Fantasy Magazine Issue 58, Women Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue

by Fantasy Magazine

  There was a chirp and a whisper of wings on her shoulder.

  The garden gate slammed open.

  “Wait!” cried Kara. “Let me try that shoe!”

  All eyes turned to her. Hannah took advantage of the pause to yank her foot out of the shoe and cram it back into her boot.

  The Duke’s son’s head jerked up.

  “That voice,” he said. “I know that voice!”

  He snatched the shoe away from the herald and dropped to his knees, heedless of the mud. “Kara? Is it you?”

  “It is!” she said, and stuck her foot in the shoe.

  It was much too big and hung like a rag around her foot. The Duke’s son stared at it in dismay.

  “It got stretched out,” said Hannah hurriedly. “Because my feet are so big. Tore the stitches, I imagine. Or the seams, or whatever they are. It’s definitely her. Ask her a question only she would know.”

  “What did I say to you, during the first dance?” asked the Duke’s son.

  Kara leaned forward and whispered something into his ear.

  The Duke’s son’s face lit up and he flung the shoe aside.

  A moment later, he had swept the servant girl up in his arms and was striding toward the gate, while she laughed aloud in delight. The herald squawked and ran after them.

  Hannah let out a long sigh of relief.

  “Could’ve been you,” said the titmouse on her shoulder.

  “God forbid,” said Hannah. “All I want is my own garden and my own bees. And perhaps to work out a cheaper method of under-floor heating.”

  “I expect you may get that,” said the titmouse. “At least the bit with your own garden. Providing dresses like that—well, you’re practically her fairy godmother. I should expect a reward will find its way here eventually. Particularly if a small enchanted bird were to show up and sing about the benefits of gratitude.”

  Hannah grinned.

  “Perhaps Anabel and I can set up together. She can sew dresses and I’ll keep bees. There are worse fates.”

  “The dryad won’t be happy,” warned the bird.

  “Sod the dryad.” She thought for a minute. “What about you, though? Aren’t you supposed to go back to being a regular bird?”

  The bird shrugged. “Didn’t get you married. I may be stuck like this for awhile, or until the dryad gets distracted.”

  “You don’t sound too bothered.”

  “Once you get in the habit of thinking, it’s hard to stop. Perhaps you could throw me a worm now and again.”

  “I’d be glad to,” said Hannah, and the titmouse rubbed its small white cheek against her round pink one.

  “That’s all right, then,” said the bird, and it was.

  © 2014 by T. Kingfisher.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  T. Kingfisher is the pen-name for Hugo-Award winning author and illustrator Ursula Vernon. Under her real name, she writes books for kids. As Ms. Kingfisher, she is the author of Nine Goblins and Toad Words and Other Stories. Both of her live in North Carolina and blog at redwombatstudio.com

  To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

  Drowning in Sky

  Julia August

  Ann tracked the seabed rising for days, or hours, or minutes that felt like months, before the jolt of the ship knocking against the harbour wall jarred her eyes open. Water sloshed in the hollows of the hold. The salted ribs of the ship were singing, as were the tin ingots stacked twenty deep at her back. Under the nasal whine of wood and metal Ann heard the slow, deep hum of earth and stone.

  She didn’t need the sailors to tell her they had arrived. She flattened her shoulders against the ingots and took a breath. Then another. Her lap was full of dust. The limestone slab that had weighed down Ann’s knees at the start of the voyage was only a pebble. Ann rolled it between her palms. She could hear Tethys scratching at the wooden walls.

  If she got up, she could get out. She could bury herself in the earth, her hands and her head and her humming ears, and she could damp down her hair with dirt and never, ever go to sea again. Tethys had promised, she told herself. Ann had walked up and down the distant shore, and Tethys had crept over the sand on a skim of foam, and Tethys had promised.

  The trapdoor opened. Ann crushed the pebble between the heels of her hands and experienced a flush of clearheaded energy. Tethys broke all Her promises. But not this one.

  The sky opened up endlessly above the deck and Ann could have drowned in it. It was cold and grey and specked with stinging rain, and Ann, glancing around, saw the horizon merge seamlessly into a froth of cloud.

