Uncanny Magazine Issue 41

by Lynne M. Thomas

  I brooded. I worked days at a local plant nursery, selling green things to gardeners and witches who reminded me of Mama and her friends. I worked nights at a tiny historical society owned by the Rat Folk of Doornwold, sorting donations. Tedious work, and disgusting, but fascinating. I was still an archivist, after all, even if the M.o.E.S. never hired me. And, well, a resumé is a resumé. Plus, I’m just gonna say it… Murine skinslippers? Especially the “ratcademics”? They’re the nicest, weirdest people!

  Thus began my long slog toward paying down my school debts. I visited my neighbor and petted my ex-cat as often as my flagging spirits allowed. But I grew low and lower—until one evening, over tea, while I was drooping over my cup, Mabelinda (that was my neighbor’s name) said briskly, “Sit tight—this got delivered to my door by accident,” and trotted over to a little basket in the front hall overflowing with incoming mail, and plucked a flyer from the top of the pile.

  It was addressed to me, from the head curator at the Museum of Eerie Skins. She was also one of the founders of WADL. Though not a university alum, she’d been invited as a guest speaker to several of my classes, and I’d done a fantastic summer internship with her a year earlier, right before this whole got-my-pelt-stolen-by-a-parasitic-tongue-eating-louse-disguised-as-an-Inductee-student thing went down.

  The flyer was a call for submissions to a new exhibit at the M.o.E.S.

  Historical Perceptions of Wolfcasters: Past and Present

  16 Cinquefoil, Reign of the Witch Queens 347

  Museum of Eerie Skins

  For nearly three and a half centuries, Doornwold, Queen’s City, has been marked as much by war, famine, persecution, and political upheaval as by peace, prosperity, innovation, and artistic renaissance. Since the cornerstone of the city was laid, wolfcasters have been citizens here, alongside humans and witches—yet they are still treated as outsiders, animals, the meritless unkempt.

  Now the M.o.E.S. is putting out a call for your stories, wolfcasters. We are asking for the loan of your artifacts, your heirlooms, your artwork, and your photographs, for an interactive exhibit premiering this fall, featuring live performance, sculpture, a series of lectures, music concerts, and a gallery of all-wolfcaster art.

  Interested? Make an appointment with Yannai Baramintha, Senior Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Collections, during museum hours.

  There was a note, written in peacock-green ink at the bottom of the flyer that read:

  “Firi, I heard what happened. I’m sorry. Come by the M.o.E.S. tomorrow. Bring your pelt. Best regards, Y. Baramintha.”

  I took Mama with me when I went. She’d appeared at my bedroom window that night, slipping through the glass like smoke, to sit at the foot of my head. I wasn’t asleep; I was too busy crying, like most of my nights in those days.

  “I could kill him,” my animal-rescuing, garden-loving, vegetarian mother offered.

  “And be hunted down by warlocks?” I sniffed up everything, and tried to wipe whatever I’d missed. To no avail. Mama got me a hankie.

  “I could steal back your last piece of pelt. We’ll take it to this witch I know—best quilt-maker in Amandale—and she could stitch it up good as new, with a spell upon it that…”

  I reached under my bed, drew out a box of postcards, and handed her the one at the top. Mama read it.

  “That gleeking fart!” she exclaimed.

  I laughed behind the hankie. Mama was the most darling, the most colorful cusser in the world. And then I shrugged helplessly. “I hadn’t heard from him in so long—I thought it was all over. And then this.” I gestured at the postcard. “Anyway, you see what he said. He burned the last piece and drank the ashes with wine. There’s no getting it back.”

  “We could patch your pelt with a slice of his heart,” Mama suggested, with just the glint of moonlight on her curving fangs (she hadn’t bothered to take off her pelt to chat) (which was fine, because she was soft and warm, and sat at my feet exuding a big-cat-like purr). “Weirder things have worked.”

  “No,” I said. “Then you’d have to touch him. I don’t want you anywhere near him. I don’t want any of us anywhere near him.”

  “Firi,” said Mama, “he seeks us out.”

  She had a point, but I also knew she wasn’t about to hunt him down with me hanging onto her ankles begging her not to. She did agree to go to the M.o.E.S. with me though; Mama always liked meeting new wolfcasters, and had heard me sing Yannai Baramintha’s praises during my internship.

