All Out--The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages

by Saundra Mitchell

  “Women are seen as less than men. That’s why they’re permitted indulgences—they’re pretty pets. Is that so much better?”

  “Then I wish I was like you. Unbeholden to carnal desires.”

  “And you’d be seen as less than a man, too. A man who does not serve God must serve his earthly father, and give him grandchildren.”

  “Is there no way for men like us to be happy, then, Tuck?”

  He shrugged. “I’m happy here. This is the most I’ve ever been myself. Aren’t you?”

  I thought of Robin, those three words he once voiced into my chest.

  Of course, I signed, forcing a smile. Like Little John said, we’re free. We can be our true selves with each other. No gold or gems could buy anything more precious. No king’s crown could tempt us.

  He gave me an odd look. Perhaps my eyes had betrayed me. Perhaps he had sensed some undertone in the movement of my hands, some quaver of fear, of dread.

  That night in Robin’s arms I kissed his smooth throat, unmarked by the apple of Eve’s deceit. I touched the leather bindings beneath his tunic. I traced the dashing lines of his face, chapped by sun and wind but still finer than any other boy’s. “I’m not like other boys, Will,” he said, his lips glistening from the touch of mine.

  I pinned him flat to the straw and said, “It doesn’t matter. I love you.”

  We stared at each other, stunned. Then I said it again.

  “I love you.” I laughed. “I love you.”

  He kissed me, smiling against my mouth with disbelieving joy. The riddle had been solved. Those three words rumbled the same way in my chest as they had when he’d spoken them.

  * * *

  Rain needled through the trees, a vast, inescapable flaying of the earth. Leaves ripped free and fell, all harvest colors—pomegranate, beet, radish—every shade of red, like heavy succulent drops of blood. Red was the color of passion, and of treachery.

  Strange to see this green place changed. Undressed.

  I drew my cloak tighter. Midway up a towering spruce, Rashida, playing my part of lookout, clung desperately to slick bark. I crouched on the forest floor, indistinguishable from a dozen other sodden hoods. An ideal time for this—Robin would never know we’d switched roles.

  Beside me Alix narrowed her eyes. One gloved hand stroked her sword hilt over and over, as if soothing an animal. We’d told her of the ruse and she’d merely shrugged. Something else nettled her now.

  What is it? I signed.

  Alix frowned. Her fingers curled around the hilt. Bad feeling.

  I felt it, too.

  The air smelled like metal. The earth underfoot flinched, braced. It was like the moment before lightning, but not the purifying, enlivening charge of Robin’s kiss—this was the indrawn breath before calamity.

  Inside my cloak were the two halves of the bounty, sewn together.

  ...for the Safe Return of a Maiden

  to her Loving Lord Husband...

  I swallowed thickly.

  Alix flung a hand skyward and I gave a start. I read the conversation between her and her lover. Riders, carriage. How many swords? One score. How far? Don’t know. How far?

  Rashida kept shaking her head. Alix glowered at me as if it were my fault.

  Twenty men was greater than expected. Nicholas had sworn this minor lord could call upon no more than a dozen. Still, in the rain and confusion we would outfox them.

  I cradled my bow beneath my cloak and prayed it would be over soon.

  Riders entered the road without warning. They moved at a calm canter, but something seemed off—the animals were tall, roped with muscle. Draft horses. Blankets had been tossed over their sides, but here and there I caught the gleam of enameled armor.

  No lord’s vassal owned a war horse.

  Who were these men?

  Before I could alert Alix, the riders came abreast of us. Nets and bolas whirled out of the bushes. A heartbeat later Little John and his boys waded into the welter of horses and men and neatly disarmed them. At first I cringed—four to one, poor odds—but the riders milled, confused. One man dropped his sword without being touched. He looked me dead in the eye as he did it, his gaze hard, and I thought: His gloves were wet. He fumbled.

  It would make no sense to intentionally throw down his weapon.

  When the riders’ hands were empty, Robin made his grand entrance: a bough unwrapping itself, revealing a boy.

