These eggs were rare. Jack Yap had found three of them in as many years. In that time, he’d broken two hundred bird eggs and trampled countless nests of tortoise and crocodile. He’d set fire to a dozen threads of faerie egg, which were like glass beads strung on spider webs. Each tiny egg was a different hue; each chimed like a silver bell. Thirteen dragon eggs he’d soaked in acid, until they were brittle and discolored and gave off the odor of six days dead. Forty banshee eggs he’d pierced with a steel pin and drained, leaving the shells–black as the mouth of midnight–empty.
In those hills, even the creatures that seemed to be mammals would lay eggs. A unicorn, for example, is not a lion, goat, white mare or rhinoceros; it is a magical thing, and the egg it lays is golden and furred in spines.
But of all these eggs, Jack Yap yearned for the skinchanger’s egg. And when he found one that day with Pudding, he rejoiced.
“There it is, Puds,” he whispered. “Oh, isn’t it a beaut? Put me down.”
The egg, nestled between two boulders, was unnaturally large, even for its type. Perhaps the others he had rooted out had been young eggs, still expanding. This one required both his slender hands to hold it. He gazed deeply into the shell, and it was like peering into a mirror, then a pool of clear water, then a faceted crystal. At the heart of the crystal was a shadow, a flame. Then the flame was gone, whisked out. Perhaps it never had been. Perhaps Jack Yap was imagining things again; his Marm always called him a chaff-for-brains dreamer. Now the shell was opaque as pearl, now iridescent as opal and giving off a heat like an open forge. It began sweating beads of perfumed oil: jasmine, honeysuckle, lavender, rose, citrus. Jack Yap sniffed and sniffed, and never could sniff the same smell twice.
“See it glimmering?” Jack Yap asked his brother. Pudding, who didn’t care for eggs unless they were dripping down his boots, stared up at the sky. The expression on his face was unreadable, perhaps vacant. Pudding could look at the sun for hours and not blink. He cast a shadow as long as an oak tree. Jack Yap stepped into the Pudding-cut shade, and the egg in his hands blazed.
And he saw inside.
He saw inside the skinchanger’s egg.
A shadow, a flame, a dark heart beating.
It shifted, it melted, it took a new shape.
A fish, a snake, a bird, a child.
A child. A human child. A girl child, sleeping in a pool of her own black hair, her skin of bright red gold. She blinked sleepily and seemed, to Jack Yap, to see right into him. One eye of ebony, one of fire. Black lips sucking on a flaming thumb, round limbs bundled to her belly, although a restless fist or foot sometimes jabbed out, distending the oval egg, making it jump and pulse.
Like holding a thunderstorm, thought Jack Yap. Like holding lightning before it is born.
And inside him, all his urge to shake the egg had died. If he knew how, he would have wept right then. He might have learned to cry at last, at that very moment, in those very hills, might have opened up and bawled like the lonesomest hound all for the beauty of that little changeling asleep in her egg. So he might have done–if, that is, the egg’s skinchanger mother hadn’t come along right then, stalking on tiger’s legs, with the tail of a scorpion, the head of a buffalo, and the eyes of a madwoman.
The skinchanger saw Jack Yap. She saw her egg. She threw back her head and yowled. Tiger, buffalo, madwoman all went into that yowl, and if Jack Yap had been a different sort of boy, he would have dropped the egg and set off running.
But Jack Yap, being his mother’s son, merely tucked the egg under his arm and stepped back, beside his brother Pudding.
“Stomp,” he said. “Stomp it dead.”
And Pudding did.
#
Later, as Pudding was rinsing the blood off his stone shoes in the stream, Jack Yap sighed.
“What’s she need, you think?” he asked. “I mean, she wasn’t in a nest or anything, just sitting out there between boulders. Does she need cold then? Fresh air? Rock? At home, we’ll keep her in one of your boots, Puds. That should do it. And then when she hatches, what’ll we feed her? Skinchangers’re nasty devils.” He caressed the egg, fond and proud. The scars on his mouth pulled lividly at his smile. “Blood-drinkers, soul-suckers, eaters of road-kill and seducers of men: that’s how she’ll grow, the pretty wee lady. Ain’t enough folk around these parts to slake her. Have to take her to the city, won’t we? And what’ll Marm say, I wonder?” Jack Yap snickered to himself. “’Course, we could always feed her Marm first.”
