“Skin,” I said to him. It was time to play my hand.
Jason’s smiling brow furrowed with worry for me, and I loved him all the more. I had not shed Gana’s skin in months—I only ever risked it when the pain was too great. And though my pain was great now, I feared his was about to be worse.
I sunk beneath the surface of the bathwater, slipped out of Gana’s skin, and stood. Well, I almost stood. Jason caught me when I began to falter. He helped me steady myself. He even smiled at my foolish show of bravado. And then he saw my rounded middle.
Every muscle in his body tensed. His brow furrowed. His face hardened. He said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing for. It had taken both of us to create the being that now grew inside me. I suspected the universe had played a hand as well—I should not have been able to conceive in this manner. Immortals could not do this. But I had not worn the skin of an immortal for a very long time.
I know I felt some guilt for hiding my condition for so long, but I did not regret that. Had Jason known about the pregnancy, he would have done something, despite the fact that I was the one with the power to hide the babe and keep it safe. He would have found a way to stop me from visiting the troll king. I envisioned him physically putting himself between us. That scenario never ended well for anyone.
Truth be told, I was probably apologizing for myself. I was a poor substitute for the woman who had loved him and willingly shared his life. This child, if it lived, would in no way replace the one he had lost. Yes, the trolls had most likely murdered both of them before Jason ever met me, but I was the one here now. With him. Carrying his child.
He reached out a hand and his skin met mine. Tears slid down his cheeks. “Rashida. She’s gone.”
“You will see her again,” I said softly. “You will see them both again. On the other side.” There was that practiced surety again. Only, I hoped this lie were true. If I could not save my skin, I might be joining them there.
We held each other in silence for a while, until I involuntary shivered from the cold. Slowly, he helped me back down into the bath. I donned Gana’s skin once more, to heal and hide. And then we made plans.
Jason had not heard of the Thaumater the troll king had mentioned, but he knew that Gana and the king were spending more and more time behind closed doors. The dungeons these days contained far fewer humans and far more fey. Whatever Atatroll’s infernal device did, if it could facilitate a world ruled by trolls, it needed to be destroyed.
Jason located the rebel, Teneka, whose fey power was the ability to walk through walls. Together they arranged a wagon that would quickly deliver me to town and, hopefully, to safety. I begged Jason to come with me, though I had no idea how to hide him once I became a seal again. I would cross that bridge when I came to it.
But he would not be dissuaded. If the fate of the world rested on destroying this Thaumater, he trusted no one else to the task. After all, the troll king and his sorceress would surely have hidden such a powerful device. Jason was the only fey guaranteed to find it. Once he had it, he would use his gift to find a place deep in the mountain where he could destroy it.
I gasped when Teneka appeared through the locked door of our chamber. She was a petite thing—the halo of her hair was almost half as large as the rest of her—but I had no doubt of her strength. If this woman said she could drive a team of aurochs through the mountains undetected, I trusted her. Granted, it wasn’t like I had a choice.
“It’s time to go,” she announced.
Jason and I pulled each other into as tight an embrace as my belly would allow. Dreamers until the end, we stubbornly refused to call it a goodbye.
“I fell in love with you the moment I laid eyes on you,” I whispered in his ear. “I was doomed from the start.”
“I found you a way out of this room,” he whispered back.
Lord and Strife help me, I laughed, even as tears fell from my eyes.
“You,” he said. “You were my way out.”
“There was always the window,” I suggested playfully.
I felt his lips smile against my cheek. “You were the better choice.”
We kissed then, long and deep. The goodbye we did not say in words was said with that kiss. Then I stepped back into Gana’s skin, hopefully for the last time.
Teneka gasped as I shifted into the sorceress. “Amazing.”
“At this moment, I envy your power much more.”
“Take my hands,” she said, and then she pulled us through the door as if it were made of water. Once we got to the bottom of the tower, Teneka and I took the left corridor. Jason took the right. I felt his hand slip from mine, but I did not look back.
There was no turning back for either of us now.
Teneka’s arrival—and our escape—could not have come at a better time. The wagon was halfway down the mountain before the cramping in my belly began in earnest. It might have started sometime earlier, but I had borne so much pain for so long that I did not take notice until the child was almost upon me. My body took over, or the universe did; I was too far gone to care, and Teneka had her hands full driving the wagon. I shed Gana’s foul skin—or it was shed for me?—and the babe burst from my loins in a rush of… something. Blood? Brine? I could not see, but I definitely smelled salt on the air. I gave birth twice, once to the child, and once to its seal skin. Until that moment, I was not sure what my child’s nature would be. I cried out in joy. Immortal or otherwise, whatever elemental magic ran through his veins would make him far heartier than any fey or human babe. If any of us survived, it should be him.
Him.
I had a boy.
If only I’d had Jason as well.
I wrapped the babe in his seal skin and cradled him in my arms and wept. I might have been weeping since I left the castle. I didn’t care anymore.
I was a mother for the length of a wagon ride. I memorized every beautiful inch of him. There were so many stories he would never know. Perhaps that was for the best. I told him to remember me, no matter how long his life was. But he would not have a life if I did not act swiftly.
