“My commander suggested that,” said Tryce. “There are too many of them. We might as well try to dam a river with silk.”
“It’s better than remaining here.”
“Even if we fight to a stalemate in the Spires of Treachery, the raiders will have our fields to grow food in, and our broods to make children on. If they can’t conquer us this year, they’ll obliterate us in ten. I need something else.”
“There is nothing else.”
“Think of something!”
I thought.
I cast my mind back through my years of training. I remembered the locked room in my matriline’s household where servants were never allowed to enter, which my cousins and I scrubbed every dawn and dusk to teach us to be constant and rigorous.
I remembered the cedar desk where my aunt Finis taught me to paint birds, first by using the most realistic detail that oils could achieve, and then by reducing my paintings to fewer and fewer brushstrokes until I could evoke the essence of bird without any brush at all.
I remembered the many-drawered red cabinets where we stored Leafspine and Winterbrew, powdered Errow and essence of Howl. I remembered my bossy cousin Alne skidding through the halls in a panic after she broke into a locked drawer and mixed together two herbs that we weren’t supposed to touch. Her fearful grimace transformed into a beak that permanently silenced her sharp tongue.
I remembered the year I spent traveling to learn the magic of foreign lands. I was appalled by the rituals I encountered in places where women urinated on their thresholds to ward off spirits, and plucked their scalps bald when their eldest daughters reached majority. I walked with senders and weavers and whisperers and learned magic secrets that my people had misunderstood for centuries. I remembered the terror of the three nights I spent in the ancient ruins of The Desert which Should Not Have Been, begging the souls that haunted that place to surrender the secrets of their accursed city. One by one my companions died, and I spent the desert days digging graves for those the spirits found unworthy. On the third dawn, they blessed me with communion, and sent me away a wiser woman.
I remembered returning to the Land of Flowered Hills and making my own contribution to the lore contained in our matriline’s locked rooms. I remembered all of this, and still I could think of nothing to tell Tryce.
Until a robin of memory hopped from an unexpected place—a piece of magic I learned traveling with herders, not spell-casters. It was an old magic, one that farmers cast when they needed to cull an inbred strain.
“You must concoct a plague,” I began.
Tryce’s eyes locked on me. I saw hope in her face, and I realized that she’d expected me to fail her, too.
“Find a sick baby and stop whatever treatment it is receiving. Feed it mosquito bellies and offal and dirty water to make it sicker. Give it sores and let them fill with pus. When its forehead has grown too hot for a woman to touch without flinching, kill the baby and dedicate its breath to the sun. The next morning, when the sun rises, a plague will spread with the sunlight.”
“That will kill the raiders?”
“Many of them. If you create a truly virulent strain, it may kill most of them. And it will cut down their children like a scythe across wheat.”
Tryce clapped her blood-stained hands. “Good.”
“I should warn you. It will kill your babies as well.”
“What?”
“A plague cooked in an infant will kill anyone’s children. It is the way of things.”
“Unacceptable! I come to you for help, and you send me to murder my daughters?”
“You killed one before, didn’t you? To save your automaton?”
“You’re as crazy as the crones at court! We need more babies, not fewer.”
“You’ll have to hope you can persuade your women to bear children so that you can rebuild your population faster than the raiders can rebuild theirs.”
Tryce looked as though she wanted to level a thousand curses at me, but she stilled her tongue. Her eyes were dark and narrow. In a quiet, angry voice, she said, “Then it will be done.”
They were the same words she’d used when she promised to kill Gudrin. That time I’d been able to save her despite her foolishness. This time, I might not be able to.
•
Next I was summoned, I could not see at all. I was ushered into the world by lowing, distant shouts, and the stench of animals packed too closely together.
A worried voice cut through the din. “Did it work? Are you there? Laverna, is that still you?”
Disoriented, I reached out to find a hint about my surroundings. My hands impacted a summoning barrier.
“Laverna, that’s not you anymore, is it?”
