A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

  Maeve was pretty sure no one wanted to buy the story of the artist who had a panic attack at her own opening. No, scratch that. She was absolutely sure someone would want to buy that story. She just didn’t want to sell her paintings badly enough to give it to them.

  “Well, then how about the story is I am a recluse. A crazy bird lady instead of a crazy cat lady. I live with the chickens. Whatever you need to say. But I don’t interact with the people buying my work, and I don’t go to openings.”

  “You’re lucky I’m good at my job, Maeve.”

  “I’m good at mine, too.”

  Brian sighed. “Of course you are. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. But I don’t understand why you don’t just buy yourself a pretty dress and have fun letting rich people buy you drinks and tell you how wonderful you are.

  “Let yourself celebrate a little. It’s the fun part of the job, Maeve.”

  • • •

  It wasn’t, not for her. Of course, Brian wouldn’t understand that. Maeve worked too hard to keep her panic attacks hidden. She had an entire portfolio of tricks to keep them manageable and out of view.

  When she wasn’t in the apartment, she was fine, as long as she didn’t have to interact with too many people. Crowds were okay as long as she had someone she knew with her and she didn’t have to interact with the people she didn’t know. When she had to meet new people, she did so in familiar surroundings, either one-on-one or in a group of people she already knew and felt comfortable with. Even then, she usually needed a day at home, undisturbed, after, in order to rest and regain her equilibrium.

  A party where everyone would be strangers who wanted to pay attention to her, who wanted her to interact with them, with no safety net of friends that she could fall onto, was impossible.

  • • •

  Even after Eorann had told Sweeney that she could not save him, it took him some time to realize that he would need to be the saving of himself. More time still, an infinity of church bells, of molting feathers, to understand that saving himself did not necessarily include lifting the curse.

  In search of himself, of answers, of peace, long and long ago, Sweeney had undertaken a quest.

  A quest is a cruel migration. This is the essence of a quest, no matter who undertakes it. But Sweeney had not known what to look for, save for the longing to see something other than what he was.

  The Sangreal had been found once already, and though lost again, it was the kind of thing where the first finding mattered. The dragons were all in hiding, and Sweeney had never particularly thought they needed to be slain.

  Nor had he known the map with which to travel by, save for one that would take him to a place other than where he was. He took wing. Over sea and under stone and then over the sea to sky.

  • • •

  Maeve saw the bird at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine again.

  Cathedrals, churches, museums, libraries, they were useful sorts of places for her. When the walls of her apartment pressed too tightly, these were places she could go, and sit, and think, and not have to worry about people insisting that she interact with them in order to justify her presence.

  “I came here for peace and quiet, you know. Not because I’m hoping to catch a glimpse of you naked.”

  The bird did not seem to have an opinion on that.

  When she sat, Maeve specifically chose a bench that did not have a line of sight to the bird’s current perch. Not like it couldn’t fly, but it was the principle of the thing. And she really didn’t want to see it become a naked man again.

  Stories about artistic inspiration that came to life and then interacted with the artist were only interesting if they were stories. When they were your life, they were weird.

  The bird landed next to her on the bench.

  Maeve looked at her bird, at her sketchbook, and back at the bird.

  “Fine. Fine. But do not turn into a man. Not in front of me. Just don’t. If you think you’re going to, leave. Please.” She tore off a chunk of her croissant and set it on the bird’s side of the bench. “Okay?”

  Maeve was relieved when the bird did not answer.

  • • •

  There was a package from Brian waiting for her when she got home. The card read, “For the crazy bird lady.”

  Inside was a beautiful paper bird. A crane, but not the expected origami. Paper made sculpture, not folded. Feathers and wings and beak all shaped from individual pieces of brightly colored paper. It was a gorgeous fantasy of practicality and feathers.

  Maeve tucked it on a shelf, where she could see it while she painted.

  • • •

  He hadn’t answered her today, the red-haired painter.

  Sweeney could speak in bird form—he was still a man, even when feather-clad—but he had learned, finally, the value of silence.

  This had not always been so. It had been speaking that had first called his curse down upon him.

  He had called out an insult to Ronan. Said something he should not have, kept speaking when he should have driven a nail through his tongue to hold his silence.

  Ronan had spoken then too. Spoken a word that burned the sky and shifted the bones of the earth. A curse, raw and dire. That was the first time the madness fell upon Sweeney. The madness, and the breaking of himself into the too-light bones that made up a bird’s wing.

  When it came down to it, it was pride that had cursed Sweeney into his feathers, as sure as pride had melted Icarus out of his. Pride and a too-quick temper, faults that dwelt in any number of people without changing their lives and their shapes, without sending them on a path of constant migration centered on a reminder of error.

  Curses didn’t much care that there were other people they could have landed on just as comfortably. They fell where they would, then watched the aftermath unfold.

  • • •

  Some days were good days, days when Maeve could walk through her life and not be aware of any of the adjustments she performed to make it livable.

  Tuesday was not one of those days.

