Some of the Best From Tor.com, 2013 Edition: A Tor.Com Original

by Various

  I wept with joy to be home. I wept that I had forever left Duenne behind. It was a contradiction that my mother could not understand. I was a heroine, she said. I had done what my sister could not. I had stopped the war.

  All I could think was that I had damped the flame of war in Versterlant, only to light a far greater conflagration elsewhere. The same day he cast me from the magical plane, Prince Leos had escaped from Duenne with all three of the magical jewels. Reports from our Council spies in Duenne and abroad reported that Károví declared its independence from Erythandra soon after. Already the imperial troops were marching toward the border of Károví to fight the rebels. Other provinces would pay for our peace, among them Ournes, where Taavi’s family lived.

  My grandmother said nothing, but she did not press me to rejoice when I could not.

  Today I woke at dawn to the late summer day, restless and uncertain. Six months had passed since I first set out for Duenne, to save my people from the Empire. Though my body had healed, I had lost some essential sense of purpose. I was no longer a spy, or a thief, or even the student Irene Denk. I was Arbija, the eldest daughter of an influential House, but what that meant I could no longer say.

  I gathered a flask of strong tea, dried salmon, and raspberries from the kitchen. It would be enough for the morning, but not so long that my parents would send out my younger brothers and sisters to inquire after my health. I packed the food in a haversack, and armed with a sharpened spear that could serve as weapon and staff both, I set off along the rock-strewn shore.

  By mid-morning, I had reached a small private cove, sheltered by boulders. I ate half the salmon and drank all the tea. I watched the endless progression of waves upon silver waves rolling shoreward. The sun ticked upward in the sky. The skies, now a burnished blue, arced overhead from sea to sea, our coast no more than an incidental interruption.

  Around noon, I heard footsteps behind me.

  Slow steps, awkward. Too heavy for my father or mother, too steady for my grandparents or any of their associates in Council. A stranger? I waited, my gaze trained upon the far horizon, but all my senses turned toward land.

  “Arbija.”

  I surged to my feet and rounded to face the intruder.

  “Taavi.”

  He was just as I remembered him—tall and lanky, his face a dusky brown, and his blue-black hair falling over his eyes, as though he were too distracted by visions of architecture to pay attention to mere human conventions. But he was here, here, in Versterlant. And he knew my true name. So many impossibilities, all delivered to me in one tangled net.

  We were both staring at each other in amazement.

  “How did you find me?” I said at last.

  “You told me yourself,” he said. “When you were sick. You were babbling.” He smiled, as if memories of my babbling pleased him. “You were no citizen of Fortezzien, that much I knew. You spoke a northern language. Versterlant. Austerlant. I wasn’t certain which, but as soon as the roads opened, I started north. That was in late spring.” In a softer voice, he said, “I applied for a position as carpenter under House Ajeti. It was only in the past week I discovered your true name and your family.”

  I could not think what to say. That he would give up his studies in Duenne and take a position as carpenter, that he came here when I had brought war to his homeland—it implied so much I wished for and could not express.

  My silence must have implied reluctance, because Taavi stirred. “I should go.”

  “No. Please, no.”

  He stopped. Uncertain, not unwilling, that was clear now, even to me.

  “No?” he said.

  I stopped, my tongue tangled.

  “No, but…”

  “But I surprised you badly,” he said. “I’m sorry. I have a contract for the season. Enough to pay my passage back to Duenne, if that is what you want.”

  I shook my head. He understood, and yet he did not comprehend everything.

  “I stole the jewels,” I said. “Yes, the prince took them for himself, but I stole them first. I wanted…” For a moment, I could not say more, but the desire for truth gave me breath and strength to say what I must. “Never mind what I wanted. I took the jewels. I started a war. No matter that I wanted no war at all. If I had the chance, I would do it again in spite of that. And I lied. To you. To everyone.”

  He nodded. “You did.”

