by Y. S. Lee
“But thank you for driving me.”
“Of course, miss.”
The village was awake when they arrived.
“Miss,” Holden asked, as he put the bag in her hand, “do you know what you’re doing?”
She laughed and turned back to tap the handle of the car. She longed to touch it, but she pulled her fingers back and stepped away.
Holden watched her but said nothing. She shook her head and gave a small wave as she went through the door. “Goodbye, Holden.”
Eve settled by the window in an empty compartment. The door slid open and the young man walked in. He smiled at her. “It’s you.”
She squinted. “Ezra?”
“How do you know my name?”
“You … you gave me the key.”
He sat across from her, his brow furrowed. “Oh, the key you dropped?”
“I didn’t drop it. I thought it was yours.”
“Not mine.”
She leaned toward him. “Your eyes aren’t green.”
His smile was delightful. “No, they’re not.”
“How did I get that wrong?” she asked, back against her seat. “Do you dance?”
“What?” he asked. “No. I mean, yes, but not very well.”
“I don’t either.”
“Oh,” he said slowly, looking as if he were trying to catch up. “You’re asking because of when I saw you.”
“In the ballroom?”
“What? Have we met at a ball?”
“When did you mean?” Eve asked.
“In the street. When you dropped your key. And I said we were—”
“Dancing. Yes, I remember now. Do you ever get off this train?”
Ezra laughed. “Well, I don’t live on it.”
“Do you live in the village?”
“My family does.” He paused. “And you live in the big house.”
“How did you know?”
“My mother told me. You’re Eve, the nice sister.”
Eve gave a little gasp. “Is that what she called me?”
“I shouldn’t have said.”
“No, it’s all right. Where do you go? On the train.”
“To London. I’m a clerk for an insurance company.”
“Ooh,” she said, shaking her head. “That sounds dreadful.”
He laughed again, his eyes dancing and watching her with pleasure. He had a genuine laugh, deep and infectious, and it occurred to Eve his kisses might not be paper-thin. That instead there would be passion and depth and promise. She blushed at the thought, but it wouldn’t go away.
“But it’s clever at the same time,” she said, wanting to touch him to see if he was real.
“Where are you traveling to?”
Eve looked out the window at the almost-empty platform. “Wherever it is, it’ll be the beginning.”
“The beginning of what?”
She turned back. “Oh…stepping outside the pages.”
“The pages? Are you a character in a book?”
“No, but I’ve been living very closely with them.”
He nodded slowly. “I think I know what you mean.”
“You do?” she asked, wondering if that could be true.
“I’m a reader as well,” he said with a knowing look.
Eve smiled then while looking into his eyes. And they had a moment of her looking at him and him looking at her and her seeing his smile and him seeing hers and something was inside of her like an unopened present not to be opened quite yet.
“Do you mind if I join you on the first part of your journey?” he asked.
“Hold out your hand.”
“Anything you want,” he said, sending a thrill through her.
Simultaneously, they scooted forward in their seats, toward one another. She took his offered hand. It feels very real, she thought. She ran her fingers along the lines of his palm, and then flipped his hand over and studied both the strength and fineness of it. One finger was stained with ink. Her eyes rose to his.
As he looked back, a whistle blew.
Eve leaned closer. “Do you happen—?”
“Yes?” Ezra asked quickly, as if her words were valuable things.
“Do you like violets?” she asked eagerly.
“I don’t have a particular affection for them.”
She hesitated. “Roses?”
“I do like roses.”
“We could get scratched.”
“By the thorns? We’d be careful of them.”
“In a field?”
“A field of roses?” he asked.
“What do you think?”
“Where are you going, Eve?”
Her eyes grew bright as an exquisite joy came over her, a yearning in her heart like when she swam toward the dome. But tasting like champagne bubbles bursting on her tongue.
“To start,” she said, glimpsing the guard wave the green flag.
“Yes?”
Sounding like the saxophone that stirred her soul.
“I want to be here,” she said. “Just right here. With you.”
Taking her in like Ezra’s eyes.
“I like here, too,” he said.
“I’m still holding your hand.”
“I’m acutely aware.”
This was quite unlike anything that had come before. “A brand new thing,” she whispered as the train began to move, “and all my very own.”
About Jenny Moss
Once upon a time, Jenny Moss was a NASA engineer. She now writes for children and teens in a multitude of genres. She's the author of the young adult fantasy SHADOW (Scholastic Press) and the historical novels WINNIE’S WAR and TAKING OFF (initially published by Bloomsbury/Walker). She's released one gothic novel under her birth name, Jennifer McKissack (SANCTUARY, Scholastic Press). Recently, she decided to stick with writing in one genre only, but has found herself working on another fantasy, another gothic, and another historical novel.
www.jenny-moss.com
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twitter.com/jennymosswrites
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twitter.com/McKissackJenn
Four Revelations from the Rusalka Ball
Cassandra Khaw
Four Revelations from the Rusalka Ball
1.
