Issue#340, Thirteenth Anniversary Double-Issue • Oct. 7, 2021

“The Burning Girl,” by Carrie Vaughn

“Stronger,” by K.J. Parker

“Nemesis and the Sorcerer,” by R.K. Duncan

“Song So Pure and Cruel,” by March McCarron

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

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

THE BURNING GIRL

by Carrie Vaughn

        I was told I must swear fealty to William the Bastard. He had taken England, made himself king, fealty was required. But I did not swear and none could make me. He could kill me, or rather order his men to kill me. But he would not, because he wanted to use me.

        I was never loyal to King William. All my oaths I swore to Sir Gilbert.

        Gilbert—he was fiercely, stupidly loyal to William, so it amounted to the same thing, but never mind. William used Gilbert as he used us all, for what we could do; for the curses we carried. The difference was William owed Gilbert. Gilbert was politic and knew how to ask for favors, such that William granting them seemed like generosity and not indebtedness. And Gilbert used those favors to protect the rest of us. I saw it from the first.

        Other chronicles have written much about those times, when England ceased to be what it had been. The great apocalypse. I will not tell that history over again. Instead I will begin at my place in the tale, the moment I first saw Gilbert.

* * *

        Mother Ursula brought me to the yard in front of the abbey. She stood apart, just out of arm’s reach. She did not want me touching her.

        Three Norman warriors stood waiting. They might have been knights, even. I could not tell such things, but they carried swords and those domed helmets. Their belted tunics were worn, stained with mud and miles. I stopped just outside the door and stared at them. The nuns and novices had gathered in the yard to gape.

        “You must come forward, Joan. Come!” Ursula jerked her hand as if she were calling a dog to be punished.

        One of the knights stood a little ahead of the others. His hood was thrown back. He was clean-shaven, young. Not even crow’s feet at his eyes. He had a serious set to his mouth, as if he bore more responsibility than he expected or wanted.

        Mother Ursula ruled the abbey of St. Edith, but she bowed her head to this young man, deferential. He spoke to her in Latin. I recognized two words: puella incendiara. The burning girl.

        At a gesture from Ursula, one of the nuns ran back to the hall and returned with an unlit candle, one of the big beeswax ones used to light the chapel sanctuary. I knew what this meant: these knights had demanded a demonstration. At the sight of that candle, I nearly cried. I did not understand, did not want to understand, but I knew what was happening.

        Ursula held the candle to me. “You must show Sir Gilbert what you are.”

        “Mother Abbess, you said that I must never—”

        “That doesn’t matter.”

        “But you said that I would be damned—”

        “Joan! If you do not do this for Sir Gilbert, the Norman army will destroy the abbey and all of us with it. Please.”

        Mother Ursula did not have to beg for anything, particularly not from a low-born novice placed here out of charity and fear. A scrawny, awkward novice, coifed and shrouded in threadbare gray and carrying the Devil’s spark. But she begged now.

        I held the candle before me where the Normans could see it. Its weight was potential; the wick beckoned. Already the spark rose up under my skin. Mother Ursula could not put a candle in my hand and expect I would do nothing.

        I touched the wick. The candle lit, a tongue of fire flaring and settling.

        “Mon Dieu.” This was whispered by the wiry, chestnut-haired man standing to Sir Gilbert’s right. The nuns made the sign of the cross.

        Sir Gilbert smiled.

        Her voice was taut with fear even as she sighed with relief. “Joan, you will go with these knights.”

        I swallowed back my racing heart. “I cannot go with them, I cannot go alone with these men—”

        Gilbert raised a hand and spoke softly to the knight on his left, who was tall and somber. This one pulled back a hood—and revealed braided hair, a beardless jaw, and a woman’s eyes. Then he spoke to me in thick and simple English. “You go with Ann. No harm to you.”

        Ursula’s voice was stretched. “You must go with them, child. Or they will destroy us.”

        Gilbert gazed on stonily. Yes, he would destroy the abbey.

        I was being sold to Normans.

        Mother Ursula had never been kind to me. I lived here alone in a stone cell, apart from all the others. No one ever came near me. I was cursed and damned already, whether I stayed with the English or went with the Normans.

        No harm, this man said. I should not believe him, but I wanted to.

        I blew out the candle, set it on the ground, and went to stand before Sir Gilbert. I came up to his shoulder; he seemed to fill the yard all by himself. Gilbert and Ursula exchanged more words in Latin. Then he spoke in Norman-French to the knight on his right, who nodded and ran. No, he did not run; he flew, racing away almost faster than the eye could see, leaving a burst of dust in his wake. A wondrous power. The Devil’s touch.

        I was not the only damned one here.

        Gilbert said in his thick English, “Felix tells army to pass by. No harm. My banner on your door. The abbey, safe.” Ursula’s shoulders slouched and a tear slipped down her cheek.

        How was it that my small life should buy so much? Mother Ursula ought to be grateful, but she did not look at me. Never looked on me again. None of them did, all the nuns and novices. They seemed so cold, and none of them offered to say farewell. They sent me to the enemy with no remorse.

        I had nothing to bring with me but my clothes.

        There were three horses tied up outside the abbey’s low wall. I could not ride, I did not want to ride... But the woman, Ann, was already atop the big gray, and she reached down to me.

        No one had ever been willing to touch my hand, not since I came to St. Edith’s. But she reached to me, took my hand, and pulled. Somehow, I landed in the saddle behind her. As soon as the horse started moving I was sure I would fall off. The big, rolling, jostling movements rattled my head and shook my spine. I wrapped my arms around Ann’s middle and prayed to the God that Mother Ursula had always said would not listen to me.

        Felix came running back within the hour, meeting us on the road. At the abbey, we had thought the army was much farther away, several days’ travel at least, but this man had crossed the distance easily. The horses flinched at the rushing of air and dust that accompanied his skidding stop. He reported to Gilbert, then got up on the third horse, because even someone who could run so fast grew tired.

        We went south and met the harrowing.

* * *

        The last Saxon lords in the north had rebelled, rebelled again, defended poor King Harold’s would-be heir fleeing to Scotland, and finally William the Bastard had enough and sent his army to raze the land.

        To the south and east, farmland and villages burned. We choked on the smoke that filled the sky. Hundreds fled. Whole families with all they owned on their backs or loaded on handcarts filled roads and fields; a river of people stumbled along, staring ahead with blank haunted expressions, the weeping long finished. Even the children were silent. They moved with no destination in mind, just trying to get away, away. We had been safe in the abbey, except there had not been enough to eat. That would get worse. With the farms burned, soon no one would have enough to eat.

        On their big warhorses, Gilbert’s company, so plainly the enemy, cut right through the fleeing crowds. Folk scattered and were left stumbling, as in the eddy of a stream, staring in confusion and consternation. Sometimes, confusion turned to helpless fury and hurled curses. Sometimes, one of them hefted a pitchfork or ax they’d managed to rescue from their burning homes and charged.

        They never came within an arm’s length of Gilbert’s horses. Somehow, they seemed to trip and fall back, or it would be as if they met a wall and stood with unnatural stillness, arms upraised, helplessly cursing. And so Gilbert’s company trotted on fearlessly through a sea of its enemies.

        I stared back at these people who had Saxon features like me, not like these tall, fair Norman warriors. My people, dispossessed of everything, burned out by the Conqueror’s army and fleeing their lands. On horseback, I floated above them, borne away by some fate outside my control. I could fall, I thought. Slide off the back of the horse and run... Or I would break against the hard ground and be finished. I stayed put.

        Ann called to Gilbert, who answered. Felix laughed. I understood nothing. Only that these people had gone to a lot of trouble to get me, and they must need me for some reason. I could not even ask them why.

        At sunset, we stopped at a camp some ways off the road, by some trees near the bend in a stream. A trio of tents were pitched around a rock-ringed fire with a pot set up over it. The smell of cooking stew displaced the smoke. My belly spoke; I hadn’t thought I was hungry. I was also dusty, thirsty, exhausted, morose. Gilbert’s company had dared not stop among the refugees. Even a knight could be brought down by an angry crowd.

        But now, at last, we stopped. Gilbert dismounted, then Felix, who took the reins and led off the horses. From Ann’s horse I looked down at the ground and wondered how I was going to get there. I could not simply swing my leg over the way they could. I tried, and tumbled. But Gilbert caught me and set me upright. Ann dismounted much more elegantly and gave me a wry look. As if I were a chore she’d rather not face.

        I stood planted, uncertain, staring at the three who were already here.

        Sitting with legs crossed was a man with brown skin, dressed in the wool and leather of a warrior. He wore his dark hair in a tail down his back, and a crow perched on his shoulder. Gilbert called him Ibrahim.

        Next was a beautiful woman with cinnamon hair in a long thick braid, wearing a green belted tunic. Her mouth was full and smiling. She studied me closely, so much so that I looked away. For the last five years I had only seen women cloistered and veiled, somber and judgmental. They might have smiled and laughed, but they never did so around me. Rather, they furtively escorted me from my cell to chapel and the garden to work and back, avoiding my touch. As if they might burn just being near me. This woman’s openness was disconcerting.

        The third was a monk of middle years, wearing a thick dark habit, his tonsure well trimmed, a wooden cross around his neck. He rose and came forward, arms wide, and he and Gilbert clapped each other on the shoulders.

        The monk looked past Gilbert to me. “Is this all you found?”

        I brightened. He spoke English.

        “It is,” Gilbert answered, and the monk sighed with what seemed to be sadness.

        “I had hoped... never mind. You are welcome, child. I am Brother Edwin.”

        I tried to say my name, but my mouth stuck.

        “She is Joan,” Gilbert said. “Is shy.”

        The beautiful woman said something quickly and handed a cup to Gilbert. He passed it on to me. “Isabelle asks... thirsty?”

        It was water. I drank it all down and blinked back, at a loss. Gilbert said a word—French for water. I nearly started crying, then. I had not asked to be brought here among strangers. But I did not want to go back. I didn’t belong anywhere.

        “Rest here,” he said, and I folded right there, on the ground by the fire, blinking back tears. I pulled off my veil and coif, baring my head. My cut hair stuck out all over like a nest.

        Felix glanced at me and said something merry. There were chuckles. Gilbert replied curtly, and they subsided. Listening to speech I did not understand made me so very tired. Even my mind became stiff and sore.

        The monk, Edwin, said kindly, “You will have to learn French quickly so you will know when they’re teasing you. They like to tease.”

        “What did he say?”

        “That you look like a kitten thrown in a pond and pulled back out again.”

        “Rescued.”

        “Yes.”

        Isabelle began scooping stew from a pot into bowls, passing them around. The brown man, Ibrahim, took a piece and offered it to the crow on his shoulder, who snapped it up with a clacking bill. The talk went on around me and might as well have been birdsong. A noise in the air.

        Brother Edwin sat nearby, but not too close. Like the nuns at St. Edith. “Have you taken vows, child?”

        “I’m not a child. I’m fifteen.”

        “All right. Have you taken vows?”

        I thought of what would happen if I said yes, or if I said no, and how my answer might change my fate. I could not guess, so I told the truth. “I’m only a novice. I don’t think Mother Ursula would ever let me take vows. She says I am damned.”

        He frowned. “You know you are not. You have only the sins that any of us have.”

        “How do you know?”

        “I believe God made us as we are for a reason.”

        Us. We. What could he do? What power had damned him? I shivered. “God made us, not the Devil?”

        “No, not the Devil,” he said firmly, crossing himself.

        Gilbert studied me. He did not seem to believe I was made by the Devil, either. But he was Norman, what did he know?

        “You, safe here,” Gilbert said. So confident in this declaration. “Belong here.”

        “No one is safe! Your army is burning everything. Everyone will starve—”

        Gilbert glanced at Edwin, who translated. Gilbert’s smile went crooked.

        “I send you back? So they burn you, for what you do?” He broke a stick and threw it in the fire. It seemed to make him angry, that Saxons burned those cursed by the Devil. The Normans did not.

        I stared at the stew in my bowl. I should eat. It smelled good and I was hungry. “They already tried. They put me in the fire, but...”

        I reached into the fire, and the flames parted around my hand. A warm touch, a caress. I picked up the stick Gilbert had thrown in. Drew it out and held it in my palm, watching buttery flames melt harmlessly across my skin. Dropped it back and brushed off the ash. “They put me in the fire and I did not burn.” I had lived in a cell at St. Edith’s ever since, praying for salvation.

        They all stared at me, and yes, there was the fear. Even from them. Just a bit, mixed up with awe and wonder. Except for Gilbert, whose expression softened to kindness.

        The beautiful woman, Isabelle, asked something. Probably, “What did she say?” Edwin answered, and she put her hand over her mouth in horror. Such pity in her eyes. The others, they looked away. Ibrahim said something harsh that was clearly a curse.

        “Child. You should eat, please.” Edwin nodded at my bowl. I only managed a few bites. My eyes stung and everything felt awful. After dark, Isabelle, who seemed very much to want to do something, anything, put a blanket over my shoulders. I flinched at first. She persisted, and so I hugged the cloth close without looking up. Curled up on my side, I stared at the fire that was like a comforting touch, a warmth brushing my cheeks, and fell asleep.

* * *

        I awoke inside one of the tents. I’d been moved and hadn’t known it. The blanket was tucked up around me. I was alone. Calm, and... safe. A muted light painted the canvas, and the soft patter of raindrops fell against it. This promised to be a wet, chilled morning.

        A cry of frustration sounded outside, along with a bit of laughter.

        The rain stopped.

        Scratching my bristly head, I pulled the blanket around me and looked out. The clouds parted as I watched, thick gray breaking up into a golden morning haze. Isabelle stood, arms stretched, a gentle wind flicking the loose strands of hair around her cheeks when no wind touched the nearby trees. She smiled up at the sky, and the clouds moved away with the gestures of her hand.

        Isabelle commanded the weather. I was astonished.

        Edwin saw me watching. “Wouldn’t want to pack up a wet camp, would we?”

        I supposed we would not.

        A small cart pulled by a mule had been drawn up. Tents were folded, cooking pots settled. A bundle of spears was visible under a length of canvas. Ann and Ibrahim were saddling horses.

        Gilbert wore a simple tunic this morning but did not have on his belt and sword.. “Ah! Good morning, Joan. You are well?”

        I scratched my hair again and shrugged. I did not know if I was well. Isabelle beamed and quickly brought over a dish of porridge. She fussed. She seemed so happy to have a thing smaller and more delicate than she was to care for. I gaped at her a bit.

        “Where are we going?” I asked.

        “We wait. For message,” Gilbert said. “Then we know.”

        “You go looking for others like me?”

        He paused, his hand resting on the side of the cart. “There are no others.”

        Brother Edwin had started dismantling the tent behind me, pulling down poles and folding fabric, all by himself with little effort, it seemed. He said, “Have you never met anyone else who had a power? A mirabile?”

        Latin. A wonder. A miracle. I shook my head.

        He took a knife out of his belt, a small and slender utensil for eating. Holding it in both hands, he bent the blade. Folded it on itself as if it were tallow, with no effort at all. He offered it to me, and I could not help but try to bend it back, but it was steel. Gilbert said something in grouchy French.

        Edwin took the knife back and tried to straighten it, but a kink remained, a swerve in the metal. “He says I ruin a lot of knives. He’s right.”

        Meanwhile, Ann knelt near the fire, took off a glove, put a bare hand on the ground—which split open. A small crevice appeared and traveled toward the remaining embers, swallowing them up. With a crunch and puff of dust, the crevice closed back up again, and the fire was out. All clear. She didn’t even glance over to see what I thought. This was just what she did: opened the earth to put out fires.

        I was beginning to be frightened again. More frightened. Each of them... could they all work wonders? It was too much.

        “What do you do?” I asked Gilbert, who was watching me.

        “Never mind,” he said. His smile flickered like a flame and vanished.

        “He’s shy, too,” Edwin said. “One thing our Gilbert does is collect people like us. Good of him, I think. Better than being burned.” Spoken like a man who had avoided being burned, and not the way I had.

        A shadow passed over us—a crow, circling. A second crow; the first was still perched on Ibrahim’s shoulder. He reached up, and the bird tilted its wings and descended, swooping in on a rustle of feathers and coming to land on his gloved hand. He bent his head to the bird’s, murmuring. Speaking to it. That was his miracle.

        Gilbert asked him a question, and Ibrahim answered. Edwin’s expression turned serious.

        “The king has summoned us,” Edwin said. “Well, Joan. You will soon meet William of Normandy himself.”

        William the Bastard. William the Conqueror, who had destroyed the England that had been, and whom Gilbert served.

        What was to become of me?

* * *

        I did not want to meet William of Normandy.

        I also did not want to flee alone into a countryside being razed. Gilbert and his company fed me, at least.

        I did not want to learn French, but I could not help it, the way one could not help but learn a bit of Latin listening to prayers. Especially when Brother Edwin was a good teacher, saying a thing in English and then again in French, all lined up, until the sounds became words and not noise. I tried, but I spoke badly. On my tongue, French words sounded like a goat bleated them, not watery and elegant the way Isabelle said them. But she lit up and praised me excessively whenever I repeated her, so it was hard to refuse.

        Even though my shorn hair made me look like a wet kitten, I left the veil off. I was not a nun, I did not want to be a nun, but that left me a raggedy-haired, gaunt-faced girl, a thing to be pitied. But I was in the sun, at least. Out of the cell. If not free then at least not caged.

        I did not want a lot of things. As for what I did want—how could I tell? I had never been allowed to want anything, and I did not know where to start.

        William’s army was camped a short march away from York, which was still held by Saxon earls and their Danish mercenaries. The others rode, but Edwin walked with the cart, leading the mule, and I walked beside him. We soon encountered the first of the Norman camps. Hundreds of soldiers went helmeted and armored. Wary, they had posted guards, and Gilbert called to them. His banner, a black arrow on gold, hung from a spear tied upright in the cart, marked him.

        The soldiers, Gilbert’s fellow Normans, did not smile at him. Did not banter. They watched him and the rest of us coolly and kept a good distance from us. Gilbert’s own company became somber, traveling among the army. Ibrahim’s crows flew off and stayed away. Gilbert seemed not to notice that William’s soldiers did not like him. That they looked at him the way the nuns of St. Edith’s looked at me.

        Nervously, I wondered if I would know it when we came to the king. If I would recognize him from all the rest of the army. I shouldn’t have worried. The king’s own encampment was large and spread out. Many guards, many camp fires. A muddy road had been worn into the field leading up to it.

        Edwin glanced at me and said to Gilbert, “Perhaps we should make camp and rest awhile before going to see the king.” As if resting would make this any easier. We were all muddy to our knees and smelled of smoke and ash.

        “No,” Gilbert said. He would not delay; he would report to his lord immediately.

        Gilbert’s odd company left the horses and cart with stablemen outside the royal encampment and continued on. Ibrahim and Isabelle hung back; Ann stood apart, glowering. Felix bounced on his feet a little as if he would rather run away. Edwin stood near Gilbert, his chin up. They put me between them, like a prisoner.

        Gilbert said, “His Grace the king... will want to see your fire. You show him? Please?”

        “I could do nothing. He’ll think you made a mistake and that I have no use at all.”

        He tilted his head, an agreement. “I cannot force. And, how you say... I might still send you back. To the abbey. You want this? To go back?”

        “No. Oh, no.” Even after just a few days in the air, I could not go back.

        Brother Edwin said, “Joan, I believe there is... some joy in using this miracle God has granted us.” Gilbert nodded as if to say, yes, that was what he wanted to say.

        He added, choosing each word. “If it comes from God or the Devil... is in its use. Do you help or harm? How do you say...” A string of French. I recognized the word for candle, and light.

        “Have you ever done anything but light candles, he asks,” Edwin said patiently.

        I had taken bits of straw from my bed and scattered them across my cell, then burned them up one by one to see how far I could throw my sparks, and how quickly. I could never do more without being discovered. Without burning down my own room, which wouldn’t have hurt me but would have lost me my home. I did not know how much I could do with my spark.

        Gilbert nodded, understanding. “I want torches,” he said. “Bonfires. Beacons. To see... what is possible.” His tone was mischievous.

        “What is your... miracle? I still don’t know.”

        He merely raised a brow and shrugged.

        We waited in the yard before the grandest tent, and the king emerged, pushing back a flap.

        He was fair-haired, full bearded, broad shouldered. Arms made strong from wielding weapons. He moved with a sureness that obstacles would fall before him. His glare instantly found Gilbert, and he strode forward, unafraid. Conqueror, unconcerned that he was also Bastard. His clothing was rough and sturdy, stained with sweat, his boots scuffed. Not at all dressed like a king, but he did not need to be.

        I shrank back and hid behind Edwin, but the king saw me, studied me.

        Gilbert bowed low and spoke deferentially. William put his hand on Gilbert’s shoulder and raised him up. These two were close. I was fairly certain William said, “What have you found for me, Gilbert?”

        Both Gilbert and Edwin stepped aside, revealing me. I met the king’s gaze. He frowned skeptically. They spoke so quickly that I could not hope to understand.

        Then Gilbert turned to me. “He asks to see fire.”

        William’s army burned the villages and fields of the north with mundane fire, brands and torches they must light themselves. If William ordered me to take part in the burning, I would refuse. Surely Gilbert knew I must refuse.

        “A small thing,” Gilbert said. “Please.” He said the please in French.

        I looked around the camp and all the soldiers staring back at me. None of them knew what I would do. I could burn the tent. I could burn everything. Well, no, I could not. I could start a flame that would be easily put out. I could start a dozen and cause an uproar. And I would be killed in the next moment. I could not be burned, but an arrow through my heart...

        Gilbert’s expression was eager, his eyes alight. I could set fire to the tent and he might not even mind, because at least he could see what I could do. He nodded as if to say, go on, it’s all right.

        It was all right.

        Gilbert wanted bonfires. I wanted them too, I decided. A candle would not impress the king. I could do more than impress him. I could make him afraid.