  She had taken the subway, something she did only rarely, preferring to walk. But a sudden hailstorm had driven her underground, and sent what seemed like half of the city after her.

  Maeve got off at the second stop, not even sure what street it was. Her pulse had been racing so fast that her vision had gone grey and narrow. If she hadn’t gotten out, away from all those people, she would have collapsed.

  Her notebook, her most recent sketches for her paintings, was left behind on the uptown 2 train. It had to have been the train where it went missing. She was sure it had been in her bag when she left her apartment, and it was clearly not among the bag’s upended contents now.

  Forty-five minutes on the phone with MTA lost and found did no more than she had expected, and reassured her the odds of its return were small.

  And though it had smelled fine—she had checked—the milk with which she had made the hot chocolate that was supposed to make her feel better had instead made her feel decidedly worse.

  The floor of the bathroom was cool against her cheek. Exhausted and sick, Maeve curled in on herself and fell into tear-streaked sleep.

  The bird was in her dream, and that was far from the weirdest thing about it.

  • • •

  The sky shaded to lavender, the clouds like ink splotches thrown across it.

  Then a head sailed across the waxing moon.

  Sweeney cocked his own head and shifted on the branch.

  Another head described an arc across the sky, a lazy rise and fall.

  Sweeney looked around. He could not tell where the heads were launching from, nor could he hear any sounds of distress.

  Three more heads, in rapid succession, and Sweeney was certain he was mad again. He wished he were in his human form, so that he might throw back his own head and howl.

  Five heads popped up in front of Sweeney, corks bobbing to the surface of the sea.

  Identical, each
to each, the world’s strangest set of brothers.

  They looked, Sweeney thought, cheerful. Certainly more cheerful than he would be, were he suddenly disconnected from the neck down.

  Each head had been neatly severed. Or no. Not severed. They looked as if they were heads that had never had bodies at all. Smiling, clean-shaven, bright-eyed. No dangling veins or spines, no ragged skin. No blood.

  Sweeney supposed the fact that the heads were levitating was no more remarkable than the fact that they were not bleeding. Still, it was the latter that seemed truly strange.

  “Hail.”

  “And.”

  “Well.”

  “Met.”

  “Sweeney,” said the heads.

  “Er, hello,” said Sweeney.

  “A.”

  “Fine.”

  “Night.”

  “Isn’t.”

  “It?” Their faces were the picture of benevolence.

  “Indeed it is,” said Sweeney.

  “We.”

  “Would.”

  “Speak.”

  “With.”

  “You.”

  As they seemed to be doing that already, Sweeney simply bobbed his head.

  “Do.”

  “You.”

  “Not.”

  “Remember.”

  “Us?” The heads circled around Sweeney.

  He tried to focus, to imagine them with bodies attached. Nothing about them seemed familiar. He could not see past their duplicated strangeness. “Please forgive me, gentlemen, but I don’t.”

  “We.”

  “So.”

  “Often.”

  “Forget.”

  “Ourselves.”

  “Or.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “We.”

  “Haven’t.”

  “Met.” They slid into line in front of him again, the last one bumping its left-side neighbor and setting him gently wobbling.

  “Can you read the future, then?” It seemed the most likely explanation, though nothing about this encounter was at all likely.

  “Yes.”

  “And.”

  “No.”

  “Only.”

  “Sometimes.”

  Sweeney appreciated the honesty of the answer almost as much as he appreciated the thoroughness.

  “Listen.”

  “Now.”

  “Sweeney.”

  “Listen.”

  “Well.”

  “No.”

  “One.”

  “Chooses.”

  “His.”

  “Quest.”

  “It.”

  “Is.”

  “Chosen.”

  “For.”

  “Him.”

  “All.”

  “Quests.”

  “End.”

  “In.”

  “Death.”

  “So does life,” said Sweeney.

  “Then.”

  “Choose.”

  “Yours.”

  “Well.”

  “Sweeney.”

  The heads cracked their jaws so wide Sweeney wondered if they would swallow themselves. Then they began to laugh, and while laughing, whirled themselves into a small cyclone. Faster and faster it spun, until the heads were nothing but a laughing blur, and then were gone.

  Sweeney, contemplative, watched the empty sky until dawn.

  • • •

  Maeve sat up, her head and neck aching from sleeping on the tile, her mouth tasting as if she had licked the subway station she fled from earlier that day.

  Legs still feeling more like overcooked noodles than functioning appendages, she staggered into the kitchen and poured the milk down the sink. It was a largely symbolic sort of gesture, performed only to make her head feel better—it certainly wouldn’t undo the food poisoning or the resulting fucked up dream, but seeing the milk spiral down the drain was still a relief.

  Talking heads flying around Central Park and conversing with a bird who was sometimes a man. It was like something out of a Jim Henson movie, except without the good soundtrack.

  Becoming involved enough in her work to dream about it was, on balance, a good thing. But there were limits. She was not putting disembodied heads into her paintings.

  • • •

  Maeve painted a tower, set into the Manhattan skyline. A wizard’s tower, dire and ancient, full of spirals and spires, held together with spells and impossibility.

