The Breaker Queen

by C. S. E. Cooney

  Analise glanced from one to the other, her mouth at once wry and wistful. “Now you are speaking the secret language of lovers—which sounds like sense until one tries to parse it. Perhaps Gideon can interpret?” she added as he joined them.

  He silently slipped her a glass of champagne, a gesture so unexpected that Analise’s face turned red, and she had to spend a few minutes in quiet contemplation of one of the paintings—“Poisoned Sleep”—while Gideon turned to study Nyx.

  “Lady.” Gideon was not quite drunk enough to slur his words, only drunk enough that his speech was too crisp and careful. “How did you manage to leave your country? I did not think emigration possible. Not in this direction, at least.”

  “My country is in chaos,” Nyx replied. Her smile went astray into wickedness. Elliot squeezed her hand. “Some of that, may I boast, manufactured to my specifications. While the various factions who seek governance squabble like dogs, I made my preparations and departed. They won’t come looking for me. They won’t dare.” This last she directed at Elliot, whose concerned gaze softened with relief.

  “And what’s to become of your House?” Gideon asked.

  Analise, her champagne unsipped, turned back from the painting to monitor the volley of dialogue. Her expression grew more and more neutral as the conversation slipped beyond her understanding.

  “My House is older than I am,” Nyx answered. “If it chooses, it will fall. But I think it will choose to fight first, and select for itself a champion to defend its ancient halls. You were there once.” She sipped her champagne. “Might you gird yourself for battle on its behalf?”

  The stem of his glass flute snapped in Gideon’s hands. “No,” he said.

  Analise hurriedly set her own flute down on a nearby card table, and snatched a handkerchief from her pocket. “Gideon, for the Gods’ sake, you’re bleeding.”

  He looked down, and barked out a laugh at the blood on his hand. Analise grabbed his wrist and began binding his wound, while the others watched. He leaned into her a little, though not, Elliot thought, for support. His hand lifted, almost touched her hair. Fell again. Elliot’s heart ached to see Gideon straighten and lean away from her, his face growing cold and closed. When Analise finished tying the knot, he tugged his hand out of hers, nodded once at Nyx, then turned and walked out of the gallery without another word.

  Analise watched him go. She looked over at Elliot. “That’s it then.”

  He did not reply. What could he say? He knew how a heart could break, then heal, then break once more. How the pieces might be glued together, patched, knotted, set high upon a shelf to gather dust. How all could be well for weeks, for months. How, forgotten, the heart could begin to heal again. Then fall from safety at whisper, shatter at a word.

  “I will have to think,” Analise said slowly, “if one day was worth the year’s wait.”

  Nyx reached out to hug her around the waist. “Some things are, Ana,” she said, in her voice that was deep and somehow resounding, that reached into her skeleton like a bass drum. “But not everything.”

  Analise’s lip trembled. But she did not, as it seemed for a moment to Elliot like she might do, cast herself upon Nyx’s shoulder and sob hysterically. Not Ana. She sighed instead, short and sharp, and left to fetch her coat. Simultaneously shrugging it on and hugging the two of them farewell, she suggested, “Let’s all have breakfast together soon! It’s on me.” Jabbing her toque over her red curls, she added, “Congratulations, Elliot. A great night. Goodbye, my friends.”

  “Goodbye, Ana,” Elliot and Nyx said together.

  A smile winked across her face. “Oh, no! From code to unison! It begins!” Laughing, shaking her head, she trudged out of the gallery. Elliot followed to lock the glass door behind her. He and Nyx would exit out the back, which locked itself. He flicked the light switches on the wall, flooding the rooms with the emptiness of midnight. Even the silence seemed to change, as it always did in the breaking hour.

  “Mistress,” he whispered, turning and stretching out his hand to her. “Shall we?”

  But Nyx had already crossed the gallery on feet as quiet and fleet as night birds. She rose to her tiptoes to kiss him, wrapping her arms around his neck. He clasped her to him, pressing kisses along her temple, her jaw, her hair. He could not believe she was here. And yet. . .

