Bone Swans: Stories

by C. S. E. Cooney

  “‘Should any of my people see this ring,’ she said, ‘they will know the wearer to be under my protection and do what they can to aid you.’

  “This debt of gratitude repaid, the Veil Queen returned to her people.

  “Her curse was on Lorez. She called the Folk from their hollows and hidey-holes, from tree and bog and bedrock. The Will-o’-Wispies, the hobs and hobgoblins, the wolfmen, the crowgirls, the Women Who Wail. She called to her brother the Deep Lord in the Fathom Realms of the sea. Together they roused the Veil against Leressa. They drowned Lorez and demolished Lirhu. They trapped Torvald in the body of a beast—and rightly, for it fit the shape of his soul, and consigned Lissa to the long dark of dreaming, to match the darkness of her scheming. They sent warriors to grapple back mortal-worked lands for the wild, to seed Gentry children in the wombs of mortal women.

  “Fiercely did the Gentry fight for their queen, but in one thing they would not yield. They would not put a monster on their throne. A hunchback boy to wear the antler crown? A scarred and crooked thing to be their king? Never. Yet while he lived, no one but he could ascend the throne. A few of the Queen’s bravest and brazenest subjects set upon the child—who was now just three years old. They tortured him almost unto death.

  “Again the Veil Queen took her child and fled. She returned to Feisty Wold, hoping to find succor and friendship again. The tailor’s wife, Mava Oakhewn, welcomed her to her house. She whittled wooden toys for the boy in his convalescence. She set him to sleep in the same cradle as her own tiny daughter Gordie. Mava entreated the Veil Queen to stop the battle between their people. The Veil Queen refused.

  “‘Your heart is hardened,’ Mava told her in despair.

  “‘Then will I give it over to thy keeping,’ did the Veil Queen reply. ‘I have no use for it now.’

  “So saying, she cut out her heart and strung it on a ribbon, disguised it as a bauble under Mava Oakhewn’s stewardship. For a third time she took her son and disappeared, to a place where neither Gentry nor mortal could find her. She raised her son in the ruins of that city which had ruined him.”

  In the silence that followed, the wind shrieked.

  She was his mother. I sat not a hand’s span from his mother. My own mam’s friend. Queen of all the Valwode and cause of the war. Just cause, if her story was to be trusted.

  Did I trust anyone anymore?

  Yes. One. And she was his mother.

  “Now,” said the Witch, “this broken boy is full grown and of an age to rule. He is both wise and good, as puissant with power as ever his mother was. Still the Gentry cannot bear that he must wear their antler crown. The war rages between Gentry and mortalkind; the Valwode withers without its sovereign. But the Folk are stubborn.

  “One year ago today did the Gentry Prince come before the queen. He knelt before her—he, to whom all worlds should bow!—and begged to give his life for his people, to make way for another heir. This the Veil Queen could not stomach. She bargained with him instead.

  “‘Go you questing to the mortal realm,’ said the Veil Queen. ‘Return only when you have my eye, my heart, and a child of our blood to sit upon the throne.’”

  The Witch subsided. My whole face was numb with revelation, but when she said, “The rest you know,” I leapt off our sitting stone.

  “No!” I cried. “The rest I don’t! For I don’t know his name. Without his name, there’s no end for me. And no beginning, neither! It’s all just another ghost story.”

  The Witch rolled her one eye up to me. The long white oval pulsed with gold. When she spoke again, the subject was so changed I nearly kicked up a foot and popped her in the knee.

  “Were children never cruel in your village, Gordie Oakhewn?”

  “Aye,” I snapped. “All children can be cruel.”

  “Did they never sing songs while clapping hands or jumping rope?”

  I jerked my chin and began to pace. “Of course.” I did not say, That’s how I found you, isn’t it?

  “Did you never join in their games?”

  Turning to scowl at her, I said, “Me? Mam would’ve clouted my backside with her dishrag, she heard me singing some of those naughty rhymes. Which you’d know if you’d really met her, Your Majesty.”

  “But you listened,” the Witch continued. “You watched from your window. You stopped at the side of the road to hear their songs.”

  “Sometimes!”

  “What did they sing?”

  “What did they sing?”

  “What. Did. They. Sing.”

