The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

  “What answer would you have of me?” he demanded.

  “Why haven’t you told the Order of this town’s sins?”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t see Keyward’s children become orphans because of behavior that can yet be changed. And your criminal insistence on solving problems best left to members of the Order hasn’t helped reinforce their trust in the Lady.”

  I kept my last thought to myself, that he had sworn to uphold the Lady’s dominion over every other concern. Whether he admitted it or not, it wasn’t the Lady’s dogma he was defending but her spirit. I smiled for him then, a real smile. I told him the truth—the children were tethered where I said—but I added a lemon-sour lie.

  “There are twenty-five selkies waiting there,” I said. The words stung my lips like a cat’s cratch. “I would have saved them myself and demanded a bounty, but your townfolk have stolen my belongings—”

  “Do not speak to me of theft,” he snapped. He threw a handful of coins in the dirt and slammed the window shut.

  Floating-Among-Lilies, I stepped into the stream and stood still as a sleeping ghost. The parish keeper didn’t take long rousing the townfolk. Lanterns flickered to life in their hands, like a nest of wasps radiant with rage. The lights flowed away over the hill.

  Only those who couldn’t fight were left behind, with a few able but inexperienced youths to protect them; Watching-as-the-Owl allowed me to see them pass through the darkness. They congregated in the smithy, not the parish. Perhaps they wanted the safety of the iron fittings, or perhaps they knew the Lady wouldn’t shelter them after what they had done.

  I sheltered them in her stead. Their safety was part of the bargain I made. The selkies and I were there to punish, not to torture; we planned to burn wood, not people. The prisons in Keyward would be too easy to use again if we didn’t destroy them.

  I stepped into the inn’s kitchen and whispered for the selkie child who Lum called Izhmir. It was a girl, not a boy, and if I had not been Floating-Among-Lilies, I would have been excited to see her again. She had risked Browan’s iron poker to tell me how many of her sestren were captured. Our names were similar.

  And she wasn’t there.

  The smith’s house was empty as well; so was the chandler’s, where the third selkie child was supposed to be trapped.

  I found Lum standing on the bank of the stream. Already, flames flickered on the roofs and walls of the other houses. He stared down the hill at the forge. Yellow light spilled out of the windows, pale and weak compared to the raging flames of the smith’s house just a few yards up the hill.

  “They’ve moved the selkie children,” I said.

  He was silent for a moment. “Show me where my daughter was.”

  He followed me to the inn, and when I opened the door, his nostrils flexed, as if it smelled of feces or sickness. He jumped over the doorjamb and forced his feet across the iron-nailed boards.

  Lum stopped where his daughter had slept, a tiny patch free of poison metal. He shredded the sacks with his claws and began wrapping his feet.

  Then he picked up his harpoon, grabbed a piece of firewood in his free hand, and stood between me and the door. Floating-Among-Lilies made this nothing more than a fact. I didn’t fear him. I also didn’t understand.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Our children are hostages in the smithy. The villagers think this makes them safe. No one is safe.”

  Things scraped against the outside of the walls like large insects. The selkies were setting kindling around the inn. They would burn it down, with me inside. I was reminded why I wrote in my book that no one was to treat with anathema. This incomprehensible betrayal strained at my Floating-Among-Lilies. Curiosity weighed heavily on the invisible shelf above my head.

  “I helped you.”

  “You are the only human who has found our caves. The others stole our children from the shore. You must die, and take your knowledge with you.”

  “And you?”

  “See me keep my oath. I appreciate your help, and for this betrayal, I will suffer the wrath of fire.”

  “I am the only one who can get your children out of that building,” I said. It wasn’t a desperate plea; it was the truth. The townfolk would be back soon. I alone, armored and unafraid of iron, could walk into the smithy and disarm the humans who were guarding them.

  “We’ve already said goodbye to them,” Lum said.

  They were going to burn the smithy, with everyone’s children inside.

  Floating-Among-Lilies tore apart, sagging and ripping under the weight of my anger. I choked it back, but it was a flood torrent, filled with sharp pieces of regret and guilt. While the calm of the lilies slipped from my grasp, the darkness beneath became real.

