by Various
One was a pretty young woman with brown, curling hair and a simple white dress with a few pale ribbons trailing from it. She wore a bonnet of valerian and heartsease. The color in her cheeks gleamed rich as bread and sun-rosy, and her feet were bare.
The other was a man with a neat, pointed beard and kindly eyes which had become the most beguiling shade of green. He was dressed in a green smoking jacket, and a green carriage driver’s cloak, and green jodhpurs, and green snowshoes. In his hands he held a long green lance, quite whole.
“He died to save her,” the Leopard growled. “And now he must take her place. It’s different for each Wind. Red will need to be tricked by her replacement into putting on a white gown. Gold will be killed. So it goes. Long ago, a girl named Jenny Chicory loved a boy, and meant to be a water-duchess in the Seelie before going on the Great Hunt. She drowned saving a little boy in green, a boy she did not know from a stranger, from a pirate band with a whale on their side. She could not let him go down into the waves, and woke up all in green with a job to do and no more a happy maid with a suitor at her door. Now Mabry’s done it, and he can’t take it back, nor go home with her to Winesap any more than she could leave the sky windless. The gales of the upper Fairyland heavens would shatter her, as they would have shattered him. In the doldrums of summer, sometimes, they arrange to meet at sea, where the sails droop and crow’s nests swelter. I imagine they’ll keep that date.”
Jenny looked at her Leopard with a grand and sorry love. “We are used to it,” she said thickly. “And storms must sometimes come to Winesap, too.”
Mallow looked down at the dying King. His breath did not stop or slow—a clurichaun his age had reserves of will waiting to be tested. He might live years in distress but not die. She considered what to do. She considered the Gremlin and the Green Wind. She considered poor, crumbling Pandemonium. She considered the shattered goblet and that blue and cloudy blood, the wettest of all possible Wet Magics, mingling with all the other blood that had poured out onto the square, wretched, dull, of use to no one.
Mallow knelt. She drew her needle and pricked the thumb of King Goldmouth’s golden hand. Slowly, as slowly as he had pushed his fingers into helpless mouths, she pushed her needle in, pulled it through, and made her stitch. Beneath her hands, a thick, glassy thread appeared. She made another stitch, and another, hauling up the clurichaun’s feet to his chest and beginning to cry a little despite herself, so exhausted and revolted and determined and sorry was she.
“I told you,” she said as she sewed. “I didn’t want to muddle in Politicks—and there is always Politicks, even when folk promise it’s just a party, or a revival, or an exhibition of every kind of magic. I didn’t want to meet a Fairy boy or dance at Fairy balls. I only wanted to read my books and learn a bit of magic. Why couldn’t you have been a better King? Why couldn’t you have left that poor world alone? Why couldn’t you have been better?” She hit him with her fist and he did not protest. She had not hit him hard.
By now, Goldmouth’s knees covered his face. He could not speak. A very neat seam ran across his nose. His eyes pleaded, but Mallow went on sewing up the King, stitch by stitch, into a package no bigger than her hand. The last of his astrological tattoos showed on the top of it, and she handed the whole thing over to the Red Wind to close away. Mallow’s skin dripped starry streaks of royal blood.
The girl who would find herself, against long odds, Queen before dinnertime stood up and looked at her new friends, at her darling Leopard, at the glittering needle in her hand. Then she looked to the empty, hollowed-out city.
“Well,” Mallow said, feeling a wave of powerful practicality break on her heart. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Copyright (C) 2011 by Catherynne M. Valente
Art copyright (C) 2011 by Ana Juan
By Catherynne M. Valente
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Deathless
Palimpsest
The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden
The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice
The Habitation of the Blessed
Under in the Mere
The Labyrinth
The Grass-Cutting Sword
Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams
Ventriloquism
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
The trains carved into land that wasn’t theirs, and swallowed the men who laid their iron roads—the tracks like threads to draw white men closer together—monsters belching smoke across a land they meant to conquer.
So Faye made herself scarce the day the men from Union Pacific visited Western Fleet Courier, to ask Elijah about the land.
Elijah wasn’t a man who thought much where he didn’t have to; maybe it was just as well, since many who’d thought harder were cruel, and Elijah’s place was where she and Frank had made their home.
So far.
The railroad men spoke with Elijah a long time. They cast looks around the yard where Fa Liang and Joseph were working on a dog, weighting the front pair of its legs so it wouldn’t flip backward the first time you scaled a rock face. Fa Liang muttered something to the dog, and Joseph laughed, and the tall railroad man watched.
They watched Maria tending vegetables, rake in hand, shirtsleeves rolled to her elbows.
Faye kept in the barn. And Frank was somewhere those men would never find him. (Better not to trust anyone with the government. That much they’d learned the hard way.)
But Elijah was white, and kindhearted, and had made friends when he lived in River Pass—Harper at the general store still set things aside for him. Elijah had no reason to fear two men who smiled and seemed polite; once or twice, he laughed.