The smell of manure stung my throat. I coughed. “My name is Naeva.”
“Holy day, it worked. Please, Sleepless One, we need your help. There are men outside. I don’t know how long we can hold them off.”
“What happened? Is Queen Tryce dead?”
“Queen Tryce?”
“She didn’t cast the plague, did she? Selfish brat. Where are the raiders now? Are you in the Spires of Treachery?”
“Sleepless One, slow down. I don’t follow you.”
“Where are you? How much land have the raiders taken?”
“There are no raiders here, just King Addric’s army. His soldiers used to be happy as long as we paid our taxes and bowed our heads at processions. Now they want us to follow their ways, worship their god, let our men give us orders. Some of us rebelled by marching in front of the governor’s theater, and now he’s sent sorcerers after us. They burned our city with magical fire. We’re making a last stand at the inn outside town. We set aside the stable for the summoning.”
“Woman, you’re mad. Men can’t practice that kind of magic.”
“These men can.”
A nearby donkey brayed, and a fresh stench plopped into the air. Outside, I heard the noise of burning, and the shouts of men and children.
“It seems we’ve reached an impasse. You’ve never heard of the Land of Flowered Hills?”
“Never.”
I had spent enough time pacing the ruins in the Desert which Should Not Have Been to understand the ways in which civilizations cracked and decayed. Women and time marched forward, relentless and uncaring as sand.
“I see.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not doing this very well. It’s my first summoning. My aunt Hetta used to do it but they slit her throat like you’d slaughter a pig and left her body to burn. Bardus says they’re roasting the corpses and eating them, but I don’t think anyone could do that. Could they? Hetta showed me how to do this a dozen times, but I never got to practice. She would have done this better.”
“That would explain why I can’t see.”
“No, that’s the child, Laverna. She’s blind. She does all the talking. Her twin Nammi can see, but she’s dumb.”
“Her twin?”
“Nammi’s right here. Reach into the circle and touch your sister’s hand, Nammi. That’s a good girl.”
A small hand clasped mine. It felt clammy with sweat. I squeezed back.
“It doesn’t seem fair to take her sister away,” I said.
“Why would anyone take Laverna away?”
“She’ll die when I leave this body.”
“No, she won’t. Nammi’s soul will call her back. Didn’t your people use twins?”
“No. Our hosts died.”
“Yours were a harsh people.”
Another silence. She spoke the truth, though I’d never thought of it in such terms. We were a lawful people. We were an unflinching people.
“You want my help to defeat the shamans?” I asked.
“Aunt Hetta said that sometimes the Sleepless Ones can blink and douse all the magic within seven leagues. Or wave their hands and sweep a rank of men into a hurricane.”
“Well, I can’t.”
She fell silent. I considered her situation.
“Do you have your people’s livestock with you?” I asked.
“Everything that wouldn’t fit into the stable is packed inside the inn. It’s even less pleasant in there if you can imagine.”
“Can you catch one of their soldiers?”
“We took some prisoners when we fled. We had to kill one but the others are tied up in the courtyard.”
“Good. Kill them and mix their blood into the grain from your larder, and bake it into loaves of bread. Feed some of the bread to each of your animals. They will fill with a warrior’s anger and hunt down your enemies.”
The woman hesitated. I could hear her feet shifting on the hay-covered floor.
“If we do that, we won’t have any grain or animals. How will we survive?”
“You would have had to desert your larder when the Worm-Pretending-to-Be-Queen sent reinforcements anyway. When you can safely flee, ask the blind child to lead you to the Place where the Sun Is Joyous. Whichever direction she chooses will be your safest choice.”
“Thank you,” said the woman. Her voice was taut and tired. It seemed clear that she’d hoped for an easier way, but she was wise enough to take what she received. “We’ll have a wild path to tame.”
“Yes.”
The woman stepped forward. Her footsteps released the scent of dried hay. “You didn’t know about your Land, did you?”
