The Boi of Feather and Steel

by Adan Jerreat-Poole

  But that wouldn’t save Kite or Tav, and the Heart was still a body, still a girl, still a lover. The Heart felt the human fear that sang through her marrow like a melody.

  The Heart turned around and went back — back to the room with the pillars of ice, back to the decaying cavern, to the mouth of the beast, to the lair where the Witch Lord puppeteered the death of celestial bodies.

  Eli had one last thing to do before she died.

  THE HEIR

  Kite used to tell time by the paper cuts on her hands, using the marks to remind herself to raise her head from the books, to go for walk in the woods, to lie on the secret island she shared with her secret friend. Now the webbing between her fingers was smooth, and her wrists were forgetting the weight of leather and fibre.

  As she brought a drowning to the Coven, as she came to bury and to save, she kept seeing glimpses of paper cranes stamped in a forgotten font; of tulips and roses blooming with ink; of a staircase that was ridged like a spine.

  When she had a vision of paper and vellum, Kite closed her eyes and pretended she was a salmon swimming back to its place of birth. She brought a flood that was salty with the bodies that had lived and died in the Coven since the first animal breathed on their planet.

  She worried about water damage. Mould was death to a book.

  No, there wasn’t time for her fears, and she had to trust in the library, in the knowledge that changed and hid and let itself be forgotten and remembered again. She would trust in transformation.

  The water was up to her knees now. She brought the flood. She brought destruction. She brought change.

  Behind her came the children with plastic forks and ceramic shards, barbecue lighters and slingshots; buttons and doll’s eyes for ammunition; dirty hands and flexible spines and an innate knowledge of how to shatter.

  Behind her came the daughters, their eyes carved from alabaster or plucked from taxidermied lynxes, their bodies sparking like electric eels or glowing with phosphorous; girls like blades, needles, arrows, shields, and shells; girls who smelled of chamomile and acetone, sumac and sesame and gunpowder. Girls with axes woven with stained glass and barbed wire, with spears of smoke and flame, with harpoons crafted from stinging nettle and porcupine quills dipped in ammonia.

  Behind her came the discarded things, the monsters of scrap metal and succulents, creatures of corduroy and rust and shadow. The other objects who had followed Kite away from the wastelands had bonded with the soldiers, and many of the children and daughters now wore crowns of asphalt or breastplates of crystal and tire tread.

  As they moved through the tunnels slowly filling with water, their footsteps wrote stories with eddies and waves, the white froth in their wake a prophecy for someone else to read.

  The Heir walked toward her execution with the grace of a single water lily in a stagnant pool.

  Fifty-Nine

  THE HEALER

  Tav and the Witch Lord twirled through the ballroom as hundreds of sycophants dressed in broken glass and tarmac watched, their eyes gleaming like polished stones.

  “What are you?” the Witch Lord whispered, eyes glittering like winter frost under an angry sun. Tav’s eyes watered under the harsh brightness. There was something horribly compelling about her — Tav could smell the dead fish on her skin, and yet felt the urge to lean closer, to catch every word, to let themselves shrivel and blister under her gaze.

  “What are you?” they responded, watching the multihued essence writhe within its shell as if trying to tear itself apart.

  The mood changed. The room darkened, the crystal chandeliers shaking violently. The sound was a warning. The Witch Lord’s eyes turned storm grey, and a bolt of lightning flashed across them.

  “You have not yet earned the right to ask me a question, sacrifice,” she hissed.

  The sickly greengold hue of the Witch Lord’s essence made Tav’s stomach twist. They wanted to pull away from her. They wanted to be the sacrifice. They wanted to let her drink them. They wanted to run away. They wanted to join her essence, to lose themselves in her sea.

  They were in over their head.

  “I am a visitor from another world,” they said finally. It was the truth — but the aftertaste of metal and dish soap told them it was only partially the truth.

  “You smell delicious,” the Witch Lord crooned, her claws tightening on Tav’s shoulder, biting skin. Tav clenched their teeth and fought the urge to flinch.

