Light in the Darkness

by CJ Brightley

  “I agree completely. That cat saved my life,” Dominic said. “I will personally give him a saucer of cream at the earliest opportunity.”

  “Speaking of which, I suppose the larder will be quite bare with you being away so long,” Estelle said thoughtfully. “What would you wish me to prepare for you, madame?”

  Ardhuin went off with Estelle to explain the state of the kitchen as best she could, and Dominic tried to soothe Henri’s feelings, greatly ruffled by the thought of Ardhuin in the habit of traveling in Michel’s cart.

  “There is a carriage,” Dominic said. “It hasn’t been used in some time. I suppose we could get Michel to drive it when—”

  The bell rang again. Dominic looked at Henri, surprised. “Were there any other prospective servants with you?”

  The old man shook his head, and with grave dignity went to the door as if that had been his task for years.

  “Yes, sir?”

  Dominic could see a man in the uniform of the Queen’s Hussars standing on the step. He bowed and stated he had a message for Madame Kermarec.

  “I shall see if she is at home to visitors,” Henri said, and made his way towards the kitchen. Dominic preceded him at a much more rapid pace.

  “Who?” Ardhuin blinked at him, as he blurted out what he had seen. “Does the whole world know about us? I thought we went to a lot of effort to keep it private.”

  “We did! I want to know why a Queen’s Hussar is standing on our doorstep,” Dominic said, in some agitation. “Those are the private guard of Queen Anne, and are not used to deliver mail. What does he want?”

  “I suppose we should find out,” Ardhuin said, and handed off a very long list of what appeared to be shopping to Estelle.

  The man bowed profoundly to Ardhuin when she appeared, offered a large, ornate envelope with both hands, and then turned and left.

  “It has a magical seal,” Dominic observed. Ardhuin let power flow over her hand and opened it.

  “So, her Majesty seems to know about me. I think we know who to thank for that. Oh. Oh my.” She stared at the letter, motionless. Dominic finally could no longer contain himself.

  “What is it? Is anything wrong?”

  “It’s from her, Dominic. The Queen herself! Our gratitude for assuming the burden of Mage Guardian of Bretagne, so on, so forth, the right of requesting a personal audience…more verbiage…kindly inform the Minister of the Treasury of the desired deposition of the yearly stipend…stipend? What stipend?” She held out the letter to him.

  “It would appear they do not expect you to provide the magical defense of Aerope out of your own pocket,” Dominic said, glancing at it. “And a good thing, too. We can afford that gardener now, I think. I wonder if Michel would be willing to be our regular coachman, since he already performs that function at need. Is the stipend…usual?” He glanced carefully at Henri, standing some distance away.

  “I have no idea. My great-uncle never mentioned it, but…but he did seem to think I would be able to support myself and the staff to maintain this house on my own. Now I know what he meant.”

  “Did you read the last part of the letter?” Dominic asked. “Is she serious? How does she expect you to find other…others like yourself?”

  “Someone has to do it,” Ardhuin said reasonably. “I certainly don’t want to be the only one. I don’t even know where to begin, though.”

  “Does Madame speak of the Mage Guardians?” Henri asked. They both stared at him, shocked, and he smiled slightly. “My former master spoke of them often, and intemperately. Since Madame was able to defeat him, I assumed you were one of their number. He feared very little, but the Mage Guardians gave him pause.”

  Ardhuin took a deep breath. “Quite. I trust your discretion, Henri.”

  He bowed. “Madame, my life is at your service.”

  Dominic took her hand. “Come, let us consider the matter in the library. Who do we need to replace? Preusa, definitely. I don’t want to go back there anytime soon, at least not until it thaws. What sort of requirements do we have?”

  Ardhuin started up the stairs beside him, her upper lip caught between her teeth in the way that never failed to make his heart race, and he wondered how long she would want to work on this—or if he could persuade her to postpone it until tomorrow.

  “Shall I bring tea to the library, Madame?” Henri asked.

  “No! No tea. We need to think,” said Dominic firmly. “Alone.”