Bad sign, Faye thought.
They shook hands with him and left at last, and Faye was able to tear herself away from the hole in the boards and pretend nothing was wrong.
People came with messages for delivery every week: homesteaders, wagon trains, the Pony Express. If she was shaken every time a stranger showed, she’d spend her life in this barn.
When Elijah came into the barn, he smiled, but there was a second’s pause before he said, “Hello, Faye.”
She didn’t mind the pause; worse to be called a wrong name.
It was easy to mistake Frank and Faye. The twins looked like their mother, the high brow and strong jaw, and they had the matching, flinty expressions of a lot of the Shoshone children who were sent to the white school. It made Frank look like a warrior, and Faye look troubled.
She stood beside Dog 2, one hand on its right foreleg. It was foolish to seek comfort in machines—look at the railroad—but still, she felt calmer with it close by.
She should have had a wrench, if she was pretending to work, but she’d been shaking.
Elijah meant well. Elijah was an easygoing man, most days. He tried to keep peace, he tried to be fair.
Faye just didn’t think she and Elijah had the same idea of fair.
She couldn’t even ask—the words stuck when she saw him—and she held her breath and looked at the open door behind him, the sliver of deep blue sky.
She’d been waiting for a sign to run. An open door was as good as anything.
Then Elijah said, “Lord, these trains have made men greedy.”
The land can be beautiful, depending where you’re c
oming from.
The sun sets in bands of red and gold, and one of turquoise just ahead of the night; sunrise is cool in summer and sharp in winter, like ice cracking; and the horizon’s so unbroken that weather isn’t a surprise—you see clouds well ahead of the rain.
The soil is shallow and it fights, but there are wildflowers and tall grass until snowdrifts cover them. Snowdrifts, with rock to rest against, climb taller than a house, thin dry powder. The snow can turn any moment, with the wind, and swallow a man whole. You don’t go out alone in winter if you want to make it home.
There is, sometimes, water. It’s always flowing away from you.
There are always hills on the horizon, even though you’re already so high up you never catch your breath. You can look out and out and out across the basin, and see specks on the horizon, twenty miles away, where a city’s fighting to take hold.
Sometimes a city lasts. Sometimes you look out one night and not one lamp is lit, and you know the land passed judgment on it.
When you look at the night sky, it makes you dizzy.
Part of this is wonder. Part is knowing how far away from other lives you are, in this wide unbroken dark.
If you’ve made your way west from the forests, and given up town life for the frontier, this land seems like punishment.
It’s beautiful, if you’re coming home.
Elijah Pike owned the fifty acres of Western Fleet Courier.
He’d come to River Pass from Boston, after he’d tired of being someone else’s clerk and decided it was time to make something of himself in the West. He’d been an indifferent farmer—too uncertain of the soil—but River Pass needed even indifferent vegetables, and he’d found enough success on his own that when Fa Liang presented himself, Elijah had the land, and money for an extra barn, and parts for the dogs.
He was proud of the business; he was proud that they sometimes boarded a scrawny boy from the Pony Express while they handed off a message going where no horse could reach.
Elijah had painted the wooden sign himself: “Any Message, All Terrain.” It hung below the wrought-iron sign for Western Fleet, nailed to the arch marking his property line.
It was just as well he owned the land; he was the only one of them who could.
A dog has six legs. Each one is thin, and tall as a man, and arched as a bow, and in their center they cradle the large, gleaming cylinder of the dog’s body. The back half conceals a steam engine, with a dipping spoon of a rider’s seat carved out ahead of it, with levers for steering and power, and just enough casing left in front to stop a man from hurtling off his seat every time the dog stops short.
It looks ungainly. The casing jangles, and the legs seem hardly sturdy enough to hold it, and when someone takes a seat it looks like the contraption’s eating him alive.
But legs that seem ungainly in the yard are smooth on open territory, and dogs don’t get skittish about heights or loose ground, and when scaling a rock face, six legs are sometimes better than four.
There’s a throttle for the engine, and three metal rings on each side of the chair, where the rider slides his fingers to operate the legs. Left alone, the dog walks straight ahead; when the rider starts his puppetry, it treads water, dances, climbs mountains.
It takes a strong boy to wield one—not muscled, but wiry, a boy who can keep his balance and his head if the ground slips out from under him.
Faye won’t train them if they look like they force their own way. On the trail, a rider has to understand enough to sidewind Dog 3 in heavy winds, enough to hear what’s breaking in old Dog 1 before it breaks.
Sometimes she and Fa Liang placed bets about what would need fixing up when some boy came back.
“The boy,” Frank said, “if he breaks Dog 2.”
Faye shouldered him, but Fa Liang said, “No bet.”
The dogs never tire, and need one quarter the water a horse does. The boys carry some, but the inside of the engine shell collects condensation at night, which siphons into a skin.
That was Faye’s idea; their mother taught her, a long time ago.
