Mosquitos buzzed. Hateful little birds flaunted their ability to fly, calling attention to themselves with boastful songs and trills. Wind rustled through the tree branches, and dark clouds drained away the powerful light of dawn. Fat raindrops fell with a steady patter, striking the skin of both her bodies before dripping down to the earth. Discordant yells, almost meaningful to her human mind, came from the far side of the field. Unfamiliar with the workings of her brain, she could not quite remember words.
It was known from prior generations that humans communicated through this unnatural sense, but Yōsei had never experienced it. The meaning was incomprehensible to even her human mind, and spoken words seemed a poor substitute for the more intimate bonding of ancestral minds and communion of images. Still, something in the shouting signaled a warning. Yōsei ran with both bodies out of the field and into the forest, at a pace frustratingly slow because she was unused to her human muscles. The movements of that body were jerky and uncoordinated.
The other humans dared not follow into the shadows of the forest.
Yōsei let her human body choose their path. She seemed to be seeking something, grasping at vague familiarities in the landscape. Yōsei hoped to use her to negotiate with the humans, and the humans most likely to listen would be those who had known her in life. She had to make them understand that the ancestors were not invaders from the West but natives returning home after a long absence, distant descendants of the tengu.
The girl was often confused, but she walked a road that led away from the capital and into the mountains. If nothing else, Yōsei was pleased to escape the humid summer air for the cooler mountain breezes.
Chrysanthemums
Suki lay face down on the tatami floor while Mother shaded the koi and chrysanthemums on the back of her right leg. She stared at the finished design on her forearm, a snake that wrapped itself around her arm, the gaps between the coils filled with peonies. Studying the completed design drew her focus away from the burning in her leg and the rhythmic tapping of the needles that seemed to vibrate down into her bones. She counted the scales on the snake, each one shaded in red and bluish black.
Faery blood ink was pure black at first, but even in the month since Mother had finished her arms, it had taken on a slightly bluish tinge. It was work well done, as Mother’s work always was. She was a master, with decades of practice. The fan of needles at the end of her bamboo handle moved in perfect rhythm, the depth and angle changing to make subtle variations in the shading of the design. Variations in color and variations in pain.
Eternities of pain, and each day she looked more like Aya. It was the same design, and as the resemblance grew, Mother became pensive and moody. Not as she worked. Those movements were so practiced that her art flowed from her automatically. But when the needles stopped, and the work was finished, it was always the same.
“Come back in two days,” Mother said. She turned her attention to cleaning her tools, refusing even to look at Suki.
Sometimes Suki tried to stay, to make conversation. To be something other than a reminder of Aya’s death. She had not complained when Mother left, and she did not complain now, but she wanted to have some part of their relationship back, some sign that her mother had really returned. Instead she was a client, and a reminder.
Suki slipped into her clothes and secured her sword to the sash around her waist. She slid the door open, but then she froze, unable to make sense of what she saw before her.
There, outside, was Aya. She was naked despite the cold autumn air. Suki remembered her sister as being taller, stronger, older. The only difference between Suki and this Aya was that the woman outside was finished, her tattoos shaded in red and black from head to toe. Suki had always assumed that Mother had given them identical designs, but now she realized that they were mirror images. This other woman bore the face she saw every morning in the mirror, a face protected with cherry blossoms and clouds, done in delicate lines and only the palest shading of pink. It was meant to be protection.
It had failed.
The body that had once held her sister was clearly a puppet, standing several yards away with an odd posture, as though she might fall over at any moment. Movements that should have been smooth—the bowing of her head, a glance at Suki’s face—were done in uncoordinated jerks and fits. A faery stood behind Aya. Suki had never seen one before. It was smaller than she expected, coming only to Aya’s shoulder, with thin, twisted limbs like tree branches. Its wings were not red but gold.
“And so the war has come to the village,” Mother whispered, tears flowing silently down her face, “brought by my own failure, and wearing the face of my child.”
There was no end to the horrors of war, no final peace, not when the faeries could take someone even after they had died. She’d spent years tending to the veterans, back from the battlefield with their minds broken, but this was worse. How could Aya free herself from want and sadness in the afterlife if she could not even escape her physical form? Suki did not know if some part of her sister’s consciousness remained, but she was certain of one thing. She could not let the fae desecrate her sister’s body this way. She had to defeat this new evil, or they would never be free of the fae, even in death.
She approached her sister slowly, arms held wide as though preparing for a hesitant embrace. Before she could reach for her sword, Aya spoke.
“Return our sacred land.” The voice was wrong. Harsh.
Suki drew her sword from its sheath. The faery turned to flee, but Suki did not care whether it lived or died. It was the wings she wanted. Golden wings to make new ink and turn the tide of the war.
“Stop,” Aya cried. Suki did not listen. She swung her sword and sliced off a large section of the faery’s wing.
Aya collapsed.
The faery erupted in golden light, blinding and hot. The gold cut through the useless red ink of Suki’s tattoo, and she could feel her energy being sucked away as the faery tried to heal itself. She would not be what Aya was. She tried to slash at the faery, but it danced away from her, too fast for her to catch in her weakened state.