  She hung the surrounding sky with firebirds, contrails of flame streaking the clouds.

  • • •

  Dawn came, but it was neither rebirth nor respite. Sweeney was still befeathered. He turned to the glow of the rising sun, and the tower that appeared there, as if painted on the sky.

  Every wizard had a tower, even in twenty-first-century New York. It was the expected, required thing, and magic had rules and bindings more powerful than aught else. It had to, made as it was out of words and will and belief. Certain things had to be true, or the magic crumbled to dust and nothingness.

  Sweeney cracked open his beak and tore at the promise-crammed air.

  A wizard’s tower is protected by many things, but the most puissant are the wizard’s own words of power. Even after they have cast their spells and done their work, the words of a wizard retain tracings of magic. Their echoes continue to cast and recast the spells, for as long as sound travels.

  The words do not hang idle in the air. Power recognizes power, and old spells linger together like former lovers. Though the connections are no longer as bright as the crackle and spark of that first magic, they can never be entirely erased. They gather, each to each, and in their greetings, new magics are made.

  Ronan had been a wizard for centuries now, perhaps millennia. A few very important years longer than Sweeney had been a bird.

  Ronan had fled Ireland in the coffin ships, with the rest of the decimated, starving population. His magic, the curse’s binding, had pulled Sweeney along in his wake.

  In the years since his arrival, magic had wrapped itself around Ronan’s tower like fairy tale thorns, a threat, a protection, and a guarantee of solitude. A locus of power that sang, siren-like, to Sweeney, though he knew it was never what he sought.

  Sweeney flew around the tower three times, then three, then three again, in the direction of unraveling. The curse, as it always had, remained.

  • • •

  “How many paintings do you have finished?”

  “Five.”

  “How long will it take you to do, say, five or maybe seven more?”

  “Why?”

  “Drowned Meadow will give you gallery space, but I think these new pieces are strong enough you’d be better served if you had enough finished work to fill the gallery, rather than being part of a group showing.”

  “When would I need them finished by?”

  Brian’s answer made her wince, and mourn once again the loss of the sketchbook, and the studies it contained. Still.

  “It’s a good space. I’ll get the pieces done.”

  “Excellent. I’ll email you the contracts.”

  • • •

  “Wait, that’s what the naked bird guy looks like?” Emilia stood in front of the first painting in the series, the man transforming into a bird. “No wonder you keep seeing him around the city. He’s hot.”

  “He’s usually a bird.”

  “Still, yum. And is that drawn to scale?”

  Maeve snorted. “Fine. The next time I see him, if he’s being a person, I’ll give him your number.”

  Emilia laughed, but she looked sideways at Maeve while she did. “So, are you seeing all of the things from your paintings?”

  Emilia had moved to the newest painting in the series, a cockatrice among the tents at Bryant Park’s Fashion Week, models turned to statues under its gaze.

  “Do you think I would be here with you, discussing the attractiveness of a werebird, after having consumed far too much Ethiopian food, if I had
really encountered a bird that can turn people to stone just by looking at them?”

  Maeve looked at Emilia again. “Or no. It’s not actually that you think that. You’re just doing the sanity check.”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy. But you know you don’t always take care of yourself before a show. And this one did start with you thinking that you saw a bird turn into a naked guy.”

  “Which, I admit, sounds odd. But you don’t need to worry that I’ve started the New York chapter of the Phoenix-Watching Club.”

  “That sounds very Harry Potter. You haven’t seen any wizards wandering around the city, have you? I mean, other than the guys who like to get out their wands on the subway.” Emilia twisted her face into an expression of repulsed boredom.

  “And you wonder why I don’t like to leave the house.”

  “No wizards?”

  “No wizards.”

  • • •

  There were wizards in New York City, nearly everywhere. War mages who changed history over games of speed chess. Chronomancers who stole seconds from the subway trains. And the city built on dreams was rife with oneiromancers channeling desires between sleep and waking.

  Even the wizard who had set the curse on Sweeney looked out over the speed and traffic of the city as he spoke his spells, shiftings and transformations, covering one thing in some other’s borrowed skin, whether they would or no.

  But though Ronan was here, and had been, he was not the direction to which Sweeney looked to break his curse. Wizards did not, under any but the most extreme circumstances, undo their own magic. Magic, magic that is practiced and cast, is at odds with entropy. Not only does it reshape order out if chaos, but it wrenches the rules for order sideways. It rewrites the laws, so that a man might be shifted to a bird, and back again, no matter how physics wails.

  To make such a thing happen, though it might seem the work of an incantation and an arcane gesture, is the marriage of effort and will. And will, once wielded in such fashion, is not lightly undone.

  But just because the wizard would not lift his curse did not mean that the spell might never be broken.

  It just meant it would require a magic stronger than wizardry to break it.

  • • •

  Maeve’s apartment was full of birds. Photographs papered the walls, layered over one another in collage; Escheresque spirals of wings that had never flown together fell in cascading recursive loops of impossible birds.