It had something to do with all those oceans he’d crossed, all those monsters he’d fought, all the winters he’d endured.
It was pride.
He stayed with her for a year and a day, in that little valley where the days themselves seemed written for them, where the gardens changed colors daily to fit their moods, and the stars danced whimsical little jigs to accompany the musical way she laughed at night. Even troubled as he was, he knew a happiness that he hadn’t known for a long time, maybe not ever, certainly not for as far back as his limited memory recorded: not since sometime before the day, a lifetime before, when he’d found himself a stranger in a small fishing village, wholly unable to remember who he was or how he’d come to that place.
Then, late one night, at the end of their year together, he awoke tormented by the strange restlessness in his heart, and rose from their bed to walk alone by the edge of her private fountain of youth. The water had always reflected the stars, every other night he’d looked upon it; it had always seemed to contain an entirely self-contained universe, as filled with endless possibility as the one where he and Cerile lived and walked and breathed. But tonight, though there were plenty of stars in the sky, none were reflected on the pond surface. The water showed only a dark, inky blackness that reflected not possibility but the cold finality of a prison.
Cerile’s beautiful voice rang out from somewhere in the darkness that suddenly surrounded him. “What is wrong, my love?”
“I was thinking,” he said, without turning to face her. “That I journeyed all this distance and spent all this time here and never got around to asking you to grant my Wish.”
“Is there any point?” she asked—and for the first time since he arrived, he heard in a voice an unsettling note of despair. “What could you possibly wish for that would be of any value to you here? Health? Strength? Eternal youth and beauty? You already have that, here. Love? Happiness? I’ve given you those, too. Riches? Power? Stay here and you can have as much of either as any man could possibly want.”
“I know,” he said. “They were all things I once thought I’d wish for when I found you. You gave them to me without waiting for me to wish for them. But my Wish is still hanging over my head, demanding to be used.”
“You don’t have to listen to it.”
“I do. It’s the only thing I own that I earned myself, that I can truly say you didn’t give me. And if I don’t use it, then everything I’ve done means nothing.”
“Why don’t you just wish that you can be content to always stay here with me, and love me forever, as I’ll love you forever?”
He turned and faced her, seeing her forlorn and lost by the door of their cottage, wanting her more than everything he’d ever wanted before, feeling his own heart break at the knowledge that he’d caused the sorrow welling in her eyes. And for the first time he understood that they’d endured this moment hundreds or even thousands of times before, for as long as the sun had been a fire in the sky.
He said, “I’m sorry. I can’t wish for that. I wish for the one thing I lost when I came here. A purpose. Something to struggle for. A reason to deserve everything you give me, whenever I manage to find my way back.”
She granted his Wish, then fell to her knees and sobbed: not the tears of an omnipotent creature who controlled the earth and the stars, and could have had everything she ever wanted, but the tears of a lonely little girl who couldn’t.
When she rose again, she approached the waters of eternal youth, and sat down beside them, knowing that she wouldn’t feel their touch again until the inevitable day, still a lifetime away, when he would, all too briefly, return to her.
Someday, she swore, she’d make him so happy that he’d never Wish to leave.
Until then—
The journeyer was still a young man when he embarked on his search for the all-powerful witch Cerile.
He was bent and gray-haired a lifetime later when he found a map to her home in the tomb of the forgotten kings . . .
Yoon Ha Lee’s work has appeared in Lightspeed, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Farrago’s Wainscot, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Electric Velocipede, and Sybil’s Garage. She’s also appeared in the anthologies Twenty Epics, Japanese Dreams, In Lands That Never Were, Year’s Best Fantasy #6, and Science Fiction: The Best of 2002. Her poetry has appeared in such venues as Jabberwocky, Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Mythic Delirium, and Goblin Fruit. Learn more at yoonhalee.com.
Our next story involves some math. Wait, don’t go! It’s also got demon armies, a lie-detecting magic sword, bitter family drama, and all that good stuff, we promise. But there’s some math too, or at least, mathematical concepts.
