I ain’t never told this part before and am like never to tell it again.

  Ay, get as comfortable as you can in this wild and weary place. Give me just a moment or two to remember.

  … Yes … Yes.

  I have it now.

  This is a story you ought to know and it’s best you know it from me.

  It’s about you.

  There was a girl once.

  A long, winding way back, there was a girl who lived in a mightsome tower so tall and regal that all gods and ghouls feared it.

  In that tower, this girl lived alone, ate alone, and filled her walls with a tally of her empty days. Yes, she was alone even though she ruled that tower and all who lived under it. The closest thing to company she kept were the meetings she’d be called to where she’d sit and listen to people talk and sign what they asked her to sign and tell little lies.

  “My mother is Mayness,” she would tell the judges, “and she is coming home and I will rule in her place until she does.”

  She’d leave and go to her quarters where the company she kept became messages and missives from those who didn’t care if she lived or died, and who—like as not—would have preferred the latter. She’d sit and scribble responses peppered with more of her fibbings.

  “Thank you for conducting trade with us in the city of Illmiv,” she might write. “We here value the partnership between our two cities and are pleased that the shared vigilance of our soldiers has repulsed all attacks on our caravans that come from the monstrous Wildmen.”

  She was Mayness of that glorious and shining city; the best city in the best civilization that mortal sweat had yet wrought. She was happy. Another little lie.

  We all tell ourselves such things, child, and over time, this girl’s little lies stacked up as tower-tall as the room she lived in. These lies were easy to live with. To tell it true—it was because of these lies she still lived.

  It also made it easy for most of the judges and captains and couriers.

  “Why worry about some sapling woman sitting in her mother’s chair?” They’d say behind doors they thought she couldn’t hear through. “Soon enough, her mother will be back. Or else, the girl will learn to keep the continuity her mother provided. In all cases commerce continues as ever.”

  And though their whispers made her stomach boil, the girl knew better than to rope up the Road workings out of rage and simple spite. She didn’t bother them none and they didn’t prod her past their piddling papers. So she sat and signed and stayed quiet when she could.

  Yet, once a week—at the most lonesome hour of the night—the girl turned into a monster.

  She’d wake in sweat drenched desire and she’d hear—pouring over the stone walls, welling up from the cobble of streets below—the song of the Wilderlands. Though she might try to bed bury herself, the hammering of that tune wouldn’t let her rest. So she’d shimmy and sly-sneak from her tower, hobbling ‘cross stone and shingle, ‘cross roof and rafter, all to quell her hearing and hide out in the Wilderlands.

  She’d make her way to the speck of a hole she’d long since chipped from the wall for wizard promises. She’d belly crawl her way beyond the wall and wed herself to the Wilder-song that strung her hence.

  In her running from the wall, she’d look at Mamma Moon and pray the goddess would not let her hobble home when Pappa Sun came ‘round in the sky. After her prayer, she would sink away from the moon and stars and into bush and branch and root and soil and dirt and death and the bosom-blossom of Grandma Dirt.

  She knew she was a monster because her father had heard and heeded the same fever song and been painted red for running off to it. She knew she was a monster because she’d once painted a man red—a man she liked well as one can like a murderer—for having been born in, and fate-twisted by, the Wilderlands.

  And she knew she was a monster because she couldn’t even stand to stay monstrous, for no matter how hard she prayed, when she saw the signs of Pappa Sun painting the sky, she’d creep shy-shamed back to her tower.

  When she was wrapped in bed and blanket and little lies, she’d say that never again would she let the Wilderlands wile her back. Then, when it inevitably did, she would lay on the bosom-blossom of Grandma Dirt and tell her that she would not let the sun scare her back home. But it always did, because she could not stomach her sins in the garish daylight. She knew it was wrong to run away and, when she did, her shame yanked her home until her feet paddled her back to what she’d been yanked from.

