“You didn’t say ours.”
“Nay, but it mightn’t have been.”
“You!” I picked up the nearest pillow and threw it at his head. Another and again—until the bed was in disarray. “You swindler! You cheat! You seducer of innocent maidens!”
My arm was weak, but he did not duck my missiles. Pillows bounced from his fine black clothes. He stood very still.
“Take me with you!”
“I cannot.”
“Why?”
“You are wed to another.”
“As if Gentry cared for such mortal nonsense!”
He shrugged. By this I knew he cared.
“I was sent,” he said softly, “to fetch three things from the mortal realm. My quest is done. When I return to the Veil, the Ways will close behind me, and I will breathe this cursed air no more. You cannot follow.”
“Why not?” I demanded. “You came to me. To help me. You took the Ways. I’ll take the roads. I’d chase you to the Valwode itself, mister, no matter that it’s forbidden. Into the Fathom Realms, even! Do you think I fear the drowning?”
He shook his head again, more slowly this time, as if it wearied him. Then he approached the bed and lifted up our daughter from my arms. She sighed deeply, whether content or dismayed no one but she could say. My tears fell onto his sleeve. When they touched him, they turned to diamonds. None of my doing, I’m sure.
As he made to leave, I grabbed the tail of his velvet jacket, fisted it hard as I could and yanked. I knew it could shred to smoke the instant he desired it. Velvet it remained.
Desperately I cried, “A bargain! I’ll bargain for the chance to win you. Both of you. It doesn’t work without a bargain, you said. Let me…”
Before I’d blinked, he’d turned back ’round again, his free hand flush against my cheek. His fingers were cool, except for the silver ring, which burned.
“Gordie Oakhewn,” he said, “you have seven days to guess my true name. If on the seventh day you call it out loud, the Veil shall part for you, and I will pull you through into my household, where you might stay forever with the child, with me—as, as my—in whatever capacity you wish. This is our bargain. Do not break it.”
I pressed a frantic kiss to his palm. “Call you by name? But you said Gentry never—”
Smoke.
* * *
The Gentry leave semblances of the children they steal. My semblance was a red-faced boy-brat who squalled like a typhoon and slurped my breasts dry. For two days he kept me awake all hours and scratched me with his hot red hands. On the third day he sickened and turned black. We buried him in the garden of Jadio House. A peach tree shaded his grave. I wondered if any lingering levin of Gentry magic would affect the taste of its fruit.
The chirurgerar assured me that sudden deaths were not uncommon among firstborns, that Jadio’s was a virile enough appetite to populate a dozen nurseries, that it was none of my fault. It was kind of him. His grin seemed less skully than sad. He left me with a soothing draught that I did not drink. I had packing to do. Maps to consult. Lists to make. Lists of every name I ever knew or could invent.
That night I recited to myself:
“There’s Aiken and Aimon and Anwar and Abe
Corbett and Conan and Gilbert and Gabe
There’s Berton and Birley and Harbin and Hal
Keegan and Keelan and Jamie and Sal
There’s Herrick and Hewett or whom you might please
So long as you love me, your name might be…”
“Sneeze?” asked the three-legged fox who had climbed through my casement window. “He’s not the one allergic to straw, Gordie. Remember?”
“Sebastian!” I scrambled up from my escritoire. “How do you do?—you’ve learned to skinslip!—no more iron bracelet?—what a handsome fox!—your poor hand!”
Next a vixen slid through the aperture, shuddering off her russet fur as she leapt to the floor to stand bright in her own bare skin. Her hair flamed loose about her shoulders. The only thing she wore was a heavy gray signet ring on her index finger. I’d seen it once before on the Archabbot’s own hand. There was a smear of rust upon it that I knew to be blood. Had she taken it off his dead body? Had she bitten it off his living one? Either thought made me grin.
“Candia!”
She made a warding gesture. “Candy, Candy, call me Candy! Sweet as syrup, twice as randy. Hallo, Gordie. We’ve come to warn you.”
“Warn me? Of what?” Even before they began to answer, I folded my maps, buckled my boots, and fetched my quilted jacket with the deep red hood.
