The Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters

by Brooke Bolander

  Mara cannot see what he is writing, but somehow, in her vision, she knows all too well what the spidery handwriting must say. It is a fairy story, a parable about the virtue of suffering as she now suffers, cold and mute and alone. Resistance is wicked. Want is wicked; little girls and women who want more, wickedest of all. God only blesses those who slog soundlessly beneath their burdens and die with a smile. To them, the gates of Heaven will eventually open, even if the only gates ever unlocked to them on Earth were the iron-tipped bars of a factory.

  Anger and resentment at the brokenness of the world should be snuffed out at all costs. Anger rises in her own limbs, swift and sudden and warming as a hot mug of cider, gulped all at once. Who does this moral serve? Why try to lull her and those like her to sleep, when that sleep will eventually kill them as surely as slow poison?

  Jaw clenched, cold and hunger temporarily forgotten, she leans in closer.

  A draft of air from somewhere causes the candle on the writer's desk to gutter. As he looks up from his work at the sudden darkness, his elbow catches the candlestick's base. It teeters and wobbles and totters, finally falling against his shoulder in a splash of hot tallow and sparks. Flame leaps from the wick to the wool of his frock coat, catching merrily in the time it takes to blink. He leaps to his feet, so fast he upsets his chair, beating frantically at himself. In his panic, he trips over the overturned furniture, totters, and, like the candlestick before him, tumbles to earth, brushing a set of curtains on the way down. They go up with almost as much gusto as the woolen coat. The entire elegant study is now rimmed in fire, the man knocked unconscious in his fall.

  The maid has just burst in and is shrieking in the doorway when the match finally goes out. The crackle of the flames cuts off abruptly. Once more, there is nothing but the soft, muffled sounds of the winter night, the distant rumble of carriages throwing up slush and the creak of street signs in the cold wind.

  Mara realizes she is smiling.

  How awful, she makes herself think. What a vision to have, of such a terrible accident! If I should light another, perhaps it would erase the memory of that poor man's suffering with its cheerful light.

  The tips of her fingers are blistered and throbbing, now. She relishes the feeling as she strikes a third. Again, a vision plays out before her eyes, the frozen spines of her lashes.

  She herself is in this one. Mara has rarely seen her own reflection, but she knows who the ragged figure is in the way of dreams, a familiarity like staring at her own hands folded in her lap. She looks… warm. Her mitten-less fingers are outstretched over a great bed of coals and ashes at her feet. Water drips from her snow-wetted braid. She has a stick in one hand that she's using to poke and prod at the smoldering mess in front of her, stirring up sparks like clouds of summer midges.

  She is not alone. Jenny, one of the girls who toils in the match factory, crouches beside her, cheeks rosier than they've ever been, her own braid thick and yellow. When this Jenny smiles, she has all her teeth, spared by the poison vapors that have stripped them in life. She pokes at the embers with a stick as well, chatting to Mara in a familiar way they've never been allowed in the waking world. Another expert jab and she's drawing a potato out of the coals, sooty and steaming, jacket split to reveal the mealy goodness inside. Looking at it makes Mara-in-the-here's mouth water. Her shrunken stomach seizes fiercely enough that she almost drops the match.

  The two girls halve the potato. It burns their fingers and they laugh, tossing the pieces in the air, blowing on them to try and make the red-hot chunks cool faster. The vision recedes, as if Mara is hiding in the back of a wagon, slowly pulling away. She can see, now, that there is a great mountain of burnt timbers and smoking rubble, metal bars half-melted and tilting to prod the gray sky. Mara and her companion — doll-sized, now, against the ruin — are cooking their meal in the remains of some great burning. Occasionally something shifts and crashes. Snowflakes sizzle and hiss in tiny, agonized whispers as they fall from Heaven.

  The gates of the factory are flung off their hinges, whether from the fire or from some other force. All that's left of the match manufacturer's industry is a pile of glowing coals, a warm place where two girls can munch on potatoes and enjoy each other's company. Mara wants it to be real so badly, she can almost smell the hot, wet ash, can almost feel the heat of the potato as she sinks her front teeth into the gritty mess. Tears are freezing on her face as the final match burns her fingertips black.