I cried out again when the wagon came to a stop, this time in anguish. Teneka hopped down from her seat, and froze in utter shock. I could only imagine the mess of me in a pool of fluid and Gana, desperately clutching a newborn seal to my breast. I sobbed as if the world were ending. And maybe it was.
Reluctantly, I thrust the babe into Teneka’s arms. “Water,” I said forcefully, and then remembered she was not Jason. She did not know what I meant, because we had not spent months—years?—in each other’s company. “Take him to the water.”
“Come with us,” she said as she cradled the seal-babe.
“I will die without my true skin,” I told her. “I must fetch it from my house.”
“Your house is the first place the trolls will look for you.”
I knew that. “Which is why you must run to the water. It is his lifeblood. Find a ship, whatever ship you can, and go as far from here as you’re able. If… anything happens, throw him into the sea.” I did not want to imagine what “anything” might entail.
Thankfully, Teneka needed no translation. “Throw him into the sea,” she repeated.
“He will thrive in the sea. It is his nature.” I pushed her away from me, though it killed me to do so. “Go.”
Teneka slowly backed down out of the wagon. “What shall I call him?”
Such a mundane thing really should have occurred to me on the wagon ride. “Use his father’s name,” I said.
“And what is your name?”
“What?” It had been so long since anyone asked me the question, I’d almost forgotten. They’d always called me Kyria in human form. Even Jason had called me Kyria. But that was never my name. “Malia,” I told her. “May you both live long enough for him to know it.”
“May you live long enough to find us again,” she replied. “Gods bless you, Malia.”
I watched her run with the babe, in the direction of the water, until I could not see her anymore. Gingerly, I slid myself out of the wagon. I was not sure if my legs would hold me, but they did. Slowly, one tenuous step at a time, I made it back to my home.
The trolls were waiting for me at the well, the same guards that had been with Jason when he captured me. The same guards that had waited outside that locked door for the length of my imprisonment. They held me until their king arrived.
Atatroll strolled through my courtyard as if it were his own. He walked right past the trunk at the base of the well. The trunk that held my true skin.
So close.
I needed to find a way to get him to throw me—and that trunk—down that well. That didn’t seem so impossible. And yet…
So close.
“Hello, Kyria. My trolls tell me that this is your true form.”
Your trolls know nothing. Smash that trunk and I’ll show you my true form, I didn’t say. The troll king deserved none of my words. He deserved nothing. He would get nothing.
“I bet you thought you were so clever turning my fey slave against me.”
He was never you slave, I didn’t say.
“He may have destroyed my Thaumater, but no matter. My sorceress will make me a new one. My true sorceress.”
He said the words “my” and “me” with such ridiculous emphasis that it took me a moment to comprehend what he’d said. To realize that the sounds beyond my house were not the ceaseless waves but screaming. To smell smoke on the wind.
A thousand human souls—that’s how many his foul sorceress had sacrificed. In order to make another one, she would have to kill enough humans to fill a small town.
My town.
“Gana told me about skin walkers like you,” he said.
How had he admitted to my existence to her without severely wounding his pride? I hoped the experience had been terrible for him.
“She told me that there would be another skin, a true skin, and that if I destroyed it, it would destroy you.”
I closed my eyes so that I could not look at the trunk. He found it anyway. I heard the iron bands spring away as he crushed it into splinters. I opened my eyes then. My true skin dangled from his fist.
He had to throw it down the well now. It was the only sensible place to discard it.
So close.
Atatroll stared at the skin until he realized what it was. “When we are done here,” he said to his guards, “kill all the seals.”
The troll guards grunted in agreement.
I bit back a laugh at the order. The seals will be safe, I didn’t say. They are in the sea, far beyond the reach of trolls. Like my son is in the sea, I thought. I hoped.
“As for you…” He didn’t finish the sentence.
He opened up his mouth and swallowed my skin whole instead.
I would have collapsed had the trolls not been holding me. My death, that thing I had never contemplated, was now a surety. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, since Atatroll loved torture so much, but someday that end would arrive.
My obvious defeat put a spring in his step. “Come,” he said. “Join me. When the new Thaumater is finished, you shall have the honor of being the first drained of power.” He smiled at that, with his mouthful of yellow, pointed teeth. “And then, we will drain every fey we can find.” He all but skipped back to the road.
The troll guards dragged my limp body behind him.
I had almost no power without my skin, and there were no fey that I knew of in town. How in the name of Love and Strife…
The sun hit my face as the troll guards stepped out the door, and that’s when I saw them. Many ships, massive ships, larger than any I had seen before, large enough to each hold a complement of trolls. They glided through the streets of town on wheeled conveyances pulled by teams of aurochs.
This. This is what the woodworkers were for. This is why they had trapped a Green Man. This is how they would kill the seals. This is how they would capture the fey. This is how Atatroll would conquer the world.
I struggled, scrambling for anything I could use to kill the troll king, to kill myself. I managed to wrest a dagger from the belt of one of the guards.
“It’s okay,” said the king. “Let her go.”
I ran at him, knife brandished, screaming for the fate of the world.