  Her lips were warm. Her eyes, so dark they glowed in the dark, gazed into his.

  “Yes, Maestro. Let’s go home.”

  ***

  Acknowledgements

  I started writing the Dark Breakers series because of author Sharon Shinn. I’m a big, goofy fan of her romantic, adventurous fantasy books. When she heard I’d moved to Rhode Island, Sharon asked if I’d yet visited The Breakers in Newport. I had not, nor even heard of it, but her excited email got me curious.

  Shortly thereafter my boss Lydia Shell, mentioned that as employees of Mystic Aquarium, we had reciprocity with The Newport Historical Society. She told me that The Breakers was great, but the Cliff Walk outside was even better. So I dragged my buddy Jack Hanlon all over the marble halls of the mansion, where we gaped at the gilding and made fun of the cherubs. Then we climbed all over the post-Hurricane Sandy desolation of the Cliff Walk outside. It was beautiful. It made me want to write.

  Writing can be lonely sometimes, and loneliness can be unmotivating. But having writer friends over for tea and writing dates makes all good things happen. I started The Breaker Queen in the presence of Julia Rios, and made great inroads in her company. (Thank you, Julia!!!)

  As an author with a narrow focus on authorial things, I know very little about cover art and design. I often inveigle my brother Jeremy “the Inimitable” Cooney of 33o Studios into stepping in and rescuing me. For The Breaker Queen’s cover, Jeremy auditioned models and found the gorgeous Sonya V. Laramie. With the help of make-up artists Theresa Gerbig (pastel artist and sculptor) of tgdesigns, and Hannah Bones (visual artist and musician), and the support of Darlene Plummer, Jeremy photographed Sonya as Queen Nyx, painted like the Firebird. Thank you, all of you, for this tremendous creative collaboration.

  After that, Rebecca Huston of Heathen Ink stepped in to create the Breaker House gates as a framework for the design. Julia Rios and Moss Collum stayed up (much too) late one night messing with fonts and shading to make title and byline really pop in thumbnail view. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve such an extraordinary community, but I’ll take ‘em! And I’m sure grateful.

  Thanks also and ever to Sita, my beautiful mother, who curls up on the mamasan chair asking for “More! Story! Now!” and who lets me barricade my study door and do the dishes on my own time, so that I can write.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  C.S.E. Cooney is a Rhode Island writer, who lives across the street from a Victorian Strolling Park. She is the author of How To Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes and Jack o’ the Hills. “Witch, Beast, Saint” the first of her erotic fairytales from The Witch’s Garden Series appeared in Strange Horizons in late July 2014, with the second in the series The Witch in the Almond Tree available on Amazon. With her fellow artists in the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, Cooney appears at conventions and other venues, dramatizing excerpts from fiction, singing songs, and performing such story-poems as “The Sea King’s Second Bride,” for which she won the Rhysling Award in 2011. Her first short fiction collection Bone Swans and Other Stories is forthcoming with Mythic Delirium in 2015.

  Excerpt from The Two Paupers: Book Two of Dark Breakers

  Analise Field did not steal the statue because it was the most beautiful thing she ever saw. Though it was.

  She did not steal it because she was angry with its maker and wanted to exact vengeance on him for any number of recent slights. Though she was.

  No, she stole it to save its life.

  If she hadn’t, Gideon Alderwood would have destroyed this statue like he did all the others. And she couldn’t let that happen.

  Not when it opened its eyes
and looked at her like that.

  ***

  Gideon stared at the space the statue had been. An empty plinth. A smear of clay, like a footprint.

  The faucet in the outer hall plinked.

  That sound had kept him awake for three nights running. He would pace in time to the plink-plink-plink and listen to Analise turn on that diabolically squeaky mattress of hers on the other side of the wall, knowing she heard him pacing even in her dreams, and opened her eyes in the dark, thinking of him.

