Hath No Fury

by Melanie R. Meadors

  Merton had written notes about her, too:

  Nyxia of Rowe, once Nyxia de Soutre-Sala, age 38, estranged wife of Cynric of Rowe, trusted physician of Prince Osriel, as reported. Heals all comers with full use of her pureblood healing. Clever. Willing, as her family told us, but insists on conditions. Fear inhibits usefulness.

  Willing to do what, other than take her pleasure with Merton de Vallé? Had she been in contact with her family? She hated Evanore and Osriel terrified her. What might she do to return to her comfortable life as a Navron pureblood? Grace of the Mother, she formulated Osriel’s medicines…

  A more recent note had been added below the first.

  Saverian of Rowe: age 16. Disaffected daughter. Halfblood; strong bent for healing, weakness in other magic (per Nyxia). Self-educated; bright. Possible access. Naive. Malleable.

  Malleable! Goddess Mother, gut the arrogant, conniving beast.

  I was half out of the window, the damning journal in my hand, when I realized that was but another idiot’s move. The moment Merton saw it missing, he would run. He must not get out of Evanore.

  Back inside, I positioned the journal carefully. Rebuilt its hiding spell. Touched both spell and journal with a spark of magic and breathed on it—another trick Osriel and I had perfected. No sorcerer could detect that Saverian of Rowe had touched either one.

  Terrified he would return before I’d set things right, I sought another way to leave him a message. On the tousled bed lay the scrap of parchment with Osriel’s refusal. I scraped the parchment with my knife and wrote:

  Friend, Find your way to my mother’s house at middle night. I know how to unlock a private door to all the answers you crave. Silly of me to forget childhood capers. Freedom awaits us—and glorious history.

  Ever in your debt,

  S.

  I left it on his pillow, as any stupid, besotted girl would.

  THE STORM HAD GROWN TO frenzy. Gales howled about Renna Major, as if Aurellian ghosts had arrived to raise the Great Siege yet again. Rain sheeted across the hillside, obscuring all but sparking glimpses of the fortress’s wind-crazed watchfires. Renna Syne, though—Osriel’s house—sat serenely dark behind its walls, an eerie quiet in the midst of chaos, as if the dead spirits my childhood friend hoped to conjure had laid a pall over it.

  I watched from the branches of the apple tree in a corner of my mother’s garden as a child rang her bell, summoning her to the woman whose knee I had repaired the previous day. My mother hated visiting commoners’ homes, and most times passed the duty to me. Sometimes I thought that was the only reason she had trained me. But my note had reminded her that she’d have to answer calls while I toured my father’s demesne, especially for Neyla who could be crippled forever if the healing I’d done was flawed. Healing-wise, my reputation was my mother’s reputation. It was all she had here, with Lirene dead and Osriel so distant. Useful.

  The child scampered home, my copper in his pocket. A short time later, my mother, cloaked, walked out. Would she go all the way to Neyla’s bedside half a quellé south? Perhaps she would suspect the summons a ruse to get her out of her house and stay close.

  Either way, I could play my role of the foolish, malleable daughter. I hoped the other pieces of my plan were well set. I’d not been idle in the hours since leaving the message on Merton’s bed. My father captained the guard at Renna Major this night. For the first time in many years, I had paid him a visit at his post. Now, shivering in the wet, I waited for midnight.

  At the second quarter bells from the fortress tower, a small party of guardsmen marched from the fortress across the hillside to Renna Syne, as they did every night at this hour. Orders and bootsteps were drowned by the rain. A small party returned to the fortress. As ever.

  This was the critical time. If a rock-headed Evanori guard captain had believed his fool of a disaffected daughter …

  At the third quarter bells, a dark shape—Merton’s shape—pushed through the garden gate and slipped behind the lattice work sheltering my mother’s herb garden. Time to move.

  I dropped outside the garden wall, the thrash of the wind in leafless branches covering my movements. Then, I circled around to the same gate he had entered. My back shivered as I passed his hiding place, forcing myself not to look.

  I tapped quietly on the door, calling, “Mama?” Three repetitions with no answer and I pushed open her door and walked in. When Merton’s hand fell on my shoulder, it required no playacting to spin in my tracks.

