by the trail of stars disappearing and reappearing, renewed and brighter than before. When they circle low again to confront the moon’s light, I hear Lilist breathe in and keep her breath until the moon is freed from shadow of wings and the dragon’s feathers carry the faint glow of the moontouched. Now, I think, she understands.

* * *

        I might have thought my living space modest before, but it appears severely austere after spending time in Lilist’s rooms in Vel. We squeeze together on my narrow bed, and I tell her stories of what we’ve gleaned from the dragons, breathing out smoke images to illustrate the strange things the dragons have told us of: that the celestial lights we call stars are far-flung suns much like ours, that planets of gas and ice and eternal storms also circle our sun, that in the cold dark of space, collapsed stars become light-eating voids.

        “That’s terrifying,” says Lilist, curling closer to me. “Are you sure the dragons aren’t speaking in metaphor?”

        “It’s real. I’ve witnessed it through fire.”

        “The same fire that shortens your life,” she says. Not accusatory, just fact. “Our bodies were never meant to hold power as untamable as fire, and you pay dearly for it.”

        She’s quiet for a moment, and though I know our relationship has passed the point where many others would have shunned us for our heretical beliefs, I still feel the prickle of worry that comes with divulging draconic wisdom to an outsider. In Vel, most tolerate our presence when we come down from the mountain to trade for goods, but when one of our order long ago tried to share what we’d learned of starfire and the properties of dragon feathers, they were violently driven from the city for daring to—in the Velians’ words—”proselytize the teachings of offworlders.” Now, we are careful what we say about our lives and the structure of the universe.

        “I understand,” Lilist begins slowly, “why you would trade your time for such precious truths.”

        “Just as a poet seeks truth, if I understand your craft correctly.”

        This draws a smile from her.

        She combs the tangles out of my hair, smooths the kinks with flower oils, and braids them into intricate swirls across my scalp. When I marvel at myself in her mirror, she says that perhaps my teacher will stop scolding me if it’s held back.

        “Maybe,” I say and thank her.

        “Do you think,” she starts tentatively, “I could talk to the dragon as you do?” When I am too surprised to respond, she hurries on to say, “It was just so beautiful. Tonight. And it’s not as if daughters of families like mine even have the chance to consider becoming fire keepers.”

        I repeat to her the first lesson my teacher taught me. “To meet a dragon for the first time requires a gift. Take some time to consider what of value you might give.”

        On the last day of her visit to the monastery, Lilist settles on a gift. It is not any of her jewels but a piece of parchment I have seen her laboring over far into the night.

        Under the watchful eye of my teacher, we enter the sanctuary together, the warmth of the space immediately banishing the outside chill that had settled into us on our way. A great pyre lit by dragon’s breath burns in the center of the cavernous space, and in the shadows, the dragon looks up as if seeing the sky through the rock above us, white eyes radiant with the light of lost stars.

        Lilist slips the rolled parchment from her sleeve and bows before the dragon. They blink as if the greeting has jolted them from their starward trance. With the patient slowness of one who has seen ages, they bend their head so that they no longer tower over Lilist and can meet her gaze as an equal.

        “I am a poet, and I have written a song for you,” she says. The dragon shifts, settling their head upon clawed feet. They wait.

        Lilist sings, and it is not a song for noble halls or ballrooms. The words are in our tongue but not organized in our way. Rather than telling a story, she weaves a suggestion among us, an emotion like longing. She sings as if breathless, and as the song unravels, I never hear her inhale. The song grows like a fire given all the fuel it has ever hungered for, and I think of wings, although she does not mention them. I feel the possibility of weightlessness, the threat of the vast dark.

        Lilist is shaking when she’s done, and she offers the parchment that holds her words. The dragon considers it, then whispers its breath over one corner of it, setting it alight. Lilist doesn’t startle at the fire and waits fearlessly as the dragon opens its fanged mouth to take her words and swallow them whole. They press their nose into Lilist’s hand and close their eyes, as one does when letting a drink warm them from the inside on a winter night.

        Lilist otherwise holds still but turns her head so that I can see her smile. The restrained joy of it is a precious thing, and I also fight my expression into something befitting the weight of the moment. My old teacher hums her approval, the closest she ever comes to praise. The dragon has accepted both Lilist and her offering, and she now has a new home here with my peers and I in the sky.