  Had the statue walked?

  They usually did not move the first day after completion. Not while they were still wet. But they never stayed wet long. After twenty-four hours his statues would harden spontaneously, as if fired from within by some infernal kiln, and he would wake to find their surfaces as smooth and cool as eggshells.

  Then they would start… quickening.

  At first the shifts were subtle. A hand lifted. A chin tilted. One blank gray eyelid tearing itself open to reveal an orb like a beetle’s carapace, black-shining-green. Eyes like exoskeletons. An alien luster that revealed nothing.

  It wasn’t until they opened their eyes that he destroyed them.

  Gideon thought he could just about bear them if they stopped at movement. If they just stirred like Analise in her bed next door. Slightly, in their sleep.

  He would have spared them the hammer if only they did not look at him.

  Plink. Plink. Plink.

  No. It was too soon. The newest statue could not have walked.

  It had not yet been a full day since he smoothed the last lines. The curve of the ear, the high forehead, the careless loops of hair. Not a day since he had washed the clay from his hands.

  That left only…

  Plink. Plink. Plink.

  It was past midnight. But no one stirred next door.

  “Analise,” Gideon Alderwood whispered. “Goddamn it.”

  ***

  The problem was, they shared the bathroom in the outer hall of the garret where they rented rooms.

  The problem was, Analise was the only one who remembered to buy toilet paper for the bathroom. And, as she’d had cause to point out more than once, she was also the only one who remembered to scrub out the toilet and sink. To which Gideon replied that as she left more strands of hair in the sink than a lobotomist leaves in an operating theater, she was the most logical candidate for cleaning it up.

  The problem was, he’d been stealing the toilet paper to mix with his clay. Some new invention of his. Clay that would dry quicker and provide tougher structural support for his statues, so that he would not have to make them solid through and through, as he used to do when he was sculpting with an oil-based clay.

  He explained this, very reasonably, when she objected to the lack of toilet paper.

  “Gideon!” she shouted. “It doesn’t matter what kind of clay you use! You’ll just take a hammer to the damned things the next day.”

  “The damned things,” he repeated with his odd thin smile.

  “In the meantime,” she raged on, “we don’t have anything to wipe with. Again!”

  Then he held up a single finger, still with that smile, bidding her wait (she was standing outside his doorway while he stood just in it, for he rarely invited her into his room), went inside, bent down to remove something from the bookshelf beside his bed, and returned presently.

  It was a copy of her book, Seafall Rising.

  “There,” he said. “Use that.” And slammed the door in her face.

  The problem was, Analise thought to herself, storming out into the Seafall city night to buy more toilet paper, that they lived next door to each other. That they’d ever met. That they knew each other at all.

  She bought two crates of toilet paper from the general store. One for her bedroom—and she’d bring a roll in with her whenever she needed it, and then she’d bring it out again—and one for his. And he could use it however he pleased.

  When she tried his door handle, it was open. Gideon never locked his door except when he was on the other end of it. He had nothing worth stealing. At least nothing he kept there. Maybe in his mother’s house his bedroom was a treasure trove of original Quraishi oil paintings, diamond cufflinks, and solid gold chamber pots. But Gideon Alderwood had elevated rich boy slumming to a high art.

  That was when she saw the statue.

  She’d only seen pieces of them before. The carnage of his fits. Heaps of limbs and bits of shattered skull.

  To see one whole…

  To see one proud and haughty and doomed, glowing in the moonlight…

  Analise thought her heart would explode into fiery wings and fly right out of her chest, leaving behind a gaping hole still steaming, a bloody ribcage like a shattered prison wall.

  She had to explore it more closely.

