The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014 Edition

by Rich Horton

Saturday came with terrible slowness. Rebekah could hardly find the strength to leave her bed. She recalled that evening vividly, the taste of butter and raspberry jam, the smell of tobacco smoke, the brush of dry, powdery lips against her forehead. Nothing in that evening had hinted at the horror of white bone and slashed muscle, and yet all of Linda’s life seemed full of signs and portents, now that she was gone.

  Rebekah barely noticed anything on her walk downtown. Before long she stood before the chrome and glass doors of the district’s rewiring center, staring dully up at the silver-lettered signs and the office windows full of desks and blurred figures. Dom could not accompany her; he had been sweetly apologetic; he had to implement new protocols in the lab ahead of state deadlines.

  Everything in the center was painfully gleaming and new, from the young man who greeted her at the desk, the crispness of college still on him, to the white leather sofas she was directed to. The interior was lit by a gentle but intense white light, enough to pierce through the fog in her head.

  “Let me explain the procedure to you,” the doctor said. “We will be making eight injections into your insula, anterior temporal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and prefrontal cortex. You will be under general anesthesia for the entire operation. It should take three hours. We have not found significant side effects but a small number of patients have reported lethargy lasting a week, loss of appetite, lingering sadness, and feelings of confusion. Would you please sign here?”

  First they shaved small squares on her scalp where the thin drills and then the needles would pass through. She watched dark strands of her hair fall into her lap, scattering over her white paper robe. Then they left her in a room to wait.

  Rebekah sat alone on the bed, numb and cold, toying with the strange spiky shapes of her grief. Rather than listen to the unbearable symphony of beeping, chiming monitors, she pulled up the recording that Linda had given her.

  It began with scraping chairs and indistinct voices, some swift French, some English. There was shuffling, and coughing, and silence. Then she heard a slender silver note, the winding of a hunting horn. Foxes and deer slid through the mist, tearing up the wet earth, followed by men and women and sleek hounds. The horn urged them on. The best of the hunters took aim and fired through the fog, but the bullet killed his lover instead of the deer.

  She heard grief in the music, flashing like lightning beneath the silver notes. It had been a very long time since she had heard music like it. Her community orchestra was very good at light, pensive, or melancholy music, but when they tried the tragic, their performance rang empty. Freeman was something else altogether. She had missed that kind of music. It was a good gift.

  Rebekah closed the file and raised her head to see two blue-scrubbed nurses approaching.

  They were wiping and tying her arm for the anesthetic, the faces around her friendly and smiling, when she realized how jealous she had become of her black, broken grief. It hurt, but it was hers. That had also been a gift.

  Wait, she wanted to say. I don’t want this anymore. She opened her mouth, then closed it again. She told herself: You refused her. You don’t deserve to grieve.

  The needle slid beneath her skin.

  You never learned how to lose someone.

  A thick soft darkness swallowed her, a sinking without bottom, through which she swam ever deeper down. Somewhere rain fell and washed the pavement clean.

  When she awoke, she was not in pain.

  Martyr’s Gem

  C.S.E. Cooney

  Of the woman he was to wed on the morrow, Shursta Sarth knew little. He knew she hailed from Droon. He knew her name was Hyrryai.

  “ . . . Which means, The Gleaming One,” his sister piped in, the evening before he left their village. She was crocheting by the fire and he was staring into it.

  Lifting his chin from his hand, Shursta grinned at her. “Ayup? And where’d you light upon that lore, Nugget?”

  Sharrar kicked him on the ankle for using the loathed nickname. “I work with the greyheads. They remember everything.”

  “Except how to chew their food.”

  “What they’ve lost in teeth, they’ve gained in wisdom,” she announced with some pomposity. “Besides, that’s what they have me for.” Her smile went wry at one corner, but was no less proud for that. “I chew their food, I change their cloths, and they tell me about the old days. Some of them had parents who were alive back then.”

  Her voice went rich and rolling. Her crochet hook glinted on the little lace purse she was making. The driftwood flames flickered, orange with tongues of blue.

