Beneath Ceaseless Skies #53

by Parks, Richard

  “There you are.” Violet spun around to see Miss Stanton emerging from the fog. “We must get back to the school at once; something’s not right here. I’ve sent the others back already.”

  The air trembled and told Violet that four had made it back alive. That was more than she would have believed Miss Stanton capable of saving, and Violet looked at her with a measure of respect.

  Miss Stanton stared back, beady eyes gone wide, and Violet realized she was watching her wings open and close.

  Violet almost laughed. “You see why I’m not worried about my soul.”

  Colour caught at the edge of her vision, and she turned to see the butterflies spinning lazily towards her.

  “They’ll kill you.” Miss Stanton’s voice was high and reedy.

  Violet ignored her and held out a hand, waiting for them to cluster on her palm—

  “You fool,” said Miss Stanton, and stepped in front of her.

  The butterflies sank into her and then gushed up from the back of her head. Violet did not feel them as they settled on her hands and her hair, did not listen to their laughter in her mind. She was staring at the ugly woman crumpled on the ground, her mind repeating a single concussed thought: She died for me.

  Miss Stanton had not loved her, had not needed her, had known she was not human. Had still died for her.

  Violet dropped to her knees in the grass. She had thought she understood humans. When they talked of love and altruism, they meant protecting mine. When they talked of bravery and moral choices, they meant destroying yours.

  Despite what humans thought, faeries did know sacrifice; every day of the war they laid down their lives for their Queen and their kin. But not for their enemies. Not for strangers. They would never die for someone who had betrayed them, simply because she needed help.

  For the first time in her life, Violet wanted to know why.

  And for that the faeries had no answer.

  There was no point to dying for someone who had tried to hurt you, and no point at all to dying for someone who had never been in danger. Violet knew it as surely as she felt her own heartbeat, and she could feel the butterflies laughing at the blood dribbling out between Miss Stanton’s wrinkled lips. But she knew, also, that something in that death had been needful and right.

  Maybe it didn’t matter who was us and who was them, whether she was human or faery, and maybe it didn’t matter whether she loved anyone or not. Maybe there was something still she had to do.

  She took a train to London, walked into the War Office, and said, “I am a changeling. I want to defect.”

  * * *

  “Nasty little fight, but we killed the buggers.” Major Harris’s voice echoed slightly in the tunnel. Then he saw Violet. He stiffened, mouth working uncomfortably, but didn’t apologize for his language.

  The soldiers were all like that: they could not treat her as a man, did not want to treat her as a woman. Violet only smiled and unfurled her wings, laughing inside as he turned away uncomfortably.

  “Right this way, miss,” said Colonel Weston. He was afraid of her, like the rest of them; Violet could taste his nightmares sometimes. But he still pretended she was a lady, and so Violet had tracked down his wife and laid protections on her. She appreciated anyone who, like her, pretended to be kind.

  Violet followed the Colonel down the tunnel, trying not to gag. They had gassed the mound with sulphur to weaken its enchantments, then thrown jam-tin grenades full of iron filings to destroy them, and enough iron and sulphur still hung in the air to make her vision swim.

  “We’ll have to hurry. We think they might have called for reinforcements.” He gave her a sidelong glance.

  “I can’t tell if there are any nearby,” said Violet. “The fumes are still too strong. They’d likely come through Faery, anyway.”

  Through a doorway she glimpsed the great white anchor stone. It was split clean across, and her wings ached in sympathetic pain: there would be no more easy passage to Faery through this mound. But come twilight, the faeries would be able to use any stream or forked branch to cross into the mortal world.

  Colonel Weston shrugged. “Well, there’s not much point to holding the mound anyway. We’re just lucky they didn’t kill the prisoners this time.”

  They were deep into the mound now, and the air had become clear again. Then Colonel Weston stepped through a doorway into the round prison room and raised his lanterns, and Violet could see the shadowed lumps of the prisoners twitching. He looked at her, and this time there was no fear in his eyes, only hope and desperate expectation. He wept for the prisoners as she could not, and he looked to her for hope; and that was another reason why she liked him.

  She knew that humans needed signs, so Violet laid her hand against the wall. This deep in the mound, there were still some scraps of power; at a touch from her mind, great glowing white flowers bloomed across the domed ceiling, filling the room with light. Under the faery lights she went to each of the prisoners in turn. They had been changed inside the faery mound, and being still inside it, could be changed back: twigs to fingers, acorns to eyes, thistles to tongues, goat’s head to human. Each one healed under her hands, and maybe this was what mattered. Maybe it was.