        Some ways behind the royal tent was a line of picketed horses and a cart full of sheaves of hay. Sheaves of hay were much like a candle, only larger. A spark flared in my palm, and between one thought and the next, a thread of smoke rose up from the top of the pile. Tongues of flame danced along a dozen stalks of hay, which burst into flames until the whole cart was engulfed.

        Horses squealed and spooked, men cried out. Some ran away, others ran forward with buckets of water, but the fire burned very hot, and the hay and cart were quickly consumed and fell to ash, with only a few embers and stray flames remaining.

        William crossed himself. Gilbert laughed, a big, triumphant sound. That of a boy showing off some great feat.

        He was not afraid of me. He... was not afraid.

* * *

        After that, William took Gilbert aside, near his great tent, to speak with him. His somber knights and lords stood intently at his back. Ignoring the flurry of panic as his soldiers put out the fire and calmed the horses, William made urgent gestures and seemed to be pleading with Gilbert, who shook his head.

        The rest of us clustered together, a wide space around us. Any who passed us did so with wary, sidelong glances and often crossed themselves. It was tiresome. Edwin attempted a comforting smile. I was not comforted. A crow flew in and perched on Ibrahim’s shoulder. It squawked and muttered, anxiously kneading its claws on his tunic. As worried as the rest of us. He finally whispered to it and it flew off.

        Their voices became shouts, in angry French. I recognized a few words. Gilbert saying now and then, But... if you please... sir... and the king replying, You must. You will. I command it. Gilbert gestured. The king stood implacably. Gilbert pleaded. The king touched his shoulder in a way that would have seemed like camaraderie, if Gilbert’s head hadn’t bowed the moment William turned away.

        Felix cursed. Isabelle covered her face with her hands. Ibrahim and Ann merely frowned fatalistically.

        “What are they saying?” I asked. “They speak too fast. What did they say?”

        Edwin’s lips worked, uncertain, but finally he explained, “The king wants us to take York.”

        The great walled northern city. The stronghold of the last Saxon lords of England.

        I said, “He wants you to help take York...”

        “No.” Edwin smiled weakly. “This task he has given to Gilbert’s company alone.”

* * *

        The awful and astonishing truth of it was that Gilbert’s company might just be able to do it. Six people to break a siege and end any further opposition to William’s rule.

        Without a word, Sir Gilbert led his company back to the horses and cart and brought them to camp apart from William’s army. I could not tell if he wished for them to be alone or if the rest of the army did not want them too close. Gilbert served the king, but he was not part of the king’s army, not really.

        “Can you do the honor?” Edwin asked me, putting together fuel and kindling for the cook fire.

        “You will forget how to light fires yourself.” I knelt and put my hand on the wood, breathed out, and felt flames rise up. Useful flames, contained, after a whole life of being told never to do such things.

        Gilbert finally broke his silence when food was set to cooking. He spoke in French, but his tone was that of a man making plans. I understood some of it. Words like walls and river and fall. Gilbert said rain and wind while looking at Isabelle, and watch while looking at Ibrahim. Break the gate while looking at Edwin, who nodded somberly and did not seem to mind that he made war against his own people.

        Because they weren’t really his people. His own people were here, with Gilbert.

        I could imagine it. How Ann could undermine the walls, how Edwin’s strength could tear a gate off its hinges, how Felix could knock weapons out of the defenders’ hands and be gone before they knew he’d been there, and how Isabelle could bring torrential rains and fog. Ibrahim’s birds could watch from high above and carry messages to Gilbert about the city’s weaknesses and where to strike next. Gilbert himself... I did not know what he could do. After they broke open the walls and routed the defenders, William’s army would come to occupy the city. Simple, yes?

        Gilbert did not look at me. He did not make me part of the plan. Even though... I could make so much destruction, if I wanted.

        “What about me?” I asked finally.

        “You stay with Ibrahim and Isabelle,” Gilbert said. Ibrahim’s sword would protect us while his birds scouted. Then he chuckled a little. “William, he thinks your fire makes us, how you say... invincible. But I will not ask you to fight against your people.”

        Gilbert was not asking me to burn the city. I could. I had not seen York, but I had heard of its walls of stone, its stone churches and abbeys. However, the houses within would be wood and thatch, and I could send fire to them, too much fire for the people to put out, and Isabelle could send wind to fan the flames, and Ann build up earthworks and dig moats so that no one could escape—

        It was too easy to think about. I did not want to burn the city. Gilbert did not ask, so that I would not have to say no. I hugged my legs to my chest and stayed quiet.

        After some back and forth the plan was settled. We would set out in the morning, in secret. Gilbert urged his company to sleep. He touched my shoulder and smiled kindly before going off to his tent.

        If I was going to run away, this would have been the night to do it. I could even make my way to York and warn the defenders... And then what? They could not defend against what was coming. And if they learned what I was, they would not be kind.

        “You are uncertain,” Edwin said to me. In English. Strange, to suddenly understand every word in a sentence after feeling slow and stupid.

        “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

        “Gilbert thinks it isn’t fair to ask you to be part of this. You are so young, and your talents still untried.”

        “I need to practice first, he thinks.”

        “You need to learn your own mind, first.”

        He and Gilbert seemed so different on the one hand, a monk and a warrior, age and youth. But they also, strangely, seemed to journey the same path.

        “How did you learn yours?” I asked.

        “I am called by God. My abbey... turned me out. Gilbert was there waiting. Saxon or Norman, I believe God’s message to me was clear. This is a good man and I do not regret following him.”

        “Even if it means making war against Saxons?”

        He chuckled a little. “I am from the south. Some would say the men of the north are barely my countrymen, their Danish blood is so thick and their manners so rude. But... I think we can take the city more quickly and more cleanly than William’s army, and I believe that would please God.”

        “But how do you know?”

        “Goodness, child. I don’t. I can’t. I pray a lot. But you know you are safer here, with us, than anywhere else in England right now, yes?”

        I believed that, yes.

* * *

        Gilbert led us cross-county on a route Felix and Ibrahim scouted to avoid burning fields and fleeing refugees. We left the camp and horses behind, traveling light. I got to see what it meant to live as a warrior in the world.

        We crossed one of the rivers and found a small rise from which to view the city. The famous walls were a gray haze in the distance, so that the city seemed like a lurking creature. Ibrahim’s birds flew over and returned to tell him what they saw.

        Gilbert altered the plan. Edwin would go first, approach the gate, tell them what was about to befall them, and ask for surrender.

        “They’ll kill him! Even if he is a monk!” I said, in English. But I had understood enough of the French to be able to respond. Gilbert raised a brow at me, to acknowledge.

        “Not with sword or arrow they won’t,” Edwin said, wearing a wry half smile. “What gives me my strength makes me so that weapons cannot harm me. I’ll be fine.” He could have been the greatest warrior in all the world. But he was a monk.

        So he went to the city, and no one was worried at all.

        He returned at dusk. The defenders had laughed, and he did not seem surprised.

        “Tomorrow,” Gilbert said, and urged us all to get some sleep.

* * *

        I could not sleep. We did not have a fire, to keep Saxon scouts from finding us. Our camp was in a small glen, but if I walked just a few paces up the hill, I could see the nighttime city, alight with the glow of torches. Soldiers on the wall were just visible, walking back and forth, blocking the light when they did. The orange light of flames, misted with smoke.

        Too far to send the spark under my skin, but I imagined I could still feel the fires calling to me.

        Ann was pretending to sleep. Isabelle was not; I could see her eyes gleaming in starlight as she lay, staring up. Ibrahim and Felix set a watch, though Gilbert had said it was not needed. Owls would tell Ibrahim if danger came close. Edwin had propped himself up against a tree and seemed to sleep, but I was sure he also was pretending. I sat hugging my knees, too afraid of what would happen if I closed my eyes.

        Gilbert came and sat near me. He seemed so calm. He had probably been in battles before. “You... not tired?”

        I was very tired. The world was tiring, and French was a muddle in my head, and I would never forget the smell of burning villages as long as I lived.

        “Why do... this?” I asked.

        “Do what?” he said wearily, and I thought, aha, he does feel the weight of this.

        I could not think of how to say it in French, so I mixed up the words. But he understood me. “Fight William’s battles for him.”

        “I swear to serve. Fealty,” he said, lip curled, as if the English word for it felt strange.

        “But why?”

        “To be a knight... is to serve.”

        “And win lands and favor,” Edwin put in archly from his spot by his tree. So no, he did not sleep.

        “Then you do it for the reward?”

        Gilbert scowled. “You ask many questions.”

        I sagged. “Because I don’t understand anything. Brother Edwin, why do you follow Gilbert and wage war against your own people?”

        “We talked about this already. You should sleep.” He snugged more firmly against the tree and still did not sleep.

        “Why does Isabelle follow you?”

        She blinked bright brown eyes at Gilbert. “What does she say?”

        That was French. I understood it. I had asked that exact question myself so often. The language was seeping into me.

        “She asks why you follow me,” Gilbert said, and I understood that too.

        “Gilbert is a good man,” she said, and continued with words I did not know.

        Gilbert explained, “She say... she had nothing, before. Was lost. And... this is her family now.”

        “And the others? Would they all say the same?”

        “Do not know,” he said, picking at grass. “I do not know why. Why me, why... this. I do not know. But I do know—we are safer together than apart. We stay together, we are safe.”

        How could he say he felt safe, how any of them could be safe, when he would lead them against the walled city in the morning?

        Gilbert looked at me and spoke English. “You not trust me.”

        “No. I don’t know. I don’t know what I should think.”

        He chuckled. “Then... know what you want? If you could choose.”

        I thought a moment. I didn’t know what was possible to want. I was such a child. “To grow out my hair,” I said finally, scratching my head, the nest that was still too short to brush out but getting too long to leave alone.

        “Done. No one will make you cut your hair.”

        He could declare it, just like that. “To see the ocean. I have never seen the ocean.”

        “When this over? We see ocean.”

        I considered. “And I would like a great hall with a hundred servants.”

        He laughed. “I also like that.” And his smile fell. “Sleep, Joan. Sleep now.” He pulled a blanket over his shoulders and moved a little ways off. He closed his eyes but didn’t sleep any more than the rest of us.

* * *

        In the morning, Edwin set aside his monastic robes and wore a warrior’s garb like the others. He, Ann, Felix, and Gilbert gathered to approach the city. Even knowing what they were, I still did not believe they could do anything against the walls and all the soldiers there.

        They left Ibrahim, Isabelle, and me behind.

        Gilbert gave instructions. I understood only a few words—signal, crows, and storm—but I did not have to ask what would happen. Ibrahim clasped his hand and nodded. A dozen crows perched in trees around us, cawing and muttering. He signaled to them, and they took to the air in a flurry of black wings. One stayed behind, taking up a post on his shoulder.

        “Be safe, sir,” Isabelle said, and stood on her toes to kiss Gilbert’s cheek. Then she put her arm over my shoulder. “We watch. It is well.” She said more, but that was all I understood.

        We stayed sheltered by a stand of alders. I had nothing to do but watch.

* * *

        For the next few hours, we watched the city, which remained unchanging to my eyes. Whatever was happening, I could not see it. I had never seen a battle and could not guess what one looked like. The plain outside the city was hazy with a winter chill.

        Ibrahim shaded his eyes suddenly. “There,” he said.

        The haze shifted. A puff of dust rose, as when we shook out rugs and blankets in the abbey yard. Then, part of the wall that ran along the river seemed to fold. A crack broke the stone, and the whole thing fell inward, as if pushed by giant hands. The low rumbling sound of breaking stone reached us a moment later. The falling structure must have crushed a dozen men.

        “Ann,” Ibrahim said with a smile, and it took me a moment to recognize he’d said the name and not some other word. The next thing that happened: a crow cried out as it flapped overhead. “Now, Isabelle.”

        She stepped forward and raised her arms.

        The wind came up so fiercely it brought a mass of dust that scoured the top of the remaining length of wall. I almost believed I could hear shouting, screams of men falling. It was my imagination, though, because the storm roared; I could hear nothing else. Isabelle stood serenely. The ends of her hair tossed a little; her skirt rippled. Her hand was upraised as if she greeted approaching travelers. She donned a small satisfied smile. There is some pleasure in being useful. Using what we could do instead of hiding away.

        She was so kind and cheerful she could not be a tool of the Devil, but then this was exactly the sort of deception the Devil would offer, wasn’t it? So fair, so powerful.

        What more Gilbert’s company did, we could not see from here. Ibrahim watched for crows that would return to tell him how things progressed. But the crows didn’t speak first. A chorus of chattering erupted, a dozen or more songbirds in the trees around us.

        “Down!” Ibrahim shouted, grabbing my arm and pulling me to the ground. Isabelle dropped, and arrows flew over us, thudding into tree trunks. Ibrahim reached for her. She took his hand, and we lay still a moment, hiding, holding our breaths for what came next. The birds still screamed warnings; this wasn’t over.

        Ibrahim tilted his head, looked, and cursed. I saw it, then. The arrows had traveled in the wrong direction; they did not come from the city but from the south. From the direction of the Norman camp. Soldiers—wearing domed helmets, dressed in Norman tabards—appeared soon after, a pair with swords and a pair with bows, trotting toward the copse.

        “But why?” I exclaimed.

        Ibrahim stood and drew his sword. “You two, run. Find Gilbert. Run!”

        Isabelle got to her feet, clenching her fists at her side. “No, I won’t—”

        Ibrahim tried to argue. “Isabelle!”

        She joined her hands together and slammed them down as if swinging an ax.

        Such wind. A terrible, ear-shattering, scouring wind rose up from nowhere and blasted through the trees. Ibrahim put his arm up to protect his face and sheltered behind her. The soldiers—they tried to keep their feet. They tried to press forward toward their quarry. The bow was ripped out of an archer’s hand. Another stumbled and tried to crawl forward on hands and knees.

        Ibrahim hissed at me, “Joan, you run. Find Gilbert.” His crows could not fly in this storm.

        More soldiers came up behind the first. They circled ‘round. I did not know if Isabelle would be able to stop them all. Ibrahim would defend her with his sword, as much as he could—

        “Run!” he said.

        I ran, hoping the archers would not see me and take aim, my breath catching in my throat with every step. The wind fell away the moment I left the trees. Isabelle aimed her power like a spear.

        Another group of Norman soldiers advanced up the river, swords drawn. They had waited until the city fell, until Gilbert’s company had done their work... and now, the army had no more use for such dangerous tools. Gilbert had said I would be safe...

        Where was Gilbert? How could I find him? I glanced overhead, looking for crows, and saw none. Not until I came upon a dead one in the field, with an arrow through it. They were killing Ibrahim’s crows.

        What could I burn? I had nothing to burn.

        A burst of wind passed by. This one was brief, stopping abruptly as Felix skidded in a cloud of dust. “Joan!”

        I cried. The tears just came out. “I must find Gilbert, where is Gilbert—” My jumble of English and French was incomprehensible, even to me, and Felix just stared. I asked, “Gilbert?”

        “Soldiers hunt us,” he said, or I thought he said. “Gilbert is there, west. He tells me to warn—”

        “Ibrahim and Isabelle!” I pointed back the way I had come. “They fight, they need help!”

        He looked up the hill to our shelter, consternation twisting his features. The trees no longer bent in a fierce wind, and I did not know what that meant. What had happened to Isabelle?

        Felix shuffled his feet, seeming torn between running back to Gilbert or helping Ibrahim and Isabelle. “Go help them,” I said.

        “But you...” He spoke quickly, of course he did, though I only understood a few words. How will you be safe?

        He barely knew me. None of them did. Why should they look after me?

        I could not explain further than I already had. The spark was building under my skin. “Them, help them!” I said, and pushed him.

        He vanished in wind and dust. I kept on toward the city.

        Up ahead, near the break in the walls, I saw the signs of what must have been battle. The chaos I had looked for earlier. Dust and shouting, soldiers falling. All of it centered on one figure. I approached as if invisible, my gray robe part of the dust around me. As I watched, details resolved.

        And I swear on my knees before the Blessed Virgin that Sir Gilbert was holding off an army all by himself, with no weapon.

        He reached out his arm as if to stay stop—and they stopped. Soldiers fell back as if they had crashed headlong into a wall and then were dragged through the dirt away from him. He did not need a sword when his attackers could not get within thirty paces of him. He kept them away by will alone. This was his power: to move a thing without touching it. He kept a space around him, knocking down his assailants, over and over. He could have crushed them all, snapped their necks with a thought. But he was trying not to kill his fellow Normans. My God, why try to keep them alive when they meant to murder him?

        At first they came at him in a melee, charging from all sides as if each raced to be the one to reach him first, to strike the killing blow, though none of them could. Then some commander shouted, and they organized. In clusters of three or four men, they circled ‘round him. Gilbert turned this way and that, trying to keep them all in view, the group in front of him, the one to the side, the one behind. This one attacked from the rear, and Gilbert spun, slashed his hand in a shoving gesture, and the men fell back as before. But as he turned around, the second group struck, and as he flung them back the third group moved, and so he did not have time between one attack and the next to gather his defense.

        He was growing weary. The power seemed like it came from air, as if made of spirit, but it took strength and effort to use, and he could not do this forever.

        The plain outside the walls was littered with the remains of the old siege and past battles. Broken wagons, shattered barrels, half-burned timbers. The planks of the nearby wooden gate. The clothing of the men who attacked. Their bodies.

        They did not see me approach because they were not looking for me. Why should they notice a scrawny girl with a nest for hair, in a place like this? The spark rose up from my bones, along my skin. It crackled across my palms, between my fingers. I sent it out.

        A broken wagon exploded into a bonfire. The scraps of wood around it caught next, then the dried grasses around that. A path of fire grew up around me. So much fire. I shaped a wall of it between Gilbert and his attackers. Between them and me. For a moment, the fire wavered, reaching toward me, hesitating as if it resisted me. Who could ever tell fire what to do?

        Me. The flames cowered from me, and I commanded Hell to give way.

        I pushed it, as Gilbert had pushed back his attackers. I swept my arms out, as Isabelle did when she steered the winds, and sent it on two different paths, breaking like a river around a stone. Flames made a ring around Gilbert, then spread away from him, sparks jumping to spear shafts, to tunics, to beards. Men screamed and fled.

        In the middle of it all Gilbert crouched, arms over his head. Sheltering, waiting for death to take him.

        I ran to him through the wall of flame. He saw me, and understanding shone in his eyes. I thought he might command me to stop, to quell the flames, but he did not.

        The fire began to die out on its own, when there was nothing left to burn. The roaring faded to a crackle, the oven to a mere throat-closing heat. But the noise of devouring flames and the screams of its victims seemed to linger for a long time, as if the sounds stuck in the air like a summer haze and could not settle.

        The stench was awful. I had never smelled air like this, after fire had burned so much.

        Gilbert unbowed himself and straightened. Across the length of just a few paces, we looked at each other. I could not move. I rubbed soot-scratched eyes and realized I’d been crying. Tears, stung by the smoke.

        He crossed the space, put his arm around my shoulders and kissed the top of my head. The touch... calmed me. We were alive.

        “You should not be here,” he said. “You should be safe, elsewhere.”

        “But they attacked. Ibrahim told me to run—”

        He held my shoulders and looked at me. “Ibrahim? Isabelle?”

        “I don’t know,” I said, crying.

        He swore roughly, using words I had not yet learned. He surveyed the field of battle, all the scorched bodies and the last of the soldiers still fleeing. I expected him to chide me for killing them, but he did not. His eyes had gone hooded, dark. As if he were looking upon another battlefield in the past.

        I made a guess. “There was a moment when your power saved William, wasn’t there? And so he owes you everything. What did you do for him?”

        Gilbert wiped a hand down his exhausted face, smearing soot across his skin. “Did you hear... how King Harold died? Exactly how?”

        Stories came to us at the abbey three years ago about the arrival of the invaders, Harold’s flight to stand against them, and the battle. “There was an arrow...”

        He spoke in English, perhaps wanting to make sure I understood.

        “I made the arrow fly. Guided it.” He made a gesture in the air, following a wobbly flight. “Where it might... inspire awe and terror. I send the arrow... straight into Harold’s eye. So that people tell stories of it. So that they fear William forever.” He shook his head, said a phrase in French. Saw me uncomprehending and tried again. “William knights me... there on the field at Hastings. I was seventeen. So yes, he owes me... much. Too much, some think. They think to remove me. Forget the debt. The north beaten, they think... no longer need me. Us. Merde.”

        I could guess what that word meant.

        “You think... King William ordered his men to kill you here?”

        “Him. His vassals. Anyone who thinks... William gives too much favor to such as us. I will learn why.”

        Scorched Norman helmets lay scattered around us. Huddled shapes that were burned bodies if I looked too closely, so I looked away. This was what Mother Ursula and the others had always been afraid of, that I could burn them all if I chose. I looked at my hands. They tingled with the spark that still lingered there, and the soot and ash smelled like power.

        And still, Gilbert did not fear me.

        Gilbert sighed. “Come, we go find others.” He patted my shoulder and scanned the sky, looking for crows. “There.” He pointed to a black speck wheeling against the high clouds and waved. This meant Ibrahim must still be alive, and that made me glad. The speck turned sharply and flew off toward the river.

* * *

        We met Ann and Edwin on the way. He was carrying her, in all her armor, as if she were light as a child. She had an arrow stuck in her right shoulder, and a river of blood matted her tunic.

        “Ann!” Gilbert cried in anguish and rushed to them.

        “I’m fine,” she muttered, but her breaths came shallow and she was limp in Edwin’s grasp.

        “She will be if I can get water and bandages to take this out,” Edwin said.

        “You should not move her!”

        “Soldiers were coming,” Edwin said, his expression like stone. “I thought it best we move.”

        “Yes. Up the river to the trees, come.” Gilbert patted his shoulder, murmured words I couldn’t make out, and Ann smiled.

        Edwin blinked at me as if startled. “Joan, child, what are you doing here? You were supposed to stay safe with—”

        “We were attacked,” I said. “They found us in the trees.”

