Eric t marin ed, p.17
Eric T. Marin (ed), page 17
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SAMANTHA HENDERSON
IV. Waterfowl
The Smallest Daughter started to trot. She might have been chasing the man in front of her or fleeing the scarred family behind her—she did not know herself. The faster she went, the more the road stretched out in front of her. Darkness dropped down and she picked her way by starlight, although she seemed to be passing the same twisted trees and black knots of grass, again and again. She began to suspect a spell, and wished her cousins, the Freckled Girls, were with her, for they could always sniff out any witchcraft and send their stoat to chew it out at the root.
Exhausted, she slowed and stopped. Her eyelids drooped.
Beside the road was the same tree that she had passed twenty times and more. She curled up at the base of its trunk and went to sleep.
She woke to the sound of water chuckling to itself, but not to her, which was so astonishing she ignored the fact that where she woke was not where she had laid down. Moving water always told her jokes, bad ones, and she laughed for the sake of politeness.
“Grandmother was right,” she said, and sat bolt upright.
“Always,” answered a nearby voice, a smooth voice, a voice like the dusk spices buried as treasure under the Eldest Aunt’s house, and she rolled away from it and crouched, spines up and claws out, and wished for fangs. And he laughed at her, the Darkling Man, lanky and long and flaunting his tassels, with a pillowcase across his shoulder.
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Beneath the fabric something moved, something the size and the shape of a girl.
Behind him was a vast lake like chopped blue glass.
Between them was three feet of sand and pebbles.
Not enough room to run.
His laughter whirled around her and she felt like she was on the swing again, barely out of her second skin, while Eldest Uncle pushed her higher, higher, until her feet were flat against the sky and she screamed with joy.
“Why does a daughter of the House of Diamond pursue a lonely traveler?” He gestured with his forefinger and she felt a phantom caress against the velvet of the House band around her throat. “Especially when she seeks her husband. Shall I find one for you, little ferret-feet?”
“You’ve kidnapped a girl and mutilated her family,” she said bluntly. “I’ve come to take her home.”
He tilted his head and frowned at her. “Did I, and did I? Then I am the wickedest man alive.” And he swung the pillowcase off his shoulder, putting it carefully on the rocks between them.
It opened like an anemone and revealed a girl, old enough to start knifeplay, in Smallest’s estimation, but not to begin jewel-weaving. She looked up at her with eyes like the boy’s, the boy with the carved smile. But her face was whole.
She smiled at the Smallest Daughter, and didn’t seem afraid.
She asked me to take her away,” said the Darkling Man, folding his arms. The smell of cinnamon drifted from his clothes like dust, and made her slightly dizzy.
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“Considering they would have slashed her face to look like theirs, I really couldn’t refuse.”
“You lie,” Smallest snarled.
He didn’t react. “I suppose they’ve told people I did it so many times that they believe it themselves. I avoid them when I can. They are a tribe that sits all day, in a cave of bones, mourning their lot and the tragedy of what-might-come. Their grief and self-pity destroys everything of beauty they have.
They butcher their own souls.”
Smallest remembered the smiling tribe clutching at her ankles and hesitated.
“She told me to sell her in the market square of Laketown, if I must,” he continued.
“And will you?” she said, with what contempt she could muster.
The Darkling Man laughed and spread his arms out wide, the tassels bouncing on his sleeve. “Do you see a town?” he cried. “Do you see a market? This is all the Laketown you’ll find: rocks and water and a couple of terns.”
She looked around her and began to believe.
The girl pushed the pillowcase away and rose to her feet.
She looked at both of them gravely, then walked to the edge of the water. Wavelets licked at her toes. Smallest found herself flexing her own claws in response.
“What is she doing?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said frankly. “After I bring them to the water’s edge, they must rescue themselves.” 196
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The girl raised her arms, like the Freckled Girls invoking the Moon, and waited. They waited with her. Then, across the water, Smallest saw a white blur, a blob that whirled and came closer and broke into its separate parts, and joined together again, always spiraling. A flock of birds, hundreds of them, snowy white with wings as long as a man’s outstretched arms.
The flock swirled towards the girl as if it would consume her, and she uttered her first sound: the harsh cry of a sea-bird. The vortex descended and surrounded her, and rose again, and she was gone.
Birds flew everywhere overhead, and Smallest stretched her neck to look at them. The Darkling Man saw the tight skin of her neck, and bent close to her.
“There is stil the matter of your husband, Daughter of Diamond,” he said. “I can find one for you. I can find one who wil break down mountains for your love, destroy cities if you ask, wipe out nations to the last squal ing child if that is your whim.” His voice was a warm trickle of honey. She backed away a handbreadth.
“Or one who will sing all day of his love for you, write poems to your beauty, live and die on your smiles.” His voice ran down the knobs of her spines. She backed away a foot.