  * * *

  The End

  Afterword

  Sabrina Chase was originally trained as a Mad Scientist, but due to a tragic lack of available lairs at the time of graduation fell into low company and started working in the software industry. She lives in the Pacific Northwest and is owned by two cats.

  Further sordid details may or may not be available at her website, chaseadventures.com.

  Pen Pal

  Francesca Forrest

  Pen Pal starts with a message in a bottle and ends with revolution.

  Em, a child from a floating community off the Gulf Coast, drops a message into the sea. It ends up in the hands of Kaya, an activist on the other side of the world, imprisoned above the molten lava of the Ruby Lake. Em and Kaya are both living precarious lives, at the mercy of societal, natural, and perhaps supernatural forces beyond their control. Kaya’s letters inspire Em, and Em’s comfort Kaya—but soon their correspondence becomes more than personal. Individual lives, communities, and the fate of an entire nation will be changed by this exchange of letters.

  Pen Pal is a story of friendship and bravery across age, distance, and culture, at the intersection of the natural and supernatural world.

  Pen Pal

  Copyright © 2013 by Francesca Forrest

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  * * *

  ISBN 978-1-49-426463-5

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to offer heartfelt thanks to the friends who read and commented on the earliest version of this story—an exchange of letters that ran on Livejournal in 2009—and to those who beta read later versions and offered encouragement and wise words, especially Lisa Bradley, Caroline Ellis, Miquela Faure, Merrie Haskell, Julie Just, and Sherwood Smith. I’m also extremely grateful to Khiem Tran, who provided the cover image, and to Aubrey Rose, who created the cover. My humblest and biggest thank you goes out to my husband, who supported me through this entire process—even traveling to hot places he had never envisioned going to—and to my children, who put up with my obsession and my neglectfulness. Warmest hugs also to my father (always an inspiration) and my brother and sister, and a prayer and an offering to my mother, grandmother, and LA, who are no longer with us, but whom I think on every day.

  1

  Letter in a Bottle

  Dear person who finds my message,

  I live in a place called Mermaid’s Hands. All our houses here rest on the mud when the tide is out, but when it comes in, they rise right up and float.

  They’re all roped together, so we don’t lose anyone. I like Mermaid’s Hands, but sometimes I wish I could unrope our house and see where it might float to. But I would get in trouble if I did that, so instead I’m sticking this message in a bottle. If you find it, please write back to me at this address. Tell me what the world is like where you are.

  Yours truly,

  Em

  June 27 (Em’s diary)

  Today Ma used up the last of the cough medicine on Tammy, and I rinsed out the bottle. It was a good, small size, and I decided today was the day to send out my message. Small Bill helped me row out far enough to see the free and open ocean.

  “It’s probably just gonna bob around here. Least it won’t sink,” he said, examining the corks that I put all around the outside of it, held on by electrical tape. “Not until the stickum wears off the tape,
anyway. Maybe the dolphins will play with it. Maybe they’ll pass it on to the seapeople. You want it to go to the seapeople, or people up here?” He waved his hand at the sea, but he was meaning the folks on the shrimp boats and the big cargo ships, and the ones out on the oil rigs, too.

  “Well, either way, but I want someone to write back,” I said. “Wish I could be the message … Go visit the seapeople, or go see some new place above-water.”

  “You want to leave here?”

  “Not for good! Just to look around. Just to see stuff with my own eyes. Haven’t you ever wanted to visit the seapeople?”

  Small Bill shrugged. “Maybe the seapeople. Don’t think I need to meet any more dry-land people, though. You want me to throw that for you?”

  “No, I want to do it myself.” I stood up real carefully, so I wouldn’t capsize the dinghy, and threw the bottle as far as I could. “Don’t say, ‘Not bad, not bad,’ like you’re the king of good throws,” I warned.