  Something made me look up at Rashida, then.

  She was not watching us, or the riders. She was staring up the road in the opposite direction, mouth agape.

  When I turned to trace her gaze I felt a chill slip inside my cloak, so strong it almost felt like a blade going in.

  Then chaos.

  Horses pounded behind us, a pincer attack. The disarmed riders drew second swords. The carriage driver, huddled in a rough-spun farmer’s cloak, stood and sedately unfastened it, revealing inch by inch the scaled black armor beneath, the wyvern-pommeled longsword, the silver star of office.

  The Sheriff of Nottingham.

  She stepped lightly into the road. Her men disarmed us in turn, cleaving our catchpoles with brutal bastard swords. In a twinkling, all of the lost boys and lost girls had cold steel at their throats. All but me and Robin.

  My side gave a twinge, and I stumbled. Had I felt a chill? There was heat now under my shirt.

  I moved toward Robin.

  The Sheriff’s head was bare, her auburn hair braided tight. Her eyes were the color of frost on dead grass. She stalked with serpentine grace, the longsword bobbing over her shoulder.

  “I don’t understand,” Robin said to her, wonderingly. “I thought the Saracen betrayed me.”

  Nick Hamish stepped out from behind us, wiping a blade on his cloak. “You thought wrong, milady,” he said, and flicked an arc of red into the rain. “I convinced the Saracen to swap places with your lookout. Her kind are ever eager to prove they can do more than spread their legs. Those fine powders she paints on her face—I saw how they reddened her eyes. She can’t see any better than this boy can hear. You have many weak links in your chain, milady. It was quite easy to snap.”

  Of course. Nick’s scars “healing” so miraculously. Rashida always competing with me, desperate to prove she was more than her past. Nick had struck at our weak points masterfully. How had I, of us all, been so blind?

  It felt as if a wild dog had sunk its teeth into my side. I groped at my tunic.

  “Will,” Robin said, rushing to me.

  Our hands found the wound together. Blood bloomed, welling in our palms in luscious wet petals. It was beautiful, I thought. Ominous but beautiful, like the autumn leaves. All of this red. Every shade, draining from me. Vermilion, crimson, scarlet. My namesake.

  When I looked at Robin’s face I saw that he was screaming, sobbing.

  Eerie that such passion could rack him while my head remained silent.

  The Sheriff bent over me. At some point my body had folded to the ground. With her this close, I saw lines mapping worry across her face, a wrinkling of regret.

  “Look, Lady Marian,” the Sheriff said to Robin, and I imagined her voice: smoky and soft, elegantly viperous. “Your lover is wounded. I can save him, if you return to your betrothed husband.”

  Robin’s tears were like nothing I had seen. When he cried over Joren and the others who died, it was calm, almost peaceful—an acceptance of nature’s inevitabilities, of all things ending. What more could we ask but to live and die free men? This was different: his face was twisted, his teeth bared and his eyes filled with a wild, mad light, an untethered terror. He looked so afraid. My Robin had never looked so afraid.

  “Lady Marian,” the Sheriff said again. “Your husband, Lord Scarlock, is waiting.”

  Robin did not look at her. He touched my chest, where the fo
xhead should have been.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, or tried to, but perhaps my lips moved without sound. “Why is she talking about my father?”

  “Will, listen to me. I must do what the Sheriff says.”

  Why? I mouthed. That’s not your name. That’s not you.

  His chest heaved. He scrubbed a hand across his eyes. “Someday, please forgive me for this. I know you’ll despise me. But I have no choice. I can’t let you die.”

  I don’t understand, I mouthed again.

  “You do. I know you do. I’m sorry, Will.”

  Faintly I felt hands lifting me. Robin’s face receded, strangely small and elfin, fragile. He lunged for me but the Sheriff held him back with a strong arm.

  I was too weak to lift mine and sign. I just kept saying his name.

  “Robin. Robin.”

