by Annie Bellet
Rin closes his hand over her own and combs their clasped fingers through her hair. He doesn’t give her one word but many, a soft stream of language that flows around her. His words wake her memory and she responds with a phrase.
His hand turns to a fist in her hair and his lips press together. He says something else, his tone soft and the words turn up at the end as though he has asked a question.
“I don’t know what I said,” Mai says. “I just remember. . .” She trails off and looks down at her thighs. She remembers her mother, or at least a woman she thinks was her mother. The words she spoke to Rin were the ones her mother said over and over as people who are no more than blurs of color in Mai’s memories talked to the tall white man she would be taught to call Love. Mai knows that she must have understood those words once but none of them have meaning now and none of them are the names of trees, water, rock, purple flowers.
Rin tips her chin up and snaps his fingers. He opens his hand and reveals a bright blue scale nearly the size of his palm. Gently he pushes her onto her back and lifts her hair off her body. Mai’s heart jumps and she feels the familiar panic in her gut but shoves it away. This is Rin. He is hers.
He starts on her chest; the scale tracing symbols that she guesses are letters. The scale is softer than it looks; brushing over her skin like a petal and leaving blue lines behind like a piece of chalk. She doesn’t know what the words mean at first but he writes the same lines over and over. Heat builds between her legs and Mai presses her thighs together, blushing. When all the skin on her front has writing, Rin slides his fingers beneath her bony hip and turns her over. Mai lifts her arms and lets him pull her hair off her back. Her muscles clench and she breathes through her nose. This position has too many memories tied to it and she feels exposed, vulnerable.
Rin’s fingers stroke down her back and he starts to hum. Mai relaxes, resting her head on her crossed arms. She catches his smile out of the corner of her eye and then he resumes writing on her body. The soft brush of the scale lulls her and the warm sunlight softens the air until she is drowsy.
In her half-sleep, Mai hears the words again. Rin writes the symbols a final time down the sole of her right foot and then turns her over. His blue body comes over hers but though she can feel the thick warmth of his erection and lets her thighs relax, he doesn’t try to penetrate her. His lips touch hers and she breathes in the air he breathes out. His fingertips brush her eyes and she closes them.
When he speaks, she understands the words.
* * *
The sun is a red disk hanging over the gardens when Mai returns to the villa. Her head hurts with possibilities. She slips into the house and ignores the glare of the woman hired to mind her.
Mai stands in the shower a long time without turning on the water, her fingers stroking the words on her skin. She brings her hand to her mouth and tastes her own salt and baby powder scent.
When she turns on the water, the tears come, her thin shoulders shaking. Rin whispered many promises, each like a gem dropping from his lips into her throat until she felt full and heavy. She would be his queen. She would live in his palace and never want for anything or be made to do anything she did not agree to. She had asked him why, rolling the words around on her tongue and clicking them against her teeth.
“I am lonely, too.”
The tap water is wrong, metallic. Mai shuts it off, watching the last of the glittering blue writing swirl down the drain. On her way to her room she stops and stares at the pink room. The furniture is the same but the walls have been freshly repainted and are bright when she flips on the light. The white bedspread is neatly made on the child’s bed with its heart-shaped headboard. Nightlights in the shape of fairies decorate every outlet, their stained-glass wings dark.
She goes to bed without eating and lies on her back, watching the patterns cast by her lamp. She runs her hands over her skin and wonders what it would mean to be whole.
* * *
The woman does not let Mai out of her sight the next day and Mai is glad for the excuse to sit in the shade and kick her pottery wheel until the red clay wobbles and droplets fly out into the sunlight. Some hit her bare legs below the hem of the green summer dress and run down her legs looking like old blood. Her mind is not on the pots but on the blue scale tucked into her jewelry box.
She washes the clay off before tea is served and pulls Rin’s scale out. It is almost too warm against her skin and when she tips it up she sees Rin in his dragon form, curled beneath the water, and hears his voice like a wave in her mind repeating a phrase over and over in a language she can almost understand.
