The Boi of Feather and Steel

by Adan Jerreat-Poole

  What did Tav need Eli for? She was only a vessel for the Heart. A thing. No one. Pride struggled with fear as the invisible girl watched a god moving in a dangerous dance, every step an act of war, an elegant pattern of parries and lunges glittering with gold. Without the Heart, Eli would be no one again. A broken tool. A flawed weapon. She would never be powerful enough to be Tav’s equal. She needed to keep the Heart to deserve their touch, to be worthy of their love. Eli felt herself begin to fall, again, into to the endless cosmos of the Heart.

  She was not a person, not a girl, not someone.

  She was the light that the trees drank thirstily. She was the calcium in the stone. She was the decaying bones and flesh of dead animals rotting under the soil. She was —

  Tav made a sudden turn, and Eli’s eyes fell on the Witch Lord, the rival god, the nameless horror who used made-daughters like windup toys and cast them aside when they were broken. The villain in the fairy tale.

  She knew that face.

  She had kissed that face.

  She loved that face.

  Kite.

  Eli inhaled sharply, smelling blood and sea salt, and reality came rushing back in. Dizziness overwhelmed her body as she became suddenly and unbearably real.

  The room wavered.

  Ever-burning essences, floating heads, and thousands of eyes stared at the intruder standing in the centre of a black-and-white checkered floor.

  Eli had materialized.

  The moment before the witches descended, Eli felt a stab of regret at her mistake, at her arrogance for thinking she could control this body, for thinking that she had become invincible.

  She had delivered the Heart right into the hands of the Witch Lord.

  Sixty-One

  THE HEALER

  Tav felt Eli’s presence a split second before she materialized, her entrance heralded by a memory of crushed petals and honey. Tav saw Eli’s reflection in the glossy pearls that served as eyes in the Witch Lord’s face, saw the moment the serene mask twisted with hunger.

  The Witch Lord was done playing with the mouse; she had a Heart to capture, and this time it would be harder than trapping a firefly in a jar. She let go of Tav and reached for Eli, her silverpinkgoldgreen essence pouring from her mouth like a swarm of silverfish.

  Tav had never seen a witch extend their essence from their body; they knew they could shed their skin, but the process was painful and made them vulnerable. But the Witch Lord had magic that no one else did.

  Tav did the only thing they could think of — they grabbed the Witch Lord’s wrist and pulled her back. The essence split over Tav’s body, shuddering away from a stray feather that had fallen from Tav’s hair and onto their shoulder.

  It was afraid to touch them.

  The essence re-entered the bluegreen nymph who still looked so heartbreakingly like Kite that Tav found it unnerving.

  “You promised to eat me first,” said Tav.

  “I’ll let you live if you bring her to me,” said the Witch Lord.

  “No.” Tav’s grip tightened. They imagined their hand as a door closing shut over flesh and magic, trapping the Witch Lord’s body and essence. They imagined their fingers as the gears of a lock intertwining. There was no key. Their magic flared up, fusing to the Witch Lord’s, and iron shavings scattered across the floor.

  The pearly eyes gleamed in the red light, and the Witch Lord smiled. Her wrist grew spines, and then scales, scratching and piercing Tav’s palm. But they held on. They were a closed door. A thousand tiny spiders appeared on the Witch Lord’s skin and crawled over Tav’s hand and up their arm. Tav held on, staring into the Witch Lord’s eyes.

  Just a bit longer, they thought. Sweat stained their shirt, and their breathing was ragged. Just hold on a bit longer. Their shoulder blades started to itch horribly.

  The Witch Lord’s hand was a bear paw, and then a raven’s claw, and then a mass of writhing, wriggling earthworms.

  Still, Tav held on.

  “How are you doing this?” The anger clouded her eyes with silt.

  “I make doors,” said Tav. “And I close them.”

