by Neil Clarke
It takes a long time, even though once he would have teased her mercilessly for her horrible taste in literature; he has found philosophy boring for as long as she has known him, and that is half of why she chose it. She is afraid for him, and he sleeps so little and eats even less. She sits by his bedside long into the night, watching her candlelight flicker across the hollows of his gaunt face. If she is lucky, she falls asleep in the chair at his bedside, with only the crooked pains of age and grief to greet her in the morning, but as often as not, she awakens to midnight and the sound of his ragged breathing as he tries to keep from waking her.
She is so tired, so often, now; there are not enough of them to pull in the harvest, and likely not enough harvest either, and the summer is waning so fast that she is very hard-pressed to think how they will survive the winter. If the soldiers do not come, she thinks, then perhaps they will make it, and she goes over the records again with her steward, searching for some slight excess they can depend upon.
It is such hard going that every other task is easy by comparison, all the grueling physical work she lends a hand to when she has a spare moment made nothing in the face of this last, most brutal fact. She knows she cannot spare the time to go to him, but equally she cannot leave him alone with his nightmares, and so she goes, and is worn thin with exhaustion.
And now he sleeps without dreams, and even knowing that she is likely being far too much the optimist, she comes back to him as soon as she can the next day with a small green silk case of books and an expression he would call determined. She needs him so badly, now, worse than she ever has; she needs his strength and his courage and his wit, and she cannot ask him to spare anything for her. He has so little for himself.
To her surprise, his mouth twitches upwards, almost a smile, and while he is still so thin that his bones show clear through the bandages at his wrists, she is strangely reassured, and cannot quite keep the answering smile from her face.
“I will be damned before I spend the rest of my life reading horrible philosophy,” he whispers. “Poetry, madam, or at least a play, for the love of all things merry.”
She brandishes the green silk books at him with mock ferocity, displaying the gilt-lettered title. It is a set of mythological poetry, rife with firebirds and wishes, precisely the sort of foolishness that he once loved, and she is rewarded for the trouble it took to find it by the ghost of a smile on his face.
“Heathen,” she says, as fondly as she dares, and he leans back into the pillows and closes his eyes as she pages delicately through the first of the thin volumes, her voice low and easy, soothing him into sleep.
She comes back the next day, as soon as she can be spared from directing the defenses, and after that again, and together they make their way through all the long slow poems of their history in the little time she cannot really justify setting aside for him, until at last they come to the tragic cycle of the sorcerer Theine. Once upon a time, it was his favorite, and even she, who has always hated poetry, could nearly tolerate it, but now she cannot help but find it cruel.
But as she starts to flip past, her fingers brushing lightly over the pages, he frowns, and shakes his head.
“Please,” he says, his voice soft and harsh around the edges, and she knows that he is afraid.
She starts slowly, pausing more often than she needs to, to take a breath or sip of water from the blue clay cup beside his bed, and every time she looks in hope he has fallen asleep she finds him watching her, his gaze unnervingly still.
And now she’s gone and laid him down,
His body limp upon the green.
His strength of limb has been and flown;
The stars are hid behind her screen.
He lies beneath a storm-torn beech
His mind grown dark with loathsome lies,
And all his gift for song and speech
Has died before her golden eyes.
His birds are slain, his master’s dead,
The school of wizards burnt and lost.
His brothers from the land have fled
And left him here, to face the frost.
She binds him now with chains of light,
Within the shadowed sleepless hill,
To live so long as day flees night
And listen to the dead winds’ will.
She pauses then, and turns to gaze,
Upon this shattered sorcerer
Whose mind was caught within her maze
Though once he sought to conquer her.
”My lord,” she whispers ‘gainst his cheek,
“In days when men may hear thy doom,
Dost think they shall my secrets seek?”
Her eyes are bright within the gloom.
She does not wait on his reply,
But opens her bright-feathered wings
And casts herself into the sky,
And as she goes away she sings.
They let the words drift away into the silence, and after a long time he stirs in his bed, half-restless and half-thoughtful.
“It isn’t like that at all, you know,” he murmurs, and for a moment there is a shadow of bitter mockery in his voice. He looks at her so steadily she is afraid. “I had thought that it would be like that, a queer dream of winds and stars, but poets,” he says, the bitterness stronger now, “are liars all.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, and she does not think she has ever been so sorry in her life. “I left you to die,” she says, and cannot bring herself to go on.
His mouth quirks painfully, and he looks away.
“My staff burnt to dust and ashes in my hands,” he says, at last, as if he is confessing to her, and his voice is colorless. “I felt myself break, and then there were shards of glass in my heart and nothing in my head but fire, and the world was gone.”
She touches the gilt lettering on the green silk lightly, with the tips of her fingers, and cannot think of anything to say.
“Nothing mattered very much anymore,” he says, quietly, his face terrible to look at.
The next day she brings only lesser poetry.