For the first time since Jack Yap had started babbling, Pudding glanced up from his streambed and grinned. It could have been the sunset that night, but his tiny teeth looked a little red, like he’d been chewing on soft strawberries. Jack Yap clucked, in close mockery of horror.
“Puds, you great stomach! You didn’t?”
Pudding murred.
“That skinchanger you stomped probably had the walking rabies. And you went and et her raw, didn’t you? I swear, Puds, do I have to watch you every minute?”
Pudding licked his lips. Jack Yap’s shoulders, sharp as garden shears, shook with silent laughter. Jack Yap never laughed out loud.
“Still hungry, eh?” he asked. “Well, no wonders there. That skinchanger was naught but bones and a few scraps of magic. I’ve a bear trap in my own belly, truth be told. Look at the sky! We orter be gettin’ home-side anyway. Eggs for you and gruel for me, King Pudding. Ah, ’tis the high life we lead.”
Nevertheless, he tucked the egg amiably enough under his shirt (the bulge of it making him look either a very pregnant boy or one with an advanced tumor), turned his long nose for home, and taking his brother by the huge, soft hand, led him out of the hills again. The ground trembled where they walked.
#
Marm was ever so, ever so pleased to see them.
She was standing in the doorway. She had a birch switch in one hand and a rusty old chain slung over one shoulder. She had her fists on her hips and her hair in a knot, where it blazed like ragged sugar maples in October. She was smiling.
“Knew I’d catch you out this day or that,” she said, “if I left you to your wiles. Oh, Jackie lad.” She raised her switch. Jack Yap turned his back, hunching to protect the egg. “Waltz into the hills, do you?” THWACK! “Encourage your poor brother!” THWACK! “Abandon my poor chickens!” THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! “And for what, Jackie? To defy me? Why must you defy me? I do well enough by you. I keep you in leggings and gruel!”
It was just cold enough, and Jack Yap just thin enough, that the skin of his back broke easily under her onslaught and began to bleed through his shirt. He tucked his chin and gritted his teeth, even as his ravaged mouth curled into its customary smile. Pudding, uneasy, sank to a crouch and started mewling. Jack Yap unscrewed his scowl for a half second to give him a little wink.
“Easy, Puds!” he gasped. “Just a tickle.”
Marm stopped switching him.
“Get your brother out of those shoes,” she said, her voice so brittle it was like to snap. “Much good they do him now. Then go to bed. No supper for you, my naughty lads! I ought instead to feed your eyes to my chickens!”
She flounced her fancy skirts (fancier by far, anyway, than a lady with a dilapidated cottage, two growing sons, a chicken coop, an outhouse and a vegetable garden ought to be wearing) and moved to make her regal exit of the yard. But a secret glimmering from the corner of her eye stayed her. What she saw, alas, alack-the-day, was the skinchanger’s egg being slipped from Jack Yap’s shirt into the bucket of Pudding’s great stone boot.
“Jackie boy,” she said sweetly.
Jack Yap froze, blood ribbons unwinding down his back.
“What is that, lad? What pretty pebble did you find out there, my precious son, my second-born, my tasty own Jack?”
Jack Yap’s lips folded together so tightly the seams of his scars closed, and Marm might never have cut the goat-gut stitches she had sewn for all the sound he made. Marm smiled at him and shrugged.
“Well. My sight’s not what it used to see, there’s that,” she said. “Pudding, love. Come up to bed. Your Marmy-Marm’ll give you buttered toast and jam and snuggle you in tight.”
The chain on her shoulder clanked, but Pudding was vastly and enormously and humongously hungry, so he heaved himself to his feet and trotted inside the cottage after her. His wispy yellow hair was set briefly aglow by the backlight in the cottage as he ducked his head to enter.
Jack Yap’s slender body twitched. His jaw hardened to honed edges. He gazed towards the dark hills and thought of running, just him and his egg. Escape. But the next moment he heard Pudding singing the egg song softly to himself, in words only Jack could understand, and Jack just barely, and as much as he longed to let the wilderness devour all sign of him, Jack Yap lingered. The egg glimmered in its stone cradle like faerie treasure, and Jack Yap could not help but peer inside. With a shuddering flash, the shell vitrified, and like clearest glass or crystal showed (as through a window), the infant within, asleep, scaled and tailed and horned in dragon-form, snoring thin blue flames. Then the shell grew white as bone again.
