The Boi of Feather and Steel

by Adan Jerreat-Poole

  The ice cracked, and someone walked out of the river.

  THE WITCH LORD

  It wasn’t like the dream, not exactly. There were no spears of obsidian stabbing the sky; no earthquakes knocking Tav to their knees. The river didn’t tear itself in two, although the split sky was reflected in the ice and made it appear just as shattered and broken.

  Watching Cam emerge from under the river was like a bird hatching from an egg, the webbing of cracks spreading inch by inch. Cam climbed out of the frozen darkness, emerging from a staircase of limestone and frost. Part of the Labyrinth had crossed between worlds, had wound its way under the river that stretched black and bright under a star-studded sky.

  Pieces of ice clung to his hair, which was getting long — I’ll have to cut it for him when this is all over, Tav thought vaguely. The pair of scissors in the bathroom drawer.

  His body was covered in stone, or it was stone — gleaming anthracite arched along his cheekbones, mica dust brightening his eyelids. Playful chips of jasper danced against fragments of agate on his wrists. His chest was mottled granite and rhyolite seamlessly embedded in skin and bone. His shirt was gone, shredded by rock, and Tav could make out the curve of his ribs in granite like a fossil. He looked thin. He looked like he belonged in the earth.

  In his arms hung a limp figure, her arms and legs hanging at impossible angles. Fragments of quartz glittered where it had broken through skin. Bangs sticking with sweat to a pale forehead. Long arched teeth protruding from a human mouth. Dried blood under her nostrils.

  “Give her to me.” Tav’s voice broke with exhaustion.

  They watched the dream unfurl from their memory and onto the ice, the black feathers tipped in red scattered around their feet. The unnatural stillness in the air, the smell of overripe plums. Red and orange streaks like dying fires lighting up the steel-grey storm clouds.

  Cam stopped and stared at Tav, at the long wings extending from their shoulder blades. Hawthorn curled from Eli’s fingernails and wound around her wrists, torso, ankles, tangled with the stone body that had once been Tav’s best and sometimes only friend.

  Tav pulled another feather from her wing, its tip sharp as death.

  “This ends now,” they said. “You can’t have her.”

  The voice of the Labyrinth poured through Cam’s body like an echo in a cave deep underground.

  “We have waited a long time to be remembered,” said the Labyrinth. “The witches forgot our language and kept the sacrifices for themselves. They thought they could chain us, but now we are free.”

  Tav’s grip tightened on the steel feather. The taste of metal in their mouth. “I said, give her to me.”

  The Labyrinth’s human body knelt down, the stones ringing out in a chorus of bells. He gently laid the girl on the ice. His eyes found Tav’s, and this time when the creature spoke, they could hear the timbre of Cam’s voice tossed with gravel and smooth round stones clattering over a pebbled beach. “Tav, we found her body. We healed her.”

  Tav hesitated; in the dream, his eyes had burned amber and the ground had shaken under their feet with tremors. Nothing from the City of Eyes could be trusted. Tav wanted to trust him. Tav didn’t want to be stupid. Didn’t want to hope. Felt hope rising like heat from asphalt.

  “We healed her, Tav. We tried. But it wasn’t enough.”

  “You came here to destroy us,” they said. “To get revenge for how the witches treated you.”

  The stones sang in mourning, and a flash of pain flickered across his face. “We don’t want revenge. Tav, I’ve been speaking with the walls, living with the walls, for years.”

  “And they taught you their anger, and they sent you to kill me.” Furious tears burned in their eyes. They could face down the Witch Lord, they could watch themselves and their loved ones bleed and break. But to see Cam turn against them? “We let them take you,” they confessed, forcing the words out with a heavy tongue. “It was our fault. It was my fault. I’m sorry. I should have come after you. I should have saved you.”

  “Thank you,” said Cam. “You know I don’t love being left behind.”

  “Cam —”

  “It’s okay.” A wry smile, a spark of light in his eyes. “You can be a dick when you’re in love. Work on it, okay?” He nodded at the prone body before him. “Are you going to help her or not? Thought you were the Healer.”

