The Boi of Feather and Steel

by Adan Jerreat-Poole

  “And what are you meant for now?” Clytemnestra climbed back on her throne and started eating it, which explained why she had a new one every time Kite saw her.

  “I want to save Eli,” said Kite.

  Clytemnestra chewed on a pink plastic handlebar for a minute and then spat it out. She stared at Kite. “You are the strangest witch I’ve ever met.”

  It sounded like a compliment.

  Clytemnestra was an oddity, an outcast among witches, tolerated only in the underbelly of the city, and only as long as she kept to the walls and left the Coven alone. An abomination like her would never be welcomed into the Coven. But Kite would. Kite, who had pretended to grow up, who was the Heir to the Coven’s power, a witch who dared to love a human thing.

  A revolution needs more than bodies, more than a charismatic leader with razor-sharp nails. It needs information. It needs connections.

  Clytemnestra needed her, and they both knew it. So even as Kite bowed and smiled and promised to follow orders, they knew that this alliance was between equals.

  Kite was sure that Clytemnestra hated it.

  “I will do what you asked of me. A show of power. A spectacle. And I will help you eliminate the Coven. But Eli lives.”

  “I will not slay her,” said Clytemnestra. “I can’t speak for the world.” She suddenly burst out laughing. “We will burn the Coven down! We will dance on their bones!”

  With an indulgent smile, Kite picked up the discarded handlebar and started chewing.

  Nine

  TAV

  Sweat glistened on their forehead and their muscles ached, but Tav was wide awake. The taste of euphoria and the smell of blood and grass flooded their senses. They had done it. They had opened a door between worlds. Not a wound, but a channel. They could feel in their shoulder blades the magic of the City of Eyes touching the human world, casting warmth and light over them. They could feel the tumultuous mix of human emotions reaching out to the witches’ realm of magic and chaos.

  Is this how symbiosis worked? Is this how worlds kept one another alive?

  Tav had done it. Tav, with the “bad attitude” and straight As that would never pay for college, a part-time job at the gas station and fistfights in dive bars.

  The euphoria faded and Tav looked away from the door and back down to the dirt: round silver glasses in a pool of blood. Eli.

  Cam was already there, stones trembling, hands fluttering over Eli’s body. “I can’t find the wound,” he said. “I can’t see it. But there’s blood everywhere. So much blood. She doesn’t have a pulse.”

  “Maybe that’s normal now,” said Tav. “She’s not human.”

  “She’s part human! There has to be a way to stop the bleeding.”

  Tav wasn’t so sure. Tav had started to think that Eli was invincible. They had never seen the assassin fail. And now, Eli was not only made of hawthorn and red blood cells, but memories and planets and the magical essence of a world. But they had been wrong. Worlds can die.

  Everything dies.

  Fuck that.

  Tav unsheathed the obsidian blade and pressed it against Eli’s forehead. This is you, I’m holding you, and you can’t die while I’m holding you.

  “Give me the shield,” said Tav, and Cam handed the stone knife over. Now Tav held two knives, two parts of a person. Tav could see the different magics that kept Eli alive sparking and flickering like a dying flame. With one motion, Tav stabbed both blades into the magic, the essence, the dark.

  Heal.

  The blood vanished. Eli started breathing with little wet gasps. Tav dropped the knives and pulled Eli into their arms.

  “You’re okay,” they murmured. “You’re going to be okay. You have to be okay.”

  “They’ll send others,” said Eli, struggling to get the words out. “Leave. We need to leave.”

  “Soon.”

  Tav noticed a curious design painted on the asphalt. Dark and wet. It hadn’t vanished with the rest of the blood. Their heart sank. Eli was resorting to using her blood. Why? What was happening to her? They were sick of Eli’s secrets. How do you get close to someone who can’t tell the difference between a lie and a truth?

  How do you hold someone who is always disappearing? Already Eli was flickering in and out of existence again. There was no one in the universe like her. Sometimes Tav loved that about her, and other times — like now — they hated it.

