Kani was not jealous of the older children, she knew the years would pass quickly, but she was jealous of the seagulls. She knew the feel of the wind under her wings and longed to feel it again.
The mother and daughter walked until they came to a clearing in the trees with a view of the cone-shaped mountain, its black slopes dotted in green. Kani pointed.
“Again?” her mother asked.
The girl nodded and smiled. “Ashna. Kyla.” The toddler had learned to speak before she had learned to walk.
The woman squatted down and looked deep in her daughter’s eyes. “Kyla had the gift of life-knowing, a great and powerful fire mage she was. It was she who became a dragon and saved us when Ashna’s Heart was stolen.”
“Sisters,” Kani said.
Her mother laughed. “Yes, the legend says that Ashna and Kyla were long-ago-sisters and she made amends for her jealously by saving our beautiful island after Ashna’s Heart was stolen.”
Kani nodded, for her mother to continue, and because she knew it to not be legend, but the truth.
She remembered it all.
~***~
Robert J. McCarter is the author of six novels, three novellas, and dozens of short stories. He is a finalist for the Writers of the Future contest and his stories have appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and numerous anthologies.
He has written a series of first person ghost novels (starting with Shuffled Off: A Ghost’s Memoir) and a superhero / love story series (Neutrinoman and Lightningirl: A Love Story), as well as two short story collections. Next up is Woody and June versus the Apocalypse, a story of adventure and love and taking things (even the apocalypse) in stride.
Of his latest novel, Seeing Forever, Kirkus Reviews says, “Sci-fi as it should be: engaging, moving, and grand in scope.”
He lives in the mountains of Arizona with his amazing wife and his ridiculously adorable dog. Find out more at RobertJMcCarter.com
APTITUDE
MATT YOUNGMARK
The great house Frinzil was born in was a stone-by-stone recreation of a much older castle, only cleaner, better ventilated, and plopped down in the inhospitable terrain of the Conquered Lands. It was called Orlehea Manor only because the name Orlehea Castle had already been claimed by its architectural ancestor. The Manor itself was utterly immense, employing dozens of servants who got up to any number of shenanigans, indiscretions and intrigues when not properly supervised. Some of these intrigues, as you would imagine, inevitably led to childbirth.
It should be noted that none of the resulting children were the secret offspring of the Master of the house. Lord Orlehea was roughly as gay as it was possible to be, and quite sterile on top of that. He and Lady Orlehea did not at all care for children but permitted the servants to keep their offspring on the property, provided that they caused no trouble and stayed entirely out of sight.
Three such offspring currently enjoying the Orleheas’ begrudging hospitality were presently hiding beneath a bush, competing for the best view of the greeting procession about to take place. Two of them are largely inconsequential to our tale, so you needn’t concern yourself with their names. The third was Frinzil. She was thirteen years old, and today was the day she would discover what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.
Greeting processions were not rare at Orlehea Manor. In fact, the Lord and Lady entertained an endless stream of guests, since their childlessness meant the castle would eventually be passed down to some as-yet-undesignated relation1. According to chatter in the hallways, though, the impending carriage didn’t carry yet another favor-currying cousin. The Orleheas would be welcoming visiting dignitaries, and visiting dignitaries were a big deal.
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1 Assuming, of course, that Westerhelm hadn’t lost dominion over the region by then—the Conquered Lands didn’t earn their name because they had been conquered a couple of times.
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The children had managed to catch glimpses of many strange visitors from their post beneath the shrubbery—dwarves from valleys between the mountains, elves from the peaks high above them, gnomes from mysterious, hidden cities, and centaurs from their settlements on the plains. Once the Orleheas had hosted a contingent of werewolves (they weren’t much to look at, but slept in rooms barricaded from the outside, which was particularly terrifying for the manor’s younger inhabitants). The territory known as the Conquered Lands was either a gargantuan island or a tiny continent, depending on how one classified such things, and fully twenty-two different civilizations had ruled over it during the past thousand years2. Descendants of these various conquerors still populated the countryside, having been raised on legends of past glory and prophecies of the day their people would rise-up and reclaim the lands they had somehow all convinced themselves was their one true ancestral home.