  “Now they’re the Witch Lord,” Kite added helpfully.

  Suddenly Tav understood. They understood that although trauma was real, it could also lie to you, that fear could colour the edges of your world in darkness. Sometimes nightmares were just nightmares. Sometimes the people who love us don’t hurt us. Sometimes our made-families deserve our trust.

  Tav realized that they had never admitted how scared they were.

  Not when the bottle was smashed over their bike.

  Not when the ghost killed the two boys from their school.

  Not when they met the gaze of the Witch Lord for the very first time.

  But it was okay to be scared. It wasn’t a weakness, and Tav let the feeling flow through them and then dissipate into the air, until there was only the stars and the feathers and the familiar face before them.

  “I missed you,” they said.

  “I’ve been busy,” he told them.

  “Tell me over drinks sometime.”

  “I promise.”

  Kite flowed forward and placed a hand on his torso. “You get more interesting every time I see you,” she said.

  “I missed you, too, Kite.”

  Kite glowed.

  Dropping the feather dagger, Tav stepped forward and knelt beside the made-girl. “She’s breathing,” they whispered.

  “I told you.” Cam gathered his long hair into a ponytail. “Just because I was pissed at you didn’t mean I was going to kill you. The Labyrinth took care of the children for generations. All we wanted was to be heard and loved and remembered.”

  “The quartz —” Tav traced the lines of new stone that stretched across ribs and calves. They looked up. “You healed her.”

  “I told you that already.” Behind him, the small chasm was slowly closing, the ice moving as if unfrozen, purpleblack glass smoothing out into a perfect mirror.

  The obsidian blade trembled in Tav’s hand and made a keening sound like the singing stones of Cam’s hybrid body.

  The body had been healed, but something else was needed to animate the spirit of a girl made from thorns and glass and pearl.

  “I don’t know what to do,” said Tav, frustrated. “She’s not injured.”

  “She needs blood,” said Kite. “Lifeblood will wake her.”

  It was a mark of how strange their life had become that Tav didn’t question Kite. And part of them remembered finding Kite pressed into the wall like a fossil — and how Eli had cut her own hand, had fed her own blood to the witch, to wake her and give her strength.

  Tav held the blade to their palm and pressed it against the skin, closing their eyes and willing the blade to cut. Blood beaded along a thin red line, and some of it was oxidized red, and other droplets were inky purpleback.

  “How do I —?”

  Kite flowed forward, resting Eli’s head against her distressed skirts. Gently, she coaxed Eli’s mouth open.

  “That’s a good girl,” she whispered. “Take your medicine.”

  Tav held her hand over Eli’s open mouth and watched as a single drop of redblack witch-human-lunar blood dripped into her throat. They expected Eli to choke or spit it out, but she only swallowed and then sighed, a sound like a cloud losing itself to snow.

  Tav, Eli, and Cam watched the sleeping girl. One, two, three breaths; a gust of summer air ruffled Tav’s hair and they felt the ice beginning to melt. The season was reclaiming the land. Soon everything would be brown and dead and dry, and the cicadas would shriek. Already the fireflies were coming back, burning the night like children’s sparklers.

  Somewhere in the city, people were dancing
. Someone was falling in love. Someone was falling out of it. A child pulled a slip from a clothesline and drew it around her shoulders like a cape. Two boys had climbed onto the roof of their school to stargaze but were kissing instead and didn’t notice the rift in the sky. A young woman, sitting on a deck that smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap whiskey, looked up into the fractured cosmos and decided to quit law school and become a painter.

  An eternity passed in three heartbeats.

  Eli’s eyes opened.

  Seventy-One

  ELI

  She hadn’t minded dying.

  She hadn’t minded being buried. The weight of all those books on her body had been soothing, the pages soft against her skin. Eli had read fragments of diaries and letters as the Heartblood drained from her body, as the light left her veins and returned to the mantle of its origin.

  Then there had been only darkness.

