Bone Swans: Stories

by C. S. E. Cooney

  “All right,” Kantu whispered. “All right.”

  Fa Izif ban Azur made a short, almost helpless gesture with his slender hands, beckoning toward the Fallgate. He wore no rings. The only gold about him was his face. Kantu slipped past him and trudged down one of the many dirt paths of Paupers’ Grave, keeping her head bent until she came to the cliff’s edge. She felt the Fa follow behind her, and the march of a thousand sandals on packed earth, and the bare feet of the Bird People padding along, too. When she was five feet from the edge, she stopped and asked her father, without turning around, “Will Crizion be herself again?”

  “I swear it.”

  “And Rok Moris given back to the Bird People?”

  “I swear it.”

  “If Vorst Vadilar’s armies invade again…”

  “You have my word,” said the Fa, “that Sanis Al will fight with Rok Moris against all invaders. She has but to call.”

  “And the Rokka Mama?”

  “Tesserree,” Fa Izif ban Azur said gently, “will return to the Shiprock. For she is my wife and my chosen one. The next Fa must come of her.”

  How many times these last twenty years had Kantu woken to the sound of her mother’s hoarse weeping? How many times had the Rokka Mama cried out her husband’s name in her sleep, haunted by a love that would not die though she had done her best to murder it? For it is terrible to love a god, but more terrible to be loved by one in return—and loved best above all women.

  Would the Rokka Mama, returning to Sanis Al, be whole? Or would what Kantu was about to do shatter her forever?

  Turning around suddenly, Kantu cried, “I love you, momi,” and flung her arms around her mother. The Childless Men still gripped her, but Tesserree’s tears ran down Kantu’s face like kisses. From there, Kantu ran to rain kisses on Mikiel’s burning eyelids, and on Crizion’s forehead where the blue jewel still glowered, and then she went to Manuway and pressed her lips to his, and his arms clenched around her, and his heartbeat hammered into hers. She felt, for a moment, that he would lift her and spirit her away on his carpet, saving her from death as he had not saved Inilah.

  Kantu did not know where she found the strength, but something wholly inexorable filled her, and she staggered from Manuway’s arms.

  Then she backed up to the edge of the known world, where the Fa her father now knelt, palms upraised. His position denoted reverence and relief and grief, and Kantu understood once again with that same jagged clarity that he loved her more than his own life, and would have gladly given his life if it could possibly have made a difference.

  “I want you to know,” Kantu said, staring at Mikiel’s fierce white eyes, her mother’s streaming face, Manuway’s rounded shoulders, her father’s bowed head, her brothers, the Bird People. “I want you to know,” she told them all, “that this is my choice. This is my will. My life for yours. My blood for rain.”

  Taking the bronze crescent from Fa Izif’s open hands, Kantu raised it to her throat, and with one quick snicking motion, she slashed through skin, muscle, vein, and artery.

  Before she could even feel the pain, she turned around and stepped off the cliff.

  * * *

  Night parted as she fell. Somewhere in the black depths of the canyon, a sun burst open, rose up. Belly down, Kantu fell, bleeding out. Her blood fell onto the sun and sizzled there. The dark was gone, and everything was light and song, a chorus of young girls singing.

  Kantu knew them. She had almost been one of them, daughters dead at five that their land might thrive. Five times five years Kantu had outlived the Fa’s long line of daughters, and now at her death was a woman grown. She had known fear and friendship and love. She had seen beyond the boundaries of Sanis Al.

  At five she would have been happy to give her life for the rain. But she would not have understood all that she gave.

  Kantu fell, bleeding out, and she heard the singing.

  She fell into light, but even in that blind radiance, she knew her friends were with her. Three to a carpet, speeding past her freefall, keeping pace, the Bird People attended her death all the way down.

  Manuway was there, and Elia. Ranna and Vishni. Mikiel, winged, and Crizion riding with her, a new scar on her forehead and her face her own again. Kantu felt them with her as she fell, but she could not see them. Everything was heat and light. She knew she should be cold by now, but her body was turning to molten gold.

  And then she went to a place where even the Bird People could not follow.

  * * *

  Kantu fell through the center of the world, thence to the top of the skies. She crashed with a thud and opened her eyes.

  There was a land here, at the end of everything.