* * *

        Because of Lilist, we begin to feed the dragon our stories. Whenever I come down from the monastery to visit her in Vel, she has a roll of parchment for me to take back to the dragon who likes her stories best. She encourages other poets to write to the dragon so that our stories might not be lost, so that Vel may travel the cosmos in the belly of a dragon. Soon, I am making my way back up the mountain with satchels overflowing with parchment, and people are making pilgrimages to visit the dragons who were once so feared.

        We birth a child who is preternaturally warm. Lilist says this is because the child grew in my belly and learned to hold fire before they knew anything else. That first winter after their birth, Lilist will not let them go, holding selfishly to their warmth. There is fear in that grasp, but I do not name it aloud. I understand how looming death would make one cling to life. I make the dangerous winter climbs to the mountain alone.

        My years are burning down to embers when we finally return to the courtyard where we first met. It is summer now, and despite the heat, Lilist still clings to the child. We sit among the verdant plants and guess at what names the child might take for themself when they’re old enough to choose, but Lilist quiets when the reality that I won’t see that moment with her comes drifting back. Time beyond the next moon has gradually stopped existing for us. Lilist is always so careful not to talk about years; holidays—anything that marks the passage of time—turn her somber. I can no longer clear the smoke from my lungs, and I cough with every other breath. Heat has made my tongue unable to enjoy the rich foods we used to savor together. I haven’t told her this. I eat and drink and describe, based on memory, how wonderful it is. I am sure to smile across the table at her.

        “Will you show me how to make the star map?” she asks.

        I look at her, and she has so much fire in her eyes for someone who has never harnessed dragon’s breath in her body. “You can’t,” I say. I do not tell her she could learn. There are things even I am still afraid of. I have loved this life, but I do not know if I want Lilist to follow me into it. I don’t want to wonder how the fire will deteriorate her body after I’m gone. “And I have shown you the star map before. You remember it?”

        She sits back. Watches the baby in her arms. “I couldn’t forget,” she says.

        “When our bodies are ashed, the dragons take us up into the stars,” I say, and I do not know why I’ve said it, only that it feels suddenly urgent. On their wings, we are dusted among nebulae; raw elements to be folded into the formation of new worlds.

        “Won’t you ask them to leave some of you here on earth with me?”

        I cough and say, “For you, the dragons would do anything.”

        I take the flask of fire from around my neck and breathe without its weight against my chest for the first time since it was bestowed on me. At my death, this fire will be returned to the dragon and they will have my memories, just as I have held theirs. I have loved this life. Years ago, I wouldn’t have thought it would mean so much to me for someone outside the monastery—someone other than the dragon—to remember it too.

        I study the dance of the flame and fold its flask into Lilist’s free hand. She looks at her fist as if it’s a star map, as if it’s something that needs discerning. When she returns her gaze to me, I breathe another unburdened breath and tell her, “When the time comes, I want it to be you who returns my fire to the dragon. They’ll see my life—our love—and know your wish to keep some of me here with you.”

Copyright © 2021 Tamara Jerée

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Tamara Jerée’s short fiction appears or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Anathema: Spec from the Margins, and Neon Hemlock’s Unfettered Hexes anthology. Their poetry and nonfiction have been nominated for the Ignyte Award. They live in the Midwest where they dream of one day motorcycling across the US.

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A BIRD IN THE WINDOW

by Kate Francia

        The first time I saw her, she stood in the arch of the gate, a black spindle against the open stretch of road. I looked up from where I was kneeling in the garden and couldn’t look away. Head to toe in black, her face veiled. The air smelled like new turned earth, sunlight. When the gates shut behind her, she didn’t flinch.

        The abbess was clear: don’t speak to her, don’t speak of her. We followed the first edict, mouselike, but did nothing but flout the second. Whispers in the refectory, in the dormitory, passed beneath straw hats in the garden. Rumors grew in the hushed-night stillness of Matins and the pre-dawn blue of Lauds: she was a great lady, a queen, come to the abbey to atone for a mortal sin, like Guinevere. She had a face so beautiful that knights went to battle, tore the countryside to shreds for one token of her favor. She had a face so hideous it could turn all who looked upon it to stone.

        I kept my nose out of it, of course, but my eyes followed her. She was somebody, that was certain, and it wasn’t my wickedness that told me that; it was plain common sense.

        One morning just before Prime, walking through the cloister, I heard a voice come out of the air. “Help me,” it said, a high clear tone. The sun had just cleared the walls of the abbey.

        Not now, not here, I thought. Stone monsters at the cap of each pillar, tongues lolling; stone saints in the alcoves, all their eyes on me. Then she stepped out of the shadows, a black shape. I bit down on my tongue to stop myself from crying out.

