by S. M. Beiko
The snake’s head split into three as they laughed, its tail winding around Phae’s leg. A threat.
“We are everywhere and anything in this place,” Fia said with the snake’s many mouths. “Why should we allow you to live?”
Ryk had warned Phae would have to prove herself and defend the world’s very right to continue turning if she were to get Fia’s help. She struggled against Fia’s grip, but the coils only squeezed harder.
“I’ve come to learn about the Family of which I wasn’t born.” This was an honest answer, and Fia’s three faces seemed intrigued. “I know your power is a lonely one. I know you think you have a lot to lose. But I just want to talk. To learn. Don’t you want the company?”
The coils squeezed as hard as they could, before relaxing, receding, and the snake became a part of the tree, and Phae was alone.
“Company,” said a voice from the ground. It was Fia, with their triple face and enormous horns, yet shrunk down to human size.
Phae climbed down, dropping beside the diminished god, their three faces considering.
“Talk,” said the man’s face.
“Listen,” said the woman’s.
“Learn,” said the antelope’s, but its face was bleakest of all.
“I’m not here to steal the Quartz,” Phae insisted. “I know that the world has to be worthy of it. If I don’t prove to be . . . then I suppose you can kill me.” After all, if she went back, what else but death would be waiting for her and the rest of the world? She thought of the tar pits, thought of the whole world swallowed up and clear-cut. She wanted to be like Roan. She wanted to be strong and fierce and above all brave.
Fia nodded their great head. “Then let us walk to the mountain, and you will see what we have seen. And you can determine for yourself if the world is worthy of being saved.”
The Devil You Know
I woke up with the crushing cold wind pressing into my face, an arm tightly braced around my middle. I opened my eyes just as we cut through a cloudbank, but the air was stolen right out of my lungs when I dropped my jaw in a screech. Someone close by hollered — maybe a bit too joyfully for my taste. I saw Saskia’s ash-pale face braced against the wind, smiling as I’d never seen her, like she was on a roller coaster.
I looked down and, through the clouds skittering beneath us and past the shifting shadow of Eli’s wings, it was only sea.
I was going to barf.
“Down!” I screamed, yanking on Eli’s collar, which was half-feather and half-linen. His sharp face looked about ready to bite off my hand, but I was not one for caring. “I said down, right the fuck now!”
We banked hard, which did not help matters, the waves approaching alarmingly fast. Was he just going to dump me into the sea?
Then, as if conjured out of the mist and the white caps, there was a crust of land peppered with bare mountains that looked so unreal as the descent quickened, and trees reached for us, that we narrowly missed them as Eli pulled us up, the downdraft of his wings ripping my hair up as they snapped. Our feet touched terra firma. He basically dumped me, and I fell to my knees, dry heaving. I hadn’t seen him put Saskia down, but I hoped it was with more care.
“God you’re heavy,” Eli grunted, massaging the arm that had been wrapped firmly around me. “Both of you.”
Saskia whooped, giggling as she basically cartwheeled next to me, until she realized I was staring straight ahead. “You don’t like heights, do you?”
“Don’t give him any more material,” I said, cringing, then as Eli got nearer I sprang up, remembering to be furious. “What the hell is the matter with you!”
He jerked, and his gold eyes faded back to grey as the Therion form receded. “What —”
I reeled back and punched him hard enough in the arm to half spin him. He tripped over driftwood and I kept coming.
“I was handling it! I had everything under control!” I kicked up sand, picked up a rock, and he ducked.
“Are you seriou—” He caught my next hook and held firm, squeezing so hard the knuckles cracked. “What the hell are you raving about?”
“I didn’t need saving!” I screamed, ripping the hand free, heaving as the adrenaline spiked. “Why are you really here, huh? You want the Opal, don’t you? Goddammit, Eli, I had him, and if you hadn’t —”
He knocked my legs out from under me and I landed in a painful, breathless heap on my back. I spluttered.
