“Yes.” He held the flask, feeling the warmth of it beneath his fingers. The moon was almost gone now. A choice. A sacrifice.
Slowly, he unstoppered the flask, and raised it to his lips. He held it for a while, in an ironic salute to the rider named Sorrow. And then he drank every drop of it.
It tasted of salt, at first, of brine and of the depths of the sea. And then it started to burn. He fell to his knees, clawing at his throat. The moon, growing dimmer and dimmer, loomed over him, taunting him with its coolness. The world was spinning, beating on the rhythm of his heart.
He felt himself expand, his body twisting to accommodate a new shape, new thoughts moving within his mind. Kindred. He would find his kindred in the realm under the sea. He had to. Dragons were not meant to prowl the mortal world.
Deep, deep within the deluge of changes, the ghost of Huan Ho sought to speak. A healing? What did he care for mortal lives, he who was immortal and could make rain fall with a thought?
He twisted on himself, his body writhing, longing to fly, and saw the rider of purest black, still watching him, with a faint smile on his lips.
“I am always bitterest when I come mixed with joy,” the rider said, and the echoes of his voice reminded Huan Ho of something, something that had once been his, a feeling that even now could take hold of his heart like an icy hand, and squeezed until he cried for release. This is what it felt like, to know I would lose Mother.
The rider raised a hand. “Enough,” he said, and the feeling was gone, but still Huan Ho remembered. He remembered everything that had happened since the door on the hill had opened.
The rider was still smiling. “Go to her. Use your powers to heal her, before you leave. Your place is no longer here.” And he remounted, before passing the door.
Silence filled the hills above Fei Weng. Huan Ho watched the rider of purest black through the threshold, watched him guide his horse towards his palace of stone. As the light of the moon dimmed to nothing, the panels of the door slowly drew together, and then they closed, sealing the riders from the world for another year.
In the darkness, Huan Ho thought of his mother, of the goodbyes he would have to make. He had had his wish, his miracle. It was enough. It had to be.
He sprang into the sky, towards Fei Weng, to do one last favour before taking his place within the depths of the sea.
© 2008 by Aliette de Bodard. Originally published in Electric Velocipede. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She studied Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, but moonlights as a writer of speculative fiction. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories, which garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and a British Science Fiction Association Award. Works include The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz, 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award), a novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, and its upcoming sequel The House of Binding Thorns (April 2017, Roc/Gollancz). She also published “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2015), a novella set in the same universe as her Vietnamese space opera “On a Red Station Drifting”. She lives in Paris with her family, in a flat with more computers than warm bodies, and a set of Lovecraftian tentacled plants intent on taking over the place.
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The Key to St. Medusa’s
Kat Howard | 3652 words
My parents knew I was a witch before I was born. The signs were there, they told me. They were unmistakable.
Well. Not all of the signs, or they never would have kept me as long as they did. But enough: My mother’s hair, previously sedate and well-mannered, turned curly and wild during her pregnancy, sometimes even grabbing forks from other people’s hands at meals. Clocks ran backward when she went near them, and thirteen grey cats took up residence in our front yard for the last month before I was born.
Also, I was born on a Tuesday.
• • • •
They named me Agatha, which was not at all a witch’s name, because they wanted me to be good.
When I was five, I asked my father what a witch’s name might sound like. He smacked my mouth, and told me such things weren’t spoken.
• • • •
As far as I could tell growing up, being a witch was a curse. Or at least my being one was—my whole childhood was made of lists of things I could not do if I wanted to be a good girl. It was imperative to be a good girl, otherwise my witchiness would take over. Good girls did not walk backward. Neither did they walk in the forest at night. They did not leave the house when the moon was full. Good girls did not talk to any of the grey cats. Or the black ones. Speak in rhyme. Wear red. Dance.
There were other forbidden things. More and more each year. An ever-growing list of mustn’ts and don’ts and shouldn’ts that bound around me tighter and tighter, until it seemed like “cautious” and “safe” and “good” were as much curses as “witch.”
I tried to follow my parents’ rules. They only made them, they said, out of concern for me. If I was a witch, I would never have a home. Never be allowed to live in civilized society. No one would be my friend. I’d never be able to get married, have a family. They were only trying to make things easier for me. I never asked why what was supposed to be easier felt so hard.
I wanted to be good. I truly did.
Until the day I didn’t.
It would be a better story, I know, if there had been a reason. If my parents had inflicted one final unfairness, done something so cruel that it left me with no reasonable choice but to undo all they had so carefully tried to prevent. But that’s not what happened.
The truth was, I was simply tired. Tired of the effort it took to remember all of the things that good girls didn’t do, tired of being afraid that one wrong step would be all it took to cancel out all of the proper ones that had come before, and render me not a good girl. I didn’t want to be tired like that, not anymore.
So I stole a red dress from my mother’s closet—red, it seemed, was safe for mothers in a way it was not for witches—and ran to the forest, under the full moon. I spent the night out there, dancing.
