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

by Various

  “I think I want to sleep,” I say. And I do, really, I do. The last thing I want is to be awake and to think about how Ilven escaped from the life she didn’t want. And why she never spoke to me, told me, warned me. Perhaps I could have changed her mind. It occurs to me that she never meant to meet me under the trees—that she knew me well enough to predict that I would wait only so long before I left—because then she could take the Leap without any chance of me witnessing her from my tower. My heart goes small, and every limb feels too heavy to lift.

  Perhaps my mother even understands a little about how I feel. She leaves, and a few minutes later Firell brings me honeybush tea.

  “Firell,” I say, and she curtseys in greeting.

  She sets the ornate copper tray down and begins fiddling with the pots and bowls. The thin liquid trill of tea poured into porcelain is soothing, and the faint sweet scent of the honeybush lingers in the air.

  “Can I bring you anything else, miss?”

  I shake my head. It’s too heavy for my neck. I’m going to snap, break in two. If I could cry, perhaps my head would be lighter. I am a rain cloud, heavy before the storm.

  She curtseys again, ready to leave, but I stop her before she can go.

  “Here,” I say, and fumble in my pocket for the little necklace that is weighing me down. She takes the gift, her eyes wide, nervous.

  “Miss?”

  “For you,” I say. And it might as well be. Firell has served me as a lady’s maid since she could carry a tray. I look at her again and really see her: her face olive complected, her dark hair drawn back into a neat pad low on her neck. Her starched uniform, marred by faint stains at the armpits, the burn on her arm, faded now, where she once caught at a falling teapot so that it wouldn’t scald me. I realize now that I know nothing about Firell—she could be a magicless unwanted baby from a High House, or some serving girl’s bastard. The latter’s more likely; along with the tan skin, she has the short stature that points at Hob parentage. The High Houses try to keep their bloodlines pure, clinging to their magic. Ilven used to say that soon we high-Lammers would be nothing more than inbred monstrosities, lording it over one another as we play king of the midden.

  It could be a true future that Ilven saw—she’s a Saint after all.

  Was. Was a Saint.

  “It’s a gift,” I say to Firell.

  She takes the package with fluttering fingers and tucks it deep in her apron pocket without unwrapping it. “Thank you, miss. Thank you.”

  When she’s gone, I feel empty. After a while, I take my teacup and blow, making tiny ripples across the reddish water.

  There’s a distinct bitter aftertaste of Lady’s Gown in the tea, and I welcome it. Anything to sleep without dreaming.

  I AM STILL GROGGY from a week spent in mourning, and my thoughts chase one another in ever-tightening spirals. This is not a good way to face my mother’s neat and quiet revenge. The early sunlight hurts my puffy eyes and I squint, wishing the ache away. The low tea table is a bridge between us, or perhaps a wall. Carefully, I arrange the teapot, the little white cup, and the sugar bowl before me like an army. Defense? Or attack?

  My mother sits crisply, folding and unfolding the letter she holds. Her weapon. It bears my brother’s jagged script. How like him, to talk to us in a way that gives us no chance to argue or interrupt. My mother still deludes herself that the letters are written out of more than a desire to spend as little time in our company as possible. She likes to think he is still hers.

  It seems we’re pretending that nothing happened. My brother is with his wife and her expanding belly. It will not be long now before her lying-in, and we shall see even less of him than usual. I hope. He will stay in his town house in New Town, near enough to the docks that he can keep his eye over our wealth. His wealth.

  As for Ilven, there is only the kind of silence that comes heavily weighted with the whispers of servants. They stop talking when they hear me coming. They do not look at my face.

  My hand darts up to brush the high collar of my dress. Glass beads and thick embroidery press against the bruises they are meant to hide.

  My mother fires the first volley. “Your brother has had some interest from House Canroth.” She sets the letter down between us, then draws her cup closer to her but doesn’t drink.

  “Interest about what?”