She could feel the faery at the edges of her mind, in the pulsing of her own blood. The heat of the faery magic burned like needles on her skin. They were merging. She did not have a second, a fellow soldier to grant her a quick and merciful end, but she would not be a puppet to this golden creature. She turned her sword upon herself, slicing through her midsection from left to right, the traditional beginning of an honorable death. The faery realized what she was doing and came forward to stop her. Smiling through her pain, she pulled the blood-covered sword from her own abdomen and sliced the faery in half.
Blood ran onto the dirt, human red and faery black. The colors of her tattoo echoed in the moment of her death. The autumn air was so very cold, now that the bright heat of faery magic was gone.
Mother came to her side and cradled Suki’s head in her lap. For the first time since her return, she was not a tattoo master. She was the woman that Suki had missed. She brushed the tears from Suki’s face and held her hand.
“Mother,” Suki said, her voice soft. There were others out there, she knew. Other gold-winged fae, killing soldiers and raising the dead. Her body shook from the cold and from fear. With her last strength, she held up a section of golden wing. “Please,” she said. “Finish me. Don’t let them take me.”
Dry Fallen Leaves
Aya woke empty and lost.
Time swirled aimlessly around her, pulsing like blood through her veins. She could not see beyond the inside of her eyes, and the gold that had filled the spaces between her fragmented selves had seeped away. She felt tendrils of death seeping in to fill the void, a reassuring emptiness, freedom from the constant longing and need that came with physical form.
A familiar sound came to her ears. Shakki. Sha sha sha sha. The rhythm brought her back to the slowness of time, the solidity of reality. It was a sound that should have been accompanied by pain, but there was no pai
n. Distracted by the sound, Aya lost the tendrils of death. She tried to find her lost oblivion, but instead of searching within her mind, she inadvertently opened her eyes.
She was home. Mother knelt on the tatami mats on the far side of the room, working on a soldier. The soldier was Aya. Time shimmered and broke. There was no pain, so Mother could not be inking her tattoo.
In another place, she remembered dying, falling into a state of clarity and peace. An army of tattooed soldiers had marched against her, puppets of the fae. If they were not protected, why did Mother still sketch color into skin? Aya opened her mouth to ask, but instead of words her dry throat only croaked.
Mother set down her tools. She brought tea. It was warm like golden magic, and Aya choked and knocked aside the cup. Heat spilled down her chest, then quickly passed. Cold damp cloth against her skin brought remorse. A sense of loss. A memory of thoughts that did not belong to her. Yōsei. The faery had wanted something. Something important.
She chased the memories in her mind, but reality shattered any time she came too close. The muddled sensations of life were overwhelming. The gold had controlled her, imposed an artificial order and a clear goal. Peace. The faery had brought her back to negotiate a truce. The only peace she’d ever known was death, and she longed to slip back into that unending darkness.
Mother brought another cup of tea. Aya let it warm her from the inside, longing for the golden magic that she loathed. Anything to help her find a direction. When the cup was empty, she practiced setting it on the table and picking it up. After several repetitions, she heard the sound that called her back to the present moment. Shakki. Sha sha sha sha.
She stood on wobbly legs and carefully walked across the room. The girl that was not Aya had dried leaves tattooed on the bottoms of her feet, the fallen leaves of winter. Mother had drawn those very leaves onto Aya’s feet, but these were different. Aya’s leaves were red and black. Faery blood and ground red wings, dark-colored protection against dark fae magic.
These leaves were tinted with gold, as though illuminated by the first light of dawn. Aya picked up a small vial of golden ink. If she drank it, would the gold pulse through her veins and make her whole?
“I sent most of the golden wings with a runner to the capital, for the Imperial Army,” Mother said, gently taking the vial from Aya’s hand. “I should have sent it all, but I kept enough for Suki, and for you, if you can bear the pain.”
Pain was nothing, but Aya wanted death, not golden skin.
She reached down and touched her sister’s face. In broken mirror-shards of time, she remembered the baby she had held so carefully when she was six, the wide-eyed confidant she had whispered to when she had her first kiss, back before the fae had slaughtered most of the men. Suki’s body was cold and hard like winter stone. Her skin did not swell pink or bleed where Mother poked it with her needles. She did not smell like gold, and she made no sound.
Tears ran down Mother’s face as she worked. “She always wanted to be like you, except in this. I abandoned her when she was alive, but I will grant her final wish. I will finish her tattoo and keep her safe from the fae.”
Suki had been alive.
Aya remembered watching through a golden haze as her sister died by her own hand. Suki had wielded the sword, but Yōsei had killed her nonetheless, while Mother stood and watched. Was that peace? The fae could remake themselves on a whim, and even if Aya could negotiate peace with the current generation, it would not last.
She would let Mother tattoo her with gold, and she would continue to fight.
