The Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters

by Brooke Bolander

  “I'll be back,” she says to the body and bones and blue iris of distant sky, gruffly. “Soon.”

  Once you've been in the light for awhile, Blue finds, it's hard as hell to willingly walk back into darkness.

  You can hear them dancing sometimes in the palace above. Blue's no good at dancing. What she's got a lot of is patience. She sits in the dark, listening to distant feet go trip-trap-trip. She goes over what the bones have told them. Bear left at the thirdmost fork. Turn right at the drawing of the Dipper. Persist. Smile if men throw the ladder down, do as they ask, but keep your horns sharp. For the sake of your mothers, your daughters, your freedom, persist.

  Months pass.

  The body isn't much more than a mummy, all leather & horn & ivory. The skin brittles from its bones with a touch. Blue is respectful, but she doesn't stand with ceremony. Hands that wiped away Blue's tears and tended scraped knees crumble to pebbly dust beneath her own clumsy fingers.

  It's mebbe what they call an e-vo-looshunary trait, my darling. Ever since the first of us was stuck down here, we've been working counter-clockwise, leaving instructions for the rest. Don't be fearing. Mebbe you're to be the last link in the chain, eh? Mebbe your bones are blank.

  Tendons part. Blue scans the bone's instructions. Two words jump out at her, written in the language of fissures: TRAPDOOR and KNIFE.

  A smile splits her face like a hoof.

  She kisses the dried-up thing, stands, and — eagerly, this time — trots off.

  They're dancing as she gallops through the labyrinth. The way is clear now. The maze twists and turns like a lizard's senseless tail beneath her. Up above, the lords and ladies thunder.

  There's a ringing in her furred ears, a stink of perfume and powder and sweat in her flat nose. She pauses only once, to punch through the tunnel's wall where the sandstone is thin. The knife inside has a curved blade, handle shaped like a bull in full charge. She jams it into her belt, keeps on running. The smells and noise grow stronger. Instruments she doesn't have name for bawl & moan.

  Further on, further in. A stone trapdoor overhead leaks yellow light. It's heavy, and thick, and no human woman could ever hope to budge it.

  With a snort and a grunt and a prayer, Blue puts her forehead against it and pushes.

  Slowly, the stone begins to move.

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  It's the last evening of the year, as bitterly cold as coins in a factory owner's pocket, and the snow makes blue hummocks of familiar landmarks up and down the avenues of the great capital city all the way to the palace gates. Crowds scurry through the drifts, hats tugged down, and collars turned up. They have no more need for matches than the little girl watching them wistfully from the alleyway might have for a china dolly.

  The royal family had been the first to have their home wired for electricity. It had been right there in the newspapers the child's grandmother used to wrap her feet, the wonders of the modern age come to make life better for every man, woman, and child in the kingdom. Grandmother, sharp as the first crust of ice on an October puddle, had snorted and spat over her shoulder in the direction of the palace, shaking her head. Her opinions of the Tsar and his rule were well-known in that section of the quarters and try as the girl's father might to make the old beldame hush up her talk, he never did manage the trick.

  “Making life better for who, now?” she rasped, breath billowing in the cold. “Mark my words, the only ones who will be benefitting from that are thems that don't need it. The rest of us will have an even harder time of it from here on out, see if we don't.”

  She had vanished sometime around midsummer, when the days stretched on till well past midnight and the skirmishes blazed hottest. The girl's father had said the squawking old banty must've gotten what was coming to her and toasted her memory in five different saloons while the girl stood outside, looking pathetic for coins. It had been an easier sell than the matches, at least.

  The palace glows on the horizon. There are four princesses who live inside, rarely seen but said to be vivacious and fair-haired and full of fun. All they do all day is learn sums and stuff themselves full of sweetmeats, huddled by fires that never go out. Grandmother always said this was a bloody disgrace, but right now, with the girl's shoes gone and her toes numb, every yellow-lit shop window full of fat geese and Father waiting at home with a strap in one hand and a bottle in the other, it doesn't sound like all that wicked an existence at all. It sounds like something she'd like to reach out and take for herself like plucking a pork pie from a windowsill.

