by Marjorie Liu
Love is powerful, replied the storytellers. Love is divine. That is the answer to every tale we tell. What sleeps can always be awakened with love.
I love her, said the Duelist, abandoning the story. But nothing has changed. I cannot see the way.
You will, they replied.
But the Duelist was not so certain.
There was a small girl among the storytellers, a bright young thing with brown hair and freckles dashed across her nose. Her grandmother, who was the eldest of the storytellers, said to her, How would you break a witch’s spell, little one?
Find her true name, said the girl.
And how, asked her grandmother, do you glean a true name from one who speaks only lies?
Patience, replied the child. You listen.
The grandmother smiled. Even the greatest liar must eventually tell the truth.
One must only be wise enough to catch it.
“I had a dream,” said Rose one Sunday. “Several dreams, actually. My head is full of them, Briar.”
The Duelist paused in mid-stretch, palms pressed flat against the floor in front of her toes. A demonstration for Rose, who wanted to learn how she had stayed in good health after more than a decade of hard fighting. No one ever assumed that anything but her size had kept her alive all these years; for Rose to realize there was actual skill and training involved was rather unexpected. And gratifying.
“I didn’t know you dream,” said the Duelist.
“I don’t. This is the first time.” The young woman grimaced, and scooted off the mattress to her feet. She fell backward, and had to struggle again to stand.
The Duelist would have only needed to extend her elbow to help, and she almost did so without thinking.
“What did you dream?” she asked.
Rose walked with small, unsteady steps to the narrow window in the tower wall, placing her fingers in the slit. “It was all . . . unfamiliar. I was in a chamber made of smooth blocks engraved with leopards. I had many servants. My skin was golden in color, not brown, and I wore white silk.”
“Was there more?”
“A different dream. Somewhere else. Carried in a litter, holding a dog in my lap, smelling the rain outside while thinking that I had better hurry or—or, nothing. I can’t remember much else. The last dream is even more unclear. Standing naked before an immense bearded man wearing armor and a red sash. My body was round. My thighs rubbed.”
The Duelist thought about that for a moment. “I have a surprise for you.”
Rose glanced at her. “You have decided to kill me?”
The Duelist stepped over the mattress to the door. With a hard tug, she pulled it open. And stood there, waiting.
Rose stared. “What trick is this?”
The Duelist started to answer, but something hard lodged in her throat, something so magnificent and wild she felt like a child again, small and vulnerable, and consumed.
“Are you strong enough for the stairs?” she asked.
The young woman still seemed stunned, but managed a short sharp laugh. “I’ll manage, even if I have to slide down each one.”
But both women hesitated at the tower door. The Duelist said, “Sometimes I wonder how asleep she really is.”
“That’s part of her trap. Using fear to bind people in their place. I wonder if I’d been stronger . . .” Rose went silent, leaning against the doorframe. “How much of that witch’s power did I hand her outright?”
“Don’t blame yourself.”
“Ah,” she replied sadly, and sat on the stairs to scoot herself down to the step below. A long journey, just like that—scooting, lowering, bit by bit—mostly silent—until halfway down, Rose’s face crumpled and the Duelist thought she’d begin to cry. Instead she let out a sharp, almost hysterical laugh that rebounded off the curved stone walls and made the Duelist blink in surprise. Rose clapped her hands over her mouth but was still shaking with laughter.
“I feel free,” she managed to say. “Oh, gods, I’m a fool. But this is the first time in years I’ve felt free.”
“Rose,” said the Duelist, and then smiled—a real smile, a crooked grin that seemed to emerge straight from her heart to her face with terrifying power. She felt flush with the thrill of exhilaration and fury. She wanted to lean in and kiss Rose.
Rose said, “You’re beautiful.”
“Let us hurry,” said the Duelist. “I want to show you something.”
The house was quiet except for them. Odd, seeing Rose walking outside the tower. The Duelist felt dizzy looking at her, for a moment afraid she was wrong, that it was instead her mistress. But then she looked into those eyes and relaxed.
There was a library, but it held no books. Carmela was not much of a reader. She possessed only artifacts, sculptures, low couches covered in soft pillows; and along the walls, massive paintings of women framed by long velvet curtains that hid the empty bookshelves. Twenty portraits, twenty different faces, twenty bodies hanging. All of them, gazing out with the same sly expression, that cruel smile.
“It’s her,” said the Duelist. “Every one of them.”
Rose shuddered. “She hasn’t done mine yet.”
In fact, Carmela had taken to bed the artist she’d commissioned to paint her portrait; he was scheduled to begin next month. But the Duelist kept that to herself. Instead she said, “Look around this room. This is where she keeps her treasures. See if anything is familiar.”
“That,” said Rose, pointing to an engraved vase perched on a small marble pedestal. “I saw the design in a dream, embroidered into a tapestry that hung beside a fireplace.” Hesitation, while she looked again at the paintings. “My dreams are of these women, when the witch was in their bodies. I’m seeing her memories.”
The Duelist felt pleased. “We already know there’s a limit to how long she can hold you. She must rest one day a week in order to regain her strength. And now that you are glimpsing her memories—”
“—perhaps the lines between us are weakening in other ways. But that could put you in danger, Briar. What if she’s dreaming of this moment, right now?”