The front door opens and Mai starts as she hears Pembroke calling her name. She closes her hand around the scale and leaves her room.
In the living room, Pembroke stands with a purple duffle bag under one arm. A young girl of maybe six or seven years stands beside him. She wears a frilly dress so new that Mai can smell the store’s incense on it and her black hair is straight and streaked with dust. Her almond eyes are wide as she looks around, trying to take in the large villa and all the details at once. It is a look Mai remembers, from the inside.
“This is Hana and she is going to stay with us for a while,” Pembroke says. He sets down the bag and pushes the little girl forward with a hand on her back. “Show her the pink room and then we will have tea, all right?” His eyes are on Hana even though he speaks to Mai.
“I am Mai,” she says, trying to smile. Her heart beats faster and faster and she hears water rushing in her ears. She takes Hana’s hand. It is tiny and warm. There is dirt under the girl’s nails.
Pembroke nods and goes toward his office. Mai bends and picks Hana up, resting her on her hip. The girl weighs very little. If she stays here, Mai thinks, she will learn to weigh nothing at all. She looks down the hall to the pink room as she walks but doesn’t turn that way. The little girl says something to Mai, babbling a quick stream of words that mean nothing and one of her little hands tugs on Mai’s braid.
Mai smiles at her and opens her other hand. Hana blinks down at the blue scale and reaches for it, hesitating at the last moment and looking up with wide dark eyes. Her chin wrinkles and quivers and her nose has started to run. Mai looks out through the open terrace doors toward the cherry orchard. She sees the years going by and all the tears that Hana will shed.
She closes her hand over the scale again and clutches the girl with both arms. Then she is out the door, running barefoot from the terrace and into the orchard. Petals fall around them and Hana struggles, half-screaming something.
Mai opens her mouth and words erupt from her, tiny seed pearls spilling over her lips and dropping down into the space between their bodies.
“Trust me, I love you, everything will be all right,” she says in the language she has started to remember. Her words are a mix of those her mother spoke and those which Rin has given back to her.
Hana quiets and buries her head against Mai’s chest. Though her legs and lungs burn, Mai doesn’t stop until she reaches the pond. She stands on the jade shore and calls out Rin’s name as she tosses the scale into the pond. Then she plunges into the water until it closes over both their heads.
Blue and gold scales coil around them and pull them down, down, away from the daylight and into the deep.
* * * * *
Falls the Shadow on Broken Stone
Sometime in the mid afternoon, after she and her horse, Sham, had crossed an overgrown highway and were nearly to the dilapidated mini-mart, Roshni noticed the tiger following her. The creature looked thin but still dangerous as it crouched low against the dead grasses and cracked earth. Its attempt at stealth, with its bold orange and black stripes, was almost funny. Almost. To have survived the Dark this long, she guessed the tiger was fiercer than it looked.
Sham danced nervously beneath her and she gripped her sword. The tiger was trying to look disinterested in either her or her horse. Well, if he kept his distance, she’d let him keep the pretense
of dignity. And his life.
“Sah, sah,” Roshni murmured to her mount. She swung down in the questionable shade of the rusted awning and shouldered the broken automatic doors aside. Sham followed her into the building, his hooves crunching on torn wrappers and bits of paper trash. It was clear from the mess than people had already been through here at some point.
Dried, sticky residue coated the floor and broken coolers toward the back where soda cans had leaked out. The air was stale and slightly sweet. A bee flew in a broken window and rested on a bright green bit of plastic for a moment before zooming away. The Dark seemed to leave the bees alone. Roshni’s personal theory was that some animals were, like her, impervious to the Dark, but without the conscious will to pull the light from within themselves.
She imagined that poor tiger was lonely as hell by now. A plastic cat food bin caught her eye and she dragged it out from under a fallen shelf and popped the seal open. Sham nosed her arm and then snorted, keeping his ears cocked toward the door.
