The Bitter Twins

by Jen Williams

  The man turned and looked at them, and the first Noon saw of Micanal the Clearsighted was the terror on his face, and the shame. Like his sister, he had brown skin, but his hair was a white fuzz across a shining pate, and his red eyes were rubies lost in a web of wrinkles. He wore an old silk robe that had once been finely embroidered with dancing figures. As he looked at them, his wide mouth was pinched into an expression of dismay, then, as he took them in, it slowly fell open. His hands – long-fingered and covered in rings – were shaking. Arnia grinned, an expression of triumph on her face.

  ‘You see? And this isn’t the half of it, Micanal. Wait until you see who is waiting outside.’

  ‘What is this place?’ Tor’s voice was unsteady, and looking at him in surprise Noon saw that he was deeply shaken, although she had no idea why. ‘What . . .’ He gestured at the lightly glowing green roots. ‘What is all this? You must tell me. Is there . . . did you find the place that Ygseril came from? Is there a new tree-god here?’

  The atmosphere in the cavern changed then. Arnia’s triumph faded, her face becoming stony, while Micanal seemed to gather his wits. He rubbed his hands together, flaking away dirt and dust.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I was miles away. Or at least, I wish I was.’ He smiled, and his face lost all the naked confusion and terror that had been there a moment ago; instead, he looked faintly pained. ‘To put you out of your misery, no, there is no tree-god here. I called this place Origin, and I still do, but . . . Never mind. Ebora lives, then? What joyous news.’

  He came forward and gripped Tor’s hand. ‘Look at you, so young. There are others like you, I trust?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ said Tor. He was still looking past the old man to the roots. ‘I am Tormalin the Oathless. You are Micanal the Clearsighted? It is an honour, lord.’

  Micanal chuckled at that. He turned to Noon, smiling. ‘A fell-witch? Is the Winnowry here also?’

  ‘I’m Noon. And no, I left the Winnowry behind. I have nothing to do with them anymore.’

  His eyes flicked up to the bat-wing tattoo on her forehead, as if the existence of that alone proved she was wrong, but he smiled and squeezed her hand anyway. His grip was surprisingly strong, and he had been strikingly handsome once – somehow the creases at his eyes and the white hair only threw that into sharper relief. He shared the same cheekbones as his sister, and he was similarly tall and long-limbed, but whereas she looked no older than a human woman of thirty, Micanal looked ancient, worn down by hundreds of long years. Hadn’t Vintage said they were twins?

  ‘There are war-beasts, Micanal.’ Arnia sounded terse, and there was a hardness in the lines of her face that hadn’t been there before. ‘Outside, waiting to meet you.’

  Micanal lowered his head, but not before Noon had seen the sparkle of tears in his faded ruby eyes.

  ‘The dream of Ebora lives. I can barely fathom it.’

  ‘Come, you must all have dinner with us.’ Arnia was already turning away, leaving her ancient brother where he stood. ‘We’ll have a feast, or at least, as much of a feast as I can provide you.’ She laughed, a sound like sunlight on water. ‘We’ve all got so many questions, I doubt we’ll even have time to eat more than a few mouthfuls, but I’ll give you a spread to rival old Ebora.’

  The sky was all colours.

  Hestillion had never thought of it as such. The sky, to her, had always been the space that Ygseril’s branches filled, or else it had represented a great absence – there were no more war-beasts to fly across it. When she thought of the sky at all, she thought it blue, or black, starry or sunny, and left it at that. The colour of the sky was a subject for poets, and they had all died with their words clogged in diseased chests.

  But with Celaphon, the sky was a revelation. During their hesitant – and frequently disastrous – flying lessons, Hestillion had discovered the pearly silver of early dawn, the hot-anvil blue of late afternoon, the pink of mid-morning, the silent orange inferno of dusk. Clouds too, sometimes stretched across the sky like yellow lace, sometimes stacked like purple bricks, solid and ominous. It was like an entire world had opened up. They saw no birds – birds did not stay in the sky when Celaphon was flying.

  The sky this afternoon was grey, blanketed with low cloud from edge to edge, and the breeze was freshening with every moment. There would be rain soon. She tipped her head back, thinking that she would welcome a good downpour; her chambers on the corpse moon had a space for her to wash in, but she was beginning to think it was impossible ever to feel properly clean in that place.

