Beneath Ceaseless Skies #137

by Beth Cato

  “Ger-trude!” The syllables belted out from above, followed by a roar of rage.

  “Does that mean I could stitch wings, too?” Madeline whispered.

  Rowan tapped his chin. “I truly don’t know that, girly-girl. It takes a lot of magic, doin’ that kind of thing, even if you’re fine with needle ‘n thread. ‘N what would you do with wings, eh? Big as you are?”

  She averted her eyes, suddenly shy. “I don’t know. Go away?” She grabbed a handful of dry leaves.

  “Even when birds fly south, they know where ‘bout they’re goin’.”

  Madeline thought of the crazed moves with Mother, the rented houses, the midnight rides by wagon and dirigible, the names she had accumulated like dust after a hinterland windstorm. “Maybe I don’t need to know where I’m going. Maybe I just want to go.”

  “Maybe.” He squinted at her. “So why’d you let me outta that cage? And don’t jess say you’re bein’ nice ‘n all.”

  The suddenness of the question caught her off guard. “I—I had to. You didn’t belong in a box. No one does.” Not even Father, though she could never say that aloud. Mother’s work had to come to some purpose, surely.

  Rowan studied her for a long moment. “What’ll it take to free you from yer cage then, eh?”

  “I’m not in a cage! I’m here right now, aren’t I?” The words, the thought, tasted as smooth as satined cream. She escaped Miss Shelly most whenever she pleased. How could Rowan even think otherwise?

  The fairy’s next words were so soft, the chilly breeze almost stole them away. “Told yourself that plenty, eh? Even caged birds ‘ave space t’ stretch their wings, little liar.”

  Madeline clenched her hand. Leaves crunched and crumbled in her grasp.

  #

  The next day, the estate emanated with heated sugar. Breakfast and lunch had been simple fare, as the cook was under orders to make sugar cakes all morning long—dozens of them. Hours later, the scent lingered even in the second floor library, where Miss Shelly drilled Madeline on numbers, letters, and how to walk with a dainty point to her toes. Below, ruckus radiated from the laboratory.

  Madeline hadn’t seen Mother since dinner two days before. If Mother had chosen to sleep or leave her laboratory, Madeline certainly would have seized the opportunity to sneak inside the repurposed ballroom. But Mother was in the full sway of her mania, and food and sleep meant nothing.

  The busywork with Miss Shelly was good, in a way. It kept Madeline’s dread to a tepid burble in her stomach.

  Whenever Mother arrived at this point, everything always went wrong. Cities fell strangely dark. The house would burn. It meant long days bobbing on the wind, Father’s coffin rattling within its tethers along with Mother’s laboratory equipment.

  The thought of leaving this place—and Rowan—brought tears to her eyes.

  Something flashed by the window. Miss Shelly had opened the pane to let the sweet smell vent, and now Rowan perched on the sill.

  Madeline forced her gaze to her verses on pistils and anthers. The peculiar odor of Rowan grew stronger as he flew closer.

  “The queen is missing,” he whispered, distress quivering in each word.

  She sucked in a sharp breath. The fairy queen was the most powerful thing in the forest. Rowan had said so.

  The floor rumbled underfoot as machinery clunked and groaned and whirred. Always, always, it was about Mother and her machines, about Father’s dinner plate set and waiting each night.

  “Please. ‘Elp me.”

  The agony in his voice was what did it. Madeline closed her book and set it on the side table alongside her sampler and sewing kit.

  “I need to talk to Mother,” Madeline said to Miss Shelly. It felt strange and refreshing to speak such an outright truth. “She’s doing something below, something very wrong.”

  “She is a busy woman and not to be disturbed. Now—” Miss Shelly’s jaw fell slack. “Oh goodness. What is that... thing?” She froze, staring at Rowan.

  Madeline cast him a quick look. “That’s my best friend. Just wait here for me, please. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Miss Shelly shrank back in her chair, and Madeline turned and walked from the room, empowered by honesty and rebellion together.

  “Think the queen’s below with all that thrumming and whats-its?” asked Rowan and he fluttered into the hall ahead of her. “Smells of metal, even from outside, it does.”

  “Yes. In Mother’s laboratory.” A place Madeline had not yet entered in this house. Fear quivered through her, just as vibrations quaked through the stairs.