“Yeah, I know,” she muttered. “Tigers probably don’t eat cat food. But it can’t hurt to leave it for him.”
Near the cat food she spied a couple bags of cheese puffs. The bags were still sealed and Roshni tore them open with glee. The salty puffs were slightly stale but calories were calories and she crammed orange handfuls into her mouth and licked the fake cheese dust from her stained fingers.
She left the cat food bag ripped open in front of the mini-mart and climbed into the saddle. Across another bank of dusty, cracked road she saw a housing complex and debated heading to it. The sun would be down in a couple hours and she’d need to be out in the open to set up her light wards. But there was enough time to search a house or two. This place seemed deserted enough.
The neighborhood didn’t have the feel of an enclave. Sham was a decent people detector and while his ears flicked around listening to the day, he didn’t seem overly nervous. Roshni urged Sham forward as she kept an eye out for the tiger or any other inhabitants.
Tigers she could handle. He just wanted to eat her horse. She’d learned early and hard that men were less honest in their intentions.
She let Sham loose in the back yard of one house to graze on the overgrown lawn. Bees flitted around some late summer flowers but otherwise the world was quiet. The house was a two story townhome, of the manufactured, cookie-cutter variety that had popped up all over before the Dark came. When there were still enough people in the world to need quick, cheap housing. When people still slept indoors.
Roshni mounted the crumbling steps to the sliding glass door. It was unlocked. The house was silent, the furniture untouched. No one had been through here in a very long time. She rubbed her nose, resisting a sneeze as her boots kicked up dust and left footprints in the beige carpeting. She took the stairs up first, checking every room to see if it were clear and if anything was hidden. In the early days some people stocked up on water and canned goods, hiding them away in strange places like bedroom closets and bathtubs.
She walked into the master bedroom. The bed was unmade. If not for the dust it was almost as though the owner had just this morning gotten up to go off to some cookie-cutter job or maybe play golf at the now overgrown green she and Sham had crossed the day before. The windows still had their curtains, though the cloth was disintegrating slowly, growing thin and all the color bleached out by the sun.
Roshni threw open the door to the walk-in closet and screamed. She stumbled back, hand on the hilt of her katana, shaking as she half-drew the blade.
In the beginning she’d avoided houses. People had still thought then that they could lock their doors, hide behind walls and the Dark wouldn’t find them. But the Dark always found them and in the morning they’d be scorched shadows on the walls, all substance gone from this world.
Shadows that remained if the sun didn’t catch them and clean them away.
Shadows like the one in the closet. He’d been a big man, fat with good living. Roshni had almost forgotten about fat people. All she saw these days were thin faces and hungry bodies, even in the enclaves.
The curtains ripped down easily, coming away as little more than dusty rags in her hands as she yanked. The late afternoon sunlight pierced the room and motes danced in its rays. The horrible blurred shadow of the man, burned into that wall for probably a decade, slowly caught the sunlight and lifted away, hanging in the air for a terrible moment before dissipating into the dust.
Roshni swallowed bile and scrambled out of the room. She didn’t care if there were hidden things upstairs. She hated the shadows. Every one she found threatened to bring her memories back. There was no point in remembering. She just had to keep moving. Survive. Sham needed her.
The kitchen was warm with sunlight and the red painted walls still had color enough to be cheerful. She found the pantry and started stacking cans on the counter. Some were obviously no good, rusted out or burst or badly dented with rotted smells coming from them. Roshni breathed through her mouth, ignoring the mess as best she could.
“Espera, Miguel!” A woman’s voice rang out in front of the house.
People. This place had seemed deserted. She straightened up carefully and looked out the big window over the sink. A woman in a flowing dress was waving to someone she couldn’t see, someone on the other side of the house. Was that Spanish she’d spoken? Roshni wondered how far south she’d traveled this time.