  Eli coughed out a word. “Thorns.”

  “I have it.” Cam stepped forward, holding out the blade. Eli recoiled.

  “Keep it. I mean, for now. Later. I’ll take it later.”

  Tav helped her stand. “Cam — you take the car; I’ll take her on the bike.”

  Cam nodded. “If something happens —”

  “We’ll see you soon.” Tav cut him off and turned back to Eli, leading her to the bike. Cam watched for a few long seconds, something like hurt flashing in the corner of his eyes, and then quietly did as he was told.

  “You healed me,” said Eli. “With door magic. How?”

  “Who cares? You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “Because of you. Magic boi. The Healer.”

  “Fuck that!” cried Tav. “That’s a terrible nickname. I don’t ever want to hear that again.”

  They revved the engine and the motorbike took off down the street, leaving behind only a few black feathers, a handful of salt, and a prayer written in blood.

  The nickname stuck.

  Ten

  THE HEIR

  Kite couldn’t remember a time before the library. The smell of ink and sour lemon, the tall bookcases that stretched into the air. She remembered climbing up and up and up, until the gold thread on the spines of ancient fortune volumes were obscured by clouds. Once, she had pulled a book from a shelf, somewhere near the top, and it had fallen apart into a pile of loose pages that had drifted down, strewn across the shelves on the floor.

  She was still piecing that book together. Recently, she had found the first page lodged behind a trunk full of ghost stories. The trunk was usually invisible, which made it difficult to find. Fortunately, Kite had been looking for a bobby pin that a paper crane had snatched away while she was reading, and she stumbled over it. She hadn’t found the bobby pin — now, as a strand of hair slipped into her eyes, she wished she had — but she had come across page one.

  Kite wondered if she would ever get to finish restoring the volume. It was her favourite project, and she had spent so many days carefully smoothing out the lost pages that the paper now smelled of sea salt and rotting fish.

  She turned the page. Her candle had burned itself out, spluttering and dying in a puddle of white wax. Smoke curled up through the dark as Kite breathed in the familiar and comforting smell of home.

  “This one is from before the moon,” she said.

  She thought about lighting more candles, but decided against it. The last thing she needed was to be caught back in the Coven, after her dramatic exit. The thrill of breaking the rules washed over her like seafoam.

  A glowing ball of light hovered nearby, bobbing near a bookshelf that was painted red and gold, with pages spilling out of its open mouth like flames.

  “If you come over here I can read better,” said Kite. Clytemnestra’s essence ignored her.

  Kite had never reached the top of the bookshelves, and besides, the library was always rearranging itself; sometimes a forest of books; sometimes an underground den, with pages buried in earth. She had used a chisel and hammer to break partial histories out of rock; had smoothed the covers with a fine brush, used her breath to clear the fine particles of dust; had caught paper birds in flight and unfolded their pages feather by feather, stitching them together painstakingly as the bird squawked in panic.

  Kite was always going to be unusual, even for a witch. She was the only daughter of the Witch Lord, made from a fragment of her mother’s essence. Having children like this was rare, not only because witches couldn’t die from old age (they could be kill
ed, of course), but because a witch’s essence didn’t regenerate. It was much safer to fashion an obedient daughter from animal skulls and bottle caps and scraps of faded velvet than risk birthing a witch.

  But the Witch Lord needed an Heir to secure her position, to prove her power, to expand her empire.

  So she made Kite.

  Kite had learned from an early age that “the Coven” meant many things. There were the rings of the Coven, the system of power in the witch world. The lower rings were unimportant. The first ring — they were the mysterious, shrouded figures who did the Witch Lord’s bidding, who claimed control of the world. But the building that housed them was older than her mother, older than the petty squabbles of witches, older than the legacy of death that Kite had been born to inherit. Kite usually referred to this Coven, this sentient building, with its sense of humour, ability to hold grudges, and playful tendency to turn doors into walls and windows into chambers of light, as the library. A palace of knowledge.