  I drowned my way down to the last of the Tactics, the only one I had never used before.

  Fight-of-the-Crocodile couldn’t be practiced among friends, because every blow that weakened one combatant poured strength into the other. I would have less time in which to win, and less strength to flee the flames.

  Lum was paths of blood, branches of a cold tree I needed to chop down. He glowed with an aura of oceanic violet; in contrast, a corona of deep orange-amber throbbed around me. Honey-sticky strands of light stretched between us, shifting with our thoughts, our breathing, and the beat of our hearts.

  I sallied forward with a series of whirling cuts. Heat stung my throat, but I could only think of opening those veins and spilling that violet ichor.

  He jabbed with his harpoon, a powerful thrust that would have punctured my heart if not for my mail overshirt. The bone barbs slid off the metal links. Some orange light sucked into the purple, where it dissipated like blood in water. I sliced his arm before he could draw back, and light swelled around me as he dribbled blood. He was too fast, though, and the cut was shallow.

  Lum asked, “What have you done?”

  I didn’t answer; he’d find out soon enough.

  He advanced, swinging the driftwood to force me away from the door. My sword chopped off splinters. I stumbled back, maddened by the tantalizing purple power just out of my reach.

  I had forgotten that Lum fought sharks with his harpoon, under the weight of water. His muscles were fast and perfect in the light resistance of the air, though his aim was off, and he coughed heavily, his slimy lungs less prepared than mine for the hot smoke.

  I kicked his driftwood and swung my sword, slicing into his arm again, but even though it was a deeper cut, the cost was a harpoon stab in my leg. The aura of his life swelled with my injury. I hobbled backward, my back bumping against the swinging door to the common room.

  If they were burning the inn the way I taught them, the roof was already ablaze. Lum smashed the lantern hanging above the big table, and drops of flaming oil spattered across the furniture and floor. I had taught them this as well, how to quicken the fire with oil.

  All the trophies above the fire remained but one: Izhmir’s pelt. The time I caught Browan’s wife by the fire with the limp thing in her hand, she must have been threatening the child with it. If Izhmir’s relatives were near, attempting vengeance, the pelt was the only way to control anathema who might otherwise risk a leap to freedom, iron doorjamb or no.

  That same twisted scene was probably happening at that very moment, in the confines of the smithy. Three little pelts. Three terrified selkies.

  I stabbed my fury toward Lum, connected, pulled free. Gutblood dribbled down the pale line around his waist where he often wore his pelt. He hadn’t brought it to the fight, of course—if he was captured, it was better to die than become a slave, like his daughter.

  Their nature. It was what I preached, and I knew their weaknesses as well as their strengths. My weakness was the need for my shield. When it was strapped to my arm, it was a part of me. But the townspeople had driven me off without it.

  My mooning got me a harpoon punched into my other leg. Now I had two limps. My orange light shrank down toward me; Lum’s purple glow expa
nded. Gritting my teeth against the oozing ache of each step, I stumbled back toward the stairs.

  Let him keep me in the house, then. If Browan hadn’t pawed through it yet, I might have an armory upstairs, in the attic. I hoped the smoldering roof would hold out long enough for me to find it.

  Lum, afraid I’d climb out the window, followed. His coughs slowed him. The smoke was thicker in the stairway. It stung our eyes.

  I could no longer kick and still hold my balance, but as I backed up the stairs, I managed to hook the driftwood with my sword hilt and knock it loose. It thumped down to the ground floor, leaving a flickering shadow that pointed toward us. The flames from the spilled lamp grew, a garden of threatening light.

  When I reached the attic room, I slammed the door behind me and locked it. It was only wood, no iron but the handle and hinges, so he threw himself into it over and over. Thump, thump. Purple glow flared along this side of the door and then melted away each time. My orange light wouldn’t glow through the door; there wasn’t enough left.