  “You smell like the sea,” they said.

  The cavern remained dark, and in the faint pink light the shadows appeared red and bloody. No longer a ballroom but the site for an execution.

  She’s like a cat, they thought dimly. She likes to play with her food.

  They felt the moment a fingernail broke skin, but it wasn’t the pain or the blood leaking from their shoulder that Tav needed to worry about. It was the essence that had turned the colour of frostbitten lichen and was inching toward them, calling to something deep inside them. Tav looked down and saw a glow of purple and black flickering in their chest.

  “Yes, that’s a good boi,” the Witch Lord purred. “Come and join me. With me, you will be strong.”

  A thought broke the surface of the ocean they were drowning in. “Why do we have to be strong?” they murmured. “Why do we need to be stronger? Aren’t we strong enough?”

  “We need our strength, child.” Her was mouth at Tav’s ear. The smell of putrid fish was stronger now. Tav’s mouth began to water. “We can use our strength to make this world great again. To rescue it from the reckless children. To save the world. To save ourselves. Until we are strong, we will be at risk. Don’t you want to be safe?”

  Safety. The word rippled the pool of Tav’s murky, swampy thoughts. Images, memory, theirs and others’, passed down through stories and blood and DNA.

  Bodies tossed over the side of the ship.

  Cops asking for ID, one hand on a gun.

  Hands shoving them into lockers.

  “Are we still on the Middle Passage?” they asked, staring past the witch’s skin and into the sea of gold and hunger that promised pleasure and pain and, above all, obliteration. Was crossing the stars all that different from crossing the Atlantic?

  “I will keep you safe.” Damp breath like mist on their neck. In the darkness, the eyes of the other witches burned like embers as Tav spun past them, turning around and around at the whim of the Witch Lord. Dizziness broke over their body likes waves, and they lost all sense of place.

  Where were they? Why were they here?

  What does it mean, to be safe?

  A single thread of greygreen essence touched Tav. Other images flashed across their vision, flooding their senses — a world crumbling into ash, the taste of smoke and sugar on their tongue; the screaming of stone being ground into powder; the lifeless eyes of the daughters and children. Then there was only pain, and they were drowning, lungs collapsing from the pressure of the ocean, their heart ready to burst from adrenalin and fear.

  And then everything stopped. Tav’s breath came in short bursts. A heartbeat pounding in their head. A migraine squeezing their skull.

  Redpink streaks painting the cavern of stone into prison bars of light.

  They were alive. They were whole.

  What happened?

  “You hurt me,” said the Witch Lord, shock sparking from her entire being. Tav stared in horror at the single burn mark in the shape of a perfect circle etched below her clavicle.

  Tav remembered the dreams of destruction. That wasn’t their idea of safety. Someone else’s subjugation was no one’s freedom.

  The Witch Lord’s grip tightened on Tav’s wrist, manacles clamping down. “If you won’t come willingly, you will still come.” But Tav heard the underbelly of fear and marvelled at it. When was the last time the Witch Lord felt pain?

  Did she enjoy it?

  Keep the game interesting. Clytemnestra is coming. They won’t leave you here. Eli needs you.

  Tav le
t themselves be drawn closer to the witch. “Have you figured it out yet?” they breathed in her ear, which was lined with black pearls. They tried to wrestle their panicked heart into some kind of rhythm. “Do you know what I am? What I can offer you? Do you know why Clytemnestra sent me?”

  The Witch Lord said nothing, just considered the strange human-magic hybrid in her arms. Her essence was now a deep rose with a blueblack shimmer. It matched the room she had made to trap and play with other creatures.

  An engine revved from one side of the ballroom, reminding Tav that they weren’t alone. So they took another risk, hoping it wouldn’t be their last.

  “Did you like it, when I touched your essence?”

  The Witch Lord drew lines in red on Tav’s back, the movement of her fingernails retracing a map of inter-generational trauma and reopening more recent wounds.

  The haunted orchestra continued to play, the music reminiscent of a waltz — but it sounded like a symphony on acid overlaid with the sounds of grinding teeth and cicadas.