I didn’t even do any magic. Not then. Not that it mattered—as far as my parents were concerned, I had gone full out witch, and it was off to St. Medusa’s with me.
• • • •
This is what I had been told about St. Medusa. She had been a witch once, too. A terrible, notorious one. Even her name from that time was so dangerous that it was no longer spoken. She had done a spell so dark, so dire, it had turned her hair to venomous snakes, snakes that would whip out and sink their fangs into anyone in reach.
But she had repented her actions. Had mortified her flesh, and done all the proper penances. She achieved control of all those wild snakes. She bound them down, every day, with a scarf of red, so that anyone who saw her would know, and would learn from her example.
And she opened up a home for witches.
I sat with my parents in her office. I could see her snakes beneath the scarf. They made the fabric bump and ripple like waves. They were beautiful.
“I do have space here for Agatha,” St. Medusa said. “But you must know this is not a temporary solution. Once you leave your daughter here, you cannot reclaim her. Do you understand?”
“She’s a witch,” said my father, as if those were the only words necessary.
My mother said nothing, only smoothed her hands over her hair, kept very short now so that errant strands could not be tempted to acts of thievery.
St. Medusa looked at me. “Agatha, do you want to live here?”
“I didn’t realize I had a choice,” I said. There had been no discussion. I hadn’t even been allowed to change out of my stolen red dress. I had come home, been told I was a witch, and we had come here.
�
��You don’t—” began my father, but St. Medusa held up her hand, silencing him. In seventeen years as his daughter, I had never seen such a thing happen before, that someone could keep my father from speaking when he wished to. I wondered if perhaps the stories that St. Medusa had renounced her witchery weren’t quite true.
“There is always a choice,” St. Medusa said.
I looked at my parents. My mother wouldn’t meet my eyes. My father’s face was hard as stone. He had spat on me when I came home that morning.
I didn’t think that was my home anymore.
I looked at St. Medusa, who had said that what I wanted mattered.
“Yes,” I said. “I want to stay.”
• • • •
Neither of my parents said goodbye. My mother would have, I think. She paused in the door, and turned toward me. But my father grabbed her arm, and pulled her with him, and the last I saw of them was their backs.
I don’t miss them.
• • • •
St. Medusa gave me a key, that first day. “I give one to everyone, so that you will know it is your choice to stay here, or to leave, and if you leave, that you may return. This place will always be your home, and there is no one who will force you from it, or bar its door to you.”
It was a small key, bronze and many-toothed, hung on a chain. “Turn it to the right, and it will open a door anywhere. Turn it to the left, and that door will bring you back here, safely home.”
I wasn’t sure that I believed in home, but I wore the key around my neck, that day and every one after. It made me feel safe.
• • • •
St. Medusa’s was not what I had been expecting.
“Certainly you can learn to use magic while you’re here, Agatha. There are a number of people who will be happy to teach you.”
“But I thought that I was here to learn how not to do that. How to be good. How to—” I waved my hand over my head, a scarf binding snakes that weren’t there. The ends of my hair reached up, witch-like, toward my fingers, and I blushed.
“We can teach you that as well, if you like. There are girls and women who come here because they want to move more easily through a fearful world. Learning how to bind your power down, to hide it, to give it up altogether may make that easier, and for some, it is the right choice.
“But that does not have to be your choice. You are the one who gets to choose, Agatha.”
I wanted power. I wanted magic. I wanted to fill myself full of both until my hair crackled with it. “But if I choose to be a witch, I can’t ever go back and live with civilized people.”
The snakes of St. Medusa’s hair curled and hissed under her scarf. “And did you enjoy living with civilized people?”
I hadn’t particularly thought about it like that. “I want to be a witch.”
• • • •
And so I was.
I remember the first time I did magic, real magic.
“It’s customary,” St. Medusa said, “to begin the study of magic with the lighting of a candle. It is a request for illumination as well as a demonstration of power. And so.”
She had set a circle of candles around us, and as she looked at each, a flame flickered into being. She didn’t need to speak words, or make gestures. She just looked, and there was light.
It was not what I had been told magic was: lies, trickery, evil. Rather, it was beautiful, so beautiful I felt like I might cry. My hands tingled like flames flickered and burned on the ends of my fingers.
“Do you see?” she asked, and extinguished the candles.
I nodded. I turned, once, slowly, all around the circle. Seeing that it was whole, no beginning, no end. Seeing the candles, and understanding that they wanted to light—that was their purpose. In seeing theirs, I knew mine.
I felt magic rise up in my blood. With a look, I set them all alight. Power burned through me. In that moment, I finally felt the truth of what I had been told my whole life: I was a witch.
I learned more things, after that. I drank in magic like I had been dying of thirst. I learned how to call cats and how to tell the future on the petals of a rose. How to dance a storm into calmness, and how to turn it the other way and dance it hurricane-strong. How to speak to the dead and how to bind them to silence with silver and salt. How to wrap a curse like ivy around someone’s house without their notice. How to set wishes, burning, inside of stars.