  * * *

  At the height of the war, Violet was with Colonel Weston in Devon. All of Cornwall had fallen, as had Lancashire and Yorkshire, and great swathes of Wales and Scotland. Will o’ the wisps floated up the Thames to London, hobs and brownies roamed the streets at night, and the new King had gone into hiding. Everyone was terrified of possible treachery, and even the small towns were papered over with propaganda posters urging people not to submit.

  The parade of pictures and slogans was endless. A square-jawed young soldier grasped a rifle, while beside him a young woman held aloft a flag: “BRITONS NEVER WILL BE FAERY SLAVES.” A green-faced, slant-eyed faery leered at screaming little girls: “THE FACE OF THE ENEMY.” The smoking ruins of a cottage, with bodies lying across the doorstep: “The village of Wattingham surrendered, and the faeries SLAUGHTERED every man, woman, and child. MEN OF BRITAIN, NEVER AGAIN!” A neatly-groomed housewife smiled over a bonfire: “Every flower is faery food. BURN YOUR GARDEN!” Two little girls knelt at their father’s knee: “Daddy, what are YOU doing to save us from the faeries?”

  And everywhere, with a hundred different illustrations: “ONE TRAITOR CAN DOOM A CITY. REPORT SUSPICIOUS BEHAVIOUR AT ONCE.”

  Even so, every day they heard of another town or village that had accepted faery rule. Violet could not be sorry that the mining had stopped in South Wales, or that the factories in Manchester no longer belched poison into the air; but the same people who smashed the machinery and broke iron gates were the ones who delivered children to the faery mounds and cut throats at the cromlechs.

  The news from abroad was even worse. The Erlkönig rode freely across the Sudetenland; in Norway, King Haakon tried without success to stamp out the álfablót, while in Sweden the älvdanser met every night in Stockholm; weisse frauen roamed the streets of Vienna. In France, the dames blanches sent matagots across the countryside and raised the Tarasque to attack Paris. The Hapsburg emperor and all his family were driven mad or cursed with donkey’s heads, and the Pope had gone into hiding.

  They no longer got any news from Ireland at all: after the Irish had cast off British rule, they had broken into a civil war over whether or not to ally with the Sidhe. No one knew which side was winning; sometimes after dinner, the soldiers liked to discuss strategies for invading Ireland, but privately Colonel Weston admitted to Violet that the generals were drawing up plans for when Ireland invaded them.

  But then the tide of the war began to shift. The Germans sent over some of the new flamethrowers, and though they were clumsy, the fire was elemental enough that faery magic could do little against it. Then they got the new Vickers guns, which could fire round after round of alternating silver-and-iron bullets, and better grenades. For the first time in over a year, the army went on the offens
ive. The official name for the policy was “sectional cleansing,” but most people called it “scorched earth”: working outwards from London, they killed every faery they could find, torched every moor and forest the faeries had awakened, and surrounded, gassed, and blasted every mound.

  On the day the Yorkshire Dales burned, Violet finally collapsed. She crouched outside the whole day, rocking and keening as the ash fell on her hair and the moorland’s agony ripped through her mind. They had to hold her down and give her a double dose of laudanum before she would quiet. Since there was no way she could be discharged, her commanding officer promptly sent her south to join Colonel Weston’s unit in Devon, where they were trying to hold the Cornish border until the main campaign arrived.

  * * *

  Violet crouched in the ditch, Colonel Weston slumped beside her. A night raid on a faery mound had gone disastrously wrong and they were separated from the rest of the unit, the Colonel badly wounded by elf-shot. In the distance, she could hear the crack of guns and scattered booms from the men who still had grenades; the cold air pulsed with the silent faery-horns. Answering song bubbled up in Violet’s throat, and she clenched her teeth to keep it back. She doubted any of the humans abroad tonight would see morning, but she owed it to the Colonel to try.

  Cautiously, she stood and cupped her hands towards the sky, then leaned back, her wings blooming. The air cradled her, caressed her fingertips, and in its eddies she could feel the men’s lives winking out, one by one, like vanishing fireflies.

  “Are their deaths not beautiful?”

  Violet opened her eyes and saw her faery mother at the edge of the clearing. She wore again the white tea dress, her pale hair floating free on the wind, her wings glistening.

  “You know what you are.” Her voice thrummed with power. “Why do you resist?” Moonlight caught and clotted in her hair, and a wave of song crashed through Violet’s mind. She fell to her knees. The whole night had been a trap to make her use her powers, opening herself so she could be turned back to them against her will.

  “Come back, my child, thread of my gossamer.” Her mother knelt before her and cupped her chin. “Come back across the water to your kin, and drink the sunlight on the fields of Faery,” she whispered, and Violet’s wings ached with longing.

  Behind her, Colonel Weston made a wet, choked noise. Violet clenched her teeth. “No.”

