by Jeff Wheeler
He shook his head, unable to speak.
She studied his expression carefully, and then nodded to herself. “It was.”
“Don’t blame yourself. There was nothing you could do.”
“Stop. You, of all people, cannot forgive me for this.” She shook violently. “I’ve killed the empire, the one thing you loved . . . how can you help but despise me?”
“Everything dies.” He offered the words gently. “It is the way of things.”
“Succession.” She spat the word bitterly, ignoring him. “That’s what started this war.” She wrapped her arms around herself, shrinking against the wind. “All those years, old man, you tried to tell me: get rid of a few more cousins, good or bad—you’ll be glad you did! And this is the final proof.” She put out a trembling hand toward the city. “You were right, and I was wrong.”
“No. Just the reverse, Cleona.”
She squinted at him, surprised.
“You tried to prevent this. The heir that you conceived was poisoned in the womb—they murdered her before she was even born. Don’t be ashamed that you refused to play that game; you should be proud that you stood above it. It was an ugly, stupid way to live.” He pointed to the broken ruins below. “And this is the way it always ends.”
“My, my.” She cocked her head, deeply amused. “You’ve certainly changed your tune, old man. You were always a great proponent of the game.”
“I practically invented it. That wreck below is as much my doing as anyone’s. I wanted to build a great empire, one that would last forever—but I laid the foundation in blood.” He turned away from her. “It’s a shame I didn’t ask the gardeners for help. They could have told me that nothing stands long, rooted in bad soil.”
She reached out a weathered hand. “Tiberius . . . There’s nothing we can do to change things now.”
“Yes. I know.” He swallowed, staring dry-eyed at the destruction below. “No one knows it better than I.”
She remained silent for some time, sitting beside him on the bluff. When she finally turned to him again, she wore an almost girlish smile. “Do you ever wonder how things might have been, if we had both lived at the same time?”
Tiberius looked away, hiding his face from her. “No, Cleona.”
She frowned. “Really? Never?”
“No. I think it was a blessing that we met when we did.”
She drew back, mingled hurt and bemusement in her eyes. “Why do you say that?”
“I was a different man when I was alive. I would have hurt you.” He turned away. “And I’ve done enough harm to the things I love.”
She reached tenderly for his cheek, but her fingertips met no resistance; they passed through him like a dream. She was fading, the wind and rain wiping her away. Grinning at her own predicament, she quickly kissed her withered palm and blew it toward him. “Something to remember me by.” Her voice was so faint it was almost inaudible.
“No need.” He smiled. “We’ll meet again.”
* * *
The Severan Funeral Garden is the planet’s largest public park, bordered on all sides by the imperial city of Nova Roma. It is a fine playground for a young empress, with a million places to hide. On certain spring mornings, when the sun and wind are right, a child still creeps through the weeds there, stalking an old man. He goes to the same place year after year, to tell her his name—because although the two of them have met before, he knows she will not remember the occasion.
Arinn Dembo
Arinn Dembo is a writer and game developer currently living and working in the Greater Seattle area. Her short stories, poetry, and novellas have appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, Weird Tales, Lamp Light Magazine, and several collections. Most recently, she contributed three stories to two anthologies, which were both nominated for the 2015 World Fantasy Award, in different categories: Gods, Memes and Monsters by Stoneskin Press, and She Walks in Shadows by Innsmouth Free Press.
As a narrative designer in the computer gaming industry, she has provided world-building and background fiction to a number of popular PC titles. She is the English-language screenwriter for the Japanese animated series World Trigger, based on the manga series written and illustrated by Daisuke Ashihara, and her military SF novel The Deacon’s Tale and her short-story collection, Monsoon and Other Stories, are both available from Kthonia Press.
The author holds a degree in anthropology and a second in classical archaeology. The inspiration for this story comes from her academic work in Roman studies and is dedicated with love to her younger daughter, Freya.
