The Tangleroot Palace

by Marjorie Liu

  “I am always gratified by your professionalism,” said Carmela.

  The Duelist nodded. “Professionally speaking, I find living more gratifying than dying.”

  The Regent had no wife, which made it less awkward when he sat Carmela at the great table, at his side. Her dress was more conservative than any she had worn at previous balls: a high collar, long sleeves, skirts that clung to her hips rather than sweeping outward like a great fondling hand. The dark red silk still served to reveal every curve of her astonishing body, but no one could complain that she showed an inch too much skin.

  The Duelist stood against the wall, watching nothing but her for the entire night, studying the way she touched the Regent—or did not touch him—taking in her new restraint, how her mistress kept her seductiveness in check except for certain moments when the Regent reached for his glass and she leaned in to whisper in his ear, rubbing her breasts against his arm.

  She was quite good. The Duelist watched her with the same admiration she felt for particularly cunning snakes, the ones who put their prey in a trance. It was clear, too, that this was what she’d been trying to achieve all along. There was no mistaking that cold, triumphant smile.

  “Just think, our mistress could be the next queen if she marries the Regent,” said the new Steward, in passing. “Should anything happen to His Majesty, that is. He’s old, doesn’t have any children. The Regent is his chosen successor.”

  “How very convenient,” said the Duelist.

  Unfortunately, midnight arrived. Before the musicians could really get started, Carmela’s hands began to tremble, and a sheen of sweat could be seen across her entire face. The Duelist tried to hide her pleasure as she made her way through the crowd. Her mistress was surrounded by the most elite of the city: men and women whose pale skin was flushed pink from drink and dancing.

  The Duelist ignored the affronted looks they gave her and locked eyes with Carmela.

  “My lady,” she said, bowing. “Perhaps it is time for you to retire.”

  Time slowed down. In that moment it was like a fairy tale come true, but only the part where the wolf eats the girl, a set of twins gets stuffed into an oven, or the ogre jams a little goat into its massive jaws. The look of malice on Carmela’s face would have broken steel.

  But the Duelist had faced grimmer odds.

  “What is the matter?” asked the Regent, turning from another conversation. “Who are you to address my lady so?”

  The sound of the Regent’s voice broke the spell. Carmela’s face smoothed into something sultry and affectionate. “My servant is right. I must retire.”

  “My love, this is nonsense—”

  But the witch had already risen to her feet and, taking the Duelist’s arm, allowed herself to be walked from the hall.

  And that night, after the witch had fallen into darkness, Rose dreamed of a name.

  They were seated across from each other at the kitchen table, holding hot mugs of tea. The chair was uncomfortable—most chairs were, for the Duelist. Far too small and unsteady. She preferred leaning against the wall, but she enjoyed sitting across from Rose, like a normal person. It was nice to pretend this was their home, and it was just the two of them.

  Rose said, “I smell of roasted goat. I loathe goat.”

  “Hunger is much worse than goat.”

  “Perhaps,” Rose said, and stiffened. A moment later, she rattled off a long, complicated word.

  It was not a language the Duelist knew. “What does it mean?”

  Rose closed her eyes. “It’s a name from my dream. A name of someone powerful. An emperor, I think. But he was speaking to the witch, and she was in no other body but her own.”

  The Duelist straightened. “How do you know that?”

  “I just do.” Rose looked startled and set down her tea. She was on her feet next, pacing around the kitchen. The hearth cat, asleep by the ashes, looked up at her and meowed.

  “It’s a feeling,” she said, rubbing her hands together. “In dreams, you just know things.”

  “The name you heard—it was not her name? You’re sure?”

  “She spoke it from her lips, addressing the emperor. It belongs to him.”

  “Repeat it.”

  Rose said it again—and a hundred times after that. The Duelist tried to say the name, but it was impossible. The language was a complex tonal tongue, more nuanced than even Stygian.

