by Jordan Reece
“Arden! Can you hear me?”
There were dragons in the trees, gray-and-blacks and battle golds, and a larger light gray on the ground. Arden called them over. They screeched and shrieked over the quiet river, Volos taking in more scent and nodding that the soldier was following the racket. Arden commanded the dragons to fly around over the bodies and fight, one or another dipping down to nip at the flesh and the others chasing it off to claim the corpses for their own.
“She’s watching,” Volos said, peering through a crack in the boulders. “Her hand is over her mouth in horror.”
FIRE. The light gray dragon reeled back and blasted fire at the battle gold as it dove down. The flames missed it and engulfed the bodies instead. When it lifted, they were nothing but ash on the water.
“What is she doing now?” the duke asked.
“Retreating,” Volos said. “She can only track Briala if she has me, and now she does not. But she still knows you are going to Havanath.”
“But not where in Havanath, she has no immediate means of crossing the brother, and it is only four more days for us to reach Halaima. Since you will not take our money, we will invest the last in a fast horse and carriage when we get to Kado and make it two days. Then Briala will send a letter to the papers in every land announcing our marriage. Her father can do nothing then. No Isle Zayre prince will marry a woman who has given herself to another man.”
He inclined his head to them. “I would suggest you make haste from the forest. Should any other force come along to stop us, this will become a place of illusion once more.”
“We have no wish to linger,” Volos said with barely restrained excitement.
“A day’s journey from here will see you to the town of Amberg, should you need supplies for a longer journey to the Cascades. Just travel along the river and you will not miss it. Good travels to you, freemen.”
“Good travels,” Arden said, and all inclined their heads in farewell.
The duke slipped away to the campsite. Two voices mumbled back and forth, and footsteps rapidly faded to nothing. Arden and Volos looked at one another, and then joy stole over Arden at this unexpected grace. They would not be followed. Neither belonged to anyone. No one would even know that they lived, and everything, everything was possible now.
“Let’s not keep our family waiting, shall we?” Volos asked, taking Arden’s hand. “It’s a long trip.”
“Not so long,” Arden said as they walked into the green. Already he could see them coming to the goddess rocks and going past them to the pearls. To the shouts on the mountains of the tracker returned, his brothers and mother pushing through the floods of people to see this miracle for themselves. Smiles and cries, laughter and open arms, and Volos bringing Arden into the embrace. The celebration would go on and on long into the night.
And then the stars would light them home.
THE END
HEXED
by Jules Oswald and Jordan Reece
Chapter One
“What do you look like?” Nicoli asked.
Bruno’s voice was a glass of warm milk, smooth and soothing, a peaceful stream in the war of noise that was the hospital. The tumult of beeping and scraping, clipped footsteps and squeaking wheels kept Nicoli’s nerves sharpened to a razor’s edge.
A soft Southern drawl slipped through the battlefield untouched to wrap Nicoli snugly in its fleece. “I’m ugly as sin.”
Nicoli laughed and turned onto his side in the bed to face Bruno. It was a muscle memory from when he could see, because one faced a man in order to look at him. But the bandages were snug around Nicoli’s head, bisecting him into a forehead above and a nose and mouth below. “I don’t believe that for a second.”
“But it’s true,” Bruno said, and his laugh was the rumble of an earthquake. Losing his eyes had sharpened Nicoli’s ears, and though Bruno had claimed to be old, Nicoli found his voice to be young. “I’m looking at myself in the mirror right now.”
“Tell me what you see.”
“I see a wave of hair pulling back from shore, and bare skin left behind. My forehead stretches up and up, naked and gleaming, and it is riven with deep cracks as if baked overlong in the sun. It’s the scalp of an aging professor, pale from decades in lecture halls. These are the cracks that science makes. English and history wrinkle the eyes, and an overlong study of math exacts a toll on the lips. But science, science draws its trenches in the forehead. ”
Such bullshit. Nicoli had been deeply annoyed when a nurse told him that he could no longer have the room to himself, yet now he would be extremely distressed should Bruno be moved out. The good-natured man filled the terrible darkness with words and stories and jokes, and read the newspaper end to end out loud each morning so that Nicoli could be distracted from his thoughts. In an hour, he had become Nicoli’s friend. In a day, Nicoli was half in love with the voice and the kindness.
Just half? He was in love with this man, sight unseen.
“And your eyes?” Nicoli asked.
An aftershock traveled to his ears. “Two round black beads strung much too closely together upon a chain. They are the eyes of a sneaky man, a swindler, a knave, a man who people know instinctively not to trust. It is not a fair assessment of my character, if I may be so immodest to say, but I cannot help what they find in the windows to my soul. And pinched between these eyes is my grandfather’s nose. It’s quite horrifying.”
“How can a nose be horrifying?”
“By its size, its gargantuan size. You could stand beneath my nose on a bright summer day and fall into shade beneath its tower. Perhaps it would present as balanced in an equally large face, but this nose of mine gained its unnatural height by robbing my cheeks and lips and chin of their flesh. I am a scalp of white smoke and deep ravines folded over a rodent’s eyes, but most of all, Nicoli, I am a nose.”
