Vinca crossed the bamboo log moat bridge, breathing through her mouth to avoid being overwhelmed by the sewer stench of the filthy water below, and approached the guards at the castle gate.
“What is your business here?” one demanded.
“I’m here to see the queen. At her invitation.” She handed the guard the scroll.
He looked at it upside-down, clearly not able to read it. “Who are you?”
“I’m her daughter. My name is Vinca.”
The guard’s eyebrows rose a bit at that, and he gave her and Bhraxio another suspicious once-over. “I’ll let my Captain know. Wait here.”
THE SUN HUNG LOW IN the sky by the time the gruff captain of the guard arrived to lead them to her mother’s chambers in the eastern tower. The castle yard was full of soldiers, all either too young or too old, and most with ill-fitting boiled leather armor and well-worn weapons. To her eye, some of the boys were as young as twelve or thirteen, not even old enough to wield a razor.
“A sad lot, indeed,” Bhraxio thought to her.
“Soon they’ll have to resort to training women,” she thought back darkly. “Or die of pride.”
“Is my father here?” she asked the captain.
“He is. He’s attending to military matters.”
“Does he know I’ve arrived?”
“He does.”
Vinca waited for the man to elaborate, and when he did not, she asked, “Did he say if he was going to see me?”
“The King has much on his mind. If he wishes to see you, I reckon he will.”
“Understood.”
The captain’s tone softened. “It’s not safe to travel. If you need a bed for the night, your sisters can give you a place to sleep.”
The sour stink of sickness in her mother’s room was unmistakable. The Queen of Coravia lay pale and gaunt upon stained sheets and a sheepskin coverlet damp with coughed-up blood. She was attended by two women a few years younger than Vinca.
The captain rapped the butt of his spear upon the stone floor and stood very straight as he announced her: “Lady Vinca of Grünjord is here to see her mother, the Queen.”
The two younger women stood, peering at Vinca nervously.
“Is it truly you?” the one with dark brown hair asked.
Vinca was mortified to realize that she wasn’t sure of her sisters’ names. “Cathara? Camine?”
They both smiled, and Vinca was relieved that she’d guessed correctly. “Yes, it’s me.”
They rose to give her quick, awkward, but seemingly heartfelt hugs, and Vinca was surprised to discover that she loomed a whole head above them both. She wondered if the household had suffered from famine, or if the girls had been pressured to starve themselves when they were growing teenagers.
“Such a fearsome hound!” Black-haired Camine was staring at Bhraxio, who seemed nearly as large as she was.
“He won’t hurt you,” Vinca assured her.
“But this is a warlord’s dog,” Camine persisted. “What master would allow his slave such a beast?”
“Camine!” Cathara’s voice was don’t be rude sharp.
“Master?” Vinca laughed. “I have no master. I’m as free as you or your sister.”
Her sisters looked genuinely shocked. Not just shocked, but dismayed.
“By the looks of things, your life has been considerably freer than theirs,” Bhraxio remarked.
Vinca wondered if her father had used her as a threat: Disobey me and I’ll sell you to the next peddler! What must it be like to realize that the sister they’d assumed had suffered a fate worse than death had instead survived and even thrived? By the expressions on their faces, it was a bitter draught, indeed.
“What ails our mother?” she asked them.
“She has the consumption,” Cathara replied.
“Tuberculosis?” Vinca blinked. “But that can be treated. Cured.”
“Nonsense,” Cathara replied.
“Not at all! No one suffers from this in Grünjord.”
“Those who allow sorcerers to tamper with their flesh go to hell.” Camine’s eyes were wide and accusing.
Vinca threw up her hands in exasperation. “It’s an extract of bread mold! There’s nothing sorcerous about it! You’re worried about your mother going to hell? This, right here, looks an awful lot like hell to me!”
“Cathara. Camine.” Her mother’s voice was a papery rasp, but it still held undeniable authority. “Leave me with Vinca. I wish to speak to her privately.”
