“Indeed.”
“And they might lie here, unclaimed, until the seasons turn.”
He fell silent again, the words stemmed.
And then she smiled. “I sense another presence, mortal. And perhaps this means that you do not understand what it is that you risk. What do you desire?”
His mouth opened. Closed.
Her eyes, her dark and golden eyes, flared; he felt a trickle of fire along his cheek, a caress that would leave a scar. “Speak,” she said again. “And speak freely.”
“I want the girl,” he said. His words now. His own.
“Let me grant you a gift,” she said coldly, “a gift of vision.” She lifted her arms, one to either side; in the wake of the moon’s light across the fine, fine mesh of chain shirt, the world darkened.
Dark, he knew it: it was his own. He saw the spires of the three cathedrals, raised higher than even Avantari, the palace of the Kings. They burned; circled in air by winged beasts and their riders, besieged by wind and shadow. They were empty, he thought; empty, he prayed. Beneath them, in the streets below, the flash of magic, the clash of armies.
Small armies, pockets of futile resistance.
The vision shifted as the wind changed; he flew over the dying city to the fields of Averalaan, and there he froze, for there he saw what they did not name.
Lord of Darkness.
It is not possible. It cannot be possible.
“Look well,” she told him softly, “for you will see no Kings upon the field, and few armies. All of the bodies are yours; the Lord of the Hells has risen.
“I cannot say that the Kings would triumph had they the Rod and the Sword for which so much has been offered. But you have not even the hope of that: the Kings perished in Avantari, bereft of the power granted them by the artifacts of Fabril. Yes, even with her hand upon them, they are his.”
She lowered her arms slowly, and the smile returned to her face. “I understand some small measure of mortality, Gilafas ADelios. It amuses me, and in this long, long Winter, very little does.
“So I will give you what I have given few: a choice. You may take the child, or you may take the artifacts. But you may not take both. Choose,” she said softly. “Choose; I will not intervene as long as you take only one thing when you depart. Either—she, or they—will be of interest to me.”
Gilafas was consumed by the Winter, the Winter’s chill.
“The dawn is coming,” the Winter Queen told him. “In your world, in the world in which you now stand, the sun will soon rise. Delay, Gilafas, and you will have neither.”
He reached out to touch Cessaly; his hand gripped her shoulder. He had thought she would not notice, for she often didn’t.
But she turned to him, turned at once, snow spilling from her lap. Her hands were dark with blood, but he could see, as she lifted her palms, that that blood was not her own. She had never been so still, in all the time he had known her. In all the brief time.
“Cessaly?”
Her face was a young woman’s face, her eyes round and dark with exhaustion and fear. She lifted her chin, and met his eyes, and he realized that she had poured so much of herself into this making that she could at last, for a moment, know sanity.
It was terrible.
I will not do this, he thought. She is Fabril’s equal. She is his superior. What Fabril made, she can make again, and better. If we have her. If only we have her.
But he did not believe it. Desired belief more than he had desired anything, even the mantle of Fabril’s legacy.
Cessaly touched his hands, pulling them from her shoulder. She was so cold he would not have thought her living had she not moved; her lips were blue.
And her eyes. Blue, he thought, and reddened.
“You can only take one thing,” she said softly. She raised the Rod; its orb was whole and glowing with fractured, colored light, a dance of fire, a thing not of this Winter place, although it had been born to it. “These.”
“Or you,” he said, and the words cut him. Guildmaster. Keeper of Fabril’s legacy. If she were gone, he would again be the only Artisan to grace the guildhalls.
She said, “I have made these. They are your responsibility and mine. Protect what I have made, Gilafas. Protect my making.”
Maker’s words. Maker’s ferocity, in her sanity.
He shook his head. He knew; he knew what must be done. The Winter Queen had shown him the truth of that need.
“No. No,” he whispered. “Cessaly—”
She smiled, her jaw shuddering with the effort of maintaining that expression. “Thank you,” she told him softly. “I know what has to be done … but … thank you.”
Then, before he could speak, she placed the Rod and the Sword into his arms, and she rose, quick and cat-like, and she pushed.