  Not yet, says a voice behind her closing eyelids. It sounds an awful lot like Grandmother, or maybe Jenny, or maybe both of them together at once. You're close, you're so awfully close, you've got your name took back and your purpose tucked in and you're glowing inside, all rosy-red, but you've just a little further to go. Can you see it? Can you see where you need to go from here?

  They find her frozen against the factory gates the next morning, a bundle of spent matches clutched in one blue hand. What a pity, the constables say. Was this the girl they called Mara? She never was one to ask for help, poor beast. Suffered quiet as anything, never complained after her father passed. Like a little saint.

  The matchstick girls know better. That was Mara, they say to each other. She never asked for anything from this lot, and why should she have to? Why should any of us have to? Don't we deserve to live better than this, scraping and starving and dying of the phossy jaw to pad the pockets of them in the palace over yonder?

  It's the last evening of the year, as glittering cold as a bayonet's tip, and the snow makes blue hummocks of familiar landmarks up and down the avenues of the great city, all the way to the royal barracks. Mara watches the soldiers clomp-stomp by in clusters of twos and threes, collars turned up and hat flaps tugged down, already enough applejack working in their systems to turn the teeth of the bitterest wind, and she doesn't even try to sell them what's in her basket, in case they recognize her from the week before. She's just a thin-faced girl shivering in the snow, a basket of matches at her half-frozen feet. As long as that's all she is, she's safe.

  Since the night of the factory fire, her family and friends have been scattered like handbills in a high wind, some in hiding and some captured and a few others most certainly frozen breathless beneath the ground. The broadsheets wrapped around her hands and feet had blamed it all on an arsonist riot, a violent rabble making unreasonable demands of their bewildered employers. They made no mention at all of the girls dead, or disfigured from phosphorus fumes, the bread shortages squeezing the city like a broken accordion, or the private army the factory owners had hired to break up the strike that really wasn't private in the slightest. They may not notice Mara as they pass, on their way to parties and saloons, but she recognizes many of their faces beneath royal livery.

  The second, third, and fourth pages of the newspaper had been devoted to an account of the youngest princess's confirmation. Ten thousand blessed candles had burned, as the priest delivered the rites (the demand for matches had outstripped the factory's ability to manufacture them; this was not touched upon). There was a detailed description of the many gifts the princess had received, the important guests who had attended, and the banquet table, where they had all nibbled and grazed afterwards. No shortage of food behind the palace walls, that was for certain.

  What about Jenny, and Olga, and all the rest of the girls out of a job, now that the factory is a smoking pile of rubble? What of the organizers, their blood spilled on the snow beneath the clubs of soldiers with faces as hard and red as bricks? Mara would pray for their safety, but prayers must go through the church, and the church is a compromised channel. She settles on lighting a match for them, instead, a tiny spark that turns the flesh of her cupped hand to rosy stained glass. Let Princess Annalise have her ten thousand flames. This one belongs to the girls of the factory.

  Such a little thing, a match. So unimportant, in this new era of electricity. But a match was a free agent; it needed no bulb or wire down which to run to be dangerous. Mara watches it push
back the night in wonderment. It gives her the same feeling in the pit of her chest she gets when Grandmother talks to a crowd like they're a bundle of matches themselves, and all they need to burst into a mighty, roaring torch is the deft strike of some unseen hand. The factory bosses had felt it and had feared and hated the old woman above all other foes. Now the rulers of the kingdom know what she's capable of, as well, and soldiers pace the streets and alleys night and day, looking for an excuse to stick a bayonet between someone's shoulder blades. It's not safe for Grandmother to show her face in public, not even to collect her only grandchild. Mara misses her so badly, it ties her empty stomach in knots, but she at least understands. They had gone over the risk of this happening long ago.

