Terribly Twisted Tales

by RABE, JEAN

  He sighed. “The old king is so easy to charm. Hardly worth the sport.”

  My eyes slid toward him, then to the hills gilded by the rising sun.

  “Don’t worry, dear brother. One more night and her first-born is yours.”

  I shifted on my seat. “What if she decides not to marry his son?”

  My brother cocked his head, his eyes dark and unreadable. “She wants to be queen.”

  “The king has threatened to kill her. Three times,” I reminded him.

  My brother lifted a wing and began preening his feathers. “She’s going to marry his son, not him. Besides, he’ll be dead soon.”

  “Hmph, are you a fortune-teller, now?”

  He laughed a harsh raven’s cry. “Hardly. I overheard his physicians.”

  I sighed and settled back against the warm stone, then closed my eyes and dozed there until evening.

  Before I entered the chamber, I studied the final pile of straw. It was twice the size of the second. Greedy mortal. After this night’s spinning he would have enough gold for several kings.

  The woman paced in front of the wheel, her hands clutching her arms.

  “Good evening, mistress.” She stopped and turned to me. Her voice was barely more than a whisper.

  “I have nothing to pay you.”

  “Not yet.” Her eyes widened. “Pay me when you are queen.”

  She clapped her hands. “Yes! I will have gold in plenty.”

  “I haven’t named my price yet.”

  She clasped her hands. “What do you want? I’ll give you anything you want.”

  “Anything?”

  “Yes, yes . . . only . . . please . . .” Her eyes darted to the straw piled to the ceiling and she swallowed.

  “I want your first-born child,” I said softly. Her eyes snapped back to me. She stepped back, and her hands covered her mouth.

  “My child? But . . . I can’t.”

  “That is my price, mistress.”

  She shook her head, moaning. I started fading back into the stone wall.

  “Wait!”

  I stepped out of the wall and waited while she stood there, trembling, her hands clenched by her sides.

  “All right,” she finally said. “I agree.”

  I nodded and set to work. Oh, how the magic flowed from my fingers and throat that night! The wheel hummed, pulling straw into gold the color of her hair. I sang the words, and in this final binding I saw her first-born, a fine manchild. Strong and sleek and fair. I would walk the earth ten thousand years in that flesh.

  That night’s spinning drained almost all my strength and stretched my magic to its limits. I slipped off the stool and sank into the floor. The future queen stood in the midst of the glittering baskets, smiling. I stayed long enough to witness her triumph, and then I retreated down the granite bones of the world to rest.

  I surged up, seething. The rocks rumbled and shook. All that searching, and I still didn’t have a name! I was close, though. I felt it hovering at the tip of memory. To be so close! I raged and shook the walls harder. Dust and bits of rock pelted down from the ceiling. The mice squealed and skittered in fright. I took hold of my temper.

  The mice huddled in a corner. I sighed and settled into the cracks in the rock my temper had opened. Poor things, cut off from the sweet air and the warm sun.

  Out of flesh, it’s hard for a fae to measure time. But since the female mouse was plump with pups, several weeks must have passed. I started. They should be dead. It was then I noticed a small pile of grain a few feet from their nest. A tiny slit in the air opened above the grain, leaking sunlight and apple slices. It seemed my brother had provided for them. And if—no, when—I freed myself, it would give me a far faster route than traveling through stone back to my queen’s kingdom. The slit closed, but it left behind the brisk scent of autumn winds.

  I burrowed deeper into the dark granite, but I stayed close enough to the surface that I could see the torch. Once again, I ventured inward, hopefully for the last time.

  I was lounging beneath an oak atop a hill just outside the main gates of the capitol, enjoying the warm spring breezes, when my brother came to tell me of the birth. He’d stayed at the castle, posing as one of the queen’s servants, to keep on eye on things. He dropped out of a sparkle of sunlight, a jug of beer in one hand and a small round of creamy cheese in the other.

  “A strong and healthy son,” he said, handing me the jug. “The king is pleased.”

  “The old one or the new one?” I asked, accepting it.