  “It’s time you looked to a suitable match—”

  “With House Canroth?” Anger makes my skin tight. “They’re—they’re not even a Great House.” As if that matters; all the eligible bachelors from the Great Houses are practically decrepit. Even the next highest ranked, like the Skellig twins, are still in swaddling clothes. I try to dredge up what little knowledge I have of Canroth, but my mind is blank. Something about glass, I think. Ah, that’s it, they make fine crystal, so they’re mostly War-Singers. At the very least I suppose I should be glad Owen is not trying to tie me to a House overrun with Readers and Saints, all lost in auras and Visions. I do not want to spend the rest of my life trying not to feel too much, in case some Reader turns my innermost desires against me. And if I think my life is measured and controlled now, how much worse would it be in a House ruled by Saints, constantly tracking futures and possibilities, their lives ruled by scriv-visions and the auguries of decks of cards? Perhaps Ilven not only foresaw her own death but also knew to an instant how long I would wait in the grove of trees before I left her to her chosen path.

  I try to calm myself by sipping my tea, but it is too hot, and I burn the back of my throat, my tongue. Good. I focus on the pain, the tip of my tongue touching the shreds of burned skin on my palate. An image of a reedy little man drifts up through my memories. We met at my mother’s last garden party—he’s a nothing, a pale little nothing in his thirties. I don’t even remember his name.

  My knees bump the table as I stand, and tea spills over its polished surface. “I will not marry a Canroth,” I tell her.

  “You sit down,” my mother hisses. “See, this is exactly the sort of nonsense that drove Ilven to—” She stops, just on the knife edge of tact. “Your brother will make the arrangements with Canroth Piers.”

  Piers. His face coalesces in my mind. His drab mustache is the only detail that made any impact on me. My innards knot and twist like live snakes. I understand why Ilven jumped. Even that damned bat on the promenade, even he—a hated vampire in a city that barely tolerates their existence—has more choice than I.

  And there’s nothing I can do. Owen is a decade older than me, and with Father dead, I answer to him, to his whims and decisions. The Pelim line ends with Owen, and were he to die, I suppose I would then be in the charge of Mother’s family in MallenIve. A ghastly thought in itself.

  The letter on the table flutters in a sudden gust that brings with it the distant reek of seaweed. I grab the letter, sweep it up to my chest.

  “Where are you going with that?” my mother asks as I stomp up to the large bay window that overlooks the short expanse of front lawn before the garden drops off to the sea.

  There’s no point in answering her, she’ll know soon enough. I throw the right window wider, then fling the letter out. The thin leaves dance across the lawn before another sea-gust takes them, sending them flickering through the air. The sea mews crowd about the papers, calling to each other in excitement, wings flapping as they fight. Another gust sends the papers over the cliff, fluttering in looping spirals. A last sheet twirls on the lawn in a giddy solo, then tips over and is gone.

  Like Ilven, it’s taken Pelim’s Leap.

  “I’m so glad you’ve managed to get that out of your system. Now, if we could go back to our tea. You know better than to go against your brother’s wishes.”

  I don’t turn around. The wind pulls my hair loose and auburn curls slap at my face. “I hate you,” I say.

  A sigh comes from behind me. “Hate me all you want,” she says. “It won’t change matters.” Her footsteps fade away, a measured click across the polished black sl
ate. The sound is suddenly dampened, and I know that she’s in the carpeted passageway.

  “I hate you,” I say again, softly, to the sea, to the cliff, to the fat-bellied clouds. To my brother’s cruelty. To Pelim’s Leap.

  When the Sea Is Rising Red

  Cat Hellisen

  ISBN: 978-0-374-36475-5

  $16.99

  Farrar Straus Giroux

  “Dark, perilous, haunted. Death surrounds this courageous female hero. I couldn’t stop reading, not when I had to know more so badly!”