  With a rub of my face and a shrug, I rattled off a few of the old chants. “‘Shark in the Cellar.’ ‘How the Fox Ate the Moon.’ ‘Come and Cut the Cute Cat’s Head.’ ‘The One-Eyed Witch Lives Where?’” I gestured about extravagantly. “Here, apparently. Oh, and the companion song, about the Witch’s—” I stopped.

  That gold eye glared.

  “About the Witch’s Crooked Son.” My gorge rose too fast. That terrible song. In her last days of life, Mam had lain beside her open window whispering it, frail and sobbing, and I could do nothing to comfort her.

  “Sing it.”

  “I won’t!”

  “Sing it.”

  “Never! How could you ask it of me? His own mother?”

  The Witch grasped my chin in her hand. I had never felt fingers so strong and fell. I, who had been wife to boorish Jadio. Cold as the claws of the White One, they were, who rides your neck until you run off a cliff to escape her.

  “You are not your mother’s daughter. You are craven. You do not deserve him.”

  “Listen, you!” I bellowed, knocking her hand aside. “Twenty years the tots of Leressa have been singing that song. Cutting his soul into snippets and wounding him with every unwitting word. How could you—the Queen of the Valwode—you who know better—let his name be wrecked like that? Gentry never tell, he said—not even their own mothers. Is this why? Who let his secret name out? Who gave it like a golden ball into the hands of heedless children, until years of low games so dirtied and dented it you can hardly see the glistening? Twenty years of mockery. It must have been like a knife in his back every time some kiddie jumped rope.”

  The Witch’s white shoulders seemed almost as hunched as her son’s. She whispered, “In the early days I trusted Lorez too dearly. I underestimated his knowledge of the Gentry. Too well did he understand our ways. The night he betrayed us, he called Torvald and Lissa into our room. ‘Witness the Witch’s imprisonment,’ he said. ‘The ruins of your baby brother on the floor. Do you see what your father does for you?’

  “Perhaps they were repulsed at the sight. Perhaps they were delighted. The faces they showed their father were pitiless as his own. Then Torvald made up that rhyme to sing while Lissa danced around the baby’s body. He had been silent until then. Stunned. That was when he began to scream. How they made him dance, rhyming him back his own name.”

  The night air was wet and cool, but my skin baked so with anger that it might have been high summer. Shrugging off my quilted coat, I rummaged in my pack for the length of gold-braided rope I’d planned to sell off in pieces for food if my quest failed, or hang myself with if Jadio’s soldiers captured me.

  My hands shook. Nevertheless, I stood, turned my back on the Witch, and began to skip.

  Swoop, slap, thud. Swoop, slap, thud. The old rhythms entered me. My breath came faster. My heart began to drum.

  “Rickedy-din, the Wicked One

  Quick — let’s kill the Witch’s Son

  Roast his hump until it’s done

  How meet’s the meat of Ricadon!”

  Tears slicked my face. My nose began to run. My throat tightened till I could do no more than squeak. A few skips more, and the rope tangled my legs. I stopped to extricate myself, puffing for breath.

  It came to me then, doubled over, that I’d been a rhymer for nearly as long as I’d been a prisoner. True, my couplets had all been curses like the one Torvald and Lissa had lain upon the Witch’s Son.
I’d never tried to compose a countercurse to coax a shy thing from the Veil. Point was, rhymes meant something to the Gentry, where a song was life or death depending on which you followed through the bog. Rhymes could make a broken baby dance with pain, or a twisted mouth flash out with laughter in the dark. My golden rope glittered in the moonlight as I got my breath back. I began skipping again.

  “Rickedy-din, the Kindly One

  How I love the Witch’s Son

  Woo him well until he’s won

  My vows I’ll make to Ricadon.”

  The ruins of Lirhu vanished. The Witch with one eye vanished (but a second before she did, I saw her smile). So did the night disappear, and the chill, and my weariness. I could not breathe. My innards turned to soup and streamed out of holes in the soles of my feet. Then the world steadied. My body unjellied. I stood in a sunlit cow pasture—near enough the sea to smell it, though I did not know in which direction it lay.

  My cow Annat grazed not far from me, her brown-dappled hide agleam. My heart jumped for joy in my chest.