Yoon Ha Lee is a former high school math teacher, and her work often incorporates aspects of her training. Most of us tend to imagine magic as an easy path to power, a way of getting something for nothing, and we’re enticed by the notion of flying through the air and hurling fireballs the moment we pick up our first wand. We tend to think of magic as something at which we would be naturally and effortlessly talented. But what if learning magic was a lot like learning math? What if you actually did have to learn a lot of math in order to perform magic? How many of us would stick with it?
Our next story presents a world in which magic and mathematics are inextricably linked, and in which solving equations is a matter of life or death. But don’t worry, you won’t need any calculus or trigonometry to enjoy this story. And no, this won’t be on the test.
Counting the Shapes
Yoon Ha Lee
How many shapes of pain are there?
Are any topologically equivalent?
And is one of them death?
Biantha woke to a heavy knocking on the door and found her face pressed against a book’s musty pages. She sat up and brushed her pale hair out of her face, trying to discern a pattern to the knocking and finding that the simplest one was impatience. Then she got to her feet and opened the door, since her warding spell had given her no warning of an unfriendly presence outside. Besides, it would be a little longer before the demons reached Evergard.
“Took your time answering the door, didn’t you, Lady Biantha?” Evergard’s gray-haired lord, Vathré, scowled at her. Without asking for permission, which he never did anyway, he strode past her to sweep his eyes over the flurry of papers that covered her desk. “You’d think that, after years of glancing at your work, I’d understand it.”
“Some of the conjectures are probably gibberish anyway.” She smiled at him, guessing that what frustrated him had little to do with her or the theorems that made her spells possible. Vathré visited her when he needed an ear detached from court intrigues. “What troubles you this time, my lord?”
He appropriated her one extra chair and gestured for her to sit at the desk, which she did, letting her smile fade. “We haven’t much longer, Biantha. The demons have already overrun Rix Pass. No one agrees on when they’ll get here. The astrologer refused to consult the stars, which is a first—claimed he didn’t want to see even an iffy prediction—” Vathré looked away from her. “My best guess is that the demons will be here within a month. They still have to march, overwhelming army or no.”
Biantha nodded. Horses barely tolerated demon-scent and went mad if forced to carry demons. “And you came to me for battle spells?” She could not keep the bitterness from her voice. The one time she had killed with a spell had been for a child’s sake. It had not helped the child, as far as she knew.
“Do you have any battle spells?” he asked gravely.
“Not many.” She leaned over and tapped the nearest pile of paper. “I was in the middle of this proof when I discovered that I’d have to review one of Yverry’s theorems. I fell asleep trying to find it. Give me a few days and I can set up a battle spell that will kill any demons you’ve already managed to wound.” Biantha saw the weariness in the lord’s green eyes and flushed. “It i
sn’t much, I know.”
“That helps, but it isn’t what I came for.”
Dread opened at the pit of her stomach. “The Prophecy.”
Vathré inclined his head.
“I’ve tried to pry some sense out of it ever since I learned of it, you know.” She rubbed her eyes. “The poetry translates into shapes and equations that are simply intractable. I’ve tried every kind of analysis and transformation I know. If there’s any hope in the rhymes, the rhythms, the ambiguities, don’t ask me to show you where it is. You’d do better consulting the minstrels for a lecture on symbolism.”
“I don’t trust the minstrels.” His brows drew together. “And any time I consult the other magicians, I get too many uncertainties to untangle. The seers and healers are hopeless. The astrologer gets headaches trying to determine where to start. The cartomancer gives me a dozen different possibilities each time she casts the cards. As far as the Prophecy is concerned, yours is the only kind of magic I can trust.”
Biantha smiled wanly. “Which is why, of course, it’s so limited.” Sometimes she envied the astrologer, the cartomancer, the enchanters, the healers, the seers—magicians whose powers were less reliable but more versatile. “I’ll work on it, my lord.”
“A month,” he reminded her.