“Or one who will bring you anything you desire, jewels and spices and clever birds, until you are buried in pretty things.” His voice cooled her like a breeze and she turned and ran to the edge of the water, where the birds still flew, and the third 197
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Stigma burned like fire. The birds encircled her and she lifted from the ground, her arms stretching out and white feathers sprouting everywhere.
The flock swept over the lake, and beneath her, on the shore, she saw the dark figure watching until he dwindled out of sight.
Below them the smell of fresh water, before them the distant shore and a glimpse of towers.
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V. Secret Things
Wisps of clouds crossed the sky, and the flock dabbled their black, webbed feet in them. The clouds had the tang of burnt carbon.
The water below started to smel salty and turn ocean-grey. Cold fog rose from it, and the other waterfowl cal ed to each other in a language Smal est did not know.
The towers before them grew to a city: tal buildings and squat, and a thousand, thousand pieces of glittering glass. The city fil ed an island and splashed across the mainland beside it. Like her Grandmother, the city was beautiful and terrible. On its breast was a great green emerald and across its shoulder a scar, the deep blackened stumps where two towers once stood.
Closer they flew, and the other birds cried “Haste!” for they knew a wind was coming. Smal est did not understand twisting her head on its long, feathered neck to see, so when the gust caught her she spun out of control, fel through the heavyside layer, and tumbled down the airstream. Head over winds over black, webbed feet, she slammed into the treetops of the peridot lozenge, and fel hard onto the grass below. Bile rose bitter in her throat at the impact, but she rol ed with it, saving her bones.
When she got up her wings and feathers were gone. She felt for broken spines, retracted her claws, checked that her knife and her bag of gold were in place and stared at the green light around her.
It was a little grove of beeches, and soon she was blinking in the sunlight. People ran past her to the trees, shouting and pointing.
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“It was a meteor!” she heard, then “No, it was a satellite!” Some gave her an odd glace as she passed, but with her spines closed tightly down her back, she could almost pass for human, and she wasn’t the strangest creature this side of the Brooklyn Bridge.
“It was a spaceship!” came the cry.
“No!” said a woman in a dirty white dress. “It was an angel.
Didn’t you see its wings?”
The Smallest Daughter thought it best to go, quickly and quietly. She bent her head and watched her feet as she crossed from the green grass to the pavement. But she looked up when she heard the familiar cry of “commerce, commerce!” Running past her was a flock of the furry little creatures from Auntie Thesis’ meadow, the ones that wanted to sell her to the Darkling Man. But they didn’t seem to recognize her, and stranger still, nobody stared at them, or pointed, or acted as if they were anyway out of place.
Leaving the green swath behind, and walking between the tall buildings where a cold wind whipped, she looked into the faces around her. Human, mostly, but there—unmistakable, a young Oak-Witch, just rising into her powers. And there, in the distance, a flash of raised spines. And here, passing so close that his briefcase touched her thigh, a feather-faced man like those who lived north of the Endless City.
And there was a hide speckled like a Freckled Girl. There was a man with a tail, a panther’s tail that lashed and postured, same as Eldest Aunt’s favorite parrot seller.
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But they walked and hurried same as the humans; like the humans, they began to stare at her, to stop and watch as she hurried by, spines down, claws tight.
There, an open shop where people sat around little tables, drinking from thick, white cups. Near the sidewalk was an Elder Scion of the Endless City, unmistakable with her full-grown spines, her claws casually extended over her shoes, and the fang-tips that lapped over her lower lip. She wore no throat-band, so the Smallest Daughter could not determine which House she belonged to. She paused beside the table and made the courtesy of near-relation.
“Service, Older Sister,” she began.
The Scion raised her head and stared at her, astonished, and the Smal est Daughter almost jumped back in shock. The sides of the Scion’s mouth had been slashed upwards into a twisted smile.
Smallest did jump when somebody touched her arm.
It was a young man, an ordinary man, a plain man. Still, he glowed in the gritty light of this place like amber in a stream.
“Sorry,” he said to the Scion, in a voice as pleasant and bland as sugar. “She slipped out, and she hasn’t had her meds.” The Scion nodded and dropped her gaze. Smallest let the young man take her arm and urge her away from the café, away from the street and into a small park, where children’s swings hung quiescent.
“They don’t know who they are,” he explained. “They’ve forgotten, and until they remember, the natives of this place cannot see what they really are.
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“Most never remember. Most never even try.” He looked at the gray clouds overhead and sighed.
“And who are you when you’re at home?” she said, trying to sound indignant.
He tilted his head at her. “How is your heart?”
“What?”
“Your heart. Is it still broken?”
She felt for it, astonished. “Why, no. It’s in one piece again.” And she was a little sad, because she had rather liked it jangling.
And you should know me,” he continued, “because I have followed you from the gates of the City of your Childhood down the great road to the shores of vanished Laketown. I followed you across the sky, although I am deadly afraid of heights.” She blinked at him, at his wry mouth, and bent closer, listening.
