Beneath Ceaseless Skies #233

by Marissa Lingen

  Outside the palace, the prince’s servant, anonymous in palace livery, had Solveig’s horse waiting, fresh and warm from the stable. Everyone’s breath came white in the cold. Across from the palace, the line of Kven refugees stretched for blocks: children and old people, huddled into their coats, clustered together for warmth. Kven who had never met each other before became each other’s new families in the refugee lines. She thought of Noora, weak and ill as she had been, subject to the rough-and-tumble vagaries of those lines, and shuddered. Was it worth Per’s death? Nothing was worth Per’s death. But unless her sorcery managed to turn time back and notice in time that Noora’s illness was of magical origin, the question was moot.

  When they had first taken Noora in, Per thought that she was having a hard time adjusting to a new country. Solveig thought that she was sullen—which was not as bad a thing as it could have been, as Solveig too had been a sullen girl at eleven. She had stared at the ground on the ride home, wept at the bright colors of the sitting room, and closed herself in the nursery—intended for a much smaller child—taking only bread and milk, and that only when the maid begged her in Kven.

  A doctor and a sorceress. Solveig felt sure that they should have seen, should have known, that there was something more wrong than only difficulties settling into a new home in a new country with a new family. But “should haves” cultured no cheese, as the peasants said. The fever the Veralduki had planted among the Kven blossomed in the child and spread to the rest of the household. “Should have” was turned to “should now,” and a long ride into the cold.

  When Solveig returned home from her audience with the prince, Marta had prepared Noora as promised, with a riding coat and hat and fine boots. Noora looked as sullen as if these had been manacles, her early demeanor returned.

  “Do I need to send for another physician, as ours is gone?” asked Solveig.

  Noora glared at her.

  “Many’s the poor child who would give their left thumb for that hat, foreign or native alike,” said Marta.

  Noora ripped the offending headwear off and flung it at Marta’s head, then fled the scene.

  Solveig pursued. Chaos followed. By the time order was restored, Marta had soothed two housemaids and the neighbor across the square, Solveig had cast two spells, and Noora had apologized, grudgingly.

  Solveig had also explained that she had no intention of returning Noora home.

  “You have to trust me.”

  “I trust no one who takes me on a ride to the north of the Veralduki scum with winter coming on,” said Noora. “And you would be well-advised to keep the same as your own maxim for life.”

  “She’s not wrong about that, daughter,” said Marta.

  “Hush,” said Solveig. “It’s just a visit. We’ll ride back out again.”

  “That’s what the Emperor of Bonterre said,” said Noora.

  “Who educated her?” said Solveig, astonished. The child was not wrong, but her timing was, as always, drastically inconvenient.

  Marta rolled her eyes.

  But the next morning they set out on their horses all the same, the two of them with pack animals in tow for winter supplies, and for carrying the icon. It was wrapped much more carefully going into the Veralduki Empire than it had come out, swathed in layers of canvas and then packed in its own box specially built for carry on a saddle.

  The snows fell as they left home to ride north, and Solveig tried not to be disheartened. It would be worth it. It would have to be.

  She checked Noora’s color periodically as they rode. Her face was angry and closed, but her cheeks were pink with exertion and cold, her health returned. Any Kven child who couldn’t bear the temperatures of early winter would find herself in serious difficulty, but the magical plague that had taken Per had nearly taken Noora too. It had been intended to. Solveig felt vindicated in worrying.

  In fact Noora had reached death’s pier first, she had just lingered there longer and eventually taken a different ship. Per had hovered at her bedside, trying remedy after remedy, until he too collapsed. By the time Solveig shouldered aside his colleagues, it was too late. She only barely did the counterspell on Noora in time—her younger constitution made her last longer.

  By the time they reached the Veralduki borders, she was beginning to think Noora was trying to make her wish she had not.

  Every furlong was a snow-covered misery. Noora replied only to direct questions. She would not sing songs. She would not play road games. She cared for her horse, spoke to him in caressing tones; even the pack beasts she showed regard for. For her foster mother, nothing.

  Finally, in their rooms in the shabby inn that was the best they could find the night before the Veralduki border crossing, Solveig had had enough. “You will not make a difficulty for me with the border guards,” she said. “I do not have the power to protect you from their wrath.”

  “No, foster mother,” said Noora.

  “Also if you annoyed them it would thwart schemes of which you know nothing, and I cannot have that.”

  Silence.

  “Am I understood?” Solveig continued.

  Noora burst out, “How am I to know anything of your schemes if you won’t tell me?”

  Solveig sighed. “I am trying to keep you safe.”

  “By marching me into a country full of people who hate me, very safe.”

  “Noora. They do not hate you. You are only a child.”

  “They have slaughtered hundreds of children like me. Thousands.”

  “And your people have killed hundreds of their children in return.”

  “We were the invaded, not the invaders,” said Noora fiercely. “Do not forget that.”

  “I never do, or I would not be on this mission.”

  Noora went still.

  “Did you think I was neutral? Your foster father and I took you in against the prince’s wishes. The Veralduki Empire is no friend to us.”