  Yannai had a whole tea service set up for us in her office. She seemed to have anticipated Mama, in that way wolfcasters have. But the service was set for four, and there were only three of us. Yannai smiled when I raised my eyebrows at her, and then the door to her office opened again, and my unasked question was answered.

  A witch walked in—Mar Riallakin, though I didn’t know her name then; she wasn’t as famous as she became after the plague years. You can always tell a witch, somehow, when they enter a room. First you get a full body tingle—“the pricking,” they call it—and then your mouth starts to water, like you’re tasting something quite spicy or sour, but also delicious, and your hair stands on end a little, and you sneeze.

  I sneezed.

  Mama started laughing, and exclaimed, “Mar! My favorite almond witch! How’s the grove? How’s Wraith? What are you doing so far out of the woodlands?”

  “Oh,” said Mar with a fast upward fling of her hands. “I’m an alumna of U of DW too, you know. I’ve spent some time in the city. Yannai and I are old friends. She told me what happened.” She jerked her chin at me. A small square dimple flashed high in her cheek, though her bootblack eyes were far more sympathetic than amused. “That Dean of Oracles and Divination!” she exclaimed. “He’s basically the result of a jar of aspic and a moray eel getting it on and having a fish-eyed baby in the shape of a man, isn’t he?”

  “I did have to take a shower after talking to him,” I confessed.

  “Anyway!” Mar clapped her hands and sat, even before Yannai asked her. “I’m here representing a few of my friends. The trees have been distressed ever since that criminal destroyed one of their own to get at your pelt. A few of us woodlanders started talking to each other, Firi. We’ve started keeping an eye on you, keeping our crystals tuned to your developments. Nothing invasive, just aware. We’ve all been bending our brains trying to come up with a solution to this tragedy. A just sentence, if you will, appropriate to his crime—”

  “I’ve had it told to me officially,” Yannai put in flatly, “that Doornwold’s current municipal system has no laws in place to govern this kind of hate crime. The Chief of Police was heavy-hearted about it, but says the city council chokes all petitions to address offenses against wolfcasters before they reach the ears of the queens.”

  “—so we witches came up with something,” Mar continued as if she’d never been interrupted. “A workaround for your pelt. Sort of. But,” she warned me, “there’s a catch.”

  Again, I was drawn to the gravity and sympathy in her eyes. I leaned forward in my seat, ignoring my tea. “Tell me. Will it stop him from doing the same to someone else?”

  And though Mar spoke no word of assent, nor even nodded back at me, I felt a pact form in the air between us. All I had to do was accept it. I wouldn’t even have to say the word, just think it.

  But of course, we were all civilized here, not meeting amongst the trees, and there was much to be actually discussed. Out loud.

  “Please, Jaca, Firi,” Yannai gestured Mama and me toward the chairs. “Mar and I have a proposition to make.”

  So there I was, at the gala opening for the wolfcaster exhibit, sitting beneath a tree. Not a real tree, though parts of it were real, scavenged from the tree he destroyed when he went after my pelt. Parts of the tree were wire, parts papier-mâché, and the leaves were all cut-outs from the nasty postcards he’d sent me. That last postcard, the one where he told me he’d burned the last piece of my pelt to ash and drank it down with w
ine, was pinned to the trunk like the bull’s eye of a target. The tree was “growing” out of the middle of the gallery floor of the Contemporary Art wing at the M.o.E.S.

  All around me were the silver-spooniest, cream of the creamiest, dressed in their dreamiest, cash-cowiest strutters of Doornwold’s elite, hobnobbing with each other and trying to ignore me. But it was not easy.

  For I was naked, draped in my tattered, patched, badly stitched-up pelt.

  At my feet sat Mama, panting with a scarlet tongue, wearing her wolfcaster form. And surrounding the tree like a pack at rest was every other wolfcaster who’d contributed to tonight’s exhibit, all of them also in their pelts, pools of shadow and quicksilver and razor-sharp ivory. I was the lonely island in their midst. From the one ragged hole in my pelt, my skin shone like a dark star, and a cold wind poured through me, through my pelt, so that, no matter how many bodies filled the large gallery, it never grew warm. Even those dressed in their best velvets shivered.

