“I owe you my life,” Ketter said. “If you wish me to give your bones to Grandmother, then I will.”
He opened the top of the sack wider and foraged around inside until he came up with a handful of small vertebrae and ankle bones. Then he brought them to Grandmother and laid them in her lap. She patted his cheeks and drew him closer to kiss his forehead. Mathie and Leyis went to look for stones that could be used for shaping and drilling.
“Do not stray too far from the fire,” Ketter called.
“We won’t, Mother.”
“Unravel my sack,” Uncle Skull said. “Wind the thread around a sturdy stick.”
“I have no knife to unpick the first thread.”
“Use one of my teeth, Mother.”
By the time Ched returned from the river, his torch burnt out and Uncle Skull’s leg bone split into four lengths, three of them thrust through several small fish, and the last bearing four fat frogs, Grandmother was busily rubbing bone with stone, Ketter was winding thread on a stick, and Leyis and Mathie were playing at thumb-wrestling.
“Daddy!” Mathie called.
“Daddy!” Leyis shouted. “It will be only a year and a day now!”
“Cook these,” Ched said, handing them the fish and the frogs. He looked at Grandmother. Then he looked at Ketter. “What’s been going on?”
“Grandmother is making buttons. I am collecting thread so she can sew them when they are made. Leyis’s jar told him your banishment will be reduced even further once Grandmother has sewn enough buttons to call herself back to herself.”
“Anything else?”
“I think you can guess.”
Ched sat down near the fire, but not too near. “A year and a day, Mother? And then we will all enter the City of New Unity City, and live happily ever after?”
“I don’t know about the happily ever after part, but basically, yes. If you consent.”
“How could I not?” Ched looked around. “Mother, father, grandmother, great-uncle, uncle, sister, brother. It looks like everybody’s pretty happy already. All right, maybe not the jar. It’s still broken.”
“Possibly someone in the City of New Unity City will be able to mend it.”
“Possibly. Or perhaps a cousin or grandfather we meet along the way will know how to do it. What do you think, Uncle Skull?”
“I think nothing is impossible.”
“Nothing?”
“I lay in the dry lands for more than a century before Mother found me. Mother was on the point of death when he stumbled across my bones. Grandmother is piecing her mind back together, button by button. The children were wandering lost and starving when you found them, and look at them now. And you have mitigated your banishment from forty-nine years to a year and a day. If all these things could come to pass, who can say what else may be in store for us?”
Ched sighed. “True enough, but I have to say I never planned on being a father.”
“You think I planned on being a mother?” Ketter said. “And don’t say they’re only names. These names bind us.”
“I know.” Ched looked at Mathie and Leyis. “Children, be careful. Don’t stand too close to the fire when you’re roasting those fish.”
“We’re being careful, Daddy,” Leyis said.
And Mathie said, “I’m roasting a frog. It smells like cinnamon and starlight.”
Great-Uncle Jar let out a soft whistle, and Grandmother looked up from her button-making and whispered, “Starlight tastes like candy.”
The Mirror-City
Marie Brennan
The sun’s right eye gazed down upon La Specchia, and its left eye gazed back a thousandfold, unblinking. Clouds and high winds had blinded those thousand reflected eyes for weeks, ever since the death of the city’s ruler, but now the canals and lagoons lay flat and quiet, not a ripple disturbing their mirrored surfaces. The skies were always clear and the winds still when a Giovane met his bride.
Cloth shrouded every reflective surface but the water. In the palazzi of the rich, sumptuous silk brocade had been hung over the expensive glass windows, inside and out. Mirrors stood draped as if awaiting the tailor’s measuring tape. Vessels of gold and silver were bundled and tucked away into cabinets, where no trailing edge could slip free and reveal a gleaming curve. Ladies and lords alike put away their jewels, adorning themselves instead with colorful embroidery, silk threads knotted into intricate lace. Even the floors were strewn with fine dust, lest their polished surfaces show too much.