The summer is fading, and soon it will be gone entirely and the harvest will have to be brought in. The apples on the trees are fat and tempting, smooth sides dappled pink and gold. The children collect them in baskets and eat themselves sick, and at night foxes chase each other drunkenly through the garden, made bold by fermenting berries. The breath of autumn touches everything with bronze.
The ploughman’s daughters, sturdy dark girls with solemn faces, have adopted him as their own, unafraid of his scars. They bring him half a hundred little presents clasped in their chubby hands, bright-colored leaves and scraps of golden silk and, once, the entire branch off an ash tree, sheared off in an early storm. It takes all three of them to carry it into his bedroom, and even so the wide branches near the top get stuck in the door frame. Even Harra, her steward, has trouble maintaining her stern expression while she scolds them, as she has to do it from behind a screen of half-dead ash leaves.
And even he smiles.
But he is quiet still, so reserved that it is sometimes hard to remember his presence at all, and much harder to remember the young man she first met, a wizard as strident as ever his crows were. Sometimes she thinks that it would be polite to ask the fate of his birds, but she is not sure even he knows. If they were not destroyed by the wizard he fought, they may have starved by now, or fled to some other wizard’s hand, perhaps even the one that ruined him. She has never been assured of the loyalty of birds.
Most days, now, he drags himself from bed to sit in the chair beside his window; his broken strength is returning slowly, but as yet he can do little more than sit and sleep and watch her farmers struggling to get their wheat in. And he leaves bread crumbs on the sill every night, scattered as if it is accidental.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers once, his eyes dark with exhaustion, and for a moment she cannot think what he means. “I’ve returned to you so useless,” he says, his mouth
twisting a little with a merciless humor.
She bends to kiss his cheek, cupping her hand about the back of his neck, as reassuring as she can. “But you returned,” she says, and he is silent.
Sometimes she dreams that she went back for him herself. In the dreams, she steals a horse from her peasants and rides as fast as she can to find him. She swings down off her horse into an empty field of grass, golden stalks waving gently in the breeze as far as the eye can see, and walks for miles as the red sun sets behind her. There is never anyone there.
In the evening, she brings him honey and raspberries, and sits beside him to watch the sun set beyond his window. The light falls across the hills like spilled wine, wakening dim colors in the mountains, and she closes her eyes against its warmth.
“I thought it would come back,” he says, after a long time, his voice gentle and almost idle. All but the last of the sun has disappeared behind the mountains, the land fading into the evening, and she turns to look at him and finds him hard to see. There are no candles in his room, but she thinks his eyes are closed.
“It might,” she points out. Her hands clench tight around her wine-cup until she is afraid she will break it, and she very carefully does not think of all the history she knows which says that it will not. Broken wizards do not heal.
“It won’t,” he says, quietly. Out the window, the moon is rising noiselessly behind the mountains, and it too is touched by the warmth of autumn, its luminous shine turned harvest orange. “I’ve known that for a long time now,” he admits, and she does not know what to say.
He hesitates in the face of her silence. “I wanted to die,” he says after a moment, so lightly that it is as if he is trying to diminish his honesty by flippancy. “I didn’t think that I was the sort to— ” But he stops again, and does not go on.
“Do you still?” she asks him, quiet and grave despite her fear, and his face is suddenly shy. He looks at his hands.
“No,” he says, and nearly smiles.
Early one morning while she is making bread with Harra, he comes limping to the door of the kitchen and leans heavily against the wall, his good hand curled around a rough staff which Gilos got from the orchard for him. His face is pale and drawn with even this short walk, and she hurries to bring him a stool, her arms covered in flour to her elbows.
She watches him out of the corner of her eye as she works, and when it is time to take the bread out of the oven, she cuts off a thick slice—too early, of course, and it crumbles into the napkin, a mess of steaming bread bits against the blue of the linen.
He picks at it while she and Harra clean, the color returning slowly to his face, and when she brings him an apple and a slice of cheese, he eats these as well, not speaking. When he moves as if to rise, she is beside him at once, offering an arm and his staff. He makes a face, nose wrinkling in disgust at his own incapacitation.
“Heroic of me,” he says, very dry, but takes her arm, and together they stumble back to his bedroom. She cannot stay; there are half a hundred absolutely vital things she must do today, and besides that she wants to check on the irrigation that leapt its ditch three days ago and was beaten back only with great effort, so she leaves him curled in the seat beside the window with most of the remainder of the loaf.
She returns much later to find the room chilly: the window open, bread eaten, crumbs scattered across the sill. He’ll be stiff later, she thinks; he has fallen asleep in his armchair, and she wakes him with a touch, keeping her hand on his shoulder. He is still prone to nightmares, and often wakes with the edge of terror sharp in his face, but today there is only a great weariness.
First thing as he wakes, he glances to the window, his face still and nearly afraid, but there is nothing there. He runs his hand through his hair, staring out at the hills rolling up to the mountains beyond, and is silent for a long time.