  “If we should get pinned apart and you can't go home, the best thing you can do is stick tight in one place and wait it out,” Grandmother had said in her smoky rasp. “You got friends, and one of our people will happen along and find you before too long. Keep warm and keep your head down, and I'll be back soon's I can. I'm a hard one to snuff, else they wouldn't always try so hard to do it.”

  It had been a good plan, and sound advice at the time, and because Mara loved and trusted Grandmother like she trusted the sun's rising, she had followed it to the letter, finding a doorway in a side alley and making camp there. But days had passed, and then weeks, and none of their people had ever happened along. Mara tries not to worry too much about them. She focuses on surviving, scraping and stealing and selling her matches when someone's actually willing to stop and buy.

  The match goes out. The alley is almost totally silent, save for the distant crunching of some passerby's boots in the snow. Mara has never felt so cold before. Her ears ache with it. Her cheeks have gone numb with it. Her fingers are clumsy, dead things that refuse to work properly as she fumbles and gropes in her basket for another two sticks, desperate to ward that inky darkness off for just a moment longer. Maybe someone who isn't a soldier will happen by and see her and take pity. Maybe the heat will wake her up just a little. Maybe —

  A vision in the spark and hiss and sudden flare, seen as if through thin muslin curtains.

  The grand cathedral of ten thousand candles glowing with a holy white light, pews filled with the rich and the powerful and the gilded. Princess Annalise, so good and pure, kneels at the feet of the archbishop and he blesses her, prays for her, secures her place in Heaven Above. All those who witness the benediction smile and simper and feel that this is right, is good, is owed. They don't really notice the candles, let alone consider who made the matches that lit each one. They are deaf to the voices of the girls screaming for justice inside the flames, although the howl is so loud, Mara can't imagine how that could be. All they can hear is the power jangling inside their own pockets, buying them an audience with God.

  There's a sudden gust of wind down the nave that sets plumes on fancy hats shaking and fur-lined collars to trembling like dandelion fluff. Shadows flicker and test their wings. The voices of the girls in the candles are a righteous chorus, now, rebellious angels harmonizing at the moment before the fall. All of the little fires seem to blow and join together until both sides of the cathedral are sheets of living, singing flame. They reach up and up, setting the walls alight — licking at the rafters — and then —

  Again, the matches sputter and die. The vision fades, although Mara's ears still ring with the sound of ten thousand ghostly voices raised in song. She sits in the quiet for a moment, trying to commit the sound of the tune to memory.

  She grabs three, this time, striking them all at once against the brick wall at her back.

  “Get up,” says Jenny, grabbing her roughly by the shoulder. There is no veil between her and this vision. She's pulled to her feet by it, linked arm-in-arm with it, half-carried down the blue alleyway by a friend who cannot possibly be there. Jenny hasn't been this spry in months. The phossy jaw has eaten her strength so she can barely stand upright at her place on the factory floor, and yet here she is, as solid and real as the cold and the hunger and the darkness, pulling Mara along to who knows where. Her grip is iron. “You've got places to be. Don't argue — just-come-on!”

  They round a corner and come face-to-face with a drunken huddle of soldiers, who blessedly pay them no mind. Mara tries finding her voice to ask where they're going, but she seems to have left it behind in the alleyway along with her basket of matches. Up a dog-legged side street so narrow their shoulders touch the walls — down snow-clogged closes and thoroughfares choked with cheerful crowds of midnight revelers — shambling across busy avenues just beneath the hooves and noses of overworked carriage horses — on and on and on Jenny drags her, steadily puppeteering them both uphill to where the palace sags beneath its domes and spires and clustered growths of incandescent bulbs. It glows like a false moon, just over the next rise, desperate to be noticed even out of eyeshot.

  They reach the top of the bluff and there it finally lolls, gaudy on the other side of the parade grounds. Nobody else is around. The palace lights throw strange shadows on the unbroken snow, the lumps and humps where statues and benches and pigeons should be. Mara has never been this close to the palace at night before. She squints her eyes against the glare.

