The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

“Well, you’re grown now, aren’t you?”

  “I hope so.” Sapira’s voice had the richness of a seasoned speaker’s. Her smile conveyed warmth, acceptance. She had seemed bright enough as a girl, but had not been vibrant. Now, as her attention slid past Gale, it was almost a loss, as though she had fallen into shadow.

  Sapira licked her lips. “I’m sure you’ll find me every inch a woman.”

  Rot. Gale coughed. “Meet my first mate, Kir Parrish.”

  He bowed gravely.

  It took the girl a moment to remember herself, to clasp Gale’s arm and lead everyone away from the shore.

  He really is that beautiful. Gale had hoped her eye was too particular, too keen to find fault. Maybe she’ll marry young Garland in marriage and I can tell Royl to find someone more…well, someone else.

  “You on your own today, Sapira?”

  “The court is with the western herd,” Sapira said. “Daddy and the crown prince are collecting horns with a group of visiting dignitaries.”

  “Sounds like you’re missing a party.”

  “Diplomats, formal dances, empty small talk…” Sapira’s gaze slid back to Parrish. “Better to be out on the highlands.”

  “I can’t wait to see these famous Redcap stags,” Gale said.

  “I’ve arranged refreshments; then we’ll set out.” Atop the hill, a silk tent sheltered a table laid with tea and light fare: braised greystag, shellfish, and pickled vegetables. Uphill, horses and trail guides were waiting.

  Sapira glided to head up the table. “You ride, Kir Parrish?”

  “A bit.”

  “The trails are slippery. I hope you’ve got a good seat.”

  “I’ll do my best to keep up, Kir.” No sign he’d picked up on her suggestive tone.

  They were packed and under way in less than an hour, and Parrish wasn’t boasting—he could ride. The pulvers hiked ahead and behind, tirelessly striding through the switchbacks into the stony hills. Winter was barely over: the rivers were high and icy, the paths wet.

  Twice the trail narrowed, forcing them through narrow passes overwatched by stone towers.

  “Nice killing pits you got here,” Gale said.

  “Relics from the days before the Fleet Charter,” Sapira said, waving to a pair of bored-looking tower guards. “Redcap was oft-attacked.”

  “Your ancestors retreated to the mountains and picked the pirates off when they followed?” Parrish said.

  She nodded.

  “What about larger forces?” Gale asked. “Someone must have tried to bring an army up this trail.” The towers were well-placed, but not impregnable. Serious invaders would have come armed with magic as well as muskets and swords.

  “There’s a fortress inland.”

  “Fortress” proved to be an understatement. Six hours into the journey, they reached a long alpine shelf, an expanse overshadowed by a jagged rise of mountain. The rock face above the plain was bald stone the color of dried blood, topped by an enormous ice pack.

  They picked a slow route across a floor of broken rock and dirty snow, slick terrain dotted with patches of young grass and flowers. Goats grazed the new growth avidly. The river they’d been following, the Kingsilver, came from higher up: it was pouring down the rock face and spilling across the plain. Fed by the glacier above, it ran fast, its water boisterous and foamy.

  Looks cold. Since around her fortieth birthday, Gale had been increasingly preoccupied with keeping warm.

  “You asked about invasions?” Sapira pointed.

  The locals had cut their keep into the mountainside. Carved doorways rose on either side of the waterfall. The doors themselves were stained glass, lit from behind in an array of colors: gold, rose, the deep blue of the sea.

  “Glass doors in a fortress?” Parrish asked.

  “There are military shutters in storage. We haven’t needed them in eighty years.”

  The land approach to the keep was encircled by a defensive wall. Eight feet high, with the random, tumbled shape of a rock pile, it was covered in bilious green vines. New shoots and finger-long thorns reached through its mat of snow and winter-sodden leaves.

  Parrish reined in well short of the barrier. “Redcap…would that be another name for maddenflur?”

  Sapira gave him an appreciative smile. “Are you a botanist as well as a sailor?”

  “I know this plant. It’s hallucinogenic.”

  “It has many uses, medicinal, magical, and military. Its poisons and thorns protect the wall.”

  “How do you keep it from taking over?”

