Beneath Ceaseless Skies #14

by Brennan, Marie; Hoffman, Erin

  ( He has betrayed her, ) the third gryphon said, anxiousness like vinegar in her voice. ( A gryphon, betraying a human. It is disgraceful. If she can kill him, it is a fitting end, balance for the apprentices he has led astray. )

  The three grew silent again, but the tension between them tightened like dry heat before lightning.

  ( Very well, ) Urri said at last, grudging, a rusted anchor pulled free.

  ( He’s here, ) the second gryphon said, pupils large and unseeing, now her voice like incense smoke. Suddenly the three creatures all focused elsewhere, their minds vanishing from Ruby’s with a lurch. The third gryphon, doing something Ruby could not see or understand, lifted the clouds away, revealing the serrated azure glass of the ocean and the strident tilting figure of the Viere d’Inar below.

  Ellisar had made a mad dash from the ship, winging swift and low just above the waves, using them to shelter him from the reach of the wind. For a second Ruby’s heart leapt with hope—that he would fly far away, that the gryphons would leave to chase him, that she would not be washed in yet more blood—

  She was spared from lancing guilt only by the speed with which his flight proved futile. Together the three gryphons released the power of the storm upon him, wrapping him in it, binding his wings close to his body and lifting him up to face them all. Ponderous, roaring, three columns of water each twice the size of Ruby’s lifted from the sea. The three gryphons folded their wings and sat atop them delicately.

  “Ellisar?” Ruby said. “What they say about what you’ve done... what they say about what you did to me and what they will have to do now... is it true?” She stretched her arms behind her, and under the guise of resting her hands on her belt, pulled free her longknife, resting her palms on its smooth haft, tracing the wood to stop her hands from shaking.

  ( They do not lie, ) Ellisar said, though his eyes darted to the three gryphons first. The truth was pressed from him as oil from flaxseed. ( I sought refuge in the sea. )

  In his hesitancy, in what he would not find the strength to admit, Ruby saw Ellisar clearly for the first time. The sight contorted her throat and heart. She turned to the three gryphons. “I’ll carry out our agreement,” she said, “but from the deck of my ship. Below.”

  ( Very well, ) Urri said. Ellisar’s eye-ridge was slanted as he worked to unknot her ploy.

  Together the four of them released their hold on the churning waters, Ruby mimicking the gryphons as they let out their grasp measure by measure, as knots in a sounding rope. There was a brief clap of rustling wings as the three gryphons leapt onto the deck of the Viere, pulling Ellisar with them still wrapped in his foaming cocoon. Knowing it might be her last time moving the sea, Ruby bent a curve of glassy water across the Viere’s rail, then stepped lightly down and let it return to the waves.

  Ruby looked to the gryphons, but they did not move or speak. She turned to the crew, and to her mother. “These gryphons have been pursuing Ellisar. He has been fleeing them, a fugitive. They wished to execute him... and destroy the Viere for its role in harboring him.”

  The crew erupted in shouting, and Mother—now every inch Rhiannon, Sea Queen— silenced them with a grimly raised hand. “What else is there, Ruby?” she asked.

  “In exchange for our lives and the Viere, I have agreed to deliver Ellisar’s sentence myself, on this deck.”

  ( RUBY, ) Ellisar thundered, drowning out the white rush of the curving waters that bound him. ( You will not do this! )

  The crew, however, remained silent, watching their captain, who but nodded, sealing her acceptance of the bargain, and renewing Ellisar’s fury. “You will act in my name and the name of the Viere d’Inar,” Mother said, drawing her saber to pass it hilt-first to Ruby. It was light, the wire-wrapped hilt warm.

  Amidst his condemnations, Ruby stepped toward Ellisar. “Tell me what you are,” she said only, softly. A great heaviness settled in her stomach. Ellisar’s great golden eyes widened.

  ( You humans and your damnable superstitions, ) he hissed in her mind, but the voice was thin with alarm, the scent in her head the musk of a cornered rat. ( I am what I am, as you know well. I can never be anything else. And neither can you. ) Ellisar’s eyes flashed, giant pupils flaring and pinning. ( They’ll destroy you, Ruby. Count on it. They’ll come for you and they’ll destroy you as they tried to destroy me. We’re alike, you and I. Together we could stand against them. Together we would be feared! )

  “I don’t need to be feared,” she said. And “I’m sorry, Ellisar,” was all she could manage before her throat closed. Without a word the other gryphons loosened their hold on the waters binding Ellisar. His claws touched the deck.

  Faster than Ruby could react, Ellisar launched from the weaker hold of his fetters, spraying seawater in all directions as he ripped free. He leapt, not at Ruby, as she had instantly expected—but at Mother, two swordlengths away. Unarmed.

  His claws sank through her leather haubergeon like a hawk’s talons through rabbit fur, and his hooked beak engulfed her side. When he reared back, he brought torn armor, shredded flesh, and bloodstained linen with him.

  Ruby shrieked and dove after him, raising her sword. Bracing both hands around the wooden hilt, she threw her weight against it, driving the point into his jugular. There was a moment’s resistance, and then the blade shot through, slipping as through pierced sailcloth, and her fists were buried in his feathers, their whiteness rapidly steeped in a spray of thick blood. Its slick warmth swept over her hands, and she caught one last glimpse of a wide golden eye before bands of water closed between them, drowning his final gasping breath.

  Ruby fell beside her mother. The gryphons’ voices were a cacophony inside her head, but she did not sort out their words. Someone yelled for the ship’s healer, but all knew this was far beyond the man’s limited talents. Hot tears flooded Ruby’s eyes and she swept them away with her palm. “If I hadn’t brought him down here,” she choked, “Mother, if I hadn’t....” But there she was adrift. If she had not learned from Ellisar, if she had not stopped the crew from throwing him back, if she had not been born....

