The Best of Talebones

by edited by Patrick Swenson

  Thereafter he visited the gaols and found that all of the convicts, save one, had been executed less than twenty-four hours after his experiments upon them. That one had received a stay of execution, which he had not enjoyed, because he had drowned in his own cell. The coroner was at a loss to explain how this could be, since there was no water in the cell.

  You understand now.

  This elixir of Dr V—’s works upon death, but only for twenty-four hours. Every day for the past fortnight, I have died at precisely 2:43 in the afternoon. Jarvis has stood by me with the elixir and raised me from the dead. But the weight of flesh upon my soul becomes more of a burden with each of my returns. I long for the gates which I glimpse so briefly.

  The time spent with you and the children has filled me with joy, and I stole every minute I could to be with you today. Forgive me, my love, but I cannot continue in this half-life any longer. Jarvis will not revive me today.

  My only fear — one which I will not know the answer to until I have crossed over — is that I do not know where I will find myself this time. By choosing not to be revived, am I committing suicide when I die today?

  But the study door is locked. Jarvis is without and my temple has begun to ache.

  I love that I get to keep saying something similar to this: Marie Brennan is another Talebones alum now writing best-selling novels. As a folklorist, she loves to retell traditional material, such as this story based on a well-known Scottish folksong of the same name. Issue #31’s cover art was by Bob Hobbs and featured a skull pen writing in blood. I have often wished I could have a pen like that to grade papers with.

  THE TWA CORBIES

  MARIE BRENNAN

  In all the fairy stories, when the hero is magically gifted with an understanding of the speech of birds, it actually does him some good.

  A robin brings him a message from his true love, or a bluebird tells him about buried treasure, or a starling warns him of a traitor among his companions. It doesn’t really work that way, though — not in real life. Birds mostly talk about seeds and worms and the breeze and nest-building and the state of their eggs. I should know; I’ve been listening to them for seven years.

  In all that time, they’ve only ever said one thing that interested me, and that one almost got me killed.

  I blame the ravens. Of all the breeds I’ve been forced to listen to, ravens are my least favorite; bird-talk about seeds may be boring, but bird-talk about carrion is just nasty. Ravens have a tendency to go into all sorts of detail I simply don’t want to hear. I avoid them when possible.

  But this time I didn’t have much choice. I was walking between towns when a pebble managed to work itself into my boot; I tried to ignore it for a little while, but it got really annoying, and at last I had to stop and get rid of it. That, of course, meant finding a place to stop. I’m not exactly fastidious, but the sky had been dumping rain on me for six days, and the road was a sea of mud. I trudged on, the pebble annoying me more with every passing second, until at last I came across a low stone wall. I heaved my pedlar’s pack onto the top, then hopped up to sit next to it.

  A raven fluttered to a landing in a scrawny ash tree nearby as I unlaced my boot and pulled it off. I ignored the bird; ravens at least have the decency not to chatter to themselves, the way sparrows do. I figured I could work in silence.

  But a second bird joined the first a moment later, and they started talking.

  “Where shall we feast today?” the second bird asked the first.

  I began very hastily to search for the pebble in my boot.

  Unfortunately, I have a really hard time tuning birds out. People are easier; don’t ask me why. Maybe it has to do with me spending so much time on the road, on account of being a pedlar. At any rate, I found myself an unwilling audience to their conversation.

  “I have found a fresh morsel just beyond the dike,” the first bird said.

  The second raven quorked in interest. “What sort of morsel?”

  I intensified my search for the elusive pebble.

  “A human,” the first bird said with relish. “Of the sort that is encased in metal.”

  My boot almost slipped from my chilled fingers.

  The second bird let out an irritated caw. “They are a nuisance to eat. The metal gets in the way.”

  “Its head is uncovered,” the first raven said. “Its eyes are yet there; we may eat them if we hurry. And its hair could be used for nest-material.”