Fantasy
Lake Heart
By Adele Gardner | 7,000 words
When Yancy climbed up to her garden, she found Julian standing straight as one of the stakes for her tomato plants, his black hair perched like a crow above the reds and greens.
“Julian, how nice to see you.” Yancy told herself sternly that she’d given up foolish hopes, but she couldn’t help the crooked grin. “What do you want?”
There was something odd about the way he stood among the cornstalks, wrapped in a cloak on a June morning. The incongruity struck her, that the prince’s right-hand man should accost a water witch in her vegetable garden.
“I came to inquire after your welfare, of course.”
“I’m fine. How’s your fool of a brother? I assume he sent you.”
“Louis-Rey would like to see you return. All of us would.”
“If he wants me at the college, he can tell me himself.” Yancy glanced at the storm clouds gathering overhead giving a green cast to the day. “Tell me why you’ve really come.”
He gazed at her with fine, dark eyes, his face long, his lips folded tight as a letter. His eyes swept the pear, cherry, and apple trees that ringed her small field, then down to her little rowboat, tucked up on the shore. Finally, he asked, “Are you really doing all right?”
She said, “I have enough for my experiments. More than a solitary body needs. A water witch’s life is simple.” Following politics at the college, she enjoyed being a hermit. Considered eccentric for retiring at the age of thirty-seven—because she could no longer stand by while the prince siphoned the lake’s magic for his own ends—she had demanded her sanction as lake maid. She’d hoped that other life sciences professors would join her, but their fear outweighed the proof, while elms died and rafts of fish washed up on shore. “I’ve grown into my role like an old, yellow toenail. And there’s always plenty of fish for supper.”
When Julian didn’t speak, she pulled gardener’s gloves from her blue gingham apron and lifted her trowel from its belt loop. As she bent to work, Julian stepped forward, his hair shining blue in the overcast day. She hummed, trying to ignore the way he trampled the pumpkin vines.
“Give me a hand, Yancy?” said Julian, his voice strangely clipped. His black cloak and red silk shirt parted to reveal a tiny fist.
“What—” Yancy reached out instinctively and got a warm, blue-wrapped bundle. With dismay, she saw a petal face looking back at her.
“Will you take care of her?” Julian asked.
“Who is she?”
“She might be Louis-Rey’s, but he’ll never acknowledge her. You know how he treats women.” There was something dark and hard in his voice, like a stone nestled deep in the lake’s muddy floor. She’d never heard him complain directly about his brother, but his empathy was clear in the way he managed Louis-Rey’s estates. She knew he did the job in part to mitigate his brother’s meanness.
The baby gave a soft, milky sigh. “Has it been weaned?” she asked.
“No, but she’ll do all right with cow’s milk. I wouldn’t ask you if she had anywhere else to go.”
“And if you were anyone else, I wouldn’t answer.” Yancy frowned. She did not want a baby. A career witch did not have time for such things.
Julian waggled his eyebrows at her, his grin making rocky crags of his angular cheeks. “Say yes,
Yancy. You can’t resist us waifs from the wrong side of the sheets.”
Yancy snorted. “You know me too well.”
“You’ll be all right here?” She nodded. She held the child close, as if it were his parting gift, not a burden he’d handed over, barely even asking her leave.
“Take care, Yancy.” He leaned in delicately to kiss her cheek. She turned her head and caught him on the lips.
Then he disappeared through the rose hedge. To the tune of a whicker, his head bobbed above the fence as Damien’s hooves crunched stones.
* * *
Yancy had to call her something, and the girl shot up like ivy, tangling herself in Yancy’s affairs. As a toddler, Ivy crammed magic pebbles into her mouth and wandered into the water until Yancy turned her into a fish just to get some work done. Ivy was small and dark and quick, with eyes like a rain cloud and hair like a slick black stone plucked from the water. Her long, narrow face looked like Julian’s. At least, that was what Yancy preferred to see. She taught the girl to call her Mistress, never Mother, as Aunt Ysabeau had done with her own apprentice.