  THE HEART

  The Witch Lord’s servants were everywhere. Eli was surrounded. As she watched the witches close in, her heartbeat returned like a roar, thrumming to the melody of panic that raced through her body. The intense emotion rattled a rosebud in her chest cavity, and she felt it open.

  The Coven had found her. She would never escape them. They would force her back into a prison made of paper chains and darkness. They would tear her apart and feed her to the walls.

  Not again. Never again.

  We are the Heart!

  The first witch was foolish, drunk on orchid wine and sugared centipedes, and when she reached for the delicious Heart, the aorta of a star, it burned through her veins and she collapsed onto the floor in a pile of sawdust.

  The other witches drew back. A few looked over at the Witch Lord. Only she had the power to overthrow the world. But she was still held in the embrace of something that was not quite human, not quite witch. Something they were starting to think they should be afraid of.

  Eli was still an assassin, still a made-thing, and she wasn’t ready to give up. She drew two blades — pearl and bone — and turned in a slow, deliberate circle. One eye black, the other yellow.

  “The Witch Lord will not save you,” she said. Her voice was strange to her — richer and deeper, the sound of wings fluttering and leaves shaking in the wind; the timbre of tree branches cracking and lightning striking. The voice of the Heart.

  Punishment or mercy?

  “Leave now,” she told them. “And we won’t kill you.”

  Mercy, then.

  I want to hurt them, Eli thought.

  They are my children, the Heart thought back.

  The floating lanterns of the first ring were coming nearer, hovering just out of reach.

  “Capture her,” they told the room. “Capture her and we will never go hungry.”

  The audience stood, unsure, shards of glass reflecting the pink bordello lighting. Masks of feathers and scales, computer chips and drywall, all turned toward the girl with her blades, the eyes underneath glittering with curiosity.

  And then the wall cracked. The great stone slab of the war room that had once been a place of healing broke open. Water leaked from the crack, dripping down the walls. Streaks of salt like lace patterned the grey stone.

  First a trickle, and then more. Water gushed through the crumbling stone. Soon the crack was a chasm, the stone falling apart. Pages poured through the gap, forgotten books falling from the sky and climbing out of the bedrock of the Coven. A flood of ink and water and paper.

  The Witch Lord’s second body climbed through the gap.

  THE HEALER

  Tav watched the Witch Lord’s face as Kite climbed through the jagged crack in the wall, scraps of damp paper stuck in her hair, a starfish clinging to her thigh. There was no emotion, only calculation. There had been much more feeling in the Witch Lord’s body when Tav had burned her.

  “She can’t hurt me. I am her,” whispered the Witch Lord. “Our fates are twined together. When I die, so does she. Will your made-thing be happy with you when her playmate is dead?”

  Tav’s grip slipped for a fraction of a moment — but that was all it took.

  “I’ll come back for you,” breathed the Witch Lord, and then she was gone, and Tav was holding an empty sac of skin and bones. They saw a fiercely glowing light, dark and green as the bottom of the sea, and then her essence was gone.

  “Fuck,” said Tav. They yanked their mask off and tossed it into the growing puddle on the floor. Then they went looking for their motorcycle.

  Sixty-Two

  THE HEIR

  A prism of light circling her head.

  You will die if I die, it told Kite.

  “I know,” said Kite.

  A pause, and the light circled her body once, as if inspecting it for damage.

&nb
sp; I understand. I would have done the same in your place. You have my ambition. But you were only another body for me. Your mistake was thinking you were a person.

  “I am a person,” said Kite.

  The essence of the Witch Lord ignored her daughter, and instead drove another blade into Kite’s heart, having discovered in her inspection the only weak spot in an otherwise perfect creation.

  Will she still love you now that she knows what you really are?

  Kite looked over to where Eli was cornered by the floating heads of the first ring. Fear boiled up in her body, and the water steamed and bubbled around her waist. A piece of sodden paper caught her eye, a fragment of forgotten poetry floating at the surface of the water. Something about love and pain.