  Oh, and, yeah. The criminal was in attendance that evening. He and his daddy, too, both in suits of velvet. His daddy must’ve gotten wind of our unveiling. It was in all the artsy newspapers: how his disgrace of a son had stripped a wolfcaster of her pelt, not only shortening her lifespan by several centuries—or millennia—and rendering her mortal, but also destroying a witchwood tree in the process. How that crime had inspired the living sculpture at the center of tonight’s show, shame, shame, shame. So daddy’d come along, paid his big ticket price and then some, fronting strong, big and insouciant, showing off his gold ring and his gold-haired son. He wanted to show that no matter what crimes his boy’d committed, his family still had the sway to walk where they would without shame, and publicly snigger about it with everyone looking on.

  But that’s what they didn’t count on, daddy and son. They didn’t count on they themselves—with their velvet suits, their sniggering and smirking and strutting superiority—being a part of our exhibit too.

  And when the criminal, looking cocky and delighted, picked his way through the sea of wolfcasters to me—when he stood over me and my tree and my pelt, hands in his velvet pockets, grinning down—I took my chance.

  The wolfcasters all around me turned on each other—not in anger, but in solidarity—and grasped at each other with their teeth: locking onto throats, tails, flanks, whatever they could catch and hold. Two dozen shadows flowed into a single pelt, continuous, gorgeous, a dark wind, encircling us, closing us in—and off from the onlookers.

  I sprang up. I was wound so tight, I was practically a catapult. I cast my pelt from my shoulders to his. And then, before he could do anything but gape, I drew out the patch that Mar and her witch friends had made for me, with the help of Mama and the other wolfcasters—even Senior Deputy Director Yannai Baramintha. It was a small patch, made from bits of all their fur, and the magic of witches, and a drop of my blood, and I set the patch to the hole where the last scrap of my pelt would always be missing. And I sealed the pelt over him.

  He didn’t deserve it. He didn’t deserve to be so beautiful.

  But, A) it wouldn’t feel beautiful to him, and B) he wouldn’t know what to do with it—how to move, or speak, or eat, or even think, not without a mentor to guide him, and C) the pelt, reconstructed, could never be mine again—Mar had made that clear to me—so it might as well know some better use.

  So there he was, the criminal, turning inside out before my eyes. He was becoming a thing of smoke and lightning, a night-pacer, a moon-swift. There he was, the wolfcaster I once had been—but with no way to return to his original form.

  He howled, and so did my mama, and so did all the other wolfcasters. But they were howling for justice, and he was howling for terror. For terror, and because he loathed what he had become. What no one could unmake of him.

  Soon his daddy was there, roaring, flashing his silver knife at my throat. But silver is an intrinsically dull metal. It will cut fruit, not flesh—not unless you’re a wolfcaster, whose shroud of shadows parts before the touch of it. But I was a mortal now, and angry. His little silver fruit knife didn’t even make me flinch.

  Besides, Yannai Baramintha had made sure there was a police presence at the gallery opening that night. She was, in fact, dating the Chief of Police, who, even though she was wearing her finest gown and flowers in her hair, had a wicked right hook and wasn’t about to let even a merchant prince like Kassel Hlapendef (there, I named him) spill mortal or wolfcaster blood on her watch.

  He staggered when she struck him, and roared when her officers restrained him. He managed to free himself for a heart-stopping moment. He lunged again with his silver knife—this time, at his son, who cringed away from him. But his son couldn’t do much more than cringe; he didn’t yet know how to move about in his new form.

  Mama interposed herself between them. Her jaws snapped down upon Hlapendef Senior’s arm, shearing it off at the wrist. Both hand and knife fell. (Nothing permanent, damage-wise. They were able to reattach it later, at the jail.) She then, none too gently, picked up Hlapendef Junior by the tender scruff of his neck and dragged him off.

  I never asked to where. Mama likely took him to meet his new mentor, who’d start by showing the new wolfcaster how to feed himself. That might take a few years, depending on his smarts and his willingness. When he got the basic mechanics down, they’d maybe start him on walking around. After years of reprogramming, Hlapendef Junior might even amount to something—at least among wolfcasters. Which didn’t mean much to the rest of the world.

  As for me, I was done with him.

