They were well but plainly dressed, themselves—gentlemen, clearly—though the shorter of the two, a ginger man with luxurious whiskers, had allowed himself the levity of a pair of bright plaid trousers in the new analine dye.
They doffed their tall hats to her, bowed courteously.
“Yes?” she asked stiffly. They appeared to be gentlemen, but this was London.
“Have we the honor of addressing Miss Bronte?”
She pressed her lips tightly together and tried not to squint. Should she know them? Were they from her publisher? Had she met them at some dinner last time and forgotten? The taller, older man did look faintly familiar to her.
“Forgive this intolerable rudeness,” the shorter man said. “We have not been introduced, but time presses. Your train will be leaving shortly. You are expected elsewhere. We will not trouble you long.”
The older man shook his head impatiently, as though annoyed at the time even these courtesies were taking.
“We bear a message,” he said softly, “to the Genius Talli.” She clutched a book rack for support. “From the Duke of Zamorna.”
Charlotte knew them then.
“Where have you been?” she said. “I have been waiting for you.”
Finis
AFTERWORD
In April of the dread year 2020, a visit to friends in Arizona that had been meant to last two weeks was already stretching into two months. It was, in many ways, the world’s nicest pandemic lockdown: my wife Delia Sherman and I had gone there to write, and now no one was stopping us.
But my soul craved something more. I started dropping hints on Facebook about doing a playreading. To my absolute amazement Emily Carding, a professional British actor (whose one-woman performance of Richard III is a wonder and delight), suggested we read A Winter’s Tale together via Zoom, with her as the jealous, raging King Leontes, and me as her wise Paulina. After I’d stopped running around the house shrieking with glee, I pulled in a few other readers from various corners of my life: in Maine, in my New York neighborhood, in Massachusetts, in Devon… and we sorted out our various time zones and did the reading. It filled us with such joy that we decided to read As You Like It together the following week. That was so utterly engaging that we chose Henry IV, Part I for the next week (because Falstaff), bringing in a guy I auditioned with for my very first in high school play (now a professor of theater himself), a friend’s young daughter training to be an actor, a professor of Spanish and Queer Studies who specializes in crowd scenes with finger puppets… As the weeks and the plays mounted up, we invited in more friends, all professionals (two Toronto, one London, one L.A.) who were hurting something fierce because they were locked down in apartments with no text and no audience. Oh, and my wife Delia and my nephew.
I don’t know when we decided that we were going to read through the entire Shakespeare canon, with each play uncut. I know it was Patrick who decided we should call ourselves “All the Bard’s Words (all of them!).”
Almost exactly a year to the day we began, we read our final play in the canon.
I call it a Gift of the Pandemic. Every single week, every word of every play layering in my ear, in my brain. I caught subtleties I’d never noticed before, made connections from play to play of theme, character, language . . . And the friendship amongst this varied and various international gang grew into something rich, magnanimous, nourishing.
I want to thank them for this story. I only wrote it because they were there every week, bringing their skills, their passions, their humor, and their insights to all the Bard’s characters. Thus, when I, um, was reminded that I had a story due for Uncanny shortly after we’d completed the canon, I realized that if I didn’t use the gift the year had given me, I was an ass.
So thank you, my beloved Zoomers:
Titus Androgynous
Nick Azzaretti
Sara Berg
Kelly Burke
Emily Carding
Blair Coats
Karen Green
Stuart J. Hecht
Michael Hovance
Alexander J. Kushner
Margo MacDonald
Patrick J. O’Connor
Kate Pitt
Delia Sherman
While I was struggling to write “Immortal Coil,” they were there, too, helping out with everything from palmistry to place names. Some Facebook friends came through as well, most notably the scholars Kavita Vidya and Carey Mazer. And when I was in the throes of trying to make page after page of pretty language say something that actually made sense, my dear Liz Duffy Adams, Mimi Panitch and Delia Sherman sat around a big kitchen table with me and saved my life as usual.
Finally, thanks to my generous editors, Lynne Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, for their patience and inspiration.