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2 Twenty-three if you counted the century when it was inhabited exclusively by ghosts.
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From the bushes, the children saw a single carriage approach the assembled masses lined up outside the castle gates and held their breath in anticipation. The driver reined his horses, stopped the coach, climbed down from his seat and swung open the passenger door.
Out stepped a stout, middle-aged, human man who would have fit in perfectly at any Orlehea family reunion.
“I told you it was just some stupid magistrate or something,” the older of the two boys muttered. He was a horrible brat and habitual liar—in fact, he had been speculating wildly about the impending visit all week, and just moments ago had insisted it would surely prove to be hill giants, or possibly a lizard mage.
“Yeah,” the younger boy said. He was a fairly sweet child, even if he followed the older one around like a puppy and occasionally soaked up some of his less-appealing characteristics. He was, for his part, entirely failing to hide his own disappointment. “Magistrates are stupid,” he sniffled.
“Wait,” Frinzil said in an exaggerated whisper. “Can you see if he has earlobes? If he doesn’t have earlobes, he might not even be a magistrate. He might be a changeling.”
“Shut up, it’s not a changeling,” the older boy grunted, pushing the younger one’s head aside to get a better look. “Do you think it’s a changeling?”
Frinzil could be fairly certain it wasn’t, considering that changelings were a story invented to frighten children and didn’t actually exist3. “Maybe! Look close—you can always tell changelings by their—”
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3 This, it should be noted, made them only slightly more imaginary than lizard mages.
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Before she could finish, a second figure emerged from the carriage. He was tall and slender beneath his voluminous robes, and by far the most beautiful creature any of the children had ever set eyes upon, with delicate features and a dark blue complexion the color of twilight on a clear summer’s eve. The lobes of his ears, for the record, weren’t distinct in any way, but their points rose almost to the top of his head.
The older boy’s jaw dropped. “It’s a lizard mage!”
The magistrate—or whoever the first man out of the carriage was—spoke. “Lord and Lady Orlehea, it is my great pleasure to introduce Mister Javrael from the Cavern Kingdom of the Deep Elves.”
Several distinct populations of sentient creatures thrived far beneath the surface of the Conquered Lands, and technically, the empire didn’t have dominion over any of them. In fact, Westerhelm didn’t even have formal relations with the Deep Elves (Frinzil knew this because she devoured every single book she could get her hands on, and much of the literature she had access to involved the rather dry subject of diplomacy). The guests were traveling with no servants other than their driver, which was unusual. Their tiny contingent was dwarfed by the massive assembly that had turned out to greet them.
Granted, what appeared to be a pair of guests was in fact a trio, since a third visiting dignitary was hiding quietly bene
ath the elf’s robes. More on that particular detail later.
After exchanging complicated bows, Lord Orlehea presented the elf with an ornate, jewel-encrusted book as a gift. It was a copy of the Orlehea family history, and it meant that, as exotic as he may be, Mister Javrael wasn’t particularly important. In fact, Lord Orlehea had dozens of copies crated up in his basement and handed them out like boiled sweets.
“It would be my honor to add this volume to my collection,” the elf said. His Imperial Common was flawless. “In exchange, I humbly offer a shrk krael, the traditional ceremonial dessert of my people.”
Lady Orlehea gasped, which led Frinzil to believe the elf must have broken some taboo dessert protocol—and to be fair to her, nobles certainly had very specific rules surrounding what and when they were supposed to eat. It turned out, though, that the exact opposite was true.