“But, Mother—” Camine began.
“Leave us!” The queen fell into a violent coughing fit and waved them off.
The two sisters obeyed, eyeing Vinca as if she might be a witch as they hurried from the chamber.
Vinca took Camine’s vacated seat close to the head of the bed. “Mother, truly, this can be cured—”
The Queen raised a shaky hand and made a motion to silence her. “I don’t want a cure.”
“Why in the name of the heavens not?”
“I’m tired, Vinca. I have done my duty and I just want to rest. Forever. I think I’ve earned that.”
The anguished ache in Vinca’s chest told her that her heart was surely breaking. And from frustration as much as anything else. “If you won’t let me help you…why did you want me to come home?”
“I wanted to see you one last time.” Tears rose in her mother’s rheumy eyes. “I wanted to know about your life. I wanted…stories of places far away from here.”
So Vinca told her the tale of the Rift and the Outlander invasion. She told her the story of meeting Bhraxio, and of the day they took down the vast dark skyship and were heralded as heroes by the Queen.
She had just started telling her about Prince Stellan when she realized that her mother’s jaw had gone slack and she’d seemingly stopped breathing.
“Has she passed on?” Bhraxio asked.
Vinca pressed two fingers against the artery in her mother’s fragile neck to check for a pulse. Nothing. “She’s gone.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Me, too.” Vinca wiped at her eyes with the hem of her chemise. “Dammit. It was too late to save her even if she’d agreed to come to Grünjord.”
“It was what she wanted,” Bhraxio said.
Vinca gestured angrily at the shabby sick room and swore. “This is never what anyone wants. People convince themselves that death is a prize when they feel trapped and hopeless.”
“Should we call for someone?”
“Not yet.” Vinca felt too drained to deal with her sisters and their tears. Especially if the tears were just for show. “We came a long way to see her. I’d like to sit here a while longer.”
The old lady’s half-open eyes were filming over. Death looked nothing like sleep. Vinca gently closed her mother’s lids. Is this what old age inevitably brought? Infirmity and regret after a life broken on the wheel of duty? What might her mother have accomplished if she’d had the knowledge to make good choices, and the power to live as she chose? But none except a few great wizards could scry the future; could anyone but them and those they held in confidence truly exercise free will? Prince Stellan had his prophetic dreams; what did she have besides an uncertain supply of grit and luck?
“I don’t fear death,” she whispered to Bhraxio. “But I surely fear the hope-lorn decrepitude I see before me.”
“This is not your fate,” her companion replied. “Your mother may have been strong once, but you are far stronger.”
She shook her head. “You can’t be sure of that; you didn’t know her.”
“I know you, and I have met thousands of humans. I have yet to meet anyone stronger.”
VINCA UTTERED A CURSE WHEN trumpeted alarums blared in the distance and in the courtyard.
“Let’s get to the roof and see what’s happened,” she told Bhraxio.
They ran up the stairs to the top of the tower. Sure enough, legion upon legion of soldiers with siege engines were marching up the cas
tle hill, surrounding it on all sides. Their numbers were hard to gauge in the moonlight, but she guessed that the unready soldiers scrambling to get into their positions below were outmanned perhaps a hundred to one.
“You did promise the prince that we’d go home if this happened,” Bhraxio said.
“They’re going to be slaughtered. We can’t just leave.”
“What do you propose?”
“The Xintu wear bamboo armor, correct? That sounds flammable to me.”
“I don’t like killing humans.”
“So let’s be terrifying, and hope they have the sense to run off before we have to kill them.”
Vinca shucked the canvas cover off her sword, dug her gauntlets and spell ingredients out of her rucksack, cut her dress so she could ride Bhraxio, and spoke the magic word to return him to his dragon size and form.