  “Queen needs a whole forest to let ‘er magic breathe! Girly-girl, this is what’s what. I’d gone mad, bound up with me magic in that iron cage for more’n a day, popped like a mosquito in a bonfire. Queen’s got a thousand times more power ‘an me.”

  She looked to him. “I’ll get her out.”

  Rowan said nothing, but for a moment, the magic of his palpable faith squeezed her like a hug. She hadn’t known such a feeling since Father died.

  Madeline yanked on the double doors to the laboratory. Even with her full body weight pulling, they didn’t budge. She looked to Rowan.

  “Iron bolts inside, nasty stuff.”

  “The wall,” she said. “It’s wood and wallpaper, isn’t it?”

  “The metal’s raised such a stink that I couldn’t tell! Wood, I can work with, aye.” He raised his hands. Starting at the baseboard, the wall tore like parchment and stopped at the same height as Madeline’s tunnel through the brambles.

  The noise worsened, the smell of oils and strangeness smarting at her nose. She dropped to her knees and crawled through, and saw Mother.

  Here, the mist of deception evaporated from Mother’s skin. She was utterly herself, surrounded by gaskets and gears, her black hair coiled so as not to snare, her brown dungarees happily layered in stains of various coloration. The vast room shuddered in cacophony, the racket made visible in the sifting of ceiling plaster and belches of steam.

  Father’s tomb rested nearest to the door. A habit, no doubt, from their quick exits from so many previous laboratories. He was fully encased, with pipes and tubes connecting him to the larger apparatus.

  And now, Madeline could smell magic.

  The potency was fiercer than Rowan’s peculiar scent: a mixture of jasmine and garlic, horse sweat-soaked leather and the first rain of spring. Particulates gushed from vents in vivid hues of violet and green, shifting by the second like ornate stained glass rendered to powder against the light.

  “She can’t be contained!” Rowan’s voice was scarcely a whisper against the din. He flew at a metal tank, but his leaf-and-web wings were buffeted backward by the awesome power that radiated from within.

  “Madeline!”

  Madeline flinched at the rare sound of her true name from Mother’s lips. She took a step back, expecting Mother to fly at her, enraged at her presence. Instead, Mother glowed and spun in place like a girl gifted with a pony.

  “This is it! I finally have a functional resurrection apparatus. Not even the steam generators in the capital created adequate power, but a fairy queen...! It’s the perfect meld of science and magic.”

  The vibrations intensified. Cracks lined the marble floor. A fog of powdered plaster burned Madeline’s eyes. Gears clanked with the violence of a locomotive engine on the tracks.

  Mother clasped her hands. Her voice was like a tinny whisper against the roar of machinery. “We’ll have your father to dinner tonight, Madeline. Miss Shelly must curl your hair and press your best dress!”

  “No!” Madeline shouted. “He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s been dead five years!”

  The joy on Mother’s face didn’t shift. She was oblivious, as always. Raw power stewed and swirled, and Madeline’s lungs struggled against its weight and the heady scent of a hundred muddled things. The walls wiggled like an army of worms.

  Yes, Mother had discovered a source of power. Too much. Mother couldn’t sense it, not like Mad
eline, not like Rowan.

  No fairy queen could be contained in an iron tank of that size, of any size.

  Rowan flew at Madeline, his arms wide. Metal pinged and steam whistled. Bolts zinged free of a tank, the discordant symphony rising to a crescendo. Terrible tension quivered in the air as everything turned hot and cold at once.

  Rowan grew to full human size, then more, his body seeming to expand like a sheet held to a gale. His bright colors dimmed as his essence poured out, thinning his body to translucent, and she tried to shout “Rowan, no! No!” but the cocoon of his power constrained any sound and suffocated her with its overbearing scent.

  “Your vow to help me ‘n the queen was good ‘n true, and my vow to you stands jess as solid. I’m keeping you safe, Madeline-who-is-most-assuredly-not-a-Gertrude.”

  She didn’t see his lips move, but she felt the words like needle pricks against her heart. Magic woven into the truths of a vow and a name.

  Everything beyond turned red and black and pink, an explosion of color. A roar filled her ears and dissipated with a slight pop.

  “Rowan?” Her whisper echoed in the vacuum. The house was gone.