  She clutched at the mast. A colossal Tethys reared up against the tidal sky, holding the whole harbour under Her bronze trident. The seahorse grasped in the Sea-Cat’s other hand seemed to be struggling to escape.

  “Khelikë,” the captain said behind Ann. “Good? You can travel by road to Tharnos.”

  At Tharnos, the magistrates had refused entry to all ships sailing from Vitulia because of the plague. Ann nodded. As far as she was concerned, the only reason to prefer Tharnos to Khelikë had been the extra week it had taken to get here.

  “Simo has your belongings,” the captain said. “Where will you go?”

  The ground sang out when Ann stepped onto it. Rich river clay, she thought, and clashing voices of disharmonious marl. Already Ann’s clarity was clouding. She could feel fault lines, she could taste young growth and silt . . .

  The sailor shouldered her bags expectantly. Unseeing, Ann plunged into Khelikë.

  • • • •

  It must have been a festival day. There was music, the jarring sort made by real instruments, and blossoms everywhere, and wine running dark down sanguinary streets. That was real, as were the trees and painted temples. Even now, Ann could see unmoving things. It was only people who flickered past like mist, seen and forgotten in the same breath.

  It gave Khelikë a delirious edge that told Ann she should find something to eat. She had been living off limestone for weeks and this flood of sensation was more than the first flush of relief at returning to land. She needed sleep too. It was a long time since she had been a stranger in a strange city. She needed to see things clearly again.

  A sycamore leaned over a damp piazza. Ann stopped beneath it, hearing the sap rising from the roots, or her heart thumping in her chest. She should have made the sailors set her down on a beach somewhere. She should have walked to Khelikë. She should have filled herself with earth before she dealt with people.

  Great terracotta jars stood open on the steps of a nearby temple. When Ann concentrated, she could see men ladling water and wine from the jars into what must be cheap cups, since fragments of smashed pottery bloomed into concentric circles across the piazza.

  “Is the Day of the Opening of the Jars,” said Simo, whose Vitulian was rather better than Ann’s Dorikan. “For the Feast of the New Wine. You want?”

  A woman who had been sitting on the steps stood up. She was staring at Ann.

  She was real. She was as real as the tree and the wine jars and the temple. Ann could see every inch of her clearly, from her sandals to her gold-flecked Dorikan cloak to her perfect cheekbones. Her hair’s spun gold dazzled Ann’s eyes.

  She looked angry. She came quickly across the piazza, her feet striking sparks. She was already speaking, but since she was speaking in Dorikan Ann understood very little. Something about mothers and protectors.

  “Simo,” she said. “What does she want?”

  Simo spat. “Says the archons will protect her if the mothers sent you. She’s Phaiakian, mistress.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The woman said something to Simo, who spat again and replied with a spiky mouthful of Dorikan. The woman drew back in surprise.

  Simo grinned at Ann. “I tell her you Vitulian,” he said. “She thinks you come from Phaiakia, like her.”

  “Why?”

  The woman plucked a hair from Ann’s gown. “But you�
�re so fair,” she said in Vitulian, and smiled suddenly. “Come. I was wrong. I should have known from your dress. Forgive me.” She took Ann’s wrist familiarly, twitching her cloak to show off its golden border. Ann felt a flush of warmth, not unlike the clarity that came from consumed stone. “Come and drink to the Wine-God with me. My name is Arakhnë.”

  She led Ann towards the temple and the wine jars. “‘Spider’?” Ann said.

  Arakhnë laughed. “Very good!” she said. “You know some Dorikan then. But after the weaver, not the spider, you know the story.” She placed a cup of well-watered wine in Ann’s hands. It tasted of sunlight and baked clay. “Tell me, darling, who are you? We hear bad things from Vitulia. The archons say we should close the gates to travellers from the west. You arrived just in time. Are you flying from the plague or the barbarians?”

  “Both.”

  “Has your city fallen? I am very sorry.” Arakhnë put her hand on Ann’s shoulder. “Where are you from?”

  “Florens.”

  Arakhnë went still.

  “Tell me,” she said, as if from a distance. “They say it was in Florens that the dead first began to get up. Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know a mother when I see one. Are you the lady Anna, who was the duke’s prisoner?”