  Lum would break the wood but perhaps not before the burning roof collapsed on us. I could win that way, if nothing else. My armor heated up, sweat tickled my skin, and the smoke was suffocating me. I rushed for the window like he expected, to breathe fresh air one last time, even if I couldn’t escape.

  What I saw stopped me.

  They hadn’t burnt the bridges yet. They were standing on them, watching this building, watching their leader’s last brave act. Waiting.

  I would choke to death on smoke or be roasted by flames or get stabbed in the back, but the last thing I did would save the smithy and everyone in it. I knew the nature of fire. I knew the nature of the anathema.

  I held my breath and scrabbled for my things, in the corner where I’d left them. They’d been pawed through, but my crossbow was still in my saddlebags, and so was the cylindrical leather case where I kept fifteen steel quarrels.

  Coughing, squinting, I elbowed out the glass panes and yanked the iron cross out of the window. It was hot enough to leave a scar on my palm to match the ink on my forehead. I threw it down and grasped the crossbow.

  This was what I was trained for. I didn’t have the strength, I thought, but I loaded and loosed quarrel after quarrel. The iron soared through the night like hunting hawks, each finding the hearts and guts of the selkies on the bridges. Only Lum’s life would leak into mine, so my orange light grew thin as I watched the selkies fall and bleed. Their thick blood flowed slowly, too slowly. It might never make it to the water.

  Behind me, the door crashed open. I turned in time to knock Lum’s harpoon aside with the crossbow. He drew back, coughing. The air was better on the floor, where I lay, but he didn’t know this. He thought he was winning if he was still standing. His purple was smaller, but my orange was barely visible.

  If I didn’t get out then, I never would.

  I couldn’t stand—my right leg now cramped when I tried—but I could swing my sword. Lum was blinded by smoke, jabbing toward me but missing. I swiped as if chopping wood with an axe. When I hit his leg, a long slab of meat peeled off and flopped down. Blood poured out.

  The branching tree inside his body crumpled as he fell to the floor; the purple fluid drained him to a dry husk. And the glow moved into mine, feeding the orange light. It flared, I think, but maybe that was the fire. The flames were orange like my aura. Like the silk sash I had worn long ago. The flames were mine, too.

  I lay beside Lum, my mail shirt scalding my skin where it touched, but I couldn’t do anything but cough. I heard howls ripping through the world, through the flames, but I didn’t know if they were Lum’s, or the other selkies, or the villagers, or wolves who had smelled cooked meat and come to feast. There was a rumbling I thought might be Lum coughing, but I couldn’t force my eyes open anymore.

  In the midst of the choking inferno, just before I passed out, I felt something cold and wet. I knew it couldn’t be real, but I was no longer Floating-Among-Lilies, so I hoped.

  When I faded back, the world was different. I coughed, but instead of smoke, I inhaled air like that of the mountain passes: crisp, fresh. It stank of charred thatch and wet pine needles. Rain stung my face, driven by a howling wind, and I wondered if I had fallen out the window after all.

  But the floor beneath my cheek was wood, and warm, and when I cracked my eyes, I saw the broken door, burning just beyond Lum’s motionless body. Even as I watched, the wind forced the door off its hinges. It splashed into a puddle in the center of the floor, extinguishing the flames. The roof had been burned by fire and torn away by wind.

  In my book, it said you must not spill the blood of a selkie in salt water, for it would cause a storm. I had spilled several pints, all carried to the sea by the stream.

  Most of the town was dark. Watching-as-the-Owl, I saw that even with the downpour, it was still ruined. Blackened beams stabbed at the sky, supporting webs of charred timber. I glanced down toward the smithy. The roof was dark; there were a few tiny flames struggling on the outside, but the storm had quenched the worst of it.

  I gathered my belongings and climbed down the side of the building. From the back porch, I jumped onto the stable roof, which wasn’t burned at all. My horse whinnied—he hated the scent of the fire and the uncomfortable force of the storm, but he was unharmed.

