Silk & Steel

by Ellen Kushner

  “No, you weren’t,” said Margo. “You just want me to compliment you on your talisman. Which, all right, you have beautiful handwriting and it looks like the work of a natural talent.”

  “I didn’t want to say it myself, but...” Pippa said, and turned her nose up in the air like a conceited cat. Margo laughed, and took her arm so she could haul her over the windowsill and onto the garden path.

  “Come on, oh wise and powerful sage,” she said. “I’ll walk you home.”

  * * *

  Margo didn’t remember what they talked about on the way back. It was one of those glorious conversations where she was barely aware of what she said at all, where the words arrived into her mouth without her stopping to think. They took the long way to Pippa’s house, stopping to buy aiyu jelly and roti prata and eat their spoils under the banyan at the center of Pippa’s neighborhood.

  “You seriously only learned a talisman that causes rainfall?” she asked. “We’re in the tropics! It rains every other week!”

  “I didn’t know how to ask your father to learn something more dangerous,” Pippa protested. “I couldn’t very well tell him you were going to a duel tomorrow, could I? Though I do think the consequences wouldn’t be as bad as you think. They only took your sword for a week after we got caught putting soap-suds in the school fountain.”

  “Yes, but I’m still feeling their guilt trip! Every time anyone says ‘sacrifice’ I’m right back in the dean’s office, listening to their lecture.”

  “You suffer so much,” said Pippa. “Here, have some roti.”

  Pippa yanked it away from Margo’s hand, because of course she did, but it was still in range. Margo leaned over, stealing the roti with her teeth faster than Pippa could react, but then their faces were very close, enough for Margo to smell the hibiscus oil in her hair. Pippa let her hand fall, eyes very wide. Margo chewed.

  “Why did I challenge Mr. Frakes to a duel, anyway?” she asked, mouth still half-full. “You seem to remember the night far better than I.”

  “He was flirting very badly,” Pippa said. “Nothing too horrible, just that he’d quite like to take me shopping sometime. Something about my being too girlish to wear the clothing of an old maid. I was about to pretend that I didn’t feel terribly insulted, when you went over with your hair all askew, shaking your sword. It was... It was quite gallant, actually.”

  They were still very close. Margo could see each individual eyelash, the pores that Pippa obsessed over in the mirror and Margo usually didn’t notice. Her eyes were dark, almost fathomless, a brown only a single shade removed from black. Pippa leaned in, or Margo leaned in, or both. She couldn’t tell, she didn’t remember, because they were kissing and Pippa was so soft and so, so close.

  For a second Margo was worried that she would not rise to the occasion. She had forgotten everything except pure instinct, and she had no way to tell if her lips were moving too slowly, or whether Pippa liked that Margo had put her hands around her waist or wanted her to move them. She was also worried that she might have gotten roti stuck to her teeth, because what if Pippa put her tongue in her mouth and then came back out again with a bit of unchewed dough?

  Then Pippa tugged at the end of Margo’s braid, just once and very lightly, and Margo knew that this was still her Pippa, and anything she did would make her smile. She breathed in the heady scent of hibiscus and then she was aware of barely anything at all.

  Eventually, one of them had to have pulled away, because Margo was staring at Pippa unmoving in her arms. Her mind was blank again. The smell of hibiscus lingered. Was this where she was supposed to prostrate herself and confess her love like in a wuxia novel? Were they supposed to pretend they were only sharing a casual moment’s touch, like in those artistic French books that Pippa liked to read? Pippa’s lips were right there and Margo knew exactly how they felt. She had to speak. Anything was better than that expectant silence.

  “What?” said Margo, which was exactly the worst thing to say. Pippa pulled away (no!) and wiped her mouth off with her sleeve (why!) and then she was Perfect Pippa again, but a worse version, because her smooth, unruffled mask was based on the Pippa that Margo knew.

  “Just for luck,” she said, “since you’re so worried about Mr. Frakes turning you into a baboon tomorrow. Who knows if anyone’ll kiss you then!” She laughed, a sort of tinkling, musical gurgle. It sounded extremely fake. Then she sprang up from the bench, curtsied for reasons that Margo knew not, and ran away. She didn’t even take the rest of the jelly.