  Ann swallowed another sunny mouthful. It helped a bit. She could almost see the edges of things. “Yes,” she said.

  “Darling, you must come home with me,” Arakhnë said, and clasped Ann’s hands warmly around the wine cup. Her smile was wide enough to fall into. “I wish you had come to my door. I would have offered you whatever you needed without any of these silly questions. I owe all I have to Dios Xenios, Dios the Hospitable you would say. Let no one say we don’t know how to welcome strangers in Khelikë.”

  • • • •

  Simo dumped Ann’s bags in Arakhnë’s patterned courtyard. The mosaic was mostly flesh and froth, twisted up with Dorikan phrases Ann could not make out. There was an altar splashed with wine and spring flowers.

  “I go now?” Simo said, looking around.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Phaiakian women are all witches. I know a good inn.”

  “This is fine.”

  There was a room and there was a table and there was bread and salted sardines. Arakhnë poured Ann wine herself.

  “It is the Feast of New Wine,” she said, leaning on the table as a maid would never have done. She had shed her cloak and flashed tawny skin down the open side of her purple Dorikan dress. “For three days, I serve my slaves. You do not do this in Vitulia?”

  The wheat had grown in foreign soil. Flavour flooded Ann’s mouth: acres and golden acres of fields, the sky alternating blue and rain-washed. She broke off another piece and dipped it in olive oil. She could taste flecks of stone from when the flour had been ground, which had probably happened in Khelikë. The oil was certainly from somewhere nearby.

  Arakhnë was smiling. “Eat!” she said. “I go to promise my maid her freedom if she will only draw you a bath.”

  She would have washed Ann’s hair, but Ann said, “No,” and Arakhnë went away. Ann’s mouth was full of wheat and olives. She washed her arms and her face and sat breathing steam until the flavours faded. Sleep, she thought. She needed sleep now.

  It was harder to get up than she expected. Her clothes were nowhere to be seen. She stumbled out wrapped in a towel, her hair dripping down her neck, and found Arakhnë coming up from the courtyard with her arms full of cloth.

  “Darling!” Arakhnë said, hurrying up the steps. “You Vitulians wear so many things. Look, I have a good Dorikan peplos for you.” It was scarlet and shot through with silk. Two bronze pins rattled together in a brown felt slipper. “I wove it myself. Come and see how it suits you.”

  She held back a curtain. Ann walked through into a wall of gold and stopped still, dazzled. Light flickered over the walls, over the table, over the spreading bed.

  Slowly her eyes cleared. Her bags lay underneath the window. The shutters were open and the golden tapestries whispered against the walls.

  Arakhnë set down the slippers. “Come,” she said, urging Ann towards the bed. She shook out the peplos, which looked like a tablecloth, and held it up against Ann as if to check the richness of the colour. “Hold it there, darling,” she said, digging her thumbs under Ann’s collarbone. “Just like that.”

  Ann lifted her hands unthinkingly and felt the towel fall. The salt breeze caught the water trickling down her spine.

  She couldn’t move. She felt first cold and then hot, a slow warmth radiating outwards from her parted lips and her navel, tingling to the pit of her stomach as the scarlet cloth brushed against her breasts. The pomegranates woven into its border glittered. She couldn’t feel herself breathing.

  Arakhnë touched Ann’s cheek and bent her bright head, and even her eyelashes shone. Her mouth was soft. The shape of her body pressed against Ann through the cloth. She slid her palms down Ann’s naked back, then under the cloth, her hair spilling, shimmering, over her shoulders.

  The bed hit Ann’s legs. She tumbled backwards as slowly as a feather, her eyes filling up with gold.

  • • • •

  She dreamed of Tethys.

  She dreamed she was standing on the beach, any beach, and Tethys lay there like a great cat with Her paws folded under Her, drowning the stars in Her midnight eyes.

  Dread knotted Ann’s stomach. “You promised,” she said.

  Ann, child, said the Sea-Cat. How do you find Khelikë?

  A thought flashed its fins, then darted away. It was impossible to catch it beneath the liquid weight of the Sea-Cat’s gaze. “Welcoming.”