“We couldn’t possibly accept so extravagant a gift!” the Lady insisted. “Such a delicacy—”
“—Is not nearly so precious in my own country as it is on the surface,” the Elf insisted. “I assure you that I have had the better of this exchange, my Lady. And at any rate, the wyrm larvae can grow upwards of four hundred pounds and must be candied whole, so I daresay I’ve brought enough that your entire staff might eat their fill.”
He looked directly at one of the Lady’s handmaidens as he spoke the last part, and the poor girl’s knees trembled visibly. Adults were always swooning at the slightest provocation and assuring Frinzil that she would understand why once she became a woman. However, she had become a woman quite unceremoniously more than two months before, just after her thirteenth birthday, and still didn’t understand what the big deal was supposed to be.
In fact, despite Mister Javrael’s undisputed beauty, it was his clothing that had transfixed her. Specifically, an ornate glyph on the breast of his robe. It certainly wasn’t Imperial Common, or Gnomish or Elvish or any of the other written languages she was familiar with. Nevertheless, she was certain she had seen that specific mark somewhere before.
Just as she was about to make the connection, a rough hand grasped the back of her blouse, and she was pulled out of the bushes in a single yank.
“Better fetch the poison—looks like we’ve got hedge rats again.”
It was Mister Crosshanks from the gardening staff, and he grasped Frinzil and the older boy by their wrists, quickly hauling them around a corner and out of view of the procession. The younger boy squealed and fled, but he was unlikely to escape whatever punishment lay in store, since Crosshanks was his father.
Frinzil expected to be scolded on the spot, but the groundskeeper kept dragging them all the way around the castle to one of the servant entrances at the rear. The children hadn’t simply been caught. They were being fetched. Standing just inside the wooden doorway was Missus Parchkuk, a towering, broad-shouldered orcish woman, with her arms crossed and a glare on her face that could have curdled milk.
“These two were right where you said they’d be, along with my little’un,” Crosshanks said. “Spying.”
“We were keeping out of sight, ma’am,” Frinzil said. “I made sure of it.”
“I’m certain you did,” Missus Parchkuk said, “which is why your heads are still attached to your shoulders.” The boy made a little involuntary whimpering sound. Although Lord Orlehea employed a human butler who was technically in charge of the Manor staff, Missus Parchkuk ran the show, and everyone knew it.
“Now, if you want to keep them there, you’ll tell me which of you is responsible for this.”
She strode off down the hall, and Crosshanks shepherded them along behind her. Missus Parchkuk stopped in front of a door that Frinzil had never actually seen open in all of her thirteen years, although she was acutely aware of what lay beyond it. It was Lord Orlehea’s library, and it housed one of the most extensive collections of books in the Conquered Lands.
The door was ajar, and Frinzil could see a short trail of mud smeared on the floor a few feet past it, and a book laying open, pages down, at the base of one of the massive bookcases.
She was aghast. For children, the library was the forbidden room among many, many forbidden rooms in Orlehea Manor. It was obvious to her that one of the boys—the younger one, if her hunch was right, after being goaded into it by the elder—had run into the room on a dare, yanked a random book of a shelf and run out just for the thrill of misbehaving.
The boy’s expression hardened. He might still be scared, but his survival instinct now overpowered his fear. “I saw Frinzil do it,” he said.
Missus Parchkuk’s brow fell, her face slipping from her putting-on-a-show-of-being-strict face into what Frinzil recognized as genuine anger. “Is that so?”
“No! I was helping Miss Posey prepare guest suites all morning!” It was the absolute truth—unlike her counterpart, Frinzil was a magnificently poor liar. Even the story she had spun earlier about changelings wouldn’t have survived the most casual cross-examination. She was well aware of this shortcoming, so stuck with honesty as a general rule. “Check with her! She’ll tell you!”
“Oh, I will,” Missus Parchkuk said. “Frinzil, you must know the penalty for this. If any of you are caught in that room, you’ll be thrown out of this house for good. But the little ones, at least, can drag their parents out the door with them. You do not have that luxury.”