        “Wait!” she whispered. “Please! I have to see the sun. I’ll go raving.”

        “What do you mean? You’re standing in the sun.”

        “Not like this, all bound up in walls. You understand? I want to feel it on my face, I want to see for miles. I can’t bear it. How do you bear it?”

        When my wickedness comes, I feel it a long way off, a pressure behind my eyes, like someone staring at the back of your head. I felt it then, starting. I didn’t see any angels yet, but they were coming. I had to hide. “I’m sorry, I—”

        “You won’t help me.” She was pacing, black-gloved hands clenching her skirt in fists. “I can’t get anyone to say even two words to me.”

        Under her veil, the set of a chin that was used to getting its way. The curve of her shoulders: despair, and defiance. A battle I knew. I hadn’t thought to find it in someone so fine.

        “It gets easier, Lady.” I pushed back against the pressure building inside my skull. “Follow me. But you’ll have to hurry.”

        I led her out the garden gate and into the apple orchard. The trees were bare still, the twisted trunks like fingers. The branches were dotted with tiny red buds.

        “From the top of this one you can see the fields and the road, on a clear day the steeple of Notre-Dame de Tournai. But I’m not sure if you’ll be able to climb it in all that.”

        She pushed back her veil. Eyes grey, wide-set. A small pale face.

        She was young—no older than me. I felt a shock of disappointment. She looked so ordinary, plain. Then she smiled, a flash of mischief that lit one corner of her mouth.

        “Help me, then.” She fumbled at the tiny black buttons that ran down her back from her neck to her waist, and I took over. She stepped out of the dress like stepping out of a bath and left the weight of it in my arms. Underneath she wore a white shift. She moved toward the tree, and the shift pulled around her stomach.

        Another shock. I lowered my eyes. The wickedness beat against them, in time with my heart. I knew very little about such things, but I was certain she would have a child before summer was gone. “Should you climb in your condition?”

        She laughed down at me from the lower branches. “If I lost it, I can’t think of a single person who’d be sorry. They’ve all been praying for it, no mistake.”

        “Please come down, Lady. Surely God would grieve.”

        “Would he? I’ve been told he’s quite cross with me.” She pulled herself higher, and the sun caught her face. She sat straddling a branch, with her back against the trunk, and closed her eyes. The sun picked out gold in her eyelashes.

        I pressed my hands against my eyes.

        “Don’t mind what I say,” she said. “It’s been ages since anyone’s said anything to me but nonsense. I’m sorry. You can go if you like. I’m quite comfortable. I think I shall live in this tree now.”

        She sat in the tree with the sun behind her. A bird called, and my wickedness came upon me all at once. The morning sun brighter and brighter, white-hot, the beams solid gold, and she in the center, crowned in fire. A lady in white with dove-gray wings. Her eyes were terrible. Angels twined round her feet, crawled out of the sun and down the branches of the tree. A roaring in my ears. I tried to close my eyes, but the angels, the angels.

        When I opened my eyes, I saw her face, plain again, swimming above me. I was lying on the ground. Underneath my head, a pillow stiff and rough—her dress. The bells were ringing, to call us to prayer.

        “Thank God,” she said. “I thought you’d had it.”

        She reached out a hand to help me, but I pulled away and climbed to my feet. My legs stone-heavy, my throat raw. I started walking. She called to me to wait, but I didn’t look back.

* * *

        I wanted to forget her, but I couldn’t, because of the angels. They were everywhere: a flash around a corner, a flutter of wings on the stair. When I saw her walking in the cloister, they clustered around her veiled head like ducklings. Of course, I call them angels, but they aren’t; I know that.

        “You must call them by their true name,” my mother told me. This was before I came to the abbey, when she caught me hiding in the churchyard, a child laughing into empty air. I saw them dancing between the graves, shining bright and rich as stained glass. I didn’t understand then why I was in trouble.

        That winter the priests burned a heretic in the town square. They came to every door in the village: had anyone given her shelter? Spoken to her, heard her ungodly visions? Been healed by her touch? My mother told them none of us had seen her, but it was a lie. I saw her all that week before they came. In the window, in the washpot, in the well, I saw a woman on fire, her hair turned to smoke in the snow.

        It only got worse after that. The angels changed, grew sharp and cold, pressed close against me with teeth and edges. They dragged me from my chair at dinner, beat me around my ears when I hid in my room. I fell to the ground and saw strange things: a gold-wrought sky, an apple tree hung with eyes, people turned to beasts turned to people.

