by Anthology
“That’s ridiculous,” snapped Auntie Rosa. “You’re my—” She clamped her mouth down on what she’d been about to say.
“You’re not my mother,” I said, as coldly as I knew how. “My mother is in prison. And I’m going to get her out.” I marched into the bedroom and slammed the door.
***
I lay awake that night, wrapped in furs and red blankets and staring up into the darkness. I knew where Auntie Rosa had put my things. Only one room in the house was locked, and she’d taught me to care for my rifles too well for her to have left them outside somewhere.
So where was the key? I’d been through the house so many times—she couldn’t have hidden it inside anywhere. She must keep it on her person. I slid my bare feet to the floor and slipped out of the bedroom.
The fire had burned down to embers, limning the shadows in vermillion crescents. Auntie Rosa slept beside it, her breath rising and falling deeply.
I crept forward.
My heart pounded as I stood above her, guilt flaming in my stomach, my hands cold with sweat. This was wrong, what I was doing.
But she had done me wrong, too, stopping me from taking the only chance we had. I thought of my mother, thin and alone in her cell. I didn’t have a choice.
I lifted the edge of the blanket, intending to check her pockets first, and the firelight gleamed off a silver chain.
I’d seen the chain before, so many times, but I’d never noticed it—it was just something Auntie Rosa always wore, some type of necklace under her clothes. Of course. I stretched my hand forward, holding my breath, and my fingertips grazed her collarbone as I pinched the chain and eased it out from under her night dress. A wrought-iron key dangled in the light of the coals.
I walked my fingers down to the clasp and unfastened it. The key fell into my palm, cool and heavy.
Almost unable to think, I hurried to the locked room and shoved my prize into the keyhole. It turned, and the door swung open.
The room was pitch black. A fur rug kissed the soles of my feet, but my eyes were useless. I raced for a lantern, lighting it as I dashed back into the forbidden space. As expected, I saw my bag and rifle cases immediately, stacked neatly against one wall.
I crouched to retrieve them. Should I leave now, in the night, before Auntie Rosa could awaken and try to stop me? Before my own courage could fail?
The rest of the room caught my eye, distracting me. I turned and raised the lantern.
Confused, I paused and stared. The room was filled with furs…which made it no different from the rest of the house. Why would Auntie Rosa bother to keep it locked?
The pelts were tossed across each other with little regard for aesthetic. And there was something odd about them. I lifted the light.
The rugs and blankets I was used to were the soft furs of game animals. These were all—odd. Odd creatures to hunt, still odder to skin. Three bear skins from progressively smaller beasts were the only ones that looked like they belonged, and the enormous wolf pelt beneath my feet might have been an animal Auntie Rosa had killed to protect herself or the home, but others—the white-tipped tail of a fox dangled off one pile, and one fur looked like it had come off a large domestic cat. A pure white bull skin was a hide a tanner might have been proud of, but was out of place for a hunter. There was a snakeskin, stretched out and dried, from what must have been a magnificent serpent, and something feathered…the preserved husk of an eagle, or, no, a swan.
I stepped farther into the room.
The lantern light fell on the far wall. Pegged against it was the sagging pelt of what had been some beast of unbelievable proportions, twelve feet tall and massive, with wicked claws and a gaping maw that now showed only the wood behind it.
“I would ask what you’re doing in here,” said Auntie Rosa behind me. “But I suppose that’s obvious.”
I spun around. “It was you. You killed the grundwirgen prince.” I stumbled backward, the lantern swinging wildly. My arm brushed the bearskins; I flinched away, my skin crawling. My toes curled against the wolf pelt filling the floor as if I could stop touching it. “Were these all…? They were all…?” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Come sit. Let’s talk.” Auntie Rosa reached for me. I jerked back, and she let her hand drop. “The world is complicated,” she pleaded.
This room was closing in on me, sickening, the air fracturing, so many murdered souls smothering me, and my mother—
“Were you going to let my mother die for you?” The words burst out of me, rising almost to a shriek.