Yancy pulled out the spell books and natural histories from which Aunt Ysabeau had taught her, battered and familiar with their lively paintings of rainbow trout and smallmouth bass grinning as they posed in the shallows. Together she and Ivy filled pots of lake water with stones and fish, braided lakeweed, strung snail-shell charms, and cooked up lake-stone remedies. Ivy helped Yancy build curatives and preservatives, charms for a good catch, guards against flood or drowning. They sold spells in the village for clothes, her wizard arts, and Ivy’s future.
Yancy logged storms like a ship captain and sent weekly reports to the Wizards Bureau. Over time, her traded spells and remedies had given place to warnings. The storms were getting worse, wind and waterspouts going wild as the college exerted more strain and Louis-Rey’s pet nobles built out into the lake. More storms meant more drownings and sailing accidents. When the stones sang in the rain barrels, Ivy helped Yancy batten shutters, flip the boat, and take readings from the weathercock and flood poles. They watched from the sunporch as the lake advanced up the shore, its colors rippled by rain and their view through the thick glass till it looked like one of Ivy’s watercolors.
The next day, Yancy stood at the end of the dock, flinging out stale bread, calling the gulls. They shrieked, circling her with fierce joy. She recognized her messenger and reached up. He squawked, then settled in her arms, one wing stretched out to shield her tawny, grizzled head from the sun.
The reply from the Wizards Bureau held only three words: “We cannot interfere.” The seal, with its cat shining through a conical hat, could not be counterfeited. She crumpled it into her apron pocket. She stroked the gull’s black head, then took the lid off a bucket. The gull squeaked and gobbled a fish head.
Depressed, Yancy walked back to the shore. Ivy splashed in the water, chasing the golden-green wiggles of sunfish and diving from algae-slick rocks. Yancy waded out to join her. It was a relief to chase the giggling girl between the docks, then glide through the cool, green underwater world.
Julian came for supper, as he did sometimes after a day of riding around on the prince’s errands. Ivy rushed out, dripping, and Julian swooped her over his head, her laughter bouncing on the water.
Yancy boned trout while Ivy told Julian how she’d caught it wading. Vegetables and fruit from their small garden rounded out the meal. They played games on the sunporch while the water lapped peacefully, till the stars came out and the bats darted like swallows.
When the moonlight rippled on the waves, Yancy tucked Ivy into the cot. With a quick surge of emotion, she bent and touched her mouth to the girl’s hair. As she let the curtain fall over Ivy’s doorway, Yancy could hear her whispering to Damien through the window, the stallion whickering in reply.
She and Julian walked onto the dock. The old boards creaked and swayed toward black-glass water, where moonlight stretched like a beacon. Julian crossed his ankles, wrists resting on pointed knees. In the darkness, he was an outline with a shadowy face.
“We could go swimming,” he said.
“There are eels now.”
“There are eels everywhere,” he confessed. “Yancy, I have to warn you. Louis-Rey knows you’ve been talking to the Wizards Bureau. He has enough of them in his pocket.”
“He can’t buy a wizard. They just need time to investigate. Deposing a prince requires a lot of proof.”
“Yancy. You know they bow to local authority. They always have.”
“Not in a case like this. To abuse magic till it results in destruction is forbidden by all our codes. It’s an agreement we reached after Atlantis—when it seemed the power of wizards would destroy the world.”
“Well, they’d better make up their minds soon,” Julian said.
Yancy fought her urge to retort. The wizards were too cautious. Already she felt the pull and drag as the lake resisted her spells—and she was the Keulocka Maid.
The night water glistened with trails from the magically lit college and mansions across the lake. Yancy watched a boat skim south, colored lanterns hung from stern and prow. The water was just glimmers of shore, the broken reflection of the moon on velvet, floating. Julian sighed and took her hand.