  Back to nest-building — just like a bird. But that thought was irrelevant to what the rest of my mind was thinking.

  Encased in metal.

  Only knights wore armor.

  The second raven sounded tempted as it said, “Perhaps. Are we likely to be disturbed?”

  “I think not,” the first bird said. “It is but new-dead. And no one knows it has died.”

  “Did you see it die?”

  The dreadful eagerness in the second raven’s voice made me shiver. The first one replied, “I did. It was riding alone, on a horse, and then it fell off and died. It had only a hawk and a hound for company, and none has come near it since then.”

  The pebble fell at last into my searching fingers, which had gone about their task without the rest of me. I tossed it to the ground, then jammed my boot back onto my foot and began to lace it up quickly. A knight, lying dead in a ditch, and no one knew he had fallen.

  I couldn’t just leave him there, for these unpleasant birds to peck out his eyes. Granted, if he was a knight in full armor, I had about as much chance of carrying him as these ravens did of carrying me, but at least I could see if he had his shield with him; if I knew his coat of arms, I could tell the people in the next town that he had died. They might reward me for the information.

  It crossed my mind that they might instead accuse me of killing him, but I didn’t worry about that overmuch. I’m just a pedlar; how could I kill a knight in armor? Besides, the raven had said the man fell dead at no outward attack. His heart had probably given out.

  With my boot finally laced, I hopped off the wall on the other side and slung my pack onto my back. I could see the dike the first raven had referred to, just a short way across the field, and began to slog toward it through the ankle-deep mud.

  As I went, the two ravens flapped past me.

  I did my best to hurry, but the mud sucked at my boots and slowed me down. By the time I crested the top of the dike, the ravens had already landed on the body of what was unmistakably a knight, lying in the filthy water at the bottom of the ditch.

  “Here now!” I called out to them, making shooing motions with my hands. “Get away from him! Off! Fly off!”

  The smaller raven looked at the larger. I had no idea which was which, from their previous conversation, and they all sound alike to me. “It does understand us,” it said.

  Damned clever ravens. “Yes,” I said; this was not the first time I’d had to explain myself to birds. “I was granted a favor a long time ago, and like an idiot, I said I wanted to understand birds. Now buzz off. You can’t eat this man.”

  The larger raven cocked its head at me. “Oh can’t we?” And its beak darted down.

  “Stop that!” I skidded down the muddy slope toward them, and as I regained my balance I saw an amused gleam in the larger bird’s eye. It had not actually taken a bite of the dead man; it was only taunting me.

  “Not yet, anyway,” I was forced to say. “Please, just have the decency to wait until I’m gone. I don’t want to watch you peck off bits of him.”

  “So go away,” the smaller raven suggested rudely.

  I would, and gladly, in just a moment. But first I had to figure out who the dead knight was, or at least get enough identifying characteristics that I could describe him to someone.

  His eyes were open and staring, glazed over in death; in life they would have been a lively blue. I shuddered away from looking at them for too long. His hair, where it was not muddied and brown, was a rich gold color; he was young, a
nd had probably been quite handsome before he died. Now, however, his pale skin had taken on that ugly pallor that corpses have. I was lucky he hadn’t yet started to rot.

  But his armor — chain-mail with a little bit of plate — was unremarkable, and he wore no tunic to show me his coat of arms. His shield was nowhere in sight.

  “How did he die?” I asked the birds.

  The larger raven shifted his feet on the man’s shoulder. “You were listening, weren’t you?” it asked snidely. “It fell off its horse.”

  “Just fell? Didn’t he clutch at his heart or anything? Sway in the saddle? Look ill?”

  The raven quorked to itself for a moment, saying nothing intelligible, then admitted, “Well, yes. It looked like it wasn’t doing very well. That’s why I followed it. When I first saw it, it was fine, but then it suddenly went very green and dropped its shield and I thought it might be about to die.” The bird fluttered its wings proudly. “I was right.”

