6. Or mean what I say.
7. Miss Field, forget forcible defenestration. Let me be plain. I need you to kiss me like you kissed that last monster I made, the one you stole, my greatest work and the closest thing I’ll ever know of a supreme being outside yourself. Kiss me like you want to make me ruler over all the Valwode, like you want to execute me for the crime of wanting to kiss you, like you forgive me, or I will die of suffocation because you are the only air I ever want to breathe.
8. ...Please?
Gideon sighed. A month and change of enforced silence hadn’t worked half as well as he’d hoped. He had wanted to learn something of gentleness. He had bitten his tongue against stinging retort thirty-six times a day. He had never once used his Alderwood smile as a weapon. He had tried to remember what it was to love the work of his hands, as she did hers.
Maybe it would be better to say nothing at all.
But this was Analise. Analise who devoured words. Who breathed them, dreamed them, summoned them. He would need to say something to her. She deserved that—and, well, everything—but for now something would have to do. Something simple, so he wouldn’t mangle it.
Like the truth.
***
Gideon Alderwood stood just beyond the screen. He held up a crate of toilet paper. “I brought these for you. Overdue.”
Analise raised her eyebrows. She craned her neck to peer past him. A battered jalopy was parked crookedly in the dirt driveway, its rusty frame appearing to be held together by nothing but paper clips and promises. She glanced back at him. Not quite into his eyes. Not yet.
Gideon wore what looked to be his work clothes, plain but clean: brown trousers with suspenders, a worn shirt with the sleeves rolled up enough to show a string of black letters tattooed up his arms. It was not her writing, which surely had been scrubbed off at the hospital, but it was her words. His right arm read simply, “Seafall rose up from the waves one Gentry Moon,” and his left, “I could hear the city breathing.”
He wore no vest or tie. No marks of clay anywhere about him, but a whittling knife strapped to his belt. He had foregone a hat, and his hair was long enough to be tied back. This he had done, but the dark strands escaping their thong awoke a restless longing in Analise’s hands that she thought she’d freed herself from. She shoved her traitor hands into the pockets of her green dressing gown and gazed down at herself in dismay. The secondhand velvet was threadbare. The ivory lace at the elbows was more hole than eyelet.
“I liked your book,” Gideon ventured. “Both of them.”
Her head snapped up. She searched his eyes, suspicious of mockery and more than ready to slam the door in his face. Once there though, she was caught. Caught, speared, roasted, and served up with an apple in her mouth. It was like she had never looked into his eyes before. Like falling into a softly beaming black light. Like descending into a natural hot spring under the full dark of evening as a warm rain fell all around her.
Analise blinked and realized she had forgotten to breathe. She decided that looking at her feet was safest. Her feet were bare. She needed to cut her toenails. He was speaking again.
“Ana.”
Why was his voice like a caress? She was used to his voice driving icicles through her ears.
“Do you think you’ll ever come back to Seafall?”
Analise shrugged. She scratched her nose where her hair had tickled it. She should have combed her hair, she thought. It was all over everywhere. A feather from her pillow floated in one of her curls. Irritably, she plucked it out.
“The landlord let your room. I brought your things into mine.” He smiled. Just barely. She noticed the twitch of his lips through her eyelashes. “Hence, the hotplate. If you did come back to Seafall, you’d have to stay with me. At least for a while. However long you’d like. You’d be welcome, of course. Most welcome.”
At the soft, fervent note in those last syllables, Analise involuntarily glanced at him.
Bad decision. Very dangerous. Caught. Again.
“Or,” he said. “I could stay here. If you wanted me.”
It will never be safe, Analise thought, to meet his gaze. It will never be safe to wake to him smiling at her like that, solemn with hope. If his expression were anymore open, she could walk right through it.
Gideon set the crate of toilet paper down by the door and laid his palm flat against the screen. Analise wanted to lean her forehead against the indentation his hand made.
“I often have trouble sleeping, Ana. It’s worse now that I can’t hear you breathing through our wall. I lie in bed and imagine you beside me, your hair upon my pillow. I turn to you, though you are dreaming and all unaware, and I count every hair on your head, strand by strand, fire by fire. I count until my eyes can bear no more of your brightness, and in their own defense my eyelids let loose their portcullis and shut fast against my vision of you.”
She shook her head. “Gideon–”
“It has to be better,” Gideon reflected, “than counting sheep.” He let his hand fall from the screen and stepped backwards toward the porch steps. “I wanted to thank you,” he said, “for saving me. I don’t know why you did. I didn’t deserve it. I’m sorry for everything. I adore you. I always have.”
When he turned and moved to take the steps down, down to the rusty jalopy and to the dirt road that would take him away from her and back to Seafall, Analise banged open the screen door and sprang onto the porch. She grabbed him by the back of his suspenders and yanked. He turned into her embrace, his kisses landing first on her neck, the line of her jaw, her ear, her chin, until she held his head still between her hands and pressed her mouth to his. And both felt again as though starlight flashed between their lips, shimmering on their tongues and sparkling like champagne, though this time neither bore so much as a seed of Gentry magic between them.