  “He died here?” Mother said, her voice finding a strength that made the gathered crew straighten instinctively, “on these decks? Then you did well, Ruby.” She squinted, then moved, her face contorting with pain and blanching white.

  Then Ruby’s stomach dropped, as it had the first day she had watched Ellisar move the waves. She looked around wildly, but the gryphons’ eyes were riveted to the fallen Rhiannon—who stretched out a hand, her face a mask of sweating concentration beneath the pain that wracked her body.

  With the smoothness of swaying kelp in a gentle tide, an arm of green water separated from the bands confining Ellisar’s lifeless body, and drew with it the bloodied saber. As it coiled through the air toward them, the water trembled, dropping pieces of itself to splatter across the deck, but the sword landed gently in Ruby’s lap. She clenched one hand around its hilt out of reflex, out of shock.

  “You did well,” Mother repeated, but her voice was hoarse. “Never drop this.” Her hand, smeared with blood, fell across Ruby’s on the sword and tightened. “It’s yours now, princess,” she whispered, and her grip, the grip of the West Sea Queen, slackened around Ruby’s wrist, and fell.

  * * *

  ( We can’t guarantee that you’ll remain undetected if you engage in active movement of the waters, ) Urri warned. They stood on the deck of the Viere, turned away from the stain of Mother’s blood, a mark among many on the dark wood.

  “I understand,” Ruby said. Out of propriety or protectiveness for her, she wasn’t sure which, Urri stood with his wings partly spread, obscuring the column of water that held Ellisar’s body. The gryphons had remained through the ceremony of committing the Sea Queen’s body to the waves, and the sun now hovered low against a crimson horizon.

  Urri bowed low, touching his beak to the side of one huge hooked claw. ( We remain in your debt for your assistance. ) And then he was leaping into
the air, with the two others launching just after him, the wind of their passing stirring sail and rattling rig.

  No one moved until the gryphons were at last lost to sight, and then some. Gradually, the crew dispersed, leaving only Ruby standing at the bow. She watched twilight settle into dusk and finally true night. Her mother’s first mate, now hers, came out at length and quietly asked for a course. Ruby’s answer, Ignirole, was the right one, it seemed, for he nodded and said it would be done. His retreating footsteps were gradually swallowed by the lap of the sea against the ship, dark waters that showed no reflection that night, and not until the stars had wheeled halfway across the sky did Ruby turn away from the rail and the waves.

  * * *

  Ruby grit her teeth as the tattooist worked at her shoulder with the reed needles. In the polished glass just above her head she watched the shape on her back gradually resolve, etched on angry skin that seeped blood sluggishly. The artisan, an old man with hands like dried vegetables, finest tattooist in Ignirole and on the whole western seaboard, worked methodically at filling in the outline of a stretched-hand-sized gryphon head that spread across her right shoulder-blade.

  The work took hours, long hours that Ruby counted by the second. But gradually the shape took form, with precision that pulled pain from Ruby’s heart, left it stitched there on her skin.

  When she emerged from the dockside parlor sunlight struck right through her eyes and hammered the back of her skull, but she grinned at the pain and light together, stretching (carefully, on the right side at least) and breathing in the sensation of being alive. The tattoo should not have cost the full bounty that the gryphons had insisted on giving her for Ellisar, but she left it in tribute, a memory donation for her mother, and with a murmur to the goddess Nistra that they were square. Her mother, the price of a dream, a handful of gold. Destinies that none of them could escape.

  Along the plank dock the bare masts and rigging of the Viere made a spidery silhouette against the fiery horizon. As she approached the gangplank something out of the corner of her eye sent a chill down Ruby’s spine and she spun, but confronted only the half-seen spectre of her reflection on the glassy waters.

  In the months it had taken to reach Ignirole Ruby’s hair had grown long and unruly. It fell in riotous curls down to her tattooed shoulder, which was still bare and gleaming with salve. She stared at the reflection, half-turned, and carefully, slowly, pulled her mother’s cap from her rucksack and fitted it to her head.

  The rippling water below, and the sudden tears that blurred her vision, wove a cruel illusion—a figure, near inscrutable through the sharp shadows dancing across the water, taller than Ruby, a swordmaster’s grace and a Queen’s carriage. And a voice. “Hurts like hell, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Ruby whispered. “It does.” She pulled a large gold coin, the last from the bounty, from her pocket and flipped it into the water, casting a burst of shimmering halos across the surface of the sea. It swallowed the coin fast, and Ruby turned down the dock, boot-heels echoing on the boards, to where her ship awaited.

  Copyright © 2009 Erin Hoffman

  Comment on this Story in the BCS Forums

  Erin Hoffman is a writer and video game designer. Her poetry has appeared in Not One of Us, Electric Velocipede, Antimuse, and Asimov’s, and her fantasy and science fiction in Deep Magic, Lone Star Stories, and elsewhere. Her novel Sword of Fire and Sea, the first of a trilogy set in the same world as "Stormchaser, Stormshaper," will be out in 2011 from Pyr Books. For more details, visit philomathgames.com.

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  COVER ART

  “Endless Skies,” by Rick Sardinha

  Rick Sardinha is a professional illustrator/fine artist living and working on the outskirts of Providence, Rhode Island. His passion is to create in traditional oil media, however, he is just as comfortable in front of a computer and often uses multiple disciplines in the image creation process. More of his work can be seen at http://www.battleduck.com.

  This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.

  Table of Contents

  “Driftwood,” by Marie Brennan

  “Stormchaser, Stormshaper,” by Erin Hoffman