  She reaches out for a passerby's trouser leg and earns a kick for her troubles that scatters her matches in the snow. Frantically, whimpering under her breath, she scrambles to scoop them back up, praying to Grandmother and the Good Lady Luck, both, they won't be ruined by the wetting. If she's managed to waste an entire basket of goods in one night, there's no telling what Father might do. Little girls, he's often fond of telling her, go for a high price in some places, even ones as dark and black-eyed as her.

  Her grimy hand trembles as she strikes one against the basket handle, barely daring to breathe. The sputter and hiss as the sulphur tip catches and blazes like a Christmas star beneath her cupped palm is the sweetest thing she's ever heard, prettier than church bells or meat's sizzle. The little flame gutters in the gust from her relieved sigh, but stubbornly refuses to go out, a tiny spot of warmth and light in this numb black and blue bruise of a night. She holds it, transfixed, until it burns all the way down and blisters her fingertips. She tosses it away into the darkness, where it lands unseen with a last faint hiss of steam. The panicked thing hammering away behind her rags and ribs stills itself.

  The night seems much emptier now that she's been reminded of light, and ever so much colder now that she's been reminded of heat. Light streams down from high windows overhead, so butter-thick and butter-yellow, you could baste a bird in it, but it's no more hers than anything else behind those thick slabs of glass. Gazing up at the frosted panes, something flickers inside her, angry and wanting at the same time. She snatches up another match and strikes it, inhaling the smoke and heat. It's not fair that she should be out here in rags, afraid to go home with snowflakes gathering in her braid, when so many others have so much. It's not right that she has to beg to be seen when Grandmother always said her mothers and her mothers' mothers were warrior queens, riding where they liked and taking what they wanted. Hot tears gather in her eyes, blurring the flame to an indistinct smear.

  The smear becomes a spangled vision. Like peering through a muslin curtain, she can just about see them: women with round faces and dark braids like hers, dressed in riding leathers, seated about a rug, laden with steaming food. Stews thick with meat, cheeses yellow as a flower-seller's daffodils, plump roasted chickens and piles of potatoes, mashed and salted — the saliva gathers in the girl's mouth until she has to swallow, ashamed, knowing none of it is real but wishing it were so badly, she smells every item in the feast. There's a fire, too, a rosy thing burning low and hot in its pit, the kind that bakes your shins so deliciously, you don't dare move them from the hearth until the heat is almost unbearable. Occasionally one of the women will give it a poke, sending up sparks and smoke that escapes through a hole in the roof.

  The women's features are indistinct, but somehow the match girl knows that her mother is there in the circle, and Grandmother, as well. She reaches for the veil, wanting to see better, wanting to join them, oh please don't go, wait for me, wait —

  Another match falls from her fingers and dies in the snow. The vision goes out like a snuffed candle. The street is empty, save for a few homebound stragglers, and the only things she can smell are her own sodden clothes and the faint, ghostly char of burned matches. The parts of her that aren't yet numb ache with the cold. She thinks of that merry fire, the searing bite of it, the coals glowing like cherries on a cake in a baker's window.

  She should be heading home. The snow is falling in great gusts, now, muffling the world
like eiderdown. If Father is there and sober, he'll beat her for wasting matches. If he's down at the saloon, the beating will wait until morning, but the house will be cold, not even the meager night-fire they keep banked with newspapers and twisted hay, sputtering behind the hearth. In either case, she sees little point in starting out just yet. At least here, she can have these little dreams, fleeting as they are. There's a recklessness in her where fear usually sets. It's a small, smoldering thing, enough to make her pull another match from the basket. This one takes a couple of strikes to get going before bursting to life.

  Such flames in her vision! Not merely a cook fire in a pit, this time, or a crackling blaze behind a hearth, but a roaring whirlwind of consuming orange and red, licking at the beams of a sagging hovel. It melts all the snow around it in a great, wet circle up and down the alleyway like spring thaw come early. Water trickles and burbles beneath the crackle-crumple-crash. Smoke and cinders erupt from the windows, the chimney, the roof. They taste the shingles of the shack next door, considering their next meal.