“I did not.”
“I’m sorry for your loss. It must be—”
The dumb child whimpered. Outside, the shouts increased.
“I need to go,” said the woman.
“Good luck,” I said, and meant it.
I felt the child Laverna rush past me as I sank back into my restless sleep. Her spirit flashed as brightly as a coin left in the sun.
I never saw that woman or any of her people again. I like to think they did not die.
•
I did not like the way the world changed after the Land of Flowered Hills disappeared. For a long time, I was summoned only by men. Most were a sallow, unhealthy color with sharp narrow features and unnaturally light hair. Goateed sorcerers too proud of their paltry talents strove to dazzle me with pyrotechnics. They commanded me to reveal magical secrets that their peoples had forgotten. Sometimes I stayed silent. Sometimes I led them astray. Once, a hunched barbarian with a braided beard ordered me to give him the secret of flight. I told him to turn toward the prevailing wind and beg the Lover of the Sky for a favor. When the roc swooped down to eat him, I felt a wild kind of joy. At least the birds remembered how to punish worms who would steal women’s magic.
I suffered for my minor victory. Without the barbarian to dismiss me, I was stuck on a tiny patch of grass, hemmed in by the rabbit heads he’d placed to mark the summoning circle. I shivered through the windy night until I finally thought to kick away one of the heads. It tumbled across the grass and my spirit sank into the ground.
Men treated me differently than women had. I had been accustomed to being summoned by Queens and commanders awaiting my advice on incipient battles. Men eschewed my consult; they sought to steal my powers. One summoned me into a box, hoping to trap me as if I were a minor demon that could be forced to grant his wishes. I chanted a rhyme to burn his fingers. When he pulled his hand away, the lid snapped shut and I was free.
Our magic had centered on birds and wind. These new sorcerers made pets of creatures of blood and snapping jaws, wolves and bears and jaguars. We had depicted the sun’s grace along with its splendor, showing the red feathers of flaming light that arc into wings to sweep her across the sky. Their sun was a crude, jagged thing—a golden disk surrounded by spikes that twisted like the gaudy knives I’d seen in foreign cities where I traveled when I was young.
The men called me The Bitch Queen. They claimed I had hated my womb so much that I tried to curse all men to infertility, but the curse rebounded and struck me dead. Apparently, I had hanged myself. Or I’d tried to disembowel every male creature within a day’s walk of my borders. Or I’d spelled my entire kingdom into a waking death in order to prevent myself from ever becoming pregnant. Apparently, I did all the same things out of revenge because I became pregnant. I eschewed men and impregnated women with sorcery. I married a thousand husbands and murdered them all. I murdered my husband, the King, and staked his head outside my castle, and then forced all the tearful women of my kingdom to do the same to their menfolk. I went crazy when my husband and son died and ordered all the men in my kingdom to be executed, declaring that no one would have the pleasure I’d been denied. I had been born a boy, but a rival of my father’s castrated me, and so I hated all real men. I ordered that any woman caught breastfeeding should have her breasts cut off. I ordered my lover’s genitals cut off and sewn on me. I ordered my vagina sewn shut so I could never give birth. I ordered everyone in my kingdom to call me a man.
They assumed my magic must originate with my genitals: they displayed surprise that I didn’t strip naked to mix ingredients in my vagina or cast spells using menstrual blood. They also displayed surprise that I became angry when they asked me about such things.
The worst of them believed he could steal my magic by raping me. He summoned me into a worthless, skinny girl, the kind that we in the Land of Flowered Hills would have deemed too weak to be a woman and too frail to be a brood. In order to carry out his plans, he had to make the summoning circle large enough to accommodate the bed. When he forced himself on top of me, I twisted off his head.
The best of them summoned me soon after that. He was a young man with nervous, trembling fingers who innovated a way to summon my spirit into himself. Books and scrolls tumbled over the surfaces of his tiny, dim room, many of them stained with wax from unheeded candles. Talking to him was strange, the two of us communicating with the same mouth, looking out of the same eyes.