  Fiery golden roses bloomed along golden roads, and the hot wind was heavy with their sweetness. Rivers of red lava ran beside the roads, and the rivers and the roads all led to a ring of tall mountains made of glass, where crystal towers sparkled, the smallest of them taller than the Shiprock. From these towers, ten thousand girl children with diamonds on their brows and mantles of white feathers trailing from their shoulders came running, falling over themselves to greet her.

  “Kantu! Kantu!” they cried.

  “Beautiful Kantu!”

  “Storm Bird!”

  “Rain Bringer!”

  “The last of us to fall!”

  “The first to fly!”

  Kantu wanted to beg them to explain, but her throat was slashed open, and her voice had drained out with her life’s blood.

  Laughing, they took her by the hands, by the hem, by the sleeve, by whatever they could touch, and like a rushing wave bore Kantu up the tallest mountainside, this one of red glass with a glaze of gold upon it. They pulled and pushed and danced around her, coaxing her along the path. They stroked the torn flesh of her throat, and the rags of her clothes, and her big, beaky, oft-broken nose, and Kantu, though she was tired, felt she had barely walked at all but they gained the peak.

  The children pointed down, and Kantu looked where they gestured. From this unbelievable height, atop a mountain of the sun, Kantu could see the world. Her world. Her feeble, arid world, fragile as a child’s ball—and in dire need of her attention.

  “It was too big for us,” the children told her. “And we were too small. But you are different. You are strong enough to last.”

  How? Kantu wanted to ask. How am I different?

  For answer, the children cast her from the mountain.

  She did not fall again. This time, her great white wings flared out around her, gathering the hot wind beneath them. Her bones turned hollow as flutes, and her bloody rags were changed to burning feathers. Kantu shot down from the mountaintop in a swift stoop, parting the air like a knife through silk. She swooped steeply first over that fiery country, her eyes seeing everything at once, in the most minute detail. Only when she was kissing distance from the ground did she pull up again, her massive talons snatching great clumps of flaming roses as she rose. With these clutched firmly to her feathered belly, she left that burning golden country, left all those laughing, singing, waving little girls, and returned to the world.

  * * *

  Such monumental winds Kantu brought back with her, gathered like nestlings under her wings. Such sheer sheets of lightning when she blinked, and dazzling white tridents of light spearing the heavens from the diamond in her brow.

  In this world, the tremendous trailing roses that she gripped in her talons swelled and blackened into clouds that wept fits of rain. She seeded the sky with storm petals, and beneath her shadow, Bellisaar and Sanis Al bloomed.

  By the storms, Kantu announced her presence. She also sent rain dreams, a ceaseless stream of them, to the Fa and his wives, to his sons and soldiers and to all the people of Sanis Al.

  “Hear me, S’Alians, for I am your god. It is I who bring the rain, and I who put pause to it. Listen well as a new law falls upon our land. There is to be no more sacrifice. Sing for your thunder. Dance for your floods. Lift the first f
ruits of your harvest to the altars of my temples. But no more—no more!—will rain be bought by innocent blood. Raise your sons and daughters in the fullness of life. I am the Rok of Rok Moris. I am the Thundergod of Bellisaar. I am the Raptor of Sanis Al, and I am here to stay.”

  In her sleep, the Rokka Mama smiled. Lines of worry and anguish vanished from her brow, and she murmured, “That’s right, pili,” breathing more deeply and freely than she had done for twenty-five years.

  And the Fa, who had not slept since watching his daughter step off a cliff, lingered over his thirteenth wife as she dreamed. With no one to see him, his eyes wept tears that glowed as blue as wizard light. His face shone like the Red Crescent washed clean.

  * * *

  After weeks of good rain, the young god tired of flight. She drew the floods back into her wings and left the Red Crescent for a time, searching for something familiar. She scanned the far horizons until she landed on a low earthen hill she thought she knew, then rummaged around in herself for a form she barely half-remembered.

  Her body collapsed in a heap of feathers. An ancient wooden dial scraped her palm.