He panted. “Are you legitimately going off your nut at me for saving your life? And that one’s life, no less?” He swung his finger at Saskia, who had been watching the proceedings with amusement. “I’m here because you asked me to come, dammit!”
I willed the air back into my vocal cords as I rolled onto my side. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. “I didn’t . . . I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
But by then Eli was pacing down the beach, snatches of his muttering carried back to me on the sea breeze. “Come back, she says, across the goddamn planet, so I can tear you a new one —” He twisted back around and came at me fast enough to make me scuttle back.
“Have you looked in the mirror lately? You look like you lost a fight with a tar pit. You’re more far gone than I thought. And you thought you could take Seela down? In this state?”
I grit my teeth, standing. “I was close, you abominable twat. I had him —”
“Oh, you had him?” Eli was essentially spitting in my face now. “Seela had you. I should rip that thing right —” His fingers were talons, snatching at the air in front of my chest, and I took a step into them. His body shivered.
“Go ahead!” I yelled. “Try! Take it! That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what they all want! Do what you do best and try to kill me! I won’t stop you!”
“You — !” Eli lunged, but he didn’t get far. His arms froze, his frantic eyes wide, then his mouth slackened, and I took a step back just in time to avoid him face-planting onto me.
He was out cold.
“Just goddamn perfect!” I whirled on Saskia, who was staring out at the steely water. “Now what? And just where the hell are we?”
A big wind came up that seemed to come from Eli’s comatose body. It pulled his wings apart and sent the scattered feathers out to sea. His clothes were shredded, and his face was turned. I’d been too intent on yelling at him to realize what a sight he was. He couldn’t kill me if he wanted to. My stomach dropped. Had he wanted to?
I came because you asked me to!
It only just occurred to me that he’d been missing before this point, and I really didn’t know what he’d been through since then.
But he was here. And he’d made that call on his own.
“Dammit . . .” I got down, turned him over gently. He let out a noise of discomfort, but when I smacked his cheek experimentally, he didn’t move. My hand came away bloody from the wound at his ear.
“I know this place.” I looked up as Saskia spoke, the wind messing her already snarled, burnt-at-the-tips hair. “Daddy used to bring us here on holiday.”
I really needed to stop passing out at every available opportunity. I hadn’t known how long we’d been in the air, let alone where Killian’s hideout was. Saskia had a bit of an accent — subtler than Killian’s, closer to Eli’s. On holiday . . .
“Are we back in Scotland?” I’d been tossed around the map with too much frequency. We could be on another planet.
“The Isle of Skye,” she said, then something caught her eye, and she was staring down the beach. “Someone’s coming.”
I swung back up to my feet with surprising dexterity. Would I ever feel like myself again? Would I ever get over this constant requirement to tense for a fight?
The figure walking towards us was bent, a wool shawl wrapped around her. I loosened — but I wasn’t about to let my guard down. When she got closer, my spi
rit eye showed me that she was an Owl, maybe in her fifties. My heart clenched as I thought of Cecelia, then brushed the thought away just as quick. She stopped short of us by a few feet, head tilted.
“So,” she said. Then she smiled at me. “He’s come back, has he?”
I bent my ear towards her like I hadn’t heard properly. “Uh . . . you mean Eli?” I stepped gingerly away from his prone body, since I’d been standing directly over him. “I really have no idea where —”
“The croft is just a ways up the hill, up a track. You can follow me there. Solomon rang ahead so I’ve opened it up for ye.”
I felt a spray on my face that wasn’t the sea. It’d started raining, and the woman had turned to go again. “Wait! He needs help. I can’t —”
“Ye look a hale lass,” the woman said, pausing to wave. “It’s just a ways to carry him.”
I looked helplessly to Saskia, who seemed to be waiting for me to make a decision.
“He did carry us all this way.” Saskia said.
I looked down. Eli was more than six feet tall and, though lean, probably almost two hundred pounds.
I sighed, opening myself up to the dark fox warrior for just a little while longer as I scooped him up, and I followed Saskia and the woman up the hill.