  “The goats can digest the young shoots.”

  “But they don’t crop it from the wall?”

  Pleased at his interest, Sapira gestured them closer. Donning a heavy leather glove, she pulled a strand of the vine, exposing the rock below. About fifteen nasty-looking ants gathered on the stem, spraying tiny drops of formic acid.

  “We add new stones to the wall each year,” she said. “The vines stitch it all together, and the ants keep the goats at bay. When maddenflur takes root elsewhere in the meadow, there are no ants.”

  “So the goats eat it,” Parrish said.

  As if to illustrate the point, a pregnant nanny picked her way over the wall, dodging the spraying ant poison around her hooves.

  “A perfectly balanced natural defense,” Parrish said, with obvious appreciation.

  “Gorgeous,” Gale agreed. “But how’s an old lady who means no harm haul her backside into your keep?”

  “We take the river.”

  Sapira led them to a covered barge waiting on the banks. Once they were aboard, the pulvers jumped into the turgid stream, seizing ropes of braided goatskin and using brute strength to tow the barge against the current. They skirted the crushing heart of the cataract, passing through the falls on one side. Water splashed, deafeningly loud, on the roof, sheeting down in curtains. Then they were through, entering a massive chamber, a reception hall, overlooked by a mezzanine and centered, at ground level, by the circular pool for the barge.

  Two more Blossoms, a teenaged girl and an elderly woman, awaited them on an ornately decorated pier.

  “Well!” Gale gushed. “This is impressive. Your enemies would have had to either brave the poison or push through the waterfall. Efficient, Parrish, wouldn’t you say? My, look at that ceiling!”

  He gaped upward at the frescoes with perfect sincerity. Her heart warmed a little.

  Sapira made introductions: “This is my half-sister Teale and our aunt Agate.” Agate gave Gale a quick, shrewd glance; Teale, naturally, was staring over Gale’s shoulder. “This is…ah…”

  She thrust out a hand: “Gale Feliachild of Verdanii.”

  “And Captain Parrish, from the Nightjar,” said Sapira.

  “Not the captain,” Gale corrected Sapira sharply.

  They toured the reception chamber, climbing to a parlor on the mezzanine that overlooked the docked barge in its pool. There they sat down to play a board game.

  Time to find out why I’m here. Gale brought up clamming again, rattling on about the shellfish of the various islands she’d been to, making bad jokes and guffawing. It didn’t take long for Agate to bring the conversation ‘round to politics.

  “Before the peace, we had strong ties with Sylvanna,” she said. “Our defenses on land are considerable, as you see, but we have a lot of beach.”

  “Lotta landing sites.”

  “Exactly. Sylvanner ships patrolled our waters in the days before the Fleet-enforced peace.”

  “And in exchange?”

  “One of our more impulsive kings agreed to supply Sylvanna with ninety flawless greystag horns every year.”

  “For how long?”

  “Forever,” Sapira said.

  “Perpetual contracts are illegal,” Parrish said.

  “They are now. Ours predates the Fleet Charter,” Agate said.

  “Ninety horns, Agate—is that a lot?”

  Agate nodded. “The herd’s population was h
igh at the time, and there has been some contraction since the Peace. Nothing serious, but for some decades we rarely saw more than eighty horns of the required quality.”

  “And the fee?” Gale asked.

  “A fixed amount, paid per horn. It was a decent rate even fifty years ago.”

  “I suppose if you’re short on the ninety horns, you owe them the next year.”

  “Exactly. We were deep in arrears for a long time, which suited Sylvanna. But lately, we’ve made progress.”

  Gale wondered if Parrish was following this: Agate was explaining why, for decades, Redcap had been voting with Sylvanna on contentious issues within the Fleet Convene. Now they were out of debt, the Sylvanners didn’t want to give up a puppet.

  “We’re not poor,” Sapira said. “But this contract will eventually beggar us. They’d let us out of it, maybe, in exchange for the inscription that makes the pulvers, but—“

  “You’ve sought legal advice?”

  Parrish coughed into his drink, spraying tea, his cheeks purpling. Agate gave Teale a warning glare.

