The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “’Ere!”

  I step back just in time to miss being clobbered by a piece of rotted windowsill.

  “Clear off!” A small dark head stares down at me from the uppermost window of a house with faded green paint mostly chipped down to bare stone and decaying plaster. The girl is as brown as a selkie, and I wonder if she’s a half-breed, if her mother was one of the beautiful seal women who sometimes marry Hobs. “Don’t bring none of your bad luck this way,” the girl says.

  Bad luck? While it’s true that I stand out here in my blue silk dress, the storm will have turned my auburn hair into a mess of mud-brown tangles. Fortunately. The reddish tint would have been a giveaway that I’m from one of the High Houses.

  My heart patters into a panicked beat. There’s no love lost between Hob and high-Lammer. The Hobs work our factories, sail our ships, wash our clothes. They are the beetle-back on which our city is built. And they do not have a gentle love for us.

  I take a backward step.

  If the half-breed finds out that I’m of House Pelim, things could go exceedingly badly. Idiots—don’t they understand that without our ships, our scriv-magic, the Hobs would still be living in hunting packs, just barely surviving on what little they could glean from the rock pools? The Hobs seem oblivious to the reality that were it not for our whalers and fishing boats there would be no city, no jobs, no trade.

  A little chill of fear crystallizes in my veins. Best to leave before I’m caught and stripped and trussed—and more than likely covered in fish guts—and left as a message to my family and our closed ware houses. How are we to help it that the catches have been small, the fish tainted by magic, inedible? Of course, it suits the Hobs to blame us for such bad luck. It’s blame us or blame a sea-witch, and we make for a much closer and safer target.

  “Go on then!” Another piece of rotted wood just misses me. I shrug and turn up the street.

  “Keep your trash!” I yell. “I’m leaving.” If I had just a few grains of scriv on me, I could teach the Hob a lesson. Like my mother and brother, I am a War-Singer, highest of the three magic castes, higher than Saints and Readers, and able to make the very air do as I will. Unfortunately, I have no scriv. That makes me terrifyingly weak in the face of Hob violence, and I step farther back, my fear building.

  “Keep walking,” says the dark little half-caste. “Or I’ll track you down and burn your house to the ground.”

  It’s not the brightest thing to engage them. I really should just ignore her. Besides, what is there to fight over? She lives in a falling-down building that even the sharif couldn’t be bothered to condemn, and I live in a cliff-top mansion. Let her think she owns this little strip of land. There’s no one else who’d want it anyway. I turn my back on her.

  It’s far to go before I’m home—I still have to walk past all of Old Town and cross the Levelling Bridge. Darkness is coming in fast as the sea-storm gathers. My sigh is swallowed by the wind.

  It won’t be long before I get a chance to speak to Ilven again. There’ll be much to tell her, although I doubt she’ll believe the bat story. She’ll probably think I’m making it up just to entertain her—the way I used to make up hordes of imaginary brothers and sisters to people our childhood games.

  I’ll stop at one of the vendors on the way back and buy her a gift. With this thought I skip up toward the center of Old Town to where the market square is in full rumble.

  I twist and weave through a crush of people who stink of work and cheap perfumes. It’s so bad that I have to draw a kerchief from my pocket and walk with my nose and mouth covered, in case I breathe in some illness of theirs.

  There are wooden tea wagons and wide tables set with fish of all kinds and vegetables and strings of sausages. Some people squat on the ground with their wares laid out on a cloth before them: herbs, seaweeds, carved ivory trinkets.

  Not far from me, a gaggle of little Hoblings play skip rope with a piece of frayed and filthy cord. They chant fast and vicious, clapping and shrieking when someone gets caught out.

  The sea is rising, one two three,

  What will that get for Ivy and me?

  Pelim House gave us bones.

  Pelim House gave us stones.

  When the sea is rising red,

  All of Pelim will drop dead.