        My family could speak of nothing else: whispers at first, when they thought I was asleep, then speaking past me as if I wasn’t there. A matter of time before someone found me out. Simpler to scrape together the dowry for the abbey. Cheaper, in the end, than what would happen to them, to their standing in the town, to my older sisters, if it was known they harbored such wickedness.

        “You must tell no one,” said my mother. Not the priest who took my confession, nor the abbess, nor any of the other novices and nuns. She told me the abbey would protect me from the angels.

        It worked, in a way. I could lose myself in the bells, in the work, in the sameness of the hours: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, Compline. If I saw angels, I looked away; if I felt my wickedness coming on, I hid. Marguerite the mouse, always running off to pray, always walking with her eyes on the ground. No one knew my secret. I was safe.

        And now this odd girl, with angels following her everywhere. She wasn’t like me, though. Even when they curled around her shoulders, I knew she couldn’t see them.

        “Psst!” She beckoned to me from a doorway as I came back from the garden. “I’ve been looking for you for ages. You’ll never believe what I’ve found.” She caught my hand and ran towards the belltower. I stumbled after her. Her white hand paused for a moment on the door, the other still holding mine. I caught my breath and pulled my hand free. My palms were creased with soil.

        She pulled out a key and unlocked the door, then turned her face back to me, all mischief.

        “Well, come on then,” she said, and dashed up the stairs.

        “Wait!”

        “Hurry up!”

        I followed her up past the long hanging ropes. At the top of the stairs, there was a landing just below the bells. She stood looking out the round cobwebbed window, out of breath.

        “The thing I like best,” she said without looking back, “is that there isn’t a need for this. No one comes this high, except to clean the bells or fix them. It’s only beautiful.”

        “What are you talking about?”

        “The window, silly!” She leaned against the window frame, her face in the sun.

        “We’re not supposed to be up here.”

        “You’re up here same as me.”

        “Only to tell you that we can’t be up here!”

        She sat in a huff of dust. “Well, seeing as we’re both here now, we might as well stay a bit. Enjoy the sin before you do the penance, that’s what I say.” She loosened the stays of her dress and rested her hands on her stomach. “Have I shocked you? Please sit down. You know my secret now, and I know yours, so we must be allies. Which is even better than friends.”

        I stood in the doorway with my arms locked straight. She couldn’t know—but I do speak, sometimes, when my wickedness comes on, and who knows what she could have heard. In the corner of my eye, an angel crawled up the wall toward the bells.

        “Are you alright?” she said. “I would never tell anyone, I swear! Does the abbey not know of your fits?”

        “No,” I whispered. If only it were fits.

        “Well, they won’t know from me.”

        I wanted to ask: why do the angels follow you? But instead I said: “Who are you?”

        “Beatrix Gherijtzdochter, of Ghent.” She gave an odd half smile with her name.

        “Oh,” I said. A reaction seemed expected.

        Beatrix laughed. “That means nothing to you, does it? I told my mother the veil wasn’t necessary. Though I’m sure it’s made for some lovely rumors.” She pulled off her shoes and wiggled her toes in a shaft of sunlight. “Shocking, isn’t it?”

        “What?”

        “The state of my ankles. Like sausages on the pan, right before they split.” She made a hissing sound, then clapped her hands together. “What I wouldn’t give for a sausage.” She wrinkled her nose. “Wait, no. The very idea of a sausage makes me want to curl up and die. How can that be? Do you ever feel like meat is just sitting there, watching you, dead? But still a part of you wants it. I’m saying nonsense again. Please sit down. It’s terribly awkward, sitting with you standing there.”

        “I can’t. If we’re still here when they ring the bells for Terce, we’ll go deaf.”

        “Then you must stay. So you can mind the time and get me out before they ring.”

        I couldn’t leave her, and anyway the angels wouldn’t let me. I sat next to her in the dust. My hands twisted in the undyed wool of my skirt. She drew her legs under her, ungainly.

        “What do you think is worse: wanting a sausage but not having any, or having a sausage but not being able to eat it because it’s watching you funny?”

        “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had one.”

        “Never had one?”

        “I suppose I might have when I was small. We don’t ever have them at the abbey.”

        “Not even on feast days? You all eat this slop year round? That is a penance. And to think I once begged them to let me join.”

        “You did? But—”

        “What, you think I’m not suited? Well. At the time, anything seemed better than where I was. An irony, really, that I ended up here anyway. But it’s just for a few months.”

        “You’re not staying?”

        “They’ll ship me back as soon as this is over.” She gestured to her stomach.

        “What about the—” My tongue tangled around the word.