  “Good sir! I didn’t hear you!”

  “I’d no intent you should. Is this what I think? You promised answers, but I never imagined they would come from the prince himself.” His beaming face and eager humility near sapped my will.

  “Osriel and I used this door a hundred times when we were children,” I said. “We called it our door to freedom—from his monkish tutors, from my mother who spent all the day in his house, from studies and practice and sickness. We would climb hills, steal mead, and do all the things ordinary children did. One day when we were out, he fell ill and I had to run for help. I refused to tell them how we’d gotten out. It was not so long after that his mother sickened…and things were never the same.”

  Merton pushed the outer door shut, but not all the way. A signal? Would my mother join us?

  “What will he say when you barge into his house with a Navron ordinary, a stranger?”

  I clasped the liar’s hand resting on my shoulder, and brought it to my breast. “The reply I got earlier didn’t sound at all like Osriel. It wasn’t his handwriting. It came to me that perhaps his fearsome bodyguard was purposefully keeping him from reading my inquiries. So, after I left you this afternoon, I looked up one of his favored guards who was our confederate back in those days. I begged a private midnight audience in memory of our long friendship, at a door long forbidden. I said my father had threatened my life.”

  “And this time, you think—”

  “Not half an hour since, I received his answer. The prince said he needed a diversion from dancing with the dead and would come alone to meet me. The last time I saw him, I told him I would never go beyond his library again until he needed diversion from dancing with the dead.” The last part, at least was true.

  “What does he do in there? What is dancing with the dead?”

  The pulse in Merton’s hand raced. I had him.

  “I’ll tell you as we ride north. Tonight is for history and Navronne. You are willing to risk your future for me. I am doing the same.”

  The fortress bells rang midnight.

  As I touched the brass latch of the garden door, Merton’s wet cloak rustled behind me. His hand returned to my shoulder, heavier this time. The smell of honed steel was not my imagination.

  I pushed the door open. Dark and rain greeted us. They smelled of wet pine bark, of dry rosemary and rue, scents wakened by the moisture. A slender form, gray against the blackness, stood alone across the small courtyard. He’d grown taller. Eighteen now. A man.

  I tried not to feel, not to see what my old playmate brought with him. The shadows behind him squirmed and slid across the stone…extended fingers into the deeper darks in the corners of the little garden…twisted despair, sorrow, and magic into shapes that tainted the soul.

  “Ah, Saverian, you said we were to be alone.”

  Osriel’s cold anger shrouded mind and limb, crushing me to the ground. Surely my plan had fallen to ruin. He blamed me …

  A cloaked figure rushed from behind me, poisonous magic crackling from sword and hand—Merton. But not alone. Others rushed behind him. Boots stepped on my hair, trampled my hand. Steel crashed on steel.

  I threw my arms over my head. This was wrong. My father had said he’d come. Merton should have been captive in moments. Too late, I recalled the journal mention—my five, who could shelter in the ruined tower. Idiot girl. I’d not imagined he had five comrades with him already.

  Thuds, grunts, and clashes broke out on every side. A man screamed. An
other moaned.

  I wrested my dagger from its sheath and lunged upward. Blazing orange light outlined battling duels and fallen bodies. Red fire gleamed from demonic eyes—Voushanti, Osriel’s bodyguard, overpowering an opponent. I planted my dagger in a dark-clad thug who was choking a man in fortress livery.

  “Saverian! Look out!” A bolt of magic slammed me to the ground. Then cold, slender hands hauled me across slick paving stones and sodden plants. Osriel’s voice and hands.

  “Thank—”

  A different voice, graveled with murder, interrupted me, bellowing, “Warlord of Rowe! Keep that man alive or your bowels will burn instead of his.”

  Silence fell as sudden as sunrise. It was over.

  Arching my bruised back, I scrambled to my knees. Voushanti plunged his sword into a writhing man. Four guardsmen surrounded my father, who held Merton de Vallé by his hair. Papa’s bloody knife pricked de Vallé’s throat. A bloody slash crossed each of Merton’s cheeks, brow to chin. Another Rowe tradition.