  See, Sloot? They can’t keep their hands off him, Gale thought.

  “We’ve had the contract reviewed,” Sapira affirmed, as if nothing had happened.

  “No easy way out, mmm?”

  “No. And we don’t want to end up in court.”

  “Hah. Sylvanner lawyers would swallow you whole.”

  They were asking Gale to find a way to break it, in other words, without arbitration or court or anything that might smack of them breaking treaty. This was why she was here playing dotty aunt.

  The board game concluded with Parrish winning everything—the girls were too distracted to play well. Afterward, servants led Gale to a room that overlooked the valley. Her view of goats and snowmelt was distorted by the pale champagne-colored glass of her balcony doors.

  Instead of enjoying the scene, she bustled around the keep, being a nuisance, demanding nettle soap, pretending to be lost and grilling the servants. There was little they could add to the story. Sylvanna had sent a large diplomatic party to court, allegedly to celebrate the fact that Redcap meant to pay off the backlog of horns this year. Trouble was expected.

  Dinner came. Gale told off-color stories; Agate endured. The girls made eyes at Parrish.

  He was distantly polite to them, but his attention was below, on the reception chamber. The barge and its dock had been cleared away from the pool, and stone spheres were placed around its circumference. Freestanding torches blazed, illuminating the back of the waterfall.

  “Are they setting up for an event?” he asked.

  “Each year the eldest of our pulvers retires and a new initiate gets scripped,” Agate said. “The changeover ceremony is about to start—see, there they are.”

  Twenty pulvers gathered at the edge of the pool. When they were in place, six more marched in, bearing a column of stone.

  A young man clad in an oversized white shift was bound to the column. They erected it in the center of the pool, so his feet dangled just above the water.

  The pulvers took up the stone spheres from the edges of the pool, throwing them in a complicated, deadly game of catch. They tossed them overhand, snatched them out of thin air, whirled to give each toss more momentum. It was a friendly business at first, the participants shouting encouragement across the water, occasionally letting out a collective “Ho!” or “Ah!” on the high throws. The stones whizzed past the bound figure in the center of the pool, some coming close, none quite striking him. He bore it with no apparent sign of fear. As the players began to sweat and pant, the sense of play gave way to a deadly, businesslike mien.

  With a final huff, each of the pulvers caught a sphere and flung it up, nearly straight overhead. The stones rose to the chamber roof, curling in simultaneous parabolas to the floor, plunging into the bargepool close to the bound man, obscuring him with a crash of water. The noise was loud enough to drown out any cry he might have made.

  As the waves settled the man—a boy, really, and drenched now—was bleeding, his white robe marked with small trickles of crimson.

  Parrish had half-risen from his chair.

  “Don’t worry, Bendi’s safe.” Sapira stroked his arm. “The collision of the stones sends a few chips of rock flying. The blood is required for the inscription—“

  Gale forced herself to unclench her fists.

  A long cry from the eldest pulver interrupted her. He faced the soaked and bleeding form, then raised a massive curl of leather…

  The inscription that bestowed his strength, Gale guessed. Scripped on…rhinoceros flesh, perhaps? Unfurling it, he whipped the leather back and forth like a flag in heavy wind, circling the pool, making a blur of its text, luminous, carefully lettered spellscrip. It snapped and whuffed at the air, rippling the pool.

  With the faintest of bows to Agate, he tore it.

  The effect was obvious. The man shrank within his armor, bowed under by its weight. Nobody helped him as he strained, groaning, to lift off his breastplate. He was both shaking and weeping as he dropped it at the edge of the pond, for his shivering, bound successor.

  “What happens to the retiring pulver?” Gale asked.

  Agate gestured at a cluster of eager-looking people waiting on the fringes. “Pensioned back to his family.”

  The pulver tossed away the torn inscription. He stumbled eagerly to his family as his former fellows turned their backs on him.

  A spellscribe stepped forward with a fresh sheet of rhino leather. Facing the bound figure, she washed her inscription tools in the blood-tinged pool.

  Agate pointed out a female pulver. “Valette there is eldest now. She takes the new fellow under her wing.”

