The Calyx Charm

by May Peterson

  The next mystery was my hair. It would prove to be the magical thread that bound the war together.

  I hadn’t realized no one else ever lay awake at night with crystalline light radiating off their hair. I had been born looking this way. Fronds of silken violet spangled off the tips of my hair, pulsating from my scalp outward into the world. They called my power the holy crown. The crown of the Honored Child. But a crown was a thing that could be taken off. It was a thing that belonged, at least in part, to others. My hair was simply my hair. Mother once held two locks of mine in her fingers, playfully making shapes with them, while teasing me with friendly jokes.

  And yet...not for long.

  “You look like such a little pink flower! That’s quite a thing to show off. You’re going to grow up the envy of the land, my pet. Not many else will have hair like this.” Luminous, a soft purple like candle-glow burning through flower petals. It signaled that the calyx charm was coming to life. Across the city, a barrier of protection magic could be sweeping over soldiers, and in my room my mind would be turned to the lucid dream of battle and my hair would be shining like amethyst.

  But it was a piece of my hair that would tell me when a thing needed to be dreamed about. Mother was the only one who could successfully cut my hair. When a servant or barber had tried when I was three or four, I had howled and pulled away, because the bite of scissors seemed to be tearing my skin off. My hair still had nerves, the sensation of hurt and danger when cut into. It was like the way the caterpillar in the box triggered my protective instinct. The strands of my hair and the many little pieces of the world, all touching me through the current of the future in my belly, may as well all be parts of my body.

  When Mother soothed me, told me to say how it felt, and went slowly, she could cut my hair shorter without it hurting. But hours or even days later, if a curl that’d been cut was on the floor, and someone stepped on it, I’d feel it like a jolt through my spine.

  Touching the cut pieces of my hair was a way to communicate with me through my prescience. I couldn’t possibly see and feel everything happening everywhere, all at once. I could divine someone calling out for help, but it was easy to miss. Especially in a city full of people with calls for help. But if Mother or Father tucked a lock of my hair in their pocket and brushed it when in danger, I would awaken from a dead sleep, as if they’d tugged on my heart from across the distance.

  And the lock of hair would light up with the magic of the calyx charm, woven around them like armor.

  So began the process of spooling my mind into tufts of hair, hidden in lockets or watches or pieces of soldier’s apparatus. It was a queasy, invasive feeling. By the time the revolution fully touched down on the soil of Vermagna, some soldiers were readying to fight with tokens from their lovers sewn into their jackets. My father’s crew had locks of his ten-year-old daughter’s hair. I sat for years on this barely digested sensation, of being stretched like taffy across infinite space. It was as if Vermagna became dotted with a population of helpless caterpillars, all tugging relentlessly on my senses on days of battle. I could practically feel the flutter of innumerable theoretical butterflies, all rising on the wind as the dead versions of them fell at my feet, split by my yawning prescient sense of the possibilities.

  I grew used to having my hair cut. But still, only Mother could do it. I made this one small demand as to how my body was used while immortals ravaged our country. No one else was to cut my hair.

  But to produce hair like this, enough to spread across an army, we had to let it grow for some time. It grew for almost two years before the war truly lurched into being, growing down to my ears and longer before being cut again. Mother would store it in sacks, in boxes, and small chests, ironed and flattened and spooled and preserved to keep it from falling apart. I felt, absurdly, like a weird doll version of me was being made. Only it was going to be composed only of my hair, full of nascent magic, mounting in size until the amount cut seemed like it might become bigger than me.

  * * *

  The War of the Doves was a dream of dying. It lived in me like an egg or a child, part of me yet draining my life, coiling in my belly and drawing strength from my blood. The name—War of the Doves—came from me. I lay in Mother’s arms and said, “The War of the Doves, the doves are screaming, they’re already here, these are no birds of peace.” It was the native tongue of my childhood, the rain-patter of prophetic images. The name simply caught on. The people were beginning to understand the message of the Honored Child. The War of the Doves was descending on us and our survival was not guaranteed.