  “I —” She turned back to the light, but it was gone. The Witch Lord had escaped.

  Kite felt guiltily relieved that she was still alive.

  THE HEART

  Chaos.

  The Coven was drowning in ink and salt. Children chewed on the necks of witches, daughters cutting through flesh and magic with weapons cobbled together from junk and desperation.

  Some of the witches fled, shedding their skins and retreating farther into the Coven, trying to outrun the bloodlust of the children. Others stayed and fought, using the shattered pieces of their costumes as makeshift weapons, using magic to ensnare and mislead their kin. Glamours of monsters and ghostly sandcastles and silk slips danced with spears and sharpened fingernails, bodies coming together and apart, ebbing and flowing like a tide crashing against a cliff.

  Drops of blood were left behind from each encounter on the checkered floor — there a piece of amber, there a fleck of neon paint. Golden dew, cumulonimbus clouds, and mouldy pennies were shed as the magical armies threw themselves against each other again and again.

  So much death.

  The Heart couldn’t watch. It was breaking Eli, the pain of so much suffering blocking out all other thoughts, feelings, desires.

  The world was dying, and she had failed to save it.

  She forgot who she was, and what she was doing there; she forgot about Tav and Kite and the Witch Lord; she disappeared into shadow, mourning the dead with a light that burned as dim as the stub of a candle.

  And then she was gone, falling through time and space, lost in the maze of the Coven, lost in her own nightmares.

  THE HEIR

  The battle raged around her. Kite stood like a single water lily in the flood. She watched as a made-daughter was torn apart by several older witches. They started chewing on her bones.

  The water lapped against her hips as it rushed through the broken wall and poured into the war room. Words in serif typeface and words handwritten in ancient languages brushed against her thighs.

  Kite turned her palms and face to the sky, eyes closed, basking in the light and shadow that played across her skin. For a moment everything was still and silent; the sound of breath and sweat muffled by centuries of dust and knowledge. She blocked out the chaos and focused only on the words, only on the feeling of vellum against her cheek.

  She knew this place. The Coven was her home. She had grown up with paper cuts and paper airplanes, with notebooks bound in leather that still remembered being animal, with myths and epics scrawled on the backs of receipts and sociology papers.

  They had followed her from their prison, slipping through the cracks in walls, wrapping their pages around her hair and fingertips. She was covered in text.

  Kite knew that the skeleton of the Coven was made of poetry and feeling.

  She pushed away the power to command that danced in her veins, the stolen strength that swam in the marrow of her bones. Her mother’s magic.

  But Kite was not her mother, even if they shared a face. Even if they shared an essence. They had made different choices. They had fallen in love with different objects.

  Please, she asked. Please fight with us.

  The books came to life.

  The papers folded themselves into an army of birds, all shapes borrowed and stolen from the City of Ghosts — cranes and pelicans, crows and ravens, small hummingbirds that moved so quickly they were only a blur; paper and cloth eagles with wingspans longer than a body.

  “I love you,” whispered Kite, and tears of ink dripped down her face.

  She dropped her hands.

  Pages ripped themselves from volumes older than planets. The sound of broken spines and damaged bindings filled the room; the carcasses of ruined covers littered the earth.

  Kite had declared a side, and the library had declared with her.

  The birds fell on the witches, slicing through the flesh and magic essence of the Coven’s minions with a thousand paper cuts, each feather lacerating the bodies of her mother’s army.

  The witches shrieked in pain, the fine cuts welling with black-and-silver blood; some of the cuts smoked or burned or spat hot sparks, catching the wingtip of a peregrine falcon and sending it up in flames, its history lost forever,

  Kite wiped her face with the back of one hand, ink mixing with saltwater. Her hands up to her elbows were black and slick, as if dipped in diesel oil.

  Clytemnestra fell out of the sky, laughing uncontrollably.