  ‘Higher, my sweet one, if you can manage it. Let’s leave the ground behind today.’

  Beneath her, Celaphon’s huge muscles bunched and strained, and they moved up, and up. The movement was still uncertain, and the big dragon seemed to find the idea of rhythm difficult, but he was managing to stay in the air for longer and longer stretches of time. She leaned forward and placed her bare hand on the scales of his thick neck.

  ‘That is wonderful, Celaphon. You get better every day.’

  ‘I fly,’ he rumbled in response. As he had grown bigger, his small uncertain voice had been replaced with something hoarse and deep. Hestillion sometimes missed his old voice. ‘It is good. It hurts, but it is good.’

  ‘It hurts you, sweet one? What do you mean?’

  But Celaphon did not answer. Instead, he beat his wings furiously, taking them up so swiftly that Hestillion found herself clinging to his harness. To fly with him she wore thick leather trousers and boots, and a dense fur vest. Her hair she tied back in a long braid, and she had even found a soft fur hat she could pull down over her ears. The queen had given this new outfit a long look, but Hestillion had lifted her head and turned away – robes and gowns were simply impractical.

  ‘You are doing so well!’ Hestillion shouted into the wind, wondering if she would lose the useful little fur hat. ‘You are glorious, my sweet.’

  Celaphon turned in the air – a little awkwardly, losing height – and once again the land below them came into sight. They were over the swamps of the far southeast now, a strange simmering land that Hestillion did not understand, and the corpse moon hung in the air just above the uncertain ground, not quite trusting its weight. The queen was not watching them today, or at least she was nowhere to be seen. Hestillion leaned forward in the harness, so that she could murmur directly to the war-beast.

  ‘Take us higher, Celaphon,’ she said. ‘Let’s see how far we can go.’

  He obliged, and in moments the corpse moon was an ugly egg in the distance. The grey sky embraced them.

  ‘Do you feel that, Celaphon? There is so much space, Sarn is so big. We could . . . we could go anywhere.’

  As soon as the words were out she felt a tightening in her stomach, a sliver of panic in her belly, but the queen was not here to witness her rebellion. It was true, after all – they could go anywhere. There must be some distant corner of Sarn, some high, lonely place where no one would come for them and they could live out the last of their days together, quietly and without fuss. She began to list places, summon maps from her memory she had not thought of in years. There were mountains she had read about, further south than this; or a desert; so far away it was the other side of the world.

  ‘And we could always keep moving,’ she murmured, no longer really talking to Celaphon at all. The wind and the height were turning her hands and face to ice, but she barely noticed. ‘There is no reason we should stay in one place. Just take what we want, when we want, and move on. We wouldn’t have to think of Ebora, or our brother, or of Sarn at all, if we didn’t wish it.’

  ‘Hestillion?’ Celaphon’s voice was tight with something. She patted his neck to reassure him.

  ‘Just think of it though! You could eat whatever you liked, we could go hunting.’ She grinned at the thought of her hunting, like a human on the plains. ‘The two of us alone, in peace.’

  ‘Hestillion, we are not alone.’

  ‘Yes, I know that, swe
et one, but we could be, now that you have your wings. All we must do is make our minds up, save our strength, and then fly—’

  ‘We are not alone now.’

  Hestillion looked up, her heart skittering in her chest. The smooth blank greyness of the sky had been broken by several strange, pale shapes, oddly misshapen men with huge wings – more of the queen’s experiments, let loose. Something in her recoiled at the sight of them, and close on the heels of that came a hot surge of despair in her chest. All her dreams of solitude and freedom seemed to boil away at the sight of the flying creatures.

  ‘What do they want?’ demanded Celaphon. The things were hanging in the sky around them, untroubled by the wind from the dragon’s wings, their inky eyes expressionless.

  ‘She is just testing them,’ said Hestillion. ‘The queen makes these things, and she wants to see how they work, that is all.’

  ‘I don’t like them,’ declared Celaphon. ‘I would eat them, if I could.’