Shock rippled across her features. “No. Never. I—” She put a hand to her face. “I thought, as long as the punishment had not been set, that there was hope, that maybe—and I could have faced the King’s Men, told them my crimes a thousand times to save her, but—but the thought of your mother hating me—that even if we all walked free, that I would lose her, I couldn’t…”
The truth dawned. “She doesn’t know you killed him,” I said.
The look on her face was my answer.
***
I sat at the table. Auntie Rosa sat across from me.
“Your mother knows about the rest,” Auntie Rosa said, her eyes on her hands. “She knows what kind of woman I…was.”
“And what kind of woman is that?” I asked coldly.
“I killed my first grundwirgen when I was eight years old.” She spoke simply. Factually. Her gaze strayed to the open door of the secret room, to the massive wolf pelt filling the floor and spilling against the doorway, and she gathered her red robe more tightly around herself. “He attacked my grandmother, then me. I saved myself. I couldn’t save her.”
“I thought your grandmother was killed by a wild animal.”
“She was, as far as I’m concerned.”
“No. No. You taught me—” I couldn’t reconcile it. Grundwirgen were the same as humans. Killing a grundwirgen was no different from killing a man.
“I hope I could have shot him if he had been a man,” Auntie Rosa said, as if she had read my mind. “I hope I would have.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“It is as I told you. Not all grundwirgen are evil. But those who are—” She coughed. “The ones who have been cursed into creatures, often they have been cursed for a reason. And those with the power to shapeshift at will can use that ability for crimes so despicable—the viciousness they have at their disposal in animal form, if they choose to use it—well. I was a very good hunter.”
“You went around—you hunted—” I couldn’t wrap my head around it. An assassin. My auntie was an assassin. My auntie who sat slumped across from me in her red-draped cottage, looking very tired and very sad and very old.
“Do you still do it?” I asked.
“Not for many years. Your mother changed me. Gave me something to live for, other than my hunt for justice.”
“But she still doesn’t know you killed her…” Prince? Captor? Husband?
“These things are so complicated.” Auntie Rosa folded her hands against each other in her lap, one gripping the other as if to anchor herself. “I came to rescue her, you see. I’d been seeking the grundwirgen who held her, and came to slay the beast and free the princess in the castle. But the strongest chains that trapped her were in her own mind.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“It had been seven years. He’d had her locked in his castle for seven years.” Her speech strained over the words as if she’d lived the sentence herself. “He was a master at…”
She trailed off, struggling. I didn’t help.
She found her voice again, the explanation dragging out of her one syllable at a time. “He knew what to do. How to control. He played with your mother’s emotions with kindnesses, was a perfect gentleman between bouts of temper—and even then he never physically touched her. He convinced her that he cared for her, that she should care for him. Guilted and shamed her. He told her if she left him, he’d die.” She took a shuddering
breath. “She didn’t want that. In time, I think she would have forced herself to believe she loved him.”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to hear this.
“As far as I was concerned,” said Auntie Rosa, “what he was doing was ten times more evil than the grundwirgen who had attacked my grandmother and me. Buying a child and locking her away without any—with no human contact—” Her voice trembled. “He needed someone to love him to break the spell. He didn’t care how he got that love.”
I wasn’t sure who I hated more: my grandfather, for selling his daughter; my auntie, for being a murderer and then allowing my mother to go to prison for it; or my mother herself, for daring to have a past that was threatening to consume all of our lives. And the grundwirgen prince, of course; but there was no use hating him; he was dead.
“I was the first human she’d spoken to in seven years,” Auntie Rosa continued. “We became close, so quickly. She realized she had to leave; she knew in her soul what he was doing to her. But it was hard for her, so hard, and she…she made me promise not to kill him.”
“But you did.” The words scraped in my throat.