In the houses of their lessers, plainer fabrics sufficed, and the precautions needed were fewer. In the houses of the poor, no draping was needed at all, for they had nothing so fine as to give a reflection.
Except for eyes. Every citizen of La Specchia, from the heights of the palazzi to the depths of the gutters, went about with gaze downcast. For the eyes, they said, were the mirrors of the soul.
* * *
One might almost have thought La Specchia a deserted city, haunted only by banners and bunting, the curtains draping the windows of glass. Here and there, though, the occasional figure moved. A servant sent on business his lady insisted could not wait. Merchants whose decorations were not yet hung, hurrying to complete their preparations before the city’s heart resumed its beat. Death had stopped the blood of life and trade, but soon it would flow once more.
Guards, dressed for today in leather armor and armed with staves, patrolled to ensure no one went too near the water.
The patrols were hardly needed. There were a hundred stories of what would happen if someone chanced to see their reflection too soon on this day, and few of them ended well. The pragmatic tales said the guards would promptly beat the offender to death—if he was lucky. If he was not, then he would die much more slowly, in the dungeons of La Specchia. The sinister tales said the unfortunate soul would lose his mind, or drown, or fall dead of no visible cause. Most foretold doom for the city, and credited past calamities—earthquakes, plagues, destructive storms—to the errant eyes of some careless resident.
Only one story ended well. It was to avoid this fate that Mafeo slipped down an empty street, all but pressing his chest to the wall.
Early in his journey, he had not held back. The front of his doublet bore scuffs and the dangling threads of an absent button, torn off when it caught in the crack of a post. But scraping down the front of a shop like that had made noise, and caught the attention of the shopkeeper inside. The man came out to harangue him, and Mafeo ran—ran, as if this were an ordinary day and he could step where he liked without fear. He almost collided with a parapet overlooking a canal before he realized the danger. After that he kept his distance from water and wall alike, to the spaces where an overhanging eave would have sheltered him from rain, on a day when the sky above did not blaze a pure, unsullied blue.
But there were precious few places one could go in La Specchia without risking the water. It surrounded him on all sides, cut across his path without warning. He knew the great canals of the city, but not the backwaters, and time and again what he thought was a sheltered alley dropped down to meet a muddy ditch, or arched over in a narrow footbridge he dared not cross.
And so Mafeo became lost.
He blamed that shopkeeper, and himself for rousing the man’s anger to begin with. Had he not fled, he would have found and crossed the Ponte Cieco long since. There was no safety on the other side, but at least he would be farther from danger. Now he did not even know in which direction the bridge lay. The sun offered no guidance, for it stood almost at its highest station: the hour drew near.
He should have taken flight days ago. Mafeo was a young man, seventeen years of age; he should have known—had known—that he might be chosen. But the possibility was a distant one, so small as to be laughable.
Until the city’s ruler died and the moon waned dark, and the youth of the city, every man and maid in their seventeenth year, crafted lantern boats from paper and set them adrift on the lagoon. Mafeo had done it a dozen times befor
e, to celebrate the new year. As they grew older, he and his friends placed bets, competing to see whose boat would float the farthest before it sank. It never occurred to him, in his ambition and naïvete, that on this occasion he should craft his vessel with less care than usual.
Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. The priests and priestesses said it was an omen, fate, the mirror’s will. Perhaps even his worst effort would have stayed whole, carried out to sea by its own reflection.
No vessel would carry him to safety now. But perhaps if he hid, that would be enough. Once night had fallen …
No. Mafeo heard voices, the tramp of feet. The entire thing had been madness from the start, doomed to failure. The guards had only to ask at the three bridges: the Ponte di Mani, the Ponte di Ambra, and the Ponte Cieco. Few enough people were about, and most of those known to one another; even with gazes downcast, someone would have noticed Mafeo passing by. If he had not crossed any of the great bridges, then he must still be in the heart of La Specchia. From there, they had only to search.