  Kantu did not know how long she lay there, feeling how the earth shook with her heartbeat, announcing her presence to her friends in the catacombs like a giant who first politely bangs the big brass knocker before blowing the roof of a house down. Hours passed. Or minutes. It was hard to tell these days. No one came. After a long while, she rolled to a crouch, drew her immense raptor’s beak back over her head like a crown, and set it securely between her two horns that it would not fall forward at an awkward moment. Her human face emerged, everything a bit dusty. There was nothing she could do about the diamond on her brow. She wiped her prodigious nose. She stood and spat. Her tongue felt dry and rough as sandstone.

  Throwing the feathers back from her body until they settled behind her shoulders like a blanket roll, she stretched, hearing all sorts of pops and crackles and creaks as her body protested this cavalier treatment. She sat down again suddenly. Her feet hurt.

  “Ow,” she told bare toes and overgrown nails. “You never ached as talons.”

  “Next time,” said Mikiel from behind her, “you’ll know to rest them once in a while. A solid month of rain, Kantu! We’ve all started to mold!”

  Scrambling up and whipping around, Kantu could barely gasp before Mikiel was upon her with a rib-crushing embrace. She couldn’t see Mikiel’s face, but Mik’s tears cut ravines into the dust upon Kantu’s clavicles. Kantu laughed a little, shaking her friend, trying to get her to smile again. Something else thumped her.

  Crizion had joined them, a second circle of arms. More crying and scolding:

  “Kantu! You’re back! You look so tired! Don’t you know, even a god must rest?”

  “I didn’t, actually. I should’ve. Thanks for telling me.”

  They touched her face, her feathers, her new curly golden horns and the sharp maw tilting up between them, its empty mask open to the sky, the sparkle on her forehead that made the lightning, her bloody rags, the scar on her throat. Though their voices were brave, their fingers shook. They wept more than they smiled.

  What—had they thought her gone for good? So transformed as to be unrecognizable? Forgetful? Did they not know they were her own, that she was theirs?

  “It’s all right,” she tried to tell them, trying to believe it. “We’re all here now.”

  Then Manuway was there. Kneeling there. Kneeling before her, head bent. And this Kantu could not bear. No one could. Not even a god.

  “Oh, hell. Fjord and flame and demons of the farthest north. Manuway. Stand up. Stand up, p-please.” She tugged his sleeve, his shoulder, his obdurate chin. “I’m still me. I am! My blood oath on it. And you know—my blood’s not a thing I idly fling about. Only in dire emergencies. This is getting…getting dire. Up. Come. Come here, Manuway!”

  When he did not stir, she lifted him with an exaggerated grunt and mashed her body to his. There was a deep thrumming in his skin that she heard like a song. And his large hands stroked Kantu’s rough black hair as if trying to braid the hour before dawn. Kantu drew back to look at him. Manuway met her eyes, as even Mikiel and Crizion had not yet done, and smiled.

  As ever, Kantu’s tongue knotted itself into mush and monosyllables. No use coaxing speech of it—she knew that from long years of practice. So she kissed Manuway instead. A quick kiss that turned into a deeper kiss that might have turned into something else had not Crizion primly cleared her throat. Mikiel was bent double, whooping.

  “All right, all right,” Kantu said mildly. “I’m done—for now!” she added, when Manuway opened his mouth to object. “Meantime, Mik, stop cackling. Crizion, love, do you have anything to eat?”

  “I have prepared a feast, Kantu,” Crizion said, solemn but dimpling.

  “Lead on, friends. I’m starving.”

  For the erstwhile Injustice League

  Dora Rose reached her dying sister a few minutes before the Swan Hunters did. I watched it all from my snug perch in the old juniper, and I won’t say I didn’t enjoy the scene, what with the blood and the pathos and everything. If only I had a handful of nuts to nibble on, sugared and roasted, the kind they sell in paper packets on market day when the weather turns. They sure know how to do nuts in Amandale.

  “Elinore!” Dora Rose’s voice was low and urgent, with none of the fluting snootiness I remembered. “Look at me. Elinore. How did they find you? We all agreed to hide—”

  Ah, the good stuff. Drama. I lived for it. I scuttled down a branch to pay closer attention.

  Dora Rose had draped the limp girl over her lap, stroking back her black, black hair. White feathers everywhere, trailing from Elinore’s shoulders, bloodied at the breast, muddied near the hem. Elinore must’ve been midway between a fleshing and a downing when that Swan Hunter’s arrow got her.

