Beneath Ceaseless Skies #53

by Parks, Richard

  “Please.”

  The stryke clucked softly and held out the bound wrist. Abby dug the key from her apron pocket and sprang the lock. Swiftly the stryke folded the crumbles and the last sardine into a bundle, knotted it, and slipped it into the carrying sack. Then it stood—oh, it was taller than she’d thought, when she’d spied it from the corner of dining hall. It was taller even than her father, she thought now, maybe half as high again. Its wings still folded, it strode the few feet to the eyrie door and swung it open to the night sea air. Then it took Abby in its arms as easily as Nurse had done when there still was a nursery and it stepped from the eyrie’s edge.

  Abby’s mouth was open to scream, but no sound came as they plunged towards the surf. Then with a soft snap the wings opened and they hung suddenly in the air, stryke and girl, only halfway down the house. They began to circle, spiraling as the shrifts did but in wider, slower sweeps. The last lights of sunset glinted over the water. So calm it had looked from above, the waters temperate and orderly, but as they slowly dropped Abby could hear the waves heaving and breaking.

  A lift of a wing and their circle encompassed the whole of the house. They swung around it and Abby could see them now, the twin pillars of stone upon which she’d stood all her life. Suddenly she was dropping nearer, nearer, and then they dove and landed flat in the carved hollow in one pillar just a foot above the tide. The stryke set her down, upright, and she ignored the trembling in her legs as she crouched at the edge and dipped her fingers in the water.

  Salt! It tasted of salt as much as the sardines did, but with some wilder flavor, too—the seaweed, perhaps.

  She cupped seawater and splashed it on her face, and laughed. And then gave a sudden cry as the stryke leapt from the ledge and flapped upward.

  It could not leave her here! It couldn’t. How would she get up? She’d never known a tide before, but she knew of them, and the brimming pools etched in the walls at her back told her the water would rise above where she stood.

  But she hadn’t told the stryke to take her back. She had bargained badly, and now would it only honor the word of the bargain, and not the spirit? Cunning creatures, they were, that was what the cook had said. And hadn’t the sailor boy told of a pair of nesting strykes that killed their eyrie master and fled?

  And then the beat of wings returned and the stryke scrabbled again at the ledge and stepped tuck-winged into the hollow. She turned to scold it, but her eye caught on light in the water and she turned back again....

  A girl rose from the brine and clutched at the hollow’s edge with one hand, the other lifting a lantern flat like a seed pod and glowing a wet green light. Water streamed from her sea-black hair. She barked to the stryke and then she tossed her head, twice, keeping her eyes on Abby.

  This girl wasn’t like the stryke, trained to docility by a mage’s charms and whispers. She was wild—even Abby, who’d never met such a being, could see that. Her eyes glistened madly with flecks of peridot and gold, and they repelled and invited and saw Abby as she was sure she’d never been seen before. They mocked her.

  Abby crept forwards, newly trembling, and then suddenly the girl let go the ledge and seized Abby’s arm. Pulling her close, she reached up and kissed her once on one cheek, once on the other with lips cool and wet. Then the girl laughed a barking sort of laugh and flung herself backwards into the sea, and instantly she was gone, her light blinking out a moment after.

  Abby’s cheeks were damp where the girl’s lips had been. She rubbed at one and licked her fingers, and they tasted briny and salt-wet.

  Abby rose. “Up, now?” she said. She had seen the pillars of her house and met a wild sea girl, and that was enough strangeness. Nor was the fear entirely eased that the stryke might leave her stranded at sea’s edge. But it didn’t; at her words it cradled her again, hopped from the ledge, and climbed wingbeat by wingbeat to the heights. She pointed to her bedroom balcony and it landed there just long enough to set her down. Then it was gone.

  Early, early next morning she returned the key to the rack where it hung, and then all the day she kept to the playroom while her father stormed of the lost stryke. She drew pictures of the sea and the girl and her lantern, though she tore them all to bits and threw them from the balcony when she was done. She knew they mustn’t be found.