They screamed down upon the invading troops like a curse from the heavens. Bhraxio breathed great blasts of fire above the invader’s heads, while Vinca worked pyrotechnic magic she’d learned in their campaigns against the Outlanders. Blinding midair explosions knocked men flat and toppled their war machines. Some of the Xintu troops responded with volleys of arrows that missed their marks, but after a few blazing passes, the invaders broke ranks and began fleeing for the cover of the forest.
Once the battlefield was cleared, Bhraxio swooped back to the castle and landed gracefully in the courtyard where the Coravian troops cowered.
Vinca didn’t necessarily expect a hearty welcome of ale and huzzahs…but she also didn’t expect her old, bow-legged father to come storming toward her, his sword drawn and an angry, profane rant about lost honor and sorcery spilling from his bearded lips.
Vinca slid from Bhraxio’s woolly back and strode to meet her sire.
“How dare you!” the old king screeched. “This sorcery will bring the wrath of God upon us! You have doomed our souls! DOOMED OUR SOULS!”
He took an unsteady swing at her with his sword. She sidestepped the blade and punched him hard in the face. The King dropped like a sack of manure and lay on the filthy stones cursing her as he clutched his bleeding nose.
“How dare you!” A man a few years older than Vinca drew his sword and rushed at her. She drew her own weapon to parry his blow, and when he inevitably overextended himself, she knocked the blade from his hand and kicked him square in the solar plexus. The air whoofed out of him and he sat down hard on the stones near his father, gasping. He was her eldest brother, surely, but in her rage, she couldn’t remember his name. And she didn’t feel the least bit badly about that.
“All right,” she called to the men around her. “Would anyone else like to be an utter arsehole to me for the unpardonable sin of SAVING ALL YOU FLEA-BITTEN LOUTS FROM CERTAIN DEATH?”
The men fell silent as salamanders.
She stepped forward and addressed the king. “My name is Vinca, and I’m your daughter, gods help me. You sold me for gold when I was just a child. I can’t say whether that deed marks you as the worst father I’ve ever met. But given what I’ve seen tonight, you are surely the worst ruler still living upon the ten continents. Whatever doom you face is the fruit of your own stupidity and incompetence.”
She stepped to the side and addressed her brother, who still hadn’t gotten his breath back. “If you’re inheriting the throne here, do better than this prideful jackass. Learn to hold onto your sword. For the sake of your people, make better choices. At least take a bath sometime.”
She strode back to Bhraxio. “Let’s go home.”
As they winged away into the night, he asked her, “So, a change of subject. Have you thought more about Prince Stellan’s proposal?”
“I think that when we get home, I’m going to learn all about economics, infrastructure, agriculture, and diplomacy. I’m no wizard. I might never glimpse the future except through Stellan’s eyes. But I’m going to be the best damn queen anyone has ever seen.”
“I wonder if this is the first time a princess has pledged herself to extreme competence out of spite?”
“It’s not spite.”
“It isn’t?”
“The prince is delicious.”
“Ah. So it’s thirty percent spite, and seventy percent lust?”
She sighed. “Could we throw some civic-mindedness in there just so I don’t sound like an arsehole?”
“Whatever makes you happy, milady…”
THE UNLIKELY TURNCOAT
A GENRENAUTS SHORT STORY
MICHAEL R. UNDERWOOD
COPENHAGEN’S WEATHER WAS UNPREDICTABLE AND quick to change—two things that most spies hated. But Shirin Tehrani was not most spies. She wasn’t really a spy at all, but here, in this story world, she played the part as best as she could.
After a day and change on a boat, she was ready to get her feet on dry land again. On the boat, all she’d had to keep her company was a small dossier, her reference texts brought from HQ, and her anger.
Betrayal was the language of the Long Cold War, the story region she was visiting, but there was betrayal, and then there was betrayal. A low-level operator with ideological vulnerabilities, a recent divorcee with expensive tastes and a need to feel special again, or a deep-cover agent away from home too long—those were who you’d expected to turn, to flip between the USA’s allies and those of the USSR.