~
Eli felt a shadow pass over him. He opened his eyes to wings, but they weren’t his own.
Though he’d only seen her likeness in the books, in the training ground of his isolated childhood among other acolytes, none of those depictions even came close to Phyr’s actual image. She was huge, as all of her god-sisters were. Her eyes were bright, pupils moving and reshaping like energized mercury as they assessed Eli. Her nine wings were three times the size of her, and in their midnight sea winked stars and unfathomable galaxies.
He could only manage to slide up to his knees before her. At her side was the Pendulum Rod, which she used to keep and manage time.
“My lady.” Eli inclined his head. If he was in a vision, in the Veil, he couldn’t tell. He seemed to be on a floating rock, somewhere in the heavens, separate from reality. The dreamlike atmosphere of this moment felt like the stone choosing he’d endured and now regretted, when Phyr’s great gaze swung to him instead of his father.
But really being here was something else.
“What have you done,” Phyr levelled, “to my stone?” Her voice was the harshest north wind.
Eli tucked his chin and looked. The Moonstone, its white surface with gold flecks, had something dark at the centre. Dark and growing.
A great talon came down to Eli’s eye, close enough to push through to the other side of his skull. “My sister’s stone, too, has been poisoned. You have been linking to it. And now the Moonstone is corrupted.”
Eli stilled. Nodded. Whatever realm he’d found himself in — maybe the Roost itself? — he had to tread lightly. “I beseech you, my lady. All I want is to reform the balance of the Narrative. Is there any way —”
“No,” she said. “The only way you will rid yourself of this poison is to rid yourself of my sister’s stonebearer. She is moving beyond the pale. Soon, she will be one with the demon inside her. And not even the Moth Queen can bear her hence. You know what must be done.”
Then Eli felt a cosmic wind push against him, push him right off the rock and into space, his body falling through the stars.
~
“His . . . cousin.”
Watching the woman preparing tea set my teeth on edge. The scene, with Saskia sitting with her knees pulled up to her mouth, hiding behind them, was too unreal. I’d laid Eli down on a bed down the hall a few hours ago, and since then I’d stayed close to the sitting room window. Watching. Waiting. The dark fox hadn’t put up a fight when I sent it back down. Whatever it — she — was, she was biding her time. Trying to make me feel like I was in control. I knew better.
“That’s right,” the woman answered, pulling the hot kettle off the electric stove. “My mother and me, Phyr rest her, used to look in on Eli’s mum, Demelza. She was touched, ye ken.” Sound seemed dialled to eleven. Even her pouring the hot water was loud, like it was right next to me, even though the small kitchen was at least ten feet off. “Eli was made to grow up too fast. Still taking the world on his shoulders, I see.”
“Yeah, he’s a real saint.” I wasn’t about to rehash the complicated allyship — if you could call it that — we seemed to have going. “So he lived here?”
“Aye,” the woman, Agathe, came round with a tray that had tea and biscuits, setting it on the low table in front of Saskia, who hadn’t yet moved an inch. “But after the sorry affair with his mum, his father came back for him. None too happy about that man, but he did his best for Eli after the fact. Bought the land up here and gifted it to Eli in trust, should he ever need a place to come back to.” She leaned back, hands on her hips. I recognized something in her, something that was maybe a dream or maybe a memory I hadn’t meant to see. Eli, me, a woman with long whipping hair on a beach. That’s my mother, he’d said.
Agathe was looking at Saskia. “And why did you bring one of them here, then?” Saskia seemed to fold tighter. “She’s an ill omen.”
“So am I,” I snapped. Agathe glanced up at me with the wry patience of a caregiver.
“Aye,” she said. “You are a sight, and no mistake. But you’re still a Paramount. A stonebearer. Which means ye have it in ye to bite it back. None so sure about this one.” She sighed, bending down to pour a mug and pass it to Saskia. “But if young master Eli brought her here, she must have a purpose.”