He was laughing when he struck me down.
I woke lashed to the mast of his ship, like the dead bodies on his castle gates. I could taste the sea on the air, but I could not drown myself in it. I thought there could be no truer torture. And then I heard the groan beside me.
I turned my head, tried to open my swollen eye, but there was no need. I knew it would be Jason there, tied next to me. He was not dead—of course he was not dead. Atatroll would desire Jason’s power most of all. Once he had it, he would be able to find all the fey, everywhere.
I struggled against the bonds, hoping to move my hand enough to find his. I managed to link a few of his fingers into mine.
He said something, one word, but I could not hear him over the rush of wind in my ears. I slipped more of my fingers beneath his hand and squeezed. He turned his head to me, lips almost touching mine.
“Rashida.”
I closed my eyes. He had figured out what the Thaumater was for. I had told him to say his daughter’s name when he was about to betray me. He said it now, knowing that his power was about to betray the whole of fey kind. Rashida’s soul may have been long gone from this world, but it was for her sake that I did what I did next. At least, that’s what I told myself.
The man, this beautiful, tortured man, had chosen life with me instead of death by window. It had not been the better choice. But I had loved him, with whatever love my sires had deemed fit to put inside me. Love and Strife… all things being equal, if any force was going to save the world, it was Love.
And so I filled my heart with as much love and magic as I could muster and did what I had wanted to do since the moment we met.
I kissed the life right out of him.
I would have wept as I felt him go, but there was nothing left in me. I turned my face into the beautiful sea air and let the salt bless my lips. Death could have me now, come what may. Love and Strife would both take me to task for what I had done. I had taken a mortal life this day, but I had also brought one into the world. Perhaps the universe, at least, would be satisfied. Perhaps the gods would find my life payment enough for the chaos I had caused. And perhaps somewhere out there a young seal boy would live long enough to sing the song of his mother.
Perhaps.
— THE STORYTELLER —
by David Bowles
It was Doña Florestela’s birthday, and the entire family had gathered at the Big House, right in the middle of the greenest orchard in the Rio Grande Valley. No one could say for sure how old Florestela Monteverde de Kinski was—she had already seemed old, the grownups said, back when she had guided her daughters, daughters-in-law, and granddaughters across the border during the height of the confluence of the Mexican Revolution and the First World War, nearly two decades earlier. The deaths of her husband and youngest son at the hands of revolutionaries—as well as the loss of the family’s beautiful, verdant estate—had etched themselves, her daughters affirmed, deeply into her flesh.
Fortunately, in the first decade of the new century, Florestela’s two oldest sons had found work as machinists in the United States, to which country they had voluntary exiled themselves to escape the madness that was brewing in their native San Luis Potosí. Once news of their brother and father’s deaths reached the men, they had sent for their mother, sisters, sister-in-law and nieces, as their status as US residents permitted them to do. The six women and four adolescents had then set out on a harrowing trek, across nearly a thousand miles of mountains, wilderness, and desert, across battlefields and broken towns, by train and on foot, till they met the Kinski-Monteverde brothers in Nuevo Laredo and crossed into their new h
omeland.
The stories of this amazing voyage had for years filled the minds and hearts of the great-grandchildren who now gathered around the stately magnolia tree that stood at the river’s edge, the pride of the orchard, its miraculous flowers the envy of many magnates of Valley horticulture. Even John Shary would pay a visit to Doña Florestela from time to time, eager to take a bouquet of fragrant flowers back to his wife, who loved to festoon the Shary mansion with those unlikely blooms.
Now the old woman sat serenely in her rocking chair, looking out at several dozen grandchildren and great-grandchildren, her green eyes twinkling with lively humor, her magnolia-white hair glowing softly against the deep, wrinkled mahogany of her skin. The tug of the spring breeze against her flower-embroidered blouse and green skirt seemed the playful touch of her husband’s hands, spectral yet insistent, calling her on. Though she felt her body’s hold on her spirit slipping slowly, she clung to this life a little longer.
There was one last tale to tell.
“Would you like to hear a story?” Her voice wavered, like the flowing of a small brook over mossy stones.
“Yes!” the children shouted, scooting closer to the storyteller, their faces expectant. One of them, a girl of seven named Rosamaría, peered intently at her great-grandmother with eyes of the same forest green. Will she tell us a story we already know? Perhaps she will whisper of the ancient gods, forest spirits, shape-shifters, and thousand-year curses. Or will she tell us family tales? Will she repeat the story of the Polish aristocrat, Joseph Kinski, and his escape to Spain? Or will she hearken back to her wedding day and the majestic balls she and José Antonio Kinski Fernández held to celebrate their many anniversaries? Will she narrate Madero’s escape to San Antonio and the plan he came up with that would destroy the life and land of José Antonio? Will she tell us of Pancho Villa and how she convinced him to let the ten women continue their journey? Of the Spanish Flu and the granddaughter she lost to it? The stories had braided inside Rosamaría, twining themselves integrally with the fibers of her soul. She would not hope for a new tale. To have the strings of her heart strummed with her great-grandmother’s voice one more time was quite enough.
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