  “Perhaps,” the Duelist said, without too much hope, “I could bring a linguist.”

  “I’ll do you one better,” Rose said, reaching into a bag of flour, and tossed a handful onto the table. “I can see it in my head.”

  And in forty-seven strokes, she traced out the characters of the name.

  It took the Duelist a month to find someone who could help her. A young scholar who, for three weights of silver, explained to her that this so-called emperor had ruled two hundred years before, across the sea, not far from where the Duelist’s nation had fallen.

  “Not a very successful emperor. Assassinated by his daughter, or perhaps his wife. His one crowning achievement? A fortress library high up on the slopes of Mount Attarra. With a peculiar covenant. No woman could set foot inside its halls, upon pain of death.

  “He must not have liked women too much,” joked the scholar.

  “Perhaps,” said the Duelist, “it was a precaution.”

  “Against what?”

  The Duelist got to her feet. “What were the names of his wife and daughter?”

  The scholar required a ten-weight of gold and sent out two dozen chiroptera. Six months passed before one finally returned. From the library, no less. “The fates have smiled on you, Duelist,” the young scholar said. “They almost never honor petitions.”

  Such simple moments when lives change, when one world ends and another begins. She remembered another time, another place, how she stared out at a cloud and her mother, in a high voice, called her name, told her to run. The soldiers were already halfway across the field. The Duelist ran. They caught her anyway and nothing was ever the same again.

  The scholar handed her the sheet of vellum, and with her hands trembling, the Duelist tucked it inside her blouse, against her heart.

  That night the Regent threw a party and announced to everyone his betrothal to Carmela. At the edge of the banquet table sat his cousin’s daughter, no older than fourteen, and already blindingly beautiful. She was to marry the king in less than a year.

  The witch never once looked at the young princess, and that of course was how the Duelist knew. Twice the witch caught her eye, and the third time she snapped her fingers, summoned her to the dais.

  “Why are you smiling so much?” demanded Carmela in a whisper. “Are you that happy for me?”

  “I am a romantic at heart,” said the Duelist.

  Storytellers gave names to everything because they knew, better than anyone, that names were power. To name a witch was to control a witch, and, in the old stories at least, to destroy her.

  The Duelist had dealt in death most of her life. If there was such a thing as a soul, hers was blacker than night. What would another stain matter? It was said that when a person died, their souls were weighed. Perhaps love would grant her some forgiveness. Such a thing happened in stories, sometimes.

  She did not wonder how the scales would weigh for the witch’s soul.

  There was a scandal, of course. Wild, torrid speculation that occupied the elite for years and had them looking over their shoulders at night, putting new locks on their doors, shivering in their underclothes with gruesome anticipation.

  Not one of them had imaginations humble enough to conceive a woman such as Carmela abandoning of her own free will the most powerful man in the south. And then, simply, disappearing. Leaving behind a household. Taking nothing with her, save jewels and gold.

  Eve
ryone blamed that female beast who was her shadow. Such an ungodly creature, more man than woman. Gone, too. Not a trace. Probably a thief who had murdered poor, beautiful Carmela and fed her dismembered body to the sewers. Or perhaps the man-woman was actually a secret agent of the north, bribed to murder the woman who had the Regent’s heart, to unmake him; a most grievous attack that some called an act of war.

  But war was coming anyway. It always was, always would be.

  The Regent dispatched hunters. They never returned. He hired mercenaries. They never came back for their gold. He hired spies, oracles, sent letters to the Lord Marshals of cities a thousand miles away, asking them to listen for rumors of a woman who looked like a man, who bore a sword, who called herself the Duelist.

  It made her chuckle, sometimes, when she’d hear tales of the Regent who had gone mad for the loss of a woman—only, the story changed, as stories sometimes do. It wasn’t long before the impossible beauty he was to marry was entirely forgotten—but not the woman warrior who had defeated him, shamed him. She lived on in tales, grew in stature, prowess, mercilessness.