  “They remember the days before the Nine Cities drowned and the Nine Islands with them. Before our people forsook us to live below the waters, and we were stranded here on the Last Isle. Before we changed our name to Glennemgarra, the Unchosen.” Sharrar sighed. “In those days, names were more than mere proxy for, Hey, you!”

  “So, Hyrryai means, Hey, you, Gleamy?”

  “You have no soul, Shursta.”

  “Nugget, when your inner poet is ascendant, you have more than enough soul for both of us. If the whitecaps of your whimsy rise any higher, we’ll have a second Drowning at hand, make no mistake.”

  Sharrar rolled her brown-bright eyes at him and grunted something. He laughed, and the anxious knots in his stomach loosened some.

  When Shursta took his leave the next morning at dawn, he lingered in the threshold. The hut had plenty of wood in the stack outside the door. He’d smoked or salted any extra catch for a week, so Sharrar would not soon go hungry. If she encountered trouble, they would take her in at the Hall of Ages where she worked, and there she’d be fed and sheltered, though she wouldn’t have much privacy or respite.

  He looked at his sister now. She’d dragged herself from bed to make him breakfast, even though he was perfectly capable of frying up an egg himself. Her short dark hair stuck up every which way and her eyes were bleary. Her limp was more pronounced in the morning.

  “Wish you could come with me,” he offered.

  “What? Me, with one game leg and a passel of greyheads to feed? No, thank you!” But her eyes looked wistful. Neither of them had ever been to Droon, capital of the Last Isle, the seat of the Astrion Council.

  “Hey,” he said, surprised to find his own eyes stinging.

  “Hey,” she said right back. “After the mesh-rite, after you’ve settled down a bit and met some folks, invite me up. You know I want to meet my mesh-sister. You have my gift?”

  He patted his rucksack, which had the little lace purse she’d crocheted along with his own mesh-gift.

  “Oohee, brother mine,” said Sharrar. “By this time tomorrow you’ll be a Blodestone, and no Sarth relation will be worthy to meet your eyes.”

  “Doubtless Hirryai Blodestone will take one look at me and sunder the contract.”

  “She requested you.”

  Shursta shrugged, sure it had been a mistake.

  After that, there was one last hug, a vivid and mischievous and slightly desperate smile from Sharrar, followed by a grave look and quick wink on Shursta’s part. Then he set off on the searoad that would take him to Droon.

  Of the eight great remaining kinlines, the Blodestones were the wealthiest. Their mines were rich in ore and gems. Their fields were fertile and wide, concentrated in the highland interior of the Last Isle. After a Blodestone female was croned at age fifty, she would hold her place on the Astrion Council, which governed all the Glennemgarra.

  Even a fisherman like Shursta Sarth (of the lesser branch of Sarths), from a poor village like Sif on the edge of Rath Sea, with no parents of note and only a single sister for kin, knew about the Blodestones.

  He had no idea why Hyrryai had chosen him for mesh-mate. If it had not been an error, then it was a singular honor. For his life he knew not how he deserved it.

  He was of an age to wed. Mesh-rite was his duty to the Glennemgarra and he would perform it, that the world might once again be peopled. To be childless�
��unless granted special dispensation by the Astrion Council—was to be reviled. Even with the dispensation, there were those who were tormented or shunned for their barrenness.

  Due to a lack of girls in Sif, to his own graceless body, which, though fit for work, tended to carry extra weight, and to the slowness of his tongue in the company of strangers, Shursta had not yet been bred out. He had planned to attend this year’s muster and win a mesh-mate at games (the idea of being won himself had never occurred to him), but then the Council’s letter from Droon came.

  The letter told him that Hyrryai Blodestone had requested him for mesh-mate. It told him that Hyrryai had not yet herself been bred. That though she was twenty one, a full year past the age of meshing, she had been granted a reprieve when her little sister was murdered.

  Shursta had read that last sentence in shock. The murder of a child was the highest crime but one, and that was the murder of a girl child. Hyrryai had been given full grieving rights.

  Other than this scant information, the letter had left detailed directions to Droon, with the day and time his first assignation with Hirryai had been set, and reminded him that it was customary for a first-meshed couple to exchange a gift.