Missus Parchkuk was Frinzil’s mother. Or adopted mother, at any rate—she and her husband, Mr. Garrkrul the cook, were the only parents Frinzil had ever known. They had taken her in and brought her up as their own when a troubled scullery maid abandoned her baby and her job in the dead of night just days after childbirth, the moment she had recovered enough strength to pack a bag and steal a horse. Parchkuk and Garrkrul were the only two orcs in Orlehea Manor, having come over with the Lord and Lady from the old country. They were treated very nearly the same as the human members of the staff, and it took Frinzil many years to understand the subtle difference: if one of the other servants abandoned their employment, he or she would find it nearly impossible to find other work without a letter to recommend them. If Missus Parchkuk or Mr. Garrkrul did the same thing, they would be hunted down and brought back in chains.
The look in Missus Parchkuk’s eyes had shifted again, from anger to concern. She was legendarily fair with the staff, even those who clearly didn’t deserve such treatment. Much more than her intimidating appearance, it was the reason she commanded the respect of all but the worst elements of the household. However, Frinzil knew that any infraction she might perpetrate—and there had been plenty, over the years—would result in a harsher punishment than another child might incur, to avoid even the appearance of favoritism. “Look at me, young woman, and tell me you were not in the library today.”
Frinzil met her gaze, unflinching. “I have never once set foot in that library.”
~*~
Frinzil crouched in the darkness, knees pressed against her chest, legs slowly cramping. The things had sprouted like bramblevines over the past year, and if they got much longer, she wouldn’t be able to squeeze into her secret waiting space at all.
She had spent the remainder of the day scrubbing floors in the servants’ quarters. Once children were judged old enough to work, they were made to earn their keep, and Frinzil had been assisting with various tasks all over the castle for the previous two and a half months4. Overall, she didn’t mind the work, even if it served as little more than a ten-week tour of all the things she knew for certain she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life doing.
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4 She’d been fully prepared for the eventuality for years—orcish children matured much earlier than human ones, and her mother was baffled when she hadn’t blossomed into womanhood by the time she turned eight.
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After completing her duties, she had been confined to the old storage closet that served as her bedchamber until her father arrived with supper. The whipped custard trifle he had prepared to complete the
evening’s feast had been supplanted by the visiting dignitary’s gift, and he explained with a very serious expression and a twinkle in his eye that as punishment for the day’s mischief she would have to make an entire meal of it.
Frinzil’s father was the kindest person she had ever known, and her mother was the smartest and wisest. She also benefited greatly from how they envisioned her future, contrasted with their own. As a free, human girl, Frinzil had internalized the idea that she could be anything she wanted to be, even if she was muddledfolk, like the vast majority of the manor staff.
Frinzil belonged to a kind of permanent servant class that blended physical characteristics from every human population the world had to offer. In addition to the Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes Centaurs, and innumerable others5, human nations from every corner of the globe had ruled over the Conquered Lands at one point or another. The descendants of each of these waves of invaders had commingled with the next (humans would commingle with anything, although for the most part the various half-elves, half-dwarves and half-centaurs that resulted couldn’t have descendants of their own). The muddledfolk were the closest thing the Conquered Lands had to a native population, even if they generally had the fewest aspirations to rule it.
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5 Technically twelve others, including the ghosts, but it still felt like a lot.
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Frinzil had never thought of her life as any particular hardship. But the day she realized the world could bequeath an entire castle to people like Lord and Lady Orlehea, while designating her brilliant and gentle parents as their property, was the day she had truly grown up, regardless of what her internal biology might be up to. Frinzil watched as Missus Parkchuk broke her back to keep the household running like clockwork, to satisfy every random whim of her masters while balancing the resulting load as evenly as possible across the backs of the staff. As far as she could tell, her mother cared about everyone, and although Frinzil had to assume that Lord and Lady Orlehea cared about something, it certainly didn’t appear to be the people who fed them, pampered them, and kept them safe.
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