“Jadio is but a day’s march behind us,” Sebastian said. “But he’s sent a deathly rumor running before him. Claims you were a Gentry witch all along, who’d fuddled the Archabbot into thinking you were holy and glammed his own gray eyes the same. That you tricksied him into wedding and bedding you.”
“An honor I’d have sold my left ear to live without,” I growled.
Candy had strolled across the room to examine the empty cradle. She said over her shoulder, “Jadio claims you killed the babe you bore him, and mean to replace it with a changeling that will bring ruin to Leressa.”
“Really?” I looked from one twin to the other. “Wouldn’t that be a shame?”
Grins all around.
“Jadio claims,” Sebastian finished, “that he will see you hang ere the week’s out. That he will wed Princess Lissa of Lirhu by the light of your funeral pyre.”
This stayed my hands where they’d been strapping on my pack.
“Old Ironshod’s daughter?” I asked. “But she sleeps, doesn’t she? A hundred-year sleep. Poisoned by Gentry magic, same as what changed her brother to a bear. How did he manage to wake her?”
“He did not,” Candy said. Her blade-thin nose serrated at the bridge, as though she had smelled something foul. Her yellow eyes glowed in the dark. “But an heir of her blood will strengthen his claim to the crown.”
“Who will wake her?” I asked wildly. “We can’t let him— We must wake her!”
“Not you!” laughed Sebastian. “That’s for other folk to do, milksop, in some other tale. Don’t you know anything? As if you didn’t have the hardest part of your own ahead of you.” He paused and looked at me, yellow-eyed and mischievous. “Do you remember what I told you before I left?”
I clutched the ashwood locket at my chest and rattled off through a suddenly dry throat: “‘The One-Eyed Witch lives where?’”
“That’s it. You ain’t milky as all that, if I say so my own self, Your Majesty.”
“Am too!” I ruffled his hair before he jerked away, baring his teeth not so much out of displeasure as habit.
Sebastian waved his one good arm like a conjurer. It had been the right hand, I’d noticed, that he’d managed to chew off, or chop off, or what. The left was still skinny as a branch, wiry as whipcord. He let me admire the brutal unevenness before explaining.
“Candy did it for me. With an ax. Good and clean. Licked it once to seal it. Then we escaped.” So proud he sounded, so nonchalant.
“Brave children. How many died chasing you?”
“Oh, one or two,” said Sebastian.
“Dozen!” coughed his twin.
“You should not be here,” I scolded. “Jadio will surely punish you if he finds you.”
“We’re fast, Your Majesty, and double sly,” returned Sebastian. “It is you who should escape, who have no real witchy ways to save you.”
Candy looked up from my escritoire, at my lists of names in long columns labeled: common, diminutive, pet, famous mortal, infamous gentry. She started snickering at something she saw written there.
I hesitated before asking, “I don’t suppose you know his name?”
“Whose?” both said at once, wary.
“Are you not his friends? Born liars, his two young foxfaces, his ‘regular but reliably suspicious informants.’ You have spied for him and lied for him and led him to my many cells. Will you not help me find h
im now?”
“We’ll never tell,” the twins said together. They puddled down in copper fur and clicking claws, black muzzles, twining tails, and rubbed against my legs, barking:
“It’s Ragnar! It’s Reynard!
It’s Stockley! It’s Sterne!
It’s Milford! It’s Misha!
It’s horny old Herne!”
They leapt out the window. I stopped just long enough to add those names to my list, then left Jadio House myself, under cover of night.
* * *
The old skip-rope chant called The One-Eyed Witch Lives Where? goes like this:
“Where does she live?
“In her cottage of bone.
Where are the bones?
In a city of stone.
Where is the city?
At the edge of the sea.
Where the Deep Lord drownded
You and me.”
In other words, if I were interpreting the riddle aright, and if Sebastian hadn’t been flaunting his tail and canting my path astray, I had four days to get to the drowned city of Lirhu, find a one-eyed witch, and make her tell me the crooked man’s name.
The road was long. I was not as bold as I once had been.
Had not the squalling semblance left to replace my daughter dried my milk and the little crooked man stopped my bleeding after the birth, I’d never have lasted the first day. As it was, the worst I felt were twinges. And a nagging clench that nine months meant nothing if I failed now.