        “Oh dear God.” His face drew long and he suddenly looked old. “Ibrahim, Isabelle—”

        “Talk later, come,” Gilbert said. He’d drawn his sword. We traveled up river, slower than Gilbert liked because of Ann.

        There came a whoosh of air, a now familiar puff of dust, and Felix suddenly stood nearby. “I’ve found you! Thank God!” His eyes were wide, shining.

        “Felix! The others—”

        “They are alive. They’ll be along soon. Ann, oh God—”

        “I’m fine,” she muttered, scowling. Felix looked as if he might cry.

        We reached the first stand of trees along the river and could go no farther. Edwin set Ann down; she groaned. Felix knelt beside her and helped Edwin cut away her tunic. I looked away.

        Felix said, “That’s a Norman arrow in her. Gilbert, what happened?”

        Gilbert was keeping watch across the plain. There were soldiers moving toward the city; none were coming here. He spoke quickly, tiredly. I caught a bit: the king, and we are too dangerous.

        None of them seemed surprised by what he said. They might have expected this for a long time. Since Hastings, even. His enemies had waited until the city was taken, the northern rebellion crushed, the last hard job done, before breaking William’s best tool.

        Edwin explained to me in English, so I understood better: “Gilbert’s enemies could make it look like we died in battle. The king might question it, or might not.”

        “What if it’s the king who ordered it?” I said.

        Gilbert looked sharply at me. “I not believe it. I go speak with him.” Standing, he brushed the dust off.

        Edwin said. “You cannot. You dare not.”

        He spoke French slowly, because he was tired, not for my benefit. “Take care of Ann. Have Ibrahim send a crow to me when he finds you. If I am not back by nightfall, go to Scotland. Seek shelter there.”

        “Gilbert—”

        He sighed. “I am sorry. I am... so sorry.”

        “I’m going with you.” Felix stood, rolling back his shoulders, straightening his spine. Pretending he was not exhausted.

        “No, I do this alone—”

        “No, you don’t.”

        “Gilbert. He goes with you,” Edwin said.

        Gilbert nodded.

        I wanted to go, too. I did not want to leave Gilbert’s side. But then Edwin asked me to make a small fire for heating water. For cleaning wounds. We made bandages from the hems of our tunics.

* * *

        Ibrahim and Isabelle found us. Her dress was torn, and he had a bloody bandage around his arm in the same color fabric. The crow on his shoulders had ruffled feathers and a crooked wing, as if something had broken it. It snuggled close to his neck.

        She saw me and ran. “Joan! Thank God!”

        Somehow I knew I should stand and let her wrap me in a fierce, enveloping hug. I even let myself sink into her arms, and the muscles of my back unclenched, just a little. And I cried.

        “Gilbert?” Ibrahim asked. Edwin explained, and Isabelle fussed over Ann.

        As the sun sank west, we worried.

        “How does he think we would get to Scotland?” I asked Edwin. I had stopped being able to speak French. I did not care.

        “I do not know,” he said. Ann and Isabelle slept. Ibrahim kept watch. Crows flew to him, and away, over and over, and he did not seem to like what they told him.

        “Ibrahim?” Edwin asked.

        “He is with the king. Still.”

        “We should have just left for Scotland. All of us,” Edwin muttered.

        We waited. A hawk came and perched in the tree overhead; it held a rabbit in its talons, which it let loose into Ibrahim’s hands. He thanked it.

        Far more useful than fire, to have birds bring you food. Edwin set to dressing and cooking it.

        “Edwin. I don’t want to go to Scotland,” I said.

        “It isn’t nightfall yet.”

        But the sun was almost set.

        Far overhead, a crow cried out—and Ibrahim looked up, listened a moment, and smiled.

        Felix raced into our camp a moment later. He slid to a halt, breathless, and spoke too quickly for me to make out words. A blur of speech. He sounded annoyed. Ibrahim laughed.

        Edwin raised a brow. “Felix always hopes to beat Ibrahim’s crows with news. So far the crows are winning.”

        “What do they say?” I asked. The news can’t have been bad, if Felix left Gilbert alone.

        Felix grinned. “Gilbert comes. He will tell you himself.”

        Ann and Isabelle woke. Ann sat up and seemed in less pain, now that the arrow was removed. She scowled a lot, which Edwin took as a good sign. Ibrahim made Felix eat; he devoured a haunch of rabbit by himself.

        We waited for Gilbert, who finally appeared as we were building up the fire to stand against the dark. We did not have to decide how to flee to Scotland.

        Edwin stood to greet him. Took him by the shoulder, as he had done when Gilbert first brought me to them. But this time he almost seemed to be holding Gilbert up. Edwin guided him to the fire, and Gilbert looked around at each one of us, as if reassuring himself that we had survived.

        “What happened?” Isabelle finally asked.

        He asked for water; she handed him a flask and the last of the roast rabbit. He ate and drank in silence for a moment. Ann was even propped on her good elbow, watching. This small family. I felt safe here, and that was a wonder.

        “William,” he said finally. “William...” I did not have enough French to understand exactly what he said, and he spoke so low. The others did not seem entirely pleased.

        What I thought he said was that he had given King William an ultimatum: either reward Gilbert as he ought, for so much service. Or dispose of him openly, without subterfuge, if he feared Gilbert’s power. Gilbert had said that—or close to it—directly to the Conqueror. It was wondrous.

        “And?” Edwin breathed.

        Gilbert took a long drink and smiled. “I have been granted land in Wessex. With a great hall of our own.” He looked at me and winked. “No hundred servants, not yet. But we will be safe. For a time.”

* * *

        And so we came to live in Wessex. My hair grew long, and Isabelle taught me to braid it up. Gilbert still went out to fight for William. Often I went with him. With practice, I learned to light a candle from a hundred paces and destroy a timbered hall in a single burst of flame. William’s enemies often laid down their arms, just knowing Gilbert and his company were present. My spark longed to be used, but I tamed it well enough.

        Eventually, I learned French well enough to make myself a nuisance, but I mostly spoke English when I was angry, or sad, or willful. My new family gave me the freedom to be willful.

        Brother Edwin is writing this down. He says that the chroniclers of the time are concerned with kings and battles, and they will say that Harold died with an arrow in his eye but not who made that happen. They will not write the name of a small Saxon girl with a spark under her skin, but that they should, and so he’ll do it. I do not know that it matters. What matters to me is no longer being afraid that I am cursed. If being cursed means living this life, and not being locked up in the lonely cell at St. Edith’s, then I will be cursed, and I will not mind it.

        That is what Sir Gilbert gave to me, and I love him for it.

Copyright © 2021 Carrie Vaughn.

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Carrie Vaughn’s work includes the Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Bannerless, the New York Times Bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, over twenty novels and upwards of one hundred short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. Her most recent novel, Questland, is about a high-tech LARP that goes horribly wrong and the literature professor who has to save the day. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

STRONGER

by K.J. Parker

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth—Matthew 5:5

        “How much to write a letter?” I asked him.

        He gave me a business smile. “That depends,” he said.

        “On what?”

        “On whether it’s a fairly ordinary, straightforward sort of thing, where I can use one of my standard precedents, or if I’ve got to make it all up out of my head. If all I’ve got to do is copy it out and fill in the blanks, four obols. If I’ve got to be creative, six to nine.”

        “Right,” I said. “Well, it’s a letter to the parents of the girl I love with all my heart and soul, telling them how I’ve just watched their daughter being dragged away screaming by soldiers and loaded on a ship to be taken as a sacrifice to the Black Island and eaten by a monster.”

        He looked at me. “That’ll be one drachma.”

* * *

        Every morning, ever since I was a small kid, I wake up, turn my head just a little, and look out through the window. I see the light blue sky and the dark blue sea and the promontory, with the temple a blaze of white, and the white gold of the sand, and the red and white sails of ships. I see warmth and beauty and the joy of life. And then I remember and think, Oh.

        You can’t see the Black Island from Castletown because the promontory is in the way, but it’s easily the most visible thing in the city. You can see it everywhere, in everything; in the frayed hems of worn-out clothes and the split seams of boots, in the bald heads and hunger rashes and sunken eyes of starving children, in the bull’s head insignia of the guards on every street corner. Lately I see it all the time, in my mirror.

        He owns a mirror, you’re saying to yourself; a rich bastard. Well, quite. One death and I’d be the richest bastard in Castletown. But that death would be my father, so I’m in no hurry. And yes, my father is a rich man. He owns a ship, two fishing smacks, seven farms, six orchards, two vineyards, a lime kiln, a copper mine, a foundry, a wheelwright’s shop, an olive press, half a ton of bronze ingots, and the only mountain on the island, which just happens to be covered in valuable timber. So yes, I have a mirror while there are people out there who don’t have enough to eat. But the mirror belonged to my mother, so it’s not going anywhere. One of my earliest memories was watching her holding it while she combed her hair. So I keep the stupid mirror, because I look at the back of it and I see her. Then I turn it round and see myself, and in my eyes a reflection of the Black Island.

        My father and I don’t work all those ships, farms, orchards, workshops and forests on our own. We employ about a hundred men and women and we pay good wages. I have nothing to feel guilty about.

* * *

        The last thing she said to me was: I won’t have to go, will I? Promise me.

        “I promise,” I said. “It’s all fine. We’ve fixed the lottery.”

        She breathed out, as though she’d been holding her breath for ever. “How?” she asked. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

        We were sitting under the crooked fig tree, looking out over the bay as the fishing boats came back in. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s all arranged. Lexias is this year’s lottery commissioner. He works for us at the mill, and he’s got a family, and debts. He guarantees he can fix it.”

        She smiled. All her life, she’d been terrified that one day it would be her turn. “You have no idea,” she said, “how good that feels.”

        I hate the fact that I’m stupid. Lexias worked for us, but Philopoemen swooped in and bought up the mortgages on his seven acres of scrub and gravel; Philopoemen has three daughters and two sons. If Philopoemen foreclosed, he could take Lexias’ wife and kids as part payment for the mortgage and sell them to the Sherden, and Lexias would never see them again. I like Philopoemen, he’s a good, kind man with a sense of humour, but when you’re scared out of your head, you do things that normally you wouldn’t countenance. Like extortion, or rigging the lottery, like I’d tried to do.

        Afterwards, I went to see Lexias. I happened to have an axe-handle with me. He made no effort to defend himself. I wanted to keep hitting him till there was nothing left I could recognise, but when he just knelt there, not even shielding his head with his arms, I sort of ran out of enthusiasm. He kept saying how sorry he was. If he’d tried to argue the toss, I’d have smashed his head in. As it was, what was I supposed to do, for crying out loud? Philopoemen had done what I’d planned to do, only better. So I gave him three drachmas and came home.

        “Could’ve been worse,” my father said. “Could’ve been you.”

        That, of course, is what’s wrong with love. My father loves me as much as I loved her, so I couldn’t even put a rope round my neck or open a vein. I shot a hare once, and the arrow passed through its hind quarter and stuck in a tree stump, pinning the hare down until I could get to it and break its neck. Love is the arrow that pins us down so we can’t escape.

* * *

        Once upon a time we were just us. Our great-great-great-you-name-it grandparents came here, found the island empty, and got stuck in. After a while, they found they could make a living and a little bit over. It’s not a bad place. There’s a river and seventeen wells, so water is rarely a problem. Apart from the mountain, whose slopes are covered in useful trees, the land is good for growing things; barley down on the flat, vines and olives in the hills, provided you don’t mind half-killing yourself piling up rocks to build terraces. Quite good soil in the river valley. The copper mine—call it a mine, it’s a bare patch on the north side of the mountain, like a scab you keep picking at so it never heals. But you can scrabble about for a day and fill six bushel baskets with ore, for which the Sherden will give you six drachmas. My great-grandfather built the lime kiln, and ever since we’ve been able to put a bit of heart back into the land. Most of what we don’t need for ourselves we sell to the Sherden, who rip us off savagely, but my father’s ships make four trips a year to Long Island, where they give us four times what the Sherden pay. Left to ourselves—

        But we weren’t.

        Once upon a time, they were just them. But monstrous creatures from the north, crook-backed savages who shot from the saddle and ate babies, drove them from their homes until they reached the sea and had nowhere else to go. So they built ships, and eventually after many cruel wanderings they reached the Black Isle. It’s a fertile country, they say, deep-soiled, well-watered. Left to themselves they’d have been happy there.

        But they didn’t get vacant possession. He was there before them, before everyone, left over from some earlier phase of existence, overlooked when the rest of the world was made safe for mortal men. They say he’s nine feet tall with the body of a man and the head of a bull, unimaginably strong, perpetually hungry. He ate the whole complement and crew of the first of their ships. They shot arrows and threw spears at him, but he barely noticed. Only when he’d quite finished cracking the bones for the marrow did he turn his head and look at the rest of them. The calculating expression on his face they put down to mental arithmetic.

        So they made a deal. He would leave them to themselves, provided they fed him.

        At first they gave him their own men, women, and children, but that obviously wasn’t sustainable. So they built more ships, sailed out into the open waters of the Friendly Sea, and started taking islands. To begin with they’d appear out of the darkness just before dawn and snatch five or a dozen from the houses nearest the harbour, but that was too uncertain. Why hunt when you can farm? So they made a deal.

        First, because from now on they’d be too busy patrolling and guarding and keeping law and order to do their own farming, they took a sixth of every kind of produce. They didn’t just grab a percentage out of the air, they sat down and figured it out, with the aid of surveys, statistics, demographic theory, and differential calculus—oh, they’re a very advanced people, as they keep on reminding us; they were calculating the recurrence of comets and predicting eclipses when we were still chipping axes out of flint. They used this superior knowledge to work out exactly what we needed to keep ourselves fed and tolerably healthy, and they took the rest. Their revenue collection directorate has a motto: the good shepherd shears his sheep, he doesn’t skin them.

        The other form of revenue was also calculated to a nicety, based on birth rates, infant mortality levels, labour requirements, the average useful working life of the average useful worker. They settled on twelve young men and twelve young women, once a year; the surplus. Remove the surplus, they told us, and you get stability. Stability brings security, security brings content. Do as you’re told and pay your taxes and leave everything else to us, and you’ll be happy as fleas on a dog.

        Not an idle promise. The good shepherd doesn’t just shear. He clips feet, dags the caked shit off tails, wards off predators, and rotates grazing, because they are the sheep of his pasture; his to shear, his to kill and eat. So they gave us laws, which somehow we’d never needed before, and institutions, mostly to do with gathering census information and quantifying produce levels. They taught us how to improve crop yields and breed better strains of livestock, how to stop so many of our children dying in infancy, how to dam streams and dig irrigation channels. They stopped us killing each other in pointless ancestral feuds, because it was such a shocking waste. They even taught a handful of us to read, write, compile records, and conduct an entirely fair, democratic, and incorruptible lottery. We owe them so much.

        Some of us did deals with them and were granted licenses and limited authority over our neighbours. My great-grandfather was one of them, which is why our family is so rich. We say that we look out for our own, do our best to soften the wolf’s bite; that you can’t fight them, but you can work with them to make everybody’s lives just that tiny bit less shitty. We say that, and people believe us. Just because everybody believes something, it doesn’t always follow that it’s true.

* * *

        A whole drachma for one lousy letter. Just because it’s us, people think they can rob us blind.

        He wrote it out on a nice square slab of clay, four inches by two, using a reed cut into a chisel point. Then it went in the kiln along with the rest of the day’s correspondence—tax returns, a couple of probate inventories, the garrison commander’s weekly report, three bills of sale and a charterparty. A day to bake, a day to cool off, and there it was. He read it back to me. A bit impersonal, I thought, but I don’t suppose I could’ve done any better myself. Then I gave it to one of the farm boys to deliver. I paid him two obols. I’m generous, sprinkling silver like rain wherever I go.

        You sent them a letter, my father didn’t say because I didn’t tell him, how much did that cost? Followed by: a drachma two, for crying out loud, do you think we’re made of money? Couldn’t you just have walked over there and told them yourself?

        No, I couldn’t. One drachma, two obols well spent.

* * *

        So I went to see Anaxandron at the foundry. He was in a mood because he was short-handed, having just sent his son to the Black Island. I offered to work the bellows for him but he just looked at me.

        “I need something made,” I said.

        “What?”

        “A sword.”

        He rolled his eyes. “You know better than that.”

        “I won’t tell the bulls if you don’t.”

        “What do you want it for?”

        “Trimming my fingernails, what do you think?”

        He’d never made a sword before, understandably enough, but if you can make a sickle or a billhook, you can make a sword; the principle’s the same. I stood over him while he whittled the pattern. No, I kept saying, that’s a tad too long, and I want more of a curve there. What the hell do you know about swords, he asked. Nothing, I said, truthfully.

        I watched him press the pattern into the two halves of the sandbox and left him cutting runners and ingates. Burn the pattern when you’re done, I told him, I won’t be wanting another one.

* * *

        The bulls aren’t too bad, or so they tell you. They’re just people doing a job, like you and me.

        I knew one of them to talk to. He was round at our place one time getting my father’s sealprint on a warrant (my father’s a civilian magistrate) and he stopped for a drink, then dinner. I was polite and friendly to him, because it costs nothing and doesn’t leave a visible mark. So when I called round at the station house, he gave me a big friendly grin and poured me a drink. I recognised the mark on the jar; one of ours, and he hadn’t paid for it. Sorry to hear about your girl, he said.

        He was watching me the way a dog watches a stranger. It happened to me once. I was over the other side of the island and two huge dogs ran out at me, barking their heads off. I froze. So did they. They growled but didn’t move. If I’d so much as twitched they’d have ripped my throat out, but so long as I kept perfectly still, nothing could happen and I was completely safe. Odryas the bull was watching        me for the first move. I shrugged.

        “The hell with it,” I said. “Plenty more fish in the sea.”

        “You don’t mean that,” he said.

        They don’t send them overseas unless they’re at least moderately smart. “No, but it’s not the end of the world,” I said. “We learn to live with stuff like that. You’d understand, if you were one of us.”

        He laughed. “Glad I’m not, in that case. The day I learn to live with something like that, kill me, I don’t deserve to live.” He watched for a reaction. “You’re a smart kid, Lysidemus. You’re like your old man. We can do business with someone like you.”

        “Thank you,” I said. “Talking of doing business...”

        While I outlined my proposition, he was watching me like a hawk. But as well as being third in command of the garrison and a big wheel in military intelligence, he was also the trade attaché. Bulls sent here have to do a lot of different jobs, because it’s really difficult to get anyone even slightly more intelligent than a trowel to take a posting like this at all. “Sure,” he said when I’d finished, “why the hell not? Assuming the price is right, of course.”

        I mentioned some figures. He barely haggled at all.

* * *

        Either you go to the Black Island against your will, kicking and screaming, or you don’t go at all. It’s not somewhere you can just decide to visit, even if you own a ship that’ll take you there. Only authorised visitors clutching a clay slab sealed by a proper officer are allowed to land, and since there’s only one place you can land a ship, there’s no chance of sneaking ashore unobserved. If you jumped overboard and tried to swim, you’d be drowned by the currents or smashed up on the rocks; if by some miracle you survived, you’d die trying to scale the unscalable cliffs. I asked the scribe about forging a landing permit. As soon as he figured out what I was asking, he started to hum very loudly, so he wouldn’t be able to hear any more of what I was saying. Besides, why would anyone in his right mind want to go there?

        But, as Odryas the bull had told me to my face, I’m a smart kid. People can’t go there; it’s different for things. Slaves of the monster they may be, but the bulls aren’t averse to making money, and a good way to do that is to buy something dirt cheap on one island in their dominion and sell it for an extortionate price on another. The only problem with that is that if the goods go direct from Island A to Island B, central government might easily miss out on customs, tariffs, purchase and sales taxes; also, things might get bought and sold and commodities moved around from place to place without them knowing about it, which might tend to screw up their economic models and distort their projections.

        So, if you want to take a hundred jars of pickled walnuts from Aeschros to sell in Callirhoe, the shipment can’t just hop the three miles of clear, calm water across the straits. It’s got to go island-hopping from Aeschros to Deisidaemon to Pandateria to Seleuthoe to the Black Island, where it’s registered, invoiced, weighed, measured, ticketed, given a number, and stuck in a bonded warehouse for a month before setting off for the longer anticlockwise leg of its journey, only this time sailing into the prevailing winds. It’s not an ideal way to do business, but it ensures that the revenue gets its rightful two obols in the drachma. More to the point, it means that jar of pickled walnuts can go where a man can’t.

        Pickles, then, have all the luck. Even so. Who in his right mind—?

* * *

        “Since when,” my father asked me, “have we been in the lumber business?”

        “There’s money in it,” I said.

        “That doesn’t answer my question.”

        Sixty-four cedar logs, thirty feet long, three feet diameter, in a neat stack outside our door. I’d neglected to mention that they were coming. Simpler that way. If I’d asked him first he’d have said no. “Since that bull Odryas called me in and told me to do it,” I said.

        My father knows me too well. “Told you.”

        I shrugged. “I may have mentioned that I was looking around for a sideline of my own. You know, to take my mind off things.”

        We hadn’t talked about the things I might want to take my mind off. Even a hint of that subject was enough to drive him off, like when you clap your hands and a whole flock of rooks rises up screaming at you out of the spring barley. “Still,” he said. “Lumber.”

        “The bulls are crazy for it,” I said. “For construction.”

        He looked at me. “That’s the thing about lumber,” he said, “it grows on trees. What makes you think it could possibly be worth anyone’s whole to shift these great big heavy logs all the way from here to—?”

        “Not just logs,” I said. “Cedar logs.”

        He paused, as though he’d just put his foot in something. “They’ve got cedar on Aeschros,” he said. “And Pandateria.”

        “Not as good as what we’ve got,” I said.

        “How would you know that?”

        “The bull told me,” I said. “It’s something to do with growing higher up the mountain. You get a straighter grain or something like that.”

