Impostor Syndrome

by Mishell Baker

  “What exactly is going to happen?” I asked Caryl. “I mean, how’s the manticore going to come out of that thing?”

  “He will not be emerging from the bag,” said Caryl. “The destruction of the crow, as with the destruction of the dog, will leave Brand’s consciousness trapped at the site of the ‘death.’ Meanwhile, once the spellwork enters the intermediate space, it will trigger its original function and rotate the alternate form into place at the site of last sensory input.”

  “What I’m getting at,” I said, “is where exactly is this gigantic lion-scorpion guy going to appear? On top of whoever’s holding the bag?”

  “At the last place from which the crow perceived the world, so . . .” Caryl acquired a sudden look of dismay. “Yes, in a manner of speaking. At the opening of the bag.”

  “I feel like this isn’t going to end well.”

  Caryl cleared her throat, fidgeted with her gloves. “Well! Let us simply do our best to stand clear of the opening, shall we?”

  That wasn’t the only problem, we realized, now that the bag and the bird were in the same place. In comparison to each other, the opening of the bag was slightly smaller, and the crow slightly larger, than we had quite anticipated. Claybriar reached into the cage and grabbed the bird around its middle, and I held the bag’s mouth open wide, but we could tell just by looking that he wasn’t going to fit.

  One of Claybriar’s ears twitched. “This is a problem,” he said. The crow just stared into space listlessly, feet dangling.

  “Perhaps,” said Caryl, “we should cut the bird into pieces.”

  The bag fell out of my hands, and Claybriar made a plaintive sound.

  “Are you kidding me?” Clay said as I bent carefully to retrieve the bag from the sand. He cradled the bird against his fuzzy chest, which was too much indignity for it to handle even in its current state of depression. It struggled feebly. “I’ve been taking care of this stupid thing for a week, and you think I’m going to watch you mutilate it?”

  Caryl let out a stormy exhale and fixed Claybriar with an exasperated look. “We are preparing to consign it to an eternity of timeless nothingness!” she snapped. “What difference does it make if we mutilate it first?”

  “It’s moot anyway,” I said, “because I seem to have forgotten my hacksaw.”

  “I will use a spell,” Caryl said.

  “Hell no!”

  “I mean I shall ask a spirit, as the commoners do. We have the luxury of a few moments for me to attempt this, do we not? I have been very curious about it, and I even have Claybriar here to guide me.”

  Claybriar looked startled. The bird was really starting to fight him now, so he put it back into the cage. “It’s, uh, kind of an easier thing to do than to explain,” he said. “You’ve never done it?”

  “No, but I am a quick study.”

  He considered. “I’m told it’s a bit like praying.”

  “I have never done that, either.”

  “Ah.” Claybriar scratched at a horn. “Well, just hold in your mind the image of what you want. And, uh . . . cast your mind out into the infinite . . . uh . . .” He gestured expansively.

  “Clay,” I said, “you are the leader of a revolution. You really need to get better at explaining shit.”

  “It’s my first time, all right?” He folded his arms. “Just think about reaching outward. Casting, like you’re fishing.”

  “I have never—”

  “Done that either, right. But you know what I mean; don’t be difficult. The point is to remain open, to put your idea for a spell out there, like bait. Keep holding it, even if it’s tiring, and wait for a spirit to come to you and say ‘Let’s do this.’ Or they might negotiate a bit, or clarify, but it’s all—without words. It feels like it’s all in your mind. Then either they’re in or they’re out. If they agree, you’ll know it when you feel it. Like a sudden burst of energy that’s yours to shape.”

  Caryl sat on the spongy sand, cross-legged, as though meditating. She closed her eyes.

  “This feels ridiculous,” she said after a moment.

  “Now you have to start over,” said Claybriar. “You can’t be thinking about anything else, including how ridiculous you feel.”

  “Focus is difficult for me without—” A flicker of distress passed over her face, and then irritated determination. “I shall try.”

  She sat for a very long time. It was extremely boring.

  I looked over at Claybriar, met his eyes, lifted an eyebrow. He shrugged and walked over to me, careful not to disturb Caryl.

  “Caryl told me about your suit,” he murmured, taking my hand.