  ‘Well, I should imagine they would not taste pleasant, and—’

  One of the creatures folded its wings and dived at them. Hestillion gave a shriek, and Celaphon dropped in the air. It wasn’t quite enough to avoid the creature, which collided with Celaphon’s flank before flying off again.

  ‘What is happening?’

  Hestillion turned around in the harness, looking back towards the corpse moon, but she couldn’t see the queen there.

  ‘My sweet one, I don’t know. Let us just—’

  All of the flying creatures began to dive at them. Celaphon bellowed, striking out with his thick legs but missing them, and they dropped again. Hestillion gave a breathy cry as her stomach collided with her throat.

  ‘Remember the flying, Celaphon! Don’t lose your focus!’

  ‘But they vex me!’

  And indeed they did. To Hestillion they looked like a swarm of biting red-fly, come to drink the blood of a much larger animal. Again and again they swept towards the dragon, colliding with him and knocking into him. Twice one of the flying men-creatures nearly knocked Hestillion from her harness – the third time, she grabbed hold of the edge of a wing and yanked it viciously, but it was greasy to the touch and it slipped away.

  ‘Celaphon, you have to dodge them.’ What was the queen thinking, to send these? Or had they escaped? ‘Move out of their way, or smack them aside. You are so much bigger and stronger!’

  ‘But I hurt.’ Celaphon twisted in the air, huge wings flapping faster even as they lost more height.

  ‘Just move! Quickly! You can outfly them.’

  The queen’s experiments were coming faster and faster, battering at them like fat bluebottles at a window. Hestillion shouted at Celaphon to move, to fly up out of their range, or sweep down below, but he was no longer listening. Instead, the big dragon was making ominous keening noises in the back of his throat, and there was a deep thrumming sensation working up through his muscles – Hestillion could feel it through her legs. He was, she realised, trembling.

  ‘Celaphon, please, you have to listen to me!’

  Another of the flying man-creatures landed next to her, and Hestillion lunged for it. This time she dug her nails into its arm and dragged it towards her.

  ‘What do you want from us?’

  The creature just looked at her blankly; it was like looking for meaning in a bowl of porridge. She made an odd, guttural noise, something she was sure had never come out of her mouth before, and tore the thing’s arm right off, tossing it into the void below. The winged creature looked in surprise at the tattered place where its arm had been. It had no blood or bones, just stringy white flesh.

  ‘We are strong!’ Hestillion bellowed in its face. ‘Ebora is strong!’

  The creature tipped backwards off Celaphon’s back and was gone, but the others were keeping up their attack, and the war-beast was beyond tired. His wings shook violently with every stroke, and then they were falling out of the sky. Hestillion wrapped her hands around the harness straps and pressed her legs to his sides, wondering if this was where it all ended, after all. Instead, their descent ended in an enormous splash.

  Thick green swamp water rose up on either side of them like a curtain, and then they were doused in it. Hestillion gasped – the freezing swamp mud was like a physical blow – and for a few moments she couldn’t get her breath. When eventually she felt like she could speak again, she glanced up to see some tiny shapes flitting away above them. The queen’s experiments were returning home. She wiped away the swamp mud from Celaphon’s neck, grimacing as she did so. The stuff stank.

  ‘My sweet one, are you all right?’

  The dragon’s sides heaved. His wings lay flat in the muck, looking like nothing more than a thick skin upon the swamp water.

  ‘Pain,’ moaned Celaphon. ‘I hurt, so much. So much.’

  ‘Your wings? Is that what hurts?’

  He shuddered all over in way of a reply.

  ‘We should leave right now,’ muttered Hestillion. ‘Leave these monsters behind us.’ But even as she spoke she knew it was impossible. Celaphon could hardly walk, let alone fly. They were still as much prisoners as they’d ever been. Hestillion pressed her hands to Celaphon’s scales, trying as ever to find a connection with him. ‘My sweet one, you must listen to me. Listen to me and do what I say. That is the only way. When we were flying and those things were attacking us, you should have obeyed me. Do you understand me, Celaphon? Do you understand that you must obey?’

  ‘But the pain.’ Celaphon’s voice was very close to how it had been when he was an infant. ‘Everything hurts, all the time.’