  Ah. No excuses. It was better that way, I told myself. And yet, his presence here had opened so many shutters, ones I thought locked and barred forever. I must ask, I thought. I must ask, and … and if I hate the answer, at least I will have one.

  “But still you came north.”

  “To find you. Unless…” And here his voice seemed as fearful as my own. “Unless that last night was a lie?”

  I felt an unbearable pang in my chest. Had he thought I lied, even then?

  “No, no. That…” My love, my heart, the one who is patterned and cut from the shape of my soul. “That was all the truth.”

  Perhaps he had heard more than my bare words, because Taavi tilted his head and offered me a tentative smile. “I am glad, Arbija Ismaili, daughter of House Ismaili and scholar of magic.”

  I laughed. I had to, because he was being so pompous, so ridiculous.

  Taavi smiled, but did not laugh in return. “May I sit with you a while?” he asked.

  My laughter died, my heart caught at his tone.

  “My face is different,” I said.

  “So I noticed.”

  Now I heard the laughter in his voice as well.

  “It does not matter,” he said. “Your face is you to me. You … you are like a silver birch to me. Strong and graceful and luminous. I love you, whatever features you wear. And yet, if you would wish me gone, I will go.”

  “I don’t,” I whispered.

  He nodded. “May I sit with you?” he repeated.

  Oh, oh, my love. Yes and yes.

  “Yes,” I whispered. It was hard to speak, because my heart fluttered with a joy I had not expected, not ever. “You may.”

  I reached out a hand. Taavi clasped mine within both of his, just one moment, before he and I settled down into the nest of blankets I had built. The summer breeze gusted over the land, carrying with it the tang of the salt seas, the new green scent, so like magic, of the ocean beyond, its waves rolled shoreward, the sunlight leaping from crest to crest.

  Copyright (C) 2013 by Beth Bernobich

  Art copyright (C) 2013 by Dominick Saponaro

  Contents

  Title Page

  Begin Reading

  They were on the run and forgetting how not to be. He wore his flowered shirt and she wore her straw hat so they could always spot each other in a crowd. The goons were a few steps behind them—had been since that day at the empty house by the sea—but they made friends where they needed friends, they bought bus tickets and street maps, and sometimes they stopped long enough for a movie or a beer, or for a quickie in a borrowed room. They were far from home, but they didn’t know how far. They figured everything would turn out all right in the end.

  “Everything will turn out all right in the end,” she told him.

  He was having a dark moment, crouched on the sidewalk with his hands on top of his head. At the bus stop on the corner, two boys wearing bulky backpacks exchanged a look.

  “See,” she said, “it’s kind of like Los Angeles here.”

  Only this Los Angeles had too many doors: doors in the sidewalks, doors on every side of every house, little doors in the trees. Most doors didn’t have anything behind them. They’d checked a few.

  “Your aunt Meg probably thinks I kidnapped you,” he said. “She’s going to be so angry.”

  She crouched behind him, ignoring the looks from those kids, and put her arms around his middle. “My aunt Meg is always angry about something,” she said.

  They stayed like that for a while, she with her hair falling over his shoulders, he slowly unclenching. Then a bu
s pulled up to the curb, and the driver threw down a rope ladder. The two boys climbed aboard, and the babies in their backpacks woke and went wide-eyed at the ascent. Babies, fat and shining, grinning, everything new to them.

  Because that was the other thing about this Los Angeles. Everyone here had babies.

  “I need a drink,” he said.

  * * *

  They’d seen a town where powdered wigs were strictly required. A town where the laws were made by observing how the alpacas grazed on a particular meadow. A town that was just a train station. They’d been in the country, and then in the mountains, and then in the desert. They learned to stop asking where they were, because people here didn’t understand that question, mistook it for a joke. A big grin and “Why, you’re right here!” was the typical reply.

  What they wanted was to get home in time for the wedding—their wedding. They held hands as often as they could. They got used to not getting used to things. They knew that his name was Jim and that her name was Laura, and sometimes that was all they needed.