  This went on for years, or days, or decades, and the girl found herself sometimes staying out for longer, but always shame scruff-scorned her home with the coming of Pappa Sun.

  It might have stayed like that, I think. With the girl, Dhorena—by now a woman—living ‘hind those hallowed walls, feeling hollowed out inside ‘cept for when she wandered Wilder-ward and could breath for just a bit until the dawn burned her face with the shadow of shame.

  Maybe it all could have hummed on like that. Maybe she could have lived her days in that tower and turned wild weekly ‘til the day she died, letting herself—once ripe with wrinkles like I am now—lay in Grandma Dirt and dream of her mother and brother and father until she turned to naught but a freckle on Grandma Dirt’s face.

  There’s a beauty of sorry sort to that I think, but it wasn’t to be.

  She thought herself shrew-sneaky and fox-clever, and she was. Yet in all her goings and returnings, she’d been malice-marked by one whose eyes burned with the light of Brother Hatred.

  There was a girl once.

  A long, winding way back, there was a girl who had learned wrath at the age where the hate you’ve been saddled with don’t shake off. They say she’d seen her parent killed by some feral faced brute of the Wilderlands.

  She had no love for the Wilderlands or the woman living lofty in the Sword Tower.

  This girl had seen Dhorena, fresh from killing her father, ascend to Illmiv’s most illustrious station. She had watched as that woman, still painted with the blood of her blood, profaned that high seat with her presence. So, soul-wreathed with vengeance, this girl set her sights on climbing within a knife’s tickle of Dhorena.

  In the course of years, that girl became one of the judges who Dhorena would sit among and pass papers with.

  The judge knew the way the world ought to be. She knew that walls were built on two sides: one side to keep the Wilderlands out and one to keep Valforians in. The judge knew that every time the woman, her Mayness, warped Wilder-ward, some Valforian was lost to the Wilderlands and some Wilderlands found its way back into Illmiv when the Mayness returned. Dhorena was breaking the boundary both ways, and the judge—oh, child—she could not let that stand.

  It was because of this judge that Dhorena encountered a paper she couldn’t sign in silence as she had so many. When the paper was passed around, every ass at that great stone table inked their inclination for its quill-furnishings. It was only as it came to the Mayness that someone minded those scribblings.

  It was seeing the word “Wilderlands” scribbled so weedishly through the document that made her halt her quill-quelling. She picked up the paper and scowled through it, face-to-feet, while the eyes of every judge and sheriff there scrutinized her.

  “What is this?” Dhorena asked, horror-slapped by the hubris.

  “A brilliant bit of legislation, if you ask me,” grumbled one grandfatherly judge.

  “‘Legislation’?” Dhorena reeled. “This is a war declaration.”

  Dhorena had never thought herself humorsome, but she got that council chortling. Save for one; the judge who’d whipped up the bill bent her lips in a snowy smile toward Dhorena and let nothing else loose.

  When at last the laughter lagged, a captain wiped a tear from his cheek. “A war declaration? War with who, Mayness? The rocks and stones? The trees and birds?”

  Had she spoken as her tongue bid, she would have lashed back: “Yes, the rocks and stones and birds and trees. And the gods and monsters and men that wait for us outside those walls! You and so many have it so good in this horrible city, why would you risk that?”

  But shame and preservation leashed her loquaciousness and she thought of some more apple-ripe remarks.

  “This proposition,” she said, “if I read it right, would double the size of the land we keep behind our wall over the course of decades. These walls have stood as they are since the founders, in their wisdom, put them up. For centuries that has been enough to hold back the Wilderlands. Why risk that?”

  “For the sake of our people, who we are charged with protecting,” the girl, the judge who penned the paper, spoke with a voice like summer’s dying. “Over centuries we have become crowded behind these wisdom wrought walls. With space at a premium, we have relied on trade for food rather than homegrown goods. That trade is often stalled when snow comes, or raided when the Wilderfolk wish it. Expanding the wall, incentivizing crop growth, creating work with the need for laborers on the wall, beating back the ever creeping Wilderlands—I see little to risk and much to gain.”