  —Tamora Pierce, the New York Times bestselling author of the Beka Cooper trilogy

  After sixteen-year-old Felicita’s dearest friend, Ilven, kills herself to escape an arranged marriage, Felicita chooses freedom over privilege. She fakes her own death and leaves her sheltered life as one of Pelimburg’s magical elite behind. Living in the slums, scrubbing dishes for a living, she falls for charismatic Dash while also becoming fascinated with vampire Jannik. Then something shocking washes up on the beach: Ilven’s death has called out of the sea a dangerous, wild magic. Felicita must decide whether her loyalties lie with the family she abandoned…or with those who would twist this dark power to destroy Pelimburg’s caste system, and the whole city along with it.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  It was during a night in the twelfth lunar month of this year when two strong hands pushed young Tangmoo down into the bed of the Mae Ping River, and by doing so, ironically, fulfilled his only wish. Tangmoo flailed his arms wildly, churning up the swirling water. The whites of his eyes reflected flashes from the fireworks as his smothered cries rose in bubbles to the surface, where they burst in silence: help, help, help, help!

  These filtered cries of alarm were mistaken by a pair of dragonflies fused in flight, their only wish to remain larvaless and so prolong their love dance endlessly, for the dripping of morning dew. So unsettled was the pair that their breaths caught, and for a second, just when the male ejaculated, they separated. Force of habit subsequently incited them to repeat this in all their future climaxes, making their fondest wish actually come true.

  But this was a chance circumstance. The point here is that young Tangmoo screamed, and his lungs filled with water, and please, he did not want to die this way.

  In order to fully grasp the tragedy of this drama, we’ll have to flash back a few days and take a peek at the village of Doi Saket, situated on the exact same river shore. Late one afternoon, about an hour before it was time for his third bowl of rice of the day, the well-bellied weed exterminator Uan1 came running into the temple square. Winded as a consequence of the oversized behind that had given him his name, he stopped to catch his breath, leaning against the enormous stone phallus outside the temple (though not on the temple grounds themselves, since Buddha doesn’t approve of that kind of non-Buddhist folly), before wheezing, “Come see, come see! The first wish has arrived!”

  “Watch out!” cried the malodorous lampshade maker Tao2, whose nickname did not spring from his shell head or his tortoise appearance, but from his extreme robustness, and he nodded toward the phallus.

  In his frenzy, Uan had forgotten all about the general consensus around the ancient fertility symbol. The adulterous rice peeler Somchai3 had once cheated on her husband with three neighbors and a shopkeeper from a nearby village after she had been spotted on the phallic altar, touching herself and wrapped in nothing but silk ribbons. As a penalty, Somchai was buried waist deep in the rice field so that her excess fertility could seep into the crops, and it was decided that the bewitched phallus was never to be touched again, and was only to be greeted by passersby with a brief nod of the head, something that was ardently copied by the villagers and which consequently led to an abundance of oral sex. (There were rumors that the stone was not in fact bewitched at all, but that lustful Somchai suffered from some type of obsessive exhibitionism. Nonsense, of course.)

  Quick as lightning, Uan let go of the stone (but he was too late: in the following year his wife would give birth to triplets) and yelled, “Come to the river, all of you! The first wish is arriving—I’ve seen it with my own eyes!”

  “So soon?” said the well-mannered crab gatherer Kulap, just returning from the rice field with her basket. “I don’t believe it. It’s way too early.”

  Inside his house the generally respected Puu Yaybaan, chief of the village, heard the commotion and came running out the door. “What’s going on?” he shouted, scattering chickens in his wild dash. “What’s all this racket?”

  “Uan says the first wish is here,” Kulap said, crinkling her nose in a way that was all in contrast to her gentle nature. “But I don’t believe it.”

  “Is this true?” the Puu Yaybaan asked.

  “It’s as true as me standing here,” Uan insisted, and indeed, there he stood.

  “Well … so did you retrieve it?” Tao asked, placing his lampshade at his feet.

  “Certainly not,” Uan responded. “I can’t swim, I’m too heavy to stay afloat. Come on, everybody! To the river!”