        One of the many things my father and I have in common is complete ignorance about the technical aspects of forestry. “That figures,” he said, trying manfully to look as though he knew what he was talking about. “And there’s enough in it to make it worth our while?”

        “Using our ship and crew, yes,” I said.

        “You want to use the ship.”

        It’s been a bone of contention between us for ages. He had the wretched thing built so he could haul grain and building stone from one side of the island to another without having to cart it overland. It was, he freely admitted, a good idea at the time. It cost him more than he thought it would; considerably more than he could afford. My mother, rest her soul, gave him a really hard time about it, every chance she got.

        “Yes, the ship,” I said. “That’s where we’ve got the edge. It’s a slim margin, but if we can get a foot in the door, we can undercut the competition and start getting big orders. The bigger the scale in this business, the more money you make.” He was about to say something, so I went on quickly: “There’s thousands of good trees on the mountain just sitting there, no use to anybody. And we’ve got a ship, which just sits there most of the year doing nothing. And people. We could make a lot of money.”

        He looked at me as though I’d suggested we start breeding peacocks so we could have the feathers. Why would we want to make more money, he didn’t ask; we’ve got plenty already. He was reassessing me in the light of new and unexpected evidence, and his conclusions surprised him. “I guess we could,” he said. “It’s a risk, though. You pull people off other work to do this, suppose it doesn’t work out? We lose what we’ve put into it and what we would’ve made from the other stuff that didn’t get done.”

        I told him: “It’s about cold, hard numbers. If the arithmetic works out, you do it. If it doesn’t, you don’t. If you want to get ahead in the bulls’ world, dad, you’ve got to start thinking like them.”

        He looked at me as though I’d just pissed on his shoes. “There’s an element of truth in that,” he said, and walked away.

* * *

        Hesychius, my oldest and best friend, came to see me. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” he asked me.

        I picked myself up off the ground and wiped blood from the corner of my mouth. “You hit me,” I said.

        He did it again. This time I was expecting it and managed to stay upright. He’s not a violent man. “You bastard!” he yelled at me. “I don’t know what’s got into you. You never used to be like this.”

        “For crying out loud,” I mumbled, “get a grip and stop hitting me.”

        They say that a bow at full draw is nine-tenths broken. He was at full draw. The slightest move on my part, or the wrong words, and he’d flatten me. He’s a tad shorter than I am but much stronger. “When they told me, I couldn’t believe it. You, of all people.”

        “Don’t you think you’re overreacting a bit?”

        The wrong words, definitely. I tried to block with my forearm, but all I parried was the feint. It hurt and I couldn’t breathe. This time I landed on my arse, which wasn’t so bad. “No,” he said. “Get up.”

        “Not likely.”

        He took three or four deep breaths, and I watched the will to murder seep out of him, like wine from a cracked skin. “You really are a sorry piece of shit, Lysidemus,” he said. “I ought to smash your face in.”

        “You just did.”

        Normally he laughs at my jokes. Mind you, it wasn’t all that funny. “You could try explaining,” he said.

        I got up. He didn’t knock me down again. I sat down on a log and explained.

        His family are tenants of ours. What I’d done that had annoyed him so much was take them away from the haymaking, which has to be done when the weather’s right or there’s no point bothering, and order them up the mountain to brash and haul timber. Properly speaking he should have been up there with them, but I didn’t feel like rebuking him just then. He’d assumed that I’d done it because I was brown-nosing the bulls, or simply to make money. I was disappointed. I thought he knew me better than that.

        “Think,” I said. “What’s the special thing about trees?”

        “The what?”

        “Trees,” I said. “What makes them different from everything else that gets carried on a ship?”

        You could see the thoughts slowly/etc crossing his mind through the windows of his eyes. When I can’t sleep, I imagine Hesychius thinking. Other people count sheep; same principle. “They’re heavy.”

        “By volume, copper’s five times the weight. Try again.”

        “I don’t know, do I? They’re—” He frowned. “Long?”

        I touched the tip of my nose with my forefinger, then pointed at him. “They’re long,” I said. “Why is this significant?”

        “I’m going to kick your head in a minute.”

        “It’s significant,” I said, “because the bulls desperately want good cedar in lengths suitable for building, but they can’t carry them on their own ships. Their ships are galleys, designed for war.”

        “So they pay more?”

        I shook my head. “So wherever they’re shipping it, they’ve got to go via the Black Island, but they can’t go on a bull ship. They’ve got to go on one of our ships. Crewed by our people.” I paused. He hadn’t got it. “One of whom will be me.”

        He looked at me as though after all these years I’d suddenly turned out to be somebody else. “You want to go to the—”

        “Yes.”

        “Why?”

        “Three fucking guesses.”

        I’d shocked him. “You’re out of your mind,” he said. “Does your father know?”

        “Good God, no,” I said. “It’d kill him.”

        All the anger melted out of him. “You’re a lunatic,” he said. “What do you think you could possibly achieve?”

        “Remains to be seen,” I said. “And don’t you breathe a word of this to anybody, all right?”

        He nodded wretchedly. “Everyone’s saying you’ve sold out to the bulls. They reckon all you’re interested in is money.”

        “Good,” I said. “It’s really good they think that.”

        “They hate you.”

        “Doesn’t matter.”

        “Don’t talk stupid. You’ve got to live with these people.”

        I grinned at him. “Chance would be a fine thing.”

        He breathed in deep, then out through his nose. That means: I want to tell you how stupid you’re being, but you won’t listen. Some people are harder to read than one of the scribe’s clay bricks. Hesychius is practically a map. “I suppose you want me to come with you.”

        “Absolutely not. What harm did you ever do to me?”

        The look on his face was a sight to see; as though I was drowning and he’d just let my fingers slip through his hand. “You can’t fight the bulls,” he said. “You know that.”

        “Absolutely,” I said. “That’s why I’m not even going to try.”

* * *

        Because, you see, I had figured it out for myself. Actually it came to me in a flash, a blinding moment of pure insight.

        There is no monster.

        That’s not strictly true. There are lots of monsters, thousands of them. But human, just like you and me, and mortal, and capable of being reasoned with.

        Think about it. Supposedly we’ve been sending our annual tribute for hundreds of years. Now, then; either this monster is mortal, in which case he must’ve died years ago, because nothing lives that long except oak trees, or else he’s a god, and gods don’t need food.

        Think about it some more. The stories say he’d been there on the Black Island long before the bulls arrived, and when they got there it was uninhabited, apart from him. Therefore, no people for him to eat, for a long time. He hadn’t starved to death, but there was no food.

        Think about it some more. The bulls rule five islands. We’re one of the bigger ones, with a larger human surplus. Assume for the sake of argument that each island sends an average of twenty victims. That’s a hundred bodies. The monster is supposed to be nine feet tall and incredibly strong; therefore it follows that he needs to eat a lot more food than you or I do. My grandfather told me about a king on the mainland who kept a lion as a pet, and it ate a whole ox every day. This monster would have the appetite of two lions. A hundred human bodies to last him a whole year; he’d starve. So, either he’s a god and doesn’t need food, or he isn’t real. And if he’s a god, he doesn’t exist, because gods don’t. Trust me on this. I prayed every day, every long, sleepless night, for them to let her go, but they didn’t. Therefore, they’re aren’t any. Logic.

        So; no monster, but lots of monsters. And the twenty-four victims rounded up and herded onto ships every year don’t go to the Black Island to be eaten; they go there to work, because the bulls don’t work, they’re too busy being soldiers and overseers and revenue officers. They tell us the victims are dead so we won’t go over there and free them, and to terrify us, but it isn’t true. So she must still be alive, on the Black Island, existing there as property. And the thing about property is, you can buy it, even if you have to pay silly money for it.

* * *

        Everybody cheats. For us, it’s more than simply a business practice; it’s the only form of cultural expression the bulls have left us with. And we take it seriously. It used to be that we only cheated the bulls, but now we cheat each other, to keep in practice, to perfect the art.

        Take the drachma. Everybody knows that a drachma is the weight of a handful of barley grains. You owe someone a drachma, you get your bag of chop silver, your scales, and a jar of barley. A level handful of grain goes in one pan, and you drop bits of silver into the other pan until they balance. It’s absolutely fair, and everyone knows where they stand.

        When my father and I do business with anybody, one of us does the buying, the other one looks after the selling. I have small hands, like a girl. He has hands like shovels. So he sells, I buy. Over the course of a year’s trading, it makes a substantial difference; enough to pay two men’s wages. Cheating isn’t just an art form, it provides employment.

        The bulls drink wine, not beer, so they don’t know about malting. If you soak your grains so that they’re just about to sprout, then roast them enough to kill them, they weigh just a little bit more. Furthermore, all barley isn’t the same. We grow one variety down on the flat and another on the upland terraces. The upland variety has very slightly smaller, lighter grains. The bulls don’t know this. When they came round in my grandfather’s time, teaching us how to farm more efficiently and maximise our taxable yields, they gave—sorry, sold—us Black Island seed corn, which derives from a mainland variety and was much better than what we used to have. They assume that all the barley we grow is that variety. It was my father who figured out that the old strain might have its uses and searched till he found an old boy up in the back country who still grew the garbage variety. He’s smart, though maybe not as smart as me.

        Everyone cheats, even when it isn’t really worth the effort. If you ask him nicely, Anaxandron at the foundry will melt down your silver, mix in an unnoticeably small proportion of copper, cast the resulting alloy into ingots, and draw it down into wire. You have to pay him for his time and trouble, of course. I generally give him half a jar of honey for making me two pounds of slightly polluted silver wire out of thirty ounces of good stuff. Half a jar of honey for a morning’s work is daylight robbery, and I’d be losing on the deal if I didn’t get the honey more or less for free from one of our tenants in exchange for letting him draw water from a well that I didn’t dig and which would be no use to me if he didn’t use it. Besides, you can water honey down a bit, if you’re careful not to overdo it. And when we weigh the wire, we use my scales.

        Everyone cheats. I tried to fix the lottery, but Philopoemen got in ahead of me. He cheated me before I could cheat him. Both of us tried to cheat the bulls, but that doesn’t count.

* * *

        I may have overdone the loading a little bit, because by the time we had the lumber on board and secured so it wouldn’t move about, the ship was a smidgeon too low in the water for comfort. Not to worry. We weren’t going far, and it’s plain sailing to the Black Island.

        The crew were all men I’d sailed with before, but there was something slightly different in their manner, as if they were ready, willing, and anxious to forgive me just as soon as I apologised, though what for wasn’t at all clear. Maybe it was because the ship was full to bursting, so no room for personal stuff, and traditionally everyone brings along a few jars of this and that to sell on his own account. (That was how my great-great-grandfather got started, incidentally, trading top-quality almonds from half a dozen spindly trees in his father’s back yard, until he earned enough to buy his own ship.) Or maybe it was simply that nobody likes going anywhere near the Black Island, understandably enough. Anyway, it was a quiet trip, with nobody in the mood for talking. I didn’t mind that particularly, though usually I like to chat. I had things on my mind.

        Obviously none of us had ever been to the Black Island before, so we had no idea how to get in to the harbour without ripping out our keel on some hidden peril we didn’t know was there. They’d thought of that, naturally. If you’re the hub of a major shipping enterprise, obviously you get ships coming in all the time who don’t know the waters. So there were plenty of nice, clear seamarks—buoys, flags, piles driven into the seabed and posts on the harbour wall to line up with. The main hazard wasn’t rocks, shoals, or reefs, it was keeping clear of other ships. When you think what a ship represents, in terms of materials, manpower, time, skill, and expense, it was amazing to see so many of them all together in one place: dozens of them, merchantmen and galleys, just lying about as if they didn’t matter. “Do you reckon it’s like this all the time?” one of the men said, with a look on his face like he’d accidentally gatecrashed the wedding of two gods. I knew how he felt. Not just the ships, but all the stuff they must be carrying; all that cargo, all that wealth of material goods, all that money.

        Odryas the bull had given me a lump of baked clay the size and colour of a flattened turd, pecked all over with little wedge-marks, which was supposed to make everything all right with the harbour authorities. To my utter amazement, it did. The harbourmaster—actually, in a busy place like that I think it must’ve been the deputy harbourmaster’s acting deputy assistant—glanced at it, nodded, and told us to stay there, someone would be along in a minute. We stared at him. Here we were, perfect strangers from another island, he didn’t know our names or whose sons we were, but everything was fine because everything about us that anybody needed to know was somehow contained in a few squiggles poked in a wet tile. Extraordinary. And yet people live like that, apparently, all the time.

        We hung about, not daring to get off the ship. Time passed. We began to wonder if they’d forgotten about us, or whether there was something we didn’t know about that we were supposed to have done.

        It got dark. We were hungry, but all we had left was a few bits of stale crust and a few dried figs. “We could just leave,” Pythias the helmsman said. “They wouldn’t give a shit.”

        “We can’t do that,” someone else said. “They know we’re here. We can’t leave without a departure permit. A bull told me that, back home.”

        “Fine,” Pythias said. “What’s a departure permit?”

        The man shrugged. “I don’t know, do I? One of those baked brick things.”

        “We’ve got one of them. Let’s go.”

        “Doesn’t work like that,” I explained. “It’s got to have the right squiggles on it. Our brick’s only got coming-in squiggles, not going-out. Let’s all just hold our water and see what happens, shall we? These people must know what they’re doing, it’s their job.”

        Sure enough. Shortly before first light, when we’d all finally managed to drop off to sleep, a gang of bulls turned up with huge carts and a crane and told us to wake up. They hadn’t got all day, they explained, and where was our bill of lading?

        The bill of lading turned out to be the other side of the clay turd, and it told them everything they needed to know about everything. All we had to do was manhandle the logs so they could get the chains round them and hoist them onto the carts. While we were doing that, I had a good look at the men working the crane. They weren’t bulls. You can tell, quite easily. Bulls are tall and lean, apart from the short, fat ones, and these men were sort of square and stocky. Also they did what they were told without answering back. I’ve never worked with anyone who hasn’t known a better way of doing the job. It’s practically a point of honour.

        They got the lumber onto the carts in no time flat, and the chief bull handed me a small clay tile with squiggles on it. Take this to the paymaster, he said, and then you can get your clearance and go home. Thank you, I said, and where would I find the paymaster? He looked at me as though I’d asked him what the big shiny white thing in the sky was, and he pointed in the direction of a row of brick buildings half a mile away. Then he yelled at the carters, and the carts rumbled away, taking our valuable lumber with them.

        “You stay here,” I told the men. “I won’t be long.”

        They scowled at me. I grinned at them, as though I had the faintest idea of what was going to happen next, and set off toward the brick buildings.

        When eventually I found the paymaster, he glanced at my bit of tile and told me it was no good.

        “Oh,” I said. “Why not?”

        “Needs countersealing. You want the merchants’ association.”

        “Of course I do. Where—?”

        “Over there.”

        Actually, the merchants’ association was exactly what I wanted, though I hadn’t realised it. At the merchants’ association, once they realised I was the man with all the sensibly priced three-foot cedar, they were delighted to meet me. Sit down, they said. Have a drink while we get your chit sealed.

        Gradually, as I talked to them, I came to realise that not all bulls are the same. The ones we get at home are one sort, but these were different: easy-going, friendly, only too happy to know you if they thought there was a chance of making some money. They explained to me, very kindly and patiently, where I’d gone so disastrously wrong. I’d allowed Odryas to talk me into selling my valuable lumber to his friends in Consortium A, when what I should have done was sell it to Consortium B, who would treat me with respect and pay me very slightly more. Alternatively—and only because they liked me so much and felt guilty because I’d been treated so badly—Consortium B and I could get together and form Consortium C; in which case I wouldn’t actually get paid for my logs, but I’d be entitled to a full share of profits at some point further down the line, once Consortium K had sold them to Consortium L. I said I’d like to think about it. Of course, they said, and in the meantime, have another drink.

        “All this money,” I said. We were drinking wine. We make a lot of wine at home, but we drink beer and sell the wine. The bulls mix it, three parts water to one part wine. I could drink that all day and hardly notice, so I had to pretend. “All this money,” I repeated, “what’s it for?”

        They grinned at me. “You can buy stuff with it,” one of them said.

        “Stuff,” I said scornfully.

        “Stuff is good,” another one said.

        “Nah,” I told him. “Takes up space and you’ve got to dust it. Who needs stuff? I don’t. All stuff is shit.”

        One of them looked at me severely, to let me know that words of wisdom were on their way. “Stuff,” he said, “is what marks us out from them. We’ve got stuff, they haven’t. That’s what stuff’s for. It’s for having.”

        “Bullshit,” said another one. “What you want is nice things. Pretty things, none of your rubbish. Why does everything in life have to be horrible? Why can’t you have something nice for a change, if you can afford it?”

        Another bull said: “Sure. Nice things, not shit. And we’ve got it and you haven’t. No offence,” he added graciously. “That’s the point, isn’t it? Stuff is how you know who’s better than everybody else. Stuff is how you keep score.”

        I was concerned they’d drink themselves incoherent before I could ask my questions. I’d been working towards my goal slowly and carefully, patiently stalking it through the long grass. But with the bulls in that state there didn’t seem to be much point. “So what happens to the slaves from the islands?” I asked.

        “Slaves?”

        “All the young kids who get brought here,” I said. “Back home, they tell us they get fed to a monster and eaten, but that’s all shit. Bullshit,” I couldn’t resist adding, but it was lost on them. “So what happens to them really? They’re sold as slaves, right? Only I’d really like to buy one, with all this money I’m going to be making. Expense no object,” I added. “Top dollar.”

        They were all looking at me as though I’d exposed myself. “You what?” one of them said.

        “The kids from the islands,” I repeated. “That’s what you do, right? You make them into slaves. You turn people into stuff. Fine. That’s fine by me.” I held up my hands, palms outwards. “We all do it, that’s fine, you’ve got to do it or nothing ever gets done. I’ve learned that, since I’ve been dealing with you gentlemen. It’s progress, it’s what builds cities, it’s what makes you better than us. That’s great. That’s the stuff I really want to buy. Why are you looking at me like that?”

        “Are you out of your mind?” one of the bulls said. “You can’t own people. That’s sick.”

        I wasn’t having that. “Oh come on,” I said. “You do it all the time. Look what you do to us.”

        He stared at me, then laughed. “You’re nuts,” he said. “Listen, my stupid provincial young friend, you’ve got us all wrong. Sure, we don’t treat you like we treat our own, of course not. We’re better than you, go figure. So we push you around a bit, we rip you off right, left, and centre, of course we do, that’s natural. That’s the point of being strong. So we cheat. Everybody cheats. Cheating’s as natural as the air we breathe, and the fact we can do it gives us the right. But owning a person. That’s horrible. If we did that, it wouldn’t make us better than you. It’d make us worse.”

        “They do it in Assur,” one of the others pointed out. “On the mainland.”

        “Yeah, well,” the first one said angrily, “that proves my point, doesn’t it? They’re animals over there. Anybody who could think that sort of thing is all right, got to be something wrong with them.” He looked at me. He was upset. “Look,” he said, “you want to sell us your fucking logs or not? If not, piss off. I don’t think I like you any more.”

        I wasn’t really interested in whether he liked me or not. “Answer my question and I’ll give you the stupid logs,” I said. “What do you do with the kids from the islands? Where do they go? What happens to them?”

        For a very long two seconds nobody spoke. Then one of them said; “They go to the citadel.”

        “And?”

        “They go to him. He eats them.”

        “This man is starting to annoy me,” said the bull who didn’t like me. “I say the hell with him. Some cheap lumber is too fucking expensive.”

        “Free lumber,” I corrected him. “You can have the whole cargo for free, if you’ll just tell me the truth. What really happens to the kids from the islands? Who buys them? Where do they end up? Who do they work for?”

        They looked at each other. Then they threw me out.

* * *

        All that trouble and unpleasantness, just to obtain one word. But it was worth it. That word was citadel. Cheap at twice the price.

        Back outside in the bright sun, I lifted my head and looked around. I could see a ridiculous number of buildings, some stone, some brick, some with flat roofs, some with arched roofs sheathed in copper, would you believe. But there was one building that stood out from all the rest, because it was bigger and taller and it was built on top of a hill. The sort of building, in fact, for which the word citadel was invented.

        I went back to the ship to get something. “Well?” they asked me.

        “Deal’s off,” I said. “Go home.”

        “You what?”

        “Take the ship,” I said, “and go home. It’s all been a waste of time. You can dump the cargo in the sea if you want, it’s dangerous, the ship’s riding far too low. If you hit a squall on the way home you’ll go straight to the bottom. Fuck it.”

        They were staring at me. “What about you?”

        I was wrapping cloth round my leg. “I’m not coming.”

        “You what?”

        “I’m staying,” I said. “There’s something I want to do. You go.”

        “Don’t be stupid,” they told me. “How are you going to get home?”

        “I’m staying,” I said. “I like it here.”

* * *

        When I was a kid, my father told me about a pet notion of his. He called it the dominion of the weak. I don’t understand, I told him. Well, of course you don’t, he said, you’re just a kid. But it goes something like this:

        I’m stronger than your mother, he said, so if I wanted to, I could beat her up real good. And sometimes I really feel like doing that, like when she gives me a hard time or goes on and on about how much money I spent on that stupid ship. But I don’t, he went on, because I’m stronger than she is, so she can’t fight back. And your mother is stronger than you are. She could pick you up by the ankles and bash your head against the wall. And you make her so mad sometimes. But she doesn’t, because she’s stronger. And if I wanted to, I could burn down old Chares’s house and push him off his land and take it for myself, because he’s old and he’s got a gammy leg, he couldn’t stand up to me and six of the hired men. I could do with that land of his, it’s right between my top pasture and the river. But I don’t, because I’m stronger.

        I don’t follow, I said. It’s not about who’s stronger. You don’t do that stuff because it wouldn’t be right.

        He smiled at me. You’re just a kid, he said. What does right mean?

        I didn’t understand.

        Right and wrong, my father said, what do they mean? Tell me.