But gold would not be enough. The fae would retreat for another thousand generations while only a decade passed here, or perhaps just the blink of an eye. Time was always changing, never constant from one swirl to the next. Eventually there would be magics in silver or green or blue. And each time another color would need to be added to the tattoos, until the pictures held all the colors of the world. Only then could the fae be banished for good.
Shakki. Sha sha sha sha. Layers of color, cycles of war.
Someday, the dragon on Aya’s back would be richly colored in blues and greens. She would be adorned with pink cherry blossoms and white water lilies, yellow chrysanthemums and brown fallen leaves. The signs of all the seasons, set in human skin. She would fight against faeries with wings of every color, and when the war was truly finished, she and Suki—and all their fellow soldiers—would find peace in the eternal black of death.
THE CARNIVAL WAS EATEN,
ALL EXCEPT THE CLOWN
The magician’s table was covered by a sheet of plywood, four feet square, completely wrapped up in aluminum foil. Sugar magic was messy magic, and the foil made for easier cleanup. Scattered across the aluminum were misshapen chunks of candy, the seeds from which the carnival would grow. And grow it did.
Overnight, as the magician slept, sugar melted into candy sheets that billowed up into brightly-colored tents. Caramel stretched itself into tightropes and nets, and green gumdrop bushes popped up to line the paths between the tents.
The carnival glittered with sugar-glass lights. The Ferris wheel was made of chocolate with graham cracker seats and a motor that ran on corn syrup. Out near the edge of the table, a milk chocolate monkey rode bareback on a white chocolate zebra with dark chocolate stripes. The monkey did handstands and backflips while the zebra pranced in a slow circle.
At the center of it all was the clown. She was three inches tall and made entirely of sugar. Her face and hands were coated with white powdered sugar, a sharp contrast to the bright red of her blown-sugar lips and the green and purple of her pulled-sugar dress. She was the seed from which each new carnival was grown, and she was beautiful.
As each of the sugar creations woke, the clown was there to welcome them to the world and tell them of their destiny. “You will be adored by children,” she told the cotton candy sheep, stroking the wisps of their baby blue wool. “You will delight them with your tumbling,” she told the flexible bubblegum acrobats. And, “You will amaze them with your daring stunts,” she told the gingerbread daredevil. She smiled at everyone, but she smiled her prettiest smile for the daredevil, because she was a little bit in love with him.
As she woke the carnival, and told them tales of children with bright smiling faces, she always added, “in the end you will be eaten, for that is your destiny.”
When she told them that, her smile sometimes faltered. She had seen a child only once, several cycles ago, the six-year-old niece of the magician who had laughed in delight to see the clown’s dancing routine. That had been a beautiful moment, the defining moment of her existence, the moment that made her the seed. After seeing the joy on the girl’s face, the clown had dissolved blissfully into the warm water in the magician’s cauldron, her sugar becoming the seed crystals from which an entire carnival was grown.
As the seed, she was the only one who woke up knowing the joy of a child’s laughter. The others would have to wait until the magician took them to whatever party was on the schedule. So she told the others what awaited them, how wonderful children are, and what an honor it was to perform for them. And she told them that they would be eaten, whatever that meant, because when she asked the magician why he grew a new carnival for every party, he told her that the carnival always gets eaten in the end.
She was a happy clown, and this was the only thing that made her sad, the knowledge that she couldn’t go to the parties. As the seed, she was never eaten, always plucked away by the magician and thrown into the cauldron to grow the next carnival.
The clown stood at the edge of the carnival, waiting, and when the magician woke up he came to greet her. She asked, as she often did, if she could go to the party with the others. He replied, as he always did, that she was the seed, and could not be spared.
He picked her up gently and dropped her in his cauldron.
Over time, the clown changed. She became a sad clown, with streaks of burnt-black sugar running down her face like smeared mascara.
Her once vibrant dress of green and purple was still beautiful, but the colors faded, and her sugar lost its glossy shine.
One morning, the clown peered out from a green-and-yellow candy tent and saw the magician running about frantically, searching for his keys. He looked tired and distracted, and he was late in collecting the carnival. The clown made a decision. Instead of standing at the edge of the carnival, as she usually did, she would hide in the tent and go to the party. She would hear the sound of children’s laughter again, and she would finally be eaten like the others.
She stayed inside the green-and-yellow candy tent as the magician loaded the carnival into his van, and unloaded it at the party. No one noticed she was there, and soon she heard children’s excited voices all around her. She would finally be eaten!
One of the children pulled off the roof of the striped-candy tent and broke it into pieces for her guests. The first performer was the gingerbread daredevil. He jumped twelve sugar cookie cars on a motorcycle with licorice wheels and a candy corn seat. The children clapped politely for his act before they ate him. The birthday girl bit off his head, then ripped his arms off to share with one of her guests. Was that what it meant to be eaten? Her beloved daredevil had met his end bravely, without a trace of fear, but being eaten looked far less pleasant than dissolving in warm water, and—a new thought occurred to her—if she didn’t go into the cauldron, would she continue to exist? The others always came back, each time the carnival grew, but they never remembered what had happened at the last carnival, no matter how she begged them to tell her.
Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories Page 19