The Underwater Ballroom Society

by Y. S. Lee

  I held out my hands.

  Four.

  They clasped hands and we formed a circle.

  Five.

  “We are twelve here tonight,” I said. “As we used to be.”

  Six.

  “Twelve sisters,” corrected Anya. “With an uninvited guest.”

  Seven.

  My sisters looked at each other with alarm.

  Eight.

  “He trod on the hem of my gown,” said Anya.

  Nine.

  “The weight of his body slowed the passage of my tortoise,” she continued.

  Ten.

  “I smelled the reek of his breath as he danced close behind me.”

  Eleven.

  I took from my bodice the hedge-witch’s gift. “But now he is revealed,” said Anya, and I opened the two halves of the walnut shell.

  On the twelfth stroke there was a whistling sound, as of strong wind through a crevice. It flayed the cloak of invisibility from the soldier’s back and restored it, with a snap of fabric, to its home in the walnut shell.

  He stood in the middle of our circle, composing his face to a sneer. “And what will you do with me now, my foolish princesses?” He spun towards Anya and she flinched. “Will you dance, my lady?”

  “Not with you.” Her voice trembled but her handclasp was steady.

  “And if I ask one of your sisters?”

  “The answer will be the same from each of us,” I replied.

  He laughed. “And when I am king? Will you refuse me then, on pain of death?”

  “Soldier,” said Anya, and now her voice rang out strong. “Never will you be king.”

  I opened the walnut shell again. On one side, Anya held my elbow tight. Keiko anchored the other. And the ravening wind shrieked and tore and lashed and sucked the soldier, bit by bit, into the walnut shell, where he might forever wear the shroud of invisibility that had lain for so long against his skin. The walnut shell closed itself with a snick.

  There was a substantial silence.

  “Sisters?” asked Johanna, for once tentative. “Do we now have a succession crisis?”

  “No,” replied Anya. Despite the missing teeth, her words were crisp and authoritative. “Under the laws of primogeniture, I will inherit the crown, and my eldest daughter after me.” We beamed at her, yet her expression remained solemn. She touched her belly briefly. “If my daughter becomes queen before she is of age, I name Princess Ling as her regent.”

  Another pause.

  Finally, Johanna said, “Ling is an excellent choice.” She cleared her throat. “The hour is late.”

  “Yes,” agreed Anya. “It is.”

  We were still arrayed in our circle of enchantment. Our dresses were creased, our coiffures quite destroyed by the wind. And our slippers were nearly worn through. What would people say this time? Would there be another scandal? And what might the King attempt from his deathbed? We all looked up, towards the threshold, the water, the trapdoor. Towards our families, our duties, our futures.

  “It is late,” repeated Anya, and she held out her hand for the walnut shell. When I gave it to her, she rolled it swiftly into a corner of the courtyard, a shadowy place where no foot ever touched down. Then she beamed at us: a wide, bold, mirthful smile, the gaps in her teeth like battle scars. “But dawn is hours away. Beloved sisters, shall we?”

  We danced on.

  About Y.S. Lee

  Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s fairy tale, “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”, features a protagonist who wins absolute power (and narrative approval) when he triumphs over a group of shallow-minded princesses. The soldier’s sadism, in particular, stands out to me and that’s why I’ve made it a focal point of this story, my first attempt at writing fantasy.

  My debut novel, The Agency: A Spy in the House, is about a mixed-race girl detective in Victorian London. It won the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s inaugural John Spray Mystery Award in 2011. The Agency tetralogy continues with The Body at the Tower, The Traitor and the Tunnel, and Rivals in the City (Candlewick Press/Walker Books). For more about my work, including excerpts from each of the Agency novels, please visit www.yslee.com. Or sign up for my (very) occasional newsletter at https://tinyletter.com/yslee. Thank you for reading!

  Penhallow Amid Passing Things

  Iona Datt Sharma

  Penhallow Amid Passing Things

  It is said that in the lands over the ocean, where birds rise from their own ashes and cats sing like larks, the court magicians can create twelve wondrous enchantments over breakfast and no one thinks anything of it. Nothing like England, where magical things fade like sun-bleached cloth, and nothing at all like this miserable Kernow, where the sea flows in all the moth-eaten holes and resets everything to true north. Nothing here but the unadorned real, for now and—perhaps—for all time.