  But in the darkness the Labyrinth had found her, had repaired her broken body. It had come to her in the fretful dreams of a dying person, and its voice had sounded like Cam’s. Its touch felt like a stone dagger returning to its sheath.

  Somehow, her mortal body had been revived. She had freed the Heart and survived.

  Images slowly came into focus, faces and colours and lights.

  Where was she?

  Why was Kite crying tears of seaglass over her face?

  Why did her tongue taste of blackberries?

  The first thing she noticed was that she couldn’t see Kite’s essence. She switched eyes, letting blackness spill over her irises. Swirls of bluegreen rippled through Kite’s body. Then she switched back. It was nice, not having to see and feel everything all the time.

  The second thing she noticed was the wound between worlds watching her like a lidless eye.

  Eli inhaled sharply, and the ice in the air stabbed at her lungs. Her fingers and toes were thawing out, and the joints ached as they warmed. Her body felt more tangible and heavy and vulnerable since fusing with the Heart.

  “You’re alive, oh my god, you’re alive,” someone was repeating over and over like a mantra.

  “We have to close it,” Eli said. “We can’t leave it like this.”

  Someone kissed her palm. Eli sat up, and a headache split across her forehead. “Fuck.”

  “You almost died.” Tav’s tenor captured her attention. “You asshole.”

  “I guess we’re all tougher than we look.” Eli twisted to look at Cam. “Welcome back.”

  “You, too.”

  “I like what you’ve done to your face.”

  “You could use a bit of gardening.”

  Eli laughed.

  The knives at her waist laughed with her.

  It was good to be back.

  She pulled herself up, Kite and Tav hovering around her in case she might fall. But she was back, and her body was no longer going to vanish or tear itself apart.

  “I hear you’re the Witch Lord now,” she said.

  “The walls are a gossip.” Tav frowned at Cam, who shrugged.

  “Can we stop this?” Kite gestured at the broken sky.

  “I don’t know. But I’m going to try.” Eli pulled the pearl blade from its sheath and tossed it in the air. She caught it by the hilt. It wasn’t hard — after all, it was a part of her. She grinned.

  “We don’t have the Heart,” she added, “but we have the wall. A witch. A made-thing. And Tav. That’s got to count for something.” She offered the hilt to Tav. “Do you want me to swear an oath of fealty?”

  “Fuck off.” Tav pushed it away.

  “Just as well. I don’t think I’d be a very good knight.” But she didn’t sheath it, and instead drew a second blade: the bone blade that remembered her name, dreams, regrets. That remembered the taste of sunlight and honey and burning flesh from its time as the Heart.

  The bone blade remembered everything.

  THE WITCH LORD

  Eli’s eyes were bright with excitement, and her movements were filled with energy — almost manic.

  “Maybe you should rest,” they said.

  Eli laughed again. Then she threw her head back and howled at the moon. “Close the door, Tav. Make us a key and turn the lock before the City of Ghosts falls into the sky, before the allium fields are burned with ice, before the moon loses its orbit and is cast out into the void.”

  “I don’t want to risk you,” said Tav quietly. “I almost lost you. I can do it on my own.” They hoped that was true.

  Eli caught their look and held it. “No,” she said. “We’re not doing that anymore.”

  “Eli —”

  “I love you, and you scare the shit out of me, and I’m not used to relying on other people. But I will if you will. Even baby Witch Lords need help, right?”

  Tav’s heart shuddered, and an electrical current ran through their entire body, up and down the length of their spine. Dozens of feathers fell from their wings.

  “I-I love you, too.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.” Another smile, the curve of a reptilian tooth lengthening from pink gums. God, she was hot.

  “Witch Lord in exile,” added Kite. Her hair was undulating gently, its shades flowing from pale green to rich turquoise and back again. She didn’t seem jealous.

  Tav took Eli’s hand in theirs, raised it to their lips, and brushed a kiss against her knuckles.

  “Okay,” they said. “We need to heal the rift. If anyone wants to help, they can, but they don’t have to. It’s not too late to cross,” they added pointedly at Kite. “The City of Eyes is healing.”