  In the Set-It-Down Saloon, the bouncer bounced a baby on his knee. At every table, in every booth, at least one baby lolled. The bartender had a baby slung over his chest and a second laid out on a blanket next to the taps. “I’ll tell you what you kids need,” he said to Jim, and Jim thought he was going to say a baby, but what he said was “You need a sure thing. My cousin Louis, for example. This guy has a sure thing. Have you ever heard of muffins?”

  “Muffins, yes, I’ve heard of muffins,” said Jim.

  “Louis is in the muffins business. It’s going to be huge, you know? When people get a taste of these muffins, they’re all going to want in on them. They’re going to eat these things until they burst. Standing room only. There’s a sure thing right there.”

  “I’ll be right back,” said Laura, and went off to find the restroom.

  Jim took a long sip of his beer. “There are these goons,” he said.

  “Goons?”

  “Thugs. Pinstripe suits, shiny black shoes. You can smell them when they get close. They smell like fried eggs.”

  “Fried eggs,” the bartender said, wiping down the bar. “Never heard of fried eggs.”

  The baby on the bar—a boy baby—started peeing. The stream of urine splashed over the bar and over the baby’s own legs. The bartender waited until it was done, then lifted the baby’s legs, cleaned up underneath, and cleaned the baby, too, all with the same rag.

  “A window or a small box,” Jim said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  It was a fortune teller in Phoenix (except it wasn’t really Phoenix) who’d said it to them. She lived in a little white house with a very green lawn and a sign out front with a picture of a crystal ball on it. She was out front, too, on a lawn chair, sunning herself in a two-piece. She was maybe nineteen. “You look lost,” she’d said dreamily, and they were lost, and feeling a little desperate, so they followed her inside, and she’d gazed into her crystal ball and told them: “Your way home lies through a window. A window or a small box.”

  “I’ve got plenty of boxes out back,” the bartender said. “Take all you need.” The baby on the bar was crying now, so he swapped it for the one slung over his chest.

  “I don’t know if we’re getting any closer,” Jim said. And then, though he knew how this would probably go, he asked, “Hey, can you tell me where we are?”

  “Now there’s the first sensible question you’ve asked all night,” the bartender said. “You’re sitting at my bar, kid. It’s called the Set-It-Down Saloon, and people come here to set things down, usually themselves. I’ve worked here for thirteen years, and sometimes I think it must be the absolute center of the universe.” He looked around. “You smell something? I’ve never smelled anything like that. Like something frying in butter.”

  Jim rose from his stool and said, “Where’s Laura?”

  * * *

  Laura had found too many doors at the back of the bar, none of them labeled women or men, ladies or gents. No helpful pictograms. So she’d picked a door at random and opened it on to darkness.

  When she felt for the light switch someone grabbed her wrist, pulled her in, and closed the door. “Hi,” someone said.

  She reached for the doorknob, but the man in the dark got ahold of her other wrist and danced her deeper into the room. Then she was in a chair, and a lamp was on, and on the table next to the lamp was a half-eaten sandwich on a white plate. The man sat beside her. He was big in his big pinstripe suit, and he had big blond hair and a handsome smile.

  “How’d you know which door I’d pick?” she asked.

  “Didn’t,” he said. “But things usually go my way. Hungry?”

  They were in a storage room, surrounded by open crates of promotional materials from breweries: neon signs, pint glasses, coasters, baby bibs.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  The man shrugged and took a bite of the sandwich. Cheese, it looked like. “So, you still with that guy?” he said. “What a loser.”

  “Guess how many,” she said.

  He stopped chewing. “How many what?”

  “Tents. Guess how many tents we rented for the wedding.”

  He blinked his big blue eyes. “I don’t want to guess.”

  “Three,” she said. “One for the ceremony, one for the dinner, and one for the dancing.”