  “Not sure you threw it far enough for ‘not bad,’” Small Bill said, grinning, and then I nearly did capsize the dinghy trying to spill him out of it, but he was lodged in as good as a hermit crab in its shell. So we rowed back and played tag with everyone else for a while, and Small Bill’s mom gave me a bundle of dried leaves tied with cordgrass twine. Ma only likes dry-land medicine that comes in bottles, but Dad’ll make those leaves into a tea for Tammy.

  And now I wait to see if anyone gets my message in a bottle.

  June 28 (Loop Current Charter Fishing Tours log entry)

  Nice family today; a father, two sons, and one daughter. Calm seas, plenty of fish. The family took home a couple good-sized red snapper. My own line snagged at one point on some rubbish—it was a little bottle wearing a life jacket of corks, and would you believe, it had a kid’s message in it. Decided to send it to Matt. He’s shipping out next week; maybe he can drop it in the Straits of Malacca or something. If someone over there finds it and writes back, the kid’ll really get a thrill.

  June 28 (Em’s diary)

  I won’t go to the post office today. There couldn’t be a letter for me there yet. I hope not, anyway. I don’t want nobody to have found my message in a bottle yet, because if they have, they’re probably from around here. Unless the bottle really does go under the waves, to the seapeople.

  Things I wonder about: What would happen if the Seafather himself found it? Would he harness up a seadragon and come riding right into Mermaid’s Hands, to find out how we’re all doing, here? Would he give me gills and invite me to come with him and have adventures?

  But if he came in this close to shore, he might make a tsunami, and that would be bad. Small Bill says he wants a tsunami to take out Sandy Neck, but if a tsunami came, it would hit our houses first. Small Bill thinks we could float through it. It’s not like a hurricane, he says. There’s no wind. There’s no rain.

  Small Bill hates Sandy Neck because a lot of folks there are mean. They don’t like people from Mermaid’s Hands.

  “It’s because they’re jealous,” Dad says. “Scratching away at a hard, dry life on their hard, dry ground while we live life floating. What we need comes to us.”

  But some of the Sandy Neck folk go shrimping and fishing, too, so I don’t think Dad is one hundred percent right.

  “It’s because they’re afraid,” Mr. Ovey says. “They’re afraid of people with seablood. People who came out of the water, or are called into it.”

  That’s what people in Mermaid’s Hands have: seablood.

  “Especially people with marlin blood, right Dad?” Small Bill says.

  Things I need to remember: Not to be jealous of Small Bill’s genealogy. Mr. Ovey’s six-greats-ago grandfather was a marlin, and Mrs. Ovey’s seven-greats-ago grandmother was a sea turtle. But all of us got seablood, even if it’s not from creatures with gills or shells. We’re either born with it or it’s sung into us. The Seafather gave it to the Choctaw and Biloxi and Pensacola people who hid out in the salt marshes, so no white folks could find them, and to runaways and other slippery folk who were happier on the sea than the land—like Vaillant, who swam from Haiti to Cuba and Cuba to here, to get away from slavery. Gran said that when he found out there was slavery here, too, he decided to give up on dry land altogether and pledged allegiance to the sea. The Seafather admired Vaillant so much he gave him fins. Whenever Small Bill starts talking about his marlin ancestor, I start bragging on Vaillant’s fins. The marlin was just born with fins, but Vaillant earned them.

  Vaillant’s one of my ancestors because of Granddad. Granddad died when I was little, but Gran tells the story of how Granddad came to Mermaid’s Hands: he swam in, just like Vaillant. He never would say where from. They sang him into Vaillant’s line when him and Gran got married.

  Getting sung into a genealogy proves that not everyone on dry land is bad. Some of the best seachildren started out as dry-landers.

  Ma came from dry land. Dad worked away from Mermaid’s Hands in a cannery the summer he turned eighteen, and he met Ma there. She told us how he brought her bouquets of whitetop sedge and milkwort and other wildflowers each morning, and at the end of the summer he brought her back to Mermaid’s Hands to meet Gran and Granddad. When Dad married Ma, she got sung into a brand new line: red-winged blackbird. Tammy loves that, because she loves birds. And red-winged blackbirds are pretty, but they’re land birds! Even if you can see them in the long grass in the water, sometimes.

