But that is a battle story, and battle stories belong to those who fight them. How a battle feels is impossible to tell, except by nonsense: It felt like a long rip. It felt like a weight landing upon me, over and over. It felt like red. It felt like a bell unringing forever. What can be told is that when Mallow and her Leopard and the Red Wind and all her brothers and sisters landed, Goldmouth still lay in the wreckage of his black blood, dying in between his breaths. Beside him, two strangers stood whole and with so much sorrow in their faces that the Red Wind staggered to see it. But beside the sorrow lay a rueful humor, as though a joke had been told while the war raged, and only now did these two youths catch the punch line.
One was a pretty young woman with brown, curling hair and a simple white dress with a few pale ribbons trailing from it. She wore a bonnet of valerian and heartsease. The color in her cheeks gleamed rich as bread and sun-rosy, and her feet were bare.
The other was a man with a neat, pointed beard and kindly eyes which had become the most beguiling shade of green. He was dressed in a green smoking jacket, and a green carriage driver’s cloak, and green jodhpurs, and green snowshoes. In his hands he held a long green lance, quite whole.
“He died to save her,” the Leopard growled. “And now he must take her place. It’s different for each Wind. Red will need to be tricked by her replacement into putting on a white gown. Gold will be killed. So it goes. Long ago, a girl named Jenny Chicory loved a boy, and meant to be a water-duchess in the Seelie before going on the Great Hunt. She drowned saving a little boy in green, a boy she did not know from a stranger, from a pirate band with a whale on their side. She could not let him go down into the waves, and woke up all in green with a job to do and no more a happy maid with a suitor at her door. Now Mabry’s done it, and he can’t take it back, nor go home with her to Winesap any more than she could leave the sky windless. The gales of the upper Fairyland heavens would shatter her, as they would have shattered him. In the doldrums of summer, sometimes, they arrange to meet at sea, where the sails droop and crow’s nests swelter. I imagine they’ll keep that date.”
Jenny looked at her Leopard with a grand and sorry love. “We are used to it,” she said thickly. “And storms must sometimes come to Winesap, too.”
Mallow looked down at the dying King. His breath did not stop or slow—a clurichaun his age had reserves of will waiting to be tested. He might live years in distress but not die. She considered what to do. She considered the Gremlin and the Green Wind. She considered poor, crumbling Pandemonium. She considered the shattered goblet and that blue and cloudy blood, the wettest of all possible Wet Magics, mingling with all the other blood that had poured out onto the square, wretched, dull, of use to no one.
Mallow knelt. She drew her needle and pricked the thumb of King Goldmouth’s golden hand. Slowly, as slowly as he had pushed his fingers into helpless mouths, she pushed her needle in, pulled it through, and made her stitch. Beneath her hands, a thick, glassy thread appeared. She made another stitch, and another, hauling up the clurichaun’s feet to his chest and beginning to cry a little despite herself, so exhausted and revolted and determined and sorry was she.
“I told you,” she said as she sewed. “I didn’t want to muddle in Politicks—and there is always Politicks, even when folk promise it’s just a party, or a revival, or an exhibition of every kind of magic. I didn’t want to meet a Fairy boy or dance at Fairy balls. I only wanted to read my books and learn a bit of magic. Why couldn’t you have been a better King? Why couldn’t you have left that poor world alone? Why couldn’t you have been better?” She hit him with her fist and he did not protest. She had not hit him hard.
By now, Goldmouth’s knees covered his face. He could not speak. A very neat seam ran across his nose. His eyes pleaded, but Mallow went on sewing up the King, stitch by stitch, into a package no bigger than her hand. The last of his astrological tattoos showed on the top of it, and she handed the whole thing over to the Red Wind to close away. Mallow’s skin dripped starry streaks of royal blood.
The girl who would find herself, against long odds, Queen before dinnertime stood up and looked at her new friends, at her darling Leopard, at the glittering needle in her hand. Then she looked to the empty, hollowed-out city.
“Well,” Mallow said, feeling a wave of powerful practicality break on her heart. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Copyright (C) 2011 by Catherynne M. Valente
Art copyright (C) 2011 by Ana Juan
By Catherynne M. Valente
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Deathless
Palimpsest
The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden
The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice
The Habitation of the Blessed
Under in the Mere
The Labyrinth
The Grass-Cutting Sword
Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams
Ventriloquism
The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland--For a Little While: A Tor.Com Original Page 4