  “I don’t want to talk about dancing,” said the man, the man who was the leader of the goons, the goons who were out to get them, though he seemed to be alone this time. “I want to talk about love.”

  The room felt colder now.

  “Do you love him?” the chief goon asked. “Do you really love that loser out there?”

  “Guess how many guests,” she said.

  He threw his sandwich onto the plate. “I hate your questions. Your questions bring me to the very edge of doing something terrible.”

  “One hundred eighteen guests,” she said. “Do you know how difficult it is to herd that many people? To make sure they all have a place to stay? To make sure they’re seated at tables with people they don’t hate?”

  “Do you love him?” the chief goon asked again.

  Laura thought of Jim on the sidewalk, thought of him weak and needy, and the only thing she felt was a hollow kind of anger. “I don’t know if I love him,” she said, and then she heard him outside, calling her name.

  She ran for the door, but the chief goon moved faster, pinned her against the wall, and held her face in his big white hands, very gently. She screamed.

  * * *

  They were just two kids from upstate New York. Before, he’d been working for an agency that tracked fish populations. Seven hours each day, in a room he and his coworkers called “the dungeon,” he sat at a window with a view on to a streambed, watching for flashes of silver in the murky light. He kept a counter in each hand, clicking one for shad, one for lampreys. Sometimes a lamprey would attach itself to the glass with its mouth and stay there for hours. Jim would try not to look at it, at its rings of teeth, at its flat yellow eyes.

  “Weird as anything we’ve seen here,” she’d said to him a few days after they’d crossed over (and this was how they referred to their arrival in this place, which they didn’t remember, didn’t understand).

  “There were turtles sometimes,” Jim said. “It always felt good to see turtles.”

  She’d been commuting into the city to work for a company that predicted trends in film, television, fashion. She’d earned a promotion and a measure of fame among her peers for her work on a report titled “The New Escapism,” which proved to be about 90 percent accurate. The interns referred to her as “the seeress” and competed for the right to do her photocopying. Whenever someone asked her what she saw coming next, she usually said, “Me getting fired,” and knew she sounded a little hopeful when she said it.

  “I’ll fire you if you want,” he’d told her one night. They were alone on his parents’ porch with a candle and bottle
s of beer.

  “It would be kind of hot if you fired me,” she said.

  “You’re fired, then. Completely, totally terminated. Don’t even clean out your desk.”

  “Mm, nice,” she said, sipping from her bottle.

  “Don’t stop by the water cooler. Don’t try to take any interns with you. Your life is one big pink slip.”

  “Okay,” she said, laughing. “That’ll do, boss.”

  “Welcome to the real world,” he said. “It’s hell out here, and you’re part of it now.”

  “Jim, that’s enough,” she said.

  He was shaking and he didn’t know why. He licked the tips of his thumb and index finger and pinched out the candle flame.

  * * *

  When Jim came through the door with a bottle in his fist, the chief goon let go of Laura and backed away. They all looked at one another for a moment, then Laura went to Jim. He smashed the bottle over the edge of a crate. The glass shattered and fell from his hand, useless.

  The chief goon chuckled, and swept back his big blond hair. “People are placing bets, you know. On how long before I catch you. I give you another day or two, tops.”

  They ran. Out in the bar, everyone was crouched low at their tables and booths, leaning protectively over babies. A half dozen goons, rubbery in their pinstripe suits, slid like jellyfish from vents in the ceiling, through the windows, from under the jukebox. They shifted in their shiny black shoes, ankles wobbling as they solidified.

  Laura grabbed her backpack from the bar and pulled Jim toward the door.

  “Trouble at six o’clock!” the bartender cried, which was strange, Jim thought, because no one here told time that way, but apparently six o’clock still meant right behind you, because there was one of the goons, smiling and ready to pounce.

  Jim swung at him. His punch connected, but Jim’s fist sank into the still-gooey head. The goon’s face bulged, looking like a balloon that’s been squeezed on one side. His smile stretched and swelled.