  “Annat, my love! You’re looking fat and happy!”

  In a distant corner of the pasture, my good red bull Manu trotted back and forth, a tiny white figure clinging to his corded neck and giggling.

  Now, I knew time moved differently in the Veil, that Gentry children did not develop as mortals did, but oh! I feared for her! She was so small, both her worlds so unsafe. I thought of my fox twins, and others like them. The war was not over—not by many a long mile and a longer year. King, Archabbot, Prickster, peasant, Gentry warrior, mortal soldier: our battles would rage ever bloodier before we knew an end. Such a tangle. Such a terror. If only the children were let to reach a reasonable age, perhaps together they might build a more reasonable world. But they had to survive it first!

  “Be careful!” I shouted, “Manu, not so fast!” and set off at a run. Not two steps I’d taken before someone had caught the back of my skirt. People were always stopping me this way. I should start wearing trousers.

  “Peace, Milkmaid! She won’t fall. We’ve taken to calling her the White Raven. If we don’t tie a thread to her ankle and tether her to something solid—like Manu—she’ll fly right up into the air and only come down again when she’s hungry.”

  My body strained forward, not quite caught up to my ears.

  “But—she’s—just—”

  “A child. Our child. Seven days old and stubborn as the sea.” He released my skirt abruptly. I splattered into the dirt as was my wont—charmingly, just shy of a cowpat. This was so reminiscent of the moment we’d first met, I laughed.

  His long black eyes danced as he gazed down. His hair was wild as a thundercloud. Clad like a farmer but for the opal on his finger, the ivory at his throat, the green flame on his brow, he looked…healthy. His shoulders still hunched, his torso still torqued, but his brow was unfurrowed, free of pain. No farmer or fisherman, prince or soldier had ever been so fine and fey, so gladdening to my eyes. Wiping my face briefly with the hem of my skirt, I took my first true breath in what seemed like a lifetime.

  “If our Raven can fly, Ricadon, she gets it from your side of the family. Me, I’m mortal to the bone—remember?”

  “Not anymore, Gordie Oakhewn,” said my friend and lifted me from the ground.

  For Bea LaMonica and Gillian Hastings

  Beatrice did not wake up in Heaven.

  She lay flat on her back. The surface beneath her was hard as concrete, maybe bouncier, like those playgrounds made from recycled tires. Bitter crazy cold out, but she could not see her breath.

  “Dead, then,” said Beatrice.

  Not panic. Not exactly. A pang, maybe. Best not to pay attention to that. Might begin to gnaw holes in a girl when a girl most needs to be whole.

  So Beatrice sat up and patted her head. Pigtails still held, thank the Good Goddess Durga, as Dad used to say…although Dad hadn’t believed in any pantheon predating Darwin, had gone gravy to the slaprash an atheist and a scientist and taking in vain the names of all fiend-eating ladygods sharing cross references in the ’cyclopedia.

  ’Spossible, she thought with an inward sparkle of enthusiasm, I meet up Dad in this place. We’ll discuss gods, or death, or breathing without breath, or whatever, like we used to do in the olden days, except…

  Except this place seemed to stretch out forever like an elastic elephant skin. Empty. Or—not empty? There. A gleam of red and white, listing not too far from where she sat. A striped barber’s pole. A fat white glove at its pinnacle wriggling HELLO. The arrow of its index finger urged her down a path.

  The path, Beatrice saw, was the same gray as ground and horizon, easy to miss. Just a thin groove to be picked across like the wirewalkers used to do under the big tops. Or a girl might elect to stroll with more dignity along its side. If a girl followed it at all.

  But standing still invited the biting chill, and Beatrice shivered. The pointing glove reminded her of the Flabberghast’s hands, which were just as white, but much slimmer. Slim and graceful, nearly transparent, the fingers too long and the wrists too bony. He was the last thing she remembered: his long painted face peering at her through the bushes, his eyes shining black as beetles.

  “He killed me!” Beatrice said aloud, startled. “Him and his diamond teeth.”

  Well, she didn’t remember that part, not ezzactly. Not the getting gobbled part, only the part where he smiled.

