by Tim Pratt
“I lost count after a thousand or so,” the blue woman says. “Most of them were more like me. Some of them were more like you.”
A thousand Jenny Changs, a thousand blue women. More. Gone, one by one, like a scatterfall of rain. “Did all of them say yes?” Jenny asks.
The blue woman shakes her head.
“And none of the ones who said yes survived.”
“None of them.”
“If that’s the case,” Jenny says, “what makes you special?”
“I’m living on borrowed possibilities,” she says. “When the battle ends, I’ll be gone too, no matter which way it ends.”
Jenny looks around her, then squeezes her eyes shut, thinking. Two significant figures, she thinks inanely. “Who started the fight?” She’s appalled that she sounds like her mom.
“There’s always an armageddon around the corner,” the blue woman says. “This happens to be the one that he found.”
The dark-skinned man. Who was he, that he could persuade people to take a last stand like this? Maybe it’s not so difficult when a last stand is the only thing left. That solution displeases her, though.
Her heart is hammering. “I won’t do it,” Jenny says. “Take me home.”
The blue woman’s eyes narrow. “You are the last,” she says quietly. “I thought you would understand.”
Everything hinges on one thing: is the blue woman different enough from Jenny that Jenny can lie to her, and be believed?
“I’m sorry,” Jenny says.
“Very well,” the blue woman says.
Jenny strains to keep her eyes open at the crucial moment. When the blue woman reaches for her hand, Jenny sees the portal, a shimmer of blue light. She grabs the blue woman and shoves her through. The last thing Jenny hears from the blue woman is a muffled protest.
Whatever protection the blue woman’s touch afforded her is gone. The rain drenches her shirt and runs in cold rivulets through her hair, into her eyes, down her back. Jenny reaches again for the fallen man’s gun. It’s cold, but she has a moment’s warmth in her yet.
She might not be able to save the world, but she can at least save herself.
It’s the end of the school day and you’re waiting for Jenny’s mother to pick you up. A man walks up to you. He wears a coat as grey as rain, and his eyes are pale against dark skin. “You have to come with me,” he says, awkward and serious at once. You recognize him, of course. You remember when he first recruited you, in another timeline. You remember what he looked like fallen in the battle at the end of time, with a gun knocked out of his hand.
“I can’t,” you say, kindly, because it will take him time to understand that you’re not the blue woman anymore, that you won’t do the things the blue woman did.
“What?” he says. “Please. It’s urgent.” He knows better than to grab your arm. “There’s a battle—”
Once upon a time, you listened to his plea. Part of you is tempted to listen this time around, to abandon the life that Jenny left you and take up his banner. But you know how that story ends.
“I’m not in your story anymore,” you explain to him. “You’re in mine.”
The man doesn’t look like he belongs in a world of parking tickets and potted begonias and pencil sharpeners. But he can learn, the way you have.
Yoon Ha Lee’s fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Sybil’s Garage. She is one of the section editors at the Internet Review of Science Fiction. Currently she lives in Pasadena, CA with her husband and daughter. Visit her at yhlee.livejournal.com
CURSE
Samantha Henderson
1
Her son was a year grown when the dream started. Always it began in the pantry, at first—she was tallying the beer, or the bags of grain, when the first joints of her fingers started to itch. Little more than a prickling warmth, then a fierce burning, and as she twisted and scratched them for relief they sprouted fur, some gray, some brown. One by one they disjointed, split away from her hands and fell to the floor, where they scampered into the corners. She thrust her hands into the folds of her gowns to save them, but it was no use—joint by joint her fingers changed into mice and ran over her feet until she was left with nothing but two stumpy paddles.
And then she’d wake, sometimes alone, sometimes besides her husband’s softly breathing body, and check her fingers in the moonlight to see if they were still there. If she was alone she’d rise and go to the cellars, checking for nibbled food and dung in the corners.
She was alone more and more. One thing she’d learned was that the smaller the kingdom, the more the king had to take into his own hands. He was away from home more often than not, now, and stayed in his own rooms most of the time when he was home, with councilors and petitions and the business of an almost-prosperous land.
Another thing she’d learned was that her business was with the beer, and the bags of grain, and the stores kept in stone-lined cisterns beneath the ground, and keeping the women a-weaving. Her business was her son, for now, and she knew that when he was grown enough he would become part of the men’s world with his father and learn the ways of a countrified prince.
Then it happened when she was awake, walking the halls to her rooms, leaving the candle behind and trusting to the torchlight. Her hands felt thick and itchy, and when she lifted them they fell away joint by joint, little dark bodies running to the walls and vanishing between the stones. She waited an instant to wake, then screamed when she didn’t.
She staggered against the wall as a curious maid poked her head around the corner, eyes widening as she recognized her.
“What’s the matter, my lady?” The maid came forward, brisk, in no sort of awe whatsoever. Because she wasn’t a proper queen, she wasn’t a lady, she was a miller’s daughter with an odd kind of luck. So far the servants treated her with condescending sympathy.
She raised her hands, for show or to defend herself, but they were normal—strong peasant’s hands with short, clean nails and losing their calluses.