No one knew if the whole world had succumbed to the Dark. Electricity didn’t work, so there was no way to communicate or know who lived. Rumors always abounded that the Dark was just in the Americas, that there were places where it couldn’t go, but they sounded stupid as hell to Roshni. There was nowhere the Dark couldn’t go. Once the sun set, she didn’t see how anyone could escape it, not without a lightbringer to ward them.
Children’s laughter and voices yelling “Mama! Hay un caballo!” from behind the house drew her attention. Caballo? Roshni vaguely recalled that meant horse.
“Sham.” She jerked her sword free of the sheath and abandoned the cans of food, racing toward the back of the house.
A middle-aged man and two young children were in the back yard. Sham had his golden ears perked and nostrils flared, watching them warily. He nickered at Roshni as she came out of the house.
“Get away,” she said, brandishing her sword. She knew a gun would be more threatening, but guns required more care than a sword. Swords never ran out of bullets.
“Please, senorita,” the man said in accented English, “no harm. We won’t take your horse.”
The children looked at her with wide brown eyes. Their mother hurried up behind them, pulling their thin bodies back against her as though her arms could protect them.
“Okay,” Roshni said. She lowered the sword. “You traveling alone?” The man didn’t look armed and the children seemed genuinely theirs and not decoys.
“Yes,” he said, smiling tentatively. His beard had some grey in it, she noticed. “I’m Angelo. This is my familia. We’re going to Hope Tree.”
That name meant nothing to Roshni but she shrugged and nodded anyway. Sham bumped his nose into her back and she turned, catching the reins she’d tied to his headstall.
“Will you share our fire tonight? We have some food and it is near Dark.” The woman tried to hush her husband as he offered this, but the man shook her arm off with a tense look.
“You are a lightbringer?” Roshni asked. She guessed one of them was, for them to be traveling alone like this.
“No,” the woman said. “We have ward stones.” She was still glaring at the man.
Wardstones but no lightbringer. They had guts, Roshni would give them that. Wards died after a night or three, depending on the strength, without someone to refresh them. The Dark was persistent and patient. It would eat away at the light in the stones until they faltered and cracked. The more people they had to protect, the faster the wards faded. Roshni understood the woman’s reluctance to let a stranger share their night, sha
re in the warding power.
“I’m a lightbringer,” she heard herself saying. “Save your stones, I’ll ward you tonight in exchange for food.” Roshni gave herself a mental shake as the family agreed, the children coming forward tentatively to hold their hands out for Sham to sniff. The stallion, sensing danger was past, went back to tearing up mouthfuls of the dry summer grass.
She finished collecting the few cans of food that hadn’t gone bad from the house and then met the family out in the open. They had a wagon hooked up to a bicycle. Roshni had seen that sort of traveling contraption before. She pulled her own stones out of her pack and pushed the light into them as the sun went down in a blaze of pinks and gold. There was no sign of the tiger.
“You don’t have a family?” The woman, who had introduced herself grudgingly as Alma, asked Roshni once they had a small fire going. The pale white light rising like smoke from the ward stones softened her thin features, making her look younger.
Shadows danced in Roshni’s memory, threatening to overwhelm her. She shook her head as much to clear it as to answer. “No, just Sham and I.”
“Where’d you get a horse?” the little girl asked. Her English was unaccented and surprised Roshni.
Roshni leaned back against Sham and smiled at her. “Allah gave him to me. His name is Sham, and if you are very gentle, you can pet him.”
The child approached, watched with jealous eyes by her younger, shyer brother. She stroked one dirty hand down Sham’s thick white-gold mane and giggled. “Sham is a weird name. Who’s Allah?”
“Sofia! Be nice.” Alma shook a stained spoon at her daughter, spraying broth over the hot coals. The fire was guttering now that the sun was gone, even inside the boundary of the wards.
“He’s named after the greatest Arabian horse that ever was,” Roshni said, shrugging at Alma to show she didn’t mind. “And Allah is God.” She leaned forward and smiled at the little boy as well. “You want me to tell you the story of how horses came to be?”