  Above spanned the cold grey autumn sky. No fire, no smoke. Rain filtered down, a rain of leaves in shades of brown with blackened specks. No, not leaves—books from the library. Shredded pages twirled and danced their way to earth. Not a foot away, her sampler sprawled out. The canvas looked splashed by yellow and blue dyes, but it was there, needle and thread still tucked to one side in wait of another dreaded session with Miss Shelly.

  Of Mother’s great machine, twisted pipes and mottled tanks remained, but Father’s casket—the focus of that awesome power—was gone. Only two wheels and part of the brake system huddled there.

  “Mother?” There was no answer, but that was so like her. A red blotch marked where Mother had stood.

  Madeline knew she should cry—she had cried for Father late at night, so many times—but instead she blinked, dry-eyed, until she thought of Miss Shelly and the servants. Miss Shelly—Miss Shelly would have been standing in the library just above, waiting for her. Madeline had promised she’d be back, and she meant it. She glanced up at the grey sky as tears slipped down her cheeks.

  “Rowan?” she called again, looking around. She spied a miniature mossy leg sticking from beneath a growing mound of paper.

  She unburied him and touched his shoulder. His wings were gone—shredded to mere nubs. There was no need to check for a heartbeat or breath; she knew he was dead. He had given everything to keep her alive; his debt filled in full.

  She blinked and breathed in the last wafts of magic as she sat on the crackled marble of the ballroom floor. Pages twirled downward like falling leaves.

  Without his wings, Rowan looked incomplete. He needed to look true, and then she could take him within the forest—whatever remained of it—and lay him to rest.

  Madeline reached for her needle and thread, fingers quaking, and cradled Rowan against one knee.

  She plucked drifting vellum from the air. Just as Rowan had in his cage, she would use what she had. These wings would be stitched of abbreviated words and shredded rhymes. And when his wings were done, she would stitch her own.

  Whether they worked by magic or not, it mattered little. One way or another, she would fly from this place.

  That was truth.

  Copyright © 2013 Beth Cato

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Beth Cato’s debut steampunk novel will be released by HarperCollins Voyager in late 2014. Her short fiction can be found in InterGalactic Medicine Show, Nature, and many other magazines. Follow her at www.BethCato.com and on Twitter at @BethCato.

  Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  WHISTLER’S GROVE

  by A.E. Decker

  One of the four of us shall die today. If all goes as intended, it will be me.

  Die, here, today. I paint the words across the landscape of my mind and they evaporate, leaving not a trace behind.

  “Could one of these be Hangman’s Tree?” asks Arrel.

  I open my eyes. Arrel stands a distance away, shielding his face with one hand. Pale sepia sky, and earth the color of rot. My breath fans out in wisps of white mist, and my toes, cold as stones, ache inside my soft boots. There’s no marker at the boundary into Whistler’s Grove, but we knew when we crossed it all the same.

  A few feet from Arrel, Tam grimaces at the seemingly endless sweep of black leafless trees, all sprouting from hillocks spaced a couple hundred feet apart. “Any of them would do for hanging, in a pinch.”

  Celina turns a look of quiet reproach on him then moves to Arrel’s side, curling her hand around his. “The records say it’s the tallest tree in the grove. One branch crooks at a perfect angle.”

  “As if beckoning,” quips Tam.

  We resume our journey. The icy light pouring down from all reaches of the sky hurts my eyes. A layer of coarse, bleached stuff, like shards of broken seashells, covers the ground, crunching beneath the others’ tread. My own footfall is silent; my breathing, less so. Once, I have to stop, overwhelmed by a fit of coughing. Wiping my mouth, I examine the back of my wrist for flecks of blood.

  I did not notice Celina drop back, but she’s here, at my side, her braids wound in a golden coronet about her head. “How are you holding up, Miro?” she asks. She smells of clean water and crushed grass. I envision reaching out and tracing the silken arch of her lower lip with the pad of my thumb. And what might happen then?

  “Miro?” she repeats. Tam glances over his shoulder. His smile is meant to be encouraging, I believe. Arrel’s pace never slackens.

  I do not reach, and the vision dissipates. Drawing a painful breath, I nod. Celina walks beside me a minute then squeezes my shoulder and quickens her step to rejoin Arrel.

