The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Leander’s cheeks darkened. His father’s face floated in his vision, and he felt no love for it. “He harmed our mother. And all her people. He destroys everything.”

  “Why should I care what is done on the earth? This is not my place. I belong to the air. I belong to all these ghosts.”

  “Aerie, you are a woman now; you are on the earth, both feet. You cannot ignore it because you remember when they were wings.”

  “He is not my father, not my duty,” she insisted, staring at the moon-speckled grass.

  “No. But it is our mother, and she gave you the wind and the clouds so you could live. I have done so much wrong, Aerie. All I wanted was a Quest—and this one has led only back to the Castle I wished to escape. But if that is what is written, that is what is written. And it is written that because we left the Castle separately, we must return together. There is the Wizard to think of, who killed our grandmother and ravaged her bones. All this is ours, the nest that made us. I am yours. You are my duty. Come with me.”

  Leander put his hand out to her, glimmering in the dark, and slowly, she clasped it with her own, still streaked in blood. “Grandmother,” she whispered, “and the flock that once had no wings.”

  Journeying back towards the Castle, Leander marveled that Aerie could move entirely without sound. Her feet made no impact on the earth as they ran from the Witch’s Glen, back and back and back towards the place of their birth.

  Of course the guards let Leander through—though he had been missing he was certainly not banished, and they took Aerie for a plaything he had brought home. It was simple as a child’s wooden blocks. They crept through the upper rooms, past door after door bolted with great brass locks. Suddenly, the Prince stopped.

  “Wait,” he whispered, and disappeared behind one of the heavy doors. It was his own bedroom, and Leander stood within it as though he had never seen it before. He was not the man who had slept here; what he knew could not live in these velvet walls. He shook his head, trying to hold to his purpose.

  “It is the function,” he told himself silently, “of a Prince to kill monsters. If the derivative of a Prince is set to zero, the kingdom survives.”

  He straightened his spine and opened the carved teak table beside his brocade bed. He had what he had come for. From the drawer he drew a long silver knife with a curving handle of bone. It shone now with a pure light; it glimmered in his mind, heavy with meaning. He had taken it as a child for a toy, from the heaps of knives and daggers and stilettos in the vaults. It had called to him, and in the blade he felt uneasily that he had no choice in the story of this night, that he had strained towards it all his life, and never of his own will.

  “Come on,” he said to his sister, whose eyes were beginning to take on the panting sheen of the hunt, “we will go to the Wizard first.”

  They slipped through the door that led into the Wizard’s quarters—easily picked, easily entered. It should not be so easy, he thought. Killing should be hard and horrible work, not like this, less effort than drawing water from a well. It had no right being anything but thudding and blood and cries. But there was no sound save the heavy breathing of Aerie behind her brother. She saw the knife glinting at his belt and had already resolved to steal it. She could wait.

  The Wizard Omir lay peacefully, prone as a baby, sleeping among white furs, his lips still full and firm. But the rest of him had long ago slid into old age swiftly as a knife slides through ribs. Leander had seen this man nearly every day of his life, but now he saw how deep the lines and wrinkles ran, how terrible the sores were that strange, hidden experiments had inflicted on his flesh. He remembered those sallow, piscine eyes always watching him, and he remembered the tale his mother told him, how Omir had killed Grandmother Bent-Bow with as little thought as baiting a hook. He reached for the knife, certain that he could do the deed.

  But the blade was gone.

  Aerie sat perched on one of the high tables with its gnarled wood. She breathed in long, sighing gasps, and in her pale fist was the bone-handled knife. She must have known it from the moment she saw it—known it for her own, for her grandmother’s blade. It must have called to her like a feather, and now they were together, knife and woman, and Leander could not stand before them.

  With a soft cry, no more than a gosling gives upon seeing its flock in the distance, she fell on the sleeping form of the Wizard, plunging the knife into him. The old man opened his rheumy eyes in time to behold her, hair streaming, skin flushed with fury and triumph. She leaned down close to him, as though she were going to kiss his rasping lips, and whispered sinuously in his withered ear:

  “Death has found you.”