“I am a fool,” he says at last. “They will not come.” She cannot disagree. Not even the local sparrows will come to him, though they grow fat begging crumbs off the children, and so she looks at him and cannot find anything to say. She smooths his hair back from his face, and kisses his cheek before she must leave him.
One night he joins her outside on the patio for dinner, a little dazed by the chatter of even half a dozen people but there nonetheless. It is nothing like their old life, but it is a life, she thinks, and curls her hand possessively around his elbow as she helps him back to his room. For a moment, she thinks she sees a fleeting shadow, sharp-edged and quick, but the light of her lamp shows nothing.
It’s grown chilly, these past few nights, and the room is tense with cold air from the open window. She leaves him sitting on the bed, hands useless in his lap, and crosses the room to close it.
“Don’t,” he says, and she pauses. He looks up at her as she turns to him, and his eyes are clear and distant. “They came to their fate only for love of me,” he says, and hesitates, searching for words. “They may leave me for whatever reason they must,” he says at last, “but I will not lock them out, no matter how unlikely their return.”
It’s the longest speech she’s heard from him in a very long time, and she is taken aback; after a moment, she nods, and lets the window be, coming to sit beside him. She will have to bring him an extra blanket, she thinks, but that is scarcely a hardship.
“Will you be all right?” she asks him, and he shrugs, rubs his face with his good hand and does not speak.
They sit together in silence and wait for the sound of wings.
About the Author
Rachel Sobel is a biology student at the University of Washington in Seattle, and a graduate of the Alpha Writer’s Workshop. She lives in a house full of people who consider her a dangerous lunatic, and generally manages to prove them right. Someday in the far future, she is going to be a scientist if she manages to survive her own education.
The Giving Heart
Corie Ralston
Coleman studied the dead heart in the store window, the aorta frozen mid-pump in clear acrylic.
Julie put a hand over her mouth. “Is this for real?”
“Sandra says it’s all the rage,” Coleman said. “It’s what everyone is doing at weddings these days.”
“Sandra says this, Sandra says that.”
Coleman glanced over. Could it be she didn’t want him to marry Sandra? He liked the thought.
He pulled Julie inside. A man in a suit approached them at once, held out a hand with perfect, manicured nails.
“Real is the new real,” Mr. Manicured said. “People used to give chocolate hearts, candy hearts, paper hearts. Why not get to the heart of the matter, so to speak? Give your actual heart.”
“I don’t know,” Julie said. “It’s kind-of creepy.”
“How does it work?” Coleman said.
Julie wandered off to a display kiosk and pulled up a graphic demo of heart-replacement surgery.
Coleman concentrated on Mr. Manicured, who was still speaking.
“Our surgeons are the best in the country,” he said. “And with cutting edge surgical techniques, so to speak, there is practically no scarring.”
A holo of a happy couple danced in the corner. Red slogans slid across the walls in laser light. Home is where the heart is, give her your heart. It all seemed very modern.
Mr. Manicured took Coleman’s elbow and leaned in conspiratorially. “Personally,” he said, “I would take an artificial heart over a real one any day. Much more reliable.”
He named a price.
Coleman gasped.
“Do you love her?” Manicured said.
“Sure.” It would take all his savings, the money he was saving for his bookstore.
“There is no cost too great for love,” Manicured murmured.
Sandra said it was about time they get married. She sighed meaningfully whenever they passed the Give Your Heart store. He did want to make her happy.
Coleman looked over at Julie, who stood with eyes narrowed at the kiosk. Julie, on t
he other hand, didn’t believe in marriage.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“Do you, Coleman?” the minister said.
Coleman blinked. “What?”
Sandra’s shimmery veil made him dizzy. The heat wrapped his head like soggy towel. He could scarcely breathe.
“Here.”
Sandra’s nephew, at Colman’s side in his tiny tux, nudged a package into Colman’s hands.
“Do you, Coleman, take Sandra as your wife?”
He knew he was supposed to say something about his heart. Still my beating heart. My heart is breaking? No, that couldn’t be it. There were so many expressions about the heart, he thought in a sudden panic.
Julie had said he shouldn’t get married. Julie was somewhere in the audience.
After a pause that felt to Colman as if it might stretch to eternity, Sandra reached over and took the package from Colman’s hands. The minister began to speak again.
Coleman felt a sudden thump from within his chest, as if his new artificial heart had done a somersault. The surgeon had assured him his new heart was in fine condition. Nothing could go wrong. So why had it thumped like that?
He knew he was now supposed to do something with the ring, but at that point, he lost consciousness.
No one would let him live down the fact that he had fainted; the reception was one long running joke about it. Coleman’s heart, in its acrylic cage, made the rounds of the room.
Colman drank three martinis and wobbled off to a corner where Sandra’s brother Giles gobbled a piece of red heart-shaped cake.
“The problem with weddings these days,” Giles said, since he was an expert on everything, “is that they are so staged and predictable.”
“You mean fainting wasn’t exciting enough for you?”
Giles laughed. “Okay. That was fun. But really, everything else. The dresses, the vows, the flowers, blah blah blah.”