  I rush past them, shaking my head. Little brats. Deeper into the market I go, exchanging the childish game for the clamor of the sellers. And what a racket they make. One shouts out his wares in a high breathless chant, and another calls to me, “Lammer, Lammer, Lammer,” waving at her collection of sea-vomited trash. Bands of ragged children run wild, pickpocketing or worse. Sharif dot the crowd, obvious as diamonds in their starched uniforms. They rake the milling people with narrowed eyes, always keeping watch, policing the city.

  I find myself oddly wary around them, even though, strictly speaking, I have done nothing wrong and the idea that my mother has alerted them to my absence is laughable. I dart past one distracted by a mob of street children and leave the pale uniform behind.

  Finally, I am drawn to a small painted trolley festooned with garlands of shells. The vendor has draped a fine silk cloth of Ives blue over the top, and on it are set out the delicate shells of the paper nautiluses that I love so. It’s these that first catch my eye, but then I spot the necklace.

  It’s made from the inner coils of the big sea-snails: little polished chips of mother-of-pearl strung on twists of silk with a larger piece edged in silver wire to make a pendant. Certainly it’s the sort of cheap thing the Hobs would find charming, and I imagine Ilven’s face when I present her with such a worthless treasure. Something to remind her of the sea, of Pelimburg, of me. The thought makes me smile, and for a moment I forget that my mother will probably lock me in my room until next year when I’m allowed to enter Pelim University and there embrace my few years of sequestered freedom.

  “How much?”

  The man takes in my gloves and my fashionable dress and champs his mustache. “Two brass bits.”

  I laugh in response, but I don’t care that he’s bluffing. What are two brass bits to me? While my brother, Owen, would probably have haggled him down until the poor man practically gave the necklace away, I dig through my purse for some change and toss the coins down on his silk.

  The necklace shimmers, the colors changing as he hands it to me, and I think of Ilven—so pretty, so polished and changeable. It is the perfect gift.

  With my dress plastered to my back by the rain and the wind whipping my hair loose and free so that it blows constantly into my face, I set off back home, away from the stench of congealed fish and seaweed.

  IT IS NOT my mother’s worried face that greets me when I return. A servant ushers me through to the formal lounge, acting as if I am an inconvenient guest in my own home. Only when I see who is waiting for me among the polished furniture and glass statues do I understand why.

  Owen scowls, his pale cheeks mottled. His eyes are storm black. Not the best of signs. My dearest brother is ten years older than me, and he has always regarded me as an unfortunate accident. I shiver and tuck my hand into my pocket, curling my fingers around the necklace. It seems to me that if I can keep clinging to it, I’ll somehow weather this. I look to my mother for reassurance, but she is pointedly watching the floor, as if she will find some message or hieroglyph in the carpet.

  “Where have you been?” Owen’s tone is soft and calm, almost cajoling. It’s the way he talks to the dragon-dogs when he wants to coax them from their kennels. He might as well be waving a cut of nilly-flesh at me.

  “Out,” I say. “Walking.”

  When he says nothing, I find myself trying to fill in the emptiness, even though I know this is what he wants me to do. I can’t seem to stop myself, and inside I’m cringing at my own stupidity. “Up in the fields toward the woods.” Under his cold stare, I’m babbling, pulling lies out of nowhere, compounding them. “I was supposed to meet Ilven, we were going to see if the sea-drakes were
back—they’re supposed to be heading into the bay, but she didn’t meet me so I headed toward the woods.” Short of clamping my hand over my own mouth, I don’t seem to be able to stop. He didn’t see me with the bat, I’m certain of it. If he had, he would have stopped the coach there and then and hauled me back home like a runaway dog.

  “Are there many bats up in the woods these days?” he interjects, and I stutter into silence.

  “I-I—”

  The magic hits me before I can think of a response. It sucks me forward, pulling all the air from my lungs. The citrus tang of scriv is in the air, and I realize with a vague un-focused horror that my brother is truly angry.

  Angrier than I’ve seen him in a long time.

  Like me, my brother is a War-Singer, able to control the air. Unlike me, he’s been to university for the full seven years, has trained to control his talent, to augment it with scriv. All my control comes from the little bit of tutoring I’ve been allowed. Perhaps if we were threatened with war, like in the past, I would have been better armed.