  Omir saw her, the bird-maiden, crouching over him like a nightmarish falcon, her eyes burning in her skull.

  “I knew!” he breathed, choking as she twisted the knife in him. “I knew she could do it! The Witch, she lied, but I knew!”

  Slowly, Aerie touched his face, gently, like a child. Her nails parted his flesh easily, as though it were water. She put her fingers to her mouth and sucked greedily at his blood.

  “Slave,” she hissed, “always a slave, whispering in the dark, stealing what isn’t yours.”

  “Perhaps… perhaps he should not be blamed,” Leander murmured. “My father, after all, was the one who commanded him.”

  Aerie did not hear him. Omir chuckled, and blood spattered his chin. “Your father is a fool among fools. And the girl knows, she knows, she knows. Her mother told her about the tower, she knows I did much that was not commanded. But she won’t kill me. She knows that I hear tales, too, and I know about her Firebird and how he left her; she knows I had his feather. I kept him in this very room, in an ivory cage.”

  Aerie’s eyes narrowed to silver slivers. Omir tried to sit up, but was pinned by the blade, and simply collapsed again in another fit of coughing. “Oh, yes, girl, just over there, in the corner.”

  She leaned on the bone hilt, and for the first time, Omir cried out, with real anguish, his white eyebrows arching, his lips peeling back from his teeth. “Where is he?” she growled.

  “I don’t… I don’t have him. I swear it. I sold him, him and his feather and his cage, to a man in the city of Ajanabh, I sold him, I sold him, I swear. Please.” The Wizard’s hands flapped uselessly at the knife. “But listen to me, listen! After all these years I have the secret: I can make you a Firebird; I can make any willow into an Ixora for you, light your wings, and send you to him. I can even change you so that he can quicken your nest, and you will never need the trees. But if you kill me, you will remain this wretched girl, and never fly again, and you’ll never find him without me. You will stay in this awful body, with only your little brother to keep you company—and I assure you, he is dreadful company.”

  Aerie was weeping, her tears falling on the Wizard’s weak hands. Her shoulders shook like bare branches, and she looked at him with a terrible hope flaming in her dark eyes. She leaned in, very close, and put her arms around the old man. Through his rattling cough and the dark stain spreading across his belly, he tried to pat her back paternally. He could only manage to lift his arm once and let it flop back to the bed. But he could still speak, and his voice was like leeches suckling.

  “There, there, your uncle will make all things well, you’ll see. No need to speak; I already know what you want, love. All manner of things will be well.”

  Aerie raised her silvery head and whispered in his ear. “Mother.”

  Then Aerie, who had never had hands since her first breath, seized him by the scalp in an expert fist, snatched the knife from his belly, and cut his throat.

  The blood was hot and thick, and though it flowed over her hands like mud, Aerie would not let go of the knife. Leander could not pry it from her fingers. He pulled her from the corpse and into the hall—her eyes glittered brightly, ecstatic, wild.

  They would never be admitted to the King’s quarters at night, so they inched across the stone wall windowsill by windowsill, ivy-cove
red stair, and finally mere toe-holds in the granite. Finally, they crouched below the King’s window, and Leander looked at his sister meaningfully before he swung up and into the chamber. She was not to follow.

  So, of course, she slid in behind him as noiselessly as the space between breaths.

  The King lay on his bed, alone, still robust and strong, perfectly awake. He turned to his son.

  “Certainly I have taught you better than to eschew the use of doors.”

  Leander expected nothing less at this point, but covered his fear with a blank face. “It seemed the best plan.”

  “Did it now? And I see you have brought the poor little bird with you. All the masks off, then?” His eyes did not blink, nor shift to Aerie even for a moment. She was nothing to him; she didn’t matter.

  “If the derivative of a Prince is set to zero, the kingdom survives,” Leander whispered.