* * *
Meralonne APhaniel was not Duvari, as he had promised. He restrained the guildmaster when the guildmaster almost threw himself into the window again; he forced him—as gently as one could a man made wild and frenzied with grief—to see that the window had closed: he had a mosaic, some proof of the existence of a girl he had foolishly learned to care for, and that was all. To run at it would simply shatter it.
At the time, that would not have been a loss.
“You have what you want,” he had said. “Get out!”
But the magi had carried the stained glass to the window, and he had gestured there a moment, and when he had stepped back, it rested securely against the greater glass.
“This will not comfort you now,” he said softly, “and perhaps it never will. But I will say to you that the Winter Queen has always had an interest in the Artisans; that their madness in the end is proof against the madness she would cause.” He bowed. “I am sorry, Guildmaster.”
He looked up. “What did she mean?” He asked, dully. “When she spoke of the turn of seasons, what did she mean?”
“Nothing,” Meralonne replied. “For she speaks of the Summer Road, and it has been forbidden her for so long, I do not know if it will ever return.”
“And Cessaly?”
“She will never return.”
* * *
He was required to come up with a story that might explain a young girl’s disappearance, and he did, but Duvari judged the explanation itself unwise, and in the end, in disgust, he accepted the Lord of the Compact’s version of events and burdened Sanfred with its spread.
He labored in Fabril’s reach in a fruitless search for a door, or a window, into the Winter world, and the days passed, spring becoming summer, summer fading into fall, and from there, the rain and the shadows of Scaral. He counted them, and lost count of them as he toiled; he spoke with the wise, and when the wise gently turned him—and his money—away, he at last surrendered.
He did not accept her loss.
And perhaps because he could not accept it, could not accept the terrible silence of the absence of her voice, it was a full year before he chose to leave the guildhall, to take the road that led to the Free Town of Durant. This was not his penance; it was his duty.
To the mother, he carried word of her daughter’s greatest act of making, but the mother had no desire for the comfort of the accolade. Hero was a hollow word.
“You promised,” she said.
And he had bowed his head, old now, and shamed beyond the simple use of words.
“How long?” she had demanded, her voice rising, the tone fierce and terrible. “How long have you known?”
He could not answer.
“Why did you not come sooner?”
Why?
Because to come here, to make this pilgrimage, to stand before her just and terrible fury, her keening loss, was to acknowledge what he had so desperately refused to acknowledge. Cessaly was gone. Cessaly would never return.
“She is not dead,” he told her.
“How can you know that?”
He met her eyes, her wide, reddened eyes, and he bowed his head. “I know it,” he said b
itterly. “And I had hoped that you might know it as well. She was your daughter.”
* * *
Fabril’s reach was no longer a cage. It was his home, the place from which he ruled the guild in the splendor due his rank. Empty splendour, as it had always been, but empty now in a different way. He heard the ocean, and only the ocean, and sometimes, in anger and desperation, he gave himself to its voice. More often, he gave himself to the numb detachment of bitterweed, and the business, the empty, hollow business, of the Guild.
And then, one quiet morning, he felt it: something familiar, some hint of strangeness in the tower walls. He rose slowly and dressed, and then he walked the hall, fingers trailing the rounded surface of stone until he reached his workroom.
He opened the door, and as he did, something darted past him and down the hall. Had he been in any other place, he might have thought it a bat; in the heights, they were common.
But its flight was too delicate, too much the drunkard’s spin, and he frowned as he stepped through the door.
Froze there, in wonder. The upper reaches of his room were thick with butterflies. Butterflies of glass, blown in every conceivable color; butterflies of silver and sapphire, of gold and ruby, of wood and stone. Among them, smaller than life, were birds, and the birds, too, were the hatchlings not of egg and warmth, but of the things with which Cessaly had loved to work.
He turned to the window, to the stained glass, and his smile, in this room, was the first that had not been tainted by bitterness in a decade. He lifted his hand to touch it; felt glass, and only glass, beneath his palm.
But the butterflies landed upon his shoulders, his head, his arms; they rested lightly upon the back of his hands, and they spoke to him, and each of their voices held some echo of hers.
