“Under the hills. She’ll tear them away from the wet bosom of the world like a scab.”
“But—everything will be destroyed!”
He shrugged. “I am Coyote. I ate my sisters to keep them in my belly and give me advice. I slept with my daughters because I felt like it. I changed a girl to stone because she wouldn’t marry me. What wouldn’t I do? I would destroy the world as a joke. I have, many times. At least, I think so. My memory’s not what it was.
“The question is: what would you do?”
She looked at the ground before answering, and when she looked up again, he was gone, as she knew he would be.
5
Coyote showed her where to look: at the rim of the water, where the fairies wouldn’t go. At the base of a sea-twisted pine she shoved pebbles aside until her fingers were sore, until she reached soggy sand. She was about to give it up as one of Coyote’s jokes until she felt a force pushing back at her hands. Fuzzy, like a mild electrical shock, it was almost-pleasant-unpleasant, like an itch begging to be scratched. She dug a few inches deeper and found, sand-crusted, a delicate reddish coil that looked like the broken links of an old necklace she’d found in the bottom of her mom’s jewelry case...
She sat there looking at it until the sun began to set, and she knew Titania was awakening.
6
“I want my freedom. I want to go home.”
She knelt with her knees deep in the moss at the edge of Titania’s bower.
The Fae Queen flashed her a look, not unkindly.
“So do I child,” she said. “But neither of us is going to get what we want this day.”
In answer, Megan held out the copper coil. She heard the hiss of Titania’s indrawn breath.
“You know what it is, don’t you? I’ll find you all the pieces I can,” she said. “I’ll bring you every one of them. But then I want to go home.”
Cautiously, almost flinching, the Queen spread her long pale fingers towards her and Megan fought the urge to scramble backwards, because suddenly the fingers looked like tentacles, the beautiful hand like an abbreviated octopus. But she made herself hold still as Titania gathered the fragment between her fingertips. Her face twitched as if it stung her, but she did not let go.
“Yes,” she said. “Bring me the pieces and I’ll let you go. I’ll break the geis.”
She drew in her breath as if to say more, and her expression was sad, but she looked again at the object in her hand and something else smoothed the sadness away.
There was a stir in the undergrowth, a scattering of fairies, and Megan looked up, expecting to see Coyote. But it was Oberon, in his silvery blackness.
He was in a foul mood: she could smell it, burnt fern and feathers in the dusk breeze. Automatically she drew inwards, bracing herself against him and against the pleasure she was beginning to feel when he changed her.
Oberon looked at her with hooded eyes. But Titania put out her hand, her attention still on the copper spiral. “No.”
Oberon’s face became sharp and glassy. “What did you say?”
“Leave the girl alone. Your games tire me.”
He shot Megan a look that prickled across her skin, and she felt like a ball of clay in the grubby hand of a toddler. But then something stole through her, penetrating as Titania’s octopus fingers, but cool, green, comforting. Her center, which was beginning to quiver and melt, stilled and became solid. Titania’s green power met Oberon’s force, and this time, like paper embracing rock in a child’s game, prevailed.
She had not once looked at him. “Go,” she said. “Until you can come here in peace, go.”
The Fae King stood, a cold black flame of rage. For a second Megan feared he would rise and consume the bower, herself, Titania, the Sound, perhaps the world. But as a flame flickers he vanished, leaving the smell of soot behind.
Titania stayed, staring at her hand.
7
“Why does she want it, Coyote? Why does a Fae want a machine?”
She was digging in the soft earth beneath a bank of ferns. Coyote had told her to look there yesterday. She didn’t see him but spoke out loud, on the chance that he was spying.
He didn’t respond at first. But presently his voice came from behind her.
“Do you think Titania likes having you for a handmaid? Dirt-girl? Mucus-woman?”
She didn’t answer, still digging in the soft decomposed mulch.
“Do you think she enjoys Oberon’s games?”
Megan took a moment to answer. “I don’t think she cares.”
“She has learned not to care.”
He appeared at the periphery of her vision and sat, well clear of the ferns.
“Once they were Lord and Lady of the Wood. Once all was in harmony between them.
“But things change. Love intensifies and fades and grows again. One seeks power. One plays politics. One is jealous and seeks revenge for wrongs real and imagined. One wants a changeling boy for himself. One falls in love with a mortal, and out again. Cromwell’s Bane would have had no power against what they once were.”
Two feet down, and something tingled in her fingers. The force that surrounded the Wild Copper.
“How do you know?” She dug faster. “How do you know what happened in Albion?”
He had gone, and his voice came from behind again, distantly.
“Of course I don’t know. I’m making it up, like I made up the world.”
Her roughened fingertips touched smooth metal.