  “Yeah?”

  He leaned in then, to whisper about a quarter inch from my ear, and traced a little circle on my gloved palm with his thumb. “It would take some creativity, but I think I could show you a good time in that thing.”

  I smacked him on the arm, and he grinned.

  “It worked!” Caryl said, childlike. I gave a guilty start and stepped away from Claybriar. Caryl was oblivious; her eyes sparkled with wonder, and her cheeks had gone pink. “A spirit came to me!”

  “Cool!” I said, surprised into sincerity.

  “Apparently, it enjoys severing things! It wants to know how many pieces.”

  “You make the loveliest friends, Caryl,” I said.

  Caryl closed her eyes again, to all appearances communing with the spirit. I had no way of eavesdropping, and things went on for so long I started to wonder if negotiations weren’t going well. Meanwhile Clay removed the crow from the cage again, holding it carefully.

  “Easy there, fella,” said Claybriar. “Try not to—”

  The bird fell from his hands into eight cauterized segments. They pattered to the sand in a heap.

  I let out a strange, hysterical laugh, and then my stomach gave a lurch. I backed away from the remains, wiping at my damp forehead.

  “You all right?” Claybriar asked. He wasn’t looking so hot either.

  “Just put the pieces in the bag,” I said.

  “I shall do it,” said Caryl, seeming more pleased than disturbed by the carnage.

  She had only gotten six pieces in when suddenly there was a sickening wrench in the immediate atmosphere, an indescribable torsion of reality. My ears popped, and then I think I might have had a slight consciousness brownout, because next thing I knew, Claybriar was helping hold me upright despite the obvious pain it caused him to touch me. As soon as I felt steady again I pulled away.

  The manticore lay on the sand, his terrifying ruby red eyes as fixed and lifeless as billiard balls.

  “Oh God,” I moaned. “Is he dead?”

  Claybriar pointed to the creature’s shaggy red rib cage, which slowly rose and fell.

  “Brand,” I said gently. I stepped closer to his horrible face, so close to human, but big enough to serve tea for two on. Hesitantly I touched his brownish-red mane with my gloved hand.

  Words emerged slowly from the manticore’s too-wide, ear-to-ear mouth, in a distant echo of his usual panic-inducing brassy rumble.

  “Don’t . . . ever . . . pet . . . me.”

  “You’re alive!” I said. I laughed, tearing up a little. “You’re all right!”

  “By what . . . fucked-up . . . definition . . .” He let out a sudden barrage of coughs like two trains crashing into each other, and a venomous spine shot off his jointed tail, narrowly missing Claybriar.

  “Fuck!” said Claybriar, standing rigid.

  Brand shuddered and lay still again.

  I hovered over him. “You don’t look so good,” I said. “You need something to drink? Someone to eat?”

  “Millie,” said Claybriar sternly. But the corners of Brand’s mouth twitched upward, and it filled me with glee.

  Brand tried to get up. I was reminded of his first efforts to work the dog body Shock had made him back in the fall. His huge bat wings unfurled halfway, flailed and then furled again. His feet slid out from under him, and he face-pla
nted in the sand.

  “Take it easy,” said Claybriar.

  “The wings are still in my head,” Brand droned without even lifting his face. “Four sets, two I can feel that aren’t there, two I can’t feel that are. But backward now. Vivian . . . Vivian . . . find me a naughty unicorn! I could eat sand. Does Parisa still want me? She’ll feed me . . . I’m a good doggie. I’m a good doggie . . .” He trailed off into an incoherent groan.

  Caryl began to look fretful, wringing her hands and worrying at her lower lip. “I do not think he is in any condition to help us,” she said.

  “We should feed him,” I said.

  “You’re kidding, right?” said Claybriar. “He eats live fey.”

  “Well,” I said, “surely there are some fey that are slightly more disposable? Fey cows, fey zebras? I saw something that looked like a deer or a horse, back in Daystrike.”

  “Whatever you saw,” said Claybriar, “it was just as intelligent as you or me. No matter what the sidhe tell you, we don’t have animals here. Everything has a soul. Plays games, feels love and despair, makes art.”