  He laughed and sat down on my left. “The new one, of course. The old one died four months ago.” He gestured, and a slender, sharp knife appeared in his hand. “I told you, remember?”

  I shrugged.

  “It was a fine funeral,” he continued. “If he’d been alive, he would have enjoyed it.”

  I laughed at that, and my brother sliced off a thin wedge of cheese and handed it to me.

  “She hasn’t forgotten,” he said softly. Tiny flames flickered in his dark eyes.

  “I didn’t expect she would,” I said, and then took a bit of cheese. It had a sharp tangy bite, perfect with the beer.

  “When are you going to take him?” The wind shifted and carried the sound of bells from the city. “They’ll be celebrating for weeks,” my brother murmured, smiling.

  I sighed. The palace would be overflowing with visitors and well-wishers.

  “Let me know when affairs settle down,” I told him. “I’ll collect him then.”

  My brother grinned then glided into a spear of sunlight aimed for the main hall of the palace. I chuckled as I raised the jug to my lips. He did enjoy a party.

  It took almost a month for life to settle back to whatever was normal for a royal court. The apple blossoms were long gone by then. The scent of roses that replaced them drifted through sheer curtains as I stepped into the nursery. Bent over the cradle, singing softly to her child, she didn’t notice me at first. She wore silk and lace now. The russet and cream colors suited her. Deep yellow gold glittered around her throat, dangled from her ears and encircled every finger. What a vision she was. She looked up, more composed than I expected. A shiver, no more than a pebble falling to the ground, went down my spine. I had been prepared for tears and pleading, not this cool and measuring look.

  My brother, still posing as her servant, hovered in the shadows behind her. He glanced at her and smiled as she gently lifted her son and held him close. My brother glided up to her left side, a short length of peeled willow branch in his hand. He held it close to his side, out of her sight, but not mine. His smile deepened and his eyes took on a hungry, feral shine.

  “You thought I wouldn’t find out,” she said. Her words distracted me from my brother.

  Find out what? I stepped back, wary, and reached for the stone. Earth magic, unlike fire, is slow to cast. Better to flee, if I needed to.

  “I know your name,” she said softly.

  My brother lifted his wand. I cursed and flowed down into the stone, or tried to. Just as I started sinking, she stepped forward and shouted my name, then two words of mortal magic. With the wand, my brother swiftly traced binding wards that wrapped around my soul like an ivy vine around an oak. He flicked the wand out of sight as she turned to him, triumphant and anxious.

  “Did I say them correctly?” she asked.

  My brother bowed deeply. “Perfectly, your highness.”

  Pain, sharp as a hunter’s arrow, shot through my limbs. Half sunk and trapped in the stone by my brother’s wards, I screamed as the spell she had spoken dissolved my flesh into dust and shards. The baby stirred and cried, frightened. The last thing I saw was her, silhouetted in the window, comforting her child.

  “Shh, my sweetling. You’re safe. No harm will come to you now, my sweet Tristin.”

  I surged up to the limit of my stone tether. At last! I had the name I needed! I remembered! Over and over, I said it, my soul humming with the sound of it. Even unspoken, I
felt it beginning to weaken the bonds my brother had set on me. As the child had been mine before he was even conceived, so was his name. But before I could free myself, I needed to speak it in the mortal world.

  In the far corner, near where the water trickled down, I had let the moss grow in random patches. I focused my will and felt the growth patterns shift. Three times, the walls would be my voice. Three times and I would be free. When I claimed my payment, my power would return in full. Then, hidden in that flesh, I would let it grow at a mortal’s pace before I claimed retribution.

  I settled back and watched the mother mouse nurse her newborn pups. I must remember to leave a way out for them.

  With the return of the name, I remembered everything. I remembered how my brother had told me of how he had deceived the queen by pretending to be me. Pretending to be moved by tears and pleading to offer her a way out of a fair bargain. How he had strutted and preened when he had told me of how the “faithful queen’s servant” had stumbled across the little man prancing around a fire, drunk, and singing his name. As if any fae would be so foolish as to shout his name where a mortal might hear it.