  Hestillion bit her lip, and then leaned down so that she was speaking next to his ear. ‘I do not care about the pain,’ she told him. ‘You will obey me.’

  ‘He did not perform so well, your war-beast.’

  Hestillion very carefully did not turn at the sound of the voice. She was towelling off her hair, having just managed to wash all the swamp mud from it.

  ‘You did that to us.’ It wasn’t really a question. ‘This wasn’t a random incident.’

  ‘We thought it would be amusing,’ said the queen. ‘And it must learn how to fight. It won’t do that jumping around in mud by itself.’

  The towel was crusted with filth. Hestillion dropped it on the floor. ‘Why must Celaphon learn to fight, exactly?’

  ‘Have you forgotten what your creatures are called, Lady Hestillion Eskt? They are war-beasts. War is in their nature.’

  Hestillion had taken off the leather trousers and boots, and cleaned them as best she could. The fur vest was too caked with muck to do anything with immediately, so she had left it to soak in the basin she used for her own baths, and she had changed into a simple yellow robe and black slippers. Once, these clothes, made of fine silk from Mushenska, would have been a comfort, but now she felt vulnerable in them, exposed somehow. She longed to put the leather trousers back on. Instead, she pulled her hair back from her face, still damp, and quickly tied it into a braid. That, at least, was an improvement.

  ‘Perhaps war isn’t in Celaphon’s nature. We know already that he is not like the war-beasts of the past. He is gentle.’

  ‘We do not believe you,’ said the queen. She stalked fully into the room, making herself shorter in order to do so. ‘But regardless. It is the time of the last extermination, we promise you that. And your people will insist on calling it war. So, your creature lives in a time of war, whether he is gentle or not. You are not gentle, Lady Hestillion Eskt, born in the year of the green bird. We saw you tear the limb from one of our creatures.’

  Hestillion straightened up, meeting the eyes of the queen. ‘If you did not wish them harmed, you should not have sent them to me.’

  The queen grinned then, an uncanny splitting of her face. ‘Good. We shall have more of these tests. My little war-queen.’

  29

  I have, with no small difficulty, recovered one of my coin caches, and for the first time in days we were able to sleep in p
roper beds, and have access to hot water. I felt better once we were behind the doors of our room, I must admit. The people in this small town are anxious and tense, and the sight of Nanthema seemed to push them in all directions. Twice during dinner, tavern customers approached us asking for news. One young man demanded to know what Ebora was going to do about the worm people, and I watched Nanthema’s face grow still as she withdrew into herself. I told him we don’t know. That our news is no different from anyone else’s.

  Later, when we were alone . . . I do not know how to write about this, but I feel I must, for my own sake, if nothing else. I have not been a hermit these last twenty-odd years. With the loss of Nanthema, I might have returned to the vine forest, but I did not sign up for any vow of celibacy – I am not some forlorn heroine in an old story, locking herself in the attic for want of her true love. I have too much to do, for a start. Yet I was reluctant, when Nanthema came to me that night. I am older than I was, and she is as beautiful as ever – imagine your lover aging twenty years overnight . . . Imagine being the one who has aged.

  Still, war and the end of the world looming tends to put anyone in the mood, and we did share a bed that night. Was it like the old days? No, of course not, and yet there were times when I listened to her breathing and tasted her skin when I could remember them better than I have for a long time, and I will admit that for a while I was lost in that fantasy. And I believe she was too. In the morning, with a cold light streaming in through the window, she turned to me in bed and, for the barest moment, I saw an expression of surprise flicker across her face. She recovered well: stroking my cheek, she told me, ‘Vintage, you age beautifully.’

  Extract from the private journals of Lady Vincenza ‘Vintage’ de Grazon

  Once empty and filled with echoes, the ballroom of the Eboran palace now shone with treasures. Vintage stood leaning on her crutch, trying to take it all in. She had made several pages of notes already, but had had to stop when her hand started to cramp up. There was so much to see here it almost made her angry – she couldn’t possibly catalogue all of it, and sooner or later Sharrik would return and then she wouldn’t be able to keep the war-beast away. Everything that was newly shining with polish and fresh leather would, no doubt, be dented in minutes. She grinned.