The food is always sumptuous, spectacularly and shamelessly allegorical: glass apples made of spun-sugar; shoes, reinterpreted as all manners of confections; dragon, slow-roasted with fish sauce and holy basil; vermicelli the color and consistency of a newborn blonde’s hair; ruby pomegranate seeds polished to a shine, piled up in vases made to resemble the faces of every princess that the narrative left behind.
It is a spectacle, a spectator’s sport, this culinary line-up of what’s what from the bible of myth, and one can bet your first-born son on the fact the caterers won’t skimp. No abridgement of fables, no matter how obscure. No censoring, no truncation, no elison for clarity. Nothing but raw metaphor, wholesale and pure. Everything that anyone has ever put to pen, quill, syllable, or scratch on a mountain face, it’s all here.
And if a human child were to sample from the buffet, if they popped a caramelized pear between their teeth or ate from the spidered bones of a swan wing, if they drank the dark honey-wine, precisely one thing would follow: dissatisfaction.
For the rest of their lives, they’ll dream of the rusalkas’ ball, its lithe and long-throated girls in frothing lace; its lords and their entourage of boys, glass smiles and the glint of gold pearling on their earlobes.
And they, these children allowed to go free, will wonder why they weren’t good enough to keep.
2.
The clothing is always phantasmagoric, always elegant: plastic-wrapped bodies dripping with neon, dead languages tattooed on skin worm-pale, vernix-slick; bearskin capes over armor like scales of a shark; dresses of blood, barely congealed; feathered collars on three-piece suits, all in colors with names yet invented.
Sometimes, they wear dreams or a stretch of nightmares like a noose around their neck.
Except they are more splendid than any sacrifice. Even Odin, belly-bleeding and swinging from a branch, isn’t anywhere as handsome.
And sometimes, they wear words. Words that no one has spoken, words that people have forgotten. A necklace of syllables; particles, past and perfect, like bangles of bone on silk-smooth arms; prepositions and adverbs, nouns without number, buttoned up around wasp-waists and legs so long you couldn’t find their start.
They wear them all.
It’s the rusalkas’ ball, after all.
3.
The halls are always half-drowned. In the aphotic deep where a cruise liner has laid itself to rest, one pocket of breath to share. Down in the river beds, buried in the silt. Down in the dark of the deepest lakes, the waters cold and black as a broken heart. Down where no scream escapes, no corpse lies unvarnished by the chill, no one is left lonely.
It is dark here, but these halls are always beautiful.
4.
The hearts are always eaten at the end.
It is the price of admission.
About Cassandra Khaw
Cassandra Khaw is the business developer for micro-publisher Ysbryd Games. When not otherwise writing press releases and attending conventions, she writes fiction of varying length. The first two novellas in her Lovecraftian noir Persons Non Grata series—Hammers on Bone and A Song for Quiet—are available from Tor.com Publishing.
You can find her on Twitter and on Ko-Fi.
Spellswept
Stephanie Burgis
Spellswept
The evening of the Spring Equinox was cool and balmy, just as the weather wizards had—for once!—reliably predicted. The glittering guest list for the Harwoods’ annual ball was exactly to Amy Standish’s design.
As she prepared to descend into the lake that gently rippled, reflecting the full moon and stars, outside the grandeur of Harwood House, Amy knew she had organized the most important night of her life so far to absolute perfection. The only tiny, insignificant task left to do was to propose marriage to the right man by the end of this evening. Then she would finally win everything she had ever dreamed of, and it would be utterly perfect. She knew it.
There was only one problem with the culmination of all her years of planning…and his name was Jonathan Harwood.
Everyone knew, of course, that Jonathan Harwood was a problem. That was an open secret in political circles, and a joke in the national papers whenever they most wished to embarrass their political leaders.
The only son of Miranda Harwood—one of the most respected members of the Boudiccate that ruled all of Angland—had actually refused to study magic?
His father, like every other gentleman who’d ever married or been born to a powerful Harwood lady throughout history, had been a notable magician until his tragic early death. Jonathan’s own place at the Great Library of Trinivantium had been guaranteed to him from birth…yet he’d refused it at eighteen and remained steadfast ever since, turning his back upon centuries of tradition.
Without magical training, he would never be able to make a marriage that benefited his family. He would neither wed nor sire any more shining female politicians to continue the great Harwood legacy; he would never himself rise to the top of the magical hierarchy that was the natural and proper pursuit of every well-born gentleman.
It was inexplicable to the world at large. To the Amy Standish of ten months ago, riding towards Harwood House to take up her appointment as Miranda’s new personal assistant, it had seemed quite simply unforgivable.
For a man to turn his back upon his own family…!
At the very thought of it, her whole body had stiffened, her strong, dark brown fingers tightening around the small travelling desk on her lap, where she’d been making notes throughout the journey. It was, of course, a delightful writing desk, made of polished walnut, with leaping horses and owls scrolled in gold along its sides. The various guardians who’d been responsible for her education across the past twenty years had never flinched in passing on the generous allowance that she’d been assigned from her inheritance.