  It was only later she understood that the stryke had flown without its guiding charm, the bit of magic that kept it flying down the north coast and up, down and up. It wouldn’t be caught by humankind again. She hadn’t understood that before, but she wasn’t sorry.

  It was later still that she understood what the sea girl had done when she’d kissed her, what binding charms were loosed and what new charms bound. For Abby was a girl no longer of the house, but of the sea, and when she was tall and grown it would be the sea she served.

  Copyright © 2010 Sarah L. Edwards

  Comment on this Story in the BCS Forums

  Sarah L. Edwards writes science fiction and fantasy, reads a lot, knits (anybody need a scarf?), and wonders what to do with this math degree she just got. Her fiction has previously appeared in Writers of the Future XXIV, Aeon Speculative Fiction, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Her stories have appeared four times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, including “The Tinyman and Caroline” in BCS #17 and the BCS anthology The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Year One.

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  MORE FULL OF WEEPING THAN YOU CAN UNDERSTAND

  by Rosamund Hodge

  During the later part of the war, the government issued a pamphlet on how to recognize changelings. Violet read it (a green tinge of the features; propensity to cruelty) and laughed. The real signs had been far more pervasive, far less clear. Sometimes she thought she had only realized she wasn’t human when she was fourteen. Sometimes she thought she had always known.

  The external, everyday things were always easy. She liked French, hated mathematics, and complained about her governess. She sailed toy boats with Thomas, bridled when he was patronizing, and once threw her oatmeal at him. She cried when a picnic was rained out, when she fell and scraped her knee, and when her governess disciplined her.

  Other things were harder. None were inexplicable.

  She did well at her piano lessons, but all music was only a string of notes to her. She supposed this was what Papa meant when he talked about his old tutor who was tone-deaf.

  There were nights she climbed out her window into the garden because she could not bear to be inside another moment, and she could never go back in till she had danced herself breathless. Mama shook her head and said that Aunt Maisie, too, had been a tomboy.

  She didn’t cry when her kitten or Grandmama died. She poked the kitten and she stood respectfully at the funeral, but both times she was curious, then bored. Thomas had once read her a poem that said hopeless grief was passionless.

  She knew she was different. She knew everyone else felt the same.

  Then the summer she was fourteen, they stayed with Papa’s family in the countryside. It was the last summer before the first rumours of the war began; a summer of sunshine and slight, warm breezes, croquet and boating and tea on the lawn. Thomas was back from his first year at Oxford, and he spent more time with her than he had in years. They went horseback-riding and translated Latin together; he told her stories about life at Balliol, and she showed him how much her drawing had improved.

  But one bright summer evening, everyone was busy and Violet took her sketchbook to the river alone. She settled in her favourite spot, on a rock half-hidden by drooping willow branches, and began to sketch the leaves. At first there was no sound except the trickle of the river and the scratch of her pencil on paper, but after a while she realized that the river-noise had a rhythm and a tune and meaning, as no song ever had.

  Beyond the willow-branches, the river was silver with the sunset light. In the middle, her bare feet just brushing the surface, stood a tall woman with pale hair and pale eyes. She
wore a white dress with lace at the neck and wrists, as one might wear to a tea-party; but streaming out from her shoulders were great, half-transparent butterfly wings that shimmered blue and cream and pink and deep, royal purple as they drifted open and shut.

  Violet stared, reduced to a racing heart and dizzy head and not a scrap of thought.

  The woman smiled at her and said, “My child.”

  Her heart still beat fast, but the fear was gone as she watched the woman step across the water to her. When the woman’s toes touched the pebbles on the shore, Violet said, “You’re my mother.”

  “Yes,” said the woman. Even standing on the drab shore, light clung to her hands and the folds of her skirt. “And you have been in exile, but I shall show you how to come home.”