  Penhallow and the scholar Merryn–the wits and pedantry of the operation, respectively–have been arguing about this all the way from the wreck of the Leander, though their oars clank softly, and their voices are pitched as not to carry over the water. Merryn thinks the English magicians will find the trick of it again someday, so they might once again cast something extraordinary even on these godforsaken shores. Never, says Penhallow. The sea will give up her dead before she allows enchantment at her edges.

  “And it’s just as well,” she adds. “We don’t have need of it. We want for nothing.”

  In the broadside of this outrageous opinion Merryn is mustering return fire when the lights flash over the headland. Two fast blinks, then two slow: hurry, hurry.

  “Quickly!” Penhallow calls to the flotilla ahead; she and Merryn are the rear guard. “Out and unload!”

  They’re on the shore now, pulling up the boats. Hurry, but handle carefully: this is all precious stuff, potions and packages, rum bottles, fine lace. Leander went down with no loss of life three days past and what’s left is decidedly salvage.

  Over the hill, silver tack jingles, and a horse picks up speed at the prick of spurs. This is Newlyn Trevelyan, who rides for the Crown. An austere figure, Trevelyan; a precise speaker, a born horsewoman; no home or hearth fire that anyone knows of. “Saltwater for blood,” say the villagers along the coast, hissing through their teeth, but that’s nothing untoward in this place where all souls sing of the sea. Trevelyan has grey eyes and ice in her marrow and is so much the living embodiment of His Majesty’s Inland Revenue that there are those who wonder if she can be human at all.

  (She is. Penhallow knows. More on that later.)

  Hurry!

  Now it’s just potion jars left—green, pink, and red. Decorations for fancy folk’s parties, Pen thinks with disdain; not like the real enchantments that Merryn prays will someday return to Kernow. If one of the jars cracks, they’ll be awash in glittery nothings—peacocks, elephants and birds-of-paradise.

  Which is not a consummation devoutly to be wished with Trevelyan on the other side of the hill. “Careful!” Pen calls, still low but carrying. “Jackie, Ram Das! Into the tunnels!”

  Her voice echoes. The coast beneath the town–also Penhallow; Pen was named for it—is as delicate a lacework as anything they smuggle from France, friable rock riddled with passageways at the mercy of the sea’s ebb and flow. Pen’s men and women who know their way through the darkness are waiting just within the entrances. Jackie hefts the crates with enthusiasm—this is his first time out under a smuggler’s moon—and the unseen watchers take them from him. By dawn the cove and most of the tunnels will be underwater, and the boxes stowed safe in the farthest caverns, to be retrieved when the tide falls again.

  “Quickly,” Penhallow calls again, not to chide, but time is not on their side. “No, Jackie, lad. Right, not left.”

  The left-hand path runs deep underground and then deep under the water. The wind sings inside those passageways with nothing to raise it, and the shadows whisper in long-forgotten cants. Penhallow doesn’t believe in the fairy folk, but she’s a sensible creature. All her
girls and boys march sharp right.

  Another flash of the lights: three rapid blinks, then the long one.

  One more agonising minute, and the crates are all unloaded, the boats beached and secured. “Tomorrow,” Ram Das says, and ducks away, his footsteps the last to disappear into the earth. Jackie lingers – Pen promised his mum she’d see him right to his doorstep – and she and Merryn snuff out the lanterns just as Trevelyan crests the hill. She pauses, her straight-backed-profile a sharp cut-out in the moonlight, then moves on. No lights on the beach; none on the wreck. The hoofbeats fade away in a soft, regular rhythm.

  Pen lets out a breath and leads the way to where the ponies are tethered. It’s a squelch of a journey – as ever in this thrice-damned damp Kernow – but a job well-done. The Leander went down with a cargo bound for the New World. Those little enchantment bottles cross the Atlantic with the benefit of European cachet, but they’ll fetch a pretty price here right enough and the whole town will eat well in consequence.

  (Pen has read most of the books of her family’s inheritance, but would have to ask Merryn how to pronounce ‘cachet’.)