— Ellen Kushner
© 2021 Ellen Kushner
Ellen Kushner’s “Riverside” series begins with the novel Swordspoint, followed by The Privilege of the Sword, The Fall of the Kings (written with Delia Sherman) and, most recently, the collaborative prequel Tremontaine for SerialBox.com. She herself narrated all three novels for Neil Gaiman Presents/Audible.com. Her book Thomas the Rhymer won the World Fantasy and Mythopoeic Awards, and is a Gollancz “Fantasy Masterwork.” With Holly Black, she co-edited Welcome to Bordertown. She has taught writing at Clarion, the Odyssey Workshop, and is an instructor at Hollins University’s Children’s Literature low-res M.F.A. program. She lives in New York City with her wife Delia Sherman in an apartment full of airplane and theater ticket stubs. She is full of good intentions. EllenKushner.com Twitter: @EllenKushner
From the Archives of the Museum of Eerie Skins: An Account
by C. S. E. Cooney
FIRI KANAPHAR. Born 327 RWQ (Reign of the Witch Queens of Doornwold).
TRANSCRIPT of Oral History 74
This interview was recorded using the Enchanter’s Bell cantrip, in the month of Goldenseal, on the 21st day, in the year 382 (RWQ), for the Wolfcasters Oral History Program. The interviewers are Mar Riallakin (biographer, Regalia Award-winning author of Plague Siege: The Darkest Days of Doornwold, witch of the Woodlanders) and Wraith Anaiason (sorcerer of Doornwold). The interview was transcribed by Icanthus Val (model, composer, sorcerer of Doornwold).
ABSTRACT: In this excerpt from her oral memoirs, Ambassador to the Outer Woodlanders Alliance Firi Kanaphar discusses her college years, the loss of her pelt, and the result of that loss: the first recorded magical confederacy between witch and wolfcaster communities in the “peltpatch spell.” She describes that spell (enacted on the evening of the 16th of Cinquefoil, in the year 347, at the Museum of Eerie Skins’ gala opening for the exhibit “Historical Perceptions of Wolfcasters: Past and Present”) and the application thereof upon a human person in the first recorded criminal justice sentence carried out by consensus of both wolfcaster and witch communities upon a human criminal. This led to greater regulations of witch and wolfcaster laws, their integration with existing human laws, and the appointment of Firi Kanaphar as ambassador between magical and non-magical communities.
Key Words: Firi Kanaphar, the University of Doornwold, the Museum of Eerie Skins (M.o.E.S.), wolfcasters, witchcraft, the “pelt laws”, extra-human vendetta, Warlocks Against Wolfcasters, the Wolfcaster Anti-Defamation League, Outer Woodlanders Alliance
NOTE: The interviewers’ questions have been edited out of the transcript at their request as, in Riallakin’s words, “they were mostly grunts of encouragement anyway.” Transcript was later augmented by memorabilia materials for Firi Kanaphar’s published memoir.
I packed away my pelt when I went to college. You hear stories about college, you know, in newspapers and stuff. My social life was governed by three rules: 1) don’t swig any dram you don’t pour yourself, 2) don’t leave your pelt lying around for anyone to steal, and 3) have fun, fear not, harm none.
Of course, my pelt needed a hidey-hole to keep it safe while I was gone. Mama—though a darling—has a tendency towards
wanderlust: a need, as she says, “to sink her fingers/paws in the loam of every continent on our great planet.” Often, she’ll just pick up her pelt, shroud herself in its shadows, its silvery protections, its mouth of tusk-like fangs, its claws of blackest adamant, and scamper off on some adventure that usually ends with her volunteering manual labor in a witch’s garden in exchange for bed and board, or as mucker-outer for animal familiar welfare and rescue sites. That’s how she met the Witch of the Almond Grove, Mar Riallakin, who later became one of my best friends. We worked together in Doornwold during the plague years, but that was a good decade and a half after I graduated from college.
Mama’s a fine gardener; she derives immense satisfaction from pulling weeds and rooting out invasive species. She’s friends with witches from all walks of life, from all around the world. She’s not a witch herself, of course—wolfcasters can’t perform magic; we exchange that ability for our pelts, which are, in essence, the concentration of all the magic we might ever have performed, gloombright or hopedark, for the rest of our lives.