        So I tried to tell him. Wrong is the stuff we aren’t supposed to do, I said, because it’s not right. Like beating up on people who can’t fight back, or taking stuff that isn’t ours.

        Fine, he said. Why is it wrong?

        I knew the answer but I couldn’t find words. Because it isn’t fair, I told him. You can’t go around beating up on people just because you can, because who made you the boss of them? I drivelled on like that for a bit, and then he stopped me.

        It’s because you’re strong and they’re weak, he told me. That’s why you mustn’t do it. You mustn’t hit kids or take what doesn’t belong to you, because you’re strong and they’re weak. Is that right or isn’t it?

        I guess so, I said.

        Well then, said my father, let’s try something else. Give me your best shot.

        So I hit him, right in the pit of the stomach, as hard as I could. He laughed. You see, he said, it’s fine if you hit me, because you’re weak. Do you understand now?

        I shook my head; I was being particularly dumb that day. It’s the dominion of the weak, my father said. Try thinking about it. If you can hit me but I’m not allowed to hit you, who’s the boss? Or take me and your ma. Or me and old Chares. He drives his sheep over onto our pasture every spring, soon as the new grass comes, and what do we do about it? We shoo them back and don’t say anything, because he’s just a poor crippled old man. So he takes advantage and we do nothing. It’s like when we cheat the bulls. Who’s the boss, him or me?

        That made no sense. My father was the richest man on the island and Chares was nobody. It’s the dominion of the weak, he repeated. Right and wrong, that’s all it is. It’s how the weak are the boss of the strong, and it’s not fair, and there’s absolutely nothing you or I can do about it.

        On that day I decided I couldn’t make sense of what he’d told me because I was seven years old. Then, as I grew up and became aware of the bulls and the way they cast their shadow over everything, I decided that my father was just plain wrong. It’s all about strength. The weak are nothing, so all you can do in this life is try and make yourself a little bit stronger, to shift the balance a fraction in your favour, as regards the balance of who tramples on you and who you trample on. What he’d said stayed with me though, perhaps because dominion is how the bulls describe their operation in the islands. Meanwhile old Chares, frail and shaking, gradually shifted the boundary stones a few yards every spring. We did nothing about it, because he was just an old man in poor health, and when he died, he had seven acres more land than his father had left him, and we spent a lot of money buying it back from his nephew. It’s like the war between the ants and the elephant. The elephant started by trampling a million ants, but the other fifty million scurried away into cracks in the ground where he couldn’t get at them. Then, at night, when the elephant was asleep, the ants crept in through his ear and ate his brain. My father would say that the ants won because they were small and weak.

        I prefer to think that they cheated.

* * *

        A kindly bull stranger saw me hobbling up the street. “What happened to you?” he said.

        “My own stupid fault,” I told him. “I fell out of a tree and tore my knee.”

        He didn’t laugh. “Nasty things, knee injuries.”

        “I’ve got it strapped up well,” I assured him. “Just makes walking a bit difficult.”

        He hesitated for a split second, then gave me his walking stick. The handle was carved in the shape of a leaping dolphin. I thanked him. As soon as he was out of sight, I threw it away.

        I’d anticipated that getting inside the citadel would be a major problem, quite possibly insuperable. Not so. There were two sentries at the gate, sleepy-looking bulls who snapped awake when they heard the sandal of my dragged foot on the cobbles. “Excuse me,” I said.

        “What?”

        “Can you tell me how to find the captain of the guard? Only I’ve got something for him.”

        “What?”

        I showed them the clay turd. It was too dark for them to read it, even if they could read. “He bought some stuff from us,” I said. “He needs to take this to the bonded warehouse, and then they’ll hand it over.”

        One of the sentries peered at me. “Give it here,” he said. “I’ll see he gets it.”

        I put on a scared look; who am I afraid of more, my master or this soldier? “Sorry,” I said, “but my boss said only to give it to the captain, in person. I don’t know why, that’s just what I was told.”

        My luck was in. The sentries grinned at each other. “Figures,” one of them said. He leaned forward a little and lowered his voice. “He’s a fucking twister, he is. Mind he gives you a receipt.”

        “What’s a receipt?”

        They laughed and stood aside. Through there, they said, first left, second right, up two flights, first left, straight on, you can’t miss it. And what happened to your leg? Ah. They can be nasty, torn ligaments. Try plantain mixed with goose fat, or a hot stone wrapped in a bit of linen.

        As soon as I was out of sight of the gate I stopped, slid down the wall into a crouch, and closed my eyes. In my mind was the view of this citadel I’d been studying all afternoon until it got too dark to see. I’d been trying to figure it out, this stone and brick puzzle; how would you build something like that if you wanted to house a monster? Or a king? Gradually, the purpose grew into the shape: a secure container inside a bubble of security. Or, taken in reverse, high walls, guardhouses and the keep itself, a series of concentric circles so as to leave no one weak point. For the centre to be equidistant from all directions of hazard, the perimeter must be a circle. Therefore, if you have a circle, the thing secured must be in the—

        I was standing in front of a door. It was pitch dark, apart from a moonbeam slanting in through an arrowslit, but I’ve always seen well at night. I could see that the door was massive, strong and old; ten feet high, five feet wide, and four bolts as thick as my forearm. Bolts on the outside.

        Not a king, then.

        I thought about the story. I tried to remember who I’d heard it from; was it my father or my mother or my nurse or one of the other kids or one of the hired hands? No idea. It had been a part of me all my life, like my hands and my feet, or a scar from an injury when you were very small. He was there before the bulls came, wasn’t he? That was how I’d always known it. The bulls came here in their long, low ships and thought they’d found the promised land, and then suddenly, in the night, they found out they weren’t the first here, or the strongest. In which case, surely, he was the boss of them. In which case, surely, the bolts would be on the—

        They were stiff, and they made a horrible screeching noise as I pulled them back. So much for sneaking about quietly. Unless the guard were deaf or dead they must’ve heard it, and so must have whatever lived behind the door. I tried spitting on them and it helped a little bit, but too little and too late. The third bolt drew two thirds of the way back and then stuck solid. I bashed on the handle with the heel of my hand until I realized I was making a real mess of something I might need quite soon, so I tried kicking it instead. I think I broke my toe. Then I got wise. I drew the top bolt out all the way and used it as a hammer. It sounded twice as loud as Anaxandron at the foundry making horseshoes, but apparently nobody was interested. It worked. The fourth bolt came out easy as anything. Presumably it had been watching what I’d done to its brother and was terrified.

        So there I was. The door would open if I pushed it. I knelt down and unwrapped the cloth from around my leg. The sword Anaxandron had so reluctantly made for me dropped into my hand, like a dog bringing you its lead in its mouth. I closed my hand around the grip. We’d had a long discussion about the shape and profile of the grip, Anaxandron and me. He said, you want a crossguard so your hand won’t slide forward, and something similar on the back end. I said, that’ll screw up the balance, balance is important. Neither of us knew the first thing about swords. In the moonlight it glowed the colour of honey, my last and best possession. I put my foot against the bottom of the door and pressed down. The door swung open, just a little.

        Light came streaming out; golden light. I froze where I was, waiting for roaring and the onset of a monster. Maybe the room was empty after all. If I was a monster, would I crouch behind the door to gain a tactical advantage? I put the fingertips of my left hand against the door and flexed my fingers. The gap was now wide enough to let me through, just about.

        It was the most amazingly beautiful room. On the walls, paintings: white background, with terracotta-red figures of men, slightly more than life size, carrying dishes and trays of fruit. The floor was black and white tiles. The ceiling was so high up I couldn’t see it, it sort of folded in on itself in a blaze of gold leaf, and I guessed I must be looking at the underside of a dome. There was a bed, made of what could only be ivory, and a table and a chair made of some sort of black wood I’d never seen or heard of before. In the chair, which was huge, sat a man with his back to me. He was huge too, and his head wasn’t human. He was looking into a mirror.

        Ah, you’re saying to yourself, he’s got a mirror. Clearly a rich bastard.

        Some mirror. The back was ivory, and from the way the face seemed to shine in the lamplight, I figured the mirror had to be gold. He was looking into the mirror, so what he saw was himself, and in the background, me.

        He put the mirror down on the table, no great hurry, then slowly stood up and turned to face me. A very tall man, very broad, and instead of a man’s head, he had the head of a bull. Around his wrists were gold bracelets, and chains on his ankles, tethering him to the wall.

        I took a step forward. The room was round, with his table and chair in the exact centre. Propped against the wall was a big sack, full of bones. I guess, just because you’re a monster doesn’t mean you’re untidy. The room smelled faintly of roses. The bulls pay good money for dried roses, for distilling into perfume. You can pack the bottom of the jar with cabbage leaves and they never seem to notice.

        I wondered if he could speak, but I decided I wasn’t interested. Even if he could, what would he and I possibly have to say to each other? It was nine paces from the door to the centre of the room. He stood there, not moving, and I couldn’t understand the expression on his face, because his face wasn’t human.

        I hadn’t killed a man before, but I’ve killed plenty of animals. When you kill a large animal, like a big old sow or a bullock, it makes it much easier if you stun it first, with a pollaxe or something like that. I only had the sword, so I figured quick and neat was the way to go. Normally you’d cut the big vein in the neck, but he was so tall I couldn’t reach and I didn’t fancy trying to do it standing on the chair. So I stuck the sword into the pit of his stomach, while he just stood there and let me. It went in quite easily. Anaxandron and I had been a bit concerned that the blade would just bend instead of going in. Anaxandron wanted to stiffen it with a central rib, but I didn’t want the extra weight. It turned out that Anaxandron was fussing about nothing, as usual.

        He dropped to his knees and I took a quick step back, to keep away from the tips of his horns. He gave a great sigh and toppled over onto his side, and that was the end of him. I waited to see if he’d twitch or jerk about, but apparently not. I couldn’t get the sword out. The way he’d fallen meant that the blade was clinched in the wound by the full weight of his upper body. Shucks.

        I sat down on the giant chair. My head was splitting and I felt sick, first-time-on-a-boat sick, only worse. I was trying to think—I had a lot to think about—but thoughts slipped away, like when you take live fish out of a net. I had those floating things in front of my eyes, the ones that you can see even with your eyes shut. If this is what murder does to you, I said to myself, I’m surprised people bother with it, because it’s no fun at all.

        I started shivering. Something fell on the floor with a clatter. It was the clay turd. I must have shaken it loose from inside my shirt. I stared at it, because there was something very odd about it. It took me a moment to figure out what it was. I could read it.

        Not that it was particularly interesting; it said, forty-eight logs, cedar, two obols per board foot, sixty-two drachmas two obols payable. I looked at it again and couldn’t understand how I hadn’t been able to read it before. It was perfectly clear, if a trifle mundane. Just business, that’s all.

        The floating things had cleared away. I glanced down at the dead body. It was changing; it had changed. Not a bull’s head, not any more. It took me a moment before I realised that I recognised her—my own, my darling, the light of my life, my reason for living, the whole object of the exercise. I reached for the mirror. In it, I saw the monster, the one I’d just killed.

        Ah, I thought. I asked for that.

* * *

        I tried banging on the door, but nobody came. Someone had shot the bolts while I was looking in the mirror. I found a small jar of oil to top the lamp up with. I was starving hungry, so I ate her body. It’s an acquired taste.

        I guess they spy on me through a gap in the wall somewhere, though I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find one. When I’m asleep they come in and dust, fill the lamp, sweep the floor, empty the bone sack. Sometimes they leave a block of wet clay, an unexpected kindness, and if I write something they take it away, bake it, and bring it back. I tried writing help, please let me out but they didn’t take that one, or the letter to my father. I tried kicking the door down. I broke another toe. The next night they put the chain on my ankle, and now I can’t get that far.

        Sometimes I feel angry, sad, frightened, disappointed, even cheated, but mostly I just feel hungry. I’d never known what it feels like to be hungry all the time. You can’t think about anything else, no matter how you try.

        Where I went wrong (it seems so obvious now) was assuming there was no monster; that a monster was unnecessary, therefore superfluous, therefore there wasn’t one—just good old human nature, grafting its bull’s head onto everyday human flesh and blood. No monster, just people; and people can be reasoned with, bargained with, exploited, bullied—and cheated, let’s not forget cheated, because everybody cheats. I was right about that, of course, but what I hadn’t taken into account was the true nature of the bull and how smoothly it grows on your shoulders when you’re least expecting it. Staring into a mirror is dangerous because after a while the mirror starts staring into you. As previously noted, you have to be a rich bastard in order to own a mirror. By the very process of being able to acquire one, you turn it into something no sane man would want to gaze into, for fear of seeing the bull. I think I started to grow the horns the moment I let the means enchant me away from the end. Now look at me: king of the bulls, the strongest of the strong, fixed to a wall by the strongest of all possible chains.

        Even so, I reckon that my father was partly right. Not completely right, because of course he didn’t understand, not being able to see the whole picture, as I can now; like a drawing of a ship by a man who’s never seen the sea, and here I am, adrift in it. I still maintain that everybody cheats; the boss, the monster, the hero, the victim, the man in the street, and the starving beggar at his door.

        By the same token, everybody gets cheated, and I think that’s only fair.

Copyright © 2021 K.J. Parker

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K.J. Parker is the author of the best-selling ‘Engineer’ trilogy (Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, The Escapement) as well as the previous ‘Fencer’ (The Colours in the Steel, The Belly of the Bow, The Proof House) and ‘Scavenger’ (Shadow, Pattern, Memory) trilogies, and has twice won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. K.J. Parker also writes under the name Tom Holt.

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NEMESIS AND THE SORCERER

by R.K. Duncan

        We ran in the blind night, six of us alongside the sorcerer, with the moon just rising and only the stars to light our way back to the ships and out of cursed Laconia.

        Orios led us, my erastes, greatest hunter of the sacred band. He picked out the smooth ground and the open way among the little hollows and stands of trees that littered the waste ground between helot-tilled fields and the sea. I ran beside him. He had trained me well enough for that. I would have run ahead, even now in the dark and the deadly danger, to show that I was good enough, better than the last boy he loved, Aegistus, who failed and fell in his first battle before the Cadmea.

        There were cries like wolves and night birds all round us and horns blowing signals farther off. The country was full of wild Spartan boys, and their soldiers would be arming and coming on behind. The other nine bands would be running to one side and the other, to draw the hunters off while we made straight for the ships with our prize.

        Orios put a soft hand on my chest and raised the other in a fist to halt the rest, where a little mound might hide us in a hollow of the land. The cries of beasts and men were loud over our breathing in the silence. The sorcerer wheezed. He was no warrior, not trained for running or for standing firm, but the beotarchs wanted him.

        “The bird-calls are ahead of us now,” said Orios, and I heard the dull acceptance in his voice like a heavy stone falling. “The net is drawn. We’ll be caught if we run straight. We must find somewhere to hide and hope for a chance to slip past them when they’ve run farther.”

        “There.” The sorcerer pointed, with his rod that was twined with serpents, up a little hill, to where shapes like roofs or standing stones were black against the sky, rising higher than the gnarled trees about them. “The crossroads-gods say fortune will smile there.”

        “We should go quickly,” said Lykos, the strong-armed wrestler. “But we must keep low, or we will show against the sky as sharp as those ruins.”

        “Quiet as you can,” said Thrasios, our chief.

        Crawling on our knees and elbows, we climbed the slope, trying to keep ourselves screened by the trees as best we could. Whatever road there was to the holy place or village on the hilltop, it was not on the side we climbed, and the way was steep. Lykos and his eromenos, Glaucon, supported and bore along the sorcerer, or he would never have made the ascent. They were our most excellent in wrestling and feats of strength, just as Thrasios and Phaidrus were in arms and in command, as Orios and I in finding the ways through wild country. Even borne up so, the sorcerer slipped at the last and tore a branch and a long strip of bark at its base from one the scrubby trees that circled the hilltop as he flailed to catch himself. The white wood beside black bark shone like burned flesh in the moonlight.

        The night felt colder on the flat hilltop. The shapes we had seen were tombs, windowless houses half-buried in the turf. Stelae, scored and pitted beyond hope of reading the lineages and great deeds once written there, surrounded the little village of the dead like a grim fence.

        “Your crossroads-gods enjoy a black joke, sorcerer,” said Thrasios. “I do not like this for a hiding place. The curse of the dead and the gods of the underworld will be worse to bear than Spartan spears. And that torn bark might as well be banner declaring we are here. Do you think their hunters are as ignorant of woodcraft as you?”

        “My patrons will defend us,” said the sorcerer. “Fear no curse while you are with me.”

        He passed the fence and struck the door of one great tomb with his serpent rod, and the seal split with a sound like a great jar being opened.

        He gestured us closer, but before any moved to join him, Orios ran swiftly to the far edge of the hilltop. His face was grave when he returned.

        “They have drawn their lines ahead of us already, as I said. I saw moonlight on the fair hair of Spartan youths like scattered stars below. We cannot get to the flat and run for the coast without being seen.”

        With a slow nod from Thrasios, Lykos and Glaucon pushed the stone door open, not troubled by a weight that might have taken oxen to set there, though Glaucon, who was a superstitious youth, trembled as he shoved.

        “There is nothing for it now,” said Thrasios. “We must hide and hope they pass us by, or we are all dead and our errand failed.”

        It was dead dark inside, beyond the little spill of moonlight from the open door, and the air smelled of earth and age. We filed in, and Lykos pushed the door back to, and we were shut in darkness, sealed in stone. In that moment, it seemed to me that we would never leave and would lie down to join those buried here and go down into Hades unmourned and without obols for the ferryman.

        I had sightless time to regret the beotarchs’ choice to send us for this sorcerer. So much he had promised them, this Hermogenes Magos, in his tablet-letter that burst from the belly of a tortoise eagle-dropped upon the Cadmea: the secret strategies of the Laconians revealed, and spells made with their names and shadows that would slay any general sent against us before the battle joined; bounty in our fields and dearth for our enemies. Prizes indeed to send us on this raid more fit for an Athenian pirate than the sacred soldiers of great Thebes. South we had sailed in twin black ships from Aulis, threescore warriors of the sacred band in thirty loving pairs, and Thrasios was our captain, most seasoned of the warriors the beotarchs had chosen.

        We had pulled into the coast as sun was sinking and gone raider-swift, without our shields or panoply, only our swords at rest and spears in hand and linen cuirasses on our chests. We had seen none but sullen Helots as we made our way to where the sorcerer had named, and they raised no alarm. The sorcerer made good his written word; he had slipped whatever prison the Spartans had him in and was alone and free to meet us, but his escape was known before we had gone three stadia or taken up our proper marching pace, and then the cry went up.

        These Laconians kept their youths in barracks companies instead of raising them one-to-one with a seasoned man, and rumor said they starved them until they were like half-wild dogs. Every pack of them was loose to beat the woods and fields for us, and we heard the tread of armed men in full panoply behind. Thrasios gave the command that we should split by sixes, and he would take his eromenos, Phaidrus the swift swordsman, and Orios the hunter, and Lykos the strong, both with their youths, and bring the sorcerer to the ships a fast as we could run, but the others should take crooked paths and lead the hunters on, and spend their lives or win the coast as they were able. The plan seemed sound as any could while we were three score against all the fighting men of Sparta, but it had brought us here, shut in a tomb, and I did not like the sorcerer, with his high-handed manner and his rod that was wrapped in serpents mummified in the Egyptian fashion, reeking of myrrh and dust and curdled poison.

        In the breathless tomb, Orios touched my shoulder and stood close, as if to comfort me, but before I could protest and tell him I feared only dying disgraceful as a badger in its den, that I shook not for fear but for the action, ready to die glorious and bright, fighting beside my love as all the gods adored, he whispered that I should look out the crack of the door; my eyes were keenest. That far at least he knew my worth and trusted it.

        I saw that I had been wrong before, there was the barest crack left, where Lykos could not close the door and keep his fingers. I pressed my face to the stone and looked to see what I could see.

        I heard the Laconian youths still howling and piping and saw the half moon rising above the hills, and there was a column of soldiers coming from the city that I could see in the distance through gaps between the gnarled trees, their bronze armor and bright shields shining in the fire of their torches.

        Then the piping was close, and a dozen Spartan youths in red cloaks and ragged sandals bounded to the hilltop like wild deer. They had light spears like hunters or peltasts and long knives on their belts.

        “See, there!” one called, and pointed. “They have broken a branch climbing.”

        “Then they passed this way already, and we’ve trampled their trail following you,” replied another.

        They squabbled like geese while I stood statue-still and felt cold sweat climb down to pool in the hollow of my back. I caught a little change in the air of the tomb and heard the soft sounds of weapons being readied. The rest had heard them too, and they made ready.

        But the fates smiled on us that once, as the sorcerer had promised. The party that thought we must have gone on down the hill prevailed, and they raced back as they had come, howling for our blood.

        When they were gone and the night was almost silent again, the sorcerer said.

        “One of you hang your cloak over the crack in the doorway, and we can have a little light. We’ll think better if we can see, and think we must. It does not seem likely this house will keep us till the morning.”

        I was closest, and I did as the sorcerer bade when no one spoke against him. He had kindled a taper by some art, and it burned with a steady smokeless light. We could see the dead now, six of them laid on shelves in the side walls and a seventh on a bier against the back wall. They had vessels of clay and bronze about them, and jewels, and the one on the bier had a thin bronze sword laid on his breast.

        My breath caught in my chest, and Glaucus whispered a prayer of apology to Kore and Hades.

        “Have no fear of the dead,” said the sorcerer. “These were all buried well and richly, they have long since paid their obol and crossed Styx and Lethe. Nothing but their bones remains to trouble us.”

        “The light is pleasant,” said Thrasios, “but what is there for us to think on? We will be safe until your careless mark on that tree has us found out, and then we will die, unless fortune should favor us and no more searchers see the broken branch.”

        “Surely not,” said Glaucon, voice breaking. “There must be some way out of this place tonight. We should send a scout, at least. One man can hide better than seven.”

        “Or cut our way through the starveling boys and outrun the hoplites in their armor to the ships,” said Phaidros, and fingered the sword that he was so skilled with.