  “There you are, lad,” Pen says, to Jackie. “First time out, and you did just fine. Didn’t I tell you?”

  Jackie gives her an amiable smile, lets her clap him on the back. And then the bottle falls out of his sleeve and cracks on the hard ground.

  Peacocks. Green, glittering, glorious with light, visible a mile off. Fucking peacocks.

  “Scatter!” Pen yelps. She and Merryn run and duck together, slotting themselves into the long ridge of gorse. She reaches for Jackie, misses grabbing his arm, but he’s close behind. No doubt he’d thought to sneak the bottle home and impress a girl with it. Pen swears silently at the idiocy of youth and keeps her head down.

  But perhaps it’s no harm done, after all. The little enchantment fades to nothingness, leaving just a faint sparkle in the air. The empty bottle rolls away, and Jackie’s almost under cover. Pen sighs with relief, then realises it’s too late.

  Trevelyan halts and dismounts in a single movement. She’s done years of heavy work on this stretch of coast, brought in naval men from Plymouth and unravelled smuggler operations like spun silk. But this isn’t a case where she needs to expend any significant effort. She picks up the empty bottle, inspects its Leander cargo label and its lack of excise mark. Jackie, who froze in place at the sight of her, is standing there with his mouth open like a codfish.

  “Name, boy,” Trevelyan says.

  “Jackie.”

  Trevelyan merely stares at him.

  “Nanskevel,” the lad says. Penhallow shifts forwards, so as to see better. Charging in wholesale would likely just get herself and Merryn arrested in turn, and she’ll need her freedom as well as all her guile to get him off this charge. Smuggling in these parts is a hanging offence, but it’s taking a while for the gravity of Jackie’s situation to descend upon him. His affable face strains from the effort of exerting his intelligence.

  Trevelyan considers, then hoists the boy into the saddle with her. He squeaks but has the blessed wits not to try and catch Pen’s eye. She lurks beneath the bushes and is grateful for that small mercy, and the hoofbeats fade again.

  When the coast is clear Merryn spits into the gorse, and disturbs one final peacock, which struts off into the darkness. “Time was,” she says, “when the Revenue would stay bought.”

  Pen remembers. They could have had the boy home for his breakfast.

  But no one’s tried to buy off Trevelyan and lived to speak of it. They trudge on towards the horses.

  In the morning Pen gets a visit from Goodwife Nanskevel, Jackie’s mother: a chattering, silly woman, who takes in washing and lodgers, and cries for the fall of every sparrow. “He’s just a boy,” she says, wiping her eyes with her apron. “Just seventeen. Just foolish. Pen, if you could do something for him, if you could say a word in the officer’s ear—”

  “I can’t promise,” Penhallow says, “but I’ll do my best for him.”

  “You’re a fool, Pen,” says Merryn, who doesn’t suffer them gladly. She’s right, of course; if the Revenue won’t be bought, there’s nothing to be done for the boy save a clean shirt before the Assizes. After that he’ll be in other hands.

  Nonetheless. Penhallow walks through the cobbled streets of the town, thumbs hooked in her pockets, and for all the good it will do, puts the fear of the Lord in the boy’s gaoler. The elderly village constable is susceptible to Penhallow’s name—Pen is its only bearer at present, and shoulders its whole weight accordingly—but it’s more than his job’s worth to interfere with the due process of the Law. (Pen can hear the initial capital.) And then she’s getting dispirited, and the sun is over the yardarm. She steps inside the Crooked Arms and finds it unoccupied, save for a gentleman with fine braid around his cuffs and ruffles on his shirt, wearing boots Pen can see her face in. He’s peering into a half-pint tankard as though it offends him.

  And also: Trevelyan. Hands clasped, pensive. Pen rarely sees her by daylight and thinks: she looks tired. Not that Pen isn’t the same way, having got to her bed as the sun was coming up and out of it again for Goody Nanskevel. “About Jackie,” she says.

  “The boy.” Trevelyan looks up at her. “Apprehended in an illicit endeavour in the full sight of the Revenue. You’ve come to beg for his life?”

  Pen blinks. Penhallow, like the town: with its weight and dignity. “To request that his mother might see him. I don’t beg.”