Yancy slept in the corner of the dining room, where Ysabeau’s bedpost stood under the trees. They left the shutters open for the occasional slap of fish, an errant wave upon the shore. Moonlight flickered through rustling trees. Julian brushed the hair back from her face.
“Why now?” she whispered.
“I have no right,” he said quietly. “After all these years. But the whole world’s going— Ah, hell.” He hugged her fiercely.
Water shushed against the stilts of the cottage, the dock. The breeze flowed in one window and out the other. Waves splashed beneath the house, patting the shore with the measured sound of a fisher’s boots on rocks.
The words welled up and spilled: “Julian, will you come live with me?”
His arms around her tightened. His warm breath smelled like chives. He said nothing for a time. She listened to the waves.
The windows showed speckles of stars above black trees that marked the distant shore. “He’d never allow it.”
“You could be a private citizen. Renounce—”
“The chains are too tight.” He stopped. His throat worked against her cheek.
She lay quiet, listening. Awareness came and went. As morning rose around her, the only sounds were the drip of rain on roof and leaves, and Julian’s snore.
* * *
Yancy always kept an eye out for Julian’s arrival. Outside her gate, Damien stretched a swan-long neck to nibble Ysabeau’s tea roses on the trellised fence. “Damien!” Yancy called joyfully. “You know better than that!”
Damien snorted and chewed meditatively. “Julian, would you kindly stop that monster of yours from eating my last rose?”
Julian towered over her. With a fierce frown, he crushed her close. “Yancy . . . Yancy . . .” He buried his head in her shoulder.
“What’s wrong?” she gasped.
Julian pulled back. “I’m sorry.” There was pain in his dark eyes.
She stood watching him, conscious of the minutes slipping past. Her hand rose nervously to her flyaway, graying frizz.
“She’s a lovely child,” he said. “A lot like you. Self-reliant. Determined. Intelligent. Stubborn.”
She wrenched her eyes from the narrow lips and hollow cheeks of the man she’d loved for years and glanced at the lake, where the girl splashed.
Julian said, “You know why I’m here, sweetheart.”
“No,” she said brusquely. But he was right. She’d always known a princess couldn’t stay a water witch’s apprentice forever.
Julian said, “It’s all my fault, Yancy. He played on my sympathies. Back then, Louis-Rey told me if you didn’t take the baby, he’d abandon her on the nearest hill.”
“What are you saying?”
> “He played us both for fools. He wanted her to be your apprentice—learn your secrets—all the things you refused to share. The joke was on us all along,” Julian said bitterly.
A wave of dread swamped her. “Don’t talk that way! I would have taken Ivy—it wouldn’t have mattered!”
“Don’t you understand, Yancy? He’s sent me now to bring her back, to collect on his investment—just another one of my errands!”
“He’ll kill you if you don’t bring her,” she said flatly.
Julian gave a tight shrug. “I always knew I’d die in his service, one way or another.”
“I can’t let you take her. I won’t have her twisted to his will!” Steeling herself against his pain, she cried, “Louis-Rey’s puppet—what kind of a life is that?”
He flinched. “All right. All right, Yancy.” He put a long, narrow hand over hers. His face showed just how well he understood. Julian promised, “I won’t let anything happen to her.”
She swallowed her bitterness. “What’s her real name?”
“She would have been Princess Camilla. But I like Ivy better.”
Different names—different lives. So many ways to choose. Yet everything was interconnected, like the seven lakes, and Yancy felt she’d rather live in a cottage with them on some unknown shore, even if it meant giving up her witchy ways until Ivy was grown and safe. She said urgently, “We can escape together. Row out to the southern tip of the lake where it spills into Sunocka. I can steer by the moon and stars, and we won’t leave a trace. Maybe the wizards will finally come through. At least we’d be together for a while longer—”
“We might all die that way. Even the little girl. I’ll stall while you and Ivy get away.”
Of course—that was why he’d come. She felt sick. “You’re not a soldier!”
“All I need to do is stall him,” Julian repeated grimly. “I’ve always loved you, Yancy.”