  The poison eating away at my innards laid me low some days ago. My companions broke off our journey to allow me to rest at an inn. I do have value. I cannot be allowed to expire before my life is used to purchase our lord’s victory.

  I recall between periods of aching, bleary sleep Celina tending to me. She would come to my sickroom, tap-tap up the stairs, the floor creaking under her light step, to bathe my temples with cool water, hold spoonfuls of broth to my lips, open the shuttered windows to let in fresh air. She spent hours by my bedside, stroking my arm, smoothing my sheets, humming. My life is needed to purchase our lord’s victory. But this, I think, is called kindness.

  Arrel came too, the same hour every morning. After inquiring about my health, he’d spend the remainder of the day practicing in the yard or standing on the small rise to the east, fingers clenched on his sword’s hilt. Tam also visited, twice, drunk on both occasions. He sang cheerful filthy songs and tried to get me to play cards, until Arrel barred him from my room.

  I don’t know how to play cards.

  Tam’s singing now. “I promised to love you then, my dear, And I’ll be loving you still, When all the seas pour out of the skies, and fishes walk out of the hills.” He has a fine voice, a baritone rich as warm wine. Martial stride; dark hair flowing over the shoulders of his deep blue uniform—it’s easy to see the soldier he once was, before excess drink spiderwebbed red lines across his nose and set off a faint trembling of his hands.

  A glance from Arrel. “Quiet.”

  I appreciate the singing, myself. It’s an act of defiance to the silence that hangs over the grove like a blade poised to fall. “There’s no harm in it,” says Celina, but Arrel’s gaze sharpens and Tam hushes. Right on the edge between song and silence, I hear a laugh, soft as a breath—I hear it, but there’s no one behind me, and I refuse to look. The back of my neck starts aching. Air hisses between my teeth when I rub it. One spot, easily covered with two fingertips, is hot; tender as if new-bruised.

  We weave our way between the soft mounded hills, watched over by skeletal black trees. The shadows they cast are sharp enough to cut your finger on. Cold light flashes off the bits of
armor my companions wear; useless here. Mere steel will not deter the Whistler if you are chosen. My own garb is in shades of dull green and charcoal gray, supple, barely whispering against me as I move. I’ve lost weight, and had little flesh to spare to begin with.

  A round white knob—bone or stone; I do not care to examine it—turns under my foot. I recapture my balance easily. Once, I never would have lost it. The line of Arrel’s jaw tightens. Noble fellow; he can hardly bear my presence. He is the sunlit warrior; I, the knife in the darkness. I am an evil necessity. For our lord I have spied, I have lied, and I have killed. Since a poisoned dart pierced my side during the last raid, I have measured my life in breaths. The war—there has always been war—goes badly. I can be of one last use to him.

  “There.” Arrel raises a finger and we halt, our eyes following its point to the shape outlined against the sky like a corpse in its shroud. It’s not height that distinguishes Hangman’s Tree so much as the one branch that juts out of its trunk, growing smooth and straight for maybe twenty feet before bending at a perfect right angle and ending in a cluster of smaller branches that clutch at the sky. A drowning man’s arm.

  “We’ve reached the Whistler’s domain,” says Arrel, and there’s a tremor of excitement in his voice. I know it is excitement, not fear; his blue eyes brighten and the corners of his lips lift fractionally. “Keep alert,” he adds. “We might hear him any time now.” And he marches onwards, closing the distance between us and Hangman’s Tree and that long, straight branch that bends so abruptly.

  Celina doesn’t follow at once. She lingers, eyes on me. Dark shadows hollow her cheeks. I don’t remember them being there three weeks ago. “How are you faring?” she asks. Inadequate, unnecessary, and she must realize it, for she drops her head, wincing. Better, however, than voicing the “you poor thing” I sense lurking behind her sad query.

  I turn up my palms. What is there to say? It is time for me to make the final payment on the debt I owe my lord. How I accrued this debt, I cannot say. My mother—I recall her as a raised voice, the back of a hand, strands of sweat-damp hair falling over flushed cheeks—sold me to the Shadow Walkers two decades ago. They fed me, clothed me, trained me, and I suppose I owe them for that. When I turned seventeen, my lord purchased my services, and I have that price to repay as well. At least when the Whistler takes me, all the debts of my life will be cast off. The debts of living.