“Nothing,” she managed, then “nothing” again, in a tone that tried to be imperious and failed. “I just tripped, that’s all.”
2
The dwarf smelled her long before she came over the rise of the hill: the soap she used and the oil at the roots of her hair, and skin that never lost a touch of the sun and the faint tang of soured milk. The boy, too—the sweat of its toiling beside its mother and a diaper clout that needed changing. They paused at the crest while she sought the entrance to his dwelling in the shadow of the valley below; a shelter hacked from the living stone of the mountainside. He stood in the doorway, not bothering to conceal himself. She spotted him and stumbled downhill, dragging the tired child behind her.
“He wants me to do it again—the weaving,” she said, without preamble.
“Took him a while,” he replied, dryly.
She started to cry, because she knew what he was going to say and realized the truth of it the instant before he spoke. He turned inside the cave and beckoned her to follow. It was cozy inside, and roomier than she’d imagined. Red coals glowed on a long, low hearth. A squat battered kettle sat there, with a water bucket in the corner.
“He’s finding a reason to despise you. He feels guilty for doing it with no justification,” he threw over his shoulder.
She was such a child. She didn’t know that he could hate her so.
She spoke to his back as he lifted the kettle.
“You sent them. The dreams. My fingers: mice. It was you.”
He didn’t turn around. She waited while he built up the fire under the heavy-bottomed copper, and folded her fingers carefully across her stomach. Afterwards he leaned against the mantle, built small to accommodate his height.
“I felt sorry for you, you know,” he said. “At the beginning, even. That’s why I came in the first place. Sympathy you’d have for a snail in the path, or a turtle turned over in the sun. And then, after the first night—no m
ore than that—you started to enjoy it, the attention that you feared so much before. I could see it in you. You almost believed you could do it, didn’t you?”
Were her fingers beginning to itch? She twisted them in her skirt and didn’t look.
It’s true, she thought. I did think I could spin straw into gold. Not because I could, but because ugliness should serve beauty. Isn’t that always the way?
“You were quick enough to agree to the child,” he said, giving her the side of his face, the silhouette of a long, gnarled nose. “And I can’t blame you, for your loving man would have killed you just to make the point. That’s a king’s job, you know. To make a point. And perhaps he didn’t want to marry you so much, for there are beautiful women enough of his own rank. But he had promised, you see. And he made his point.”
“You hated me.”
“Yes. For a long time.” He poked at the fire and a great clot of sparks flew up, some landing on the hearth and squirming like lit worms before darkening into black ashy spots. In the corner, the boy chuckled over some toy.
“But I wouldn’t have sent the dreams if you hadn’t played the game of not knowing the third day. Belshazzar, Cruickshanks. Conrad. Harry.” His voice became burred and rough at the edges. “Three days you played me like a salmon.”
She said nothing, being an inland girl. She had never tasted salmon.
3
The girl wrapped potatoes in damp clothes and pushed them into the coals banked behind the hearth. The men in the doorway were not going to go away, but she made them wait for all that. She heard one grunt softly and shift his weight.
She’d grown a lot the past year and had to bend her head to avoid hitting the arch of the fireplace, which had been built too low for human kind.
“My brother left years ago,” she said, finally, still kneeling and staring at the coals. “He visits sometimes, and brings game from the forest. Less and less these days.”
“Does he know who he is?” One of the men—the taller, thin one—surged forward, shrugging off the other’s restraining hand. “Do you?”
He stopped as she turned, her eyes cold and hard and blue, so blue they were almost violet at the edges. Her father’s eyes, a king’s eyes, chilly and appraising. She said nothing.
The thin man flinched but stood his ground. He made an effort to gentle his voice.
“Your pardon. But your father is dying, and dying with no successor. Your brother is his heir.”
She was still kneeling, still looking up at him, and now she smiled very slightly and the thin man felt that to stand over her was no advantage at all.
“His heir? What, with a miller’s slut-girl for a mother, who ran away from court to return to the squalor she came from?”
The thin man swallowed and stood his ground.
“Even so, my lady.”
She sighed and looked back at the coals. The roasting potatoes filled the rough-hewn chamber with the smell of clean dirt.
“He hunts,” she said, finally, rising and dusting the ash off her full skirts. “Track him down in the wild wood, if you must, but don’t seek him here, not if you value your lives.”
They didn’t move, glancing at each other nervously. The other man, who stood in the doorway, was shorter and stouter than his companion. He cleared his throat.
“We do not seek only your brother, my lady,” he rumbled.
“Ah?” she was grinning now. “My own humble self? But I would not inherit; I couldn’t. Perhaps my dam carried me in her belly to the manikin’s house, perhaps he got me on her—isn’t that what they say? You’d never prove the king’s my father.”
“But your mother was your mother,” said the stout man. “And your mother had her gifts.”
“Pieter,” said the thin man to his companion.
The girl laughed: a harsh bark. “So! Straw into gold, is it? If she could, then I can? How does your master’s kingdom these days, Pieter? Are there small economies? Is the wine cheap and raw in your throat? Are there discontented whispers outside the chamber of the dying king?”