  “You are returning to their care a valuable piece of art. Why not keep it?”

  “Noora, what do I do for a living?”

  Their hearth fire snapped. The tiny inn bedroom stretched large between them. “You are—you are a sorceress.”

  “And what are children told from their earliest days about accepting gifts?”

  “That a gift from a sorcerer....” Noora’s mouth made an o.

  “Blessing or curse, what do you think, Noora?”

  Noora’s eyes darted to the parcel, too valuable to leave in the inn’s stable with the horses’ tack. “I had thought,” she whispered.

  “What had you thought?”

  Noora slipped off her bed and padded over to her own bags. She pulled from them a tiny pot of indigo ink. “I was going to sabotage the icon. So that they would suffer, the Veralduk scum. I was going to put a spell on it.”

  Solveig rubbed her temples. “There is a spell on it already.”

  “What does yours do?” asked Noora eagerly. “Wait, I know, I know. It brings them the same illness they gave Per and me. That’s what it has to do, doesn’t it, Solveig? It has to.”

  Her thin face was alight with joy. Solveig almost hated to disillusion her, but she remembered what the illusion was, what source for her joy. “Noora. No.”

  “No? No? What do you mean, no? What else could it be? Unless it has more pestilence, more despair, how could it be enough? They killed your husband. He was the best man I met since my father, and they killed my father too, and they used me to do it. You have to kill them all!”

  The hearth fire lit Noora’s thin, pale face a flickering orange. Vengeance gave it an internal glow. Solveig winced away. “Noora. Sit down. Let me explain.”

  “No!”

  “Noora.”

  Glowering, she subsided onto the bed.

  “The people in this village, the people who gave Per the icon,” Solveig began. “Wait until you see them. They are poor, desperately poor. He helped them. They are no better off under the Emperor than your people would be.”<
br />
  “They’re Veralduki,” Noora objected.

  “They’re from the far north. The empire gives them nothing and takes their children in conscription, all the strongest of their sons and daughters,” said Solveig. “They are losing too. If I sent plague among the Veralduki elite with this icon—if I killed them through these peasants—it would be just as unfair as if I used one of your cousins to do it. And it might not work. The people from this village don’t travel much.

  “So the plague I’m sending takes some time to kill.”

  Noora frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a revolution, child. I am undermining their government. I’m sending it as a seed from this tiny village, but since no one will die directly, it can spread from there.”

  Noora frowned suspiciously. “That sounds like the sort of thing grown-ups say when they don’t want to do anything at all.”

  “Quite the opposite. I was married to a doctor for years—I learned how important the tiniest things can be. This revolution will spread like a disease. Like the one you had, that you gave to Per. But with magic assistance. Like the one you had.”

  “That I gave to Per.”

  “And the fishers, the farmers, eking out a living along the coast, they will pass it to the cities, and they will kill the people who killed your family in this horrible way. The people who killed Per. But not the innocents living in squalor. Not the ones Per wanted to help.

  “They’re like you. You’re someone he wanted to help. We can’t betray him that way, Noora, can we?”

  Noora was quiet for a long time. She got up and poked at the fire with the poker.

  “I needed you to come along to convince the prince I was making a genuine effort,” said Solveig. “No one knows I’m doing this. He has to believe I’m trying to sow peace. We have to complete this mission for peace among our three countries: my neutral one, and yours at war. Perhaps we even will see peace—with the new government, when it settles. But for now, all we must do is complete the public gesture, which only we will understand. Then we can go. If you don’t want to stay with me after, I will take you home to Kvenmark, to whomever you can find to take you. Or you can come home with me as you said you wanted.”

  Noora poked the fire again and did not turn. “You give them the death of their entire empire, in exchange for Per’s death.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I am your daughter now,” she said very quietly.

  “Then you will behave yourself with the border guards.”

  “Yes.”

  “And do as I tell you at the village.”

  “Yes.”

  They passed the rest of the very short night in quiet, and Noora was as good as her word with the guards at the only border Solveig’s country shared with the Veralduki Empire in the far north. Some eyebrows went up at a Kven child coming into Veralduk with a neutral sorceress, but Solveig’s diplomatic status made it impossible to object, especially when Noora showed so much respect and courtesy.

  Still further north they rode, and soon the ivory gulls, rarely seen over any but the most coastal of lands, flocked overhead, alerting Solveig that they had almost reached their destination.

  The village was much as she had imagined it from Per’s reports, much as it had appeared from the water. One church, no other public buildings. A handful of hovels. Snow-covered farms. It was the church to which she repaired. The villagers, unused to visitors, soon abandoned the tedium of their daily work and gathered on the front steps to hear their business.

  Solveig performed a minor healing in honor of Per. The village priest, upon hearing of their loss, performed a short honorary service for their benefactor. Many bows all around, though only the priest understood what was being said on all sides. Everyone was shocked to see Solveig, uncomprehending of Noora’s status. The minute they saw the icon, no one objected.

  And so the deed was done.

