“It’s the will of the gods,” McKenna hissed. “I know you’re an impious little shit, but I won’t be cursed because you decided to run from your first responsibility.”
“What gods?” Tiwa said. He made a mocking face and looked all around. “Where are they? I’ve never seen one and neither have you—nobody even believed in the gods when the world was electric, and they did fine!”
McKenna’s face paled and her eyes grew wide as Tiwa spoke. He took small pride in scandalizing the weakling, but then a rough hand fell on his shoulder.
“Until they didn’t,” Brandan’s deep voice rumbled. “You shame yourself, Tiwa.”
Tiwa looked up into the druid’s weathered, tawny face with a suddenly dry throat. The adults were all staring at him, and the hill rose horribly behind them, and beyond that the forest waited closer than Tiwa ever liked to see at night. A stark white cow lowed sleepily between the wicker man’s legs, blissfully unaware of what this ritual would mean for her. Tiwa envied her.
“It’s time,” Brandan said. “Come.”
McKenna followed, shoulders hunched and hood pulled forward to avoid the eyes of everyone she had ever known. Tiwa clenched his fists and ground his teeth but followed all the same. The crowd parted, whispering as the winter prince and winter princess crested the hill.
Tiwa and McKenna took their places at the right and left hand of the wicker man. The tumbled brick, shattered glass and twisted, vine-strangled metal of the dead River City glistened in the moonlight in the valley below. Brandan’s assistant handed him a bone-white knife and stood aside. Brandan stroked the white cow’s velvet snout, then turned to the people and raised his knife.
“The gods demand sacrifice,” he called, in a voice clear and bright as the moon above. They chanted his words back like the tide. “And we give gladly, dreaming of spring.”
McKenna and Tiwa knew their part. No sense in defiance now. Tiwa lifted his voice.
“Our forebears forgot their duty under the electric glow,” Brandan said. The people called back.
“They forgot that prosperity and life have a price,” McKenna said. The people called back.
“We do not forget,” Tiwa said, though his face twisted in disgust. Secretly he’d always suspected the world going dark was just a thing that happened with no moral dimension one way or the other, like a thunderstorm or getting kicked in the head by a donkey. Even if the gods did exist, who could say what they wanted or why? “We hear the voices of the gods, and we gladly pay our debts.”
“When will winter end?” the people called.
“When we have proven our devotion,” Brandan said, “or never, whichever comes first.” He slashed the cow’s neck. Blood gushed forth, black as rich earth in the moonlight, and ran through the wet, slick grass.
She did not struggle or cry out, but merely lay on her stomach and blinked at the incomprehensible world as her life faded. The people took her calm as a sign the gods watched and approved.
Brandan knelt in the tide of blood and kissed the cow on her forehead, then rose again. “All rests on the resolve of our king and queen.” He held out a hand and another assistant approached and passed him a torch. “A boy will never know manhood. A girl will never know womanhood. We thank them for their blessed sacrifice.”
“We thank them for their blessed sacrifice,” the crowd called.
Tiwa did not feel blessed, and even McKenna felt a shadow of doubt.
Brandan touched the torch to the wicker. Flame crawled up the leg, casting the faces below in otherworldly light. The sounds and smells of roasting beef washed along the wind. All voices rose in song.
A roar washed down the hill into dilapidated streets as the fire blazed unnaturally high. McKenna and Tiwa covered their eyes, and the people gasped, and Brandan stood calmly.
“The veil thins,” Brandan said. He wrapped the knife in a rag and slipped it into his belt. “The dead walk. The crown passes. Go now. Find comfort. Mourn the passing of McKenna and Tiwa. Pray that winter is short.”
The crowd dispersed. Brandan turned to address the children while his attendants set about cleaning.
“I know you think I’m a monster,” he said.
Tiwa crossed his arms and spit in the grass. McKenna squeezed Summer’s haft and shook her head.