  On Sharrar’s advice, Shursta had taken pains. He had strung for Hyrryai a long necklace of ammonite, shark teeth and dark pearls the color of thunderclouds. Ammonite for antiquity, teeth for ferocity, and pearls for sorrow. A fearsome gift and perhaps presumptuous, but Sharrar had approved.

  “Girls like sharp things,” she’d said, “so the teeth are just right. As for the pearls, they’re practically a poem.”

  “I should have stuck with white ones,” he’d said ruefully. “The regular round kind.”

  “Bah!” said Sharrar, her pointy face with its incongruously long, strong jaw set stubbornly. “If she doesn’t see you’re a prize, I’ll descend upon Droon and roast her organs on the tines of my trident, just see if I don’t!”

  Whereupon Shursta had flicked his strand of stone, teeth and pearl at her. She’d caught it with a giggle, wrapping it with great care in the fine lace purse she’d made.

  Hyrryai Blodestone awaited him. More tidepool than beach, the small assignation spot had been used for this purpose before. Boulders had been carved into steps leading from searoad to cove, but these were ancient and crumbling into marram grass.

  In this sheltered spot, a natural rock formation had been worked gently into the double curve of a lovers’ bench. His intended bride sat at the far end. Any further and she would topple off.

  From the smudges beneath her eyes and the harried filaments flying out from her wing-black braid, she looked as if she had been sitting there all night. Her head turned as he approached. Perhaps it was the heaviness of his breath she heard. It labored after the ten miles he’d trudged that morning, from the steepness of the steps, at his astonishment at the color of her hair. The breezy sweetness of dawn had long since burned away. It was noon.

  Probably, Shursta thought, falling back a step back as her gaze met his, she could smell him where she sat.

  “Shursta Sarth,” she greeted him.

  “Damisel Blodestone.”

  Shursta had wanted to say her name. Had wanted to say it casually, as she spoke his, with a cordial nod of the head. Instead his chin jutted up and awry, as if a stray hook had caught it. Her name stopped in his throat and changed places at the last second with the formal honorfic. He recalled Sharrar’s nonsense about names having meaning. It no longer seemed absurd.

  Hyrryai the Gleaming One. Had she been so called for the long shining lines in her hair? The fire at the bottom of her eyes, like lava trapped in obsidian? Was it the clear bold glow of her skin, just browner than blushing coral, just more golden than sand?

  Since his tongue would not work, as it rarely did for strangers, Shursta shrugged off his rucksack. The shoulder straps were damp in his grip. He fished out the lace purse with its mesh-gift and held it out to her, stretching his arm to the limit so that he would not have to step nearer.

  She glanced from his flushed face to the purse. With a short sigh, as if to brace herself, she stood abruptly, plucked the purse from his hand and dumped the contents into her palm.

  Shursta’s arm dropped.

  Hyrryai Blodestone examined the necklace closely. Every tooth, every pearl, every fossilized ridge of ammonite. Then, with another breath, this one quick and indrawn as the other had been exhaled, she poured the contents back and thrust the purse at him.

  “Go home, man of Sif,” she said. “I was mistaken. I apologize that you came all this way.”

  Not knowing whether he were about to protest or cozen or merely ask why, Shursta opened his mouth. Felt that click in the back of his throat where too many words welled in too narrow a funnel. Swallowed them all.

  His hand closed over the purse Sharrar had made.

  After all, it was no worse than he had expected. Better, for she had not laughed at him. Her face, though cold, expressed genuine sorrow. He suspected the sorrow was with her always. He would not stay to exacerbate it.

  This time, he managed a creditable bow, arms crossed over his chest in a gesture of deepest respect. Again he took up his rucksack, though it seemed a hundred times heavier now. He turned away from her, letting his rough hair swing into his face.

  “Wait.”

  Her hand was on his arm. He wondered if they had named her Hyrryai because she left streaks of light upon whatever she touched.

  “Wait. Please. Come and sit. I think I must explain. If it pleases you to hear me, I will talk awhile. After that you may tell me what you think. What you want. From this.” She spread her hands.