  The week after that, Yannai hired me as a junior archivist for the M.o.E.S. Later that year, WADL appointed me to their Board of Directors, even though I was no longer a wolfcaster. I went on to do a few good things over the decades since. Life is so short now, you know, but I’ve done a few things. And however short it is, it’s also full and splendid, and terrible and magical. Even without magic. Even without my pelt.

  FROM: The Firi Kanaphar Papers (yrs 347-348) | M.o.E.S. Archives

  DESCRIPTION: Papers of Firi Kanaphar (b. 327 — d. 421), MSLS yr 347, include oral history, biographical items, correspondence, publications, manuscripts, memoranda, journals, and photographs relating to her student days at University of Doornwold (yrs 343-47); her membership in the Wolfcasters Anti-Defamation League (yrs 343-421); the Society of Ecological Thaumaturgists (yrs 345-350); the Outer Woodlanders Alliance (yrs 348-388); the Predator Conservation Service (yrs 350-62); the Witchwood Nature Conservancy (yrs 350-400); the Eerie Skins Union (yrs 360-80). Significant correspondents include Mabelinda the Megrimancer (witch), Princess Dora Rose of Lake Serenus (Swan Folk), Maurice of Amandale (Rat Folk), Nicolas Piper (Musician), Marline Riallakin (Witch), Wraith Anaiason (Warlock), and Icanthus Val (Warlock).

  Access Restriction: None. Collection is open to the public.

  ( Editors’ Note: C.S.E. Cooney is interviewed b y Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

  © 2021 C. S. E. Cooney

  C. S. E. Cooney is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Bone Swans: Stories. Her short novel, The Twice-Drowned Saint: Being a Tale of Fabulous Gelethel, the Invisible Wonders Who Rule There, and the Apostates Who Try to Escape its Walls, can be found in Mythic Delirium’s recent anthology, The Sinister Quartet. Both her forthcoming novel Saint Death’s Daughter and her story collection Dark Breakers, will be out in 2022. Other work includes Tor.com novella Desdemona and the Deep, and a poetry collection: How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, which features her Rhysling Award-winning “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her short fiction and poetry can be found in Jonathan Strahan’s anthology Dragons, Ellen Datlow’s Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere. When she’s not writing, she’s designing games with her husband Carlos Hernandez, and recording albums of mythy-type music under the name Brimstone Rhine.

  The Chameleo
n’s Gloves

  by Yoon Ha Lee

  Rhehan hated museums, but their partner Liyeusse had done unmentionable things to the ship’s stardrive the last time the two of them had fled the authorities, and the repairs had drained their savings. Which was why Rhehan was on a station too close to the more civilized regions of the dustways, flirting with a tall, pale woman decked in jewels while they feigned interest in pre-Devolutionist art.

  In spite of themselves, Rhehan was impressed by colonists who had carved pictures into the soles of worn-out space boots: so useless that it had to be art, not that they planned to say that to the woman.

  “—wonderful evocation of the Festival of the Vines using that repeated motif,” the woman was saying. She brushed a long curl of hair out of her face and toyed with one of her dangling earrings as she looked sideways at Rhehan.

  “I was just thinking that myself,” Rhehan lied. A Festival of the Vines, with its accompanying cheerful inebriation and sex, would be less agonizing than having to pretend to care about the aesthetics of this piece. Too bad Rhehan and Liyeusse planned to disappear in the next couple hours. The woman was pretty enough, despite her obsession with circuitscapes. Rhehan was of the opinion that if you wanted to look at a circuit, nothing beat the real thing.

  A tinny voice said in Rhehan’s ear, “Are you on location yet?”

  Rhehan faked a cough and subvocalized over the link to Liyeusse. “Been in position for the last half-hour. You sure you didn’t screw up the prep?”

  She snorted disdainfully. “Just hurry it—”

  At last the alarms clanged. The jeweled woman jumped, her astonishing blue eyes going wide. Rhehan put out a steadying arm and, in the process, relieved her of a jade ring and slipped it in their pocket. Not high-value stuff, but no one with sense wore expensive items as removables. They weren’t wearing gloves on this outing—had avoided wearing gloves since their exile—but the persistent awareness of their naked hands never faded. At least, small consolation, the added sensation made legerdemain easier, even if they had to endure the distastefulness of skin touching skin.