        “No,” said my Orios, confident that no one would think to gainsay him, wise and skillful as he was. “We may be fortunate and hide here until a chance comes, but a scout will be caught. Even I would be with so many hunters.”

        We nodded and looked down at the stone floor and its drifts of dust.

        “There may be a way for one to scout without being caught,” said the sorcerer, “but they must dare to pass through the borders of Kore’s kingdom. We are lucky to be here, where the door to places below is already open. As I have put you in danger by my lack of warrior’s craft, let me deliver you by the art I have mastered.”

        I saw fear then, and disgust on every face, and felt it on my own. There was something unclean about the sorcerer’s smile as he offered this deadly escape.

        “I will dare it,” spoke Orios, my love, boldest and best of us.

        “No.” The sorcerer held up his hand, denying Orios before I could. “It must be one of the youths. Too many dead without their toll wait for you seasoned men on this side of the rivers.”

        “I will go,” I said, before another or my fear could snatch the glory from me. Orios would see that I was bold and excellent. I would dare, and I would return to his embrace.

        “There is a good young man,” said the sorcerer. “Your lover should be proud.”

        I knew better than to expect it. Orios’s mouth was tight, his face wan in the pale light of the taper. He would not deny me a chance for glory in this desperate hour, but he would never trust me to return until I did. Still pricked by Aegistus’s death, always he urged me to caution before glory.

        The sorcerer put his hands on my shoulders and looked me up and down like a horse trader.

        “Strip,” he said, “and lay aside your weapons and your jewels. You must take nothing with you that might pay passage over the river and down to the dark kingdom.”

        I stripped my cuirass and my clothes, my silver ring stamped with the Aegis, and my pendant of unicorn’s horn from Kush beyond Egypt. The sorcerer daubed me with a sticky red stuff from his bag at the heart and throat, as if I had been wounded unto death, and he mixed charcoal into wine and wrote words on me in Phoenician letters. From cunning slits hidden in the skin of the serpents on his rod, he pulled little packets of herbs. One he burned in a little bowl, and the smoke lingered at the roof with a heavy scent like pine honey. The other he mixed into more wine and offered me the draught.

        “You will feel cold,” he said, “and it will be dark beyond all sight. You must turn away from the sound of running water, and follow the notes of the lyre up the slope. If you can do this, you will walk the world as a spirit of the air, silent and invisible, and your flesh will lie here until you return to it.”

        They all looked grim, but we were in too desperate a danger for them to recoil from this passage into tales of ghosts and monsters.

        His draught was sweet like honey on the tongue, but it had an acrid scent that stung the nose, and I had to clench my throat to force it down. The cold came quickly, and I felt my limbs loosen. Orios saw me shake. He laid his cloak on the stone floor for a bed and set me on it gently and kissed me before he rose.

        “Return to me, beloved. I could not bear the loss.”

        I tried to promise I would, but the sorcerer’s draught was heavy as lead on my tongue, and it would not move to speak.

        I saw fear in Orios’s dark eyes, and then I saw nothing.

        The darkness was thick as pitch, beyond chance of sight. The cold grew through my body until I could feel nothing.

        I heard the rush of swift water, and I could feel again. The ground under my feet sloped and I was walking down to the water.

        That was wrong. I tried to turn away, and it was difficult and easy. Difficult to will instead of floating in the darkness; easy to move weightless limbs, if limbs I had in that dark place. I strained my ears for the sound of the lyre and found it, and there was no beat of my heart or whisper of my breath to drown it out.

        I climbed, and every step felt unnatural, not like the sinking down had been. If I had limbs to tire, I would have fallen, but there was only dark and timeless toil until the world changed, and I stumbled out of a shut door in the same place of tombs I had descended from.

        I saw the world of the living now with different sight. They shone like candle flames, even many paces distant, and through the walls of stone, I felt the warmth of my companions and saw their lights. I had no light myself, nor warmth, but my skin was cleaned of what the sorcerer had written.

        I saw also the dead, as pale and cold as I was. A crowd of them were gathered beyond the fence of crumbled stelae, and one or two wandered the tombs forlorn and seemed to see nothing of me or the world.

        I went to depart and search for a gap in the net of our hunters, and I felt the earth pull with each step, for all that I was without weight or substance. Hades still hungered, and the earth pulled at me to sink down to the dark kingdom.

        Where I came to the fence, the spirits gathered and blocked the way. One shouted from the throng. “Halt, boy! I smell Orios the Theban on you.”

        Cold as I was, my anger was still hot to be so chided. “Who speaks his name as if it is a curse?”

        The crowd of them drew back to let one stand forth, a tall man, broad and heavy, with a bloody wound, as of a tearing spear, in his right side.

        “I speak it so—Alkaios of Chios. By Orios’s hand I was laid low and buried common, without an obol for the ferryman. You are not dead, but I will rend your spirit until it cannot find your flesh again, and pay Orios back with the death of his beloved, as once I paid him before and got a common grave in recompense.”

        Here was the one who had killed Orios’s first eromenos, Aegistus. I did not think even for a moment of racing past. Here was my chance to show Orios that I was strong enough to never leave him in such sorrow. I would return with more than my safety; with victory enough to earn the full measure of my love’s trust at last.

        “If you are set on this,” I said, “Nikanor son of Diomede will prove upon whatever body you still claim that his lover is the best man of Thebes, and that your death was just and well deserved.”

        He had no more weapons than I, and so he came on with bent knees and wide arms, and we wrestled there on the turf beside the stone fence of the tombs.

        We clenched and struggled, and I felt again the strangeness of this body without flesh. He was formed as tall man, and heavy with the muscle of training and the fat of rejoicing over it, and I had still the slimness of youth and was not tall among the sacred warriors of Thebes, but when we strained to pull and throw in that clench, I felt no weight or strength from him that did not match me like a mirror. We had no strength in spirit to match our seemings.

        We broke, and he came at me low, bulling head down for my knees, but I kicked my legs back and caught myself atop him. I tried a throw that could not be done against a stronger man, hooking my arms around his so that he twisted over and fell on his back. I guessed no man had tried such a thing against him, so strong and big a fighter, for long years before he died. He fought me instead of turning in, and so I threw him on his back and came down on him.

        I held him there with my full strength and ground him into the earth as best I could. He did not give over as in a friendly match, but he had no strength to put me off, and as I held him down, the earth pulled at us both, and I stood back when he was half-devoured in the soil, dragged to whatever waiting place Charon keeps for those who will not render him his due.

        The other spirits drew back and kept whatever grievances had them dogging our steps silent as I passed to my real errand. I should have felt the lightness of victory lift me and burn in my cheeks, but all was cold and grey still, the flush left with my heartbeat in the tomb beside Orios.

        With my new sight, I could pick out the young wolves of Laconia among the trees and hollows like torches flitting back and forth and the hoplite columns as creeping grassfires along the road. I looked east from the hilltop, searching for a gap of darkness with no flames that could be a road back to the ships.

        More than once I saw a way open for a breath and then close. The bands of skirmishers were scattered in a careful net, and they knew their work; no broad space was left open for long. We could not make a sprint that way.

        Just as I swallowed that stone and went to find my flesh again and make my report, I saw the flitting torches change their dance, and many of them gathered toward one place. I ran to see what had drawn them.

        I saw too soon, and it was a sweet sadness. Twelve of my brothers had been run down together, and they had found a copse of straight-trunked trees to make their stand in, letting the trunks guard their left sides since they were shieldless. They had made a hedge of their spears, youths and lovers fighting in pairs, and already many young Spartans lay on the turf around them.

        Oh what a valiant hopeless stand they made there. What a loss it was, these warriors in their prime and young men who never saw the full flower of their strength and excellence. But here their end was glorious, and maybe it would serve as Thrasios had hoped and give us a clear chance to bear the sorcerer back to our ships. I had to find the path that would make it so.

        There. The southern column of soldiers was leaving the road and coming for those standing valiant, and they had drawn off that part of the hunting youths. We could go down the south face of the hill and be away before they knew and caught us, but I needed haste. Already I could see one band of searchers like distant flames climbing halfway up the west face of the hill along our trail. I doubted they had found it by the light of half a moon, but they were coming too close nonetheless.

        I turned to run and saw where I had missed before a great shadow over the larger column of the Spartans on the northern road. Need ordered me back to the tomb where my brothers hid, but I was dragged toward the shadow and the marching men like the inexorable tide running out before a great wave rises to drown the land. I strove against it, but I could not even look away or slow my spirit-steps.

        I saw the Spartan ranks were shade-attended, dogged by the dead they had sent down to coinless graves, and over them the mistress of the tide that dragged me to them spread her black wings. Nemesis, undeniable more than the tide or avalanche, was titan-tall, with wings to blot the stars, more solid and more black than any shadow, and in her hand lay a cruel scourge, many-thonged, and each tongue sheened like bright bronze edged by red and black like burning oil.

        I quailed at it and felt a pain in my absent heart to see her there, and wondered what god we had offended so terribly that Nemesis came with our foes and cracked her scourge for us.

        If my will had still commanded, I would have fled the terror of her majesty, but my feet walked me unbidden down the hill until I was close enough to throw myself prostrate before her. I did not doubt that if I had beheld the goddess with my eyes of flesh, I should have been destroyed as Semele by the glory of Olympian Zeus.

        I felt her gaze on me like spears of hot iron sliding through my skin to peer into the butcher’s goods beneath, and when she spoke it was trumpets and cymbals of bronze sounding inside my head loud enough to shatter stone, and yet my spirit could abide it.

        “You are not bound for Kore’s kingdom by right, little wanderer. How come you out of your flesh while it still should live?”

        I was compelled to speak in answer but found I could speak more than she demanded, and so I pled: “Great Lady, if we Cadmeans have offended, I beg you tell me how we may appease whichever god has set you on us.”

        She cracked her whip in idle gesture. “What care I for Cadmeans or for Laconia? I am come at the word of my cousins Hermes and bright Apollo, after the mortal who has claimed their patronage and worked spells by trickery in their name without remitting sacrifice and praise back to them, and who has angered Kore and Hades by breaching too many times the borders of their dark realm. They have no mind to see a second Sisyphus, so I shall see this tricksters dies and goes down to Tartarus without escape.”

        The sorcerer, Hermogenes. Nemesis had come for him, but that meant we all would die with him when the Spartans came to do her office, unless I could return and warn my comrades and we might do it ourselves and sever the curse from us. All of them dead and cursed for Hermogenes’s hubris.

        I made to go, but before I could tear my eyes away, the goddess spoke again.

        “His mark is on you. That is how you wander. That I forbid.”

        She cracked her scourge again and its thongs wrapped me, and the pain was a sound too low to hear vibrating in my bones, a bone-deep ache in my eyes and under my tongue and in the bones of my pelvis and my spine, like being flayed and bathed in brine and grieving loss unto utter desolation.

        I gasped in breath and felt my heart imprisoned once more in my chest. I screamed and flailed and bucked, and the pain ran up and down through me like serpents in my flesh as I beat against the stone and the arms and breast of Orios and Lykos where they held me.

        I had been elsewhere, but the memory twisted and fled like smoke when I grasped for it, and I could not rule my limbs or my voice. I gasped and screamed, and in the quiet as I half choked on spit, Orios shouted at the sorcerer.

        “What in Hades’s name have you done to him, sorcerer?”

        “All that I promised. His spirit was weaker than his daring and the journey has addled him. He will recover, but we must make a new plan of escape. He will not be of use for some time, and his memory may never be whole.”

        My mind raced through fever dreams as they spoke, and I remembered a great shadow of wings and a voice beyond bearing.

        “Nemesis,” I cried out, “Nemesis!”

        I saw a flash of fear on the sorcerer’s face, but no one in that place made any move or sign that they had seen.

        Slowly, slow as a broken man crawling from the field, I was recovering the rule of my body and the memory of what had passed. Lykos withdrew, and Orios held me down alone, gentle as my shaking lessened

        “With Hermes’s help,” the sorcerer said, “we might escape in flesh through the same borders of Hades’s realm the boy traveled in spirit, but the cost to open that way is higher.”

        Even I, still wracked with pain and broken memory knew what he meant, and by some trick the serpents of his rod seemed to come alive and drip venom from their mouths in readiness to strike.

        Phaidros the swordsman, that bright youth, did not hesitate. “I will bear it,” he said.

        Brave heart to offer himself so; and doubly cursed the sorcerer who would spend such a one to escape his traitor’s doom.

        Hermogenes began to draw a door on the empty wall of the tomb, behind the bier. Phaidros stripped off his cuirass.

        I remembered what I had seen and heard—spirits contending, the brave stand of our brothers that had opened our escape, the goddess who pursued the sorcerer. I stilled myself. All hung on this moment, and if the rest still thought me addled, I would not carry a debate, and even if one began and I was victor, the sorcerer might well escape and the Spartans would happily slay us without any spur from Nemesis.

        I looked my lover in the eyes and hoped he knew me well enough to trust me now, even without knowing the tale of all I had dared in spirit to deserve his love and confidence.

        “Your sword, Erastes. The sorcerer is false.”

        He put it in my hand without question.

        I rose and crossed the space in one pace, and none was fast enough to stop me, for Phaidros and Thrasios were busy preparing Phaidros’s sacrifice. The blade was bright and clean and I was strong and drove it into the accursed sorcerer’s back, through bone and through the heart until it grated on the stone behind.

        Below the sorcerer as he fell limp, the tomb wall withdrew, and there were steps down toward the sound of swift and unforgiving water, and snapping thongs edged in red fire reached up for him.

        “Bless me Nemesis,” I prayed, “with some of your father’s darkness.”

        The moon and stars were hidden when we pushed open the tomb door, but I knew the clear road to the ships that had been opened for us. We ran, and Orios held one step back and let me lead us home. There was the sweetest victory I could have won.

Copyright © 2021 R.K. Duncan

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R.K. Duncan is a queer polyamorous wizard and author of fantasy, horror, and occasional sci-fi. He writes from a few rooms of a venerable West Philadelphia row home, where he dreams of travel and the demise of capitalism. In the shocking absence of any cats, he lavishes spare attention on cast iron cookware and his long-suffering and supportive partner. Before settling on writing, he studied linguistics and philosophy at Haverford College. He attended Viable Paradise 23 in 2019. His occasional musings and links to other work can be found at rkduncan-author.com.

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SONG SO PURE AND CRUEL

by March McCarron

        Moonless nights are a hurting kind of lonesome. No Danu, mother goddess, for company. No bright face to beam upon my horseplay. Just the humorless black, the faint winking of stars.

        But darkness has its uses, too—for a faerie of mischief.

        The tide is in, water so shining smooth I can see my reflection: copper forelocks, liquid eyes, a velvety white muzzle. I flash a horsey grin, then stamp the image until it fractures. I keep stamping, just for the joy of it, splashing and braying and frolicking in the surf.

        Though I may take any form I please, this one suits me best. I love the jittery power of these dancing legs, the whipping of the wind in my mane. The speed.

        Sand churns beneath my hooves as I gallop up the coast. In the distance, the palace of the Sea Court is lit up from within—its spindly spires glowing aquamarine, like pixie wings. Or poison.

        I may be young, a mere foal, but I know not to mix with the shee. Those noble fae do not appreciate japes. They do not giggle or shriek or do anything jolly. They are all joyless and brutal, like the Faerie King, and better avoided. I turn away.

        Nearer by, I catch the hum of merry voices. Laughter! To a pooka, the sound of laughter is as irresistible as music. I trace the sound to a small cove. There, a group of females dance to the tamping of drums. They look wild and wonderful, wearing nothing but starlight.

        How joyful, how wild, how fun! I want to play, too. These are selkie, shapeshifters like me. Though a selkie must climb in and out of her skin to change form. A notion I find baffling strange. If I wish to be a seal, I am one.

        Tonight their sealskins are set aside, folded carefully on a large stone. Wouldn’t it be a lark, if I took one and ran? We could have a jolly chase beneath the stars. How we would laugh and laugh!

        Nickering so they will hear, I snatch a sealskin with my teeth and prance away. I do not go fast. I want to be caught.

        “Pooka!” they cry. “Return that at once, you little fiend!”

        They are so angry, and it is marvelous funny. Whinnying with delight, I bound into the surf and let them surround me. But some of them have spears, and they hiss at me with livid eyes. They do not like my joke. I toss them the skin, but they keep prowling nearer. There is a strangeness in my chest, a horrible tightening. I shift into a seal and beat my flippers against the wet sand. See? I’m like you.

        “Oh, leave him be,” one of them says. “He’s just a baby.”

        “Pooka need to learn this lesson young,” another answers. “We do not tolerate their pranks.”

        She jabs me. She jabs me with her spear, and I bleed, and—oh, Danu—it hurts. All I wanted was to play, to laugh, to dance. Why are they so nasty?

        With a keen of pain, I turn to the sea and swim away. I don’t know if they’re chasing me. I imagine that they are, that they’ll stab me again—stab me until I am dead, my immortal life ended right at the start. So I swim, heedless of time and distance. Until I am far from land, far from the continent of Faerie itself.

        My mind is hazy and my shoulder stings, and it becomes difficult to keep my head above water. If only I had changed into a fish, I could sleep beneath the waves. But now I am too tired to shift, too tired to turn back, too tired to move forward. I float and bleed. Alone. Beneath a black and unloving sky.

        Will Arawn, lord of death, collect my soul if it is all the way out here? Or have I traveled beyond his reach? Fear sings through me at the thought.

        I am going to die, going to—

        Or perhaps not. Before me, mists begin to... to open, like a curtain drawn back. An island reveals itself, a green gem in this vacant place. Beautiful and bewildering, it calls to me. I do so love all things peculiar.

        I struggle onward until I crawl onto a strange and unknown shore.

        There, I hear a voice of impossible sweetness. “Hello, wanderer.”

        And that is when the moon appears.

        She looks like a human girl child—short-limbed and soft, with cheeks full and blooming. A riot of ebony curls haloes her face, and starlight twinkles in her night-sky eyes. Even the dark hue of her skin seems to gleam, to shimmer, to shine with some inner light.

        She casts not a shadow upon the waves but a silvery reflection. Moonlight.

        I am just a pooka, just a pup—a faerie of no consequence and little experience—but even I know Danu when I see her.

        “You’re hurt,” she says, approaching with outstretched hands. Her bare feet leave perfect impressions in the sand. “Let me help.”

        She touches the wound, and I yelp in reproach. But a moment later the pain is gone, the bleeding stopped.

        “There, isn’t that better?”

        I bark and drum my flippers. Thank you, thank you! But I am so exhausted, I can barely keep my eyes open.

        “Come,” she says with a smile. “We’ll sleep. And in the morning you can tell me how you got so lost, little pooka.”

        I follow her up the beach and into a house, too weary to notice my surroundings. The girl who is Danu climbs onto a pallet and opens her arms to me. With a delighted arf, arf, I snuggle in close, tucking my nose into the crook of her neck.

        We sleep.

        At some point in the night, I wake long enough to realize that I have shifted form. Now we match. My furless arms are wrapped around Danu

        She looks like a girl. I look like a boy. Neither is wholly true.

        Happily, I nuzzle closer to Danu and close my human eyes. I sleep again and do not rouse until daylight warms my cheek.

* * *

        The house is spacious yet simple, built of raw wood beams and sheets of glass so faultless clear they are nigh invisible. Danu keeps many strange collections. There are vibrant flowers in vibrant pots. Paintings and sculptures. Seashells, books, and useless human oddities. Her wardrobe brims with beautiful dresses and tunics and nightgowns, all smelling like her, like jasmine and dreams.

        There is a whole room devoted to silverware. Old spoons armor an entire wall, arranged by the shade of their patina. I think it is the best thing I have ever seen.

        “Giving yourself a tour?” a voice asks from the doorway.

        She has surprised me. Oh, how I adore surprises! “You were sleeping. Why spoons?”

        “Why not spoons?”

        Yes, true. She is wise.

        “I want to see the island, all its secret places,” I say. Overhead, a blue, blue sky beckons through the glass ceiling. “Will you show me?”

        “No faerie has ever set foot on Breasal before,” she says. “This is not a place that can be found. But I sensed you out there, near drowning, and I made an exception... “

        “Thank you.” I shuffle my bipedal feet. “I want to see the island. Will you show me?”

        A slow smile. “All its secret places?”

        “Every single one!”

        She laughs: a sudden burst of joy and sound, like a thousand shattering glasses, a thousand silver bells, a thousand birds taking wing. My boy-heart is gripped by a—a feeling. I don’t know what it is, only that it has reshaped me.

        “Let me change my clothes and find something for you to wear, then we’ll go.”

        I trail after her, back into the jasmine-scented wardrobe, studying her every movement. Her elbows are dimpled, and I think that is wonderful.

        “Pooka, did you rearrange my undergarments?” she asks, frowning into an open drawer.

        “Oh, yes,” I say. “I’ve rearranged all your things.”

* * *

        The Isle of Breasal has many secret places. The girl Danu shows me caverns full of luminous jellyfish; a path through the forest, where the trees are so dense they form a leafy tunnel; hot springs where geysers explode into the air, as if the earth took a sip of water then burst into sudden, spewing laughter.

        We eat fruit plucked from branches, and I lick the sticky nectar from my fingers, and then hers. She complains that it tickles.

        “I thought you would ask me a great many questions,” she says, sometime in the late afternoon.

        “Should I?”

        “Most would, if they found a goddess living on an isle of legend.”

        Now that she mentions it, I do have a few questions. “All right. Why are you so young? Which fruit is your favorite? Will you send me away? Why are your ears round? Is the sky lonely? Are the stars your friends? Can I smell your hair?”

        Her mouth purses into a smile. “Perhaps just one at a time?”

        Just one, just one. I want to ask about her hair again, but I force myself to pause and think. I remember the hollowness in my chest last night, when I looked up into the black and she wasn’t there. “Where do you go when you’re not in the sky?”