  And I remembered why he had betrayed me. His face loomed in my mind, dark and full of hate.

  “You cost me flesh, dear brother. Flesh to walk the world a hundred centuries. Lost! Because of your dithering the last time you renewed.

  “Her death was not my fault.”

  “Liar!” Fire and lightning had flashed from his fingers to scorch the wall I was trapped in before he’d streaked back to the surface world.

  I roused from the memory and sighed. After I had claimed the child that time, she shouldn’t have run after me in the darkening wood when shadows trick the eye. She’d stumbled on a gnarled root and struck her head on a rock. I’d doubled back when I’d heard her cry out as she fell. But by the time I reached her, she and the child she carried within her were already dead. The child who would have been my brother’s renewal. I understood his anger, even his hatred. But he had betrayed me when I could have helped him find another. That demanded justice.

  I smiled then as I remembered his name, Tristin. A short name. An easy name to speak. There is power in names.

  NO GOOD DEED

  Jody Lynn Nye

  Jody Lynn Nye lists her main career activity as “spoiling cats.” She lives northwest of Chicago with two of the above and her husband, author and packager Bill Fawcett. She has published more than thirty-five books, including six contemporary fantasies, four SF novels, four novels in collaboration with Anne McCaffrey, including The Ship Who Won; edited a humorous anthology about mothers, Don’t Forget Your Spacesuit, Dear!; and has written more than a hundred short stories. Her latest books are An Unexpected Apprentice, and Myth-Chief , co-written with Robert Asprin.

  Athickset man in a jumpsuit with a hand control box guided a train of loaded antigrav skids marked for transit off-planet and let them drift a little too close to the bench where Androye Clesborn sat huddled. Androye looked up, wary eyed, and braced himself. An opportunity like this was not going to come again, not in time. The other prisoners sent the skinny healer rueful glances that offered fearful wishes of good luck. He would need it.

  He edged closer and closer to the side of the bench, away from his guard’s line of sight. If the blue-uniformed woman would just look away for one second . . . there! The fat man ran one of his skids into the legs of a well-dressed man looking the other way. The ensuing altercation attracted the attention of spaceport security, several onlookers, and the uniformed guard. Androye sprang from the bench and dashed away into the gathering crowd.

  The alarm didn’t go off when he slipped through the portal and out onto the concrete apron where atmosphere transports let off their passengers who arrived to travel off-world from Danton. The temporary RFID tattoo on his arm permitting him to pass through the doors had not yet been purged from the spaceport security system. It was his second piece of luck. Perhaps Fate meant to let him get away this time. He took a deep breath of the surrounding damp, hot air before he remembered not to.

  How horrible this planet smelled! Androye choked on the stink of chemicals and decay held close to the surface by the heavy, damp inversion layer of the geosphere. He just managed to suppress the wrench of his internal organs trying to force their way upwards. He couldn’t afford to draw attention by vomiting up his meager breakfast on the edge of the pavement. His worn, beige shipsuit was nothing out of the ordinary among the travelers. No one dressed up to go anywhere since the Dominion had conquered half of known space. If one wore ostentatious clothes or jewelry, one was apt to find oneself being stripped of it publicly. The same went for knowledge or talent. The individual character of every planet was being compressed into a characterless, bland average.

  If that were true, every planet would smell alike, too, and his allergies wouldn’t be bothered by every single change in atmosphere he had undergone. If only he had had three more minutes at the end of the battle of Triusk. He would be home on sweet-scented Orskia, back in his little flat, back in his inoffensive medical practice. Back with his wife.

  He could hardly picture Meriglen’s face as a face. He thought of individual features, each precious and beautiful, but should anyone have asked him to put them together, he would have been embarrassed at his lack of observation. With every breath in his body, with every bone, with every blood cell, he wanted to get back to her. They had been separated for three months, the longest they had been apart in their eight years of marriage.