  Margo leaned against the banyan, her mind spinning. Why had Pippa kissed her? What did it mean? What did she want from her? Where had Pippa learned how to kiss so urgently and so sweetly, and why hadn’t Margo been involved?

  She still had to fight a duel tomorrow. Margo picked up the aiyu jelly that Pippa had abandoned so heartlessly and began the long walk home.

  * * *

  She arrived at the dueling ground the next day unslept and unnerved but looking very, very sharp. She’d had to ask her older brother for help, but her bangs fell in careless, tousled waves, her braid pinned up into a crown around her head. She wore a cultivator’s loose robes in the blue and silver of her family sect, her Western-style boots spit-polished to perfection.

  Mr. Frakes was already waiting in the arena, his robes shining with every shade of the sunset. If she looked at them for long enough, she could see them changing as the sun stitched on his back traveled from his collar down to his ankles. It was the clothing of a man who didn’t expect to break a sweat.

  The umpire called them to inspect weaponry. Mr. Frakes presented him with his staff, made of a moonbeam with studded, inset circles of silver starlight. Margo handed him hers.

  “That’s not a wizard’s staff! That’s a sword you’ve stuck a crystal on!”

  Mr. Frakes’s voice was not so indolent anymore. It was fascinating how his accent changed with alarm, rougher and deeper vowels suggesting that, at one point, he might have actually held a job. He looked like he was only then realizing that the duel would be quite different from any he’d fought before.

  “I think you’ll find, Honored Judge, that Margo’s weapon meets all the stated requirements in the Duelists’ Code.”

  A high, sweet voice made the objection from the front row. Margo didn’t have to turn around to see that it was Pippa, but she did. It was the first time she had seen Pippa look like such a frump outside the home. Her hair frizzed, and she had buttoned her dress slightly wrong so one extra buttonhole flopped awkwardly above her collar. She looked beautiful. Her eyes met Margo’s like they were sharing something significant, though Margo didn’t know precisely what.

  The umpire called paces, and Margo spent five of the ten steps away from Mr. Frakes thinking about that look and the other five about her imminent humiliation. At the sound of the whistle, Mr. Frakes turned and immediately flung a bolt of lightning, which Margo dodged by diving onto the ground and rolling away.

  He had spells aplenty, glowing glyphs and purple bolts of pure magic that he threw out faster than Margo could even inhale, but that didn’t matter as long as he couldn’t hit her. He called vines up from the floor to tangle around her ankles and she cut them in a single swing. The floor itself rumbled and split beneath her, but Margo jumped and skidded back onto solid ground.

  She had to close the distance, and she was. He was throwing everything he could at her, but she was relentless, each dodge and duck bringing her a step closer. If she could only move forward, until she was a sword’s length away....

  Mr. Frakes launched an armory’s worth of magical knives at waistheight, packed so close that there was nowhere for Margo to sidestep, and Margo dived underneath them and rolled, somersaulting like she and Pippa had learned together in primary school. She had perhaps a few more paces to go. She sprang up into a crouch, tensing the muscles in her calves.

  Mr. Frakes smiled, and only after she had begun to leap did the floor in front of Margo burst into a wall of flame. S
he managed to throw herself sideways at the last second, landing awkwardly on her hip, but there were flames behind her and to the right, and they were only getting closer.

  This was it. She had fought, but she had lost. Margo squeezed her eyes shut and raised her hand to forfeit, feeling a tear run down her... forehead?

  She opened her eyes again. Rain was falling indoors, the storm clouds gathering in the arena’s eaves, a gentle pattering rhythm against the stone floor. Her painstakingly arranged curls flopped into her eyes, and through them Margo saw Pippa standing with the talisman gleaming in her hand.

  “Now, see here,” said Mr. Frakes, frustration creeping into his voice. “I was just about to defeat Miss Lai! No outside interference!”

  “The Duelists’ Code states, in exact language, that none may cast spells upon the arena except for the parties involved,” said Pippa primly. “As the person whose hand is being fought over, I am quite definitely a party involved.”

