The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four

by Jonathan Strahan

  They rode off through the twilight forest. They were a fine company, all dressed for hunting, not for court, but in silks and satins and velvets and rare furs, with enough gold and silver about them and their horses to show that they were no ordinary hunters. The ladies among them rode astride, like the men, and all of them, men and women, were beautiful, for the king was young and as yet unmarried and would have nobody about him who did not please his eye. Their horses were fine beasts, with arching necks and smooth coats, though too tired now to make the show they had made when they had ridden out that morning. The last rays of the sun had gilded them in the clearing, touching the golden circlet the king wore about his dark unruly locks; now they went forward into deepening night. The sky above them was violet, and a crescent moon shone silver like a sword blade. The first stars were beginning to pierce the sky when they splashed across a brook and saw a little village.

  "What place is this?" the king asked the master of the hunt.

  "I don't know, sire. Unless we have come sadly astray it isn't marked on my map," the master of the hunt said.

  "We must have come astray then," the king said, laughing. "I don't think the worse of you for it, for we were following a hart through the forest, and though we didn't kill it, I can't think when I had a better day's sport. But look, man, this is a stone-built village with a mill and a blacksmith's forge, and an inn. This is a snug little manor. A road runs through it. Why, it must pay quite five pounds of gold in taxes."

  The counselor smiled to himself, for he had been the king's tutor when he was a prince, and was glad to see he remembered the detail of such matters.

  The master of the hunt shook his head. "I am sure your majesty is right, but I can't find it on my map."

  "Let us go on and investigate," the bard said.

  It had been the red gleam of the forge they had seen from far off, but it was the lamplight spilling out of the windows of the inn that the bard waved toward.

  "Such a place will not hold all of us," the king said. "Have the tents set up for us to sleep, but let us see if we can get a hot supper from this place, whatever it is."

  "A hot supper and some country ale," the bard said.

  "There are three white cows in the water meadow beside the stream," the master of the hunt pointed out. "The country cheese in these parts is said to be very good."

  "If you knew what parts these were, no doubt my counselor could tell us all about their cheeses," the king said.

  They dismounted and left the horses to the care of those who were to set up the tents. The four of them strode into the village to investigate. The bard brought his little harp, the counselor brought his purse, the master of the hunt brought a shortsword on his belt, but the king brought nothing.

  The inn was warm and friendly and seemed to contain the whole population of the village. Those who were not there came in as soon as the news came to them of the king's arrival. The counselor negotiated with the innkeeper and soon arranged that food and drink could be provided for the whole company, and beds for the king and the ladies, if the ladies did not mind crowding in together. The master of the hunt pronounced the ale excellent, and the villagers began to beg the bard to play. The rest of the company, having set up the tents and rubbed down the horses, began to trickle into the inn, and the place became very full.

  The king wandered around the inn, looking at everything. He examined the row of strange objects that sat on the mantelpiece, he peered out through the diamond-paned windows, he picked up the scuttle beside the fire and ran his hand along the wood of the chair backs, worn smooth by countless customers. The villagers felt a little shy of him, with his crown and his curling black beard, and did not dare to strike up conversation. For his own part he felt restless and was not sure why. He felt as if something was about to happen. Until the bard started to play, he thought he was waiting for music, and until he was served a plate of cold pork and hot cabbage he thought he was waiting for his dinner, but neither of these things satisfied him. Neither the villagers nor his own company delighted him. The villagers seemed simple, humble, rustic; their homespun clothes and country accents grated on him. In contrast, the gorgeous raiment and noble tones of his company, which were well enough in the palace or even his hunting lodge, seemed here overrefined to the point of decadence.

  At length the door at the back opened and a girl came in, clad all in grey and carrying a basket. The master of the hunt had called for cheese, and she was the girl who kept the cows and made the cheese. She was plain almost to severity, with her hair drawn back from her face, but she was young and dignified, and when the king saw her he knew that she was what he had been waiting for, not just that night but for a long time. He had been picking at his dinner, but he stood when he saw her. There was a little circle of quiet around the corner where he sat, for his own people had seen that he did not want conversation. The girl glanced at him and nodded, as if to tell him to wait, and went with her basket to the innkeeper and began to negotiate a price for her cheese. The king sat down and waited meekly.

