by Chuck Wendig
Miranda’s mouth tightens into a firm line. “It’s a risk. A very big risk. Especially with you going along—let your Harpies go. You can remain behind. If you’re injured, or worse . . .”
“My girls are the knives, and I am the one wielding them.”
“And who is wielding you?”
Enyastasia twitches. She tries not to, but there it is. What is Miranda playing at? Is Miranda suggesting that she controls Enyastasia? Or that she wants to? Or that nobody does—and that’s the problem? Shake it off. “You have to trust me. I won’t fail at this. Someone has to go into that nest of vipers and cut off their heads.” She hesitates. “Do you trust me?”
Miranda purses her lips.
Enyastasia thinks: I don’t want to have to kill you, too.
But the architect nods. “I trust you. Go. Bring us back their heads.”
Later, Enyastasia lays out seven ace notes, each one flipping forward with an audible thwip—“The currency of the filthy Heartlanders,” she says. “But now, these seven cards are our currency.”
Suddenly, the yacht takes a hard bump. The air: choppy today. Winds moving in. Somewhere, she figures, a twister is etching a line across the corn and the yacht is catching a taste of it way up here.
The yacht can handle it. It was her father’s once.
She pulled it out of storage for just this purpose.
That pleases her. To take something that was his and to subvert it to her own purposes. This was where he kept her. Where she was forced into a box and made to stay. And listen. And weep. And foul herself.
He is dead now, and she is alive. Her father was a stain on the legacy of the Ormond name, a legacy she reclaims tonight.
Across the table, seven pairs of eyes watch her.
Seven girls, standing stock straight. Hands clasped behind their backs. Faces painted, scarred, branded. Guns at their hips, knives strapped to legs.
My Harpies. Each without a name. Oh, they had names once. But those names are erased. Willfully forgotten. Identities eradicated—these girls become one. Each just Harpy. They sleep together. Eat together. Live together. They are one entity, not seven separate.
In the old stories, it was the Harpies’ job to take revenge on those who killed their sisters, their families, and snatch up the evildoers and deliver them to the nest of the Dirae. All of them, sky-spirits and cloud-creatures, half-bird, half-human. Diviners of the law. Executors of justice.
And so it is today.
On each ace note, a name and a sketch.
“These are the ones calling themselves the Boxelder Seven,” the Dirae says. “They are villains. Evildoers of the highest order. They are parasites inside the body of the fallen Saranyu, repurposing its corpse and defiling it for their own purposes. What do we do with evildoers?”
In unison, the girls say:
“We claim them with our claws, we throw them to the wind, we break their bodies and water the corn with their blood.”
“Again.”
“We claim them with our claws, we throw them to the wind, we break their bodies and water the corn with their blood!”
“Again!”
Claws! Wind! Bodies! Blood!
All these girls: they will be the justice she wants.
(A small voice inside her says: To be the justice you need.)
Justice for a world where her legacy—the flotilla, the Ormond Stirling Saranyu—was swatted out of the air and robbed by brigands and idiots.
“These seven are the heads of the hydra. These heads must be taken for the beast to die. When they die, the city they have built from the bones of our home will die with them.” To think, the old fools wanted to just send the Herfjotur there, start blasting away. As if that would matter. To kill a colony of bees, you must find and extinguish its queen. To win that simplest, stupidest of games, Checks, you had to kill the queen. You don’t kill kings and queens with hammers. You cut them from the tapestry with fine razor blades. Enter the Dirae and her Harpies. “Are we ready?”
In simultaneity: “We are ready, Dirae.”
She gives a sharp nod.
The girls each step back. They raise their arms into the straps hanging above them—each tugs on a circular chest plate, a narrow metal ring molded to their bodies with shimmering blue glass in its center.
Cut from hover-panel tech.
They tighten the straps. This happens mechanically, the Harpies timed almost perfectly to one another. Enyastasia thinks with stifled surprise: They really are one entity. They move as one, think as one. I did it. I win.
Each reaches down, pulls red-lensed goggles from their hips.
They put them on, too.
Enyastasia mirrors their movements: She steps back, grabs the straps, puts on the hover-plate. She denies herself the goggles. She wants to see everything. Wants to feel the sting of the cold air and hard wind in her eyes.