“Are you thin? Fat? An apple or a pear?”
“An Egyptian mummy: drained of organs save the heart, dehydrated and sunken and wrapped in cloths. This burglar of a nose did it to me. I am nothing to look at, nothing at all to tempt a man into loving me, and once your sight is back, you will see this for yourself.”
Nicoli loved him anyway, hideous looks and all. “If it comes back, Christ God be merciful. In three days, I will know.”
The screech of a pained bird came from the next room, and Bruno’s voice brushed it away. “When it comes back.”
“And if it does not? That happens often, the doctors tell me. The odds are not weighed in my favor in this game of chance.”
“Tell me what you will lose. Do you work?”
“I’ve worked for seven years in a tiny shop of trinkets. Not hexes,” he added hastily. “No black-market, under the counter trade. Baskets of lucky rings, rings full of love ribbons, we have trick coins, charmed teas, carved guardian animals and much more . . . I do not think any of them even work. They are simply novelties for tourists coming to New York City who wish a bit of Old World flavor to take home. I stand at the counter and count pennies most of the day. If my sight quits me with these bandages, I will not be able to do that anymore.”
He would be shuttled to an infirm home to idle away the rest of his life among the aged and mentally feeble. At twenty-five, and in otherwise perfect health, that would be a very long time.
Twenty-five! To end up in an infirm home was a horror to consider. His soul was still full of green forest paths to walk, and he shuddered to be dragged into this nightmarish new reality where every unsighted path ended in a pebbled wall.
“Are you there?” Nicoli asked, frightened by the dark and quiet.
“I’m here,” Bruno said.
“It is not the job in and of itself. The job could be any job. I am trained for little. But it is a job, my job, and that is what I will lose. I’m strong, but I cannot lift planks when my eyes don’t see ahead to where they should be placed. I can write and read and figure, however simply, yet what use will any of those skills be in the blackness? All
that will be left to me is a life hinged on mercies. A life listening to what others can see, a life remembering what once I saw. Had I known . . .”
“Had you known, what would you have looked at longer?”
Nicoli would have looked at the food on his plate and the rain through the window. He would have looked more closely at all he passed in his walks through Central Park, and lingered upon the view of a handsome man. “Everything.”
“If you were granted five minutes?”
Five minutes. Nicoli pondered such a terrible gift as that. “I think that I would spend it strolling upon Fifth Avenue on a rainy day.”
“Ah, yes, all of those umbrellas bubbling up like black balloons beneath the malcontented gray sky. I love that, too.”
“And the stores, Bruno. Each window shines into the darkness like Christmas to me, with heaps upon heaps of delights through the twinkling glass. Since we came here on a visit from upstate when I was a boy, I have loved to walk there. It was upon Fifth Avenue where I saw my first rumble buggy three or four years ago. Where were you when you first saw one?”
“In the Skirmish I saw plenty of those dashed steam cars when they were the sole province of the military.”
“Hah! So you are not that old if you fought in the Skirmish. I tried to enlist, to bring glory to my name, but they did not believe I was seventeen. A greatly aggrieved boy several years shy of his mark was sent home without ceremony.”
“I could just as easily be a man who cut his teeth as a foot soldier in the War of Brothers, and grew to lead them in the Skirmish.”
This was also possible, since the brothers of the North and South had dueled to the finish a little more than thirty years ago. Yet the game of guessing was all that Nicoli had for entertainment.
In his heart, though, he felt that his guess was right. Bruno might be ugly, but he was no old man. Perhaps he was no more than a few scant years older than Nicoli himself, which would make him an infant or not even born during the War of Brothers.
“What did you do in the Skirmish then?” Nicoli asked.
“I saw things for which I would be thankful for blindness, with no disrespect intended to you.”
“No offense is taken. I do not mean to pry into a soldier’s tales. I am sure they are fearful indeed.”
“Not all. War is an equal balance between boredom and fear, though the boredom lasts nine-tenths of the time and the fear only dwells in that paltry remainder. But powerful, yes, that fear. It wipes out all else.”
“The fear of death in battle?”
“The fear of death in battle is great, yet just as great is the fear from knowing. You will never feel as insignificant in your life as you do when facing the mad, rampaging beast of death upon a battlefield. It does not matter if you die. It does not matter if you live. Most of us are such small cogs in the great machine of this world, but we do not like to know ourselves as utterly insignificant, to face the truth that whether we tiny gears spin merrily along or break our teeth and stop, the machine continues on without so much as a falter. For our lives matter deeply to us, naturally, and to us our lives are full, rich, formidable things. We do not want to let go of this illusion, but war strips it away without mercy. We are nothing but a still hand and blood browning in the grass.”
“I had not thought of it like that.”
“You would have, had you gone to war. And you would never forget it. So do not mourn that overeager boy of your past going home. It was for the better. War is made of many things, but glory . . . glory is finishing first upon a track. It is the day you realize you have given your heart to a man, and that man returns his own heart to you. There is no glory to be found in pulling a trigger and watching the enemy fall.”
A storm of voices passed down the hall, crackling with thunder as a patient in distress was hurried away. When the ruckus tapered to trickles, Nicoli said, “Were you on the front lines, Bruno?”