  When she had disposed of her cheeses, the girl in grey picked her way through the room and sat down opposite the king. "I have been waiting for you all my life. I will marry you and make you my queen," he said. He had been thinking all the time she was at the bar what he would say when she came up to him, and getting the words right in his mind. For the first time he was glad he was king, that he was young and handsome, that he had so much to offer her.

  "Oh, I know that story," she said. She took his ale tankard and breathed on it, and passed it back to him. He looked into it and saw the two of them tiny and distant, in the palace, quarrelling. "You'd pile me with jewels and I'd wither in that palace. You'd want me to be something I'm not. I'm no queen. I'm no beauty, no diplomat. I speak too bluntly. You'd grow tired of me and want a proper queen. I'd go into a decline and die after I had a daughter, and you'd marry again and give her a stepmother who'd persecute her."

  "But I have loved you since I first saw you," the king insisted, although her words and the vision had shaken him. He took a deep draft of the ale to drive them away.

  "Love? Well now. You feel what you feel, and I feel what I feel, but that doesn't mean you have to fit us into a story and wreck both our lives."

  "Then you . . . " the king hesitated. "I know that story. You're the goddess Sovranty, whom the king meets disguised in a village, who spends one night with him and confirms his sacred kingship."

  She laughed. "You still don't see me. I'm no goddess. I know that story though. We'd have our one night of passion, which would confirm you in your crown, and you'd go back to your palace, and nine months later I'd have a baby boy. Twenty years after that he'd come questing for the father he never had." She took up a twist of straw that was on the table and set it walking. The king saw the shape of a hero hidden among the people, then the straw touched his hand and fell back to the table in separate strands.

  "Tell me who you are," the king said.

  "I'm the girl who keeps the cows and makes the cheeses," she said. "I've lived in this village all my life, and in this village we don't have stories, not real stories, just things that come to us out of the twilight now and then. My parents died five years ago when the fever came, and since then I've lived alone. I'm plain, and plainspoken. I don't have many friends. I always see too much, and say what I see."

  "And you wear grey, always," the king said, looking at her.

  She met his eyes. "Yes, I do, I wear grey always, but how did you know?"

  "When you're a king, it's hard to get away from being part of a story," he said. "Those stories you mentioned aren't about us. They're about a king and a village girl and a next generation of stories. I'd like to make a new story that was about you and me, the people we really are, getting to know each other." He put out his hand to her.

  "Oh, that's hard," she said, ignoring his hand. "That's very hard. Would I have to give up being a silver salmon leaping in the stream at twilight?"
/>   "Not if that's who you are," he said, his green eyes steady on hers.

  "Would I have to stop being a grey cat slipping through the dusky shadows, seeing what's to be seen?"

  "Not if that's who you are," he said, unwavering.

  "Would I have to stop being a grey girl who lives alone and makes the cheeses, who walks along the edges of stories but never steps into them?"

  "Not if that's who you are," said the king. "But I'm asking you to step into a new story, a story that's never been before, to shape it with me."

  "Oh, that's hard," she said, but she put her hand on the king's hand where it lay on the rough wooden table. "You've no sons, have you?"

  "No sons, but I have two younger brothers," he said, exhilaration sweeping through him.

  She looked around the room. "Your fine bard is singing a song, and your master of the hunt is eating cheese. Your counselor is taking counsel with the innkeeper, and no doubt hearing all about the affairs of the village. Your lords and ladies are drinking and eating and patronising the villagers. If you really want to give up being a king and step into a new story with me, now is the time."

  "What do I have to do?" he asked, very quietly, then she pulled his hand and for a moment he felt himself falling.

  It was a little while before anyone noticed he had gone, and by then nobody remembered seeing the two cats slipping away between the tables, one grey and one a long-haired black with big green eyes.