  I put my hood up, but it did no good. The wind was a wild thing, intent on badgering me in whatever way it could. It slapped my face with the coins in my hair, flung water into my ears and even up my nose. Without Watching-as-the-Owl, I wouldn’t have been able to see my way to the smithy.

  I carried a bar for prying the lids off of coffins, and I used it to crack the door off of the smithy. Rain poured in through the roof in places, where the fire had burned through before the storm.

  “The three blond children are coming with me, back to the sea,” I said. “Anyone who tries to stop them will also go into the sea.”

  The selkie children were bound with their hands behind their backs. They looked sickly amidst all the iron. Izhmir didn’t smile, but when she looked at me, her gray eyes were silver with hope.

  One of the young men who was supposed to be guarding the prisoners cut them free. Browan’s wife looked as if she might try to throw the seal pelt in the fire, but the parish keeper hissed at her, and she grudgingly handed it to Izhmir. When the other children had their pelts, I shepherded them down to the water, and I told them the truth.

  Two of them shed their clothes, tugged their skins on, and disappeared into the maelstrom. Izhmir watched them first, and then she tore off her human clothes. I was shivering under the sky’s onslaught, but she tied her pelt around her waist as if it was only a spring breeze and the rain was the heat of the sun.

  “I want to see your book,” she said.

  I wondered if selkies age the same as we do. Was she older than she seemed? I thought on it for a moment, and then I reached in my jacket. If she ruined the book, I could make another. I knew it well. And I would deserve it, after my volume had caused the slavery and destruction of so many of her people.

  She picked through the pages from the back of the book to the front, using her index finger instead of her thumb the way a human would. Her hands still moved as if she had webbing instead of scars.

  The storm shrieked around us while she perused the book. I realized I didn’t even know if she could read, or if she was amazed by the pictures, or if she could even see in the darkness. The few flashes of lightning couldn’t be enough.

  Suddenly, she recited from the book, her voice clear and sharp as a ship’s bell. “ . . . and if they find their pelt, they will return to the sea. Because of this weakness, selkies avoid humans when possible. They will not attack unless directly provoked, such as by sealers with harpoons. It is best to remain uninvolved.”

  She turned to stare at me, and we studied each other’s faces in the blue darkness. The hollows around her eyes were black, her mouth expressionless. My own mouth fought me, trying to cry
instead of speak.

  I managed to say, “I’m sorry.”

  Izhmir dropped the book in the sand. She draped the pelt over her head like a hood, and her body seemed to flow upward even as the pelt lowered toward the ground. By the time her round belly hit the sand beside the book, she was a seal. An orphaned seal, because of me. She dove into the surf.

  I clumsily mounted my poor wet horse. I had one chance to escape the wrath of Keyward, and it was in the arms of this equally furious storm.

  For hours, the horse and I trudged back the way we came, inland, away from the force of the gale. Finally, I spied a fallen tree near the road. It had blown over in another storm, long ago, and we sheltered behind the giant fan of its gnarled roots.

  When I unrolled the old sailcloth I used as a tent, I saw Izhmir crouched against the edge of the roots, her head tipped back and her mouth open. Rain beaded on her lips and splashed directly onto her eyes, but she didn’t blink it away.

  She had followed me through miles of shrieking wind and stinging rain. I was crippled by the cold as much as my wounds. If it was revenge she sought, she could have it.

  “I thought you went into the water,” I said. With the webs cut from her fingers and her hair over her ears, only another Bane could recognize she wasn’t human.

  “I did. Then I came back out.”

  She crawled over and peered at the wounds on my thighs. They glared up, like two wet red eyes. My body accused me of poor judgment. The wounds said I should have floated out of Keyward on a bed of lilies, not stayed to defend children who weren’t mine, weren’t even human.

  One of those children turned her large, pale eyes up to me.

  “Why did you go into the smithy.” It wasn’t a question, the way she said it. That was fitting, because what I had to say wasn’t an answer.

  “It’s been a long time since I stopped floating above everything. I’d forgotten what it’s like to swim along with everyone else, to feel currents instead of merely watching them.”

  “You find pearls only when you sink,” Izhmir offered.