“Silly Coyote,” she said, smiling. “Raven made the world.”
“Ah. You are learning.”
He was gone, leaving behind a coil of laughter.
8
“It’s the last piece,” Megan told Titania.
“How do you know?”
“I’m dirt. I know.” Nothing else had worked itself free. The rest lay buried underneath the peninsula.
She held it out on her palm, and it gleamed like burnished gold.
Titania reached for it but Megan drew it back, fisting her hand by her shoulder, and for the first time her eyes met the Fairy Queen’s.
Leaf green and leaf brown and stormy, like the tops of trees tossing in high wind. She smelled ozone and lightening, and felt the pull to run wild in that wind. If Oberon’s power was that of spider-webs and the dark places between the trees, Titania’s was of storms slashing though the forest.
Megan didn’t look away, but she squinted until her eyes couldn’t hold any more storm.
“Your promise, Majesty,” she said. “You promised my freedom with this last piece.”
“I did,” said Titania, in a gentle voice that was a soft breeze counterpoint to her wind-tossed eyes. “I will. Give it to me.”
“Break the geis.” Megan kept her hand clenched. She heard a Coyote-size rustle in the dry leaves.
Titania’s eyes narrowed and Megan learned a new thing: the wind has the power to tear you apart. She felt dog’s-warmth behind her and pulled the fibers of her being back around her, like a cloak.
The Fairy Queen’s beautiful eyes widened and the tempest became a gentle breeze, winding around her, caressing and seductive.
“Stay with me, girl,” said Titania. “Come with me across the sea, when I break Cromwell’s Bane. I will be Queen of Albion then, and you will stay at my side.
“No, Majesty,” said Megan, her heart breaking. “Our bargain. Break the geis.”
“Don’t you understand?” said the Fae, with a contemptuous sympathy. “Don’t you know that your people, your family, died years ago? Have you no concept of how long you have been here?”
Megan couldn’t answer. Her mouth was dry, and a small brittle hope she’d hardly been aware of crumpled away.
“A hundred years, two hundred. You have lived with the Fae. In a season with us, your mother grows grey and brittle, and fades away. In a year, your brother ages and dies. For all you know, the world of men is gone. Stay with us. Live in beauty.”
Megan crie
d, although no tears came. She shook her head.
Titania’s eyes narrowed, but there were no storms left for Megan. “Very well then,” she said. “I would have crowned you with English daisies, and shown you secrets no mortal has dreamed of, but you are a silly girl after all, in love with your human flesh and mortality. Give me your hand.”
Megan stretched out her left hand, a grubby paw, and the Queen’s fine ivory fingers closed around it briefly and there was a prickle like nettles and that was all.
She was free.
Titania held out her hands: on her palm were six twisted fragments of copper. Her beauty was terrible and cold and immense.
Megan unfisted her hand and dropped the last piece into the Queen’s hands.
For a second they lay on her white skin like dull garnets. Then they began to move.
She watched, and the Queen in her beauty watched, as the Wild Copper twisted and turned and crawled together, piece to piece, crawled together and joined together, one by one.
Megan stepped back, stepped back again. Titania was immobile, a smile playing on her lips, and something glowed in the cup of her hands.
Megan forced herself to turn away and stumbled through the trees. A rustle told her Coyote followed; he emerged from behind a cedar and waited for her.
9
Despite herself and needing comfort, she drew close to Coyote’s side. He was warm, and smelled rank and foxy. She knew he was afraid, too.
“What is going to happen?” she whispered.
He whispered back. “I don’t know. There is much I don’t remember.” He rubbed at his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Sometimes I think I dreamed it all. Copper Woman with her balls of dirt and snot and sweat, the Bears standing upright with their bows and arrows, marrying chieftain’s daughters.
“Did you know people cooked their food by the heat of the sun, until I gave them fire? Did you know they went hungry until I made the Beaver sisters give the Salmon back?”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
“I taught them how to live as men, and I bargained with River and Wind and Bear and Eagle to ease their lives, to give them time to weave and make pots and store food and create a people out of an animal.
“But sometimes it wasn’t me, but Raven.”
His features flickered and looked, momentarily, birdlike.
Back in the grove, out of sight in her bower, Titania screamed.
“Run.” Coyote’s breath was hot on her ear. “Run as if Tsonoqua was coming after you.”
She didn’t think, but turned and ran, and sprawled as the earth shook beneath the trees.
Oh for four legs and a tail, she thought, and something inside her, the same something that knew to ask Oberon for her brother’s life, that knew about the laws of geis, something reached deep inside her and made her blood and bones remember what it was like to be a deer.
She sprang to all four feet and saw Coyote waiting for her, and ran until the woods closed in and became brambles.