  One guardsman and five others lay dead. None of the dead were Osriel, which relieved me.

  None were my mother. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  Man-at-arms Fillol, blood dripping from a gash on his brow, lifted one of the dead men by his hair and nodded to me, as if serving up the corpse as a betrothal gift. I retched into the crushed herb garden.

  MY MOTHER WAS CAPTURED HALFWAY to Caedmon’s Bridge. She bore a writ from the Pureblood Registry that she was pardoned of all crimes and indiscretions and forever free to practice magic in all of Navronne. Her family was relieved of all burden of her youthful rebellion and could negotiate her future contracts as they wished. Alas, as she was yet in Evanore when apprehended, the laws of my father’s demesne held sway, not to mention the laws of her sovereign, Prince Osriel, whom she had conspired to murder. My father beheaded her at the roadside.

  Papa did not tell me this. Our houndsman did, on a morning a few days after the event, as I walked out to clear my head and contemplate the future.

  Merton de Vallé—what was left of him after Mardane Voushanti’s questioning and his execution, which was not so much—hung from the battlements at Renna Major. I erased all memory of our conversations from my mind. The man I knew had been a lie. Voushanti had sent to me, asking if I had mitigating evidence to present before final sentencing. I’d said no.

  ON A SUNNY MORNING, WHEN the air was perfectly clear as only happens after a storm, I was summoned to my father’s study for the first time since the incident at Renna Syne.

  “That woman is dead,” he said.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “She had promised to tell the spy everything she knew of the prince and Evanore’s defenses, once they were safe across the bridge. Then you…I still don’t know how you came to know the spy…to know what he planned.”

  I offered nothing.

  He cleared his throat. “You must tell me of your dealings with the man.”

  “No. I’ll tell Prince Osriel if he asks. He can decide what others hear.”

  “That’s fitting,” he said, surprised. “But you must tell me if the spy compromised your person in any way? Daegle asked me.”

  “No.”

  The relief poured out of him, as tangible as Osriel’s unhealthy magics. “You showed great loyalty to your prince and to our house that night. In reward, you may set which day of the coming month will see your vows and first coupling. Daegle awaits your word.”

  “I will not marry Daegle Fillol, Papa.”

  He rose from his chair, fire blossoming on his visage. “I warned you—”

  “I have given you a third entry for The Book of Rowe,” I said. “You can write that you rescued Prince Osriel on the day an assassin plotted his death. Elaborate your role as you see fit. For myself, I have filed a writ with Prince Osriel’s secretary that I intend to remain unmarried and childless until the day of your death, and that upon that day, when I assume the title of Warlord of Rowe, I will yield all right to this demesne to my sovereign prince in thanksgiving for his survival.”

  “You what?”

  “The Book of Rowe will conclude with me. I will choose my own way in this life, now and forever.”

  MY FATHER THREW ME OUT of his house. What I had done was unthinkable to any true Evanori. Yet, he had won a victory of a sort.

  My mother thought she could buy a new life with secrets she had no right to tell. Her pureblood lover thought he could buy his fortune with a foolish girl’s dreams. No matter how granite-headed he was, my father’s aims were clear. He lived by his rules and did not hide them. I liked his way—the Evanori way—better.

  On the afternoon of the day I abandoned my father’s house, I presented myself at Renna Syne, the little palace King Eodward had built to house his beloved and their son. The ginger-bearded guard knew me well.

  “Greetings of the Mother, Philo. I’ve come to use the prince’s library. I bid you deliver him another message. Perhaps today, he’ll heed it.”

  “Aye, mistress.”

  “Call me Saverian, as I am mistress of nothing and no one. Tell the prince that I understand he is in need of a new physician. I am applying for the position. Though of small experience, I am intelligent, studious, and everlastingly loyal.”

  The soldier opened the gate, not quite suppressing a shudder. “Guess he knew. His Grace left word that did you come, we should bring you to him straightaway.”

  I nodded and walked through, ready to serve my dark lord, loyal until my last breath.