“No. I worked with the hex men, though a good half of them were women.”
“You are a scientist!”
“A soldier-scientist, though no more. In the Skirmish, I sought caches everywhere from the bowels of ships to the earth beneath pigpens, and fought for them when necessary.”
“You missed one,” Nicoli said in a weak joke.
“We missed thousands. There was no way to uproot them all. But for missing yours, I apologize.”
“Why are you in the hospital?” Nicoli asked the question mostly because he liked Bruno’s fanciful answers.
A staccato of feet heralded the arrival of nurses. Before they could begin their checks and balances, Bruno said lightly, “I went to Central Park with bread in my pockets. Never underestimate the damage a swarm of those ducks can do.”
Chapter Two
Nicoli dwelled in darkness by day, but at night he opened his eyes to light.
No color was muted in his dreams. It was all loud and glaring and beautiful. Blue was blue, as radiant and breathtaking as a field of violets; red was red, rubies of blood spilling over the floor at Clant’s as mugs of burning amber liquid transformed into fleshy rainbow brawls.
He had only ever gone to Clant’s because it was across the street from the trinket shop, a matter of proximity far more than affection. Now he sat at a table as a ghostly dream form, watching four men thrash like a tangle of eels over an inexplicable grievance. Top hats swilled their drinks at fancy places like Sumner & Sigh, and bowler hats queued at the Hutton. But Clant’s was for the cloth caps gracing a workingman’s crown, and the market stall cast-offs that dressed them.
Then he turned away from the fight, hearing the coax of a flute behind him, and there was Dallen.
Nicoli jerked awake, his heart at a gallop over cobblestones. Was it night? Or was it day? He had no way to know. He tried to feel the hour upon his skin. Failing this, he asked, “Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
Nicoli reached for the edges of the bed, ran his hands along the twisted blanket, anything to orient him in space. “Speak to me? Even lies?”
“In most things I am truthful, just as you.”
“I have told you no falsehoods.”
“It is no crime to try a trinket or to sell them, despite what some people may think.”
“The lie was white. I did not want to upset you, should you have a prejudice.”
Sheets rustled in Bruno’s bed. “Little spells if any from the Old World, they are harmless things either way to my knowledge. I could not have stood in a store of trinkets for seven years and refused to bolster my luck. Even just a lucky ring, costing me a dime yet finding me a nickel, would have found its way onto my finger.”
“One did, several years ago,” Nicoli admitted. “And from how long and how far I walked to find that nickel, I cannot say that it was magic to place it there. Since then I have kept my dimes and left the rings alone. The luck is only for the shopkeeper in selling them.”
“How is it that people do not just simply steal them by the handfuls to make a profit?”
“To steal a lucky ring is to render the spell inactive. So while they are the most shoplifted object upon the shelves, it is some consolation that the robbers enjoy no benefit from them.”
“Fascinating. I am a somewhat learned man, but in my academics the study of trinkets was largely overlooked. Teach me what you hold in that head of yours.”
“I am no academic of trinkets, so I don’t know where to start.”
“You work in a shop full of them. Start there. Sell me a trinket, Nicoli, like you have done with your customers. What can I do with this dollar in change? If I were to give you ten dimes for ten rings and wear them all at once, would I find ten nickels at half my investment, or would their power altogether give me riches?”
“No, or I wouldn’t be working here anymore,” Nicoli said, having answered that question countless times. “Do you have any afflictions, sir? Along this wall we keep our charmed tea eggs, each with a different infusion matched to your disorder.”
<
br /> “Do I look disordered to you?” Bruno asked in umbrage.
“You look to be in smashing good health, sir, but perhaps your dear mother has a complaint. The charm in one of these teas could offer her respite for a time.”
“Well dodged. But my mother has gone to her reward, Christ God rest her soul. Are you quite sure that if I put a ring on each finger and a ring on each toe, and on any other appendage of mine upon which one would fit, that I would still be denied a kingly treasure?”
“I fear this is true.”
“Well, so it is. What else have you in this shop? Something to change this gnome’s visage of mine into a comely one?”
“We do indeed have a bracelet that can improve one’s looks, to a mild degree. Over here in the bucket by the counter, but be warned that it is a short-acting spell, and each time you wear it, the spell works a little less than before.”
“Then I shall buy as many bracelets as I can and strut around as a prince.”
“You cannot trick the spell this way. Buy one and understand it will ever be on a declining arc in its power.”
“You are a terrible salesman!” Bruno scolded. “Frame the negatives as positives or people shan’t buy a thing.”
Nicoli laughed at his displeased customer. He could see them clearly in his mind’s eye within the shop, green tendrils hanging down over their heads from the vines that wound through the latticework along the ceiling. Baskets and buckets cluttered every surface and crowded into the aisles, a kaleidoscope of colored trinkets in each one. On the other side of the counter was Bruno just as he had described himself, that rich voice coming from a wizened throat, his nose so large that it made a shadow fall over his thin lips. Standing beside the register was Nicoli, his dark hair pulled into a loose ponytail and his clothes hidden by his gray work-apron.