  It’s true nobody would say Ma’s one of the best seachildren. Ma don’t even call herself one. Sometimes I think if only she’d of been sung into a petrel line, maybe it would of put a bigger love for Mermaid’s Hands into her. I worry sometimes, that Ma don’t like it here all that much. Dad and her argue a lot. But Dad says so long as he can get Ma to smile, everything’ll be all right. Mostly I believe that.

  July 1 (Em’s diary)

  There was nothing for me at the post office. There was only a letter for Ma from Aunt Brenda. Next time we go, I think it would be okay for me to get a letter. By then the bottle will of been floating long enough to reach someplace far away.

  Person who gets my message, will you be a grown-up or a kid? Will you live right by the sea, or will you be visiting it? Will you be excited to find my letter?

  I should of put a treasure map in my bottle, along with my note. A treasure map would of made it more exciting. But I’d need to have a treasure to do that, otherwise the map would be a lie, and I don’t have a treasure.

  Maybe tomorrow Small Bill will want to go looking for Sabelle Morning’s treasure again. Just because we haven’t found it yet don’t mean it’s not out there somewhere. We just need to look harder. Tammy can come too, and Skinnylegs and Clara, if she ain’t busy watching her brothers.

  2

  A Response

  July 4 (Kaya to Em)

  Dear Em,

  It was a pleasure to get your message. Sumi, my pet crow, brought it to me.

  You ask what it’s like where I am. I’m a prisoner, actually. My prison has the poetic name “Lotus on the Ruby Lake.” You mentioned in your letter that your house floats when the tide comes in. My house floats too, in a manner of speaking. It sits on a long wooden platform, which hangs from thick chains that are bolted into the sides of the crater of a volcano. If I lean over the rail at the edge of the platform, I can see the glowing lava of the Ruby Lake. It’s not anyplace you’d want to swim, that’s for sure.

  My captors bring me supplies by helicopter once a week, and they let me send notes to my mother. I will include this message in my weekly note, and my mother will post it on to you.

  Please do write again; it’s very lonely here by myself.

  Yours,

  Kayamanira (Kaya) Matarayi

  July 4 (Kaya to her mother)

  Dear Mother,

  You will see I am enclosing a little note in English; you will see an address in the lower corner—a wonderful-sounding place, with a name from a fairy tale, looking out on the great bowl of
the Gulf of Mexico. If they hadn’t confiscated my computer, you could go online and look for the place. Maybe you can go to the research station and ask Piyu (he’s the friendly one) to find it for you, then write and tell me what it’s like.

  It’s a reply to letter I’ve received from someone in America. Is it hard to believe? The way the letter came to me is even harder to believe. Yesterday, I was resting my elbows on the guard rail, just woolgathering. I was staring at the fires of the Ruby Lake and thinking that it’s like a heart, an exposed heart. The mountain seems strangely vulnerable, when you think of the Ruby Lake that way.

  I couldn’t keep looking at it for long, though. It’s too bright. It paints itself permanently on your eyes, the way the sun will if you stare at it. I closed my eyes and saw black spots where the lava had been especially bright, and when I opened them, one black spot remained, seeming to rise right out of the lava.

  It was Sumi. Seeing her flying toward me that way put the old stories in my head, about crows being the tribute the Salu evergreens sent to the Lady of the Ruby Lake, and how they’ve been the Lady’s messengers ever since.

  But for all that Sumi seemed to be to flying up from the depths of the Ruby Lake, she must actually have been returning from a trip to the coast, because she brought me a present from the sea. It was a little bottle, and in the bottle, all soft and damp with seawater, was a piece of paper, a letter, still legible in spite of its soaking.

  A letter in a bottle, can you imagine that? I remember Tema and I talked about messages in bottles the day I found Sumi, and now, years later—and I in these circumstances—Sumi brings me one! I’m laughing as I think about it, and when I laugh, Sumi cocks her head and looks at me sideways. Maybe she’s smiling? She seems pleased with herself.