  The hubbub caused many a window shutter to open, many a cell phone to ring, and many a banana leaf to furl bashfully back into its tree, as curiosity was the one thing that could mobilize all the villagers in unison. And sure enough, when they arrived at the riverside, they all saw it. A trace of brilliance on the tranquil stream. A floating lily made of plastic and crepe paper. A pearl inside a lotus blossom. The first wish of Loi Krathong.

  The philosophical irrigator Daeng4, named after the blood that covered him when he was born, waded through the shallows saying, “Is it a wish for happiness? A love wish? A last wish? Wishful thinking?”

  The short-spoken restaurant owner Sorn5, named after some curious agricultural mishap that no one remembered, pointed his stone pestle toward the brilliance on the water and said, “If we don’t do something, it’s going to float right past.”

  “Someone needs to go get it!” the Puu Yaybaan cried, shushing the onlookers. Men hesitated on the shore, children waded into the river until their mothers whistled them back, and the scrawny frog catcher Yai6 took off his clothes and dove into the deep green water.7

  “What is it? What’s the first wish?” the people shouted when Yai finally resurfaced and reached the little boat. “Does it have a note inside?”

  Treading water, Yai unfolded the lotus leaves and produced a moist piece of paper. “Wait. I’m having trouble reading it. The words are smudged. But it says”—dramatic pause as the river held its breath in anticipation—“‘I wish for my dying water buffalo to get well —Bovorn S. from San Phak Wan.”’

  “LOI KRATHONG HAS STARTED!” the Puu Yaybaan declared over the PA system, used for announcing all important and unimportant news in the village, and his tinny words were greeted by cheers from the crowds on the riverbank. The cunning monk Sûa8 broke into the traditional Loi Krathong song, soon joined by the village elders clapping their hands and the children splashing one another with water, while miles upstream, in the city of Chiang Mai, thousands upon thousands of wishes were being launched onto the river.

  November full moon shines

  Loi Krathong, Loi Krathong

  And the water’s high in local river and the klong

  Loi, Loi Krathong, Loi, Loi Krathong

  Loi Krathong is here and everybody’s full of cheer

&nbs
p; We’re together at the klong

  Each one with his krathong

  As we push away we pray

  We can see a better day

  Young Tangmoo9 heard the noise from where he was perched in the crown of the slender teng-rang tree, slinging a piece of plaited cotton around a broken and dreadfully sagging branch. The tree had been struck by lightning the previous summer. No matter how Tangmoo propped, nailed, tethered, or jiggled the dead wood, every day around noontime it produced a loud crack and the infernal thing sank down a little closer toward his father’s house. Every day Tangmoo climbed the tree with new boards or ropes, and every day the proportion of natural versus artificial outgrowths in the teng-rang tree shifted a little more in favor of the shoring material. His mother kept her tip money in an old wok, saving up so she could one day afford to call in a landscaper to eliminate the danger. But Tangmoo did not mind his daily chore. It somehow reminded him of a sacred ritual. The crown and leaves of the tree triggered a subconscious memory of the hollowed-out watermelon after which he had been named; a crib that had afforded him many sheltered days and nights when he was a baby.

  “EVERYBODY DOWN TO THE RIVER!” the Puu Yaybaan’s voice rang across the fields. “THERE ARE WISHES TO BE GRANTED! OH, AND REMEMBER TO PIN PLENTY A PENNY TO THE MONEY TREE OUTSIDE THE TEMPLE. WE WILL SEE A BETTER DAY!”

  Tangmoo climbed down. He stopped to leave an offering of fresh oranges and cigarettes in the little spirit house and say a prayer, to thank the tree spirit for blessing them with a still-uncrushed house beneath the dead branch. (While Tangmoo naturally believed in Buddha and his lessons and rebirth and all, it didn’t mean he had no room for spirits. And in fact the branch’s benevolence had nothing to do with the tree spirit—so traumatized by the lightning strike that it had long since gone to live in another tree—but was closely related to young Tangmoo’s own exceptional karma.)