The sounds echoed off the walls and the ever-present water. He could not tell where the guards were, which way to go to avoid them. Mafeo chose his turns at random, pace quickening until he was almost running. Water seemed to be everywhere. Here a gutter; there a silenced fountain, its basin still full. Someone shouted, and he spooked like a cat in the opposite direction.
And there, ahead of him, was the Ponte Cieco.
It rose in geometric perfection, the straight ramp of its central stairs flanked on either side by shops that blocked the view of the canal. These were arrayed in splendor, for soon enough the streets would be filled with all the people of La Specchia, from the eldest to the babes in arms, each one hoping to see good fortune in the water. But that time had not yet come, and for now the bridge held a scant handful of merchants, startled into looking up as Mafeo ran toward them.
If he could clear the bridge’s crest before the guards came within sight …
The comandante was no fool. He’d sent his men to patrol the streets, yes—but he had left others behind to block Mafeo’s escape.
Even four were enough to cordon off the bottom of the stairs, forming a line close enough that they were sure to catch him if he tried to rush through. From behind Mafeo, more shouts: he needed no glance over his shoulder to tell him that other men were rushing into position, denying his retreat.
They would not kill him. And Mafeo did not want to die. He only wanted to save La Specchia from disaster—the disaster he would surely bring, weak and unready as he was. Which meant that only one path remained to him.
Mafeo darted left. It was a risk: the outer stairs of the Ponte Cieco were narrower, scarcely wide enough to let three men pass between shops and parapet. If they tried to stop him—and they would—then either he or the guard would run a great risk of looking upon the water. His only hope was that the guard’s fear of the consequences would overcome his determination to do his duty, and in that lapse, Mafeo might slip through.
That guard’s devotion never came to the test. As Mafeo ran through the portico at the bridge’s crest, he collided with a shopkeeper curious to see what the noise was about.
Mafeo and shopkeeper both went sprawling. Only a quick thrust of Mafeo’s hands kept him from cracking his head against the stone balusters of the parapet—and then he looked down, through the gap, and he saw the canal below.
Another face gazed back at him.
* * *
The reflection should have been dim and muddied. The waters of La Specchia, no matter how still, were not clean; they should not have been able to produce so clear an image, its colors so bright. But today was the day the Giovane met his bride, and Mafeo, in his attempt to flee that duty, had brought himself to it just the same.
It was a face he had glimpsed a hundred times before, but rarely looked upon directly. Why should he look? Only after his lantern boat floated blazing out to sea had Mafeo been named the Giovane; only then did his reflection matter, the Giovane of La Specchia’s mirror-city. Her hair was darker, her chin more fierce. She dressed in clothes not much different from the servant’s robe he had stolen stole before he fled the palazzo, as if she were born to a lower station than he.
Mafeo had, without realizing it, climbed to his feet and leaned over the parapet. Below him she did the same, echoing his actions in perfect synchrony.
Had she, too, been fleeing through the streets of her home?
They said the citizens of the mirror-city had their own lives; only in the waters of La Specchia’s many canals did they reflect their counterparts above. The family she hailed from was not his, and her thoughts today were not his, either. She was as alien to him as the sun: sometimes visible, sometimes not, but never within reach. Mafeo wondered what had brought her there—what events had drawn her away from the Ponte di Mani, where five hundred years of tradition dictated they should meet.
Whatever the answer, it changed nothing. The sun stood high overhead, and here, with only a dozen guards and a handful of shopkeepers to watch, the Giovane would be wed.
Mafeo climbed atop the parapet. No one stepped forward to help him; no one would risk seeing their own mirror-city echo in the waters below. Not until the ceremony was done. As a boy, Mafeo used to believe that whoever first looked in the water on this day would take the Giovane’s place. It seemed a grand thing back then. Then he became the Giovane, and it did not seem grand at all—to know that the well-being of La Specchia would rest upon his shoulders, a burden he could not possibly bear.