  Take My advice, child. Ask your hostess about Nikë Apteros.

  “Why?”

  I have a kindness for those who shake the earth when they walk, the Sea-Cat said. For am I not the Mother of Earthquakes?

  • • • •

  There was a terracotta lamp, and in the lamplight Arakhnë crouched against the wall, her hand raised to shield her face. She looked amazed. Ghostly images of Tethys and the midnight beach were collapsing into shadow.

  The scarlet cloth was twisted up around Ann’s legs. She began to sit up.

  “Anna!” Arakhnë said, turning towards her. “Did you see that?”

  “Yes. It’s nothing.”

  “But what was it?”

  “Sometimes I dream like that.” It was hard not to see two of everything, except for Arakhnë, whom Ann could still see clearly. A few more good meals should bring the world back into focus. Ann’s bags lay open at Arakhnë’s feet. “What are you doing?”

  Arakhnë looked momentarily blank. The lamp gave her feet a golden glow.

  “I was thirsty,” she said, picking up the lamp from the floor. She set it down on the table and filled a two-handled silver cup, which she brought back to the bed.

  “Here,” she said, sitting beside Ann and holding up the cup. “Drink.”

  The wine was strong. “This is the old wine,” Arakhnë said, sniffing it appreciatively. “I save it for my guests.” She sipped, smiled, set the cup down. Her peplos was pinned at the shoulders; she slid out one long bronze pin, letting the cloth slip down just enough to reveal the swell of her breast. “You must not dream, darling. It displeases me.”

  She straddled Ann’s thighs. Ann felt the breath rise out of her as Arakhnë pushed her back into the pillows.

  • • • •

  Arakhnë’s voice drifted down:

  “You are so fair, darling.” She was stroking Ann’s hair. “Only the oldest mothers are so fair. And you are so young.” Her fingertips brushed Ann’s lips. “And your dreams . . . I never knew there were such women among the barbarians.”

  Ann opened her eyes and found even Arakhnë was blurring, her hair falling in a shimmering silken curtain around Ann’s head. Her knees pressed Ann’s hips. The gold flickering behind Arakhnë, above her, in every strip of cloth covering eve
ry wall and surface, merged dizzyingly in the dying lamplight. It made Ann’s head spin.

  She floated upwards into Arakhnë’s honey-coloured gaze. “What can you do?”

  “Darling?”

  “You must have . . . some sort of talent. What is it?”

  Arakhnë’s lashes flickered. “I’ll tell you,” she said, her voice dropping to a purr. She crooked her arm around Ann’s head, piling up her hair on the pillow. She was still wearing most of her peplos and the rub of silk and wool between their bodies was more intimate than skin. “I’ll tell you when you ask me again. But ask me something else first.”

  Sleep lapped Ann like the sea. “Who are the mothers?”

  “Ah, them! They are the great women of Phaiakia, darling. My city, the city I come from. The most northern of all the Ten Cities. I left the mothers behind long ago.”

  “Why did you think they sent me?”

  “There was a misunderstanding. I went to Pallatinë first. It is our daughter-city. When I was not welcome there, I came here. It was all a long time ago.” She had the skin and smile of a young woman; but then, so did Ann. “Tell me, Anna, how did you leave Florens?”

  Ann closed her eyes. She didn’t want to remember Florens now.

  “It fell,” she said. “I walked away.”

  “The duke died, did he not?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were revenged?”

  Ann didn’t want to remember Pietro either. “You’re a weaver?”

  Arakhnë laughed. “I am a woman,” she said. “I weave. Do you not in Vitulia? In Phaiakia, even the mothers weave. Especially the mothers. Phaiakia is not the city of Pallas for nothing. But not for money, darling. Do you know the word ‘hetaira’?”

  “No.”

  “It means something like ‘companion’ in your language, I think. I have many friends. You must meet them. I know the archons will want to meet you.”

  “I don’t want to. Who is Nikë Apteros?”

  Some of the elasticity went out of Arakhnë’s smile.

  “Ah,” she said. “You mean our Wingless Victory.”

  “Do I?”

  “She was commissioned for the new temple last year. The archons wanted her carved without wings so she could never fly away.”