  More than that, Owen has control of our house hold scriv. He hoards it, hands out thimblefuls as rewards, withholds it as punishment. And even though my natural talent for magic is greater than his, right now I can barely do more than raise the smallest breeze. Without scriv, I have no way of accessing my full power.

  It’s better not to fight, I know, so I let my body slump. The magical wind is cold, sharp as glass splinters, and it pricks into my skin, tearing at my clothes and hair. My eyes burn as I fight to shut them against the needles of air.

  No good. He’s keeping my eyelids pried open. The air forces me to face him, but my vision is blurring red and my chest is slowly being crushed.

  I want so badly to kick, to lash out, but I know from a bitter childhood full of my brother’s games that doing so will only make him play longer.

  He’s not entirely cruel. He gives me back my air before I pass out.

  “I dislike leaving my wife,” he says, and flicks at his fingernails before buffing them against his sleeve. He’s not even looking at me anymore, but I know that this too is merely part of his act. I know this because he’s let his magic lift me up so that my head is level with his, and he’s made sure that I can do nothing but stare at his face. “I especially do not like it when the reason I have to come back up here”—and now he looks up from his manicure and around at the dark interior of the family home—“is because yapping Houses run to tell me they have spotted my sister in the city dallying with a bat.”

  My mother, who until now has been keeping white and quiet behind her precious son, finally takes the time to look up at me. “Felicita,” she says, “there’s been a terrible accident—”

  “That can wait, Mother.” Owen cuts her off.

  She frowns and changes tack as easily as the little fishing boats that litter the bay. “It’s not true, is it?” she says to me. “I told him it couldn’t have been you, that it’s just someone trying to make our House look bad.”

  It’s all she cares about. I feel defeated and irritated at the same time. “Of course it was me,” I snap.

  Cold threads of my brother’s power tighten around my throat. Finally, I think, I’ve pushed him too far. This time he’ll do more than lock me up in a cupboard for a day or leave me merely with bruises that will fade.

  He drops me. I collapse against the black slate floor, my ankle twisting painfully under the sudden weight of my body. I gasp, trying to make up for the lack of air, or to somehow store it up in my body for another attack.

  “Malker Ilven is dead,” my brother says.

  For a moment I think he’s attacked me again. My throat is filled with grains of glass.

  Then Owen walks past me, his boot heels thudding against the slate floor, and he is gone.

  I can breathe. I just don’t want to.

  2

  “OH GRIS!” My mother grabs me in her arms and pulls me so tightly against her that it feels like my spine will crack. Finally, I manage to work one hand free and I raise it to wipe her clinging hair out of my face. My mother never wears her hair loose.

  “He’s lying,” I say. “Isn’t he?” I push at her stiff arms until she lets me go. Her face is blotched, the powder in damp patches on her skin, gathering in the fine wrinkles by her eyes and mouth.

  Her fear vanishes, and she presses her lips into a thin angry line. “You’re never to leave the estate, you know that.”

  I’m House Pelim’s little bird, the only daughter. After Father died, Mother kept me closed up, fearful that somehow I would go down like him—victim of a prole illness caught off a river-Hob or a hacking low-Lammer. “I wanted some fresh air.” I cough the words out, then rub my neck gingerly, trying to massage away the pain.

  She’s regained her composure, and she scrapes one thin hand through her silvered hair. “Never,” she says again. “We’ve talked about this.”

  No. You’ve talked about it. I just had to sit and listen. The only person I can talk to is Ilven. We grew up together, shared the same flight space. And now, if my brother is to be believed, she’s gone.

  I pull away from my mother and race up to my room.

  The turret room is probably my mother’s sole concession to my state as perpetual prisoner. Technically, I should be in the family wing and not in this drafty little tower. But I like it up here, and as I’m the only daughter, my mother has allowed me this indulgence. Or maybe she just understood that I needed what little artificial freedom I could get to keep me sane. So I have this room that overlooks the chalk cliffs and fills and echoes with the sound of the sea mews squabbling over fish. The white gulls look like scraps of paper buffeted about the cliffs.