  “Okay, but they all die, eventually, right? Some of them eat each other?”

  “If it’s part of a Hunt, then it’s a game. There’s honor in it: The stronger party gets to live and the other to die, and all that. But he is in no condition to Hunt; we’d just be kidnapping some poor creature and feeding it to him.”

  “Is there a quick way to find someone willing? Someone dying of a wasting disease or something?”

  “The Seelie don’t get diseases, and the Unseelie don’t die from them.”

  “Condemned prisoners? The White Rose has a prison. Does Skyhollow?”

  “It does.” Claybriar looked thoughtful for a moment and then suddenly straightened. “Oh.”

  “What?”

  “I may have an idea.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “It may be nothing. But it also could be a big deal. I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up. Just wait here, and make sure that Brand doesn’t go anywhere.”

  I looked down at the manticore, who had just begun to snore gently. “I don’t think that will be a problem,” I said.

  19

  When Claybriar returned, he brought company: a stunning sidhe woman leading a lean, shaggy canine by a chain. I was so distracted by something unidentifiably wrong about the animal that it took me a moment to recognize my former boss Inaya’s Echo. Vicki Plume, a.k.a. Foxfeather, the homeless baroness.

  She was homeless, incidentally, because Brand had destroyed her estate. What the hell was Claybriar thinking?

  Once the trio stepped off the enchanted path, I hurried to meet them halfway, as though I could prevent them from seeing the giant red lion-beast that was sprawled on the sand next to Caryl.

  “What is this?” I said uneasily to Claybriar.

  “Millie, this is Baroness Foxf—”

  “I know who it is. Why is she here? And what’s with the dog?”

  Only when I glanced at the pointy-eared beast from closer range—a coyote, monstrous and lanky, its back at my hip level—did I notice what had disturbed me about it from a distance. It had no eyes. The glittering chain around its neck looked to be made from diamonds. Its tongue lolled, dripping; ribs showed through the golden fur. But it had no eyes.

  “Hello again, Ironbones,” said Foxfeather. She had eyes: lavender novas. Her hair was an undulating stream of opal silk, and diaphanous wings caught and scattered the sunlight where they lay folded against her back. She reached a four-fingered hand toward me in greeting, and I took it gently with my glove.

  “Sorry for being rude,” I said. “But given the situation, I thought Claybriar was supposed to be keeping certain things secret from you.”

  “He was right to tell,” she said, a little pouty. “Despite what the manticore did to me, his Echo and my Echo are partners. So I have decided to redeem him. And redeem this wretch here.” She jerked the eyeless coyote’s chain. It let out a choking sound, then a menacing snarl.

  “What exactly did it do?”

  “It betrayed me. It was my vassal, the one who cast my estate’s wards. It knew the Words of Power.”

  “She means he knew the spirits’ names,” said Claybriar. “He’s a trickster with spirit-sight.”

  “And spirit-sight means . . . ?” I prompted.

  “He sees the same way the spirits do. Well, not exactly; he has a limited field of ‘vision.’ But to see a spirit lets you figure out its name. This asshole befriends them and then enslaves them for the sidhe.” He looked down at the beast with such contempt I thought for a minute he was going to actually spit on it.

  “That is no crime,” said Foxfeather. “The beast’s crime is that it joined forces with the manticore to betray me. The manticore made me believe it was safe to leave my estate, and once I was gone, the trickster canceled all the protective wards that it had cast!”

  Sidhe estates were closely tied to their owners; their wards could not be destroyed, even by the original spell casters, so long as their owners were inside them. That was why Vivian had spent decades hatching a plan to spill fey blood at all the corresponding spots in our world simultaneously. That would have bypassed the problem by dumping all the noble estates—wards, owners, and all—directly into the void.

  I looked between the creepy, blank-faced coyote and Brand, conspirators to destroy Foxfeather’s little barony. “You’ve brought these two pals back together why?”

  “Justice,” said Foxfeather. She beamed at Claybriar. “The king gave my ex-vassal a choice. A poetic end—devoured by the monster he allowed to devour his friends—or he could rot in Skyhollow’s prison forever.”

  “Fey are big on poetic ends,” explained Claybriar. “Religious thing, sort of. Or as close as we get to it.”