  “Just a little farther,” Jenny says. She sounds almost sorrowful. “I wish I could've lived to see you do it, Mar, but I know you'll — ”

  The last of the three matches dies with a fizzing whistle. Jenny winks out. Mara blinks and she's lying beneath a bench on the parade grounds, alone, a basket with four matches left at her head and a burned-out bundle of smoking char clutched in her fist.

  I don't want to go any farther. No. No more moving. Here in the lee of the bench, out of the wind, she feels safe and comfortable, almost warm. After all that walking — vision or not, it had been a lot of walking — all she wants to do is let the snow fall over her like a blanket until Grandmother comes to pull it back. What was it that Jenny had wanted her to do? Why had she dragged her all the way up here? If she was only a vision, did it really matter what she had wanted?

  Up ahead, the lights of the palace blur into a soothing smear.

  Rest, my child, whispers the voice of the priest. You've earned a rest, after all you've been through.

  Sleep, poor innocent soul, wheedles the voice of the author, the writer of fairy stories and moral parables. You've suffered so well, so beautifully well, and wouldn't you like to go to Heaven?

  Take a load off, says the voice of her father, slurred from too much drink. Get comfortable. Ain't comfort a grand and glorious thing?

  Look at the lights of my palace, says the voice of the princess, flutelike and well-fed and used to being obeyed. Don't they look nice? So pretty! Wouldn't you just love to sit here and look at them forever?

  And really, truth be told, she would like nothing more than to stay right where she's at and do just that. But the song of the fire is still in her head — all those voices raised until the rafters over the heads of the rich and the spiteful caught and smoldered and burned like kindling — and nobody who advised you to lie down and sleep instead of fighting was ever worth trusting.

  She takes three more matches in her hand, frozen to a claw. She strikes them weakly against the frosted granite of the bench.

  It's Grandmother who lifts her to her feet this time, Grandmother and a whole crowd of friends and colleagues — rabble-rousers and revolutionaries, torch-bearers and mask-wearers, so many Mara can't count them all. There's a current running through them that feels like fire. Someone sets her atop Grandmother's shoulders and a cheer goes up, an echoing hurrah that sends snow sliding off statues. Mara holds her breath, waiting for soldiers to come pouring over the hillside from every direction — for gunshots and alarmed shouts, the crunch of clubs on bone and the confused cacophony of a street battle — but somehow, miraculously, nothing happens.

  “C'mon, child,” Grandmother says. “Hang onto my hat. We're going to tear it all down,
the entire blessed thing.”

  They surge across the parade grounds like an army of shadows, cheering, invincible, flickering firebrands beating back the steady electric glare of the palace all the way to the front gates. They break against the bars once — twice — again — until with a sound like a groan, the hinges give beneath the weight of hurled bodies and the entire structure goes toppling backwards into the snow. Now there are soldiers pouring forth, drunk on holiday milk punch or too much sleep, clumsy with sudden surprise. Most of them don't even have time to fix their bayonets or load their weapons. They swing their rifles like clubs, as the wave sweeps over them, pushing them back across the courtyard to the palace itself.

  Grandmother sets Mara on the ground. All around them, the fight is joining.

  “Don't worry about me,” she says. “I got ninety-nine lives, and this isn't my first or my last. You get in there and give ’em what for.” She pushes Mara towards a side entrance. “Go!”

  And Mara goes, darting through the thicket of legs, the distracted throng of brawlers giving and getting just over her head. She's inside the palace before anybody has time to even think about stopping her.

  Inside is more chaos. Guards are already rushing to secure the exits. Maids and servants and cooks and governesses mill and shriek in confusion. Someone outside hurls a flaming brand through one of the ornate windows, setting the curtains alight. Mara cuts a path through them all, shoving and clawing, headed for the grand central staircase. In the way of dreams and visions, she knows who waits for her on the topmost floor, on a balcony in a room at the end of an impossible hallway. The palace is vast beyond reckoning, but she doesn't lose her way, not even for a second.

  Behind her, the front doors creak and rattle and finally give as the human wave batters them down.