  Dropped its shield. I’m not much of a tracker; in this muddy trench, I could not make out the hoofprints of a horse. “Where did it come from? Did it drop its — his shield near here?” I needed to get away from these damn birds; I was starting to talk like them.

  “If I tell you will you go away and let us eat in peace?”

  The thought of leaving the dead man here for these ravens turned my stomach, but there wasn’t much I could do to stop them. I had no horse, and the knight’s was long gone. “Yes.”

  “Come on.”

  The raven took to the air, flapping up over the other embankment. I followed, slipping in the mud, cursing the ill-fortune that had put a pebble into my boot just at the right moment to get me caught up in this mess. Why couldn’t it have happened a mile sooner, or later?

  Or why couldn’t I just have ignored the damn birds and walked on?

  A narrow track ran along the embankment on that side. The raven had flown a short distance along it, and now sat on the ground, waiting for me with an impatient air. I hurried to see whether it was telling the truth or not.

  It was. The knight’s shield lay face-down in a thorny bush, as if it had been dropped from horseback. I dragged it clear and turned it over to find the knight’s blazon. Two crossed spears done in white on a black field.

  “I know this blazon,” I muttered, talking to myself more than to the raven. As I’ve already said, I don’t like having conversations with them. “It’s Lord Tergram’s.” But that couldn’t be him in the ditch; Lord Tergram was an older man, with his hair gone grey. The dead knight must be his son, the one who had gone off to war — I couldn’t remember his name.

  “Can I eat it now?” the raven asked, shifting from foot to foot.

  I blanched. Somehow it was much worse to think about the bird eating the dead knight now that I knew who he was.

  “You promised,” the bird reminded me, and glared at me balefully.

  I wanted to say no. But knowing the man was the younger Tergram did not make me any more capable of stopping the bird. I sighed and nodded.

  The raven said nothing more, but flew off.

  I returned to the road and my journey. Tergram was the overlord of the very town I was headed for. I would return his son’s shield to him, and hope someone got to the dead knight before the ravens did too much damage.

  *

  The guards at the town gate were huddled inside their little tower, hiding from the rain. Two of them emerged, though, when I came slogging up.

  “I need to talk to Lord Tergram,” I said.

  The fatter of the two guards shook his head. “Lord Tergram’s dead.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “Lord Rallec Tergram?”

  “He died about a year ago.” The guard was plainly not interested in this conversation; he wanted to get back inside where it was dry.

  I shared that sentiment. “Then I want to speak to whoever’s in charge now.”

  “And why should her ladyship see you?”

  I supposed I did not look like someone who deserved to see her ladyship; I was soaked to the bone and spattered with mud up to my hips, thanks to my little jaunt into the fields. I still had a card to play, though. I held up the shield. “Because of this.”

  The skinnier guard peered through the rain at the shield. “Whassat?”

  My impatience slipped its leash a little. “It’s the shield of Lord Rallec’s son,” I snapped, and only barely swallowed the “idiot” I wanted to stick on at the end.

  “Right,” the fatter guard said, and for a moment I thought he was expressing disbelief. But when I looked at him, he was nodding wearily. “I’ll take you to her ladyship.”

  As we hurried through the half-flooded streets, it occurred to me to wonder who “her ladyship” was. Not Rallec’s wife; I seemed to remember him being a widower. Had he remarried? No, it had to be the son’s wife.

  Great. I was going to tell a woman that her husband was lying dead in the mud. This day was getting better all the time.

  The Tergrams were not a powerful family, for which I was grateful; a grand hall would have put the cap on my discomfort. Instead I was shown into a room which, while big and impressive and hung with tapestries, was something I could deal with. My escort muttered to another guard, who muttered to a man standing at the other end of the hall, who muttered to the woman seated in a huge carved chair beneath the Tergram banner, while I waited and dripped on the floor.

  The man beckoned me forward.