  “He is dying,” said her mother. “Unless you heal him.”

  If she used her powers once, even just to heal, she knew that the last dams of her mind would break. Violet wondered if her mother had planned this part too.

  “Either way he is betrayed. One way he lives.”

  “I have orders. So does he.”

  Her mother’s voice was thick with disgust. “How could you betray us for these gasping things of smog and dust?”

  Violet thought of Miss Stanton and Thomas, of the army chaplain’s long sermons and the ragged, pointless songs of the soldiers. She could guess what any one of them would say, but they were all human replies, and here in the moonlight she could not pretend they were hers.

  Instead she lifted her eyes and said, “Because their deaths are beautiful.”

  Her mother’s fingers dug into her chin. “Do you think they’ll ever love you?”

  “Do you think I’m human enough to care?”

  There was a rustle at the edge of the clearing: a soldier stumbled through the trees. Her mother turned, and Violet flung herself to the side; as briars sprouted from the soldier’s eyes, her hands found Colonel Weston’s revolver and she brought it up.

  Her mother went still. “You are not of them.”

  Violet thought of the men she had cursed for the faeries, and the men dying tonight; the woods destroyed by factory pollution, and the fields screaming as they burnt in the war. “I know,” she said, and pulled the trigger.

  “You will never come home,” her faery mother snarled as she died, and Violet was not sure that she cared.

  * * *

  After the war ended, nobody was sure what to do with Violet. Her mother had died of a fever, and none of her more distant relatives would take her, but the army would not let her go free.

  Eventually Colonel Weston offered to take care of her, and since he had commanded her during the war, he was allowed to adopt her as his ward. He took Violet back to his country estate; after a while, Mrs. Weston stopped looking at her with fear, and even sat with her in the evenings to sew.

  Violet embroidered roses on a pillow, sketched the parish church, and practiced playing songs that still made no sense to her. She took care that nobody saw her dancing in the woods, and when the longing for Faery was so bad that she could only curl up in her bed and shiver, she said she had a headache.

  She still couldn’t weep for Mama or Papa, but she could remember them both with the hallucinatory clarity of faery memory, and she thought that if she could not be a daughter, at least she was a faithful monument. One evening she finally played “Swans at Sunset” for the first time since Papa died. It was still just a string of notes, and she wondered why she had waited so long.

  Then one morning, as she sat practicing at the piano in the parlour, the maid came to her and said, “There’s a man here to see you, miss. He says—”

  “Show him in,” said Violet, because she could feel him, she could tell.

  A moment later Thomas stepped into the room. She did not turn around but continued playing “Swans at Sunset.”

  “I heard about you sometimes, during the war,” she said.

  His voice was lower than she remembered. “Sometimes I heard about you. Mostly from the faeries.”

  He’d never joined the army, but had gone straight from nobody to legend: the half-mad son of a peer who charged into faery mounds alone and came out again alive. The man who’d sworn to walk into the Faery Court itself to find his sister.

  “Did you find her?” she asked.

  “Yes. She didn’t remember being human.”

  “I didn’t remember being faery.” Her fingers moved smoothly over the keys.

  “She made her choice. I made mine. What are you doing now?”

  “Colonel Weston has been kind enough to adopt me as his ward.”

  Thomas sighed, then stepped to the side of the piano, where she could see him. There was a scar across his cheek and lines around his eyes.

  “I’ve just settled the estate,” he said. “Father left me the house in town, and Uncle Harold left me the old house in the country.” His fingers drummed against the wood of the piano. “If you want... you could come stay with me.”

  “You know I’m no family of yours.”

  “I think you’re the closest I have left.”

  She stopped playing. Thomas watched her steadily, waiting for her answer.

  It would not be true to say she had ever missed him, but she was now fairly sure that she had, all this time, been waiting for him.

  “And what are you planning to do?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “The war’s over, but they still need men with experience of Faery. Here, or... there’s talk of posts in the Orient. I might be gone sometimes.”

  She could never exactly care for him, any more than he could ever make her kin. But she thought that she would like to try.

  “We could study Chinese together,” she said.

  Copyright © 2010 Rosamund Hodge

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  Rosamund Hodge is a graduate of Oxford and Viable Paradise. She lives in Seattle, Washington. Visit her online at www.rosamundhodge.net.

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  COVER ART

  “Fantasy Gate,” by Wolfgang Wachelhofer

  Wolfgang Wachelhofer is an Austrian graphic artist and web designer who has a deep passion for surreal art. Most of his inspiration comes from the rich and colorful cultures of Brazil, where he lived for four years. He has done a lot of work for various clients for which he has earned a high reputation for his
uniqueness. View more of his art in his online galleries.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1046

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Copyright © 2010 Firkin Press

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