  He held my gaze as the forest closed around us, screaming my name over and over, and I did not shut my eyes even as darkness crept in at the edges. I knew the air trembled at a higher pitch when he spoke. His throat held no apple. His face was beardless, soft. These things had been used against him, fashioned into a name and a fate that were not his. My birth name was not mine anymore, either. It didn’t matter. Like Tuck said: if we must lie to the world to be true to our hearts, then we would.

  A face bent near mine. Something pressed into my chest. The foxhead. Rashida gazed down at me and signed fiercely, You better bloody stay alive, Scarlet. At least until you get our Robin back. Do you hear me?

  Then her mouth compressed in a pained smile, and she brushed the hair off my forehead.

  I’ll find him, I whispered breathlessly. I promise, Robin. I’ll find you.

  The last thing I saw was the green roof of the forest dulling into gray and falling down around me, and then darkness. But in the darkness all I saw was my beautiful boy. My golden boy, my Robin. No other name fit him, and never would. Sometimes sight is a more powerful way of hearing than sound.

  * * * * *

  WILLOWS

  BY

  SCOTT TRACEY

  Southwyck Bay, Massachusetts, 1732

  The shock of red hair against the black ocean froth disappeared beneath the surface as Benjamin remembered a time when his own hair had been that same shade of fire-dark. A time when he’d stood on the Highlands and let the wind ruffle the hems of his skirt and pulled his hair back and tangled it into loving knots. He had been she then. Her name was Mariot, and she knew well what it was like to sink beneath the swell.

  It had been many years since Benjamin had been alone in his own head. Memories of other lives, other versions of himself, grew with every year. He was the only one in Southwyck who knew himself in that way, who knew that one life was never really the end.

  “Mercy Elizabeth Dare has been committed to the waters that once stole away our children.” Reverend was in a frightful mood. He was more theatrical than his father had been as guiding hand for the village of Southwyck, and even when drowning a girl of fifteen he felt like the act needed something more. Words. So many of them.

  Benjamin watched the last traces of her disappear beneath the water, and soon even the bubbles that could have carried her last words had ceased. The waters churning below them were unforgiving as ever—the ocean would take her and hold her deep where none would harm her again.

  In other villages, witches were drowned, or, if they refused to plead, were pressed to death. Elements of a natural world. In Southwyck, they preferred a more immediate solution to the problem. A small cliff at the tip of the headlands overlooked the shredding rocks below, and the cursed fell as quickly as the innocent. Over the years, the rocks gorged on so much blood they now kept a crimson cast, a stain to the stone that announced their intent and hunger for the castoffs. The rocks were hungry, and soon they would feed on Benjamin.

  “Blessings on the family Dare in their moment of acceptance,” he continued. His rum-roughened voice was no more pleasant now than when he had been cups deep the night before with Benjamin’s father and the other elders. A night of drinking always preceded a morning of Return.

  That was what they called it when they dropped one of their children off the high rocks that overlooked the inlet of Southwyck. The Return. The Elders taught that because of their burdens, the people of Southwyck held vigil.

  The children born in Southwyck were not like children born in other villages. Not for many years now. The children born in Southwyck were as dangerous as girls whose tears would summon storms, or boys who left fire in their wake, even when a thing should not burn.

  There were other curses that were worse. Curses like a girl who could not be lied to, or a ten-year-old boy who gathered secrets that no one meant to tell.

  “Long has the village of Southwyck prospered even in the face of its burden.” The Reverend’s eyes swept the crowd, looking for signs of emotion, of weakness. But if the Dare family did not weep, then neither did any other.

  It was less than one hundred years since the curses began, and the age of plenty succumbed to the age of strife. When Roanoke fell, Southwyck thrived.

  “The life of Mercy Dare is one drop of water in the bucket. We must remain watchful, for our enemies lie all around us. They hope to see us fail. They hope to see us falter.” The Reverend’s drinking voice came out—louder, more boisterous. “But we are in control.”

  The more dangerous the curse, the faster the Return. But it was only the Reverend who decided when a life should be sacrificed. Only he who saw a girl that inspired honesty in those around her, and sought to silence her one last time.