  FIERCE WOMEN IN HISTORY BY

  MELANIE R. MEADORS

  CHING SHIH

  WHEN WE THINK OF PIRATES, one of the first names that usually pops into people’s mind is Blackbeard. Blackbeard was considered one of the most feared and famed pirates. He commanded four ships and some three hundred men in the early 1700s. Compare that, however, with Ching Shih.

  Ching Shih started life as a Cantonese prostitute in the late 1700s. When she was 26, Chinese pirate Cheng I married her. Legend has it he pursued her because she had a mind well-suited for business and he admired her ways of manipulating people of high social and political standing. Ching Shih’s name means “Cheng’s widow,” and that’s what she would become only six years later.

  Most other women would have faded into the background, perhaps going back to prostitution, or falling into an even darker fate, but Ching Shih shrewdly managed to gain control of her late husband’s infamous Red Flag Fleet. It couldn’t have been easy. While there wasn’t the superstition in China that women were unlucky on ships, as there was in the Western world, women were the distinct minority in pirate fleets. Commanding the not hundreds, but thousands, of outlaws that made up the Red Flag Fleet would have been challenging even for the toughest of men. Ching Shih unified her fleet under a strict code. Anyone caught giving their own commands or disobeying a superior was beheaded on the spot.

  Qing dynasty officials, the Portuguese navy, and the East India Trading Company (EITC) all tried—and failed—to stop Ching Shih’s Red Flag Fleet. Richard Glasspoole of the EITC was captured by Ching Shih in 1809, and upon his release reported that she had 80,000 pirates under her command, with 1,000 large junk ships and 800 smaller ships and boats. Now think about the fearsome Blackbeard’s four ships. Most men wouldn’t have been able to command a fleet of outlaws that size!

  Further Reading:

  “The Chinese Female Pirate Who Commanded 80,000 Outlaws” by Urvija Banerji, Atlas Obscura http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-chinese-female-pirate-who-commanded-80000-outlaws

  SHE KEEPS CRAWLING BACK

  DELILAH S. DAWSON

  I’M WALKING DOWN THE EMPTY sidewalk when this crazy bitch pops out of a boarded-up bodega and grabs for my suitcase.

  “Hey, that’s—” I start, yanking the handle back.

  “If you want to see the inside of a croc’s belly or the underside of a giant robot’s foot, just keep standing on the sidewalk and yelling,” she says, real low.
“You’ve got bad timing.”

  She doesn’t let go of the handle, her dinged-up brown fingers snug against mine. For a moment, we’re trapped there, playing tug of war with our eyes and a mostly-empty secondhand Samsonite. I look her up and down. She’s in her thirties, not quite pretty but wiry with this honest, determined energy, like she’s the kind of person who gets bored in a Jazzercise class. Dark skin, dark hair shaved close, no makeup, tight-fitted tee, cargo pants with stuffed pockets. Her boots are beat to hell and dripping wet, but it’s dry as a bone in August. When our eyes meet again, it’s like a bolt of heat lightning.

  “For serious, girl,” she hisses. “Get in here.”

  I tighten my grip and look up the street. I’m two blocks from the Civilian Conservation Corps barracks, some building they’re renting cheap after the Wall Street cats split. Right where it should be, there’s an orange cone with a sign stuck in it. CCC SAFE ZONE, it says. The skyscraper is half gone, and it doesn’t look particularly safe.

  Illustration by M. WAYNE MILLER

  Then I hear it. A rhythmic pumping like a jet engine interspersed with a jackhammer.

  I have seconds to choose: government-offered safety or crazy but intriguing girl?

  What the hell. Crazy girl wins.

  “Fine,” I say. “Lead the way.”

  She rolls her eyes, releases the suitcase handle, and holds open the door. The room inside is dark, but it doesn’t look like a bodega. It’s a gym—and not the Jazzercise kind. I hurry inside, dodging giant tires and huge weights, and she locks the plywood-covered door behind us.

  “This your first time?” she asks, cool as hell.

  “My first time for what?”

  “In New York since the fights started.”

  I shake my head. “First time here ever. I hear it was nice, once.”

  “Once,” she agrees. “So, you wanna watch?”