I learned that not everyone who lived at St. Medusa’s was a witch, even if that’s what those who lived on the outside called them. There were banshees and oracles. There were women who lived on others’ blood and women who lived on others’ memories. There was a pack of girls that slid into wolfskin once a month. There was Lucy, who knew everything about St. Medusa’s, who had been abandoned at its gates when she was five, lived here until she died at thirty-seven, and had been a resident ghost ever since. “Forty-two years now. Or forty-three. Counting gets hard when you’re noncorporeal.”
While I was there, I did something I never had before: I made friends. Saoirse, who looked like a storm, all cloud-white and rain-grey, and her hair a blood-red tangle on her head. Her voice, when she spoke, had the clarity of glass. A banshee. Irena, who was a seer, petite and dark and lion-hearted. You could see universes spinning in her eyes. From them, I learned what it was to share secrets, to feel like I was part of a family. To be loved.
I began, slowly, to make a home in that love. Not a civilized one, but one rough-shaped and outsized and beautiful. The key around my neck had a door that it would open.
• • • •
When Irena had the visions of the murdered brides, Saoirse and I were the first ones she told. “I see a wedding in bits and pieces. White and candles and a grand cathedral. I see his hands. A door, a key. Then blood, blood everywhere, on the white, on the door, on the key.
“He’s killing them.” She turned to the side and vomited. “Sorry. Visions make me seasick, and these are foul beyond that.”
We went with her to tell St. Medusa. “I want to help—I don’t want to have to watch another girl die,” Irena said.
“I can help you focus your magic,” St. Medusa said. “It may not be pleasant.”
“Neither is this,” Irena said.
That was the day I saw St. Medusa take off her scarf.
She unbound the red and loosed the snakes. They slithered and hissed, a wild tangle. One detached itself from the rest. It crawled down, and bit Irena’s wrist.
Irena cried out and clutched at Saoirse’s and my hands. The universes spun in Irena’s eyes, faster and faster, and her visions came clear from Saoirse’s mouth. She told us where to find him. She told us that he had married four women. That they had all been called witches. That they were dead, and their ghosts were bound.
The snake, turned white with the force of the magic, crawled back to St. Medusa, and nested itself with the others. She rebound her scarf.
“I’m going to be number five,” Saoirse said. She sat, calmly, as Irena and I babbled out warnings, begged her not to.
“I saw them. The visions in your head. What he did. I don’t mean to let him kill me, but someone needs to stop him. To be their voices if they can’t speak. Who better than a banshee?” She was unmovable.
“You don’t need to do this,” St. Medusa said. “No one will ask it of you.”
“Four dead women,” Saoirse said. “Four dead witches. Who will care enough to stop this, if we don’t?” There was no arguing with that.
So we dressed her in red and equipped her with spells and we kissed her and sent her off to her wedding.
• • • •
I knew the moment Saoirse died. We all did. A great keening filled the air, a voiced that cried out, that rang through us like bells, that set hair on end, and even the clouds to weeping.
They cried tears of blood.
“He’s killed her.” The voice low, rough, like it had walked up out of a grave. Irena.
“Did you see?” I asked.
“Everything,” she said. She couldn’t speak, just clawed at her throat, trying to let Saoirse’s words out. But Saoirse’s voice was too far away to be heard.
I stood, red rain pouring over me. My heart felt empty, its beat the rattle of a broken door. There was no magic I knew for this.
• • • •
The problem wasn’t just the serial-killing husband. There are any number of ways to kill effectively at a distance. None of us would have needed to put ourselves in danger if his death had been the only necessary thing.
The issue was the women. As those of us at St. Medusa’s knew, dead didn’t necessarily mean gone. We lived with ghosts, those who had chosen to linger, to stay. They were our friends, our family. We had made a home for them. But ghosts can’t come back on their own. They need to be called, to be given the choice. If there was a chance, even a piece of one, that we could get any of those women back, that we could help them choose the place they would be after their death, we would take it.
Irena went next. You don’t need to be a seer to know how her story ended.
• • • •
“I need to go,” I told St. Medusa. “To fix this.” As if Saoirse and Irena and the other wives were broken things I could put back together.
Her snakes hissed caution at me. “I am going to tell you two things that you already know: You don’t have to, and it will be dangerous.”
“I do. Have to. He has to be stopped, and I can’t bear the thought of sitting here, doing nothing, and then hearing he’s murdered another one of us. Plus, Saoirse, Irena. I have to bring them home.”
• • • •
I left St. Medusa’s then, for the first time in years. For a moment, my heart clutched in my chest, warning me to go back, to be safe, to not walk in a world that had told me the only good thing I could do was shut myself away.
Saoirse. Irena. Four names I didn’t yet know. I clutched the key around my neck and kept walking.
I rented a room in a house near his. I wore a red dress, so he would know I was a witch. I caught his eye, and I flirted and enchanted.
“You should be careful of that one,” my landlady said.
Lightspeed Magazine - October 2016 Page 11