Snake, said something. She saw the ferns grow over her head and she slithered through the undergrowth, rocks round and cool and bark scraping against her belly, and her way was barred by thick spiny stalks of blackberries and something said...
...mouse...
...skitter scatter between the thorns like she was born to them and clitter clatter of tiny claws on the beach pebbles that were starting to shake and could crush a little mouse, break her skull like a dryad, and something said...
...girl.
Megan crouched at the rim of the water. In the middle of the Sound the water was shaking like jelly, and wavelets crashed on the shore frantically, out of their natural rhythm. Coyote was beside her, with his man-body and his dog-face. Behind them the slope of cedars and close-knit ferns was shaking apart.
She turned to the water. She could swim, but not fast enough, and Oberon had never changed her into a water-creature. She didn’t have that pattern knit inside her. Coyote watched her, eyes wide, and understood.
“Leave me,” she said.
“Never,” said Coyote.
Something tore free deep underneath. From the woods came a high-pitched keening.
She stepped into the water and the cold of it struck to the bone. Pebbles and shells scraped against her bare feet and she made herself push on. She was up to her waist, up to her neck, and now she had to kick off by herself. The cold water made her limbs leaden and ripples were turning into waves, knocking into her and filling her mouth with salt.
Just behind her and to the side was a flash of silver as a salmon leapt out of the Sound: grey and pink with Coyote’s lazy eyes. It darted around her and underneath, brushing against her flank, her toes, but he couldn’t help her, and the waters were getting rougher.
The rumble of the land stirring sounded like a freight train, like an earthquake. She managed to float on her side and looked over her shoulder.
The peninsula was lifting as something huge ripped from underneath it. Birds flew, and other animals, squirrels and snakes and deer, darted from the undergrowth by the shore and plunged into the water.
A hundred feet up the shore the earth gaped. As it lifted and lengthened, Megan saw what was inside, what had been buried under the peninsula for millennia, what made it, and what would destroy it now: the flank of an enormous, copper-colored vessel, the same color as the coils and knobs of Wild Copper she had given Titania, some kind of trigger that rebirthed the ship when allowed to reassemble.
The submerged land beneath her was shaking and clots of dirt from the land were flying by her head. She couldn’t swim away fast enough. The little snakes that arrowed past her on the surface of the water had a chance: she didn’t. She would die along with the Fae. The silver salmon darted about her like a reflection itself.
She looked down at him, willing him to swim for the other side, and saw two bulbous, brown eyes beneath her, behind them, a smooth black-and-white body. She was paralyzed with the cold and hardly moved as the long feelers tickled her feet.
It surfaced beside her and it wasn’t until it nudged her that she understood. She grasped one of the flippers and wrapped her legs around what she could of the slippery body.
It took all her strength to cling to the water-demon as it drove towards the far shore, the harbor town, with powerful strokes of its tail. She willed her muscles to lock into place, shutting her eyes against the stinging salt spray. She could not block out the sound of the land behind her and all its creatures being torn asunder.
Rocks beneath her bare leg: the Kooshinga had brought them to the opposite shore. Numb, she released her grip on its flippers and stumbled onto land. Something silver flipped beside her and Coyote stood on the shore.
The Kooshinga rolled into the deep choppy water and vanished.
The sky was darkening, the sun turning sunset-copper although it was still over the horizon. She spared a glance for the town splayed across the shore. Stores and restaurants and little cottages were crumbling away, their paint long gone. There was no sign of any people. A rusty car squatted on a ragged shelf of asphalt that jutted where a pier had fallen apart, driver and passenger doors spread open as if the occupants had fled a hundred years ago.
Across the Sound the peninsula was ripping itself apart. As they watched, the land split open.
The craft that rose from its deep womb was larger than any ship or building Megan had ever seen. Clumps of dirt, not clumps really but clots of land with boulders and trees, dropped from its terraces.
It was a dull red-gold that blanched the bloody sun, it had wings and sails and delicate towers laced along its sides, it moved through the air with the controlled strength and grace of a seal in water, and as it moved it sang. It sang a song to make you cry and laugh and cover your ears.
Copper Woman.
Megan felt Coyote’s hand warm on her shoulder. She closed her eyes and let the song inside, free within her.
The song coiled and lapped at her very core, coiling like copper wire
through her flesh. It pulled and tugged and caressed. It found the places soft and bruised from Oberon’s tinkering, and healed them. It found the defenses she had built against him, and broke them apart. It found the years she had spent with the Fae and braided them together. It found the wet sound of a dryad’s skull breaking and pondered that.
She opened her eyes. The ship was gone.
She stood on the pebbles of the Sound. She had the legs of a deer, the tail of a snake, and the ears of the mouse. And then, with a thought, she didn’t.
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded Page 21