She nods again, then says:
“Let us descend.”
They shout together: “Let us descend!”
The Dirae reaches up, finds a handle there—
She pulls it.
Several gunshot bangs in quick succession—
And then the floor is gone. Falling out from underneath them.
They fall down through the night. Stars streaking. Wind whipping their hair, chapping their exposed skin.
Together they fall toward Pegasus City, far below them in the Heartland.
REAPING WITH THE SWEEP OF THE SCYTHE
IN GWENNIE’S HEAD, it’s a twisted mash-up. Like two motorvators that crashed together and became one. Or like a Heartlander suffering the Blight, she thinks. On the one hand, this is Harvest Home. It looks like Harvest Home: the stands selling food, the booths running games, the people carrying bowls of chicha beer. It feels like it, too: the twang of a banjo, the smell of roasted corn, the dizzy, drunken feel even before she’s gotten properly dizzy and drunk.
But then—the Empyrean feeling bleeds in, like water soaking a towel. She sees the signs and sigils and remnants of the Seventh Heaven: a statue of a Pegasus with its hooves up and out as if it’s about to crush some poor Heartlander, a woman laughing and gnawing on a carrot that’s big as a baby’s arm (carrots, after all, were not on the list of acceptable foods back in Boxelder), the shine of visidexes, the clink of liquor bottles once too good and too rare for all but the most influential Heartlanders.
It’s Harvest Home, but gilded with an Empyrean edge. A Heartlander tradition in chrome and silver, given wings, made to fly.
She wanders into the crowd, feeling suddenly alone. Some of these people she knows a little bit—over there, one-armed Wesley Wong stands behind the plywood booth running a wheel of chance, and behind the big line at Sully’s Kitchen wagon is the hefty-chested Benigna Batts. But all told, these people are strangers to her—familiar for their Heartlanderness, perhaps, but no more her townsfolk than the people who lived on the Saranyu.
It’s then that she misses Boxelder with an ache. Like something’s been removed from her—some unknown vital organ between her stomach and her heart. Her grief over its loss is suddenly so real it feels like it’s about to knock her legs out from under her. And then, when she thinks about Boxelder and that loss, the door is open to thinking about Cael, and what Wanda told her . . .
Rigo suddenly jostles up alongside Gwennie.
“Oops,” he says, fake bumping into her. He holds up a bowl of chicha beer. “Got you this!” The foamy, sour beer almost sloshes over the lip.
She waves it off. “I think I’m good. Thanks, though, Rigo.”
“Oh, come on! We have some celebrating to do—Boyland rubbed together his two brain cells and came up with the location of the Maize Witch’s secret weapon, oooooh. And maybe we have a plan to break the blockade. And I notice that you and Cael have been getting a little chummy again—”
“Cael doesn’t own me. We’re not a thing.” She hears her own voice and realizes she’s protesting a little too loudly.
“I di
dn’t say—wait, what?” Rigo’s face is a house of cards, collapsing. “Oh no. Oh, jeez. What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” she says, stern-faced. Then takes the bowl of beer and tosses it back. Foamy, spit-slick, sour. Just like home. The rush that goes to her head is more from the lack of oxygen when guzzling it, but just the same—it’s a nice precursor of the drunk she now decides has to come. “Nothing.”
“I don’t understand—”
She says the words without even really meaning to let them out—it’s like closing the barn door halfway and then finding a horse slamming them open once more before bolting.
“I felt differently this time,” she says. “In Boxelder, we got together because . . . because we were two dumb kids, and it was a lot of fun, but we always—or at least I always—knew it would end. Obligation Day and all that. And then everything went sideways, and I ended up on the Saranyu and . . . I saw him that one last time. He’d still been carrying a candle for me and almost died doing it.” Her volume rises to compensate for the crowd. “Lord and Lady, I thought he did die! And that killed me. Killed me. I realized, I think I love this dumbass. Gods, can you believe I almost married Boyland? Jeez-dang. Then: here. Pegasus City. I was the one who started it with Cael. It was me, okay? Not him. I was playing like it was no big thing, but it was a big thing because suddenly the rules had all gone out the dang window. I looked forward. I could see a life where he and I were together, a real team! Maybe we had kids, maybe we ran some scavenger crew somewhere picking through the Empyrean bones, maybe we’d leave the Heartland and see a world that two years ago we didn’t even know existed. But all that’s done and gone now. Window’s shut. Door’s closed.”