“All right, Gideon,” Analise said against his mouth, sliding her hands from his face to his shoulders to his shirt collar, which she clutched, tugging him closer to her. “All right. You can come in.”
She pointed to the crate by the porch. “Bring that.”
*****
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I started writing the Dark Breakers series because of author Sharon Shinn’s suggestion that I visit a mansion called The Breakers in Newport. I loved the idea of a decadent house in a fictional city quickly advancing from its industrial age into a technological one. I loved the idea of a city of motor vehicles and vaccines that yet retained a few of its olden portals into other worlds of Gentry magic and goblin kings. Thus the genesis of The Breaker Queen, the story of mortal painter Elliot Howell and Nyx the Nightwalker, Queen of the Valwode: how they found each other, lost each other, and what they sacrificed to be together again.
The Two Paupers, though it is second in the series, has an even older genesis. Back in my Chicago days, I awoke one morning in an apartment that my roommate Gillian Hastings and I called “The Gypsy Den” with the oddest urge to write a play. I don’t often just sit down and write a one act for no good reason except some vague compulsion, but I did that day. I wanted to explore the story of a great sculptor who destroyed his own statues, and a writer who was maybe not so great but held her art—all art—sacred. What would it be like if they were neighbors? What cataclysmic clashes of opinion on art and ownership would they have? What do we owe those who do us favors we do not want but perhaps desperately need? And how can we ever avenge ourselves on them?
Perhaps the play The Two Paupers wasn’t the most amazing thing ever; I was less experienced at the time and also working outside my main medium. My roommate Gillian, my friend Sam Rahn, and I once did a staged reading of it at the erstwhile Kate the Great’s Book Emporium in the Edgewater Neighborhood of Chicago’s North Side, and that was all the exposure the play ever got. But Analise and Gideon’s bitter chemistry was so compelling to me that for years the characters stuck to the periphery of my thoughts. When the writing of The Breaker Queen came around, there they were, my two
artists in a garret, jumping right into the story and almost taking it over—will I, nill I. I told them that if they calmed down they’d get their own story. They settled, grumbling and reluctant, and waited.
I would like to thank Sita Aluna, Stephanie Shaw, Julia Rios, Caitlyn Paxson, Kiri-Marie O’Mahony, Patty Templeton, Jeanine Marie Vaughn, and Eric Michaelian for their valuable insight into this story. I loved writing it.
And as always, thank you to my brother, Jeremy Cooney, who is expert on all the things I’m not so great at. Like cover designs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C. S. E. Cooney is a Rhode Island writer who lives across the street from a Victorian Strolling Park. She is the author of The Breaker Queen (Book One of the Dark Breakers Trilogy), The Witch in the Almond Tree, How To Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, and Jack o' the Hills. She won the 2011 Rhysling Award for her story-poem "The Sea King's Second Bride."
Other examples of her work can be found in Rich Horton's Years Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (2011, 2012, 2014), The Nebula Awards Showcase (2013), The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures (2014), The Moment of Change Anthology, Black Gate Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Apex, Subterranean, Ideomancer, Clockwork Phoenix, Steam-Powered II, The Book of Dead Things, Cabinet des Fées, Stone Telling, Goblin Fruit, and Mythic Delirium.
EXCERPT
“How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain with the Crooked One”
From Bone Swans: Stories
I waited in the shadow of the spinning wheel. Dusk came, and midnight, and dawn again. He did not come. By the king’s orders I’d nothing to eat or drink, no blankets to cover me, no visitor to comfort me. Dusk, then midnight, dawn again. I cleared a small space on the floor and pressed my face to the cool tile, and slept. High morning. High noon. Late afternoon. Twilight. Night.
Perhaps a hundred years passed.
He held a flask of water to my lips. Quicksilver, crystal, icicle, liquid diamond. Just water. Followed by a blackberry. A raspberry. An almond. The tip of his finger dipped in honey. I sucked it eagerly.
“Milkmaid,” he said.
“Go away.” I pressed the hand that pressed my face, keeping him near. “I have nothing left to give you. And anyway, why should Jadio win? Keep your gold. Go back to the Ways. There’s a war coming. No one’s safe…”
“Hush.” He slipped a purple grape into my mouth. A green grape. A sliver of apple. His scars were livid against his frowning face.
“Milkmaid.” He sighed. “I can do nothing without a bargain. Even if I—but do you see? It doesn’t work without a bargain.”
I felt stronger now. I could sit up. Uncoil from the fetal curl. My legs screamed as I stretched them straight.
He’d been kneeling over me. Now he kept one knee bent beneath him and drew up the other to rest his chin on. This position seemed an easy one. The frown between his brows was not of pain but inquiry.
“I heard how you were… I could not come sooner. I was too deep within the Veil.” He smiled. His teeth glowed. “With the Deep Lords, even—in the Fathom Realms beneath the sea. Do I smell like fish?”
I sniffed. Green and sweet and sunlight. Maybe a little kelp as an afterthought. Nothing unpleasant. On an impulse, I leaned my nose against his neck and inhaled again. He moved his cheek against mine, and whispered with some shortness of breath:
“Milkmaid, have you nothing to offer me?”