  ***

  Gideon knew every dress in her closet. When Analise was in charity with him, she was always inviting him over for dinner, or tea, or some kind of soup she’d conjured at her hot plate. He’d had ample opportunity to observe her tiny chamber. He knew every patched pair of trousers handed down to her from her legion of brothers. Every one of those ridiculous vests she and Elliot liked to ferret out in thrift stores and bazaars, the kind that flattered no one, least of all a figure like hers, which would look better in a thin sweep of silk and best in nothing but bathwater. He knew every pair of shoes she owned. All three pairs. Black flats for dress-up occasions, thick boots for every other occasion, ragged sandals for summertime.

  So Gideon knew that Analise had packed a small valise.

  Enough clothes for three days. Perhaps five, if she rinsed out her underthings. Also, there were a number of books missing from her shelves.

  Elliot had pointed out, more than once, that Ana always packed more books than clothes.

  Her notebook was gone, too, and her favorite fountain pen. So she’d taken her new novel with her, which she was drafting longhand. The book she would never let him read. Not after what he’d done to her first book.

  He had purchased Analise a typewriter for her birthday. It sat in a box under his cot. Her birthday was three months ago. She’d been lusting after a typewriter, he knew, but was too frugal to buy one for herself. It was an Alderwood, of course. His grandfather had patented the design forty years ago, and the family owned, amongst their other interests, the factory in Seafall that produced the latest models. Hers was the newest production design, the Alderwood Diadem, not yet being manufactured on the assembly lines.

  “I’ll throw it out the window,” he promised the silence of her room. “Happy birthday to whoever’s standing below.”

  The emptiness mocked him.

  “Where did you go, Ana?” Gideon whispered. “Where have you taken it?”

  The walls swam before his eyes. Wavered like curtains in a breeze. The walls reached out for him.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and backed blindly out of the room.

  ***

  Analise did not know why Gideon destroyed the statues he made. Or why, if he hated them so much, he didn’t stop creating them altogether.

  What she did know was that while he was working, he rarely ate or slept. That he worked every day of the week but one, and generally spent that one day in a sort of stupefied swoon on his cot. That sometimes, once or twice a month at most, he would knock on her door, streaked with clay, hollow-cheeked and fever-eaten, and rave about walls moving, and women with hands like linden branches covered in snow, about falling into a deep pit whose walls crawled with wailing purple flowers. And that sometimes in these moments he would kneel beside her bed, where Analise sat very, very still, and lay his hot head in her lap, and she would stroke his hair until his fever broke, and his sweat cooled her thighs and he slept.

  In the morning, when Gideon was still weak, he would let her feed him. And smile at her, sweetly, without that bitter edge that made her bleed. And though he never did and never would say thank you, Analise sometimes thought she could rest forever in the cradl
e of his smile.

  Mostly though, he gave her such a headache, roaring and storming on the other side of their shared wall, smashing ceramic, dashing (she surmised from the sound) larger pieces to floor then taking his hammer to them, that Analise often fantasized about buying a mallet of her own.

  Yet she did not move away from her garret room.

  “A glutton for punishment,” Gideon had once sneered at her.

  “Glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” she’d retorted.

  “Analise Field, Authoress, industrializing the cliché.” He paused, then said, glitteringly, “You should write for ladies’ magazines.”

  At which point she threw a newspaper at his head.

  There had been a period of time (most of last year, more or less) when she did not talk to Gideon at all. This had been after a terrible fight they had at his aunt’s summer mansion, Breaker House, where she and their painter friend Elliot Howell had been invited to fete Gideon’s cousin, Desdemona Mannering, on the occasion of her twenty-fifth birthday.

  Gideon had not wanted her there.

  Gideon had not thought she belonged there.

  He’d pretty much forced her to leave.

  Very well, she thought. If he did not want her, why inflict her company on him? So she’d locked her door against him. Left a room if he walked into it. Stopped going to pub parties or group suppers if the invitation came from mutual friends. It wasn’t like he minded. He never tried to talk to her.

  Except on his bad nights. Then she heard him stand outside her door, and lean against it, and mutter in that fast, febrile whisper words she trembled to hear.