“I did,” she said, so low I could barely hear it. “He was a grundwirgen, but still a prince; no one was coming to stop him. He would have done the same with another girl, another time. I was older than your mother; I’d been hunting monsters for more than a decade by then. It had to be done.”
“And you never told her,” I said.
“It was the only promise to her I ever broke,” said Auntie Rosa, “and he was the last grundwirgen I ever killed.”
I stood up. “You’re a coward.”
She shuddered.
“She’s in a cell. She thinks she’s facing execution. That should be you.”
Her face tightened in apparent pain. “I never would have let it come to that.”
“You never should have let it come to this.” I went into the bedroom and shut the door, leaving her sitting at the table, alone.
***
I had the evidence I needed to prove my mother innocent now. All I had to do was go to the city, march the King’s Men back to Auntie Rosa’s, and tell them to break into her secret room.
That was all I had to do.
It’s what she deserves, I told myself, staring up into the predawn dimness, sleep never having come for me. She did it. She killed him. She killed all of them.
Hunting monsters, Auntie Rosa had called it.
How would I feel if I had found a room full of human trophies, and Auntie Rosa had claimed it had to be done, they were all bad people? This was the same. Grundwirgen were not animals.
It was the same.
I found Auntie Rosa already awake, wrapped in a red shawl and waiting by the door.
“Where are you going?” I demanded.
“You were right.” She stretched one arm to the wall as if to steady herself. “I was so…I was so selfish. I’ll go now. Today. They’ll have to release your mother.”
A wave of emotion slammed into me, threatening to drown me. I’d spent the entire night wrestling with whether to turn her in, and now—now—
Auntie Rosa reached out a hand, slowly, tentatively, as if she was afraid I would flinch away from her. I didn’t.
She tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “I love you, Xiao Hong. Don’t ever forget that.” Her hand was shaking. “Please.”
***
It would be better, Auntie Rosa told me quietly, if I was back at my own house when she brought the King’s Men to hers. I wouldn’t be alone long. My mother would be meeting me soon enough.
I nodded, not speaking.
She helped me carry my things back over the hill, back over the well-worn path. Helped me start a fire and set the house to rights, sweep out the dust from our weeks-long absence, lay in some extra wood. She brought over food stores from her own cottage, too, breads and cheese and cured meat. I stared at it.
“I never ate them.” Her voice broke. “Child, what you must think of me…”
I put the food away.
Auntie Rosa brought her gear over, too, her packs and knives and nicest rifles.
“I don’t want those,” I said. Not after what they’d been used for.
“Your mother might. Ask her?”
I took the rifles. My mother was an unsentimental woman. Maybe practicality would stir her to keep them.
Auntie Rosa adjusted her shawl around herself. She tried to say goodbye, but the words faltered away when I didn’t respond.
She took nothing with her, only the red shawl wrapped around her head and shoulders, a bright scarlet figure bobbing down the trail with her walking stick marking the paces as she hiked toward the city. It was late in the day; she wouldn’t arrive there till long past dark.
And then she’d turn herself in to the King’s Men. They’d probably escort her back to her cottage, or arrest her and then tramp back without her to investigate. With Auntie Rosa’s confession in hand, they’d release my mother.
Unless they didn’t. I wrestled down nightmare fears that they would think my mother had been in league with her, that I would lose them both.
Lose both my mothers.
“Auntie Rosa!” I called.
She was almost out of sight. The bright red figure stopped. Turned.
I grabbed her best rifle, the one she could splinter a coin with from a thousand yards away, and raced down the trail. I thrust it into her hands.
“Run. Disappear. I’ll bring the King’s Men back tomorrow. I’ll tell them you fled when I found the room.”
She stared down at me, uncomprehending.
“Go,” I said.
“I don’t want you involved,” she pleaded. “I’m old. I don’t have much time left. I can—”
“Go,” I repeated. “For me. For my mother. Please.” I didn’t know what was right—maybe I never would—but I suddenly knew what I didn’t want, what I couldn’t bear.