THE END
Short Stories by Michelle West and Michelle Sagara
The first six stories released are connected to the Essalieyan Universe of the novels I write for DAW as Michelle West. Since those are my most asked-for short stories, those are the stories I wanted to make available first. The rest of the stories will be released in chronological order from the date of their first appearance, which are listed in brackets beside the titles, along with the anthology in which they first appeared. All of the stories have new introductions (which will probably come through in the samples if you’ve already read the stories but want to read those.)
In the Essalieyan universe:
Echoes (2001, Assassin Fantastic)
Huntbrother (2004, Sirius, the Dog Star)
The Black Ospreys (2005, Women of War)
The Weapon (2005, Shadow of Evil)
Warlord (1998, Battle Magic)
The Memory of Stone (2002, 30th Anniversary DAW Fantasy)
* * *
Birthnight (1992, Christmas Bestiary)
Gifted (1992, Aladdin, Master of the Lamp)
Shadow of a Change (1993, Dinosaur Fantastic)
For Love of God (1993, Alternate Warriors)
Hunger (1993, Christmas Ghosts)
Four Attempts at a Letter (1994, By Any Other Fame)
Winter (1994, Deals with the Devil)
What She Won’t Remember (1994, Alternate Outlaws)
The Hidden Grove (1995, Witch Fantastic)
Ghostwood (1995, Enchanted Forests)
When a Child Cries (1996, Phantoms of the Night)
The Sword in the Stone (1997, Alternate Tyrants)
Choice* (1997, Sword of Ice: Friends of Valdemar)
Turn of the Card (1997, Tarot Fantastic)
The Law of Man (1997, Elf Fantastic)
Flight (1997, Return of the Dinosaurs)
The Vision of Men (1997, The Fortune Teller)
By the Work, One Knows (1997, Zodiac Fantastic)
Under the Skin (1997, Elf Magic)
The Dead that Sow (1997, Wizard Fantastic)
Kin (1998, Olympus)
Step on the Crack (1998, Black Cats and Broken Mirrors)
Diamonds (1998, Alien Pets)
Sunrise (1999, A Dangerous Magic)
Elegy (1999, Moon Shots)
Return of the King (1999, Merlin)
Work in Progress (1999, Alien Abductions)
Water Baby (1999, Earth, Air, Fire and Water)
Faces Made of Clay (2000, Mardi Gras Madness)
Sacrifice (2000, Spell Fantastic)
Shelter (2000, Perchance to Dream)
Pas de Deux (2000, Guardian Angels)
Déjà Vu (2001, Single White Vampire Seeks Same)
To Speak With Angels (2001, Villains Victorious)
Lady of the Lake (2001, Out of Avalon)
Truth (2001, The Mutant Files)
The Last Flight (2001, Creature Fantastic)
The Knight of the Hydan Athe (2002, Knight Fantastic)
Legacy (2002, Familiars)
The Nightingale (2002, Once Upon a Galaxy)
A Quiet Justice (2002, Vengeance Fantastic)
The Augustine Painters (2002, Apprentice Fantastic)
How to Kill an Immortal (2002, The Bakka Anthology)
Fat Girl (2002, Oceans of the Mind VI, ezine)
Winter Death* (2003, The Sun in Glory: Friends of Valdemar)
Diary (2003, The Sorcerer’s Academy)
Dime Store Rings (2004, The Magic Shop)
To The Gods Their Due (2004, Conqueror Fantastic)
The Stolen Child (2004, Faerie Tales)
The Rose Garden (2004, Little Red Riding Hood in the Big Bad City)
The Colors of Augustine (2004, Summoned to Destiny)
Unicorn Hunt (2005, Maiden, Mother Crone)
The Snow Queen* (2005, Magic Tails; with Debbie Ohi)
Shahira (2006, Children of Magic)
*Set in Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar, as the anthology titles suggest
For more information—or just to say hello!—I can be found online at:
Twitter: @msagara
Facebook: Michelle Sagara
My blog about my written works: Michelle West & Michelle Sagara
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