        “If it’s a girl, she’ll stay here, I suppose. If it’s a boy, I don’t know. If I were a man I could take him home and make him my master of horse. Give him my name, if I wanted. But ladies don’t have bastard children. It isn’t done. So you see, this child isn’t mine. Not really.”

        I haven’t seen many children made, me being the youngest and my oldest sister just married when I left for the abbey. None of the nuns here have gotten in that condition lately, our abbey being a strict one.

        “Can I ask—” I said. “What is it like?”

        Beatrix reached for my hand and put it on her stomach, where her white shift poked through under her loosened stays. “Just wait,” she said. I could almost feel her heartbeat, fluttering like wings. Then, a rolling under my palm, the sharp moving ridge of a bone. I snatched my hand back.

        Beatrix laughed. “Strange, isn’t it? Like it’s a sea beast in there and no human child at all. Something inside you, part of you, growing, until you can’t contain it. It’s got to come out, one way or another, even if it kills you.”

        “Was it true love?”

        Beatrix’s smile stilled. “Of course it was. It’s a terribly romantic tale. Even now, my true love is riding here to find me.” She looked at me sideways under her gold-tinted lashes. “I’ll tell you the whole story if you agree to meet me again tomorrow.”

        Dust swirled in the patch of sunlight from the window; though the air was warm, I shivered. But the next day, I went back.

* * *

        The angels loved Beatrix’s stories. When she leaned forward, a story playing around one corner of her mouth, the dust came alive, the tower full of held breaths. Everything else went cold in contrast. When I sat at prayer, long hours of silence, the angels laughed at me from the windows of the chapel. I lost my place, started over again and again from the beginning. I wandered through my thoughts like trees. Behind every tree an angel waited. They winked at me until I lost the path, until I couldn’t bear it, until I went back to the tower to meet her again.

        Beatrix made a code: small white stones left in the mouth of a stone lion in the cloister. The number of stones meant the hour. One stone for Prime, two for Terce, and so on, Prime being the earliest hour Beatrix would countenance (“The birds do a perfectly good job of singing up the sun without my help. Besides, there’s no good trying to climb in the dark”). If we climbed the tower just after the bells struck the hour, we could safely stay until just before they struck again.

        “My true love has hands as white as snow,” said Beatrix one morning in the tower just after Terce. “Hour by hour, I watched him in the hall. His hands moved over the harp like birds. When he took my hand at last, it was like holding a dove. His heart beat against the tips of my fingers.”

        As always when she spoke of her true love, Beatrix sat straight. Light brown hair, braided against her scalp but always wisping out around her face. The light caught the wisps when she moved, lit them gold.

        “When he heard that I was gone, I’m told he drew his sword and knelt before the holy cross. Never again, he said, shall my hands touch the strings of my harp, until I hold my beloved in my arms once more.”

        “But how will he find you? There are hundreds of abbeys like ours.”

        “An excellent question, Marguerite. Perhaps our bird could bear him a message.” She hoisted herself up and went to the window. On the tree outside, full green now, a bird was flitting from branch to branch. Beatrix opened the window and reached her hand out as far as it would go. “Ho, friend! Can you find my true love? Tall fellow, riding a horse? Carrying a red scarf as a token of my favor?”

        The bird ignored her.

        “I don’t think he’s a messenger bird,” I said.

        “Then what’s the use of him?”

        “Their dung is good for the vegetables. And we roast them, sometimes, when the bishop visits.”

        “Roast them!”

        “Don’t you eat birds?”

        “Only silly ones, like chickens. I wouldn’t eat a friend.” Beatrix stretched, put one hand in the small of her back. She was getting bigger. “A fine sight I’ll look on a milk-white steed. You’ll come with us, of course.”

        I looked away. “I don’t know.”

        “Marguerite!” She took my hand and dragged me to the window. “Just imagine. We’ll eat berries and make our clothes out of leaves.”

        “You want me to come with you and your true love? As what, a nursemaid?”

        Beatrix laughed. “My child won’t need a nursemaid. It will run naked and wild, like a little forest beastie, and hunt squirrels with its teeth.”

        “A chaperone, then?”

        “Certainly not! No, I have it—you’ll be a holy woman. Then you can keep your vows, if you like. You’ll live in a cave like the desert fathers, and people will come from miles and miles to hear your miraculous visions.”

        From far away, eyes staring at the back of my head. “Beatrix, don’t.”

        “They’ll bring you offerings—milk and cheese and bread and sausages. We’ll do whatever we like.”

        “Stop!”