  THE NIGHT CACHE

  Andy Duncan

  Andy Duncan was born in South Carolina. He studied journalism at the University of South Carolina and worked as a journalist for the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., before studying creative writing at North Carolina State University and the University of Alabama and serving as the senior editor of Overdrive, a magazine for truck drivers. Duncan's short fiction, which has won the World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards, is collected in World Fantasy Award winner Beluthahatchie and Other Stories. Upcoming is a new short story collection, The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories. He currently lives with his wife, Sydney, in Frostburg, Maryland, where both teach in the English department of Frostburg State University.

  I met Destiny Creech during my afternoon shift at the register at a chain bookstore that a 19th-century novelist might here identify with a capital B and a series of dashes but that I am pleased to call Yarns Ignoble. As usual, I was working the register nearest the Yarns Ignoble mall entrance, which compared to the register nearest the parking-lot entrance gets fewer customers but a higher percentage of sketchiness. People who already are angry, needy or neurotic even without chemical assistance toke up on carbs and caffeine at the food court and are propelled straight to my register. So I've had to cultivate a sort of furtive efficiency. I'm the prop girl in black who darts onstage with two inverted wineglasses in one hand and a picnic basket in the other and darts offstage with the previous scene's princess phone and beanbag chair just before the light comes up on the lovers' idyll. I don't make eye contact; I don't tarry; this ain't my show. So I was wholly unprepared when I turned back to the register after rearranging a Nicholas Sparks display to find myself facing a 5-foot-10 blonde with porcelain skin, Cate Blanchett cheekbones and eyes the color of the green flash at sunset that portends good fortune in love.

  I gaped. She smiled, plucked at her Hermès scarf and slid a trade paperback a half-inch nearer me on the counter. Her fingers were free of rings. The book was Best Lesbian Erotica 2008.

  I snatched up the book, clutched it in both hands and blurted: "Oh, is the 2008 out already? Seems I just finished re-reading the 2007!" I felt a junior-high giggle coming on and suppressed it as best I could, so that what came out instead was a junior-high chirp of pleasure abruptly swallowed, like a gnat.

  My special guest star, still smiling, closed both eyes and opened them again—sort of like a wink, only doubled—and said, in a throaty voice, "Time flies when we're having fun, doesn't it?"

  I pounded the keys one-handed and told myself, Jenny Jenny Jenny get a grip. This is Yarns Ignoble, not The L-Word, and Hagerstown is not Showtime, and for the afternoon shift, parental discretion is not advised. I calmed a little when she paid not with an Amex black card but with a tatty twenty on which someone had stamped "John 3:16." "Need a bag?" I piped, my voice cracking.

  She shook her head, picked up the book with its pert little white receipt poking out, began to turn away—then set the book back down. With one long burgundy nail she rotated it so the cover faced me—two punk girls locking pierced lips—and pushed it another half-inch toward me. "You read it first," she said, "and then we'll talk." She double-winked and turned and strode around the Dover clip-art rack and into the food court and was gone.

  "Ahem," someone said—just like that, not a throat-clearing noise but two spoken comic-book syllables, "A-hem." It was the woman next in line, a girl really in a denim vest, with a crooked grin and a pointed chin and red hair cut short except on top, so that it fell across half her face like a curtain.

  "Busted," she said.

  "Sorry," I said, my face burning. I dropped my gaze and reverted to the prop girl. I scanned her Val Lewton Horror Collection DVD set, rang it up, made her change. "Would you like a bag?" I asked, already reaching for one; those boxed sets are heavy and eight-pointed and awkward.

  "She won't be back," the girl said.

  I looked at her. She was biting her lower lip and tilting her head like an owl's. She let the lip go, sucked in a deep breath, like a diver bracing on the edge of the pool. "I don't know her?" she said. "Only I sort of do, I mean, from experience? I think maybe she was playing a game? And now the game's over?" She shrugged. "Sorry."

  My blush had never quite gone away, and now it flamed anew. "Fuck you," I said, slamming the till on the first syllable and glancing toward Sally the Snitch's register on the second. Score! Smoke break.