But this time, the betrayal had come from the very top. Rupert Amis, head of MI6, the old warhorse himself, turning his coat for the Soviets. In exchange for what?
The sensors back at Genrenauts HQ had registered this as a massive breach, so Shirin hopped to, speed-reading the briefing before making the crossing, securing the ship in their vacant warehouse, and stepping out into the London streets, back in that timeless world eternally stuck hazily between the sixties and eighties, the height of the Cold War. Her instincts guided her straight toward the nondescript office building which housed Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligenciers.
Illustration by KERI HAYES
The building was still smoking.
None of that prepared her for the sight itself, for the list of the fatalities she got from Gertrude on her hospital bed. Amis’s secretary had been out for lunch, gone early to get pastries for the team. So instead of being inside with the explosives, she’d caught debris from the street.
Copenhagen, she’d said. He’d been there three times in the last two years, developing neutral contacts.
That one thread was enough to get Shirin onto a chartered boat through the North Sea and around to the Danish port city, a half-way point between the warring super-powers. She’d been there with Amis before, years past.
Everything made sense except for Amis’s betrayal. The man might as well have been swaddled in the Union Jack. World War II veteran, old money, old guard, connections in the nobility.
And yet, here she was, stepping onto neutral ground, trying to intercept a man who’d helped invent modern spycraft in this region.
Everyone at MI6 was either dead, in traction, or too far away, deployed around the world. So it fell to Shirin, arriving “just in the nick of time” from her extended surveillance mission in Grenada.
She walked past pastel-colored houses, trollies, and dozens of bicycles, mixing and matching different decades from block to block. Here a man with a full beard and bell-bottoms, there a woman with stockings and heels, a dress straight out of 1955. Some regions had more historical consistency, some less. Cold War spy stories spanned decades, so this world was just a patchwork, the vagueness of time only underscoring the sense of eternity, of an unending stalemate just seconds away from turning hot. Which is just what it would do if she wasn’t able to stop Amis from getting to Leningrad.
And luckily, she wouldn’t be the only person in town who wanted to keep the Cold War from blowing up.
First, she stopped into a coffee shop to break some bills and top off on coffee. She’d been awake since five or so, the rolling of the boat upsetting her stomach. Then, coffee and change in-hand, she f
ound a phone booth, relishing the regions which still had them, compared to the all-cellular, all-the-time modern story worlds. She flashed back to the Iran of her childhood, of standing on a friend’s shoulders to place crank calls to her house.
Holding her dossier open, she dialed a number, waiting three rings. A bored woman’s voice greeted her in Danish. Shirin’s scant Danish was rusty, but good enough to recognize the passphrase. She spoke the counter-signal, and the woman asked her to hold.
Shirin casually scanned the street, eyes flitting up to open windows and rooftops, checking for tails. No one here should know to expect her, but the KGB might be expecting someone to pick up Amis’s trail. An Iranian woman of fifty-something stood out here as much as any foreigner, but age also granted a measure of invisibility, especially when she could wear a heavy coat and scarf, and shield her face from the wind with a hat.
“Hello?” said a new voice, familiar, excited.
“Hello, Axel. Did you miss me?”
A beat. “Shirin? What are you doing in my neck of the woods?”
“Same as ever. Taking in the sights, meeting interesting people. You wouldn’t happen to be free to show me around?” she asked, delving into spy canter, phrases with double and triple meanings. She was on the hunt for someone, looking for information.
“I can always spare some time for an old friend. Coffee?”
“The place near the cobbler?” she asked.
“Just what I was thinking. See you soon.” And the line clicked off.
She waited another moment, scanning the street once more, then hung up and quit the phone booth.
Every genre had its dangers—some physical, some social. This region was both, often at the same time, and from a direction you never expected. She’d been working the Spy genre beat for a long time now, and coming back was like slipping into a familiar coat and stepping out into the brisk chill of late autumn. The cold bit, and there was the promise of nastier weather around the corner, but it came with a thrill, the exhilaration.
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