  It had been long neglected. Malicious intent had twisted the tunnels into spiteful creatures, had turned the Heart into a hungry mouth that devoured the unwanted, had caused the building to fold away its bright histories and poetry and rituals in drawers locked with no keys; in towers guarded by smoke snakes, buried in coffins wrapped in curses.

  Until Kite.

  Until the child who dripped seawater over old pages and left salt incantations on the clothbound covers. The child who gave her own blood to restore the faded ink, who fed sacrifices of insects and fish bones to the living words.

  Witch children are not raised, not taught in schools, not coddled by their parents. They are not, and then they are. They are children until they cross over to the human world and steal a name. Before they have a name they are no one, nothing. The Witch Lord had ignored Kite for much of her life. And so Kite had been given the freedom to fall in love with the library, and, even worse, to fall in love with a made-thing.

  I’m bored, the glowing ball of light told her as Kite smoothed a hand over a page of long-forgotten incantations for communing with the stars. How is this helping?

  “We could speak to the stars,” said Kite dreamily. “Can you imagine?”

  If she catches you, she will kill you. And more importantly — she’ll kill me.

  “I know.” Kite turned the page. “Do we have any taxi-dermied wings lying around?”

  To speak with the stars? Only if they’ll sing me a lullaby. The ball of light whirled around Kite once and then hovered over her left shoulder, illuminating the page. A crown of light flickered over Kite’s head.

  “No,” she said, closing the book regretfully. “To burn magic stone.”

  A creature of smoke and lightning, with a face that looked a little like a fox and many legs — some hoofed, some with paws, and at least one lizard claw — snapped at the ball of light, which darted out of reach.

  Do you have to keep that thing around? the light complained.

  “Oh, he won’t do any harm, will you, precious?” Kite offered the dead candle to the Beast, who ate it, and then started chewing on her hair.

  The light-essence flickered. Burn, Clytemnestra’s voice whispered excitedly in Kite’s head. Burn, burn, burn.

  Kite carefully tore the page out of the book. “I have what you need,” she said. “We can go now.”

  Two witches — one flesh, one pure light — travelled through the forgotten pathways of the library, crossing the shadow door back to the Labyrinth, back to the Children’s Lair, back to the army and the promise of vengeance.

  The children love burning things. Clytemnestra’s glee shimmered in Kite’s skull. It’s time to teach the Coven fear.

  Kite wondered if she would regret giving this knowledge to the rebellion. But if it saved Eli, it was worth it.

  She would do anything to keep Eli alive.

  Eleven

  THE HEART

  Eli was back on the roof of the building. A scattering of stars shone overhead like a handful of costume jewelry had been flung into the sky. It was the only place she could breathe. The only place she could escape from Tav and Cam’s worried looks and unasked questions. Escape from their doubt.

  Eli had almost died today.

  She waited for that knowledge to scare her, to spark a reaction in the flora of her limbs. She had been created with a strong sense of self-preservation. She should never have been able to put herself in that kind of danger.

  But death didn’t scare her half as much as being rejected by her blade. Her blades were a part of her body. Cam had brought the thorn blade back to her — it hadn’t hurt him. It hadn’t rejected him. Eli had wrapped it in a silk scarf from Cam’s drag collection rather than touch it with her bare hands. Now it hung dormant at her waist. But Eli could no longer trust it, and the pain of that knowledge ached.

  The persistent thud of a human heartbeat — Now. Now. Now. Eli let her eyelids shut as she leaned back and fell into the rhythm of her body.

  She could still feel the obsidian blade tenderly pressed against Tav’s forearm. A shiver tremored through her body, and it had nothing to do with the cool summer night air.

  She let her hands run along the hilts of her other blades — frost, thorn, pearl, stone. A sound like a chime echoed in her skull when her fingers brushed each material, resonating in the capillaries and bronchioles and joints of her patchwork body.

  “Why didn’t you help us?” she asked.