She hesitated. “Have you declared your heir yet?”
Vathré eyed her. “Not you, too?”
She swallowed. “If you die, my lord, someone must carry on. Don’t leave the succession in doubt. A problem may have several solutions, but some solutions can still be wrong.”
“We’ve been over this before,” he said. “Considering the current state of affairs, I’d have to declare a chain of succession down to the apprentice cook. If anyone survives, they can argue over it. My advisors can rule by council until then.”
Biantha bowed her head and watched him leave.
Usually Biantha avoided Evergard’s great hall. It reminded her of her former home, the demon emperor’s palace, though the scents of lavender and lilacs drifted through the air, not the smell of blood; people smiled at her instead of bowing or curtsying rigidly. Musicians played softly while nobles chattered, idle soldiers gambled for pittances, and children scampered in and out, oblivious to the adults’ strained voices. A few of the boys were fair-haired, like herself. Biantha closed her eyes briefly before turning along the walls, partly to avoid thinking about a particular fair-haired boy, partly because she had come to study the tapestries for inspiration.
The tapestries’ colors remained as vibrant as they had been when she first swore fealty to Lord Vathré upon the Blade Fidora. Biantha had long ago determined the logic by which the tapestries had been arranged, and did not concern herself with it now. Instead, she inspected the scenes of the Nightbreak War.
Here was the Battle of Noiren Field, where webs of starlight blinded a thousand soldiers and angular silhouettes soared above, ready for the massacre. Here was General Vian on a blood bay destrier, leading a charge against a phalanx of demons. Here was amber-eyed Lady Chandal weeping over a fallen young man whose closed eyes might also have been amber, flowers springing up where her tears splashed onto the battlefield. Biantha swallowed and quickened her steps. One by one she passed the tapestries until she found what she sought.
Unlike the other Nightbreak tapestries, its border had been woven in rust rather than Evergard’s colors, blue and black: rust for betrayal. She stared at the dispassionate face of Lord Mière, enchanter and traitor to Evergard. His had been a simpler magic than her own, drawing upon ritual and incantation. With it he had almost defeated the Watchlanders; only his daughter’s knife had saved them.
Symmetry, she sighed. The one thing she had pried from the Prophecy was that it possessed a twisted symmetry. It hinted at two wars between the demons’ empire and the Watchlands, and because records of the first war—the Nightbreak War—were scant, Biantha had yet to understood certain cantos, certain equations, that dealt with it. Hours with Evergard’s minstrels and historians hadn’t helped. Other than herself, only Vathré knew that there might be a second traitor among them.
Or that, because they had won the first war, they might lose the second, in a cruel mirroring transformation of history.
“Lady Biantha?”
She turned. “Yes?”
The captain—she did not know his name—bowed slightly. “It isn’t often that we see you down here, my lady.”
Biantha smiled wryly. “A bit too much noise for my work, and on occasion I test spells that might go wrong, sometimes fatally so. My chambers are shielded, but out here . . . ”
In the demon emperor’s court, her words would have been a veiled threat. Here, the captain nodded thoughtfully and gestured at the tapestry. “I was wondering why you were looking at this. Most people avoid it.”
“I was thinking about the Prophecy,” she said, retracing the intractable equations in her mind. There had to be a way to balance term against term, solve the system and read Evergard’s future, but it continued to escape her. “I’m worried.”
“We all are.”
Biantha paused. “You said ‘most people.’ Does that include yourself?”
His mouth twisted. “No. It’s a useful reminder. Do you ever wish you had stayed at the demon emperor’s palace?”
She read honest curiosity in the captain’s expression, not innuendo. “Never.” She breathed deeply. “I started learning mathemagic there because magicians, even human magicians, are protected unless they do something foolish. Otherwise I would have been a slave or a soldier; I had no wish for the former and no heart, no talent, for the latter.”