  Making his saunter look as casual as he could, Androye strolled toward the edge of the apron, past an airbus dropping off a gaggle of giggling girls in white jumpsuits—cleaning staff, all under twenty standard years of age—and surveyed the burgeoning, green and purple plant life as though he were thinking of buying it. As soon as the last girl hefted her carryall to her back and turned away, he plunged into the undergrowth. Thorns whipped at him, tearing his face and hands, the only parts of his skin showing out of his shipsuit. Underfoot, roots and creepers grabbed for his booted feet. He thought of running barefoot and immediately dismissed it. Danton was useful as spaceport only because large portions of its terrain were flat, once the jungle full of poisonous lizards, snakes and plants was cleared away. Androye didn’t dare expose himself to the local biology any more than he could help.

  Within two meters the spaceport was invisible over his shoulder. He leaped over roots and tripped on creepers. He had to find a place to conceal himself long enough for the transport to take off without him. He wasn’t the most valuable of the prisoners of war from Orskia, and they had other doctors. They would do without him.

  In the back of his mind, he knew that wasn’t true. He was the most experienced healer they had captured, and the Dominion never let a living prisoner escape. But the guards had been in a hurry to lift ship. Perhaps he would be lucky. Plenty of independent traders, too slippery a commodity to be subsumed by the Dominion’s rules, landed here. He would wait until he saw one land, then thresh his way to the landing strip under cover of night and beg to be taken on board. His profession, coupled with the obligatory mental block that prevented him doing harm to others, was a passport anywhere. Maybe even back to Orskia.

  The irony was he had been due to be demobilized after this battle. Free at last of travel in military transports, of sleeping eighty to a room with other people, all of them restless and unhappy, away at last from the war which he hated but understood needed to be fought to maintain the independent worlds’ freedom against the Dominion. He had been pinned down in a field with a host of wounded waiting for evacuation. An unlucky movement of the flanking forces left him and his patients exposed. The evil empire’s monotanks moved in, surrounding them. The small, nearly indestructible vehicles held two men—or, rather, beings. The Dominion soldiers shot all the wounded, but seeing the medical insignia on his uniform and the plaswraps in his hands, figured out that he was worth something to them. They hauled up his sleeve to find the tattoo
with the implanted capsule that guaranteed he was a certified healer, a permanent noncombatant. At gunpoint he was bundled into the rear seat of a monotank and taken away.

  Ever since, he had been shuttled around the Dominion and its newly captured systems, treating illness and injury in species they didn’t understand. He had learned to treat many new species. He was a good doctor, and the long-forgotten Earth had given him the Hippocratic Oath that he had sworn to upheld, no matter what the circumstances. All the time he kept asking when he could go home. The Dominion guards ignored his questions, which meant that he had to take matters into his own hands. This was his fifth attempt at escape. Maybe this time he would get away unnoticed.

  Too late! Angry voices in the distance meant that the guard had discovered his absence and was raising the alarm. Androye put his arms up to protect his eyes, and hurtled blindly into the undergrowth.

  It would take them time to work out where he had gone. He had followed no path, squeezing past prickly tree trunks and slimy lianas, wherever he could fit. He shied away from the slightest movement, fearing attack wasps and snakes. Thorns ripped his jumpsuit and left long, aching scratches in his scalp. He dared not look at his beautiful, long surgeon’s hands. They twitched and quivered with sharp agony, as if they had been dipped in acid.

  The hot sunlight was cut by more than half. He squinted through the shadows, trying to make sense of what he could see. He heard a warning beep pulsing ahead of him. That was probably the automated air traffic control tower. Maybe he could hide there. Those towers were usually surrounded by a repulser field plus several fences and other protective measures to keep out intruders and local wildlife. From experience, Androye knew the fields weren’t as impenetrable as the designers wished. He had overseen the removal of the sad remains of small children in his neighborhood who found the meshwork tower irresistible and perished in their attempts to climb it. Animals, too, would find their way into the dog-proof sanctuary and often died there. He’d saved some. They stiffened when he picked them up, afraid to accept help, but they couldn’t help whimpering with the pain.