Most of us consider it well worth the price. I certainly did, so I wasn’t about to bring my precious pelt into a cheap apartment share in Doornwold. But leaving it back at Mama’s den, which she might rent out to any frog-licking, mushroom-sucking, weed-puffing, backwoods tree worshipper (not that there’s anything wrong with that) needing cheap shelter during one of her spontaneous sabbaticals, was out of the question. Her renters might burn the whole den to the ground in one of their hallucinogenic orgies, and my pelt with it—and then where would I be?
So I buried it.
There was this tree I adored and trusted, so I wrapped up my pelt in finest silk, nestled it in a box of mothballs, and set it deep among the roots.
Okay, so yeah, I occasionally worshipped trees too, what are you gonna do, call me a yokel and yodel at me? Thanks very much, I got plenty of that in college. People in the great city of Doornwold tend to view anyone from the outer woodlands with contemptuous suspicion. Ha! When they’re the ones wearing wards against us! Twists of iron on salt-soaked ribbons. Chance-found coins carried at the bottoms of pockets—the reliefs rubbed to planchet-blankness from all that touch-for-luck nonsense.
As if coins or ribbons or iron could stop a wolfcaster when she’s out for blood.
Not that we wolfcasters have some cyclical “out for blood” agenda that we regularly lose our sentience to. That prevailing myth about the negative influence of the full moon upon our folk is very harmful, and I joined the Wolfcasters Anti-Defamation League first thing my Induction year at U of DW. I still pay annual fees as an alumna to this day, even after what happened. HOWL FOR JUSTICE! as we WADLs liked to say!
Anyway, speeding up, short story, so:
My work with WADL really brought out some shoot-first, ask-no-questions later types. You know the kind. The sort of person who uses their weak-sauce urban legend conspiracy theories about wolfcasters as an excuse to decimate the local predator population. Which (as anyone with half the brains of a brain-eating amoeba knows) leads to all sorts of problems: overpopulation among grazers, the rise of mesopredators, and, like, the collapse of whole ecosystems, etc.
But never mind my soapbox.
The point is—killing wolf-wolves has no effect on wolfcasters except to make us angry. We’re nearly impossible to kill while we’re wearing our pelts—because they protect us. When we’re not wearing our pelts, we are actually impossible to kill because our pelt possesses our life force. The only way to take us down is to ferret out our pelts whenever we’re not wearing them and destroy them utterly, thereby rendering us magic-less and mortal. That way, you can kill us as easily as any other wounded animal with her back to a wall, little to lose, and teeth enough for the task no matter that they’re not as sharp now as they once were. As far as she’s concerned, buddy, it’s full moon every night, and there ain’t enough silver bullets in all the wide world to keep her from your throat.
I know. I talk a big game. Possibly I should have gone to see one of those couch-counsel witches, the kind who sit behind a clipboard, wear horn-rimmed glasses, and keep an animal familiar around for you to pet while they ask you questions, so you can come to understand yourself better, and leave their cottage knowing you can face the world with equanimity again.
(CC-certified witches are almost as good as trees. My best friend Mar swears by them, so I gave one a try once, and after that, I just kept going. But again, I was older by then and a little less on my dignity. Worth it! Highly recommend!)
You’ve probably guessed the gory bits of my story by now. But I’ll dish out the deets, why not? Maybe they’ll help you someday. Knowledge is the surest path through the woods.
(Funny: books are made out of knowledge and trees! Cut down enough trees to pack a book full of knowledge, and you have a literal path through the woods as well as a metaphorical. Not that I’m telling you to cut down trees. Don’t do that. I love trees. I may have mentioned.)
So. What happened was this.
Some dipshit from Warlocks Against Wolfcasters fixated on me after a rally where I apparently looked at him the wrong way across the picket line. He spent I don’t know how many months and how much money (his daddy had cellars full of gold) (not kidding about the cellars part) (or the gold part) (not that it helped him in the end) to find out everything about me that could be observed, suborned, researched, scried, or, like, rifled through after breaking into my apartment and going through all my drawers and also letting my cat out.