  Shursta did not remove his rucksack again, but he sat with her. Not on the bench, but on the sand, with their backs against the stone seat. He drew in the sand with a broken shell and did not look at her except indirectly, for fear he would stare. For a while, only the waves spoke.

  When Hyrryai Blodestone began, her tones were polite but informal, like a lecturer of small children. Like Sharrar with her grayheads. As if she did not expect Shursta to hear her, or hearing, listen.

  “The crones of the Astrion Council know the names of all the Glennemgarra youth yet unmeshed. All their stories. Who tumbled which merry widow in which sea cave. Who broke his drunken head on which barman’s club. Who comes from the largest family of mesh-kin, and what her portions are. You must understand,” the tone of her voice changed, and Shursta glanced up in time to see the fleetingest quirk of a corner smile, “the secrets of the council do not stay in the council. In my home, at least, it is the salt of every feast, the gossip over tea leaves and coffee grinds, the center of our politics and our hearths. With a mother, grandmother, several aunts and great aunts and three cousins on the council, I cannot escape it. When we were young, we did not want to. We thought of little else than which dashing, handsome man we would . . . ”

  She stopped. Averted her face. Then she asked lightly, “Shall I tell you your story as the Blodestones know it?”

  When he answered, after clearing his throat, it was in the slow measured sentences that made most people suck their teeth and stamp the ground with impatience. Hyrryai Blodestone merely watched with her flickering eyes.

  “Shursta Sarth is not yet twenty five. He has one sibling, born lame. A fisherman by trade. Not a very successful one. Big as a whale. Stupid as a jellyfish. Known to his friends, if you can call them that, as ‘Sharkbait.’ ”

  Hyrryai was nodding, slowly. His heart sank like a severed anchor. He had hoped, of course, that the story told of Shursta Sarth in the Astrion Council might be different. That somehow they had known more of him, even, than he knew of himself. Seeing his crestfallen expression, Hyrryai took up the tale.

  “Shursta Sarth is expected either to win a one-year bride at games, do his duty by her and watch her leave the moment her contract ends, or to take under his wing a past-primer lately put aside for a younger womb. However, as his sister will likely be his dependent fo
r life, this will deter many of the latter, who might have taken him on for the sake of holding their own household. It is judged improbable that Shursta Sarth will follow the common practice of having his sister removed to the Beggar’s Quarter and thus improve his own lot.”

  Shursta must have made an abrupt noise or movement, for she glanced at him curiously. He realized his hands had clenched. Again, she almost smiled.

  “Your sister made the purse?”

  He nodded once.

  “Then she is clever. And kind.” She paused. The foam hissed just beyond the edges of their toes. A cormorant called.

  “Did you know I had a sister?” she asked him.

  Shursta nodded, more carefully this time. Her voice, like her face, was remote and cold. But at the bottom of it, buried in the ice, an inferno.

  “She was clubbed to death on this beach. I found her. We had come here often to play—well, to spy on mesh-mates meeting for the first time. Sometimes we came here when the moon was full—to bathe and dance and pretend that the sea people would swim up to surface from the Nine Drowned Cities to sing songs with us. I had gone to a party that night with a group of just the sort of dashing handsome young men we would daydream about meshing with, but she was too young yet for such things. When she was found missing from her bed the next morning, I thought perhaps she had come here and fallen asleep. I thought if I found her, I could pretend to our mother I had already scolded her—Kuista was very good at hanging her head like a puppy and looking chastised; sometimes I think she practiced in the mirror—and she might be let off a little easier. So I went here first and told nobody. But even from the cliff, when I saw her lying there, I knew she wasn’t sleeping.”

  Shursta began to shiver. He thought of Sharrar, tangled in bladderwrack, a nimbus of bloody sand spreading out around her head.

  “She was fully clothed, except for her shoes. But she often went barefoot. Said even sandals strangled her. The few coins in her pocket were still there, but her gemmaja was gone. I know she had been wearing it, because she rarely took it off. And it’s not among her things.”