  “Burn it down!” she cried as she tumbled through the air, her golden ringlets a tangled nest on her head. Her skin was pink and unblemished as if newborn.

  Kite wondered why it had taken her so long to join the battle.

  A paper albatross caught the tiny witch midfall, or perhaps midflight, and carried her across the cavernous ballroom. Reaching into her many pockets, Clytemnestra grabbed fistfuls of jacks and iron nails and chips of obsidian, throwing them like confetti over the partygoers.

  Kite watched her soar through the crumbling stronghold, envy irritating her vocal cords. The Warlord was ecstatic, caught in the revelry of violence and passion. Clytemnestra’s essence pulsed brighter than any other prism of light in the room.

  She was a shooting star, a beacon of hope soaked in sandalwood cologne and blood, a float in a parade — the kind with a million balloons that sometimes burst and cause infants to cry.

  And Kite was a historian watching what she treasured most sacrifice themselves to fire and water. Watching the ink drain from their wings. Her hair curled into question marks of loss.

  An origami periwinkle fell from her hair and Kite caught it in her hand. It unfolded its petals and Kite saw that it was a note Eli had left for her on the island a long time ago. A single word, a simple question, holding within it a universe of meaning, a history of limbs and tongues intertwined, a secret cache of promises and shared dreams.

  Tomorrow?

  Kite stared at the word for a long moment. Then she curled her fist around the note, and felt her skin absorb the ink, felt the question mark settle into her sternum. Then she opened her hand again and let the blank sheet tumble into the waves.

  Kite took a breath, and then launched herself into the battle.

  Sixty-Three

  THE HEALER

  Ariel purred at their touch, the witch-infused bike recognizing the texture of Tav’s palm on its leather seat, responding to the timbre of their voice as they leaned close to the painted mermaid and whispered, “We got this, okay, girl?”

  Ariel revved her engine in excitement and emitted a cloud of exhaust.

  Tav climbed on, adrenalin shrieking in their tendons and ligaments. Gripped the handlebars. Took a deep breath, letting their rib cage expand. One of the glass buttons on their vest popped off. Tav looked down and realized that the remaining buttons were shaped like the phases of the moons. The one they had lost was the waning gibbous.

  It felt like a sign. They were a waxing moon, chasing away the darkness.

  They looked out over the sea of bodies — bodies of text, bodies of water, flesh-and-bone bodies, incorporeal beings of heat and magic and comet tails. Looking for a girl who was like a knife. A girl with two hearts.

  The Witch Lord wanted the Heart. So Tav had to go af
ter the Witch Lord. No way in hell were they letting Eli get torn apart by some poor-quality photocopy of Kite.

  An albatross made out of tissue paper and twine swooped down beside them. Clytemnestra tossed a small package in their direction. It was wrapped in newsprint and tied with black ribbon.

  “A gift from the Heir,” she said with a wink, her eyelids painted deep plum and gold. “She didn’t seem to think she’d be able to deliver it herself.”

  Tav tore open the paper and the obsidian dagger fell into their hand. Before they could open their mouth to thank her, the girl and bird dove back into the fray, the blue-and-pink wings like the sails of a great ship.

  The key turned in the ignition of its own accord. Tav and Ariel took off, weaving through the chaos, leaving the battlefield behind.

  Going deeper into the catacombs of the Coven.

  They were going on a witch hunt.

  Sixty-Four

  THE HEART

  So much death.

  So much destruction.

  Where was she? Who was she? Why was she here?

  Everything was dark and cold.

  The light of her body moved into the space like a child moving into their bunk at camp, marvelling at the spiders and leaves and the whimpering of small animals at dusk.

  Books. Stacks and rows and piles and towers and caverns of books. The light of the Heart kept exploring farther and farther, making visible the gold stitching here, a fragment of prose there — sunflowers at midnight and salt, everywhere, beloved — until all Eli could see were pages of history and promises of love that had never been fulfilled.