  “No.” Trevelyan seems startled by herself, as though coming out of a dream. “No, of course not. I apologise, Penhallow.”

  An apology from an officer of the Crown. Pen stares at her in mute amazement, as Trevelyan gets up and strides out with spurs jangling, resolutely on her way to God knows where. When she’s gone, the man dressed in rich cloth comes up to Pen.

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, ah, Miss—”

  “Penhallow. Just Penhallow.”

  The man nods. “I’d thought to speak with you. About, ah, smuggling. In these parts.”

  Pen resists the urge to hush his mouth with her fist and ask if he were born in a barn. “I fear you must be confusing me with someone else, sir,” she says politely. “That was the Revenue officer just leaving.”

  “I hear she made an arrest last night,” the man says. “A young lad with a bottle of something he shouldn’t have had. I doubt he’ll hang.” He waves a hand. “Not in Kernow, not with a jury of his peers. But would you want to take the risk?”

  Pen starts paying attention. “Who are you, to speak to me so?”

  His fingers uncurl and a seal clinks on the bar in front of him. It’s made of dull metal, the engraving worn to nothing by centuries. Pen has seen things like it in her father’s books.

  “My name is Deveraux,” the man says. “Perhaps you’d care to take a walk, Miss Penhallow.”

  “Just Penhallow,” Pen says irritably. But she follows him out to the harbour edge out of curiosity more than anything.

  “Lovely part of the world, this.” Deveraux gestures around him with the beer mug, which he’s apparently appropriated from the pub. The sun is dazzling, the fishing boats lining up on their return. “Wouldn’t do the ride down again, for God’s love. Bruises weren’t the worst of it. Tell me something, Miss Penhallow. What do you know of magic?”

  “Less than most,” Pen says briskly. “We don’t hold with it here.”

  “You can’t hold with it here,” Deveraux says. “All the better. If I had a package I needed out of the country in a hurry. If it were—dangerous. If, in the wrong hands, it might cause more plagues than just peacocks.”

  News does travel fast, Pen thinks sourly. Damn the boy, anyway.

  “The tunnels,” Deveraux prompts, after a while. “The ones beneath the beach. You know your way around, I’m sure.”

  “That’s as well as may be,” Pen says. “For all I know you’re a travelling charlatan.”

  He isn’t. Not with
the seal of the King’s messengers, with the same ancient insignia that marks Trevelyan’s collar. But Pen’s stubborn. (Too stubborn. Merryn despairs. Will you ever know the love of a good woman, Pen, and you almost forty.)

  Deveraux glances at her, then pours his tankard out into the harbour. He leans down, fills it again with brine, tosses his seal into it as though it weren’t worth cut rubies, and hands the tankard to Pen. “Drink.”

  “I see the ride from London addled your brain as well as your arse,” Pen observes.

  “Drink,” Deveraux says again, and Pen shrugs; one may as well indulge the touched. She dips her head to the brine, and then stills, a shiver passing through her sinews—it’s fresh water.

  (Speaking of those touched: When magic began to pass from Kernow, it was said to be the reckoning that was due to her. Inhabited time out of mind by intemperate, wilful, pagan-fey people, finally brought low by a righteous God—but it turned out they were the first, not the only. Magic is leaving everywhere on an island, everywhere bruised by the sea. A king’s seal is an old, great, powerful thing, but a last thing. Its like will not be seen here again.)

  “I hope that will suffice for my credentials,” Deveraux says. “To business, then. I have something that needs to be kept safe overnight, then rowed out on tomorrow’s tide. Something powerful, you understand. Not to be pried upon, not to be tampered with. If it gets clear away, so does your lad. Agreed?”

  He pours the fresh water back into the harbour as he says it, each droplet a separate jewel. It will be a shame, Pen thinks, if this is the last Cornish springtime that Jackie will ever see.

  “Tonight,” she says. “An hour before sundown, the headland north-northwest. I’ll leave a light. Don’t be late.”

  Deveraux holds out a hand and they shake on it. He ambles off into the town once the bargain is concluded but Pen lingers where she is, contemplative in the sunshine, with the taste of clear water still crisp in her mouth.