“You speak for the gods!” she said, but her voice shook with fear and sadness. “Who would I be to...to—”
“A human who wishes to stay alive,” Brandan said. He rested a hand on her shoulder. “No shame in that.”
“How kind,” Tiwa spat. “I suppose this exchange will warm your heart while you sleep by your fire and we freeze in the woods. Can we go?”
“Not yet,” Brandan said. His eyes drifted between them. “Heed me,” he said. “Do you know what happens when girlhood is burned out of a girl?”
“She withers and dies,” Tiwa said flatly. All the children had been raised on stories of this ritual, on the off chance that they might be chosen. It was meant to be an honor, or at least the adults said so, and no parent wanted their child to shame them or, worse yet, fail in their duty.
“And what happens when boyhood is burned out of a boy?”
“The same,” McKenna said in a small voice.
“You should know,” Brandan said, “that you will not be escorted to the thrones.”
McKenna and Tiwa scanned the bridge spanning the river and, beyond it, the path leading to the forest, with narrowed eyes. They’d assumed an escort waited in the darkness. It was how things were done—a dutiful young person might walk this far on their own, but in the forest alone? In the dark? It would only be human to break and run. Still, from this high vantage, with light from the fire pouring down, where would they even hide?
“Wait,” Tiwa said. He leaned in and smiled conspiratorially. “So we can leave? You’re just letting us go?”
Brandan cuffed the side of his head. Tiwa stomped and issued a stream of curses.
“I’m telling you I trust you!” Brandan said. “And I need you to trust me. Attend closely, because this is the last thing I will say before you must go: I am not blind. I know your lives have been...hard. Disappointing. But no matter what you have endured, there are people in this village you love. Who love you, in the only way they know how. Picture their faces while I speak. The stakes are very real, I promise you, and if you fail to do your part tonight, a five-year winter will kill or drive into exile everyone you have ever known.”
“But—” Tiwa said.
“And if I’m wrong?” Brandan said. “If there is no curse, and the thrones in the forest are little more than dead stone?”
He snapped, and an attendant brought two packs heavy with gear and provisions and dropped them at McKenna’s and Tiwa’s feet. “No guards. No threats. You’ve done your part and you’re free to go. Strike out for a place where you can be what your spirits say you are, and no druid will bar your path.” He jabbed a finger first at McKenna, who flinched, and then at Tiwa, who blinked and huffed. “But know that if the curse is real, as I say, and you resolve to do what you must, that there is a way to survive the sacrifice. Only you two can do this.”
“Isn’t that cheating?” McKenna said.
“How do we survive?” Tiwa said. “Tell us!”
“I will say no more,” Brandan said. He embraced the children, wished them good luck, bade them to keep faith, and set off for the village with his attendants following on his heels.
The clouds parted. Mingled silver and orange light bathed the crumbling bridge and the trees at the edge of the forest. McKenna and Tiwa watched the old druid walk down the westward path until he disappeared behind a pile of bricks that had once been a cafe, both feeling naked despite their heavy clothes as they put together what he’d said about their lives thus far.
Up to this moment the king and queen had imagined themselves quite subtle,
had convinced themselves that they might fail to be a perfect son or daughter, but that the secret in their heart was perfectly safe. Not so apparently. And then, almost as one, they put the pieces together.
“Oh,” Tiwa said. “You too?”
“Yes,” McKenna said. She shouldered her pack and strode toward the bridge.
“Hey,” Tiwa said. “Wait!” He grabbed his pack and trotted after her, cursing the length of her legs almost as much, he realized, as she probably did. As much as he hated being short, someone with the heart of a girl must have despised the idea of towering over her peers.
But she did not wait, nor did she look back.
“Slow down!” He pouted once he caught up to her. She kept her eyes straight ahead. “Why so cross? At least we finally know we’re the same.”
“We are not the same,” McKenna said. She stopped at the end of the bridge, squatted, and set about lighting a torch.
“But Brandan said...” Tiwa mumbled. “I thought... I’m a boy, in my heart anyway, and...” He swallowed and squared his shoulders. “Aren’t you as well? Not a boy, I mean, but—”
“A girl?” McKenna said. “I am.”