If mortal roads were not safe for Gentry in these dark days of civil strife, they were no more safe for a youngish woman on her own, be she ever so plainly dressed. On the first day I encountered soldiers. Jadio’s men—possibly sent ahead to the House to prepare it.
“Ain’t she a pearl?” one asked.
“Cute hood,” said another, flipping it off my hair.
“Where’s your basket of goodies for Gramamma?”
A year ago, I’d’ve clouted them with a dishrag, or sniffed and stuck my nose in the air, or showed them the sharp side of my tongue. A year ago, this kind of behavior had got me clapped in chains and dragged to the Holy See at Winterbane. Instead I made my eyes wide and mild, slightly popped, with the whites showing all around. All gentleness, all complacency, all bovine. With the mightiest will in the world, I pretended I was my cow Annat.
“Moo?”
The first soldier laughed. “Is that your name? Little Miss Moo?” and tried to tickle me. I backed away and pawed the dirt of the road with the scuff of my toe, and then galloped forward and rammed his stomach with the hardest part of my head. He went down with an oof and an oath. All his comrades laughed.
I reeled back, nostrils flaring—like my bull Manu on a cranky day when the flies are at full sting.
“Moo!” I bellowed, and bent my head again.
“Easy there, Bessie!” cried a square-faced man, catching the hem of my skirt to pull me off-balance. I staggered, spun ’round, and glared, huffing. The soldier had blunted hands and a beaten face, but his squinting eyes were kindly. Though he’d not been among those teasing me before, he seemed fully in charge now, and he took my measure at a glance. His chin jerked in a slightest nod.
“She’s Gentry-touched,” he told the others. “Best not brush up too near her, or the enchantment’s like to run off and addle you. How’d you like to show up to Jadio House chewing cud and sucking at each other’s teats? His Majesty’ll have us butchered for his wedding feast. Come on. Move along, men.”
The soldiers marched back the way I’d come. They gave wide berth to the one who’d tickled me and been rammed, as if waiting for him to grow horns and a tail and start a stampede at the first loud noise. The square-faced man sauntered after them, after giving me a shy salute and a wink.
As soon as they were out of sight, I ran.
On the second day, I hitched a ride with a vegetable seller as far as Seafall, where I scrounged for an unoccupied bit of mossy embankment beneath a bridge and slept there like a troll, shivering. From Seafall to the Cliffs of Lir was thirty miles, and I started at dawn on the third day, following the sea road south.
No one traveled to Lirhu regularly anymore since it was wave-wrecked by the Deep Lord. The road was in disrepair. There were signs that Jadio’s army and the Holy Soldiers had been through. Graves like raw wounds in the chalk. On the fourth day of my journey and the seventh day of my quest, I came to Lirhu by twilight.
This near the sea, a frantic, long-smothered homesickness burst upon me. The drumming of the breakers, that tang on my tongue, the whip of the wind. So long as I had time enough to drown myself before they took me back, I’d never live inland again.
Dry-mouthed and with cracking lips, I chanted my litany of names as I walked, punctuating the rhymes with every blood-blistered footstep.
“Jack Yap or Jessamee. Pudding or Poll. Gorefist the Goblin. Tonker the Troll. Dimlight the Dwarf King. The Faerie Fin-Shu. Azlin the Angel. The Wizard Samu.”
The ruins of Lirhu rose before me, white stone streaked with veins of rose quartz. Ragged battlements, perilous parapets, watchtowers and clock towers—all crumbling to rubble. Each blind, weed-wracked, ivy-grown window seemed a doorway into some lightless, airless, awful hole in reality. Wind howled through a shattered labyrinth of arches and pillars.
I glared about the city to fend off my fear of ghosts.
“What a racket! So the Deep Lord drowned you, stones and bones and all. The earth might have quaked and done the same. There are droughts and forest fires and plagues, too, and all manner of horrid things in the world—without you adding the Gentry into it. Do you hear the rest of us whinging?”
“I quite like the wind,” said the woman beside me. “I find the sound of futility soothing.”