        “I don’t suppose you could see your way clear to doing a miracle or two. Just to keep up our reputation.”

        I turned and stumbled toward the door but found it blocked by angels, crawling all over each other.

        “Marguerite, I was only teasing! Don’t go.”

        “Bells for Sext will ring soon. I have to.”

        “It’s ages still before they ring.”

        The angels spread their wings. I pressed my knuckles into my burning eyes. “Get out of my way!”

        “I’m not in your way, I’m behind you. Who are you talking to?”

        “No one.”

        She came to stand beside me in the doorway, and the angels parted for her. We walked past them. I could feel Beatrix looking at me, and the angels on the walls, restless, but I kept my eyes on the ground.

* * *

        Beatrix was sobbing in the orchard. Curled in on herself. She was bigger again, overbalanced. She wasn’t a romantic crier. Her face was streaked and red, her veil in a heap on the ground beside her.

        I ran to her. “Someone will see us together,” I whispered. “What’s happened?”

        She opened her hands. The bird lay there, eyes closed, one wing bent. “It just fell out of the sky! Something hurt it.”

        “A hawk, probably,” I said. A spot of blood on her dress. Wind through the leaves. The walls started whispering. Not here, not now. The orchard was empty, but just over the wall in the garden, I knew there would be sisters working.

        “Can’t you do anything?” she said.

        I pulled back. “What could I do?”

        “Save it!”

        “I’m not Saint Francis!”

        “But the eggs! They’ll die.”

        “It’s the way of things.”

        “The way of things is horrible! If you find one beautiful thing in the world, they only take it.” She collapsed to the ground with the bird cupped in her hands. It was still alive; I could see its little fluttering heartbeat, and every so often it twitched. I knelt next to her.

        “We keep hundreds of birds in the dovecote, Beatrix. I’m not even sure this is the same bird. Did you look for it at the tower window? Perhaps your bird is fine and well.”

        This only made her cry harder. “You don’t understand. It will all be for nothing,” she sobbed. “I can’t do this, it will be like it never happened. It’s all for nothing!”

        “Stop it,” I said. “Stop it, you’ll hurt yourself.”

        “I can hardly breathe. Marguerite!”

        A dull pound, in the back of my head. It was coming on me soon, and no question. There were angels all around; not pressing in for once, just watching. I couldn’t leave her like this.

        “Not here,” I said. I grabbed her by the elbow and threw the crumpled veil back over her head. “Come on.”

        I pushed her through the door of the belltower, stumbled up the stairs. She was breathing in gasps, her body wracked. What was one bird more or less, in the balance of things? When we reached the top she folded to the floor, not a step further.

        She took a long shuddering breath. “I’m sorry. You must think I’ve gone raving. Perhaps I have. I just—I can’t bear it right now.”

        I pressed one hand against the center of my forehead. Shaking inside, down my arms, into my fingers. I held my other hand out to her. “Give it here.”

        Now she looked at me, but her face was growing blurred. “Wait, are you alright? It’s happening again, isn’t it?”

        “Just give me the bird!”

        She pulled me down to sit with my back against the wall. The bells hung over our heads. The weight of them. I took the bird and held it in my hands. My wickedness rose up inside me, a stillness, a fire. I raised the bird to my lips and kissed the top of its head.

        The room went dark. Beatrix was a bird, grey-eyed. She tore at her side with her beak, opened the skin, and blood ran down, red over white. A single tear. Angels changing from one shape to another, claws, wings, tails, eyes. The light, gold. The air cried out. A baby bird opened its mouth for the blood, wide, wide, wide.

        I came back to myself, my head in Beatrix’s lap. Her fingers rested on my forehead. She was singing softly:

        Ah poor bird, why art thou

        Singing in the shadows at this late hour?

        I opened my eyes. Beatrix’s hand grew still.

        “Are you alright?”

        I turned my face away. The bird hopped to the window, flexed his wings. The sun caught the grey-white of his feathers.

        “You can’t tell anyone.” Everything before my eyes was grey with angels, everything blurred. My hands were shaking.

        “That was extraordinary! Just shook itself and flew off, like nothing was ever wrong. Did you know you could do that?”

        “I’ve never done it before.” Never done it, but my fingers had itched to do it, my skin had stretched with the pressure of not doing it. “I’m not supposed to—”

        “It’s not ordinary fits, is it? You kept saying my name, over and over. Are they—are they visions?”

        “I can never make any sense of it. Please, Beatrix—”

        “I can’t believe you’ve been keeping this a secret!”