  An old woman took them into her ramshackle hut after, her arm protectively around Noora, and gave them tea with berries floating in it. The hut was filled with smoke from the sullen fire. Everything between the child and the old woman was conveyed in gesture. Sit here. Be warm. Thank you. Thank you.

  Noora’s eyes were as wide and wild as they had been since the height of the fever. She pressed the old woman with a fierce embrace when they left. Solveig was glad to get both of them out of there without an emotional breakdown or an international incident. She breathed the frigid outdoor air with relief.

  She could not burn all of her clothes, but she was glad to get far from the village for the night, to start a campfire that was her own and her new daughter’s. To be unburdened, lightened, finished with what needed to be done. The wheels were in motion. She could go back and work on other things for months, years, waiting to hear the results.

  She could afford to be patient.

  “You were right,” said Noora. “They were—they were not a threat, those people. That woman. I couldn’t have—if I had sabotaged the icon, I would have felt so—”

  “I know it,” said Solveig. She put her hand on Noora’s shoulder for a second only, then drew back to watch the birds side by side, content with the quality of the silence they had found.

  Solveig feared that someday Noora would realize that igniting revolution was not clean or kind, especially to destitute villagers who were likely to bear the worst of it. She could only hope that the girl would realize that her foster mother had done her best. She could make vengeance her own; she could not make it clean.

  The ivory gull wheeled out over the pack ice, a speck of white only distinguishable against the shimmer of blue-white ice because it was moving. They watched it into the distance before mounting their horses and turning south, toward home.

  Copyright © 2017 Marissa Lingen

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Marissa Lingen lives in the Minneapolis area with two large men and one small dog. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Lightspeed, Apex, and eight times previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  GALLOWS GIRL

  by Mel Kassel

  A good Gallows Girl knows how to steady a man when he twitches at the end of the rope. She’ll take his hands and hold them tight, or grab him by the forearms if she needs to. The firm touch of a good Gallows Girl is usually enough: he’ll go slack, stop kicking, and let the noose dig. The death is just as ugly, but the passing is eased.

  A good Gallows Girl will open herself a tiny bit, let him scrape off some of her innocence to carry with him as he goes. My sister told me that it hurts a lot. But it’s supposed to be a good hurt, and it’s the only way to know that you did your job.

  “It’s a saintly pain,” she told me, her face somber and set like wax. After that, we stopped playing hideaway and throw-the-bones. She was needed by the town, and she took it on all at once, all that seriousness, after just one hanging. They said that she was a natural. They stretched her shadow bigger and bigger, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to fit in it, when it was my turn. And that was fine with me.

  * * *

  Ellie, my tutor, took me to see my first sentenced man on the day after I turned twenty. He was shirtless and singing in his cell, a song made of nonsense words. I couldn’t find his navel among his belly hair and rolls of fat.

  “He’s so big,” I whispered. “Can I quiet a man that big for my first?”

  “How big he is in the world doesn’t matter,” said Ellie. I waited, and sure enough, she followed up with: “Your sister’s first man was over six foot.”

  “My sister’s first man was the Hell-Pig Himself, and she tamed him without touching him, and he was probably eight feet if he was an inch,” I said.

  “That’s enough, Kal.” Ellie looked down at me, beseeching from underneath her green hood. My parents would scoff or yell if I mocked Lillian’s perfection, but Ellie reacted as if wounded. She was reminding me that my reputatio
n was braided with hers. And I liked her, so I listened.

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  “Killed some folks. Robbed their home. That’s all we know about, but I’d bet the T-bird he was riding on wasn’t his neither.”

  “He has a T-bird?” I clutched at her arm. “Can we go see it? Please?”

  “We’re here to see him. We can look in on the bird later.”

  I nodded, fidgety. There had been terror birds in the town stables before but I’d never tended to them. I had looped by during my errands to catch glimpses of them eating, their huge beaks plucking at red slabs of meat with surprising daintiness. Their riders—couriers, doctors, hunters for hire—typically didn’t stay in town for more than a few days.

  Ellie would be doing me a kindness by taking me to see the bird, and so I doubled my focus while we were in the jail. I squinted through the bars at the man, tried to get a sense of who he was. He had made his bed, but was he naturally neat? Did he always sing when idle?

  He ignored us while I studied him, though he could see us perfectly well. He had to know why we were there.

  Tomorrow, I would climb the ladder to my platform and wait for him to fall through the trapdoor above. There would be a bag over his head, and the noises coming from the bag would sound like a drain struggling to swallow mud. I would take his hands, and I would let him see inside me and paw at my bones until he found a gleaming part he liked. Then he would die, and I would let go, and because of what I had given him, he’d have a chance at forgiveness.

  For now, we were strangers. All I knew was that he had murdered people and that he couldn’t sing very well. I fiddled with my skirts and tried one last time to learn something from his face, which was disarmingly normal. No beady eyes, no shelf-like brow. He looked like any of the men who sat in Jordan’s saloon in the early afternoon.

  “You’re my Gallows Girl, then?” he said, abruptly cutting off his song. I straightened, adjusted my expression.