She fingered the rifle. “Tell Mei I’m sorry.” The words were rough and quiet. “I’m so sorry.”
***
I went into the city the next day. Bringing the King’s Men back was a confused jumble I could never quite remember afterward—answering their questions, waiting outside as they shoved through Auntie Rosa’s cottage and broke down the door of her secret room. Red fabric fluttered to the floor as they tore the cottage apart, as if the little house were bleeding.
They insisted on keeping my mother until they had a trial. After a long, terrifying day before the throne, during which I had to talk, to lie, about what had happened when I found the room, the King declared my mother innocent, and they allowed me to bring her home. She didn’t speak for five days, just sat by the window and fingered the edges of the tablecloth. Red. I didn’t know if Auntie Rosa had given it to us, or if my mother had gotten it to please her.
On the fifth day she cried.
I sat down across from her, unsure what to do. My mother never cried. She reached out and held my hand as she had in her cell, the tears seeping down her white face unchecked. “You must hate me,” she whispered. “For putting you through this.”
I squeezed her hand. “I could never hate you, Mama.” It turned out I couldn’t hate people even when they were murderers. Emotion welled up in my throat. “I’m glad you’re back.”
Her breath caught. “I never wanted you to know. My past, how I was a…I was so ashamed. But now, I find—I find I’m glad she told you.”
My mother had never spoken to me with such naked emotion before.
“I miss her,” she said.
I swallowed. “I do, too.”
We sat together holding hands, gazing out the window as if hoping we would see a bright red figure bobbing up the walk.
But the sun set, and no one came.
By Degrees and Dilatory Time(Short story)
by SL Huang
First published at Strange Horizons (May 2015), edited by Julia Rios
“On the bright side,” said Zara,
poking at his glasses a week before, “this means you get new eyes.”
But I don’t want new eyes, he thought.
***
The surgery isn’t bad, as surgeries go. The one he had when he busted his knee ten years ago, as a teen, was much worse. Or maybe it was worse because of what it had meant: that he’d never go out on the ice again.
That had been his identity, and he’d had to forge a new one from the fractured shards of cold and steel and sharpness. It had taken years, and he still wasn’t sure the new version of himself wasn’t brittle in places—the fault lines barely below the surface, just waiting for one tiny tap by a ball-peen hammer to make the whole construct shatter.
His eyes, his eyes have never been his identity. It won’t matter to lose them.
He tells himself that over and over. Through the days following his diagnosis. On the night before the procedure, as he stares at himself in the mirror one last time, and the image blurs. In the hospital just before, as his surgeon squeezes his hand with her gloved one, and the broad white lights of the OR fade out, the last visual he will ever truly see.
He’s told everyone else the same thing. It’s not the worst thing in the world, Ma. It’s not like I’m an artist. Dad, don’t worry—at least we have all the options we do these days, right? It’s not that big of a deal.
He tells himself one more time as he lies in bed following the operation, his world swallowed in darkness behind the bandages, a dull ache prickling through his face like it doesn’t know where it wants to hurt. This is just a bump in the road.
In a year it won’t even matter.
***
Cancer.
His doctor said it gently. It was part of a full sentence, even. “We found cancer cells.” Later he wondered if she sat there and practiced her delivery before she made calls like this, pronouncing the words with such gravity and care, like she knew how fast he was about to fall and wanted her voice alone to reassure him she could catch him.
Cancer.
The word stalled out in his brain, and his world went sharp and too-bright—the gold tiles of the kitchen, the bright blue ceramic of the fat penguin salt shaker, a drooping rose Zara had laughingly given him when they’d walked the gardens the week before. He wasn’t sure what he said back into the phone, only that his doctor must have asked him to come down to the clinic and talk to her in person, because he had. She talked to him and talked some more and kept talking, and then gave him a lot of pamphlets. Diagnosis, treatment options, recommendations. Everything in that same comforting voice, that gentle-calm-grave-understanding one.