His voice was honey, and trickled down the knobs of her spine. His voice cooled her like a breeze. She felt warm inside, as if an eggshell of hot water had broken in her breast.
“But perhaps,” she said, “I was following you.” He shrugged. “It’s much the same thing. Do you know me now?”
“Why, no,” she said, coyly. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“And how,” he said, “do the women of your house claim their husbands?”
“Usually we must fight,” she said.
“The only other Scion within ten miles has forgotten who she is,” he said. “After you fight, what do you do?” 202
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“This,” she said, and extended her two sharpest foreclaws, and carefully slashed two small parallel lines over his right cheek.
Later, in the velvet-dark of his chambers, she lay on her stomach while he stroked the nubs of her spines.
“Already the humans are beginning to see you,” he said.
“Soon they will know who you are, unless something is done to stop them. And then they will take you away to the zoo, or the cathedral, or burn you at the stake, and I shan’t have that.” He fingered her throat-band and bent close. She could feel his breath on her ear.
“If I cut this loose, you will forget,” he whispered. “Little by little, you’ll forget and no one will recognize you. It will not hurt a bit.”
Feeling his fingers on her neck, she shook her head.
The last Stigma, the sigil of Secret Things, glowed on her arm.
“Very well,” he said.
He left her side, and she dozed a little, listening to him rum-mage through his tools. She woke, though, and held very still when she felt the sharp blades slice, one by one, each spine from her back. Then he began on the claws.
The alcohol was cold on her skin and sharp in her nostrils when he finished. He covered her with a soft blanket and left her to heal.
“How does it feel to be a Secret Thing?” he said, before he left.
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She laughed, but was too sleepy to say it aloud: “Whatever will we do when the fangs grow in?”
Outside the window, feeling for purchase on the rough bricks and railing, a stoat turned away and began its long journey home.
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STEPHANIE BURGIS
I’ve hidden my heart in an egg, in a box, in a well at the end of the world. My father taught me that trick a long time ago.
If I’d kept my heart, I would be in trouble now. This princess is too beautiful.
“Darling,” she sighs into my ear. Her breath is warm and smells like lilacs; her tiny hands are feather-light as they stroke my cheek. “I worried about you today.”
“Today? Why?” I shift position on the bed. I can’t let myself enjoy her touch too much—after all, it was only a week ago that she stopped screaming whenever I stepped close to her. I hate it when they scream.
As I shift, again that terrible smell flits through my nostrils, the smell that’s been bothering me since I got home. It smells like fear; it smells like dried sweat. “Are you sure that’s just a dead bird in the chimney?”
STEPHANIE BURGIS
“Of course it is. I heard it fluttering around in there for hours.” Her voice tightens, and her fingers still for a moment on my cheek. “It couldn’t get out. It was trapped.”
“That’s too bad.”
It doesn’t smell like a bird. It smells human, but I don’t say so. I don’t like the sound of her voice. It reminds me too much of the way she talked the first month after I took her from her parents’ castle. The things she whispered as I pretended to sleep.
She seems to have gotten over that by now. I hope so. She’s my fourth princess, and my favorite so far. Something about her face reminds me of my mother, before my mother gave up and stopped eating and died.
She lets out a sigh, and starts stroking my cheek again.
“The bird doesn’t matter,” she murmurs. “You do. You were late coming home tonight.”
“You noticed?” I turn my head to look at her.
“Of course I noticed. I was frantic.” She looks down, bites her lip. “What if you had been killed?”
If I had a heart, I would be in serious trouble. I feel my lips crack into a smile for the first time in—how long? Months?
“You don’t have to worry about that.” I reach out to stroke her soft brown hair, and for once, she doesn’t flinch away. “I can’t be killed in combat.”
“But that’s impossible. You must have some weakness!” I shrug. “Only one, and nobody but me knows about it.” My father taught me that part, too.
“You can’t trust anyone,” he said. “They all lie, even the 206
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princesses so pure you’d swear they wouldn’t know how to.
trust them and you’re dead. You think your mother wouldn’t kill me in an instant if she could?” He pointed to her across the room, and let out a shout of laughter. “She’d be telling my secret to the first idiot knight she came across.” I couldn’t keep myself from looking at my mother to see her reaction. She’d stopped her work, and was staring at him. What was she thinking?
I loved my mother.
My father caught me looking. He laughed again. “Trust me, son. I know princesses. Isn’t that right, sweetheart? Wouldn’t you just love to know my weakness?”
She didn’t answer. But the look on her face was the most frightening thing I’d ever seen.
That night was the night that she stopped eating.
Now, I shake my head, breathing hard. I have to get rid of those images. I can’t let myself think about my mother. The way she looked at my father that day. The way she faded into a skeleton. The way I felt as I watched it all happen.