  Parrish chose that moment to skitter sideways out of Sapira’s grasp.

  “Sapira Majesta, croo vel appartri!” Agate hissed. Then, as if nothing had happened, she said: “Shall we play another round of board and bones? It’ll be hours before that inscription’s done and young Bendi breaks the chains binding him to that column.”

  After the ceremony, Gale changed to a black tunic and slacks that passed for pajamas. The garments covered her from neck to toe, constituting modest wear almost everywhere in the world. Lurking jammies, Sloot called them. They were warm, convenient for sneaking about, climbing walls…even fighting, if it was called for.

  But this was no court full of spies and assassins, just a small country with a knotty contractual burden. She wrapped a lurid yellow and blue bathrobe around herself and stretched, easing out the knots from her hours on horseback.

  A yelp in the hallway: one of the girls.

  She cracked open the door. Teale was on the floor in the corridor. Parrish bent over her, apologizing. Smiling, determined, the girl reached up, catching him by his belt, yanking herself upright by hauling him down.

  That looked to be her intention, anyway. Parrish held his balance, lifting her upright with balletic grace.

  Gale stepped into the hallway. “Parrish. Where’ve you been?”

  “Ah. Kir Feliachild, I…apologize for the delay.” He handed Teale something, bowing hastily. The girl reddened, thwarted, as Parrish trotted into Gale’s room.

  “That wasn’t what it looked like,” he said, standing at attention as she shut the door.

  “No?”

  “The Blossom asked me to help her unfasten a bracelet. The catch is quite small and she was struggling.”

  “I see.”

  “It fell, I bent to retrieve it, and we got entangled…”

  “I bet you did.”

  Those full lips of his quirked: was he hiding a smile? “You don’t want an explanation.”

  “I want you to get some rest. We have another full day on horseback tomorrow.”

  A tiny slump. “Sapira’s in my room.”

  Sloot, what am I to do with this boy? “At least Sapira’s near your age.”

  “She’s…the women here, they’re…formidable.”

  “Not my problem.” She set
tled by the fire.

  “Not that the women of your homeland aren’t—“

  “Relax, cub. I’m not offended.” She settled by the fire, thinking. “Sapira is impressive, isn’t she?”

  “It’s like summer sunshine, when she looks at you.”

  “They must be holding back a few horns, for charisma inscriptions.”

  “Would they risk it? You’d be sure to find out and tell the Sylvanners.”

  “Would I?”

  “Of course.”

  Oh my. Not one devious bone. She added “lack of guile” to her growing list of Parrish’s deficiencies.

  She drifted off, making bets with herself as to whether she’d find the boy curled up on her floor come dawn. But when the servant came—early—to wake her, he was gone. Either he’d braved his room or gone elsewhere.

  She found him in the great receiving chamber with all three Blossoms Majestic. The dock had been restored; the barge awaited. Sapira, dressed for riding, offered a frosty nod. Teale was deep in a sulk.

  “Refreshment, Kir?” A servant offered a tray of breakfast dainties: maize cakes, dates, small boiled eggs studded with sliver-like maddenflur thorns that had, no doubt, been pickled out of their toxicity.

  Agate twinkled at Gale over the youngsters’ heads. Amused by her girls’ failed attempts to entrap Parrish? “Morning, Kir. I heard you like to get an early start.”

  “It supposed to rain or something?” One of the benefits of being an Awful Woman was you didn’t have to play coy guessing games.

  “One of the Sylvanner delegates hared off from the court party. He’s been sighted on the highland switchbacks. Coming to pay his respects, I’m sure.”

  “If we’re here when he arrives, we’ll have to invite him up the mountain with us?”

  “Just so.”

  She had no wish to fence with her Sylvanner counterpart. “Feed yourself, Parrish, we’re going.”

  Breakfast in hand—he refused the eggs, she noted—they climbed aboard the barge, riding through the waterfall to the waiting horses and trail guides.

  The sky was just brightening, the Kingsilver hidden under a cushion of mist. A pack of small canines had caught one of the goats, and were at the opposite edge of the ridge, worrying at the carcass. One alternated mournful howls with gut-wrenching heaves, bringing up the meat.