  Someone inside is screaming. The match girl recognizes his voice. She's heard it raised in anger or dropped in slurred good humor many times before in her life. This is the first time she's ever heard it screeching in fear, scalded down to naked pain and panic. Perhaps he is pinned beneath a beam, or unable to find the door in the smoke. Perhaps the way is blocked.

  The match girl smiles. She's smiling still when the match at last goes out, leaving her alone once again in the dark and cold.

  Were it summer, or spring, she might feel guilt for such an imagining. The priests, safe and dry now in their warm churches and their great, wool vestments, would tell her to honor her father as she would honor the great God in His Heaven, the eternal Father of them all. But God, she thinks deep down in her blasphemous little heart, feels very far away, and if He is anything like Father-on-Earth, that's probably for the best. All she has are her matches, and aren't those named after Lucifer himself?

  If she's going to Hell for these thoughts, she muses, at least she'll be warm. She takes a whole handful this time and strikes them all at once like a torch —

   — in the hand of her beloved grandmother, standing before her as real and sturdy as a policeman or a lamppost. She tries to cry out, but all that emerges is a croak.

  Her face is indistinct in the flickering light of the torch, her wiry, old frame cloaked in a woolen greatcoat, dyed a startling red. A cap is pulled down low over her gray braids.

  “Girl,” says the grandmother in a voice so familiar, it makes the match girl's heart ache, “you're on the right track, but you're not quite there yet.” She stamps her boots in the snow. The girl cannot remember her grandmother ever wearing boots like these, but there was much about her life Grandmother had never revealed. “And I'm afraid until you find the right track, there will be no rest for you, mightily unfair as it seems. Try to remember what I'm about to tell you, little one. Carry it with you to the next cycle and go from there.”

  She leans down, so close the match girl can see herself reflected in the old woman's black eyes, the little bundle of matches blazing away in her hand. Grandmother smells of rosemary, vodka, gunpowder, and cheroot smoke, just as she had in life. Pamphlets stick out of the coat pockets, the kind you found littering the ground after marches, wadded in-between the bars of the palace gates.

  “Dying in the snow's not enough,” Grandmother rasps. “Taking down that drunken lout of a father of yourn, still not enough. You got the blood of warrior queens in you, child. Think bigger. Seize back what belongs to you from them who took it long ago. And for pity's sake, if you're gonna be a martyr in anybody's story, at least make sure it's your own. Let others tell it, and they'll take your name and they'll take your fire and then they'll take everything else.”

  The match girl tries to focus, but Grandmother's face seems to recede into the darkness before her. She tries to move her limbs, to crawl after her, but they feel frozen solid, too heavy to even twitch.

  But her ears still work, and they catch the last words Grandmother speaks before the matches burn out and darkness falls a final time.

  They find her frozen in a doorway the next morning, a bundle of spent matches clutched in one blue hand. What a pity, the constables say. Poor little beast. At least she died smiling. D'you think she saw Heaven, there at the last, and the good reward that awaits all who suffer quietly in the snow?

  It's the last evening of the year, as glittering cold as a guillotine blade, and the snow makes blue hummocks of familiar landmarks up and down the avenues of the great city, all the way to the factory gates. Mara watches the last of the holiday crowds go by, bundled and fur-framed against the cold, warm and on their way to warmer, in brightly-lit parlors and dining rooms, and she wants to throw her basket of matches after them like a curse. Were Father still alive, he would beat her for even thinking of such waste, but Father is long dead in the garden where they plant paupers, burned to a cinder in his bed one night while she was out selling her wares.

  The world is cruel to orphans, cruel as a man reeking of drink with a strap in his hand. His death has made things no easier, although she's still glad for it, down in her secret heart of hearts. What she makes now, she keeps. She uses it to buy more matches from the factory girls — the match-makers with their swollen gums and gapped smiles, with lives like mayflies — and in this way she keeps alive a little longer, one more sunrise and one more sunset, snatched defiantly like a pork pie from a windowsill. But her cheeks are very thin, now, are Mara's, and every night this winter is a little colder than the one before it. The rich have long since wired their homes for electric bulbs, mimicking the royal family in their palace on the hill, and the poor hoard their matches like gold or the last bite of stew, buying more only when it's necessary.