The thin man turned to expostulate with Pieter, but the bulkier man pushed him aside roughly.
“I’ve heard enough about it,” he growled, to his companion or to the girl.
“Fine threads of gold, reams of it, spilling on the floor and piling under the window. Enough to buy a kingdom, much less . . . ”
“I’m useless to you, gentlemen,” she returned, lifting her fingers spread like a fan in front of their faces. “For see?”
And before their eyes her fingers sprouted fur, and separated from each other joint by joint, and scampered to the floor with a squeak and a flutter, with a twitch and a shiver of bright, beady eye.
The thin man started back with a shudder; Pieter never got a chance, because a great hairy bulk loomed behind him, wrapped a beefy arm around his throat, and lifted him half a foot off the floor as he choked him.
But the thin man didn’t run, not even then; it was only when he saw the footprints the girl had made in the ash and sand of the hearth that he ran—not footprints, but claw marks, a bird’s foot, like those the chickens make outside the kitchen door, but huge, monstrous.
He turned and pushed past the enormous man and the gasping Pieter and vanished into the night.
The big man released Pieter, who fell to the floor in a limp bundle.
“Is he dead, Bearskin?” asked the girl.
Her brother shrugged. “Perhaps.”
She returned to the fire and poked at the potatoes with the stumps of her hands.
“We have to go,” she said.
“Come with me,” he said. “I have places to hide you in the forest. And they will be afraid of you for a while.”
“Yes,” she returned, tucking the hot potatoes in her apron and wrapping them against her. “But not long enough.” The cave was rustling with mice, scampering over the ashes, over the mantle, across Pieter’s limp body.
She followed her brother into the forest, the potatoes warm against her thighs and the stubs of her hands, warm against the tiny fingers that were sprouting from her bloodless flesh.
Samantha Henderson lives in Southern California. Her fiction and poetry have been published in Strange Horizons, Chizine, Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy Magazine, Helix, Lone Star Stories, and Weird Tales, and her first book was published in 2008 by Wizards of the Coast.
CLOCKWORK CHICKADEE
Mary Robinette Kowal
The clockwork chickadee was not as pretty as the nightingale. But she did not mind. She pecked the floor when she was wound, looking for invisible bugs. And when she was not wound, she cocked her head and glared at the sparrow, whom she loathed with every tooth on every gear in her pressed-tin body.
The sparrow could fly.
He took no pains to conceal his contempt for those who could not. When his mechanism spun him around and around overhead, he twittered—not even a proper song—to call attention to his flight. Chickadee kept her head down when she could so as not to give him the satisfaction of her notice. It was clear to her that any bird could fly if only they were attached to a string like him. The flight, of which he was so proud, was not even an integral part of his clockwork. A wind-up engine hanging from the chandelier spun him in circles while he merely flapped his wings. Chickadee could do as much. And so she thought until she hatched an idea to show that Sparrow was not so very special.
It happened, one day, that Chickadee and Sparrow were shelved next to one another.
Sparrow, who lay tilted on his belly as his feet were only painted on, said, “How limiting the view is from here. Why, when I am flying I can see everything.”
“Not everything, I’ll warrant,” said Chickadee. “Have you seen what is written underneath the table? Do you know how the silver marble got behind the potted fern, or where the missing wind-up key is?”
Sparrow flicked his wing at her. “Why should I care about such things when I can see the ceiling above and the plaster cherubs upon i
t. I can see the shelves below us and the mechanical menagerie upon it, even including the clockwork scarab and his lotus. I can see the fireplace, which shares the wall with us, none of which are visible from here nor to you.”
“But I have seen all of these things as I have been carried to and from the shelf. In addition the boy has played with me at the fountain outside.”
“What fountain?”
“Ah! Can you not see the courtyard fountain when you fly?” Chickadee hopped a step closer to him. “Such a pity.”
“Bah—Why should I care about any of this?”
“For no reason today,” said Chickadee. “Perhaps tomorrow.”
“What is written underneath the table?” Sparrow called as he swung in his orbit about the room, wings clicking against his side with each downstroke.
Chickadee pecked at the floor and shifted a cog to change her direction toward the table. “The address of Messrs DeCola and Wodzinski.”
“Bah. Why should I care about them?”
“Because they are master clockworkers. They can re-set cogs to create movements you would not think possible.”
“I have all the movement I need. They can offer me nothing.”
“You might change your mind.” Chickadee passed under the edge of the table. “Perhaps tomorrow.”
Above the table, Sparrow’s gears ground audibly in frustration.
Chickadee cocked her head to look up at the yellow slip of paper glued to the underside if the table. Its type was still crisp though the paper itself threatened to peel away. She scanned the corners of the room for movement. In the shadows by the fireplace, a live mouse caught her gaze. He winked.
“How did the silver marble get behind the potted fern?” Sparrow asked as he lay on the shelf.
“It fell out of the boy’s game and rolled across the floor to where I was pecking the ground. I waited but no one seemed to notice that it was gone, nor did they notice me, so I put my beak against it and pushed it behind the potted fern.”