Before long, we realized that we didn’t need words. Our knowledge seeped from one spirit to the other like dye poured into water. He watched me as a girl, riding with Rayneh, and felt the sun burning my back as I dug graves in the Desert which Should Not Have Been, and flinched as he witnessed the worm who attempted to rape me. I watched him and his five brothers, all orphaned and living on the street, as they struggled to find scraps. I saw how he had learned to read under the tutelage of a traveling scribe who carried his books with him from town to town. I felt his uncomfortable mixture of love, respect, and fear for the patron who had set him up as a scribe and petty magician in return for sex and servitude. I didn’t know it felt that way, I said to him. Neither did I, he replied. We stared at each other cross-eyed through his big green eyes.
Pasha needed to find a way to stop the nearby volcano before it destroyed the tiny kingdom where he dwelled. Already, tremors rattled the buildings, foreshadowing the coming destruction.
Perhaps I should not have given Pasha the spell, but it was not deep woman’s magic. Besides, things seemed different when I inhabited his mind, closer to him than I had been to anyone.
We went about enacting the spell together. As we collected ash from the fireplaces of one family from each of the kingdom’s twelve towns, I asked him, Why haven’t you sent me back? Wouldn’t it be easier to do this on your own?
I’ll die when your spirit goes, he answered, and I saw the knowledge of it which he had managed to keep from me.
I didn’t want him to die. Then I’ll stay, I said. I won’t interfere with your life. I’ll retreat as much as I can.
I can’t keep up the spell much longer, he said. I felt his sadness and his resolve. Beneath, I glimpsed even deeper sadness at the plans he would no longer be able to fulfill. He’d wanted to teach his youngest brother to read and write so that the two of them could move out of this hamlet and set up shop in a city as scribes, perhaps even earn enough money to house and feed all their brothers.
I remembered Laverna and Nammi and tried to convince Pasha that we could convert the twins’ magic to work for him and his brother. He said that we only had enough time to stop the volcano. The kingdom is
more important than I am, he said.
We dug a hole near the volcano’s base and poured in the ashes that we’d collected. We stirred them with a phoenix feather until they caught fire, in order to give the volcano the symbolic satisfaction of burning the kingdom’s hearths. A dense cloud of smoke rushed up from the looming mountain and then the earth was still.
That’s it, said Pasha, exhaustion and relief equally apparent in his mind. We did it.
We sat together until nightfall when Pasha’s strength began to fail.
I have to let go now, he said.
No, I begged him, Wait. Let us return to the city. We can find your brother. We’ll find a way to save you.
But the magic in his brain was unwinding. I was reminded of the ancient tapestries hanging in the Castle Where Hope Flutters, left too long to moths and weather. Pasha lost control of his feet, his fingers. His thoughts began to drift. They came slowly and far apart. His breath halted in his lungs. Before his life could end completely, my spirit sank away, leaving him to die alone.
After that, I did not have the courage to answer summons. When men called me, I kicked away the objects they’d used to bind me in place and disappeared again. Eventually, the summons stopped.
I had never before been aware of the time that I spent under the earth, but as the years between summons stretched, I began to feel vague sensations: swatches of grey and white along with muted, indefinable pain.
When a summons finally came, I almost felt relief. When I realized the summoner was a woman, I did feel surprise.
•
“I didn’t expect that to work,” said the woman. She was peach-skinned and round, a double chin gentling her jaw. She wore large spectacles with faceted green lenses like insect eyes. Spines like porcupine quills grew in a thin line from the bridge of her nose to the top of her skull before fanning into a mane. The aroma of smoke—whether the woman’s personal scent or some spell remnant—hung acrid in the air.
I found myself simultaneously drawn to the vibrancy of the living world and disinclined to participate in it. I remained still, delighting in the smells and sights and sounds.
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