After the third strike of flint against stone the torch lit and she rose to walk further down a narrow game trail. From a distance the forest seemed to be nothing but trees climbing the mountainside, but once you got close to it, once you got inside it, it became clear that this forest was the destiny of all the dead, electric cities without people to clear and cultivate them.
Oaks and peach trees in their fall colors erupted through pharmacies long ago cleaned of every useful medicine. White pines and Fraser firs twisted their way out of banks, withering kudzu on the crosses from old churches. The trees seemed to rise forever into the sky and the darkness seemed to move, but if McKenna was afraid, she did not show it. “Still, I’m not like you.”
“But—” Tiwa started.
McKenna turned, the torchlight glittering in her narrowed eyes, and Tiwa wilted.
“I never laughed while my friends threw cow shit at you,” she hissed.
“I...”
“I never drove livestock into the hills with my games. I never broke the scavver’s son’s thumb and called him a weakling when he ran home sobbing. I also never stole old world tools from my neighbors when the scavver justifiably stopped selling to me because I brutalized his son. I never smashed the fence Widow Yadira’s husband built for her before he died!”
“Come on!” Tiwa said. He struggled to light his own torch under her withering gaze. “It was just a bit of fun, and that last one was an accident. We never—”
“Did your ‘friend’ Beli tell you he spied me kissing the bard who came through last summer?”
Tiwa’s face went slack. He remembered the bard, yes, and Beli snickering about something, but he hadn’t heard...he’d never imagined...and didn’t he remember the man saying he was nineteen or twenty?
Under all the confusion, a little spark of indignation burned in Tiwa’s chest that a man that old would kiss McKenna when she’d only been fourteen. The spark faded to guilt as Tiwa recalled all the other bad things he had allowed to happen to her.
“You’ve laughed at the things Beli’s yelled at me since then,” she said. “Did he tell you he told my father and brothers?” She leaned closer to Tiwa with each sentence until their noses almost touched, and had the dense woods not been to his back Tiwa thought he very well might run away. “How do you think they felt, knowing their ‘son’ and their ‘brother’ had kissed a man? Did he tell you they beat me?”
“I never meant anything by it,” Tiwa said in a small voice. His torch finally caught and he did his best to stand with dignity.
“I know boys think so, but girls aren’t stupid,” McKenna said. “Whatever I am, I’m not stupid either. I always suspected things about you, and when we were small, I even thought you handsome. I almost considered broaching the subject with you, trying to be your friend.” She turned and continued down the trail. “But then I realized that whatever else you are, you’re a nasty, cruel little brute. So, no, we are nothing alike, despite what we might have in common.”
Tiwa ground his teeth, his face hot with the directionless anger and resentment of a young man who doesn’t want to feel shame. They walked in thunderous silence. Time passed, though neither could say how much with the overgrown ruins hiding the heavens.
The darkness to either side of the trail seemed to twitch and rattle with a thousand growls and chirps and hisses. Fear flashed on the king’s and queen’s faces, but neither was willing to let the other see.
“Why didn’t you hate me for—” Tiwa said eventually.
“For being a beast?” McKenna said. Relief flashed in her eyes at the sound of another human voice, but she hid it with a flip of her hair. “I did. I do. Here I thought I’d made that clear.”
“No,” Tiwa said. “Why didn’t you hate me for having what you wanted?” He held his arms out as if to encompass his entire body, seeming shorter and less comfortably shaped every day, and a look of disgust spread across his face so thoroughly that McKenna’s glare couldn’t help softening. “And wasting it.”
“Audrinahae sets souls in motion as she will,” McKenna muttered, though a guilty twinge plucked the corners of her eyes. “It is not my place to—”
“Don’t use the gods as an excuse!” Tiwa said, and the forest seemed to go quiet.
“Don’t raise your voice at me!” McKenna said.