  Mercy hadn’t cried. She hadn’t given in to her fear. The Returned always knew it was coming. It wasn’t them who protested, Reverend said, but the curse inside them. It wanted to live; it wanted to thrive. All good children of Southwyck were stronger than their curses.

  “Since my grandfather’s day as the founder of Southwyck,” Reverend continued, “obscenities have plagued us. Only in our iron will do we prosper. Only through our vigilance will we maintain.”

  The Dare family remained stone-faced at the center of the gathering. Southwyck did not understand mercy, and even less compassion for a child named such. Her fate had been sealed as a child of the curse.

  She was not a heathen like Benjamin, one who accepted their curse as a matter of their life. She was one of the unlucky few—the ones who could not hope to suppress it. No amount of prayer, no pleas for understanding could stop what had ravaged Mercy’s life. Father had thought he could deny Mariot, that if he did not think and speak of her, he would prevail against his curse, as if she was a door in his mind that he could close and bar away forever. His father didn’t understand. He was Mariot and Mariot was him.

  A part of Benjamin knew he could have tried harder. The other voices in his head urged him at times to keep his head down, to keep his thoughts to himself. But he had always been different, would always be other. He spoke of things learned in other lives, told stories that he had been told as an urchin striving to feed himself at a monastery. He flouted the secrets of the town every time he opened his mouth.

  The truth. Mercy’s was a curse of honesty. Just as she herself could not lie, those around her found themselves unable to deceive each other. She was a threat to a town as strict as Southwyck.

  The village gathered around him, but Benjamin felt as alone as he had ever been. Despite memories of other lives and a vastness inside his head that was sometimes shelter in the storm of his life, he was not meant for Southwyck. They watched him with haunted eyes. Silence Goode and her daughter Temperance, who had sewn the gowns of every Returned this year. John Thomas and his wife, Agnes, dry-eyed though their sons had taken competing dives two summers back-to-back. Susanna and Deliverance, the widows Byram, had not stopped staring at him during the entire service.

  It was hard enough to stand by and do nothing, but worse when the entire tow
n watched and imagined that you were the one dropping off into the water, disappearing beneath the tide. He was glad that Sebastian, the outsider, had not attended. He would hold his tongue, of course, but any who saw his face would read the contempt there.

  Benjamin did not care what the people of the village thought of him, but he cared very much about Sebastian. The blacksmith’s son was no native of Southwyck—he’d come in on the ships and grew into his role as apprentice. Being born outside the village meant that while he had learned of the curses, and of the Return, he could not understand them the same as the others. He saw cruelty in what they insisted was vigilance and kindness. Bearing witness at the Return of Mercy Elizabeth was just a reminder of that hideous truth. Once the Returns were a rarity, only one or two a year. Mercy was the fifth since the spring thaw. Five times that the children of Southwyck—children susceptible to the curse—witnessed. The Reverend said the Return was to save them. The truth was a midnight ache: it stayed buried inside until the sun disappeared and the world grew quiescent, and then it rose, unrepenting. Unwilling to hide any longer. The Return was their future, their inevitable goodbye.

  Leaves fluttered on the wind, torn from branches by a vigorous push off the ocean.

  Father’s hands clamped down upon Benjamin’s shoulders, holding him in place. They were closest to the swell, facing the Reverend, and behind him in the distance, the town itself. Reverend’s eyes kept falling to Benjamin.

  “We must not let our cursed souls rule us,” he said, and his eyes never left the boy’s. “For though this land is cursed, we are still the caretakers. So long as the Withers surround us, so long as the New World grows beneath us, we will not let them win. We will not give in to the flames of iniquity.”

  Things broke apart soon after that, though Benjamin’s father’s hands would not release him to the day. And when the Dares came up to them, there was a rare moment of compassion across Mr. Dare’s face. His parents expressed their condolences, but Mr. Dare waved them off. “Acceptance of a thing makes it easier,” he said. “No amount of resisting ever kept the winter from coming.”