  Nods and affirmations filled the air, with only Dhorena stone-staring back at this judge who met her unblinking bane in kind.

  As the council settled and looked back to their Mayness, she still stared at this irksome girl. “I will not sign it.”

  The girl leaned back, for she did not have to speak as every voice at that table chimed off her words for her:

  “Now, Mayness, be reasonable.”

  “This is a proposition long overdue!”

  “The council—representatives from across districts—all agree.”

  “Not approving this proposal would be a gross neglect of your office.”

  “Our unanimous decision compels you to do the same!”

  The hair on the back of Dhorena’s neck stood the way it often would when she was in the Wilderlands and the howl of coywolves would draw nearer and nearer. She almost reached for her steel, but knew this wasn’t the sort of pack she could slay—‘sides, she hadn’t brought her blade to a meeting such as this.

  So she stood and slammed her hands on the table, silencing the council’s chittering.

  Slowly, like a snake swallowing some corpulent carcass, she looked each leader there in the eye. ‘Til she came to the judge who’d brought this bill to her. The judge just smiled back.

  Dhorena took the papers, flipped through them again, sorted and straightened them, and filed them into the roaring fireplace that lit the chamber.

  Gasps filled the room as the white pages turned black and withered and fluttered through the chamber as ash and soot.

  “I,” Dhorena said, “will not approve such a proposal. This will not be mentioned to me again. I am Mayness of Illmiv and I have spoken.”

  She heel-spun toward the door and was most of the way marched out when the judge finally spoke again.

  “Thank you for your wisdom, Mayness,” she said. “I suppose it is important we have the perspective of one who, on many occasions, turns mad and drooling and dances, lustily and unsanctioned, into the Wilderlands.”

  Dhorena stopped. She looked over her shoulder and spoke before the cold sweat she felt coming could stain her clothes. “You speak out of turn.”

  The council was already muttering.

  The judge morphed her face in fox-mock surprise. “Do I? Then I apologize most profusely. I was out of line. Thank you for correcting me, Mayness.”

  The muttering was growing and all Dhorena could hear was howling.

  She straightened up, stepped out of the room, and—once the door was closed—she ran.

  Like a hunted beast, through winding halls and twisting stairs, she retreated to her empty room at the top of her shining tower and she locked the door and she waited for them to come for her, making herself comfortable near the entrance with the weapons of her forbearers.

  She waited.

  And she waited.

  And more she waited.

  Days passed without so much as the flutter of fingers at her door.

  Wake-crazed and weary, she eventually let herself slouch toward her bed. When she woke, she was surprised not to find herself sleep slaughtered, nay, instead, she found mundane messages delivered through her door.

  So, she went back to the lonely rhythm she knew from before her fright. Somehow, though, she fought the song of the Wilderlands.

  Dhorena did avoid the judges and sheriffs and captains where she could in her days and it was only when she was duty wrangled back to one of the meetings that she sat among them again. When she did, there was no mention of the proposal they’d tried to push on her. No mention of pulling apart a portion of the wall to build it up stronger and wider than ever before, to swallow up a swath of Green with the cobblings of mortals.

  But there was still the girl, the judge who’d penned the proposal, sitting and smiling—though small-like—all through each tedious meeting.

  Soon the slow return to rhythm became a time-telling tempo yet again. Dhorena was shocked that she never caught musk or mutter of the bill, her outburst, or anything of the like.

  Nearly a year passed—maybe more would have hummed by in that weathered tempo, but Dhorena finally felt it again. Like a warbler is called with its season, like bees fly fixed, she heard the buzz-hum of the Wilderlands again. She had staved it off long and the song’s reprise, after all her fighting, found her flimsy. The Mayness scarce realized she was following the call until she was squirrel-scurrying down the side of her tower and leaping like a cottontail from roof to roof.