  “Dora Rose.” Elinore’s wet red hand left a death smear on her sister’s face. “They smoked out the cygnets. Drove them to the lake. Nets—horrible nets. They caught Pope, Maleen, Conrad—even Dash. We tried to free them, but more hunters came, and I...”

  Turned herself into a swan, I thought, and flew the hellfowl off. Smart Elinore.

  She’d not see it that way, of course. Swan people fancied themselves a proud folk, elegant as lords in their haughty halls, mean as snakes in a tight corner. Me, I preferred survivors to heroes. Or heroines, however comely.

  “I barely escaped,” Elinore finished.

  From the looks of that gusher in her ribs, I’d guess “escaped” was a gross overstatement. But that’s swans for you. Can’t speak but they hyperbolize. Every girl’s a princess. Every boy’s a prince. Swan Folk take their own metaphors so seriously they hold themselves lofty from the vulgar throng. Dora Rose explained it once, when we were younger and she still deigned to chat with the likes of me: “It’s not that we think less of anyone, Maurice. It’s just that we think better of ourselves.”

  “Dora Rose, you mustn’t linger. They’ll be tracking me…”

  Elinore’s hand slipped from Dora Rose’s cheek. Her back arched. Her bare toes curled under, and her hands clawed the mossy ground. From her lips burst the most beautiful song—a cascade of notes like moonlight on a waterfall, like a wave breaking on boulders, like the first snow melt of spring. All swan girls are princesses, true, but if styling themselves as royalty ever got boring, they could always go in for the opera.

  Elinore was a soprano. Her final, stretched notes pierced even me. Dora Rose used to tell me that I had such tin ears as could be melted down for a saucepan, which at least might then be flipped over and used for a drum, thus contributing in a trivial way to the musical arts.

  So maybe I was a little tone-deaf. Didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy a swan song when I heard one.

  As she crouched anxiously over Elinore’s final aria, Dora Rose seemed far remote from the incessantly clever, sporadically sweet, gloriously vain girl who used to be my friend. The silvery sheen of her skin was
frosty with pallor. As the song faded, its endmost high note stuttering to a sigh that slackened the singer’s white lips, Dora Rose whispered, “Elinore?”

  No answer.

  My nose twitched as the smell below went from dying swan girl to freshly dead carcass. Olly-olly-in-for-free. As we like to say.

  Among my Folk, carrion’s a feast that’s first come, first served, and I was well placed to take the largest bite. I mean, I could wait until Dora Rose lit on outta there. Not polite to go nibbling on someone’s sister while she watched, after all. Just not done. Not when that someone had been sort of a friend. (All right—unrequited crush. But that was kid stuff. I’m over it. Grown up. Moved on.)

  I heard the sound before she did. Ulia Gol’s ivory horn. Not good.

  “Psst!” I called from my tree branch. “Psst, Dora Rose. Up here!”

  Her head snapped up, twilight eyes searching the tangle of the juniper branches. This tree was the oldest and tallest in the Maze Wood, unusually colossal for its kind, even with its trunk bent double and its branches bowing like a willow’s. Nevertheless, Dora Rose’s sharp gaze caught my shadowy shape and raked at it like fingernails. I grinned at her, preening my whiskers. Always nice to be noticed by a Swan Princess. Puts me on my mettle.

  “Who is it?” Her voice was hoarse from grief and fear. I smelled both on her. Salt and copper.

  “Forget me so quickly, Ladybird?” Before she could answer, I dove nose-first down the shaggy trunk, fleshing as I went. By the time I hit ground, I was a man. Man-shaped, anyway. Maybe a little undersized. Maybe scraggly, with a beard that grew in patches, a nose that fit my face better in my other shape, and eyes only a mother would trust—and only if she’d been drunk since breakfast.

  “Maurice!”

  “The Incomparable,” I agreed. “Your very own Maurice.”

  Dora Rose stood suddenly, tall and icy in her blood-soaked silver gown. I freely admit to a dropped jaw, an abrupt excess of saliva. She’d only improved with time; her hair was as pale as her sister’s had been dark, her eyes as blue as Lake Serenus where she and her Folk dwelled during their winter migrations. The naked grief I’d sensed in her a few moments ago had already cooled, like her sister’s corpse. Swan Folk have long memories but a short emotional attention span.