They’re five strange beasts—they terrify horses—but they do as promised. The Express advises riders to use them if the road gets impassable for animals.
Even folk in River Pass have a little pride that for those who need a message sent where no messenger goes, you can point them right to Western Fleet.
Fa Liang started the business.
He left the Central Pacific line and came to River Pass in search of work. River Pass wouldn’t have him.
He’d never said if it had come to blows; it didn’t always have to.
But Susannah Pell from the clerk’s office followed him out of the general store and told him about Elijah, living on land of his own, well outside the city limits.
Elijah welcomed him. He was working alone, then, and the place was falling to ruin.
The barn had a pile of equipment Elijah had run so poorly that no one would take it off his hands.
The first dog Fa Liang built was small, and slipshod—the engine casing was one sheet of tin, and the seat little more than a metal spoon nailed on in front of it. The engine sputtered on steep inclines, and it limped. But when the livestock count was off one day, Fa Liang rode out in it, and came back with a calf he’d maneuvered out of a split in the rock.
“Damn,” said Elijah, grinning.
Fa Liang peeled himself off the seat—that first build wasn’t kind to the rider, his back was scorched for a week—and asked, “There a courier in town?”
They met Joseph when they came into River Pass looking for a blacksmith.
Fa Liang handed him two uneven legs from the dog.
“I need something to make this one longer,” he said. “And some weight, for the bottom.”
Joseph frowned, turned it over and over, smoothed his hands over the joints.
Then a smile stole over his face, and he said, “What the devil are you building?”
When Elijah came back from the general store with his wagon of dry goods, Fa Liang and Joseph were waiting.
Joseph had come from Missouri a freedman, after dismissal from the Union Infantry; he’d been working to earn money to go with the Mormon wagons headed west.
“If it weren’t for the dogs,” he told Faye once, “I’d have kept going until I hit the ocean.”
The dogs wouldn’t have kept him long, but Maria came soon after, and she could keep hold of almost anything.
What Maria hadn’t held was her farm—Texas ranchers ran her off as soon as her husband was in the ground.
But she was determined to find another homestead, so she’d joined a traveling preacher, and in River Pass, when he demanded to see the husband she’d claimed to have in a town she’d picked off a map, Maria saw Elijah coming out of the clerk’s office, and took a chance.
Sometimes, in January when it seemed winter would never break, Frank asked for the story. Maria made Elijah act it out, laughing; she claimed he’d been marvelous.
Faye didn’t buy it. Elijah was an honest man. Playacting didn’t suit him.
“He must have been bad, though,” Faye said once, when they were alone.
Maria grinned. “Horrible. Not even Padre was fooled.”
“But you came back with him.”
She shrugged. “A man who can’t lie is sometimes a good sign.”
Faye went to wash before the supper bell rang at the big house.
They came from their own cabins—Joseph, Fa Liang, and Frank and Faye from farthest out.
Maria had moved into the big house two winters back, when the ground betrayed her and her cabin floor split.
The garden turned into a cornucopia when she laid hands on it.
(“It’s like he tried to kill them,” Maria muttered to Faye once, wrist deep in dirt. She was planting squash far enough apart that they wouldn’t choke.)
When they came inside, Maria glanced up and nodded. “Frank. Faye.”
Frank glanced at Faye
with the ghost of a smile. He had his shell necklace on, looped down his chest like a breastplate, and it was the only reason why Maria had been able tell one from the other. It was the same, the days Faye wore her skirt because her trousers were drying.
Still, Faye took any smile she could get from Frank.
At the table, Faye pressed against Frank and Elijah on either side; wedged at the end was a boy from the Express whose name she had forgotten, bunking with them while Tom Cantor from River Pass delivered his message.
They talked about nothing, for a while, for the sake of the Express boy. They all fought, sometimes—about the dogs, about the town, about elbow room at table—but never in front of strangers. Some things you couldn’t afford to do.
Joseph sat next to Maria, as always, and she pretended not to give him the biggest slice of cornbread, and he pretended not to look at her even when she wasn’t speaking.
They talked with Elijah about Tom and Dog 3, due back any day, and Faye watched Elijah’s face for signs he’d been a fool about the Union Pacific.
He didn’t seem a fool, but you got used to worrying.
When the cornbread and preserves were polished off and the boy from the Express had taken a hint and vanished, Elijah sat back and said, “We had a visitor.”
They set down their forks and knives too fast, ready for the bad news they’d known was coming.
Elijah laid out the visit from Michael Grant, and the plans for the Union Pacific construction, and the offer he’d gotten for his land.
It was the biggest number they’d ever heard.
It was the sort of money that evaporated loyalty; it was such a number that they all sat, stunned silent.
Faye watched him. For a bad liar, his face gave so little away.
“What do you mean to do?”
Elijah shook his head. “Wanted to hear from everyone.”
“It might not come,” said Maria. “If they’re promising that kind of money across Wyoming they’ll run out.”