  The ghost said nothing, just stood there, wavering slightly as if unsteady on his feet. Watching her.

  She tried again. “Where were you?”

  Nothing.

  Eli sighed. “If you want your revenge, we can help you find it.” She shifted slightly, the pain of sitting in one position for too long arching up her spine.

  The ghost was flickering badly.

  “Stop that.”

  A spark of light in the corner of her eye. Eli looked down and saw through her skin a constellation of granite and hawthorn and pearl under the surface. Blink. Her arm faded to light, to nothingness. Blink, and she was solid again.

  The ghost opened his mouth in a sucking O, or maybe a question, or a cry for help. Then he vanished.

  Eli wrapped her arms around her knees and prayed to be left behind. But she vanished, anyway.

  What happened, when a girl turned to light, taken over by the magic of a distant world?

  What did it feel like?

  Flashes of memory — golden trees, rocks like giant teeth. No sense of time. No sense of being one. She was everything and nothing.

  Where did she go?

  She didn’t know that, either.

  All she knew was waking up — but that wasn’t the right word, because she was never asleep, never more aware of the taste of sunlight and the scent of shadow than when she was her true self, the Heart freed from the prison of matter.

  One moment she was on the roof and the next she was in a field of flowers stained indigo. Then she was in Tav’s bedroom, staring at the rumpled sheets they never bothered to make, stray purple hairs on the pillow. Then in the attic apartment with wine stains and dust bunnies. Cam and Tav, deep in conversation, fell silent and stared at her. She placed a shaky hand on the counter for support and tried a smile.

  “Miss me?”

  “Can’t you use the fire escape like a normal person?” complained Cam. “You know that scares the shit out of me.”

  “What’s the point in being the Heart if I can’t enjoy it?” she said.

  Cam had several heartsick, heartbreak, and heart-attack puns ready.

  Eli let herself exhale and fell into a mantra that was half truth and half wish. I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.

  THE HEALER

  Tav watched Eli for signs of pain, fatigue, or weakness. There had been a moment, after the battle, when Eli had been pressed against them on the bike, and Tav thought she was finally opening, finally letting them in.

  But that door had slammed shut, and not even Tav’s magic co
uld open it again.

  “How are you feeling?” Tav winced at the sound of their own voice, so careful and tentative.

  “I said I’m fine.” Eli’s nails tapped on the wooden arm of the sofa. “We’re losing time and momentum. We need to do the main seam. The Vortex.”

  “Closing the Hedge-Witch’s seam was hard,” said Tav. “Eli —”

  “Don’t say my name like that.” Pure-black eyes snapped to meet Tav’s. “I’m fine. We have to do this.”

  “We will.” Tav took a shaky breath. “But we need to make sure we’re ready —”

  “I’m ready.” Her voice was clear and strong, but Tav could hear the chords of uncertainty underneath. “This mission matters more than anything.”

  “That sounds like the old you,” said Cam quietly. “Your purpose —”

  “Do you want to let the world die?” Eli snapped. “We have to do this. Alone.”

  Tav nodded. They looked away, unable to meet Eli’s gaze.

  “Tonight,” said Eli firmly. She was starting to fade, her body slipping into the Heart. Losing herself in it.

  What would happen if she didn’t come back this time?

  Tav had already decided. They needed the Hedge-Witch.

  “Early morning,” they said. “We have to set the wards, keep humans out. We don’t want collateral damage.”

  Eli’s body had disappeared, but her face was still visible, and her eyes were sad. “I think it’s a little late for that, don’t you?”

  When she was gone, Tav sank back against the old sofa and closed their eyes. Maybe Eli wasn’t the only one who was coming apart. “We need help, Cam.”

  “I’ll go,” said Cam. “I’ll bring the message to the Hedge-Witch. You need to rest.”

  “No.” The word felt like gravel scraping their throat as they regurgitated it. “It has to be me.”

  “Why? I don’t —”

  “Let it go, Cam. Just — I’ll go. Wait here.”