“Well, I’ll think far on it, my Tam,” he told the little changeling girl. “Dream soft and worry not. Jack’s brain is a-muttering tonight.”
But Marm’s shadow fell over Jack Yap and the boot. Inside that darkness, the egg blazed up like the birth of a rainbow.
“Very pretty, Jackie,” said his Marm.
And she hit him over the head with the coal scuttle.
#
Jack Yap bleared awake to the sound of the cottage falling down around his ears.
With not quite his normal nimbleness, but with considerable presence of mind for one who had been brained, he dragged himself to the far side of the chicken coop and took cover. There was a terrible groaning of beams bending, stone cracking, chains snapping, wattle pulling free from daub and patches of thatch thumping to the floor. In the midst of it all was a sound Jack Yap knew well, though he’d never heard it quite at that decibel before.
“MURRRRRRR!”
Jack Yap began to laugh.
Pudding, it seemed, did not like being chained to his bed much past that special morning time reserved for his sprinkle and splat out there in the chicken yard. And since Marm was gone and Jack Yap had been dead–or as near to dead as the coalscuttle could render him–to the world, it fell to Pudding to leave his prison bed by whatever means he could. No matter what walls stood in his way.
#
There was a man at market who knew the price of eggs. That did not mean he was not a lie and cheat and miserable old beggar; in fact, he had once tried to sell Jack Yap five beans in exchange for Marm’s brown cow. Jack Yap had kicked the old man in his wooden leg repeatedly until he offered good coin, and after that they had gone on as tolerable friends. Jack Yap and Pudding went to him first, for so would Marm have done with the skinchanger’s egg.
“Ah! It is the crafty young fellow with the spicular feet!” exclaimed the old man. “In answer to your question–yes, indeed, young master, yes indeed! At dawn today there was a matronly woman graced my booth, whose vulpine locks and butcher’s grin indicated a close consanguineous relationship with your diminutive and lethal lordship. What relation she bore to that huge monster yonder is any man’s guess, for surely such a tiny body as hers would have split in twain bringing that bulk into the world.”
The old man’s white-whiskery nod indicated Pudding, who was shambling about the marketplace, accepting free bread and mead from vendors too terrified to let him come under their stalls.
“Old man,” Jack Yap leaned into the counter on the sharps of his elbows, “you talk like a twat, toothless though you are, but I like you, so I won’t kick you dead just yet. Did Marm have my egg on her?”
The old man scratched his chin. The sound of it was like chicken claws on wire mesh, and dried skin fell in fine snowflakes to his grizzled chest.
“That she did, that she did,” he admitted. “Your admirable progenitress and the virile young man with her, whose mammoth musculature connoted daily labor in some geologic field, such as the quarries of our craggy wilderness, had with them an ovoid object most rare and costly, the monetary worth of which your lady mother most fervently desired me to evaluate.”
“What did you tell her?” Jack Yap grabbed the old man by his ratty collar and shook him the same way he had shaken a thousand eggs dead. He shook him until he could hear the old man’s dry old brains rattling around in his head, until the old heartbeat stuttered and clacked like a sack full of bones and the web-work of his skin turned gray and blue.
“Gold!” choked the old man. “That egg’s worth gold and jewels and gems and half the king’s realm, plus his son’s hand in marriage and his daughter’s first born child!”
Jack Yap released him. Not gently. The old man collapsed where he stood and died not half a day later, but by then Jack Yap and his brother were far from that place.
“PUDDING!” he roared. “Pudding man! I need you!”
Pudding, as has been noted, had great big legs that had not as yet come to the end of their growing. He swiped a fourth loaf of black bread and a flagon full of mead and meandered back towards the origin of his brother’s urgent voice. His stone-clamped feet wanted but a step or three to overtake Jack, who had bounded out of the old man’s stall in search of him. Jack Yap glared up at Pudding with red fire in his long, cruel eyes and his scarred, cunning mouth began to smile. Pudding recognized this particular smile as a creature-killing smile. He began to chortle and chuckle wetly with pleasure. Jack Yap took him by the hand.