  The rain has swollen the wooden frame, but a few hard shoves soon have the window open and salt-spray air and drizzle sweep in. The sea mews are louder, circling in great wheeling flocks, and below me is the rumbling crash of the surf.

  “Felicita.” My mother is standing outside my closed door. She’s keeping an even tone.

  I ignore her and pull up a footstool so that I can lean right out the window and stare down at the dizzying waves. They flash white around the humpback brown rocks, seething.

  “Felicita!” she snaps. “We need to talk.”

  Across the bay, I can just see the gaslights dotted along the Claw, blinking faint as night-worms. And there, like a stain on the horizon, a little ink blot, is Lambs’ Island. Maybe next time I run, I’ll get farther than the promenade. I’ll steal a boat and make it all the way to the island and hide there with the Mekekana ghosts.

  “Felicita.”

  If she says my name one more time I’m going to scream. They’ll hear it all the way out in Old Town. It’s not true, my brother just knows what lies will hurt me the most, that’s all it is.

  “You must forgive your brother,” she says. “He was worried about you, and when he’s worried he doesn’t think.” I can hear her breathing, a trembling, liquid sound. I think she’s crying. “He shouldn’t have told you the way he did.”

  It’s not true. I clench my fists and force myself to stare out the window, to block out my mother’s voice, but there’s no need. She’s fallen silent, waiting.

  Ilven is almost my age, but blond and delicate in the way of House Malker. Glass fragile and dangerous. She’s one of the few playmates I was ever allowed. I’ve known her my whole life. I crawl down from the window ledge and thrust one hand into my pocket and take hold of Ilven’s gift before I open the door.

  My mother twists her hands. “I’m sorry,” she says. And I realize suddenly that she truly is.

  My syrupy anger cools, and inside I feel breakable.

  “How?” I say. My tongue is thick and heavy; I’m trying to talk with a mouth that isn’t really mine.

  “Oh, Felicita.” She wrings her hands, over and over. “I didn’t want you to find out like this.”

  “Tell me what happened.” I let go of the necklace.

  “She jumped.”

&n
bsp; That’s all Mother needs to say. Our estate and House Malker’s are built on the high cliffs along Pelim’s Tooth. The Tooth, like its mirror the Claw, is a pincer of land that juts around the mouth of the Casabi river, making a protected bay.

  But the cliff isn’t called the Tooth all the time. In fact, most people call it Pelim’s Leap.

  Not to our faces, of course.

  They don’t like to remind us that our House has brought the Red Death to Pelimburg’s shores before, that we have a history of suicides and ill luck.

  I bite down, grinding my teeth, trying to stop the shaking from spreading through my limbs. None of the superstitions are true, but even now there will be talk through the Houses that Ilven has caused House Malker to lose face, that her death brings ill luck to our shores. If there are bad catches in the bay, if the whaling ships are lost in storms, or if another merciless red tide sweeps down the coastline, Hob and low-Lammer alike will whisper Ilven’s name, and they will know at which House’s door to lay their blame.

  So Ilven took the Leap. My hands tremble and I bury them in the soft folds of my dress. “Are you certain?”

  My mother nods. “They found her…body.”

  I hate to think what she means by body. It’s a long drop to the bottom, to the rocks and the crushing waves. In my mind, Ilven’s delicate face turns to a slab of hammered meat. I try to swallow down my nausea.

  There will be whys—people gossiping and speculating as to what Meke-damned trial drove her to it. Whatever thoughts spurred her on, Ilven’s not going to spill them now. And any ill luck that comes to Pelimburg now will be blamed on Ilven’s dive, on the alchemy of falling girls and broken-glass sea. If her death wakes something in the deep, then she will bring more shame down on her House with that one act than she could have accomplished in a lifetime of disobedience. They will hate her for it. I wonder if Lady Malker has already struck her daughter’s name from the family tree.