        “Oh, sweet pooka. Just because you cannot see a thing, that does not mean it isn’t there. I’m always in the sky. Even now.”

        I guess I was lonesome for no reason at all.

        Later, we climb the peak at the center of Breasal, and I am tempted to shift into a sure-footed beast, like a goat. But I do not wish to leave Danu behind, so we scramble up the incline, side by side, on clumsy human feet.

        The crest of the mountain is a small bowl, like two cupped hands. And at its center there is a lake, covered in a thin, perfect film of ice. It shows me our reflections: Danu, bright and dark and lovely, her curls wild from the wind; and me, with a clump of copper hair falling over my eyes, like a forelock peeping between horse ears.

        “Do you often take this form?” she asks.

        “No,” I say. “In this form, I have so many feelings I don’t understand.”

        The ice is as unblemished as the glass in Danu’s house. I reach for a stone, and I shatter it.

        Chaos, restored.

        Danu blinks at me for a moment, aghast, then bursts into bright laughter—laughter as lovely as shattering ice.

        “In all my many lives, I’ve never had a pooka for a friend.”

        My chest puffs up with a sense of bigness, because only something very big can be a friend of the moon. “It’s good that I’m here. Now you have someone to play with.”

        She chuckles and shakes her head. “Quite.”

        We fall onto our backs and watch the stars prick the sky. The moon appears, a faint sliver in the blue. I don’t understand how she can be up there and down here, both at once.

        I ask, “Can I smell your hair?”

        “Yes, pooka. You can smell my hair.”

        It smells sweet as spring and feels soft against my hand. But it doesn’t taste good at all.

* * *

        Our first months together brim with new discovery. I seek out all the wonders of Breasal, and all the wonders of the girl-child Danu too.

        I discover that she’s ticklish, that cherries are her favorite, and that she looks young because she is young—or, at least, this incarnation of her is.

        “Sometimes I like to live a life,” she says. “So I can remember how it feels.”

        Because it’s lonely in the sky, I surmise. And the stars are not her friends.

        On one sun-bright day, after I smash a sculpture and follow her around saying—Danu, Danu, Danu; look at me, look at me, look at me—she snaps, “Stop calling me that! I’m not Danu! I’m a bit of the goddess, but mostly I’m something new.”

        “You’re a bitta Danu,” I say, solemn. “Sorry, Bitta. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

        And so I call her Bitta, and she likes that. She dubs me Crash, for obvious reasons, and I like that too. Before, I’d only ever been called pooka. Now I am more than just a kind of a thing. I am Crash. She is Bitta. And when you name something, it becomes just a little bit yours.

        I want to be hers forever.

        Slowly, I learn which pranks will make Bitta laugh, and which will make her screech, and which will make her cry; and I learn that one of these things is much better than the others.

        One star-bright night, I watch Bitta chase after fireflies. I experience a spike in my chest—a hot something I can’t name—at the sight of her, so delighted by them, not me. So I shift into a firefly myself, and I lead her to the edge of a precipice. She’s so amused by my weaving, dancing flight, that she doesn’t realize where she is. She falls.

        I shift into my boy form again. Laughter burbles up from my throat. It was so funny, the way her eyes went wide right before she tumbled.

        But Bitta isn’t laughing. She sobs a little, holding her shin. It’s bent in a way that human legs aren’t supposed to bend.

        “Crash?” she gasps.

        “Oh, no,” I breathe.

        I broke her. I broke her. And while I love broken things, I realize that I do not love a broken Bitta. My insides turn jagged and hurting, like I can feel her fracture inside my chest.

        “Oh, no. What do I do?”

        Tears shine in her eyes. “Help me back to the house.”

        I scoop her up, and she loops her arms around my neck. My heart pounds so, so hard. I carry her up the hill, into the house, and set her—gently, ever so gently—onto the pallet.

        She sleeps.

        All night I run to and fro, getting her things she hasn’t asked for: cups of water, bowls of cherries, spoons, books, seashells from the eastern shore, a jar of fireflies, three very fine stones. When she wakes, she blinks at my offerings in faint confusion.

        “How is it?” I ask.

        “Better,” she says, swinging her two perfect legs into view. “I heal fast.”

        But that doesn’t erase the memory of pain, nor that I caused it.

        I fall to my knees and press my brow to the floor. “I will never hurt you again,” I vow.

        She lifts my chin with her finger, so I will meet her gaze. “I know, Crash. I know.”

* * *

        It is Beltane, and so Bitta opens a portal to the mortal world and glamours us to appear human. Everywhere, there is chaos. Bonfires and drums, dancing and drinking, prayers and songs. Such odd mortal behaviors, too.

        It is all so new, so enchanting. I prance through the festival, giddy as I have ever been, trying to see everything at once.

        Bitta laughs and tugs on my arm. “Try not to sprout wings and fly away.”

        “But look!” I say, sweeping a hand at all the wild human wonder. “Look at it all!”

        “It’s more entertaining to look at you,” she says.

        We dance around the fires, along with the humans. We are not the only faeries present. They, like us, are glamoured—either to blend into the crowd, or else to disappear. But I see them: pixies and goblins and imps. There are several shee in attendance, too—looking like mortals but far more beautiful and far more cruel. From them, we keep our distance.

        The beat of the music is the beat of my heart and the beat of the world. Bitta and I spin and twirl and stamp and frolic, until I am sheened in sweat and her cheeks are blooming and we’re both panting for breath.

        “Can you wait here for me?” she shouts over the drums. “I want to find you a gift. For Beltane.”

        I clap my hands. “Good idea!”

        I don’t wait. I go in search of my own present, determined to make Bitta smile. It is easy to enter vacant human homes, to shuffle through their drawers. Determination fuels my hunt. Only briefly do I pause to shatter glass or disarrange belongings.

        When I return to our meeting place, I am impatient with glee. I have found the best gift. And so I will win.

        Bitta returns minutes later. Her present is concealed in an ornate wooden box, tied with a silver ribbon.

        “Me first!” I demand, thrusting her gift into her lap.

        She studies the spoon closely. It is old, discolored, and covered in dings. The tip of the handle is shaped like the moon. Slowly, slowly, she smiles. “Thank you, Crash. It’s wonderful.”

        If I still had a tail, it would be wagging.

        “Now, yours.”

        I’ve never received a present before, nor owned a possession. So it seems a ceremonious event, to untie this ribbon and open this box. Inside, nestled in a bed of crushed velvet, is a flute. A beautiful, delicate instrument carved with strange and dreamlike shapes.

        My throat pinches, and my eyes burn. A happy-pain.

        “You’re always whistling such interesting tunes,” she says. “I think you have music trapped inside you that wants to get out. Do you like it?”

        Do I like it?

        This flute makes me feel like a dragon curling around its horde of treasure. Like a mama defending her young. (A foreign notion, since pooka mamas do no such thing. We are solitary beings.)

        I think I would go to war to protect and keep this flute.

        “It gives me such a strong feeling,” I say, tapping my heart. “Here.”

        Then I bring the instrument to my lips and blow, producing a sweet, crisp tone that resonates through my chest.

        A shadow looms from behind me, and Bitta frowns at something over my shoulder.

        “Honorable and immaculate Danu.”

        It’s a shee, his fair head bent in a low bow. Like all the noble fae, he is beauty made flesh, with silver-white hair and turquoise eyes. His ears are pointed like mine, but that is where the resemblance ends.

        “It is a blessing to stand in your presence.”

        “How did you know?” she asks, sounding oddly resigned. Not so young as usual.

        “The king sensed you the moment you were born, goddess. I have been trying to reach you for years, to extend his majesty’s humble invitation. He would be honored to host you at the Moon Court, as is only right and fitting.”

        “I thank you,” she says, in a voice I have never heard before. A voice with a bite of iron. “But I have no interest in visiting the courts, now or ever. Tell your king to leave me in peace.”

        Surprise splashes across his face. He bows again. “By your word, goddess.”

        She watches him leave with narrowed eyes, then extends her hand to me. “Come, Crash. Let’s go home.”

        Bitta opens the veil once more, and we step through a shimmer in the air. On Breasal, it is almost dawn, the sky a dim and ashy gray.

        “Why don’t you want to go to court?” I ask, cradling my flute to my chest. She would be worshipped there, afforded every luxury. And I’m not sure I could follow.

        She pulls her expression back into a smile, a faint one. “The last time I became flesh, I spent most of that life at the Moon Court. I did not enjoy it, and the current king is much worse than that one. In this life, I wanted only peace and solitude.”

        “But I spoiled that,” I say, despondent.

        Finally, she grins and looks herself again. “And I’m so glad you did. Now, play me a tune. I want to dance some more.”

        I play—not a tune, exactly, but a jumble of nonsense sounds—and she spins and laughs as the sun crests the horizon.

* * *

        Spooked by the king’s emissary, we do not return to the mortal realm in the years that follow. Not even on Beltane. But we find a thousand other ways to entertain ourselves.

        We invent games. Like when Bitta wears a blindfold, and I shift into various animals and objects while she guesses.

        A tiger! A spoon! A three-toed sloth!

        We swim in the cove, then dry on the shore. We build sandcastles, only so I can kick them down. We tell each other long, elaborate tales. Her stories brim with truth, mine with fancy.

        Most mornings, I take my horse form. Bitta climbs onto my back, thighs pinching my flanks, and I gallop up and down the beach, her fingers woven into my mane.

        We eat beneath the swaying branches of the forest. The way the leaves rustle in the breeze, it always sounds like the trees are laughing. And I always say so.

        “Why shouldn’t they laugh?” Bitta pokes my shoulder. “With you to entertain them.”

        Every night, we sleep wrapped together, our limbs a twining tangle. And when we wake, we recount our dreams. All of them, even if they are frightening or embarrassing.

        I dreamt that I drowned with a spear in my side, and the sky was empty, I say.

        I dreamt that we had a baby, and he looked just like you, she says.

        But most often I play my flute. I could play for hours and days and months and years and never tire of it. I don’t know any melodies, and the notes I produce are not rightly a song. Rather, I play the sound of my soul—chaotic and joyful and strange.

        One night, after I’ve performed a particularly odd piece, Bitta takes my hand and says gravely, “I have never heard such music as you play. It is a gift. You are so special, Crash.”

        That doesn’t sound right. We pooka are all the same, or are meant to be. But who am I to gainsay the moon?

* * *

        We swim beneath the stars, the water cool and gentle.

        “Tomorrow is Samhain,” she says.

        “Is it?” It’s difficult to keep track of the days here, where there are no seasons.

        “I want to go to the mortal world again. It’s not as if the king can summon me. He has no power to command a goddess. And besides—” She arches her back, letting her arms float on the surface of the sea, and I fail to hear the rest of her words.

        Our bodies have been changing. In all my forms, mine has grown longer and leaner, stronger. In this form, I have grown a little ginger hair on my chest, and rather more between my legs.

        Bitta has changed too. Her face and arms and legs are not so round, but she has become soft in other places. Her body was never such a distraction before. “Crash,” she says, snapping her fingers. “Where did you go? Looks like you were thinking big thoughts.”

        I wasn’t thinking, I was feeling—hot, peculiar, man-like feelings. I don’t know how to hold these emotions inside, so I do what seems natural: I splash her. Bitta shrieks and splashes back, and for a while we flail and kick and wage a wet sort of war, until we are both sopping and short of breath.

        Bitta’s hair sticks wetly to her neck and chest. Her face is luminous. “So, what do you think? Fancy a trip for Samhain?”

        “Of course,” I say. “I want to play with the humans.”

        For a moment, her expression pinches. But then she offers a small, measured smile. “Good. It’s settled then.”

* * *

        Samhain is like Beltane, and yet not like. There are drums and feasts and dancing still, but there is also a tang of blood in the air—as animals are slaughtered in sacrifice—and the humans wear masks and hoods, with long beaks and snouts and antlers, turning themselves into grotesqueries. Faeries without beauty.

        Everywhere, there is a pulse, a sharpness, a burn—like fear, or hunger. I feel some base, innate part of myself stir. My inherent pooka-ness, throwing back its head and howling into the night.

        But then there is a different part of me, centered in the place where my hand is clasped with Bitta’s. And that part wishes for flowers not blood. Laughter not screams.

        Scenting humans, I turn sharply toward a pair of them, who stand a little too far from the fires and the crowd. Asking for trouble. I know that Bitta is watching with a frown, but my nature compels me.

        Lead them astray.

        Take them far from here.

        It will be a laugh.

        I transform into a shadow and circle my prey, flying into the woods. And then I am a light, a will-o’-the-wisp—a beautiful gleam, bright and silver as Bitta’s soul.

        “Look,” one of the humans says, pointing. They both pull back their masks. A man and a woman, young and comely, their hands entwined. As they stare at me, their eyes glaze over. Ensorcelled. I am overcome with a sense of rightness, of purpose fulfilled.

        I weave my light deeper into the forest—deeper, deeper. Away from the drums and the bonfires and the human crowds. Away from Bitta too. She may be wroth with me, but she’ll forgive if I ask sweetly, if I smile her favorite smile.

        For now, I am a will-o’-the-wisp. A giddy flame in the night. I lead, and the humans follow.

        Though I have never visited this place before, I know all its pitfalls, dangers, and snares. A pooka always does. Instinct urges me to guide this couple to a nearby precipice, to giggle while they tumble. But I remember the tightness in my chest when Bitta fell, and I do not want that again. These humans are not her, of course, but they have rounded ears like she does. And breakable bones, too.

        So instead, I steer them toward a lake. Drown them, something inside me whispers. Lead them into the water, until their heads go under. What a jape! What a lark!

        I take the couple to the shore, right to the edge of the lake, and then I stop them. Even their feet remain dry. The humans gaze unblinkingly at my light, where I hover over the still surface. An urge burns inside me. I need to do something.

        So, I explode—a thousand fractures of light slowly raining over the reflective waters, glimmering in the dark of the wood.

        In the shadows of the far shore, I retake my man-form to watch. The humans gaze in awe at the falling stars, heads tipped back. Wonder and delight dance across their features.

        “You did something good, Crash,” Bitta says. I did not hear her approach, but I’m unsurprised to find her at my side. It’s her usual place, after all. “These mortals will remember this moment fondly for the rest of their lives.”

        “That’s not very long,” I say.

        She shrugs. “Just because something does not last long, that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.”

        I study this strange mortal pair, trying to see them as she would. “Maybe it’s more important, because it doesn’t last long?”

        Bitta looks at me like she’s seeing something new, something more. My human-shaped heart swells, and I cannot hold her gaze. It is too depthless. Across the lake, the humans present a new puzzle.

        “What’s that they’re doing now?” I ask. “It looks like they’re trying to eat each other.” Use your teeth, not your tongues, silly mortals.

        Bitta snickers. “They’re kissing. It’s something that lovers do.”

        “Humans are so odd.”

        She stifles a laugh behind a hand. “Kissing isn’t just for humans, Crash. Faeries do it too.”

        “Whatever for?”

        She shakes her head, starlight gleaming in her eyes. “A funny question, from the faerie who puts his mouth on everything.”

        “Hey! I haven’t done that in years.”

        “Let’s go back to the festival. I want to dance.”

        She tugs me away, but I spare one last look for this peculiar couple. They seem to be undressing, despite the cold. I’d call that silly too, but I remember yesterday at the cove. The hot wanting in my hands and my blood when Bitta arched her back. So, maybe I can understand these humans, when I’m in this form. Or, at least, I can nearly understand. A light seen through closed eyes.

        Really, everyone should try being a horse. It’s so much simpler.

* * *

        We dance, my hands on her soft waist, our gazes locked. I am caught up in the tide of her, and happier for it. Her jasmine scent fills me up. My man-heart is a drum, beat-beat-beating along with all the others.

        When a lull in the music comes, it is like waking from a dream. Bitta plucks the flute from my pocket and presses it to my palm.

        “Play, Crash,” she says. “Play for me.”

        “Whenever I play, it is for you.”

        I lift the instrument to my lips, more reverently than usual, and blow. A curious melody rises up from my depths.

        At first, the crowd falls into unnatural silence. All is still.

        I play the feeling in my chest—this warm, wanting goodness. And I play the look in her eyes, the dimple at the corner of her mouth, the beauty of this night. I play the tune of old spoons and shattered ice and laughing trees.

        As if under an enchantment, the revelers peel away their monstrous masks, revealing sweetly human faces. And when they dance anew, it is with more joy and less frenzy, more laughter and less fear. It seems the festival has reshaped itself around my song; it is riotous and gleeful and strange.

        I perform for the next hour, aware of the mortals’ wild delight yet never tearing my eyes from Bitta’s face. There is wonderment in her expression. She looks at me as if I were the moon.

        Later, when the drums begin again, we drink ale. After three mugs, my head becomes a fluttering dandelion seed. Make a wish. I’m so dizzy with glee, every face in the crowd seems an old friend. When a shee approaches—the same shee from that Beltane, all those years ago, with his snowy hair and blue-green eyes—I greet him with a wave.

        “Honorable Danu,” he says, bowing low. “Forgive me my impudence, but I am ordered by my king to give you this message: he demands your presence at the Moon Court. This is a summons, not a request. I can take you to him at once.”

        The shee extends a perfect, long-fingered hand, ready to transport her away. His words would compel anyone else to take hold. The king’s command is a binding magic.

        Bitta’s cheeks are rosy and her eyes are bright with humor. “You can tell your king he has neither the right nor the ability to summon me. He is a faerie. I am a goddess. Any power he possesses came from me in the first place.”

        Oh. I had never considered... The Faerie King is a descendant of Danu’s. (That is why he rules the Moon Court, after all.) Which means some previous incarnation of Danu bore a child. Who was the sire? Did she love him? Does she miss him, even now? The thought makes me feel so low, I could shift into a worm.

        “Run along, emissary,” Bitta says. “I want to dance in peace.”

        She skips away, merging into the mass of pulsing bodies. I don’t immediately follow.

        “What does the king want with her?” I ask the shee.

        He arches one of his elegant brows, as if I am a great simpleton. “Surely you can guess. Haven’t you heard of the prince?”

        I shake my head, and the night spins.

        The emissary stamps a patronizing smile on his face. “I suppose low faeries do not know such things, hm? Allow me to educate you. For many centuries, the king tried to produce an heir but could get a child on no one. There was a prophecy. It pointed to a low shee of the day court as a viable womb, never mind that she was unwilling. Well, as with most prophecies, it was only a partial truth. Before she slithered back to her own court, she indeed bore the king a son. A son who took after her, not him. A snake, not a wolf.”

        I am confused when he stops speaking, as if that is the end of the story. “What does this prince have to do with Bitta?”

        Again, that condescending look. “Obviously, the prince is unworthy of the crown. The king needs to purify his line. And what could be purer than returning to the source?”

        When I at last understand his meaning, I go terribly, dangerously still. I can barely breathe for rage. “He means to use her as his—his broodmare?”

        “She is the mother goddess. Don’t make it sound obscene.”

        “He can’t have her,” I hiss, every beast that is a part of me evident in the sound. “She is mine!”

        The emissary only regards me blandly. “Know your place, pooka.”

        I do know my place: it’s by her side. I am not vain enough to believe that Danu belongs to me, only this one little piece of her.

        Bitta is mine because she made herself so. And she will continue to be mine for as long as she wishes. I am not worthy of her, but that doesn’t matter. We chose each other.

        I stalk away from the shee, too furious and disgusted for words. My feet take me to her, through the whirl of dancing bodies. Bitta beams at the sight of me. She wraps her arms around my neck. I draw her nearer with trembling hands, fueled by an unfamiliar protectiveness. We press close, swaying, body-to-body. She rests her head against my pounding heart.

        I hold her so, so tight.

* * *

        Our island is always best at sunset, when the sky is a chaos of color. But today those hues are muted, grim.

        “You’re in a peculiar mood,” Bitta says, tugging on my sleeve.

        I shrug.

        “You’ve been in a peculiar mood. Since Samhain. Do you want to talk about it?”

        I don’t have the words to describe how I feel, this dark snarl in my chest. And also this—this wanting.

        “You know he can’t get to me, right? No one can find Breasal, and even should I go out there—” she gestures, indicating the world at large, “—he has no power over me.”

        “I think I hate him,” I say softly. “I’ve never hated anything before.”

        She takes my hand. “Sweet Crash. Come, I know what will cheer you up.”

        Bitta leads me to a cavern off the beach. It has been long years since we came here. The opening is nearly too small. My shoulders were not so broad before.

        Once inside, the space is as I remember. Dim, but full of narrow shafts of sunlight. The roof of the cave glitters with minerals and rough, natural gems. It looks like the night sky.

        “Crash!” Bitta calls, cupping her hands to her mouth like we did when we were young. Her voice echoes around the cavern. Crash, Crash, Crash. “Don’t be sad!”

        Don’t be sad, don’t be sad, don’t be sad.

        My heart pangs and my throat pinches. She is so dear to me that I can barely stand it. She is so beautiful that it is killing me slowly.

        “I love you!”

        Those are words I’ve never heard before. I want to hear them again, and the cavern obliges: I love you, I love you, I love you.

        All I can do is point to my chest, point to this feeling. It’s so much and so strong. I don’t know what to do with myself. Something in my expression makes Bitta laugh, and the sound shatters and refracts around us.

        It is the most delicious sound in the world, her laugh. I wish I could take it inside of me. I wish I could taste it.

        All at once, I remember the humans by the lake. Is that what they were doing? Was the mortal man tasting his lover’s laugh?

        “Say something!” she demands, pulling on my hand.

        “Something!” Something, something, something.

        She laughs again, and this time I swoop in. My mouth presses to hers, swallowing the sound. Consuming it. Her throat shivers in surprise, and I taste that noise too, finding all of it sweet, sweet, sweet. Headier than ale, more honeyed than mead. I flick my tongue across her lips, to lick up the last traces of her joy.

        Bitta blinks at me, startled. Then, ever so gently, she cups my cheeks in her hands, and she claims my mouth. I’m not laughing, so I don’t know what she’s trying to taste. Just me, I suppose. Her lips brush mine and then warmly meld.