  Child, she might have made the trip with her eyes closed, guided only by the scent of wild wind. Roof and rafter, rock and road she crossed, hungry to breathe in the gods and the growing world you’ve come to know.

  She did not make it to the Wilderlands that night.

  Nay. As she rambled ‘long her usual route, she was stopped by sheer sight.

  That mighty wall that had played tyrant to her all her living days was pulled apart here and there. Not sundered in full, only in part so it might be stacked more sinister. For every stone missing in that gap there was a guards, for every deficit square foot of defense were three workers. Even at this hour of the night, the scent of burning oil lamps and the ping of pick axes sang a song of industry, expansion, and thunderous treachery. A plan she’d been privy to pulled all these things in didactic discord.

  She heard the howl of coywolves and, fear-fraught, she slinked back to her quiet tower where she spent the night grinding her teeth, choking on wrath and terror.

  In the morning, as the sun set the sky blushing, she called an emergency meeting of her council.

  “You all have deliberately disobeyed me!” she spat at them. “I walked about last night to find a wall torn apart by the ambition of plotting fools who have deluded themselves with the farce that the bill I burned so long ago was of any worth. You conducted your business as though I would not notice and now you have been discovered.” She looked at the cold and smiling judge. “Do you, do any of you, have anything to say for yourselves?”

  For a time, if you really strained your ears and knew what to listen for, I bet you could have heard the song of those pick axes echoing in the crannies of that chamber. Until—

  “… You did not walk about last night,” said one captain, older than some. “Not like civilized folk do, anyhow. If you had, your guards would have noted it to me.”

  Shame and anger boiled her face. “And now you admit to spying on me! I’ll see you hanged! Would any other collaborators like to come forward? Do so now and the repercussions may merely be imprisonment beneath the Sword Tower for the rest of your natural days. Speak now!”

  No one spoke. Until—

  “You actually didn’t notice,” one of the jitterier judges offered. “For, well, for quite a time. Anyone walking the city, or—by the gods—who bothered to speak with citizens, could have told you what was happening.”

  Her left fist racked the table while her right hand pointed at the aghast judge. “Hanged! Would anyone else like to speak against your Mayness?”

  An old judge, old enough now to be ancient—the same who had incited the duel between Dhorena and Zacharie—stood.

  “You are not Mayness.”

  Dhorena hissed like steel. “I beg your pardon?”

  “As you should,” the ancient judge said. “It’s your mother who was Mayness. You had said she yet lived in the Wilderlands. Yet that was years back, she is, by now, long dead. You are not Mayness of Illmiv or anywhere else.”

  It’s wondersome how much of a fight a soul might put up even when doom has drawn upon them like a fit cloak.

  “Hanged!” Dhorena screamed. “Guards! Guards! I have men with necks that need tightened, to keep the owners from vomiting up more madness. Guards!”

  Wondersome.

  “Guards?”

  The guards remained cozy by the door and the whole of the council stood, ‘cept for the judge who just sat and smiled.

  One of the captains stepped toward Dhorena. “Now all that you said to us, wasn’t very nice, eh? I think you should apologize.”

  She spat in his face, buried her elbow in his gut, hammered him to the floor, and would have done more if the guards didn’t get to her just then. They found that seizing her was like trying to wrangle a mad thunder-snake in its death throes—but she had no bite, no steel, and so they managed.

  The pride-pricked captain heaved himself to his feet and staggered to stand over her. He spat a glob of blood on her face. A scattered laugh went through the council chambers; they’d found a goddess they could kill for not going to their liking.

  She Wilder-hissed at them all. “Horse fuckers!”

  “Guards,” he slurred past a swelling lip. “This chamber is for council members only. Take this interloper to her cage while we consider what to do with a mongrel such as her. If she’s seen outside of her quarters, kill her as though she were a foam-mad mutt.”

 

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