  But she was here, wasn’t she? And here could be anywhere, but it could also be in the Flabberghast’s stomach. And even if here were really elsewhere, she’d bet she’d left her bones behind to undergo eternal digestion. Danged Flabberghast! Old carrion eater. Old clown.

  But how’d he get close enough? Beatrice had lived by the same command she’d drummed into her little Barka Gang. If she’d told Tex, Diodiance, Granny Two-Shoes, and Sheepdog Sal once, she’d told them a kajillion times: “Beware the Flabberghast.”

  And when they asked her why, she’d said, “Well, because he’s a Tall One. Because he appeared in the gravy yard with the other eight after the world ended. Because he’s here to eat the bones, and he’ll eat yours when you go.”

  “So?” Diodiance always asked. Diodiance liked the Flabberghast, liked his cardboard hut, his yellow shoes, his little way of bowing low. “We ain’t dead yet, so he can’t rightly eat us. Till our slaprashes show, Queen B, mayn’t he come over to play?”

  Quick as a slung-shot rock, Beatrice always parried, “What if Ol’ Flabby don’t feel like waiting till your slaprash shows? What if he picks up a crushing stone with his weird white hand and caves in your skull, strips your flesh to stretch upon a great moony drum, and sucks your bones good and fresh? The Flabberghast’s not contained like the other Tall Ones. The gravy yard gates don’t hold him. Lives outside the arch in his cardboard hut, don’t he, while his friends slaver and babble and gobble up crypt-crunch behind the black iron bars, those white lights on their shoulders a-shinin’. And don’t he smile to be so free, aiming his big, bright teeth at any kiddo strayin’ bold from her gang.”

  Tex, taking her pause for breath as permission, would jump in to plead with Diodiance: “Di, don’t stray.” Those two were just each other’s age, just shy of nine. His ashy, stiff hair stood on end at the thought of losing her.

  “Oh. Awright.” Diodiance never did sound convinced.

  And Beatrice, more quietly, made sure to repeat what they’d all heard before. “Don’t stray.” She gazed at her Barkas with the solemnity of her age. Twelve now, or thereabouts, and they all knew the slaprash would get her soon. Watching them remember this, she’d soften her fierceness to a smile.

  “Barka dears, this is world’s end. You’ve only got a few years left to your names. You gotta live ’em, not go playin’ flirt to Death’s own maggotman—no matter how he smiles and bows. Don’t go near the gravy yard. Don’t stray. And beware the Flabberghast.”

  Or not.

  Sighing for her lost Barkas, Beatrice pushed herself up from th
e squishy hard ground. Her gait felt off. She glanced down.

  “Appears,” she observed aloud, “I’m missing my shoe.”

  Not only that, but the white cotton lace edging her left sock had gone all rusty. Looked old. Looked like it’d been dragged oh, many a long mile. Or like something had bled all over it. Someone.

  Beatrice bit her lip, and even that felt like nothing, and she covered her eyes with her hands, but there was only the same gray inside as everywhere else. The thought of limping listlessly along that thin gray groove with only one shoe and a rusty sock was the three-ton straw set atop a brittle-boned and spindly-kneed camel, and it was enough, it was outside enough!

  Beatrice crumpled and began to cry.

  “Please!” she sobbed, her tears all dried to dust. “Oh, please! Oh, Durga! Oh, Dad! Daddy!”

  Above her, pouring from a rip in the empty sky, something like ravens circled.

  * * *

  Tex crept back to the Catchpenny Shop-‘n’-Save where the other members of the Barka Gang awaited.

  “Beatrice is gone.”

  His face, gussied up for recon, was ghoulish under the black paint. The whites of his eyes were very white, but his teeth looked yellow. Tex never did learn to brush regular, though Diodiance nightly whupped him upside his rattlebox for forgetting.

  “Gone?” Diodiance asked. “Like, to the gravy yard?”

  Tex shook his head. Fleas flew. “Nope. But I found a ribbon from her hair right there by the black iron gates. So I axed the Tall Ones through the bars if they’d seen her, and they smacked their lips and said, Nothing fresh has come in oh so long, and won’t I stand a little closer please, and what nice fat hands I have. I’m thinking, Di, you can’t go into the gravy yard ’less you pass the Flabberghast. And I’m thinking, Di, it’s the Flabberghast what’s got Queen B for sure.”