Until now. Until he stood balanced on the parapet’s thin edge, meeting the gaze of the young lady below him, the two drawn together like magnets seeking their mates. He did not know how he would find the strength to do what he must, what his predecessors had done, day and night without respite, from now until he died.
He knew only that he longed to be complete.
Mafeo spread his arms—she did the same—and as one they fell.
* * *
The Perfette rose from the water to the sound of bells. All over La Specchia they rang, above and below … and e knew it was illusion, that one was above and one below, one the truth and the other mere reflection.
But all of La Specchia rejoiced, for it had a ruler, and the two halves were whole once more.
There should have been robes waiting to receive em on the bank of the canal. There should have been a triumphant parade, an honor guard a thousand strong, priests and priestesses to bless the perfection formed by the unification of the two Giovani. Instead there was a wall covered in the slick growth of weeds, a challenge to the Perfette’s grip. E shed the waterlogged clothing that weighed em down, and climbed the wall naked. On the pathway above people were beginning to emerge from their houses, eager to greet their counterparts in the mirror-city. But on this pathway they stopped, gaping, and knelt when they saw their neighbors doing the same—for the Perfette stood before them, dripping with the waters purified by eir marriage, male and female melded into a single harmonious whole.
As La Specchia was whole. Once again trade would flow, the two faces of the city brought together as before. The crowded warehouses would throw open their doors, every lack answered by abundance from the other side. The two realms would prosper, their ruler the gate through which everything passed, the point upon which the city’s peace and prosperity balanced. It was a burden too great for one alone to bear … and so Giovane wed Giovane, and in completion found strength.
Soon enough the Perfette was gone, whisked away by guards to eir palazzo, with only a damp patch on the stone to mark where e had stood. But the memory lingered. When the citizens rose from their knees and flocked to the canals to greet their reflections, to celebrate the beginning of a new reign and the renewal of La Specchia’s unity, each of them studied well the face in the waters below: women gazing down at men, poor reflected by rich. If they leaped into the canal now, they would only get wet; the moment of transformation had passed. But when they returned to their h
omes and uncovered their windows, brought out once more their copper pots and silver spoons, they studied their faces in the polished surfaces and remembered perfection.
The Finch’s Wedding and the Hive that Sings
Benjanun Sriduangkaew
When the frozen tide sweeps in allusions red as pomegranate seeds, it also brings the oxblood contrails of Fallbright Choir, their canticles making a prayer flag of the sky. Ystravet observes through the part of her trapped in frost and reads their intent in the hull of Fallbright Envoi, the spilled ghosts and void steps of its navigation.
One Envoi and three lesser Cantos, in katabasis: descending, they find perches and berths in a monastery glacier, each ship unspooling pathways for their judges and commanders, assassins and foot soldiers. They walk as though on surface tension, every pace a sanctified action; under the Song all land is holy, an expression of the eternal symphony. Each quark is a note, each composition of baryon or meson a stanza.
This is not written anywhere. As much else with the great symphony, the fact is simply known to the skin much as the heat of the sun, the pangs of hunger, the threshold of pain.
* * *
The monastery gives Fallbright welcome within the heart of its glacier, and the heart of the monastery is a map. Here the Cotillion—territories brought into the Song—is shown in real time, its boundaries snapping and stretching as stars are lost, worlds forfeited, asteroid belts absorbed, and planets conquered.
The Finch oracle is flensed down to essential bone and skin, wracked and cadaverous. Clerics and novices bow as she walks over the map, the fall of her bare feet casting ripples over the cusp of borders, momentarily disrupting the vectors of veilships in skirmish.
“Commander Anjalin Vihokrasi, the Ghazal of Five Victories.” The Finch shakes as she makes her greetings, though her eyes are calm. “Her entourage, the aubade of Fallbright. As you achieve your fullness at dawn, so we receive you now in the hour of our morning. I am Ystravet Dal, the Finch of this monastery.”
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