  * * *

  What the country needed was for me to be put into a machine. A machine called the Honored Child, a role I wore like jeweled mechanical armor. My hair ritually grown and disseminated like holy objects. My latticework of golden chains to confine me, temper the fruits of my spirit. The future itself was wrapped around that spirit, and I was too young, too insufficiently adept with witchcraft, to nurture it correctly.

  And I did not want the people of my country to die. Father hadn’t actually struck me, at least not many times. Not like he could have, like the currents of time at the bottoms of my consciousness suggested he might. I might unravel how, when, why, and be able to push against them, if I dared probe. But I was too small. Too small to save myself and save a country. Too small to feel every vibration plucked on strands of enchanted hair. Too small to answer every call without losing myself in the throng.

  But as part of the Honored Child machine, I could face the war when it came.

  * * *

  Day and night lost all meaning while I was fighting the war. That was, strangely, how I thought of it. My rhythms became unhooked from fatigue, meals, needs, and became centered around the events of battle. It was as if the war were something happening in my body, and the Colombi a sickness I was personally resisting.

  I stood awake on my dais as long as I could stand lucid dreaming about battles across the country. Sometimes my consciousness was split between several points at once, blurring many regions and people together. At times, I inhabited a crucial battlefield or street or building in spirit, that place stretching to fill the whole of the world. My reaction to the future was becoming easier to control, and in the nick of time. Precision was literal life or death.

  A fierce battle had been won at a place called Angelo’s Aerie. Like so many places that took on significance in my inner world, I had never set foot in this place. I had never directly smelled its flowers to been seen by its people. But oh, had I seen them. As the map of the revolution took shape in me, I had experienced this place through lucid dream. I knew the color of the birds that gathered there in spring, the precise time of year the leaves were at their brightest, was familiar with smiles and voices of people I had never met. I had to know, was hungry to understand the world within as if hunting for meaning in the taste of a dissolving sugar cube. It was as if a gigantic, country-sized body was waking up, the network of nerves and sensations and actions that was emerging out of my prescience and the calyx charm. The two were connected, like the feeling of pain in your foot and the responsive ability to move your foot away from the source of the pain. Disaster unfurled in my massive, weightless new body, and with the calyx charm, I answered it. Told it no.

  When the Colombi had fallen on the town of the Aerie, it had been easily defended. Too much was happening elsewhere, like on the borders of Vermagna itself. But in the ebb between conflicts, when I could finally sleep, I had awoken with a start in Mother’s arms. Some of its people had been given lockets with my hair in them, and were touching them to invoke me. She told me later the second defense of Angelo’s Aerie had spread across days, but to me it had felt like the distorted twist of mere hours. I had grabbed her arm and breathed, “They’re coming. He’s pulled his people away, no, wait, they’ve all come back to the city, but they’re coming. Everyone there is going to die.”

  This wa
s when my magic’s rules were coalescing to me. I could dream this with exquisite detail, but one pattern had remained true: if I prophesied anything that precisely, it always came true. The only barrier against that fate was the calyx charm. Mother warned the counsel, marshaled her crew to send aid, but there was no way to rally in time. The only answer was me.

  So I stood gazing out the tower window, my vision vast as the whole sky, glaring down with a sudden seer’s calm on the Colombi. They seemed like such small things in my palm, tiny yet impossibly powerful. So powerful, that any one battalion could fall to one of them, in their age and strength and hunter’s cunning. So strange, that they were doves, and yet so hawklike. They raided the town from above, dropping flaming oil and ballistics, shrugging off bullets and toying with the terrified residents that remained. Refugees and wounded were still in hiding there, not yet carried to more defended spaces. Only half a dozen Colombi were deployed there, weaving patterns over the blighted ground and seething inhuman laughter.