        A shudder went through me and I started to cry, as I hadn’t cried since I came to the abbey and the doors shut behind me. Never tell anyone, never. I promised my mother I wouldn’t. Then something rang through my blood, the pulse of the hours, the bells. I sat upright.

        “The bells,” I said. “We’ve stayed too long—”

        We were halfway down the stairs when Nones rang. Each bell struck behind my eyes white-cold.

* * *

        Born in sin, and drawn to it, said the statues in the cloister. They lolled their tongues at me, murmured to each other behind my back. Whispers in the garden, in the walls. You must never tell anyone, ever. It was only a bird: a small thing. Who could notice? Hundreds of birds, living and dying every day. A small life, in the balance. But it cracked something open in me.

        When they burned the heretic in the town square, my mother had covered my eyes, but it didn’t matter. I saw everything in red on the backs of my eyelids. The air was full of voices, angels in my throat. Let us out, let us out, they said.

        I found six white stones in the lion’s mouth: Vespers.

        “There you are,” Beatrix said. “I’ve been waiting for ages. Come sit. You’ll be black, I’ll be white.” A game board chalked in the dust, pieces made of stones and twists of paper. Early evening, hot and still, slanting shadows. Beatrix looked up at me in the door.

        “I can’t.”

        “I’ll teach you then. Sit down.”

        “I mean, I can’t meet you anymore.”

        “What?”

        “I’m sorry.”

        “Don’t be a goose, Marguerite. What’s happened?” She hoisted herself to her feet, her pale face framed in the window.

        “I just can’t.”

        “Did you have another vision?”

        “Don’t call them that!”

        “What else should I call them?”

        “They’re wickedness,” I whispered. “I’m going mad.”

        “Who told you that? I don’t think there’s a speck of wickedness in you, or madness either. Visions, and miracles—”

        “Stop!”

        “Why are you so convinced you’re a heretic? For all you know, you could be a saint!”

        “Have you never listened to the saints’ lives? They only saint you after you’ve died horribly! Much good it does you then.”

        “So you’re just going to hide forever? Your entire life?”

        “You couldn’t possibly understand! With all your fine words, and your true love.”

        “As it happens, I do know a bit about wickedness. More than you, I’d wager. I know what happens when you step out of line. But you can’t just—you can’t let them take everything from you. You have to take something back for yourself, even if it’s only an hour.”

        “If you understood at all you wouldn’t be acting this way. You’re making it worse. It’s everywhere, in everything, all watching me. I had it under control before you came!”

        “What are you talking about?” She reached for my hand. “Just sit down, tell me what’s wrong.”

        “We can’t be friends. Or allies, or anything.”

        Her face, red and splotchy. She drew her hand back. “I certainly won’t force you.”

        I turned to the door, my heart beating behind my eyes.

        She burst out: “You’re being a coward. I don’t know what’s happened, but you’re being a mouse about it. Go if you want.”

        I spun around. “What’s your true love’s name?”

        “What?”

        “His name? If all you want is to run away, then why wait for him? Why aren’t you long gone? Climb the tree, over the wall, gone tomorrow.”

        She stood straight as a spindle against the open window.

        “He was never coming, was he?” I said. “It’s just stories.”

        “What would you rather? Shall I tell you all the other ways besides love that a girl can get into my kind of trouble? Shall we talk about what will really happen to this child, this part of me that I never wanted and can never keep? Perhaps I should just lie down and let the hours march on, but I won’t. It would be like walking around already dead while I’m yet living.”

        For once, the tower was quiet, without even a whisper of wings.

* * *

        Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, Compline. On my knees: dirt in the garden, stone at prayer. For seven days I tried to remember how to hide. In chapel when the windows whispered, I dreamed of becoming an anchoress. We didn’t have any at the abbey, but I heard there was one at Notre-Dame de Tournai. A holy woman who lives in a little cell above the altar. A room with no doors. They would wall me in, speak the prayers of the dead. I would be safe forever. When the priests next came to take our confessions, I could tell them I’d been called.

        The angels were angry with me. Pressing, hissing, a high thin chime that went through my teeth. The sun, white-hot on my skin in the garden. In the orchard, the trees grew heavy with apples, green and hard like closed fists.

        I saw Beatrix from afar, a black shape, faceless, in the arch of the cloister. She looked back at me, and looked away. Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, Compline.

        The air cried out.

        I heard the cry from the garden. The sun was low in the sky, the hour just before Compline. I ran to the apple orchard and stopped at the gate. Fire in my chest. I gasped for pain. The angels tried to warn me.