        This is the best thing that has ever happened.

        I feel—I feel...

        So much at once. This thing we are doing, it is hot and chaotic and crashing and peculiar and ravenous and joyful—and all the things I like best.

        Kissing, I remember.

        Bitta pulls away just a little, and then—with twinkling eyes—licks my lips. As I had done. I only realize I am grinning when she grins in return.

        “Humans may be on to something,” I say.

        “I told you. Not just humans. All lovers do this.”

        How have I never noticed before the crease at the center of her lip, that it is lush as a peach? My thumb reaches to touch that spot. As if to feel its ripeness. “What else do lovers do?”

        She nips at my finger. “Let me show you.”

* * *

        Chaos, restored.

        Hours, days, weeks, and months pass, all in euphoric oblivion.

        Bitta and I, we make love. Make it, let it shatter us, then make it again. In this, I am the thing that is broken. And better for it.

        Love must be a creature of mischief, like me.

        We are gentle. We are wild. We are strange and curious, learning all the ways our bodies fit together. My hands are intrepid explorers—as are my mouth and tongue and teeth. We learn each other with purpose, all our secret places.

        “Crash,” she gasps, nearing the point of bliss.

        Smiling a pooka smile, I stop pleasuring and start tickling. She squirms and laughs, yet still manages to glower. “You finish what you’ve begun, or I swear—”

        I do. Because there is a sound sweeter than her laugh.

        Everything is different now, though little has changed. Our days are much the same as before.

        We swim in the cove, then make love on the shore.

        We pluck ripe fruits to eat. I lick the sticky nectar from her skin.

        We climb up the mountain, to the lake with its perfect film of ice. Under the night sky, we come together again and again—the moon above me and below me.

        Passion is not like hunger. It is not so easily sated. Sometimes, I can be inside her and it isn’t close enough. Sometimes, the wanting is so painful I cannot bear it. I shift into a hound and sleep peacefully at her feet.

        Until she nudges me with her foot. “Come on, Crash. Change back. Play with me.”

        On a perfect star-bright evening, I lead my love astray. She follows my weaving light into the woods, to a clearing where I’ve set a picnic. She’s more interested in unwrapping me than our supper. I gaze up at the swaying branches, at the laughing leaves. My spine arches away from the ground as I shatter.

        Later, I pluck my flute from the basket and play the melody of my bliss, giving sound to the tingles of pleasure still drifting along my limbs. She pillows her arm beneath her head and watches me, with stars in her eyes.

        When I’ve finished, she takes my face in her hands and brushes my cheekbones with her thumbs. “I have never adored anyone or anything as I adore you.”

        I don’t know what to do with this—this feeling. This burning, aching wonder. So I flick her nose, and she laughs.

* * *

        “I want to visit the mortal world again,” Bitta says. “It must be winter there, now.”

        “Me too,” I say. “I want to drink ale and play with the humans.”

        “I want to kiss you with snowflakes in your hair.”

        I flash her a smile, her favorite smile, the one that makes her go soft. “I wonder if making love in the snow is like making love in the sand?”

        “Colder, I’m guessing.”

        “I could keep you warm.”

        She wriggles her brows. “I know you could, Crash.”

        “Do you think the king’s emissary will find us again?”

        She sniffs. “He should be accustomed to rejection. Let’s go now. Before the sun sets.”

        Caution is not in my nature, so I make no objection. I only press a rough kiss to her cheek, wrapping her in my arms so we both stumble. Laughing, she flicks her hand to open a door between worlds.

        And we enter the mortal realm for a third time.

* * *

        There is no holiday, so all is quiet and still. More so because of the snow—a dense white blanket, hushing the forest and town beneath its folds. The air is cold in my nose and makes my cheeks burn.

        Hand-in-hand, we trudge through the whiteness toward a tavern. Within, there are only a few humans nursing drinks. A fire crackles in the hearth.

        The barmaid winks at me when she delivers our ale, and Bitta frowns. I am as merry as the bubbles in my mug.

        “Why are you smiling?” she asks, suddenly cross.

        “Because there are snowflakes in my hair.” I purse my lips and close my eyes. She kisses the tip of my nose instead, just to make me feel foolish.

        I do so love to feel foolish.

        She laughs at my expression, and we clink our tankards together. The ale is lovely, but the atmosphere here is bleak. Surely there is better fun to be had? We leave glamoured leaves on the table as payment and make for the door.

        When we push out into the night, a shee is waiting for us. The king’s emissary. He looks like winter made flesh, with his snow-silver hair and ice-blue eyes.

        “You again?” Bitta says, her tone dismissive. She grabs my hand and steers us around the emissary as if he were a mere obstruction in her path.

        “I come with a summons from the king,” he says.

        “I believe we’ve already sung this song. The king cannot summon me.”

        “True,” the shee says. There is something in his voice that makes us both pause, something that sounds like triumph. “But this summons is not for you, honorable Danu. It is for the pooka.”

        The words grab ahold of my heart and yank.

        A king cannot command a goddess, but he can certainly command me. The compulsion twists like a rope around my ribs. My feet take me to the shee, quite against my will.

        “No...” Bitta breathes. Her hand turns viselike around my own.

        “You are, of course, most welcome to join us at the Moon Court,” the emissary says, his smile catlike. “You may accompany your... friend.”

        He extends his hands to us, palms up. I snatch onto him immediately, incapable of doing otherwise. Bitta hesitates. She and the emissary are locked in some silent exchange—his eyes glinting, her jaw set. Finally, she reaches out and takes his hand.

        The white of the world is ripped from my eyes. We swirl into darkness. My ears pop as our feet hit the ground, returned to Faerie for the first time since childhood. Before us, the Moon Palace looms like a mountain of glass and quartz.

        It may be a monument in Danu’s honor, but it is the domain of the Faerie King.

* * *

        As we follow the emissary into the palace, I cling to Bitta’s hand, fearful I might lose her. She squeezes just as tight. Tension vibrates from me to her, from her to me. We are an echo-cavern of dread.

        The shee leads us past a towering, glass-roofed atrium, up a grand staircase, and through a labyrinth of hallways. This place is an eye-watering marvel, an impossible web of riches. I crane my head to and fro, trying to memorize the layout. Everything is silver and quartz and white marble. Ornate scrollwork runs along the walls and over the doorways. The roof glitters and the floor gleams. It’s a diamond the size of a city, and all in Danu’s honor.

        Don’t they know she prefers simpler things?

        As Bitta sweeps by, every faerie pays obeisance—from the lowliest brownie to the noblest shee. Many prostrate themselves fully, belly to floor.

        Bitta does not acknowledge them. She marches forward with her chin in the air, her grip on my hand only tightening.

        I have a horrible, clawing feeling in my chest.

        “You should go,” I whisper. “Go back to Breasal. I will come and find you. After.”

        The king’s expectation is a thorn in my mind. It hurts me to remember it.

        The king needs to purify his line. And what could be purer than returning to the source?

        On that Samhain, when his emissary first explained, I had not fully understood. I was too inexperienced. I grasped the why but not the how. The result but not the means.

        Now, I know. Now, I understand exactly what this king wants from Bitta. My Bitta.

        Rage has a taste, I discover—like metal, or blood. It vibrates through my body, through every body I carry inside. I would like to shift into a form with fangs and claws and poisonous barbs. I would like to reduce this king to a red smear upon his shiny palace floor.

        Bitta squeezes my hand. “He has no power over me. It’s you I’m worried about. Do not leave my side, all right?”

        “I never do.”

        “Relax, Crash. Everything will be well. I promise.”

        I realize I’m crushing her fingers, and I loosen my grip. But my heart is still thump-thumping so very hard.

        “Hey.” She nudges me with her elbow, trying to draw me out. “You know, I was jealous of that human barmaid. She was flirting with you.”

        Despite my anxiety, a smile blooms on my lips. Not her favorite smile, the one that annoys her. “I know! It was wonderful.”

        This time, she drives her elbow into my ribs hard enough to make me yelp. “Wonderful?”

        I lean in close, as if to whisper a secret, then nip the shell of her ear instead. She squawks a laugh that makes the emissary stop and stare.

        Disgust pulls his face into an ugly shape. So I grin and wave, wriggling my fingers.

        “You may rest and refresh yourselves in here,” the shee says, pointing us to a spacious bedroom. “The king will call for you in the morning.”

        I have no choice but to follow him; the king’s compulsion still grips me.

        “Do you require anything else, honorable Danu?”

        Casually, I knock a vase of lilies from a side table. The glass shatters, sweet as a song, and Bitta snickers.

        “Pooka,” the shee sneers as he departs.

        We are left alone. I clamber onto the cloud-like bed and flail my limbs with delight. I have felt nothing so plush before. It’s impossible to remain afraid when cradled in a cocoon of snowy-white softness.

        Bitta does not relax. She is determined to leave this place, and she spends the next hour trying to sever the king’s compulsion on me. I don’t know what she’s attempting, only that she stares at me with a furrowed brow, mumbling unhappily to herself.

        I can’t help but distract her. I tug on her hair. I kiss the hollow where her neck meets her chest. I try to tickle her side, but she catches my hand.

        “Crash!” she snaps. “Can you not be a pest for once in your life?”

        I go still. My heart breaks, just a little.

        Bitta seems to hear it, that decisive crack from within my chest. “Oh, no.” She takes my face in her hands. “Oh, Crash. I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. I’m—I’m just frightened for you, that’s all. Please forgive me.”

        Sadness is like a throat-ache.

        I shift into a hound, because it’s too difficult to be a man just now. Tears shine in Bitta’s eyes. When they spill over, I lick her face.

        “I love you, Crash.”

        I wag my tail and curl into her side. Her fingers work into my short fur. It’s a nice, drowsy sort of feeling.

        “We’ll just sleep, then,” she says soothingly. “And tomorrow, after I’ve had words with this fool king, we’ll go home.”

        Home.

        I drift toward sleep, thinking of the sea-breeze, of the sound of leaves rustling in the forest.

        “I’m sorry,” she murmurs a few more times, but I can’t recall what she’s apologizing for. It doesn’t matter. I would forgive her anything.

* * *

        A voice that is not mine whispers inside my head.

        Wake up, pooka, it says.

        My eyes snap open. It is still dark, either very late or very early. Bitta is asleep beside me. Dried tears stripe her cheeks, and her lips are softly parted. She always looks so sweet in sleep, but not usually so sad.

        Do not disturb her.

        No, of course not. Bitta needs her rest.

        Come.

        My paws pad light as a whisper on the marble floors. The palace is a mazy dreamscape, but my heart knows the way. I trot up a winding staircase, then through a door left ajar.

        I find him on the balcony, standing with his back to me, hands clasped behind him. He is caught in a beam of moonlight that limns his dark hair silver.

        “Shift,” he commands.

        I do. As a man, all my emotions sprout thorns. Fear, the sharpest of all, because I was not meant to leave Bitta’s side. She will be so upset when she wakes and finds me gone.

        The Faerie King turns, his expression carved from stone. He is not so beautiful as his emissary. He is shorter, broader, with a blunt face and lupine eyes. I see nothing of Bitta in him.

        “So,” he purrs. “You are Danu’s lover?”

        “Yes.”

        He circles me, and I am compelled to remain still. “A low faerie. Not even handsome.” I am faintly disappointed to hear it. It would be nice to be handsome. “But I am to understand that she loves you. Danu—goddess of all—loves you. A pooka.” He stops, his face horribly close to my own. As if he might kiss me. “Why?”

        “I never thought to ask,” I say.

        The king snarls, the wolf in him shining through. His power is a physical presence. Every speck of me strains to keep its shape. Compared to him, I am ash and dust.

        He reshapes his expression into a smile, a seductive light glinting in his eyes. Suddenly, he is breathtakingly lovely. My heart thuds an erratic rhythm.

        “To save you, would she give herself over?” he asks, his voice a croon. “If I threaten your life, will she agree to lie with me?”

        “No,” I say immediately. I have no doubt Bitta would go to extremes to save me, but she would not play his game. She is more powerful than him. She is clever and bright and good. She would find another way. “You will never have her.”

        A wolfish rumble reverberates in his throat. Silver eyes narrow. “Well, in that case,” he licks his canines. “What use are you?”

        I barely see him move. The pain is worse for catching me unawares.

        “Oh,” I say, as blood streams down my abdomen.

        The king presses his dagger up and in, piercing my human-shaped heart. “What made you think you had the right to touch her?”

        And it hurts. Oh, Bitta, it hurts. This is an unmaking kind of pain. I can’t recall pleasure, I can only recall this. I’m reaching desperately for something, anything, to save me, as if salvation might be tucked in my pocket. My hand finds my flute. I clutch it tight, feel the carvings dig into my palm.

        Oh, Bitta, I’m dying. I’m dying. And it is terrible.

        And—and—and—I didn’t say goodbye.

        The king pulls his dagger free, and my lifeblood leaves me. I stare down at the ruin of my body. Broken things—truly broken things—cannot be put right again.

        My knees hit the ground, but I do not feel the impact.

        The moon is bright above me.

        At least there’s that.

        I remember licking the nectar from her fingers. I remember floating in the cove, body weightless in the water. I remember the joyous burst of her laughter.

        I remember—

        I—

* * *

        They dump my body in a wooden trunk.

        I cannot roam far from my remains, so I am forced to watch on, a silent and unseen spectator. A mere ghost. At least the pain is gone—the pain, and most everything else. I am a shadow of myself. Insubstantial. Tired.

        So, this is death.

        I’m gone and yet still here, which seems a rather humorless jape. Isn’t Arawn meant to take me to the otherworld? Guide me to whatever paradise or hell I’ve earned? If so, he’s late.

        The king’s liveried servants are not gentle with me.

        “Couldn’t he have died in a smaller form?” one grunts, lifting his end of the box. My corpse shifts inside.

        “Be grateful. Coulda been an ox. Or a troll,” the other says, laughing.

        At least my blood lingers, a black stain upon the marble. An imperfection. I take faint pleasure in that.

        The servants haul me away from the king’s chambers. They travel down the same winding stair I climbed last night, when last my spirit was attached to my body. I drift alongside. I have no choice.

        They carry me to the throne room. It’s an impressive space, this mountainous prism of glass. Long and narrow, with nothing but sky overhead. Shallow steps lead to a raised dais, where there gleams a throne of peerless silver. The seat-back tapers into a spire and is crowned by a crescent moon.

        The servants drop me at the foot of the throne, the trunk thumping heavily to the floor. They depart, and I linger in isolation. Just me and this empty space.

        I try to leave, to go in search of her, but cannot. I am tethered.

        Dawn warms the room to a pale pink. The palace is rousing, far earlier than I would have guessed. Are the noble folk not a twilight people?

        Bitta and I always rose with the sun.

        I am relieved when the doors are at last opened, glad for company. The room fills with nobles, who file into perfect rows. An audience. There is an expectant energy about them. I hear Danu’s name on every tongue.

        They wait for their ruler to arrive.

        The Faerie King is not so pedestrian as to walk into the room. Rather, he appears in a flash of blazing light, already lounging on his throne.

        All the gathered shee fall to a knee. It is rare to see such proud fae kneel. I wonder if it chafes.

        My attention is drawn not to the king but to the small boy-fae sitting near his feet, tucked into the shadow of the throne. A thin silver circlet glints in the child’s green-black hair, marking him as royalty. The Faerie Prince.

        His crown is the only clue to his identity. In no other way would anyone know it—certainly not from his stained and unkept clothing, his hungry face, his hair that needs both washing and trimming.

        This prince has the look of a feral animal, poorly treated and liable to bite. When he sweeps the assembly with a slitted gaze, his pupils elongate. He coils into himself, like a serpent prepared to spring, but flinches at the sound of his father’s voice.

        The king addresses his people in languid tones, “I am certain our honored guest will arrive any—”

        The doors fly open with such force, they crack upon hitting the walls. The being who enters is not my Bitta. She is Danu. Goddess of all.

        The raw power of her presence flattens every shee in attendance to their belly. A sourceless wind ravages the room, ripping at fabric and hair. Her dark skin glimmers. Her black hair is wreathed in divine light. Her eyes contain not just stars but the feelingless void that swallows them. She flies to the foot of the dais without seeming to move her feet.

        Only the king remains upright, but I see the way he trembles. I suspect he remains so at her will, not his.

        “Where is he?” Danu hisses in a voice that contains a thousand voices, an infinity. She is ancient in a way I will never comprehend.

        But still, she is Bitta. Bitta who likes cherries best. Who collects spoons. Who loves me, even when I’m a pest.

        I’m here! I cry.

        But even she cannot hear my voice. And though I wave my hands, she does not see me either. Only now do I understand that we have been cleaved from each other. It is a sadness deep enough to drown in.

        “Had you been reasonable, you would not have forced my hand,” the Faerie King says, speaking through gritted teeth. Straining against the force of her anger. “Now it is time you heard my offer—”

        “You will return my pooka to me, unharmed, and I will not eviscerate you. That is the only offer that matters. Where—is—he?”

        With an effort, the king kicks over the wooden trunk at his side. The lid was not latched, so my body spills out and tumbles down the stair. My flute travels further, rolling all the way to Bitta’s feet.

        I have not been dead long, but already my fair skin has turned gray, the blood darkened into a blackish stain. My brown eyes are open and sightless. A roguish clump of ginger hair falls over my face, like a horsey forelock. My mouth is twisted up at the corners, as if I somehow had the last laugh.

        “Cra—Crash?”

        A ragged sob rips from her throat, a sound of exquisite sorrow. It hurts me to hear it, even though I have no body left to feel pain.

        It’s all right, Bitta, I want to tell her. I’m only dead.

        It is then that I notice the dark presence hovering at my side, watching the scene unfold. A figure shrouded in shadow, hooded so that only his mouth and chin are visible. Even just that small slice of him is viciously beautiful. Arawn, lord of death. About time he showed up.

        Bitta kneels beside my body. Her hands quiver as she smooths back my hair. One perfect tear falls onto my cheek.

        “I’m sorry,” she murmurs.

        I would forgive you anything.

        “I love you.”

        The king observes Bitta with a cruel smile. He thinks he’s won something. He thinks reducing a goddess to tears is a victory. Even as a child, I knew better. “Now, you see. I have no power over you, Danu, but I can take anything, anyone, away—”

        Beneath her hands, my body transforms, reshaping itself one last time. My limbs branch and reach wide. From the tips of my pale fingers, color sprouts. The same shade of red as my hair, my mane, my animal heart. My trunk grows tall, tall, taller still. Creaking, groaning, I rise up like a silver-scaled giant. The Faerie King flees his dais as my body twists around his throne, swallowing it.

        I am a tree, a mighty sycamore. My roots crack the perfect white floor. My branches thrust all the way to the ceiling and sprawl to the far corners of the room, so that every shee present is under my shadow. My ruddy leaves rustle in the breeze. It sounds like—

        “Laughter,” Bitta sobs, head tipped back.

        Wind gusts through the room, harsher than any storm. Bitta rises up off her feet, levitating in mid-air, hair whipping wildly around her face. She gleams so brightly, so terribly, that every fae in the room must shield their eyes. But I do not.

        Danu.

        The moon throws her head back, and she screams—a cry of grief and rage so terrible that even Death, hovering beside me, shrinks from it. A moment later, the king screams too, staring in horror at his own hands, at the bits of himself drifting away from the whole. He is crumbling, like the sandcastles Bitta and I once built.

        The king of all Faerie dissolves, the flecks of him catching in the wind, until there is nothing left.

        The wind stops. The room goes quiet. Danu no longer screams. She drifts back to the floor, her bare feet gently landing on the broken marble.

        “You,” she says.

        The Faerie Prince stands, his narrow shoulders squared. He looks unnervingly cool, for a boy who just witnessed the disintegration of his father.

        “I will give you fifty years to prove this royal line is not irredeemable. Find in yourself some shred of love, some scrap of decency, or I will curse you and your kingdom. And, oh, how you will suffer.”

        The boy-fae only cants his head. “We folk are not a loving sort.”

        Bitta glances up at my swaying, laughing leaves. Her voice is soft and sad. “If a pooka can develop a conscience, so too can a king.”

        I whimper, and Death places a hand on my shoulder.

        If the child meant to say anything more, Bitta affords him no time. She bursts into a flash of blinding light—washing the room in white—and when the blaze dims, she is gone. Little gleams of silver rain over the heads of the shee, like falling stars.

        I have seen this before. It is what I did for that human couple, when I did not wish to cause them harm. I remember the odd expression Bitta wore that day, and only now do I understand it. Pride. Because I had shown empathy, despite my nature.

        I long to tell her that it was all her influence. But she is not here and will not return, I know it. This life of hers is over. My Bitta is once again a part of the whole that is Danu. Gone.

        “Well,” says Arawn. “Quite a fuss you’ve caused, for one little pooka.” He grins like a creature of mischief himself. When he turns to face me, I catch the gleam of silver eyes beneath his hood. “In fifty years’ time, things will finally become interesting around here.”

        Through the windows, I can see the faint sliver of the moon, still lingering in the morning sky.

        I love you, too.

        I am not alone. And though I am sad, I am not afraid. So, when Death offers me his hand, I take it.

        And hope that, somehow, she’s waiting for me in the otherworld.

Copyright © 2021 March McCarron

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March McCarron is a writer of character-focused fantasy, currently living in Omaha, Nebraska. An indie author, she published her first novel, Division of the Marked, in 2013 while traveling Asia as an English teacher. She haunts coffee-shops, writing stories of doomed romance, costly magic, and martial-arts. Learn more about her work at www.marchmccarron.com or connect on Instagram or Twitter at @marchmccarron.

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“Colossus,” by Godwin Akpan

Godwin Akpan is a self-taught artist currently based in Lagos, Nigeria. Godwin brings his unique set of skills into creating digital masterpieces for the entertainment industry. View more of his work in his gallery at ArtStation.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1046

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2021 Firkin Press

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