  She cupped Violet’s chin with cool fingers and tilted her head up; Violet closed her eyes and stood, sketchbook falling to the ground. She supposed this moment should be difficult, that she should be thinking of her family and home, but it was not hard at all. Not at all.

  Cold fingers brushed her back, and her shoulders loosened. She knew that her wings were blossoming; she could feel their colours in her throat. When she opened her eyes, the world was different: shadows were longer but filled with hidden glimmers, and the house was hazed with mist but she could see leaves on a tree half a mile away.

  “Come across the water,” said her faery mother.

  * * *

  Violet returned to the house as the grandfather clock in the parlour chimed seven; in the human world, she had not been gone over a quarter of an hour. Her wings were hidden and her hair, which had flown free and tangled in Faery, was neatly braided. She felt as if she had been opened up and re-made, then sewn back together and wrapped in her normal clothes.

  Thomas leaned out of the study and smiled across an invisible infinity. “I say, Violet—I’m reading a bit of Virgil; would you like to help?”

  It had been easy to leave, and it was easy to follow him into the study and laugh at how many declensions he had forgotten. That evening felt almost real, just as all the evenings before had felt almost false.

  * * *

  For the first few years, she only passed information, while the reports of faery incursions began to grow. Then—when they went to London for Violet’s introduction into society—three things happened. The faeries turned the Prime Minister’s fingers into twigs and his eyes into acorns. Papa died. And Thomas discovered what she was.

  There was a curfew after the attack on the Prime Minister, but it made no difference to Violet’s family. They were all staying at home anyway, listening to Papa’s breath rattle and guessing how much longer he would last. Violet had wondered a few times if she would need to hurt her foster-family, but in the end it was a purely human sickness that killed him. All she had to do was stand by and give Mama damp cloths to wipe his forehead.

  There was a song called “Swans at Sunset” that to her was just a string of notes with a sentimental name; but Papa loved it, and she played it every evening, pounding the keys so the sound would carry to the sick-room. As she worked through the measures, she remembered Papa’s throaty laugh, and teaching him to play patty-cakes, and handling his rock collection as he told her about where he had found the pieces.

  The man she remembered didn’t seem to have much to do with the withered body upstairs, and neither of them had anything to do with her. She spent hours listening to the clock and hoping he would die before the next chime so the waiting would be over. But she still played “Swans at Sunset”; maybe she had picked up the habit of love, if not the substance.

  When Mama finally came downstairs and told her it was over, Violet said, “Oh,” and went to pay her respects, bubbling inside with happiness because she could spend the rest of the evening undisturbed. Then she curled up in her room and finished The Moonstone.

  Thomas discovered her the day after the funeral. They had gone back to the country to bury Papa in the family plot, and when the sun touched the horizon she slipped down to the river to make her report. This time they let her visit Faery, and she came back with her wings still unfurled. She stretched, enjoying the feel of mortal sunlight on gossamer membranes—and heard the click of a pistol.

  She turned, and saw Thomas holding the gun steady, his lips pressed together.

  “Where is my sister?” he whispered, biting off each word.

  The last remaining bits of the old Violet, who had babbled proudly to everyone about her older brother and always put on her best dress when he came home, shredded and blew away on the evening breeze.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “When?”

  “We were switched as babies,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault you didn’t notice.”

  The change in Thomas was a little like the change in Papa as he withered on the sickbed. Suddenly there was a new Thomas, wide-eyed and desperate, who had nothing to do with the brother who had slapped her on the back and taught her Latin. And as with Papa, she knew he was gone and felt no regret, for she had changed equally. He had loved her, and now hated her. She had been his sister, and now was not. There was no one left to be sorry.

  “Are you going to kill me?” she asked. She was almost certain she could confuse him with a glamour and escape.

  Thomas drew a shaky breath. “No.” He lowered the gun. “I’m finding her. No matter what it takes, I swear I’ll get her back. Then maybe I’ll come for you.”