Rigo blinks, and his face wilts. “I only heard, like, half of that, but I got the gist. I’m sorry. Maybe it’ll still work out between you two. . . .”
“Yeah.” A big, empty laugh. “No.”
She wants to yell: Wanda’s pregnant. Pregnant with what, I dunno. Maybe she isn’t even pregnant at all. Maybe it’s all a ruse. A lie to keep me out of the equation. The girl was nice enough when she told her. She almost seemed human again. Until the end of it, when she said to Gwennie: “I’m sorry this happened. But if you try to ruin things, like you tend to do, then I will kill you where you stand.” Before saying once more: “I’m sorry, again.”
Rigo reaches up and hugs her. Gwennie almost spills her beer. She leans forward, catches the rim of the bowl and sucks down any of the near-spillover.
As they’re embracing awkwardly, a third body pivots and hip-checks them—at first she thinks it must be someone else from the Boxelder Seven, maybe Lane, or even Boyland (certainly not Cael, not now), but it’s someone she’s seen and doesn’t know—a haggard ragman, an old hobo whose mouth is a ruined cupful of broken dice. He gestures at them with a jar of something that smells strong enough to strip the fur off a shuck rat and yells:
“I saw stars falling! The stars falling right upon us—”
Rigo shoves him back. “Bortigan, this isn’t the time, you old drunk.”
“Blue lights, streaks of blue lights—bright as the blue blazes!”
The weather-beaten hobo mutters as he wanders into the crowd, swilling his jar of paint stripper, white-lightning whiskey. He tumbles away like a wad of blowing trash.
“I gotta go find Scooter and Squirrel. I think Mom should be here by now. . . .” Her words fall apart in her mouth, and she really just wants to say: I’m gonna go find a blanket to hide under and cry and drink this awful beer until the sun rises or sleep finds me or the world ends or whatever.
That, however, isn’t an option. Her mother really is here somewhere with the two kids.
Without saying anything else, she pulls away from Rigo and heads into the throng, putting on the bravest face she can muster.
“Why the long face, goat?” Lane asks.
Cael lifts an eyebrow. “It’s why the long face, horse.”
“Yeah, well, we ain’t got any horses, do we?” He smiles—a big, boozy grin. A few Heartlanders pass behind him and shout—Mayor!—before clapping him on the back hard enough that he spills a bit of whiskey from his glass. “Haha! Good men, good men.” He pops his lips. “Hey, besides, goats have long faces.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I am in my cups, as they say.” He gives a woozy wink. “Oh, what? Come on, this is Harvest Home, Cap’n! This is like all the grand old times getting secretly drunk around the adults, except this time, it’s not so secret!”
Cael finds a small smile at that: “It wasn’t much of a secret then, either.”
“Ha, probably not, probably not. Still, it’s nice to be the ones in charge for once, isn’t it?” Lane narrows his gaze, looks Cael up and down. “You look like a man with troubles on his shoulders. An ox with a too-heavy yoke.”
At first, Cael isn’t even sure if he wants to tell Lane. The lanky beanpole has enough to worry about: running a city, trying to undermine an Empyrean blockade, navigating the emotional bramble-patch that is Killian Kelly.
But Lane’s his friend. And he needs someone to talk to. Badly.
“Wanda’s pregnant.”
It takes a second to pierce the miasma of inebriation, but the news finally gets there. When it does, Lane’s jaw hangs loose like a door knocked off its hinges. “Holy shitfire and damnation. You’re gonna be a father. You’re gonna be a father!” He guffaws and slaps Cael on the arm, then wraps himself around Cael like creeper ivy up a crooked tree. “I don’t know whether to be happy for you or scared for the world. Look out, Heartland, another McAvoy on the way!” He whistles and loops his arm around Cael’s neck, then pushes his glass of whiskey to Cael’s lips.
Cael sighs and goes with it, lets the whiskey leave a trail of burning caramel down the back of his throat.