She had materialized so naturally out of the twilight I could no more question her appearance than that of the first evening star. Her one eye, white, with no hint of iris or pupil, washed now and again with a pulse of gold, like the tide. Her skin glowed like antique ivory. Her hair was silver-gilt and fell about her like a mantle. The plainness of her robe, the long scars running down her face and her chest, these made her no less beautiful.
The Witch gestured for me to sit with her on a stone that may have once been a pedestal.
“I would invite you in for tea, but you might find the architecture of my cottage upsetting to your digestion.”
I sank with a grateful groan, letting my pack tumble to the ground. “No argument here, lady. I’ve had enough of walls for a lifetime.”
The Witch sat very near me, palms on knees, straight-backed and still as the lost statue she replaced might have been. We watched the fireflies blink about for a while. Then she sighed.
“You’ve come a long way, Gordie Oakhewn. Tell me what you’ve learned.”
So I recited the five hundred seven names I’d clobbered together on the journey, mortal and Gentry, royal, ridiculous, just plain bad. The Witch listened patiently while the ghosts of Drowned Lirhu did their best to shout me down.
When at last I gasped to a halt, the Witch shook her head. I’d known already I had failed. Had I guessed his name aright, he would have appeared himself, in rags or velvet or verdant flames, to part the Veil with one hand and draw me through with the other. Where I might see our daughter, and hear her laugh, and learn her name.
I bowed my head. Nine months for nothing, and a whole empty life ahead. For what? Maybe someone would hire me as a goose girl or shepherdess. How far would I have to run to flee the shadow of Jadio’s gallows?
“Your mother was fond of stories,” said the Witch, breaking into my thoughts. “Are you?”
Elbows on knees, head hanging, I nodded. “Mam told the best.”
“She had the best from me.”
I snorted. Had Mam known every single Gentry exile stuck this side of the Veil? Sure would’ve explained her distress at the Invasions, being friendly with our sworn enemies and the killers of our king. Though not why I never’d seen even a one
before that day at Winterbane.
“Long, long ago,” the Witch began, and my thoughts fell away with her words, “one full score and a year more, the Veil Queen set down her antler crown and ventured forth from the Valwode. No Gentry sovereign may evade this fate. It is laid on them to bear their heirs to mortal lovers, renewing the bonds between our people. Thus, she arrayed herself nobly and presented herself to Leressa’s king. Lorez the Ironshod was a widower with two children of his own: Prince Torvald, a boy of nine. Princess Lissa, two years younger. They mourned their mother’s passing and did not take well to their father’s new mistress.
“Truth be told, the Veil Queen did not overmuch concern herself with wooing the children. Lorez it was she wanted. Handsome, with a sharp black beard and teeth like a tiger’s. She gave herself to him and took pleasure in it. By and by she bore a child of that union.
“At first Lorez seemed pleased with both of them, but his people whispered, and his children complained, and soon he waxed wroth. One night he visited his mistress’s chambers, drunken and angry, a sprig of rowan on his tunic to protect him from enchantment. He rang a silver bell that froze the Veil Queen where she stood (had he not surprised her, such a tawdry spell would hardly have been effectual), then bound her with that iron against which she could do nothing.
“‘No bastard son,’ he declared, ‘would threaten Torvald’s crown.’
“While the Veil Queen looked on, Lorez snatched her baby from his cradle and dashed him to the floor. This would have killed a mortal babe, for it broke his back and cracked his skull and snapped his neck. But this boy was a Gentry prince, heir to the antler crown, and possessed of great magic. Nearer to a god you cannot come while breathing. He did not die. Lorez left both child and mother bleeding. Greatly weakened, for the Veil Queen could not remove her iron shackles on her own, she managed to flee with her broken child in a small coracle across the sea. She took shelter on an island, in the village of Feisty Wold.
“The village tailor’s young wife helped her. She struck the shackles from her wrists. Cleaned and bound the baby’s wounds as best she could. He had already begun to heal, too rapidly, before his bones could be reset. In gratitude for this good woman’s kindness, the Veil Queen removed one of her eyes and set it in a ring.
Bone Swans: Stories Page 23