  Violet nodded and turned back to the river. She knew she didn’t love him because it didn’t hurt to leave.

  “Did you always know?” he demanded.

  She knew he was asking if the sister he loved had ever existed. He was a human and he wanted to know what was in her heart.

  “Yes,” she said, because she was a faery and had no heart. Intentions mattered nothing; and her nature was that she had always been a traitor.

  * * *

  Afterwards, people often asked her why she had worked for the faeries even though she had been raised by humans. When she told them how it felt to stand in Faery after the grimy dream of the human world, and that she could not stay there until her task was done, they took that as reason enough.

  But for the faeries there was no such thing as reason. There was only theirs and mine, us and them. She knew at last why she had never cared for her family: they were not hers. She knew why she would work for the faeries: she was theirs.

  To the extent that she had been tainted by humans, and therefore needed a reason, she thought that she worked for them because they gave her an answer.

  * * *

  Miss Stanton’s School for Young Ladies in Yorkshire was cold and damp, its paint peeling on the walls. The girls stood in rows for inspection every morning, their hair parted down the middle and pulled into painfully tight braids. By the end of the day, Violet’s gums hurt and her shoulder blades ached with the need to let her wings free.

  But the school sat on the edge of the moors that the faeries were raising to life, and they needed someone to make sure no one who guessed the truth came away again. So a handful of leaves and a mouthful of glamour became a letter from the school’s patron that made the headmistress, Miss Stanton, not only hire Violet but keep her when she was in trouble.

  “Miss Thornton, I cannot permit you to give your students such things to read.”

  Violet kept her voice submissive. “If I am to teach them French, ma’am, I must give them something.”

  “We have several French Bibles.” Miss Stanton drew her thin eyebrows together. “I think they should provide you with sufficient material.”

  Violet strongly suspected that Miss Stanton had never heard of Candide before yesterday, and she was torn between wanting to laugh and wanting to turn her Miss Stanton’s knobby fingers into twigs.

  “I understand,” she said.

  “Indeed?” Miss Stanton let out a little huff. “I realize, Miss Thornton, that you find it amusing to treat your students in this fashion. But I have a duty to
safeguard the souls of those in this school—including yours.”

  And I must guard my people, who have no souls, thought Violet, but she did not say it aloud; making any more trouble could endanger her mission. So she looked at the table and nodded, thinking that when she was done here, she would drive Miss Stanton mad to run naked over the moors.

  That night, Agnes Thompson was missing at curfew. In twenty minutes, Miss Stanton turned the whole school upside down; then she started search parties. Violet tried to make them wait for morning, but Miss Stanton would have none of it. So she walked into the damp spring night with one of the porters, and when he turned his back she took a leaf from her pocket and blew it onto the wind, thinking, They are coming.

  The wind shifted, and she knew that the moor, already more than half-alive, had heard her. Violet smiled and hummed a scrap of faery song. Mist began to rise out of the ground.

  The porter stumped along, lantern held high, bleating, “Miss Thompson! Miss Thompson!” Then he paused, staring at the base of a bush. “What’s this, then?”

  Violet peered around his shoulder and saw a cluster of imp-eggs, glowing blue in the darkness. She thought to the wind, Now.

  Jewel-bright butterflies bubbled out of the ground, glowing ruby and amber and lapis lazuli, and they rushed up through the porter as if he were mist. He collapsed with a soft, choked noise, his chest shredded and bleeding where they had touched him. The butterflies corkscrewed up into the sky, then descended in a rush to twirl about Violet, who laughed at the crazy scraps of colour.

  “Go find the others,” she said, and they streamed away into the darkness. The mist had thickened into fog. Violet tilted her head and let her wings unfurl. Every now and then she heard shouts in the distance, as the butterflies found the intruders one by one. At this rate nearly all the school staff would be dead by morning; perhaps the girls could be lead away to serve the Faery Queen. They were all young enough.