  “This is where my family is,” said Kite softly. Cam’s stones crooned in harmony with her dulcet tones.

  “Me, too,” said Cam.

  Eli nodded.

  Tav looked up at the rift: the frayed edges, the fabric of the universe coming unravelled. The rip slowly spreading like a run in a stocking, until there would be nothing between the Earth and the alien planet that had been feeding on its energy for years. The Witch Lord was gone, but the harm had been done. Momentum carried her project forward, draining the life from a little blue planet.

  This was what Tav had promised to do, when they had thirsted for the Heart that burned under Eli’s skin. When they were huddled in the dark in the Children’s Lair dreaming of power and strength. They had promised to heal the wound.

  They looked at their companions. Only Cam had been born here. The other two had chosen to come. All of them had been changed in the past few weeks. They had risked death, and still, they would risk it again. They had saved one home, and now they would save another.

  Maybe that’s what being born from diaspora meant — having not one home but many, having many places and people to fight for. (It meant other things, too — pain, loss, guilt, and a sense of being unrooted. But now Tav had wings and was a feathered tree.) Maybe it meant understanding that nations and borders and divisions of human/not-human were meaningless. That some lines needed to be crossed. That some lines needed to be eroded by wind and sand and intention.

  Healing the wound didn’t have to mean locking the door. It didn’t have to mean another line they couldn’t cross. Doors could open both ways. Healing the rift didn’t mean an ending, but a change. It meant a new kind of relationship. Maybe one based on care and love.

  Maybe a Witch Lord in exile who was also human and had moonlight in their eyes could bring the worlds together in a way that didn’t hurt. After all, worlds can meet like lovers. (Lovers meet like worlds.)

  The obsidian blade was warm in their hand. They felt the sharp, sweet burn of Eli’s magic whisper through their body. She was with them. She was always with them.

  A delicate thread of bluegreen algae inched toward Tav over the ice, hesitating near her feet. Kite was waiting, probably wondering if Tav would flinch away from an essence that had done so much damage. But it felt right that she was here to see this end. Tav pushed her own purpleblack flames toward the algae, and when their essences touched, nothing burned.
No one was struck by lightning. There was no pain — only pleasure. Tav wondered if Kite was having the same thoughts they were — if she, too, felt the energy that passed between them. If she, too, longed to feel their bodies pressed together.

  The stones began singing, and the Labyrinth joined them. Slowly, Cam drew a circle around them in the ice, etched with a sharp piece of granite. It seemed like he had done it before.

  Rituals have power.

  Kite joined the song, her voice wavering like a sea wind teasing a sail. She followed the line he had cut in the surface with her sword, a metal monster with elegant curlicues and geometric shapes and gears.

  Eli traced the circle with the bone blade.

  Now it was their turn. Tav took the obsidian blade in one hand, and a feather in the other. They carved the line deeper with the black glass, and they brushed the soft feather along the smooth cut.

  Four bodies stood in the centre of a magical circle.

  They were human, witch, moon, animal, and stone. They were made of blood, sediment, glass, sea salt, steel. They were smoke and feathers, hawthorn and ocean, they were hundreds of pasts and even more futures. A small light glowed under the ice, and Tav recognized it as the fire dancing in their eyes.

  Hope.

  This time, there was no pain. There were no mechanical monsters animated by mutilated witches trying to tear them apart. Tav reached up into the darkness and let their mind and magic touch the ruined edges of the rift, soothing the fever and infection with each touch. A sound joined their chorus, and it came from all around them.

  The stars were singing.

  As they watched, and whispered to the wound, and drew on the shared power of the circle, the rift began to close. The edges brightened, the frayed tips stretching into tapestries of dark and light, asteroids and comets, and the idea of planets that had not yet been born.

  Standing on a river of ice in an August heat wave, ringed by the people they trusted most in the world, Tav healed the wound between worlds. And they didn’t just close it; they made it a door that would open both ways, but only when it was asked nicely. Silver and purple glitter fell from the sky like rain, magic dust from another world. Sharing light and heat and enchantment with the blue-and-white planet.