  "O-kay," the girl said. She tossed the hair out of her flashing eyes, and her grin got wider and goofier, exposed big teeth, made her look older and cuter. "Feels good to say that at work, huh?" She looked over her shoulder, smiled at the glowering guy behind her in line. "How ya doin?" she asked. He lifted his wrist and tapped his watch. She pulled from her handmade shoulder bag what looked like a chunky 10-year-old cell phone, which she set on the counter. "Got a pocketknife?" she asked me. "Pair of scissors? Embossed Swiss baselard? Nail file?"

  Already embarrassed by my outburst, I silently handed her a box cutter; as she appraised it and winked, I wondered for a moment whether she was going to lunge. Instead, she raked the edge of the package she had just bought, tore back the slit plastic and—despite fingernails down to the quick—lifted out a single DVD case with such ease it seemed to follow her hand, like a card coaxed from a deck by a conjuror. She handed it to me. "To atone," she said. "The Seventh Victim. Ever seen it? No? Depressing as the waiting room of hell, least convincing bunch of Satanists that ever flipped a paternoster, makes not two consecutive licks of sense, it's. Fucking. Fabulous."

  The DVD case showed a sexy woman in a helmet of black hair and a shapeless fur coat, coolly watching a giant switchblade that may or may not have been moving her way. The redhead before me was watching the screen of her phone, which she held in both hands, punching buttons with both thumbs. She murmured, "Triangulate, damn you. Ah! There you are."

  "Jesus Christ," said the next guy in line.

  "Listen," I said, "I'm sorry for effing you, and you're probably right, but it's really none of your business, you know. Whether she comes back . . . or not." Suddenly sure she wouldn't, I slid the erotica volume off the counter, tumbled it into the lost-and-found box, cushioned by an old Betty Boop beach towel.

  "Not yet it isn't," the redhead said. She tucked the boxed set under one arm, nodded at the DVD still in my hand and said, "So take a look. Tell me what you think." She headed for the mall entrance. "We can even talk about the book, if you want."

  "Hey!" I called. "How do I find you?"

  On the way ou
t the door, she held up the phone-thing. "I'll find you. I've got your coordinates."

  Disgusted, I flung the DVD into the box with Betty and the punk hotties. What the hell movie was I in today, Let's Tease Jennifer To Death? I'm not playing this game, I'm not. "Can I help you, sir?"

  He slapped down a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and handed me a black Amex card. "And you don't get to keep this one, honey, if it's all the same to you."

  The blonde in the scarf? Never came back. The weird-ass redhead—that was Destiny Creech. And what's really interesting about The Seventh Victim, I realized that night, the second time through, is the whole point of the movie, right, is supposed to be that Mary is looking for her sister Jacqueline, who's in desperate danger, OK? But once Jacqueline turns up, Mary barely notices. She's too busy hooking up with guys, even with Jacqueline's husband. So Jacqueline, at the end, is left to climb those stairs alone.

  Next day the redhead turned up in the Yarns Ignoble café. I noticed her about one, and she sat there much of the afternoon, dawdling over a notebook and a latte, acknowledging me not at all. When the end of my shift finally came, I tore a nail in my haste to clock out, then walked over to her spindly iron table. The notebook pages she studied were filled with cramped handwriting: not words, but numbers.

  "A-hem," I said.

  She looked up.

  "Well finally," she said, and stuck out her hand. "Join me. I'm Destiny."

  I hooted. "Well, of course you are," I said. "I'm Jennifer, or Jenny, or Jen, depending on the mood."

  "What mood are you in now?"

  "Confused. I have your DVD."

  She leaned abruptly forward, her eyebrows raised. Her right eye, I saw, ticked to the side. "Isn't it good?"

  "How do you know I watched it."

  "Oh, please." She sat back, looking disappointed. "Let's not even pretend. The only question remaining on that score—because there are so many more interesting questions, which we'll get to momentarily—is how many times did you watch it?"