They’d each delivered it to her with scrupulous fairness, just as they’d delivered Amy herself, every year or two, to the next distant relation with an unfortunate obligation to care for her. Then they’d passed the whole sum on to her, with even less well-disguised relief, the moment that she finally reached the age of maturity and they could dust their hands of all obligations towards her forever.
Of course, they’d had their own families to look after. One day, though, Amy would finally establish a family of her own, and then she would be fierce in its protection—and unlike some hopelessly over-privileged and thoughtless young men, she would never turn away from them! Even the idea of such a betrayal was—
A flash of blue water caught her gaze, distracting her from her ire, as the thick woodland cleared ahead. Aha: finally, the famous Aelfen Mere. It was the site of the late Mr. Harwood’s legendary wedding gift to his wife, a spell that had lasted for a mind-boggling three decades by now to create the Boudiccate’s most unique and acclaimed festive meeting place.
Over the years, Amy had devoured dozens of newspaper reports about the spectacular masked balls, dazzling theatricals, and world-changing international negotiations that regularly took place beneath the seemingly calm waters of that lake. Emissaries from Angland’s allies among the various African nations, the Marathan Empire, and even the widely distrusted new Daniscan Republic had all danced and schemed beneath the blue, along with representatives from the local fairies who shared Angland’s landscape in a state of uneasy détente.
Soon, if she succeeded in impressing Miranda Harwood, Amy would find her own place in those negotiations. She had been waiting her entire life for the chance—but of course, being Amy, she hadn’t merely waited. She’d spent the last three years making detailed lists of plans for exactly how she would manage it.
If there was one lesson Amy Standish had learned in twenty years of being unwanted by her guardians, it was that planning and perfection were the only sensible strategies to manage life with her head held high.
And then she met the Harwood family, and every one of her plans was thrown into turmoil.
Now Amy hesitated by the lakeshore on the night of the Spring Equinox Ball, ensnared by memories and hopelessly tangled in emotions...until a familiar voice spoke suddenly behind her.
“There you are.” Miranda Harwood’s words broke through Amy’s swirling thoughts. “Still worrying over all the tiny details?” Amusement rippled through her mentor’s rich, warm voice as Amy gave a guilty start and stepped back from the lapping waves of the Aelfen Mere. “Trust me, young lady,” Miranda said. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s this: no matter how perfectly you’ve planned anything, something will always go amiss.”
“Oh, Mother,” said a second voice. “As if you’d ever allow that to happen!”
Amy could actually hear the eye-roll in that younger female voice...and she couldn’t help the rueful smile that tugged at her own lips as she turned around to follow it.
Cassandra Harwood was thirteen years old, bursting with energy, a small and fiercely irrepressible force of nature, and the absolute bane of her famous mother’s existence. Mischief glinted in her brown eyes now as she nudged her mother’s waist with one impudent elbow. “If anything ever dared go amiss in a party you’d organized, you’d simply look every guest in the eyes and inform them that it had never happened. You know they’d be far too intimidated to disbelieve you!”
Miranda cast her own eyes to the night sky. “If only either of my children felt the same way,” she said drily. “Perhaps one day, if I’m extraordinarily fortunate...”
“Standing dreaming outside your own party, Mother?” That affectionate voice was adult and male, and so was the jacketed arm that slipped around Miranda’s shoulders.
Amy’s throat tightened as she tipped her head back. The fond smile she’d been wearing suddenly turned fraught in he
r own head, a matter of urgent strategic importance. Should she—? Shouldn’t she—?
It was a friendly smile, she told herself firmly. Nothing more.
It was only polite to smile at her mentor’s son.
It was...
Oh! His eyes caught hers in the glow of the lanterns that marked out the path from the house to the lake, and she sucked in a breath, her heart lurching horribly.
It was too much. It was always too much with Jonathan, because he never even tried to disguise his own feelings for the sake of common sense and self-protection. They shone, unguarded, through his open gaze to pierce her heart with a sweet, aching pain that cut through all of the shields she’d so carefully constructed across the years of her life.
Amy had plans. She had a whole future laid out before her, full of professional satisfaction and astonishing achievements that would change the entire nation for the better—a future in which no one would ever again look at Amy Standish and see an unwanted burden, a girl with no proper place in her world.
“We certainly can’t stand about dreaming any longer, can we?” Miranda stepped briskly out of her son’s embrace. “Just think, Amy: by the end of tonight, you’ll be an engaged woman. And then...!”
Amy’s smile slipped hopelessly away as Jonathan’s steady gaze remained fixed on her face.
Cassandra scowled mutinously. “Well, I think Lord Llewellyn’s a bore, and not nearly as clever with his magic as he thinks he is. If I—”
“You,” said her mother through gritted teeth, “are not to mention magic even once, Cassandra, from the moment we step into that ballroom! I know you haven’t any concern for my feelings, but do you really wish to ruin one of the most important nights of Amy’s life?”