  The umpire consulted his rules, while Mr. Frakes muttered exasperated imprecations against interfering females and Margo lay exhausted on the floor. She watched as the umpire conferred with a colleague, then his book again.

  “I’ll allow it,” he said. Pippa looked panicked for a second, then the mask descended and she was perfect again, as indolent and commanding as Mr. Frakes himself.

  “No,” she said.

  “What? But you just argued—”

  “I actually prepared a rather longer argument, and I’d like the chance to give it, if only to establish legal precedent,” she said, very convincingly grave. She snuck a glance at Margo, though, and when their eyes met and Margo saw that familiar mischievous gleam, Margo knew. Pippa was giving her time to catch her breath.

  The whole crowd, and Mr. Frakes, watched, mesmerized, as Pippa held forth upon the nature of dueling, marriage, womanhood, and magic itself. Margo eased herself upright, and slunk along the side of the arena, behind the massive stone pillars that Mr. Frakes had been so kind to raise for her. The only one who noticed her move was Mr. Sastrowardoyo, in his promised front-row seat, but he had just enough mercy in him to beam with silent glee and wave her along.

  From experience, Margo knew that Pippa could speak extemporaneously for hours on end, but the umpire had none of Margo’s patience. He cut her off after a minute, and Mr. Frakes sighed in relief, then gasped in alarm.

  “Wait, where did she—”

  Margo leapt at him, sword extended. Faced with eighty centimeters of cold steel inches from his face, Mr. Frakes defaulted to instinct and turned himself into a jaguar, then a komodo dragon, then a great white bear. Unfortunately for him, Margo’s mother had taken her into the wilderness for training several times, and all those animals were susceptible to being stabbed.

  “Forfeit! I forfeit!” cried the great white bear that was Mr. Frakes, Margo’s swordpoint at the vulnerable underside of his belly. He reverted to his human form and raked his hair back with his hand, dropping his staff to the floor. “Damn it all to Bristol, you win! You can have Miss Philippa’s hand!”

  Margo felt the entire arena audience focus its attention on her, Pippa not excluded. She blushed, again. Lowered her sword. She could still hear Pippa asking her if she was showing off. She could still feel her kiss.

  “Right, er,” she said. “I’m giving it back to you, Pippa. I suppose.”

  Pippa was very silent and still for a second, then she mimed catching something and grinned, to the general laughter of the arena. Mr. Frakes picked his staff up again and leaned against it, looking harried.

  “Hang on a second, so you didn’t even want her hand in the first place? I don’t— but why— If you’re not getting anything, I still have to give you a forfeit,” he said. “It’s only fair, and that was the most exciting duel I’ve had in a year.”

  “You have to fund the celebration party,” Margo said, feeling abruptly like she had fought a thousand duels instead of just one. “And tell me how you do your hair.”

  * * *

  Mr. Frakes had thrown possibly the most extravagant party Margo had ever been to, but she couldn’t bring herself to enjoy it. Not the dancing candy figurines on the table, or the life-size ski jump that launched partiers into a bed of soft, fluffy clouds. Even the wizards in the crowd trying to best each other at casting marvelous illusions couldn’t put a smile on her face.

  Pippa was enjoying herself immensely, dancing with the ten illusionary simulacrums of herself Mr. Frakes had summoned from thin air, but Margo needed nothing more than some quiet and fresh air. She left Pippa’s house through the side entrance, carefully avoiding Mr. Sastrowardoyo recounting the story of her duel to some legal colleagues in the foyer, and walked towards the banyan.

  She was going over the events of the past few days in her mind, and trying to think about what she could’ve changed to make everything go right instead. She had frozen up, like she always did, even after Pippa had given her chance upon chance. When her mind went blank she worked on instinct, and every single one of her instincts was wrong. She wanted to be someone else, someone who knew things like how people felt and what to say to them.

  She didn’t want to be Margo Lai anymore. Even all the— all the breath in her body wanted to be air.

  She felt like she was floating already before she even leapt, and then the sky dipped down to meet her until she landed among the branches of the banyan. The city seemed so small from up there, or, well, at least the neighborhood did. She could see the lights of Pippa’s house shining through the dark, multi-colored fireworks exploding from a window. She even thought she could see Pippa herself, or maybe just a corner of her scarlet gown.