I left the window, satisfied for now that nothing was coming after us. Yet. “I asked him to bring her.” I’d had to. I didn’t want her getting swept up in that fight. Or getting left behind, forced to turn her fragile body into a tool for Seela, as I was slowly becoming.
“Oh, aye? Well, that there is a wonder in itself. That he listened to ye, I mean.” She had picked up her shawl from the electric fire, was flapping the remaining damp out of it before draping it back over herself. “Boy’s always had a thick skull. Only ever sought his own counsel. Surprised anyone could make him do a whit.”
I felt my face flush. “I’m loud and persistent enough, I guess.”
“Ye’d have to be to get through that.” She tapped her head. “In any case, I’m off.”
Like a feral cat, Saskia snatched a biscuit from the tray, wrapping herself around it but not taking a bite.
“Off?” I said.
“Aye. Ye’ve got yerselves to sort out here. Trouble’s coming. Don’t need to read minds to know that.” She pulled a hat down from the rack near the door, fastened the flaps under her chin. “The Owls here will try to keep you lot hidden until ye make yer move. We trust that the Paramount of our Family will know what to do. Phyr ever guides us, even if Ancient does not.” She stopped me with one last appraising stare, nodding. “And two Paramounts are better than one.”
I didn’t bother correcting her. She didn’t know the half of what I wasn’t capable of, despite everyone’s blind belief. I stood up and caught her at the door. “Listen. I . . . Thank you. For this.”
Her smile was crooked — how Eli’s might look if I ever got more than a caustic smirk from him. “Don’t thank me. Thank him.” Then she was out in the rain, and I let the door close behind her.
“Tea?” Saskia asked, and when I turned back, Eli was standing in the sitting room, surly.
“Black,” he said, and when he came around to one of the sofas, he lowered himself gingerly onto the cushions as if his joints needed a bad oiling. He’d changed his clothes into, presumably, whatever had been left behind in the small cabin’s musty closets. He wore a fisherman’s cable-knit sweater and cargo pants, feet bare. Blood was still crusted in his skin and hair, despite having obviously tried to scrub most of it off. He glanced around. “Still the same damn furniture, I see.”
/> I huffed. “The prodigal son et cetera.” I came back to where I’d been near Saskia, to begrudgingly make small talk. “How you feeling?”
His eyes were mean, annoyed I’d even ask. “Better than either of us look,” he rasped, coughing. “But anything is better than being slowly squeezed to death inside a tree.”
I blanched. “Is that . . . Wait, how did you get free?” Maybe this interlude would be good for something, after all. Now that I’d seen the cinder kids in action, seen what they were capable of, the relief that Seela’s wake of destruction could be mended was welcome.
“Your Rabbit friend. Barton.” Eli winced at the tea, put it back down. “Egh. Not even steeped.”
“Barton? He’s here? I mean. Well, wherever you were.”
“Russia,” he said.
I pushed myself deeper into the armchair, letting my head loll back. “Russia? God . . .” Toto, we were not in Winnipeg anymore. “I’m not even gonna ask how you got all the way from there to London to . . . wherever I was. To here.”
“I believe the place Seela holed up is somewhere in Newfoundland. And I’m not going to waste either of our time alleviating your guilt about me or any of it. I obviously should’ve just let things play out and made off with your stone. Less trouble.” I was too tired to sort through any of that statement to separate the sarcasm, if there was any.
“He’s lying,” Saskia translated for me. “He wanted to save you.”
Eli was still when I lifted my head, glaring at Saskia. Was his face colouring? “And please remind me why that is still here, and why she hasn’t been exterminated like the rest of her vermin siblings ought to be?”
I let my head drop again, shut my eyes. “Saskia isn’t like them. And I figured you’d want a two-for-one deal on the rescue.”
“I didn’t. Also, weren’t you biting off my head earlier about this? I thought you didn’t need rescuing.”
I waved my hand at him, hoping he’d just go away.
When I opened my eyes, he was standing over me. I jerked.