“Rose,” began the Duelist, then stopped and turned, listening.
The young woman also went very still, balanced on the balls of her feet. She’d bragged once that she was a fast runner—or had been. But there was no outrunning what was inside her. Or what had opened a door in the other room and was coming toward them with heavy footsteps.
The Duelist strode from the library. Her sword was in the tower, but her hands were strong and that unspent fury burned deep in her belly—rich and hot, and powerful.
“You,” she said, entering the hall and finding the Steward just outside the parlor, holding a satchel in his chubby white hands. “You are not permitted in my lady’s home on Sundays. Where are our guards?”
He gave her a startled look, but only for so long as it took him to remember who he was.
“How dare you,” he replied. “You desert cunt. Our lady gave me special permission to come here today. She has errands for me to run.”
“You are a liar,” replied the Duelist in a cool voice. “And a thief, I think.”
His mouth twisted. “It hardly matters. We’ll all be turned away from her employment, soon enough. She’s going to live soon with the Lord Marshal, and he has his own staff.”
“What are you talking about?”
The Steward let out a laugh. “Of course you don’t know. You never speak to the serving class. Our mistress is pregnant with the Lord Marshal’s child.”
The Duelist went still. The Steward looked past her, and his smile froze.
“Oh,” he said.
Rose stood in the hall, staring at him. The Duelist watched her, every nerve on fire. Her slender body, covered in fine linen—her hands at her sides, slowly rising to touch her stomach.
; “How does he know it’s his?” Rose asked. And then laughed. A cruel, unhappy sound.
“M-my lady,” stammered the Steward.
The Duelist slid a thin wire from the back of her belt, stepped behind him, and in one smooth motion brought it down over his head and pulled back hard on his throat. He stiffened, choking, but it was easy enough to knock the back of his knee and ride him face-first to the floor. Bones crunched. His feet kicked. The Duelist pulled back so hard she felt the wire cut through his throat.
He died quickly. The Duelist slid off his back, tugging the wire free. Blood dripped, but she cleaned the thin steel on his fine jacket. Her face was hot, heart pounding. She felt deeply troubled, and knew it was partly because Rose had finally seen her kill.
The young woman said, “Thank you.”
The Duelist finally glanced at her. “He was a dead man the moment he saw you. He would have brought up this conversation.” She paused. “But you knew that.”
Rose gave her a cold smile.
They tossed his body into the slop pit where all the excrement flowed. It was a tight fit. The hole in the cellar was only meant for garbage, but the Duelist used a sledgehammer to break and twist his arms and shoulders until they resembled pulp, and kicked his body through. Someone else might have wavered or lost their resolve, but this was the sort of work, sadly, she excelled at. The work of eliminating foes.
She cleaned. Got down and scrubbed the stone floor where she’d cut his throat, checked the walls, the stairs to the cellar, examined every place his body had been. And then she had Rose hold out her hands, and examined her nightgown for blood.
“I can’t truly be with child,” Rose said.
“Your hands are trembling,” the Duelist said.
“The sun has gone down. I’ll have to sleep soon.” She hesitated. “I was angry before, but now I’m just afraid.”
The Duelist led Rose up the tower stairs. It was harder going up than down, and there were long moments when the young woman was forced to stop and rest. It was not just the drugs in the previous evening’s tea—it was the arrival of night, it was the curse, it was the witch beginning to stir from her own brief sleep. The Duelist could feel Rose slipping away from her. Sunday was almost over.
In the tower, in her room, the young woman collapsed upon the bed with a groan.
“Briar,” she said, as the Duelist sat on the mattress beside her. “I will try my best to dream. I will look for a way to be free.”
“I will be with you,” replied the Duelist. “The next time you open your eyes, mine will be the only face you see.”
A month later the Lord Marshal announced he was divorcing his wife to marry the incredibly wealthy daughter of a foreign duke. The girl was rumored to be only a little better-looking than the sea sloths that spouted water in the harbor.
Within days Carmela was confined to bed complaining of a stomachache, but her bitterness prowled through the house. Maids were dismissed or beaten with hairbrushes, dishes were thrown at the cook, even the Duelist found herself nearly slapped for standing too close, but perhaps—even in anger—Carmela was not quite that stupid.
“I would have killed the child anyway, before it had a chance to grow too large inside me,” she told the Duelist outright, watching her as if she half expected recrimination. “It was only a whim, nothing more. I thought it would be an interesting experience being a mother.” She patted her breasts. “Thankfully, I came to my senses. I alone am allowed to cannibalize this body.”
The following Sunday, when Rose found herself still spotting with blood from the miscarriage, she wept with all the force of a monsoon. Relief, yes. But grief, too, that a life had been forced inside her womb without her even realizing it.
“What am I?” she cried, scratching her own arms. “I’m not human anymore. I’m just a thing she uses.”
The Duelist said nothing. Outside, the guards were shouting about an oversized cart. She left the tower early.