Don’t worry, animal lovers; the cat was fine. She went over to my neighbor’s apartment and scratched to be let in. My neighbor is a softy with a load of salmon sticks in her ice box for just such occasions. Eventually my cat decided to adopt her—and who was I to interfere with true love and fish treats? Besides, having a pet around invariably improves my mood, and at that time in my life I was in the mood to be angry and stay angry for the foreseeable future.
Yeah, that’s right. This WAW-dude found out, somehow, about the tree. About my pelt. And, you guessed it, he destroyed both. The tree, out of spite. Just sheer meanness.
But the pelt… the pelt he took his time with.
Look, I’d plunged three whole years of my life and buckets of money I didn’t have into the University of Doornwold’s Library and Information Science Masters program, even going the extra mile (and the extra migraine during finals) to achieve my National Chronicle Keeper’s certification—all for the chance to one day be Chief of Archives in charge of Records Management at the Historical Museum of Eerie Skins.
When that kid stalked and stole my pelt—when he cut it up into a hundred pieces—he stole that from me, too. Not just my power, my joy, and my family legacy, but my future. One of the reasons I wanted to work at the Museum of Eerie Skins so badly was because they only hire wolfcasters—on principal! Because so many institutions are so benighted that they immediately chuck you out of the hiring pool the moment they get a whiff of pelt. But the M.o.E.S. is wolfcaster-owned-and-run, and I’ve been wanting to sink dust-deep in their stacks ever since I was old enough to turn my shadow inside out and wear it.
(Okay, not “dust-deep.” Any museum archive worth its weight in paperwork—and certainly this goes for the archive at the M.o.E.S.—is spic and span as my Auntie Lupa’s pantry. Dust encourages mold.)
Because of this kid, my life was ruined.
Or not “kid” exactly. I don’t know why I keep calling him that. He was on the cusp, for sure: that age where, if he shaved, he was more likely to pop a pimple than scrape off his peach fuzz. But that doesn’t excuse him. I was his age when I moved out of Mama’s den and into Doornwold, got a job, started working my way through college. Even green as a sapling, I knew better than to stalk folks and steal and cut up their pelts and send the pieces to my victims day after day, week after week, parcel after parcel, always with a mocking postcard full of the foulest ward-alls and the most puerile slang.
At first I went to the authorities, both m
unicipal and the university’s. The police were nicer than I expected. They took a few of the postcards (for handwriting comparisons), wrote down all my information, and promised to look into it. But they never contacted me. Well, not directly. The Chief of Police helped later, but sort of sly-like. The laws weren’t in place for handling this sort of thing officially. That all came later.
The university was even more disappointing. Remember, U of DW didn’t yet have an Office of Access and Equity. The first thing I tried after my pelt was destroyed was making an appointment with the Dean of the School of Oracles and Divination. That’s the school where my bogroll of a pelt-hacking foe was farting around with his fratdudes and other WAWboys like him, making no real attempt at a degree.
But, surprise! All the Dean could tell me was that the kid’s—young man’s—daddy was a big donor, old money, famous family of scryers, been attending U of DW for generations, and what I was accusing him of was just not possible, such a nice clean youth, very decent, yada yada. He immediately followed this up by telling me that, since I was a recent graduate, I really ought to be taking my concerns to the Office of Alumnae and not bothering him; he was much too busy.
So I went to the Office of Alumnae, and though they believed me—they were very sympathetic, kept apologizing profusely—they said they just didn’t have the infrastructure to address this kind of complaint, and had I gone to the police yet, and would I like to sign up for their next fundraiser? In other words, a wash.
Eventually, my mail stopped bringing me surprise bits of fur and filthy postcards. I spent all that winter trying to piece my pelt back together, but I was no seamstress. And even if stitching it could’ve worked, that suppurating WAWboy bubo had kept the very last piece of my pelt for his trophy. I could feel the hole in my pelt’s magic—like a window with its pane knocked out. A cold current whistled through the remnants; I feared I would never be warm again.
Uncanny Magazine Issue 41 Page 8