  Even, in beauty.

  “But you are beautiful,” Rose would say, tucking her scarf more closely around her throat, her silver earrings chiming in the wind. Faint wrinkles had begun to touch the corners of her bright eyes and mouth, deepening when she smiled. Which was often.

  “But you love me,” the Duelist would reply.

  Years passed. Not many, but enough.

  A rumor bloomed, with an unexpected origin, carried deep from the east, in wild lands never conquered, lands ruled by nomads on fast horses. Barbarians, they were called. Fur-wearing, slant-eyed mongrels.

  Who also, it was said, guarded veins of gold thick as a dragon’s neck, endless gold that blinded men in the sun, filled with healing powers: gold that would make a saint go mad with avarice. Deep in the mountains. Deep in the forests. Deep where no king had ever been able to send a single spy. Not without having his head returned in a handsomely embroidered velvet bag.

  Only silk and spice merchants could buy passage through those barbarian lands. Escorted, watched, gently (and sometimes forcefully) guided. The smart merchants minded their own business. Respected rules of passage. Bartered, drank, made gestures of peace with those wild men and women. Without forgetting, ever, that they would never be one of them.

  And so it was quite strange—impossible, really—when a spice merchant came home to his city telling a tale of two foreign women living amongst these barbarians—dressed in furs and silk, necks wrapped in loose scarves, riding fine horses. Seen with his own eyes, he swore. One of them huge, so broad in the shoulders he would have sworn she was a man until he saw the curve of her breasts beneath her jacket. Wearing a sword against her back, and her skin dark as a desert shadow.

  And then, there was her companion.

  “She was not human,” protested the merchant. “No human woman could be so beautiful. I thought I must be mad.”

  “You are mad,” said his colleagues. “No foreigners would ever be allowed to live amongst those horse-riding dogs.”

  “No,” replied the merchant, incensed. “I heard them. The mannish one told that beauty, ‘I would still kill the world for you.’”

  “Stop,” replied the others. “You’re drunk.”

  But the merchant leaned forward. “They held hands even when they rode. It was the strangest thing. And that fair creature, that most beautiful woman, kissed that immense mannish paw and said, ‘No. We are free, forever.’”

  “Fool,” they said. “Idiot.”

  It was beyond impossible. Offensive, even. Such lunacy.

  But the tale spread. It made the storytellers laugh.

  Once, they said, there was a witch who cursed a beautiful girl into a deep sleep. Until a warrior found and woke her, and together they killed the witch. A witch who had spread her curse through many lands—some, where her evil was still remembered. Where her killers would be welcome.

  Storytellers have a long reach.

  The theme of The Starlit Wood, the anthology where “Briar and Rose” first appeared, was simple: a fresh take on old fairytales. Sleeping Beauty was already on my mind. The Disney remake, which focused on Maleficent, had only come out the year before, but the troublesome nature of the source material hadn’t left me.

  The problem of the original Sleeping Beauty (called “Sun, Moon, and Talia” written by Italian poet Giambattista Basile in 1634) is that, ultimately, it’s a story about a woman who is far more attractive “dead” than she is alive: a woman who has little agency, who is forced into an unnatural sleep, raped while she is unconscious, and then, when she finally wakes, must go and marry the man who took advantage of her. It’s a bleak story, but not an unfamiliar one. It’s also one of my least favorite fairy tales, which is why I wanted to reinvent it as a tale about women, and the power of women, and how women save each other and themselves through sisterhood and love.

  As most women I know will tell you, they don’t always sleep a lot—but they fight plenty.

  The Light and the Fury

  There were gods in the sea, but Xīng had never prayed to them, nor to any holy spirit since she had buried the tin star. Yet she found herself on the cusp of prayer as she plummeted fifty feet to the dark Pacific, a leather harness buckled around her torso and shoulders, dangling like some gristly worm at the end of a long hook. The cable was not quite long enough and when the dirigible heaved upward, caught by the first, smashing gust of the oncoming storm, Xīng was torn from the brine, swinging madly, naked toes skimming foam. She would have vomited had there been anything in her stomach, but she had emptied her gut that morning. Never an admirer of flying.