The angry season passed and with it the summer plague. The only person who died in the house was the new Steward, but that was the final indignity. Before the corpse cart could drag the poor man off to the pits, Carmela announced it was time to move.
“This is not a place for a woman with ambitions,” she declared.
“So where do we go?” asked the Duelist.
They were standing over a map of the Known World, a gift from an admirer, his name long since forgotten.
“South,” said her mistress.
The entire household fit into three barges, and they traveled down the river into the rich farmlands of the southern valleys. From the deck one could see lush, rolling hillsides over which ran countless grape arbors; local children in dusty rags played along the shore among ragged herds of goats.
It was idyllic, lovely—except for the boatloads of mercenaries heading north. The Duelist could smell them from nearly a mile off. War was coming again, perhaps. Across the sea, over the mountains, in the desert, in these perfect valleys—no place was ever quite safe enough. The Duelist had learned that the hard way. Peace rarely lasted.
Carmela turned her nose up at it all—the vineyards and mercenaries alike—and rested beneath her parasol, the latest Steward at her side. When an undine slid under the barges, she refused to come to the rail to see. The Duelist crowded with the crew, gaped at the creature’s massive, graceful passage. The Duelist wished she was a painter, so that she could show Rose these sights with more than just her poor words.
Their new manse was even larger than the last, tucked within the most elite neighborhood of the capital; a steaming, sprawling riverine city where every canal and building was part of some ancient ruin. The Duelist did not care for the place; its rulers had funded the invasion of her desert kingdom, hoping to possess the endless, gnarled groves of a rare spice tree her people were famous for, which grew only in the perfect sandy soil at the base of their mountain.
She could smell that spice everywhere. It floated in the air, on the breath of everyone who spoke to her; she tasted it in every meal that curdled on her tongue, and even her clothing began to reek. To her, it smelled like ancient history. Like blood.
“I’m sorry,” said Rose, when the Duelist could no longer hold her bitterness inside. “I remember hearing of that terrible invasion, their awful greed. My father was too far away to send help.”
“It would not have mattered,” the Duelist said, amazed at the ease with which she lied.
Carmela had no such reservations about their new city. Her target was the Regent, a man both cold and restless, and with immense power. He had the long-lobed ear of the king, some said—and most certainly held the keys to the coffer.
When the Regent came with them on the tour of their new home, he asked the Duelist, “You, with the sword. Man or woman?”
Carmela answered for her with a laugh. “Oh, how you jape. A woman, of course. I can’t have a man guarding me while I sleep, can I?”
“You could leave that to me,” he replied, with absolute seriousness. “Your guard won’t be necessary in this city, I promise. If you must have protection, at least hire someone less . . . frightening to children. I’ll pay for it.”
“Oh, you,” demurred Carmela; and later said to the Duelist, “The Regent is a very generous man.”
“You think quite far ahead,” she replied.
“A woman must,” said Carmela. “Only men can surrender themselves to the Fates. If a woman is to make something of herself, she must plan. Otherwise, even the most precious gifts”—and she waved her hand over her face—“will go to waste.”
This, the Duelist knew, was true.
For nine months she waited. She watched the household prosper. A stable was refurbished to house a matching pair of stallions, a gift from the Regent. The new cook tried to steal some gold, was caught, and survived the amputation of his left hand—but not th
e removal of his right.
And every Sunday she listened to Rose’s dreams.
One day in particular when the monsoons had finally returned and the war in the south was turning from rumor to fact, they sat quietly for a long time, listening to the downpour. Rose looked up suddenly, half-shy, half-defiant. “Do you know what it’s like when you have a word on the tip of your tongue and can’t remember it?”
The Duelist did, having learned and forgotten three languages before the one she spoke now.
“Well, it’s not a word precisely,” said the young woman.
“Is it a song?”
Rose shook her head. “It’s a life.”
Then she stood and pulled off her shift, standing naked. And for an endless time neither of them moved, nor spoke.
The Duelist could feel the girl’s breath on her, and she was sure the girl could feel her breath in return.
Storytellers knew other storytellers and were loyal only to one another—and to those who had a very particular need. The Duelist sought out the old ones who lived in her new city, but they had already heard her tale from their sisters and brothers in the north.
They had nothing new to offer, but only a word of warning: the body her mistress had stolen was still young and beautiful, but a smart woman like the witch would already be looking for a replacement. In the stories, in the lore, it was so—and once she left one body for the next, her old skin would be destroyed. The witch wouldn’t even need to order it done. The separation alone would kill the body she’d been inhabiting, drop it like a puppet, even with another soul still trapped inside.
The Duelist was deeply troubled by this. She’d told herself she could wait, wait forever, for the witch to leave Rose. And then it would be as simple as spiriting her away, protecting her from the witch and whoever she sent to kill her.
But this . . . she could not fight. Which meant there had to be another way.
And then came the Regent’s ball, on a Saturday.
In the weeks preceding, the city had been abuzz with rumors of assassins, that this would be the night when western agents attempted to murder the king’s right hand. Carmela laughed such things off as petty, but the Duelist clad herself in cold gray Samarin chain mail. Around her neck, a stiff collar. Even the edges of her gauntlets were ridged in iron.