Such a small word, foolish, when the penalty it carried had given Biantha nightmares for years. She had seen the demon emperor touch his serpent-eyed scepter to a courtesan’s perfumed shoulder, as if in blessing; had been unable to avert her gaze before she saw the woman’s eyes boiling away and splinters of bone erupting through the rouged skin.
The captain looked down. “I’m sorry to have reminded you, my lady.”
“A useful reminder,” she echoed. “And what does this portrait of Lord Mière remind you of, if I may ask?”
“Honor, and those who lose it,” he said. “Lord Mière was my great-grandfather.”
Biantha blinked and saw that there was, indeed, a resemblance in the structure of his face. Her eyes moved to the tapestry’s rust border. What had driven Mière to betrayal? It occurred to her, not for the first time, that she herself had fled the demon emperor’s court—but the symmetry here seemed incomplete. “Do you think there’s hope for us?” she asked the captain.
He spread his hands, studying Biantha’s face as she had his just a moment before. “There are those of us who say we must have a chance, or you would have returned to the demons.”
She felt herself flush—and then laughed, though that laughter came perilously close to tears. “I have rarely known demons to forgive. Neither have they forgiven Evergard their defeat in the Nightbreak War.”
“More’s the pity,” said the captain, frowning thoughtfully, and took his leave.
For us or the demons? Biantha thought.
Symmetry. The word haunted Biantha through the days and nights as she struggled with the Prophecy. She had wondered, after meeting the captain, if it meant something as simple as her flight from the demons, the fact that one of Lord Mière’s descendants survived here. The ballads said Mière had but a single daughter, named Paienne, but they made no mention of her after she saved the Watchlands.
The secret eluded her, slipped away from her, sent her into dreams where dizzying shifts in perspective finally drove her to awaken. Biantha turned to her tomes, seeking clues in others’ mathemagical speculations; when she tired of that, she memorized her battle spells, bowing to the heartless logic of war. And went back to the tomes, their treasury of axioms and theorems, diagrams and discussions.
She was leafing through Athique’s Transformations when someone imitated thunder on her door.
Biantha put down the book and opened the door. “Yes?”
The herald bowed elaborately. “A meeting of the court, my lady. Lord Vathré wishes you to attend.”
“I’ll be there.” Firmly, she shut the door and changed into her formal robes as swiftly as she could. Biantha had attended few court meetings: at first, because Vathré had been uncertain of her loyalties, then because of her awkwardness as a foreigner, and finally because she rarely had anything to contribute to matters of state and found her time better spent working on her magic. That Vathré should summon her now was unusual.
She was right. For once the attendants and servants had been cleared out, and the court had arrayed itself along the sides of the throne room while Vathré and his advisers sat at the head. She took her place between the astrologer and Lady Iastre. The astrologer wore his habitual frown, while the lady’s face was cool and composed, revealing nothing. Biantha knew better, after playing draughts or rithmomachia against Iastre once a week in less hectic times: Iastre’s face only went blank when she anticipated trouble.
“We have a guest today,” said Vathré at his driest. His eyes might have flicked to Biantha, too briefly for her to tell for certain.
On cue, the guards led in a man who wore black and red and gold, stripped of his sword—she knew there had been a sword, by the uniform. The style of his clothing spoke of the demons’ realm, and the only one besides the emperor who dared appear in those colors was his champion. The emperor’s champion, her son.
A challenge? Biantha thought, clenching her hands so they would not shake. Has Marten come to challenge Vathré? But surely the emperor knew Evergard held different customs and would hardly surrender the Watchlands’ fate to a duel’s outcome.
Hopelessly, she studied the man who had so suddenly disrupted her memories of the child who hid flowers and leaves between the pages of her books, who climbed onto her desk to look out the window at the soldiers drilling. He had her pale hair, a face very like hers. His hands, relaxed at his sides, were also hers, though deadlier; Biantha knew of the training an emperor’s champion underwent and had little faith that the guards could stop him from killing Vathré if he wished. But Marten’s eyes belonged to a man Biantha had tried to forget, who had died attempting to keep her from leaving the palace with their child.
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