  She reaches out for a passerby's trouser leg and earns a kick for her troubles that scatters her matches in the snow. Frantically, hissing curses under her breath, she scrambles to scoop them back up, praying to Grandmother and fickle Lady Luck, both, they won't be ruined by the wetting. Grandmother had vanished not long before Father's death, during the bright mosquito-bite summer when the nights were longest and the skirmishes outside the palace hottest. Mara's father had toasted the old revolutionary's presumed death, but Mara still holds out hope that, someday, she'll return for her girl. It's the one bright spot that keeps her hanging on, the goad that moves her to snatch up the matchsticks when she otherwise might simply watch them sink into the dirty slush.

  Her grimy hand does not tremble as she strikes one against the basket handle, resigned to whatever may come to pass. The sputter and hiss as the sulphur tip catches and blazes like a morning star beneath her cupped palm is a relief, but not as much as the sound of a sizzling goose or frying bacon would be right now, when all she's got in her belly is a crust of soggy bread and half a Christmas orange a passerby handed her in lieu of coins, earlier that evening. Mara always accepts food when they offer it. She rejects their pitying looks, the sad shaking of a hat-swaddled head atop a scarf-wrapped neck, the way they want to make her into something she isn't — something that doesn't belong to her, but to them. A symbol, an icon like the ones all gaudy-painted in church, dying in the snow.

  She'd rather them just buy the bloody matches and throw them away, if it came down to it. It makes no difference what they do with the things, so long as they pay up.

  The little flame is warm, bright, and for her and her alone. For the briefest of moments, her fingers stop being numb as it burns down to their tips. And then, just like that, it's gone, smoke sighing away into the lowering sky like the soul from a body. Mara is left alone in darkness, feeling even wetter and colder than before.

  She could go to the orphanage run by the church, but she knows all too well what the nuns and priests get up to in there; there are plenty of other escaped orphans on the streets with stories to turn your hair white. Grandmother had always been dismissive of the entire institution.
She would wave her hand at their newspaper-wrapped feet — the holes in the roof of their hovel, the grim factories hemming them in, the grand, distant domes of the royal palace — and bark a laugh, cold as the sparks off an iron wheel.

  “Whose god,” she would ask of no one in particular, “that's what I'd like to know. Is there a God reserved for them up on the hill, and another assigned to us down below? Does He walk up and down the factory rows with a little badge and notebook in His hands, handing out citations, scribbling down the names of them that works hardest and suffers longest? ’Cause so far as I can tell, there's no God down here and never been in my lifetime. Maybe He's something you take for yourself like a loaf of bread or a rich man's pocket watch.”

  On the rare occasion or two Father had taken her to mass, the priest had gone on at length about the importance of suffering. To suffer hardships without complaint was a virtue, he said, and virtue would surely bring you closer to God. But if that's true, Mara finds herself thinking, she and the girls who work in the match factory should glow from head to toe like consecrated candles. It feels like a lie told to comfort someone — a lie told to soothe someone into a cold, frozen sleep.

  Sleep. She knows better than that. Don't sleep. Light another match and be done with virtuous suffering, if only for the length of a single match's lifetime. The sharp hiss of the head striking brings her eyes back into focus, warding her eyelids off for another sweep of the clock's hands. In the glow, she sees a vision, indistinct, as if seen through a gauzy curtain or a frosted windowpane.

  There is an older man in a study, balding but well-dressed. A warm fire roars in the grate behind him, well-fed and stoked without a care for how much fuel it might be burning. On the desk next to his inkwell, something in a mug wisps steam. Tea, maybe; he has to blow on it before taking a sip. A maid comes in to carry away the remains of a half-gnawed roast mutton, doing her best not to disturb him.