  “We will finish our dance,” the Witch Lord said finally. “And you will show me your secrets. Then I will eat you.”

  Tav didn’t need Eli’s frost blade to tell them the Witch Lord was speaking the truth.

  Tav kept their eyes on the burn mark on her chest, hoping that their body held other secrets that could save them.

  Sixty

  THE HEIR

  The water was up to her thighs now. The shimmering coils of her skirts floated around her limbs like the stingers of a jellyfish. And still the Coven wept, offering every bit of moisture to Kite’s procession.

  She was the Witch Lord’s weakness. Her betrayal would hurt; and her death, when it came, would scar. After all — Kite’s pain was the Witch Lord’s pain. They were the same.

  She looked down at her pale blue skin and watched the glimmer of whitegold swim across the surface of her left knee. Stolen power. A kind of necromancy.

  The Beast had taken the form of a feathered dragon-bird and perched on her left shoulder. He nuzzled against her neck. She had told him to stay behind in the Children’s Lair, but he was stubborn. “Try not to die, my sweet,” she whispered. He chewed on her hair.

  She hoped the children would make a new world worthy of being remembered.

  The flow of water around her ankles changed; she turned her head and caught the scent of rosehips and ferocity. The white marks on the made-daughter’s brown skin were like drops of bleach. If Kite was stupid, she would reach over and trace a constellation between the pale freckles. But Kite was not stupid.

  The assassin. The first one she had found, dismembered, in the depths of the Coven. The one she had put back together. The one who now led the small coalition of daughters who had been recovered through Kite’s alchemy or who had fled their mothers and been welcomed in the Children’s Lair. The one who would take no name.

  The unnamed stared at the Heir, her white eye smooth and clear as cream. The gold power in Kite’s body surged toward that eye, the eye that absorbed power and used it to heal. Kite’s essence wanted to steal that magic, but she forced the urge down.

  “They left their mothers for this fight,” the unnamed said. “The daughters that march with us.”

  “We have that in common,” said Kite.

  “When this is over, we will be free. We serve no master. Not even you.”

  “No one will serve me.” The truth fell easily from Kite’s lips, like water gushing from a fountain.

  “We want your promise that you will not interfere with us.”

  “Do you speak for them?”

  “No one speaks for us. I speak only for myself.” The words emerged as a canine growl from the back of her throat.

  “Then I give you my word.” Kite leaned closer, her hair dancing around the coyote-girl’s neck. The gold magic urged her to drink, but Kite ignored the whispers of a tyrant that sang in her DNA. “And the word is named.”

  The Unnamed’s human pupil widened, and a single ripple travelled through the white sucking orb.

  “A word and a secret,” she purred softly, her voice velvet paws on soft underbrush. “I accept.”

  What would the unnamed do with this knowledge, that the Heir was not a full witch, that she had lied to her mother, that she truly was one of the children? What would she do with the knowledge that Kite had accepted a name from a part-human daughter, a name Eli had read in the taste of her sea-thick blood?

  Kite felt the confession tingle on her tongue and lips like lime and chili juice, but once she had offered it to the coyote-girl she felt steadier, as if her bird-bones were thickening, as if she was growing scales. Becoming more herself.

  It was time for secrets to be revealed, for notes crumpled in back pockets to be taken out, smoothed flat, and read.

  The time for crawling through filthy tunnels and hiding behind serrated smiles was over.

  The time for truth — in all its ugliness and magnificence and violence — was now.

  “I hope you survive,” Kite told the unnamed.

  “Not even death could kill me.” A feral smile. It was the curve of a wave the moment its mouth closed around land.

  The touch of water on Kite’s feet shifted, the only sign that the assassin had fallen back to walk with her sisters. She had been silent as an eclipse.

  The Unnamed’s smile was contagious, and Kite offered a toothy grin to the darkness.

  Bluegreen and goldwhite glowed in her body.

  The flood rose.