Tiwa opened his mouth to yell again despite her protest, but a sound froze him in place. It started with a loud snap and a snuffling like a bear, then grew into the groaning of trees being pushed aside and a rumble like a landslide somehow slowed down.
“Be quiet,” Tiwa said.
“You be quiet,” McKenna hissed. She grabbed him and pulled. “Come on, it’s probably just a deer.”
“Bigger than a deer,” Tiwa whispered. He saw an eye open through the trees, and it seemed almost to glow with an inner fire. “We need to get off the trail. Hide.”
“Don’t be a fool,” McKenna said. “The gods wouldn’t let—”
A twisted giant lurched into the light, half again as tall as McKenna, with skin the color of stone, long, spindly limbs, the face of a horrible old woman, and a right hand with an index finger like a long obsidian knife. The thing kept this appearance for only an instant.
In a blink its stone form warped into a towering copy of McKenna’s father, with his heavy brows and arms just a little too long and heavy for his frame. The stone face sneered, and one over-long limb reached out faster than should have been possible, snatching McKenna by the neck and driving her into the mud.
Summer clattered to the ground. The stone giant leaned in close to the lanky girl, its face especially horrible for all the ways it resembled her own, but somehow gone wrong.
Gibberish billowed over its tongue, and its gaze bored hungrily into her. McKenna kicked and scratched and pried at the hand, but it fixed her to the earth like a tree grown overnight.
Tiwa willed himself to move, but with every moment the giant seemed to grow larger and more grotesque, its back bulging and its stone skin rippling as muscles warped impossibly.
“Run,” McKenna rasped with what little breath she had left.
Tiwa took one step back, and then another, his head rattling with visions of the life he could make if he ran. His gaze darted from the salivating, monstrous face back to McKenna’s struggling features growing paler by the second. One more step away.
But then, in a flash, he saw himself from the outside, and he thought: The boy McKenna thinks I am would have run away without being told.
He clenched his fists. He willed his right foot to slide forward through the mud. The giant laughed and bared more of its awful teeth. McKenna’s gaze darted to Tiwa, wild and desperate. He kicked Summer up and into his out
stretched hand as easy as slipping into a shoe and lunged forward with a jab worthy of Cú Chulainn.
The giant batted the blow aside but left room for McKenna to wriggle free. She scrambled to her feet, coughing and clutching her throat as her heels slid and sent her crashing into a tree trunk.
The giant wheeled on Tiwa, its form shifting to a new horror, the undulating mass blocking the path, its burning eye singing like rock heated to the breaking point. Tiwa dropped into a low stance and licked his lips.
A golden light began to grow in the core of Summer’s haft, brighter and brighter in tune with the beat of Tiwa’s heart.
“Tiwa...” McKenna coughed.
“You run!” Tiwa growled.
The giant’s eyes flared and it lashed out. Tiwa dodged and jumped higher than he’d known he could. The giant overextended, stumbled forward, and howled as Summer bit into its shoulder, chipping away bits of stone.
Its shape solidified into Tiwa’s grandmother Athas, whose blind right eye had frightened him when he was small and who used to cuff him in the head and whip him with switches when he refused to wear dresses and dance in ceremony with “other girls.”
When Tiwa landed McKenna was gone, but a kick from the giant’s prone form robbed him of the chance to dwell on it.
Shame and fear tore through McKenna like a fever as she sprinted away, her torch guttering in time with the tears streaming down her cheeks. She shut her burning eyes and let her feet carry her blind down a straight section of the trail dotted here and there with chunks of asphalt. She snapped her eyes open as hoofbeats pounded just off the trail.
She looked out through hazy eyes and just made out a black coat highlighted orange by slivers of torchlight, black hooves tearing through the underbrush as if over an open plain, and a single golden eye casting its own eerie light.
Lacking other options and quickly growing exhausted, she came to a slow, gasping stop.
The creature stopped beside her and kept its golden eye pinned to her, though a wall of trees and rusted iron light fixtures remained between them.
Out Now Page 26