  I turned back to Foxfeather. “So Wile E. here wants some sort of religious absolution. How does this square things with you and Brand?”

  Foxfeather smiled. “The manticore has been well punished, according to King Claybriar. Now he will be redeemed in a different way. He will swear fealty to the Seelie Court.”

  “Ohhh boy,” I said. “Yeah, I think Brand’s probably going to pass on that.”

  Claybriar looked up at me entreatingly. “Millie,” he said. “Shiverlash nearly got Brand to murder Caryl. If he’s going to be working with us, he needs a kinder person holding his leash.”

  “I’m not arguing the logic,” I said. “Just saying he’s not going to do it.”

  “I can persuade him,” said Foxfeather.

  “You’ll . . . persuade the guy who destroyed your estate.”

  “Trust me,” she said with a smile. Something about her reminded me so much of her Echo Inaya in that moment that I was willing to believe she was capable of anything.

  “Worth a try,” I said.

  The four of us approached Brand and Caryl. Caryl knelt in the sand a little too close to those jaws for my liking; Brand lay with his eyes half-closed. When Foxfeather approached, though, Brand made a futile effort to sit up.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Hello, friend,” said Foxfeather. “I brought you something to eat.”

  “Really, I couldn’t,” Brand said. “Couldn’t eat another bite. Your aunt was incredibly filling.”

  “Cut it out, Brand,” I said.

  “You know,” Caryl observed, eyeing the listless manticore, “your Echo would be displeased to see you mistreating Foxfeather. Foxfeather’s Echo is Inaya West: Parisa’s partner and best friend.”

  “The manticore and I were friends too,” said Foxfeather softly. “Once he let me climb on his back and ride all over Skyhollow.”

  “Pfft,” said Brand. “I just like to make sidhe trash straddle me.”

  “He was lonely,” Foxfeather insisted. “And I wasn’t afraid. We had fun together, until I found my Echo. Then he got so jealous.”

  Brand snarled, making Foxfeather jump. “Fuck off,” he said. “Or I’ll ea
t you, too.”

  “I know you’re hungry,” Foxfeather said, unruffled, leading the coyote closer. “To show that I forgive you, I offer you a choice. You may—”

  Brand, showing a sudden strength I could never have anticipated, lunged forward over the sand, mouth stretched wide, and engulfed the coyote in one swift hrrrrrlllllp.

  I shrieked, slapped a hand over my mouth. Foxfeather leaped back, dropping her end of the diamond chain, which Brand drowsily slurped into his mouth like a spaghetti noodle.

  Foxfeather burst into tears, turned, and clung to King Claybriar.

  “Welp,” he said.

  “Yep,” I agreed.

  Brand squeezed his eyes shut, swallowed hard. I heard muffled crunching, as though the muscles of the manticore’s throat were so impossibly powerful that they pulverized the coyote’s bones into a fine paste on the way down.

  “Holy mother of garbage disposals,” I said.

  “I feel sick,” said Caryl. I went over to rub her shoulders.

  Brand, still in the process of doing whatever it was he did to render an entire live wriggling carnivore digestible, did not answer. After a moment he collapsed back onto his side with a groan.

  “Well, now what?” I said to Foxfeather. Claybriar was stroking her hair. I suddenly realized he’d probably slept with her, too, and tried not to get too distracted picturing it.

  “Not fair!” Foxfeather exploded at Brand, still clinging to Claybriar as she stamped her foot.

  “Unseelie,” Brand reminded her.

  “Commoner,” she riposted.

  Clay stopped stroking Foxfeather at that; she almost fell over as he approached Brand.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said. “Feeling better?”

  “Not your buddy,” Brand said, tail giving a peevish twitch.

  Caryl sighed. “I suppose I knew better than to expect gratitude.”

  “All right, coyote breath,” I said, going to stand in Brand’s eyeline. “Caryl and Claybriar and I have just literally given you your life back. So I suggest you start showing us a little respect.”

  “Or what?” said Brand, glaring back at me. “Obviously you need me, so don’t pretend you did this because you’re so very fond. Let’s get to what you want, and what you think you can offer.”