  I advanced across the floor, painfully aware of my appearance, and made the best bow I could while holding the shield. “My lady,” I began, wondering if there was any good way to break this news. Probably not. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your husband’s dead.”

  She did not scream; she did not weep. She didn’t even stare. “I’m aware of that, thank you.”

  I blinked. Aware of it? What the hell?

  “We heard months ago,” she added calmly.

  My familiarity with corpses was limited, but the knight in the ditch had not been dead for months. Even the ravens had called him “fresh.” And if these people knew he was dead, why hadn’t they fetched his body for decent burial?

  I must have spoken out loud, at least for that last thought. I usually have the sense not to talk about the birds. The lady looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Because no one could find his body,” she said.

  “I found it,” I said, and for the first time I had the attention of everyone in the room. I held up the shield in the sudden silence. “I’ve got this to prove it.”

  The lady sat quite upright in her seat. “You . . . found his shield?” she whispered hoarsely. “You’ve come from the war?”

  “No,” I said. She was making my confusion worse instead of fixing it.

  “Then where did you find that?”

  “About an hour’s walk south of town,” I said. That, at least, was something I was sure of. “He’s lying in a ditch out there, and if you don’t want ravens eating too much of him, you should send someone for him right away.”

  “He’s not in a ditch,” she said, her voice harsh. “When his father died, we sent to him, and the messenger came back saying he had been killed in the war.”

  “Then somebody screwed up,” I said, forgetting to be polite. I hadn’t expected this sort of trouble when I decided to be a good guy and bring news of the son’s death. “Because your husband really is out there. Send someone out to look if you don’t believe me.”

  The lady looked reflexively to the man at her side. He nodded. “My lady, with your leave, I will check the truth of his words.”

  “Do,” the lady said. “And in the meantime, someone get this man cleaned up. He’s dripping.”

  How the raven found me, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe there’s a conspiracy of birds, and the town pigeons told him. All I know is, I was changing into relatively dry and clean clothes from my pack when he fluttered onto the window-sill.

  “This is your fault, isn’t it,” he accused me.
r />   I stared at him. “You again? Why are you here?”

  “You promised we could eat in peace,” the raven said. I thought he was the larger one, the one who had found the body in the first place, but without the other for comparison it was hard to tell. “Now more humans have come and taken our food away.”

  I supposed that was my fault. “Sorry,” I said, and did not mean it in the least. “The people here wanted to bury him.”

  “Well, they did that all right,” the raven said disconsolately. “Now I won’t get to eat its tongue.”

  I was in the middle of congratulating myself for having saved the young lord from being snacked on by ravens when the actual words registered on me. “They buried him already?”

  The raven glared at me. “Yes. It’s a waste, if you ask me.”

  I wasn’t asking. What I wanted to know was, why had they buried him already? That made no sense at all.

  At least, it didn’t make any sense until they took me back to the hall.

  “We found nothing,” the man who had led the riders said.

  The lady fixed unfriendly eyes on me. “So. You are a liar, as I suspected.”

  A liar? I might be an idiot, for getting involved in this mess in the first place, but never a liar. “I brought you his shield,” I reminded her. Surely that was proof.

  “Which you stole off the battlefield, or obtained from someone else,” she said. “And, for reasons only you can know, you felt the need to come torment me in my grief by telling me vile falsehoods about my poor, late husband.” She didn’t sound very tormented or grief-stricken; she sounded angry.

  That was so far from the truth that I wanted to scream. Instead I gritted my teeth and searched for something that would get me out of this before my day got any worse. “Maybe . . . maybe I was mistaken, my lady.” Mistaken how? I couldn’t say they’d searched in the wrong place; I might not know what was going on, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the riders had hidden the body, and would not produce it no matter what. At this point I didn’t care why; I just wanted to stop being involved. “Maybe someone was trying to deceive me, my lady. I did find your husband’s shield in the ditch, I swear to that, and there was a man there in armor. Maybe . . . someone else is trying to torment you, as you say.”