  A part of me was slowly understanding. They knew I was watching. They knew I would feel this. And they knew I might not be able to stop it. Their weapon was to stretch me until I could not stretch anymore. They may not know the source of the calyx charm, but did understand that whatever spun this magic, it could not withstand them forever.

  In this realization arose anger. Anger at the burning walls falling on helpless mortals, on wounded and dismembered, on people whose faces lit up with infant fear. Anger at the children running screaming from the buildings, dashing for cover somewhere, only to be seized into the air by cruel talons. Anger at the catlike disdain for their prey. Anger alien and yet so close to my heart, shifting the tide of cosmic vibration in my belly.

  The serene place in me opened like a flower, expanding to engulf both heaven and earth. I lifted my hands up against them, against the downpour of the future on me, on the doom I had crystallized into being through sight. Across the distance, across the endless leagues of my consciousness, I stood in front of these people and said no.

  The calyx charm wreathed the town like perfumed mist. As walls and bricks fell, violet glow limned them, rendering their impact harmless. Children, amputees, elderly in the grips of dove-souls became bright in invulnerable grace, unharmed even when dropped to the earth. The spark and shimmer of protection magic, pulsating like a song, radiated through the smoke. Ballistics hit the earth and did not detonate. Floors that collapsed did not cause those walking on them to fall; the villagers floated midair, the calyx charm softening even the rules of nature to prevent harm to those I blessed. One dove-soul shrieked and laid talons against a villager, but the blow landed like pillows striking each other.

  The people of Angelo’s Aerie stood, turned from their flight, beginning to sob with relief or go still with shock. The Colombi had played their gambit, perhaps only to wrack me if not to win any victory more important than that.

  But I would not have it. I had given everything to the device of the Honored Child, to being it, to living in its gold-plated body. The body covering Portia, closing dragon-touched hands around the people of my land. They would not touch them. They would not beat me. They were many, immortal, brutally strong, strengthened by long years. I was one hapless girl with magic hair, trying to swallow the ocean of future in my gut. But in this, they would lose.

  And in less than an hour, the Colombi had no choice but to retreat. They wasted their strength battling a shield that could not be broken. Before even the first reinforcement arrived at the Aerie, I had driven them back. At last, I fell back into Mother’s embrace, ravenous for sleep before the future dragged me back to my purpose.

  So the war went. Soldiers far and wide touched their locks of hair in prayer, calling out to the Honored Child. Each lock was a spot of pain, a new nerve in my new body, burning with energy. My devotion hardened. I responded. The body of the Honored Child was becoming invincible.

  Chapter Four

  Violetta

  I sometimes imagined when dressing that I was putting on dragon scales. One by one, as if the scales were brushstrokes, added with intentional care. An earring, a slip, a gown, a necklace. Each item of clothing another piece of magical protection.

  Dragon-souls weren’t really the dragons of myth, of course. No serpentlike beings with glass-and-gemstone scales. But I liked to pretend. I had lived a life covered in my own scales, mirrored surfaces in which Father had read the futures he wanted to see.

  No more. Time for him to see the person behind the reflection.

  I was going to pay my father a visit.

  He had a soirée at his villa, and I would fit right in wearing my evening best. My gown was white, with fuchsia and purple flowers. White decorated with the impurity of violet in wild shapes. It was not the kind of apparel he would approve of.

  Only one thing gave me pause—Rosalina had no need of falsies, but the same could not be said of me. I liked having the falsies on, and felt as out of sorts with them as I did without them. My own body seemed to alienate me in all directions.

  This gown fit me flawlessly with my flat chest, but flat indeed it was, and no eye would miss that. Rosalina, standing beside me in front of her mirror, wrapped an arm around my shoulder. “You look sleek. Like a goddess of the stars.”

  My laugh was soft, but a little nervous. “I look very flat chested. I can never decide how I feel about that. Sometimes I want it, sometimes I don’t.”