  “What nonsense are you spouting, boy? Did that foul Witch find you at last? She was never worth the price of her bedding. A pity the fire could not be extended indefinitely. Executions must always be handled personally; remember that, when you are King, my son.”

  “I will not be King. I will kill you here where you lie for what you have done to my mother’s people, for what you have made me do to countless others like her when the men rode out under white flags.”

  The King laughed, low and hooting. “Oh, my son, my son. How do you think I became King? I, too, cut out my father’s heart while he slept…”

  HIS FACE WAS SO FAT ON THE PILLOW. LIKE A SLAB of meat on a white tablecloth, all spidery red blood vessels and swollen nose. He hadn’t slept in the same bed with my mother for years—but then, no one did. I think I would have actually preferred it if she had had a lover. It would have meant she was human. But she never let anyone between her legs; she spent every night in a shabby old bed in a shabby old tower, and my father slept in the great ebony four-poster bed that was meant for the lord and his lady.

  Didn’t you know? My father was never King.

  A country Baron at best—some winters, the pigs and cows slept in the great hall to keep them from keeling over in the frost. The stink of it reached the rafters and hung there like a dung-spattered chandelier. My mother was better than that. I was better than that. I used to watch her, her profile against her window, and wonder how she ever married the sack of onions and pig snouts I called a father. I heard from servants that he wasn’t always so useless. Before my mother shut up her mouth with grief, this was a rich place, and the cows slept in the grass where they belonged.

  But things were as they lay. She never said anything. She never said a word. My mother had kept silent as a nun since the day my sister was taken from her.

  I was an infant when she vanished from us; I never knew that sister. But her absence stalked the house like a hungry dog. The hole where she had been took up space at our dinner table, it sagged and slumped in the musty air, it ate and drank and breathed down all of our necks.

  My other sisters were married off before I could manage arithmetic. I grew up alone in that silent house with nothing but the stinking cows and my mute mother and the hole. Even my father didn’t want to spend his days there; he stayed in the fields directing hay-rolling and goat-breeding until it was dark enough to slip back inside without anyone bothering him. But still, the hole answered the bell when he rang, and he had to scurry to bed with his head down to avoid looking it in the eye.

  I didn’t think anyone would miss him. He was a fool now, feeble as a sheep after shearing, and I was well into manhood, ready to be Baron, hungry for it, tired of the ramshackle place falling down around us, propped up only by a hole in the air, by empty space. Dirt-farming squalor like my father always has a kind of rude health, and I knew if I wanted a Barony, I would have to take it.

  I wasn’t even very quiet going up the stairs to his room. I stomped like anything—in that dead house, who would care if one more dead thing turned belly-up by morning? But the hole was there. I could feel it, tugging at my sleeves with sisterly disapproval. If she had been there, the hole sighed sadly, there would have been no silence, and I wouldn’t need to hear my own father’s screaming just to know I was alive. The hole was sorry for me, and I hated it.

  But he didn’t scream. It was as easy as cutting meat for a roast. I didn’t even think when I slid the knife into his ox-huge heart. I just did it, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Killing, I thought, should be harder than this. His eyes flapped open, and he gurgled a little, no more than a calf will when you cave in its skull for the summer banquets. He didn’t scream; I wasn’t alive.

  But I was Baron.

  Mother watched me coming down the stairs, wiping blood on my trousers. She stared, and her mouth was thin and colorless, but she said nothing. She never did.

  The Barony was better for my hand, as I knew it would be. The fields gave grain, the trees gave cider, the pigs slept in the penned muck and grew sweet with fat. The dust was swept from every corner of the great hall, and long white banners were hung from the well-scrubbed rafters. Folk came to the Castle again, and there was music and dancing when the summer broke the spring.

  The hole never came back.

  Finally, it came time to choose a wife. I didn’t really care, but I was told it was the lordly thing to do, and already I was considering how to move myself into a crown the way some men consider how to move themselves into a larger house by the sea. A King has to have a Queen. A Baron has to have a Baroness. So it was that I consulted the family books, oily and filth-stained as they were, and discovered how my mother managed to marry a sack of onions and pig snouts.