  The moon was large in the sky, and Margo felt that if she only leapt again she could perhaps brush her hand against its surface. Years and years of trying to learn magic, months of the same lesson from her mother, and she had finally mastered flight the... what? Thousandth time? She’d lost count.

  There had been nothing special about the leap she’d made, no epiphany or perfect metaphor. All she’d had to do was try one thousand times, and then try again.

  She squinted at Pippa’s house and saw that it really was her, walking down the cobbled path with her practical shoes clicking against the ground. Margo shouted and waved, rustling the roots, until Pippa looked up.

  “How did you get up there?”

  “I finally learned how to jump,” Margo said. “Like my mother’s been trying to teach me. I could take you up here, if you like.”

  “I think I’ll wait till you get some more practice in, thank you,” said Pippa, face taking on an exaggeratedexpression of concern. Margo could make a joke back, fall into their practiced rhythm, and Pippa would let her. They would never have to talk about the kiss again, if she didn’t want to. If there was bad news, Margo would never have to know.

  “Pippa, I...”

  She didn’t know what to say. Her heart was pounding, blood roaring in her ears. Margo tried again.

  “I think... I loo... After, everything I mean, the roti...”

  She was fumbling again, trying out words and then discarding them just as quickly. Margo could hear nothing but the sound of her own voice, not even the party only two streets away. Then Pippa laughed, a small, quiet, fond sound, and Margo laughed, too.

  “You can have my hand, you know,” Margo said, rediscovering the ability to form sentences with each word. “In marriage, and whatnot.”

  “Yes!” Pippa said before Margo could even finish saying “whatnot.” “I—It’s been eons, you know? That’s how long I’ve wanted you to say... Well, not that, precisely, but something. Anything. And you can’t say I was the one who kept us waiting so long, because I did try. I kissed you! First!”

  “But you couldn’t tell me what it meant,” said Margo, grinning. “So I think I should really get the credit.”

  “You—Come down here so I can argue with you properly!”

  “Not a chance,” said Margo. She rustled the roots of the banyan a littl
e more so that they brushed against Pippa, making her shriek with laughter and shake her fist up at her.

  “Come down here so I can kiss you again,” Pippa said, and Margo did.

  It was a perfect night. Moonlight making Pippa’s brown skin gleam, faint music from the party, and a distant shout when someone knocked over a vase. The scent of gardenias, because Pippa had changed her shampoo. For a while, it felt as though they were the only two people in the world, and yet also part of the world, their hearts beatingin the same rhythm as all the lovers who had ever loved before.

  Then, nestled in Margo’s arms, Pippa asked:

  “We’re not going to get married just yet, though, right?”

  “Spirits, no,” said Margo, with feeling. “I think—I feel much too young. Don’t you feel too young?”

  “By decades,” Pippa said. “Though for a while there I thought about pretending that I wanted to get married next week, just to really give you a scare.”

  “You’re horrible,” said Margo, and Pippa giggled and tugged her braid, then kissed her again. Being perfectly in love was all right, but she liked Pippa laughing at her even more.

  Princess, Shieldmaiden, Witch, and Wolf

  by Neon Yang

  My liege is the most beautiful woman in all the land. No one knows this better than I, her shieldmaiden, who has watched over her since memory has been memory. Her beauty grows with each exchange of sunrise for sunset, and today her shining hair catches the afternoon light and she is as bright as the summer around us. Nothing compares to her: not the net of jewels dancing across the river, nor the smell of honeysuckle on the breeze. At the water’s wild edge she pulls off her tunic and trousers and beckons, hair loose around her shoulders.

  “Come, my dearest.” She holds her hand out as she wades in, calf-deep, free of every care in the world. Light plays upon her glowing skin. “Join me.”

  It’s a hot day, and the water is inviting, but fear grips me. We’re meant to be at sword practice, except the allure of birdsong drew my liege, giggling, to the ribbon of water lacing the woods around the castle. I cling to the cotton shield of my clothes.