  THE HEART

  When the Heart touched the crumbling limestone, she felt like her entire being was strummed by invisible fingers. If she pressed herself into the wall, she could feel the Coven responding to her energy, like hands grasping for something to hold on to.

  The Coven guided her back through shifting passages of bone and steel and stone, past stalactites of pale ice encasing fallen stars and stalagmites of marble and beeswax. Phosphorescent moss wrote mathematical equations in blue and indigo and coral light.

  The Coven knew where the Heart was needed, and drew her along like a beacon. She didn’t need her made-eyes to see the threads of violet and black flame. She knew where she was, and it was not just a reluctant prison. The Coven was older than the Witch Lord, almost as old as the Heart itself.

  As she moved through the space, invisible except for the ribbons of shadow and light that wound themselves around her limbs, Eli was no longer a girl with caffeine cravings and a fear of abandonment; no longer a passionate lover or a scared kid. She was something older, deeper, and stranger. She was a spectre of bright and dark, a star, a planet, a breath of air, a sea-changing wind, the roots of a sapling in damp soil, the chlorophyll pigment of the tiniest leaf. An ending and a beginning.

  She was the Heart.

  The Coven led her to the war room. Once, it had another name. The Heart remembered the silver birch leaves pressed into stone, the fingerprints of children mapping out constellations on the wall. The tide pools of healing and knowledge overflowing with sand and shells and feathers. Once, every part of the Coven had been a library, a sacred place of knowledge. Once, it had been open to the whole world, to every beast and rock and gust of wind that passed through.

  But the tide pools were gone, long dried up. The birch leaves had been torn down, the fingerprints burned away. The war room was dressed in pink crystals and wrapped with shadows, a pretty gift that promised faithlessness.

  There were many bodies in the room; some visible, others shielded by glamour and wishes. Eli could see the burnt umber colour of their desires, could almost taste the peppermint aftertaste of their dreams in the back of her throat.

  Eli loved all these bodies. Every essence, every ankle, every blade and piece of earth. They were hers, and she was their Heart.

  From where she stood, Eli could make out the members of the upper rings drifting around the edges of the dance floor like lanterns, only floating heads, their bodies shrouded in light. At the far end of the room was the thr
one, which reminded her of the junkyard. Objects, piled onto each other, forced together, shattered and broken and beautiful, formed a throne made of seaglass and sheets of oxidized copper folded into sensuous curves. The spokes of a rusted bicycle stabbed through hundreds of damp plastic bags. A doll’s head, the hair matted and dirty, was affixed to the skeleton of a fish. A throne made of flotsam.

  Her eyes trailed upward, following the strands of seaweed that were still damp — living and growing from the throne. The crystal chandeliers were trembling.

  And then she saw Tav.

  Tav blazed into focus, bright and hot and fierce. They were dressed in black and gold, and looked more like a mythical creature than a human with spiky hair. Eli could taste the steel on her tongue, and her human senses came flooding back. She was still invisible, still a ghostly figure of energy and intention. But she was also a lovesick girl missing her broken blade.

  Eli had come here to save Tav, but she had been mistaken: Tav did not need saving. They were not the weak one. Proud in their vulnerability, burning with black-and-purple flames, the ghost of feathers following their footsteps, Tav was as terrifying as any of the witches.

  What were they?

  They were a god.

  (Gods were stories humans told each other to make sense of the chaos and beauty that shaped and unravelled their pieces of dirt. Eli was often more human than she liked to admit.)

  They opened a hole in you, Eli thought, hand going to her chest. They reached inside the Heart and survived.

  Tav moved between worlds like it was nothing. They had channelled the power of the Heart. And now they danced with the Witch Lord as an equal. They — not Clytemnestra, not Kite, not Eli — held the power to heal or destroy worlds.

  The Heart was drawn to them, to the fine bones of their wrists and the magic essence that was more like wings than honey. The Heart had always been drawn to them, but Eli thought it had been her desire that animated every touch, every look, every press of her skin against Tav’s. But maybe the Heart knew that only Tav could free it from its shell, from the broken husk of a weapon that no longer had a purpose.