“I’m gonna be a shit dad,” he says to Lane.
“Nonsense. Cease those shenanigans, Captain. Quit it right damn now.”
Cael shakes his head. “No, seriously. What the hell, man, I’m no good for anybody. I’m a dope, a dumbass, as much of a donkey as Boyland Barnes Jr. is. I don’t know squat about squat, and I make good decisions, ohh, about half the time—and that half is because I got lucky, not because I got wise.”
Lane leans in, says loudly in Cael’s ear with the intimate proximity drunks so often favor: “The fact you recognized this fact? Shows you’re gonna be just fine. You’re the captain, Cap. Your crew’s just growing by one is all. We’ll figure this out together. We’ll all be the kid’s family.”
“You mean that?”
“Of course I mean it. Way I see it, that means I’m gonna be an uncle. I can’t wait to meet the little—er, boy?”
“Girl.”
“Haha, oh, by the sulfurous balls of Old Scratch, you are in trouble. I can’t wait to meet her, seriously. Cael. Cael. You listening?”
Cael sighs. “I’m listening.”
“You got this.” He leans forward, kisses Cael on the temple. “Now, I notice that both you and I are without a drink, and I have a bottle of eighteen-year Moon Isle malted whiskey squirreled away in a nearby bolthole. I don’t know what it is or what it tastes like, but I want to crack the cork and try it with you. Can I go get it?”
Cael grins. “You got my blessing, Mayor.”
Another kiss to the temple, and Lane is off, pirouetting through the crowd, clapping shoulders and cackling like a happy madman. Cael’s glad they mended fences. Lane’s a true friend. That boy is bona fide.
Lane’s fingers search under the shelf of rubble—they touch something cold, something that spins a bit away from his probing digits.
“Ahh, dangit, get . . . over . . . here.” His fingers spin the glass.
I hid this thing too well.
It’s away from the crowds. The pile of rubble is one that still hasn’t been cleaned up, though it’s been drawn on with paint and chalk by some of the few children who are here in Pegasus City. In the distance someone yells: “Hey, Mayor, you
lose something? The keys to the Mayormobile or something?”
Folks are laughing and he knows they’re laughing with him, not at him, but growing up where he did, any laughter still has the chance of making him feel oddly small and unwittingly persecuted—but he can give as good as he gets, and so while looking under the rubble, he lifts his free hand and gives the catcallers a well-extended, up-thrust middle finger.
He won’t let it ruin his good time. They don’t mean anything by it. Lane’s just drunk—booze can turn one’s mood the way wind turns a mill. Tonight, though, he has a great deal to be happy about. The city has come together for Harvest Home. A city he helped build with an event he helped put together. Heartlander solidarity on display—all with the help of the Boxelder Seven. Old friends. Even Boyland, that brick-headed dunk-tank. And now Cael and Wanda having a baby—
There! There. His fingers finally get atop the bottle and manage to pull it in the right direction. The bottle rolls out into his hand.
The label is weathered, worn, yellowed. A blue ink moon like an old raider tattoo next to a sketch of an island chain. Moon Isle. The number 18 handwritten at the bottom of the label. The cork sealed into the bottle with wax the color of blue spruce. The whiskey sloshes, and for a moment Lane thinks: Maybe I’ll visit Moon Isle someday. Wherever it is. There must be people there, right? Certainly the fish aren’t bottling whiskey!
When all this is done, when he’s a bit older, a journey is in order.
Bottle in hand, Lane stands.
And there stands someone right behind him.
He turns, frowns. “I don’t know you. Thought I knew everybody.”
The girl looks up—the electric lights strung up all around illuminate a face that looks almost like broken pottery. Her scar tissue—the “cracks”—painted with a shimmering gold, or bronze.
The knife-blade flashes.
Cael kicks a bit of broken brick. Not far away, the crowds seem whipped up even more than they were before—lots of laughing, lots of drinking. This was a good idea, Harvest Home. When Rigo came up with the idea, Lane thought it would be a mockery—as much a facsimile as a scarecrow, fake and obviously unreal, but damnit if it wasn’t a thing people really needed. He looks around. Folks venting steam. Letting it all hang out.