  “You see it?” roared one of the lieutenants, boots securely locked within the iron braces of the hangar floor. Xīng, on the ascending portion of her dizzying, madcap swing, managed to glimpse the young man leaning down, headfirst, into the fifty feet of air separating him from the churning sea. It was night, no moon. Low clouds. He was dressed in warm silver wool and leather, and wore search-goggles over his eyes, crystal lenses lit like twin moons.

  Xīng wished to remind the young man that he was in a better position to see than she; but the dirigible dipped, plunging her back into the sea. The lieutenant shouted again, though the drone of the engines drowned his words. Xīng, clinging to the cable as she kicked her legs, cast a wild glance around her.

  Nothing. Impossible to see. The hull’s exterior lights had been dimmed, and the waters were black. A wave slammed, rolling Xīng upward with sickening speed—and then down, sucked under. She held her breath as the ocean buried her, listening to a brief muted roar in her ears. She gripped the cable with all her strength.

  When she resurfaced, the lieutenant was still calling out to her. His voice had gone hoarse. He held a knife in his hand, serrated steel reflecting the soft phosphorus glow of the night paint smeared against the wall around the exposed hangar gears. He was not looking at her, but at the sky.

  Xīng twisted around the cable, searching—and discovered pinpricks of light, burning behind the clouds—growing larger, brighter. Rumbling shuddered the air, metallic groans broken with pops and low whistles that cut through her eardrums. She gritted her teeth, and threw back her head. The lieutenant was staring at her again. His knife, pressed to the cable. Xīng fumbled to free her own blade, sheathed among the sealed packages strapped to her body.

  One-way trip. She had understood that, even before leaving the mountains; before saying yes; before packing her guns and memories, and her father’s chemicals.

  “Go!” she screamed at the lieutenant, cutting through the cable in one swipe, nearly breaking off the blade in her haste. The dirigible surged upward at the last moment, leaving her airborne. As she fell backward into the sea, swallowing a scream, she glimpsed that final surge of light through the clouds.

  And
then, nothing. Just down, down deep into the ocean. Her eyes squeezed shut. She lost her knife and did not care. All she could hear was her hammering heart, and another kind of pulse—longer, deeper, a single shockwave that boomed through her body like thunder. She clawed upward, lungs burning, and burst through the surface with a gasp.

  The dirigible was trying to flee. It was a small air ship, built for speed and the transport of politicians, intercontinental couriers—but not war. Silver as a bullet, and slender as one, engine-fired with some of the finest core crystals the skull engineers could produce, and still, it had no chance against the vessel plunging from the clouds: an Iron Maiden, bristling with the sharp mouths of cannons, each one silhouetted like needles against the beacon lights shining from the hull. A monstrous thing, blotting out the sky as its belly rode overhead, radiating such heat from its exposed crystalline core that her face felt burned.

  Xīng heard the thrumming charge before the cannons fired—felt the vibration in the water. Flinched, instinctively, at that first shot—blasted in rings of fire at the escaping dirigible, which was making a sharp ascent into the clouds. Shells tore through the silken sail, igniting hot gas. She stared, resigned and horrified, as a fireball erupted around the dirigible.

  Reminded her of a man burning alive. Or a mass coffin in the oven, souls trapped inside. She imagined bodies tumbling, falling, swallowed by the sea.

  Just as she was swallowed, moments later.

  Hands grabbed her ankles, and yanked her under.

  There had been experiments in her youth involving a pressure chamber, performed by a man on loan from the Redcoats who had something to prove. The ocean brought back those memories: all that immense, inescapable strain, as though the sea wanted to squeeze her vital organs into pudding, or implode her eyes, and brain.