        Two sisters were already there and the abbess was running. Someone was on the ground, and I knew it was Beatrix. I heard voices from far away.

        “What happened?” said the abbess.

        “She must have fallen,” said one of the sisters.

        “We have to get her inside.”

        The abbess knelt beside her and loosened her dress. Her palms came away red. “Send for the midwife.”

        I stood in the gate. I couldn’t move. Beatrix cried out. They took her by the arms and feet and carried her past me into the abbey.

        I pressed my hands against my eyes. Wickedness, or visions: Beatrix crowned in fire, Beatrix winged and bleeding. I’d seen it all along, but I can never sort through what I see until it’s too late. So useless. Like trying to translate birdsong, or sunshine. When I was a child, I hid in the churchyard and found it full of angels. They twined round my ankles and licked my face. Beastlike, but no earthly beast. I laughed. I didn’t know to be afraid. When Beatrix laughed, it felt like that. Like wonder. Like a stolen hour, or found gold. A life. What was one life, in the balance of things? One life, or another.

        My legs gave way and I sat inside the gate, knees against my forehead. I had to follow her, had to help her, but my body was heavy, the air around me syrup-thick. Alone in the orchard now. But I wasn’t alone. They were there, as they always are, eyes behind every tree.

        “I can’t do this by myself,” I whispered. They crept closer. Their eyes, their tongues. I reached out my hand. “Help me.”

        The angels streamed towards me, all joy and teeth and wings. I opened my arms to them as I once did. They burrowed their heads into my neck, lifted me to my feet.

        I took one step, and another, then broke into a run. Angels behind me. I weighed nothing. Through the doors of the abbey, down the hall, to the room where I knew Beatrix slept, though I had never been there. It was busy with people: sisters, the abbess, the midwife, and Beatrix on the bed. The door slammed shut behind me. I didn’t flinch.

        “The priest must be sent for,” the midwife was saying. “If by a miracle the child comes out living, we’ll need to baptize it quickly.”

        “What are you doing here?” said the abbess, to me in the door.

        Beatrix screamed.

        I ran to her and everything else went grey. Her face, small and pale between my hands.

        All around me were whispers, whispers; whether it was the sisters talking or the air, I didn’t care.

        “What’s wrong with her?” I said. “Is this usual?”

        “Do you know her?” said the midwife.

        “She’s my friend.”

        “I’m sorry. Best if you stay out of the way.”

        I smoothed back Beatrix’s hair with my hand. She caught my fingers with hers. I could almost feel her heartbeat weak against my palm. Her eyes were wild.

        “Marguerite,” she whispered. “Don’t move. Just above your shoulder, by your ear, I could swear there’s some sort of—”

        “Ssh, don’t say it.”

        “They’re everywhere, winking in and out! God help me, I’ve gone and done it, really truly raving this time.”

        “You’re not mad, Beatrix. You’re just in pain, and you’ve lost blood. I see them too, all the time.”

        “You see this all the time? How do you bear it?”

        I smiled, a bit wry. “Not particularly well.”

        “I’m sorry, the things I said to you. I didn’t know—” She bit off her last words and screamed again. Her hand in mine, gripped so tight I couldn’t feel my fingers. The others were standing back in the shadows. Not dragging me out yet. The midwife had a hand outstretched; perhaps she was stopping them. I held Beatrix’s hand until the screaming stopped.

        “It hurts,” she whispered. “Hurts like it’s going to tear me open.”

        “You and your child are going to be fine,” I said.

        “Tell me another. Wait. Marguerite.” She breathed my name. Her eyes widened. “Everyone is watching.”

        Power trembled in my fingertips. All my life I have pushed it back. Afraid of the pain, but even more, afraid of the power. Afraid of what I could do if I let it out. But in the end, it was as easy as opening a window.

        “Don’t be a goose, Beatrix,” I said. I kissed the top of her head, where her skin met her hair, and let it out.

Copyright © 2021 Kate Francia

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Kate Francia is a writer and teacher in the New York area. Her stories have appeared in Electric Lit, Fireside Magazine, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in Speculative Fiction and a BA in Medieval History and Literature from Harvard, where she first became fascinated by fourteenth century female mystic seers. You can find her at katefrancia.com.

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COVER ART

“The Kingdom of Alexandria,” by Jérôme Comentale

Jérôme Comentale is a concept artist in the film and video game industry. He is inspired by everything related to fantasy and is an undisputed fan of natural landscapes. Nature is his main source of inspiration, and he always tries to bring his personal touch to tell a story or build a universe. View more of his work on ArtStation.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

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