“Put me on your shoulders, Puds! There’s a few folks down this road want stomping, and I know just the two young boys to do it, says I.”
#
Marm and the mason sat on the mason’s large mattress and stared at the egg. The changeling babe had been taunting them all morning with brief glimpses of her beauty–now a black colt, now a firebird, now a pearl of a girl–but for hours since lunch the egg had prove impenetrable. Nor the heat of the hearth nor the freeze of the cellar could make glass of the stone. Neither flat-bladed chisel nor tooth chisel broke the shell, nor hammer and tongs, nor did dashing it against the wall prove method of entrance. Marm and the mason were quite flummoxed.
“It won’t be worth much if it keeps looking like a lump!” Marm cried. “The old man said a changeling slave girl would sell to a higher bid than the king’s own daughter–and the princess is half witch herself!”
The mason gave the skinchanger’s egg another mighty blow of his hammer. The egg rocked a little but did not so much as dent.
“How to hatch it? How to hatch it?” Marm pondered. “Shouldn’t have struck my little Jackie down, now should I? He knows all about them hill creatures like he knows his alphabet. Always a bright boy, my baby bantam, my daffy little bullybum.” She shrugged philosophically and regarded the egg.
“Never mind the hammer, lovey,” she told the mason. “Thought of gold has my thighs so tingled, I’ll need a roll or I won’t catch three winks tonight. Put that great bowling ball beneath the bed. Perhaps our bouncing’ll give it a crack, eh?”
The mason grunted in his usual way and tossed the egg aside. Marm chucked her dress and the mason grabbed her breasts and they set to a nice rough tumble on the hay tick.
Marm and the mason were just getting on in the usual way (the usual way going something like this: “Oh, no! Oh, yes! Oh, God! Oh, gold! It’s gold! It’s gold we’ll get, it’s aaaaauuuggghhh!!!”) when Jack Yap climbed through the mason’s low square-cut window. He quietly went to the door of the cottage and unlatched it for Pudding, who stooped inside as though velvet shod, for all his boots were stone.
The brothers stood over the wheezing mattress, looking down at the sweat-soaked clowns upon it: one brother so tall his head near brushed the roof, the other so small he had to crane to get perspective on the heaving things. Pudding had his boots. Jack Yap had an iron poker he had pillaged from the ruins o
f their cottage.
“Me first,” Jack Yap breathed, and he brought the poker down. The sound it made was something like “THWACK!” but with a bit more juice and crack in it.
After a moment or two, Pudding joined in the fun.
#
The hay tick was a blood-sodden mess when the brothers were through, and Jack Yap was feeling just the slightest smidge of tired. His head still ached something fierce from the coalscuttle, and the red fire that had fueled his eyes and the killing machine of his skinny, poker-bearing arm had all but banked its devil flames. He fished the egg out from under all the mess and cradled it close to his thin chest.
“Hush now,” he crooned to it. “Jack Yap’s come back to fetch you, Tam my child. And Uncle Pudding too.”
The skinchanger’s egg pulsed and flashed in Jack Yap’s arms. Though it was warm and sticky, positively writhing in blood, the egg was brighter than ever and seemed almost to be chiming.
Pudding began humming the egg song, perhaps supposing a soothing sound was in order. He was eating parts of what used to be the mason’s muscular arm, for stomping things always made him marvelous hungry.
And then the egg began to rock.
The skinchanger’s egg began to rock.
It rocked and chimed and rang like faerie bells, and then it began to flame and flare and flicker. It grew warm in Jack Yap’s hands, then scalding hot, then cold as ice, and then the shell began to splinter. It splintered, shivered, and exploded, and where each shard of burst shell fell, it turned into diamond and pearl and silver. Pudding, who liked shiny bits, murred excitedly and bent to pick up the pieces. In this way, he missed the birth entirely, and missed the precise moment Jack Yap met his changeling child. It was probably better for all three of them that he did, for Pudding had been Jack’s only darling for so long that it might have been a blow to find himself supplanted in a heartbeat. Or–and this was more likely, as brains are brains and Pudding’s weren’t much–the portentous event might have meant the merest nothing to Pudding. Few things did.
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