  In our backward, beer-addled family, a wife is gotten by contest, not courting. There is a belt of gold and jasper, handed down grandmother to granddaughter, and the next lady of the house must fit the belt, or else she cannot sleep in a tower and ignore her husband for twenty years. Yellow-eyed superstition and idiocy will always outlive the family that perpetrates it.

  I took the belt from my mother’s waist. She said nothing. She never did.

  But when I sent out my summons for likely young women to come and try the belt to their hips, my mother closed herself up in her tower and would not come out, no matter how many sweet-cheeked maids begged her to unbolt the door. From within, she said nothing.

  The whole procedure took weeks. They came waltzing up to my door in every conceivable color and manner of dress: rags and bustles, blond and black, velvet and muslin and plain cotton sashed with rope. I slung the gold and jasper around dozens of waists; I fastened it under dozens of blushing cheeks. It slipped off their hips and cinched them till they could not breathe—no one fit the belt; no licit woman lived in all my countryside.

  I did what logic dictated. I went up the long, winding stair to my mother’s tower, fingering the belt in my hand, watching the dim light glitter on its dull gems. Faced with the thick oak door and its bronze fittings, I knocked as politely as a suitor.

  “Mother,” I said. “The belt fits no one.”

  There was no sound from the room.

  “Mother,” I said, “I must marry.”

  There was no sound from the room.

  “Mother,” I said, “the belt fits you.”

  Oh, don’t be so shocked. Morality makes way for Kings, and the dirt-virtue of cattle farmers is of no interest to me.

  There was a shuffling and rustling behind the door. Finally I was finished with her nonsense, her childish tantrums, her hiding like a crab in its scarlet shell. I put my shoulder to the hinges—I was never a weak man, and the bronze bent after only two blows. They bent, creaked, and gave, and my mother was sitting on a bed in the middle of a room filthy with dust, sheets tangled around her, her violet-black dress torn and too small, her red hair matted and tangled, spilling onto the sagging mattress.

  On her lap was the hole.

  The edges of it crackled and warped in a way I had never seen, a strange silver light that actually rimmed the outli
ne of a long-haired girl, slumped into my mother’s lap. There was nothing there, as though the girl had been ripped out of the air and left but a suggestion of what she might have looked like, what her posture might have been. All I had seen of the hole until that morning was its absence; this thing had weight and heft, weight and heft and light. There was nothing there, but the nothing glinted dully while my mother stroked its shape.

  “I made it,” she said, and her voice creaked and groaned, a stuck door pried open. “When he took her, I made it. It was the last magic I ever did.”

  “Magic,” I snorted.

  “I set it to walk the house as she would have done, to eat and sleep and laugh as she would have done. But as she might have done, it kept coming here, and only came down the staircase to see you grow, and watch you play and frown and sleep.”

  “It’s nothing, Mother. It’s less than air.”

  She shrugged miserably. “It’s not her, I know that, I’m not mad, but when I sleep, it puts its airy arms around me, and I can almost smell her skin. I miss her. I just miss her. But after you killed your father, I let it stay here.”

  I shrugged. “I wanted to be Baron. I won’t apologize for it. Father had let this house go to ruin, and you with it. You only married him for the sake of a gold belt, anyway.”

  She glared at me through her ruined curls. “You’ll believe what you want to believe, Ismail. Belts, collars—they only give you a reason to take the woman you wanted all along, without giving her space to speak.”

  I looked at the damp-warped floor. Not out of shame, mind you, but because I thought that was what a good son in this situation might do. “The belt fits no one else.”

  My mother rested her hand on the hip of the hole, and her face seemed to sag, as if some final thing slid out of it, leaving nothing but a dry shell, a sea snail rolling in the sand. “If you cannot think of a reason not to come breaking down my door proposing a thing which not even a King would dare—”