  Rosalina’s nod was wise, nonjudgmental. “How very us. What do you think causes the contradiction?”

  I thought about it, fiddled with the locket in my hand. “I want people to look at me and see a girl. But I want that girl to be me, as I am. Not their standing mental image of a girl. And the girl I am has a flat chest.”

  I wished for my body to stop being a thing that was wrong. That had to be changed or hidden or justified or excused.

  But she kept her calm intensity softly focused on me. “Then for now, stay as you are. We aren’t pale copies of dualistic girls. We don’t have to look like or sound like them. You aren’t a failed version of the son he wanted you to be. There isn’t a soul on this earth, or in all the Deep, that we owe an apology for our existence.”

  She pulled me close, my head on her shoulder. Standing side by side, gazing in the mirror, we could have been pieces of a shared future.

  Mollyqueens so seldom had futures to claim. We had todays. We had the little time we could claim for ourselves.

  My locket hung around my throat, like an homage to what I had once been. I gripped it in my hand as I walked. Toward Father’s villa.

  The villa emerged on the horizon like a palace built from city shadows. The district housing the Fragrant Rose was not far from the bay, though the sort to people these events would pay good money to never be seen in a molly’s bar or a card club packed with smoking tomkings. I walked through streets spotted with people like sunlit clouds—a singing mollygirl in a jade gown, waggling her elegant fingers and calling out to me as I passed; a circle of youngish tommyboys wearing overcoats and playing dice, one of which lifted his cigarette in salute; a gaggle of handsome sailors reclining with bottles of liquor, hailing me with pet names. I blew one man a kiss, feeling outrageous and embarrassing and ugly, but allowed to be. It made it all right.

  The villa overlooked the bay, dainty and sweet enough to have once been the home of a peasant family fat off the spoils of revolution. Maybe it had been. Father no doubt enjoyed it precisely for that reason, a vessel to climb into from his heights in the palatial former homes of immortal kings. Like all parts of Father’s life, this was an acquisition. Like the loyalty of his honor guard, the grudging fear of the street witches, the silence of dignitaries he’d bled dry of good faith. Like Mother. Like me, and all the circuitous futures he controlled through my glassy cracks.

  My thoughts fumed hatred and poison into the sky, polluting the tang of the breeze with bad omens. Any wi
tch with the vaguest touch of telepathy must have scurried away to avoid me.

  I stepped past the gate with other guests, hiding my face so I wasn’t noticed. A person who stood out, who had a name to these people, may have garnered attention. But I could be the escort of a rich gentleman with no identity of my own for them to care about. It was its own kind of invisibility.

  I was ushered in, and began retracing my internal map of the villa.

  It came back to me like a burn scar. Places I’d listened to life whistle past me, taking my breath with it, watched the elite of the thickening postrevolutionary world drink up that life like a twist of lemon. Father had unspooled my life from me, used it to decorate his homes and offices and entertaining places, the soles of his shoes and veneer of his gloves. In my bruised guts he’d found a substance so magical he wanted it on everything he owned, to smell like the futures I was brewing for him. While I died by drops in the scarecrow image of his son, red stained and forbidden and secret.

  An urge to vomit climbed up in me. I should leave. Why had I thought I could do this?

  No. I had to do this now, or I’d never do it. And if I stopped doing things, stopped moving in my own life, my fear would take over and germinate into a suicide. For Rosalina, for Mother—maybe even for me—I would keep moving.

  A servant drifted by with a tray of glasses. He bowed fractionally. “May I help you find your gentleman friend, signorina?”

  I snatched a glass of rosé and eyed him. The question was easy to decode: Can I redirect you to your patron? Because there was no other way a mollyqueen would be attending a party like this.

  I swallowed deep and gathered what courage I could. “Yes. My gentleman friend this evening is God himself. I dare say you may have some trouble finding him, though, as he’s known to be elusive.”