I shook my head slightly so as not to disconnect from him.
“You are not to take my cows in trade! Gods know what you Gentry would do to them.”
It was he who drew away, laughing, and I almost whimpered at the loss.
“Much good they’ll do you where you’re going.”
“Eh,” I shrugged, pretending a coldness I did not feel. “Da has probably already sold them off for mead.”
“Perhaps he did,” my friend agreed. “Perhaps he sold them to a hunchbacked beggar whose worth seemed less than a beating, but who offered him, in exchange for the fair Annat and the dulcet Manu, a wineskin that would never empty.”
For that alone I would’ve whapped him, had he not tucked a wedge of cheese into my mouth. The finest cheese from the finest cow that ever lived. It was like being right there with her, in that homely barn, where I sang Mam’s songs for hours and Annat watched me with trustful eyes.
“You have my cows already.”
“Aye.”
“So I can’t trade ‘em. Even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.”
“Nay.”
I smoothed my silk dress. Three days worth of wrinkles smirked back at me.
“Time moves differently, you said, in the Veil?”
He nodded carefully, smiling with the very corners of his mouth.
“It does indeed.” He sounded almost hopeful.
“Well. That being so, would you take in trade a piece of my future? See,” I rushed to explain, “if he gets that gold, Jadio means me to wear his crown. Or a halo, I can’t tell. When that happens, you may have both with my blessing, and all the choirs of angels and sycophants with ‘em.”
“I do not want his crown,” the little crooked man growled. For all he had such a tortuous mangle to work with, he leapt to his feet far faster than I could on a spry day.
“You’re to wed him then?” he demanded, glaring down.
Oh.
This needed correcting—and quickly.
“He’s to wed me, Mister, provided he deems this night’s dowry suitably vulgar. Oh, do get on going!” I begged him. “Let us speak no more of trade. Leave me with this tinderbox and caper on your merry way. For surely as straw makes me sneeze, I can withstand Jadio’s torments long enough to die of them, and then it will all be over. But if he marries me, I might live another three score, and that would be beyond bearing.”
He snorted. A single green flame leapt to his finger, dancing on the opal there. The light lengthened his face, estranged the angles from the hollows, smoothed his twists, twisted his mouth.
“I’ve a trade for your future.” His voice was very soft. “I’ll spin you a king’s ransom of gold tonight—in exchange for your firstborn child.”
“Jadio’s spawn?” I laughed balefully, remembering that hot dry hand on my neck. “Take him! And take his father too if you’ve a large enough sack.”
“You barter the flesh of your flesh too complacently.”
“No one cares about my flesh. It’s not mine anymore. I’m not even me anymore.”
“Milkmaid.” He stared at me. It was strange to have to look up at him. How tall he seemed suddenly, with that green flame burning now upon his brow. “Some of my dearest friends are consummate deceivers, born to lie as glibly as they slip their skins for a fox’s fur. I was sure they were lying when they told me you were sillier than you seemed, soft in the head and witless as a babe. Now, I must believe them. To my sorrow.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Your flesh,” he murmured, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. “How can you say no one cares for it, when I would risk the wrath of two realms to spare it from harm?”
My heart too full to speak, my eyes too full to see, I lifted both my hands to him. When he grasped them by the wrists, I tugged gently, urging him back to the floor, and to me.
He fingered the ribbon of my bodice. Triple-knotted as it was, it fell apart at his touch. The sleeve of my shift sagged down my shoulder. Our eyes locked. There was a pearl button at his collar. A black pearl. I unhooked it. For the first time I noticed the richness of the black velvet suit he wore, its fantastic embroidery in ivory and silver, the braids and beads in his hair.
“Were you courting a Deep Lord’s daughter?” I asked. “Is that why you were in the Fathom Realms? Did the distant sound of my sneezes interrupt you mid-woo?”
The sound he made was maybe a “No,” more of a sigh, slightly a groan. Then I was kissing him, or he me, and we were both too busy happily undressing each other to do much talking, although when we did, it al
l came out sounding like poetry, even if I don’t remember a word of what we said...
***
BONE SWANS: STORIES
Forthcoming from Mythic Delirium
July 2015
A swan princess hunted for her bones, a broken musician and his silver pipe, and a rat named Maurice, bring justice to a town under fell enchantment. A gang of valiant kids confronts a plague-destroyed world and an afterlife infested with clowns but robbed of laughter. In an island city, the murder of a child unites two lovers, but vengeance will part them. Only human sacrifice will save a city trapped in ice and darkness. Gold spun out of straw has a price, but not the one you expect.
Bone Swans, the whimsically infernal debut collection from C. S. E. Cooney, gathers five novellas, including "Martyr's Gem," featured in Rich Horton's Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2014, and "Life on the Sun," which Tangent Online calls "bold and powerful...Brilliant." In the words of World Fantasy Award winner Ellen Kushner, C. S. E. Cooney's writing is "Stunningly delicious! Cruel, beautiful and irresistible."
Keep an eye out for
Desdemona in the Deep: Book Three of Dark Breakers
The Two Paupers Page 8
