“What are they protecting?”
Kuolma shot a grin at Lammeët. “Why don’t we find out?”
“There’s five of them and only two of us.”
The dead slowly surrounded them, their eye sockets mere dark pits that nonetheless blazed with undisguised antagonism. They wore their skin in scraps across yellowed bone, barely distinguishable from their clothes’ disintegrating fabric, but their blades were as sharp as the day they’d died.
“What do you want to do?”
Lammeët twisted her cane until it collapsed into itself and slid it back into its case. When she spoke, there was a smile in her voice. “Fight.”
Warmth spread in Kuolma’s chest, burning through any lingering doubt. That was her Lammeët. A woman who was as fierce as she was quiet, as kind as she was stubborn, as wild as she was beautiful.
Lammeët drew her sword, a glint in her eyes like a wolf’s midwinter, hungry but sure of her strength. Lammeët took her place at Kuolma’s side.
The dead attacked. Kuolma got the first one, sending its skull flying with a single hit. But animates obeyed different rules from the living: they had to be fully dismantled before they would stop.
The second one gave Kuolma no time to breathe. Unlike any other animate she’d encountered, it knew how to use its weapon. Its sword came for her as soon as she committed to her club’s swing.
But Lammeët was there, meeting its sword with her own in a clash of sparks and metal. She drove hard and fast, no time between her defensive strike and her offensive one, which took the animate’s leg. Magic or not, it tumbled to the ground, bones scattering in a cacophony of clattering.
Even as the animate fell, Kuolma beat back another, her club breaking off bones piece by piece, giving Lammeët time for her own fight. When she’d relieved the animate of its skull and arms, she smashed through its ribs and the whole thing fell apart, bones scattering beneath their feet.
Behind her, more bones met the floor with a clatter. That left two animates: one each.
Despite the cold of the cave, Kuolma’s gloves were damp with sweat. She clutched the club tightly and met her last animate’s rictus grin with her own. She swung at its leg, eager to finish it off and join Lammeët in taking down the last one. It fell, as she’d expected. What she hadn’t expected, though, was the chicken.
A bundle of bones barely shin-high careened out of the darkness and shot between her feet. She toppled beside the fallen-yet-still-whole animate, whose boney hands found her shoulders and searched for her throat. Kuolma tried to pry the hands off, but the chicken was back, its beak just as sharp in death as it had been in life. When Kuolma shielded her eyes from that relentless beak, the animate wrapped its fingers around her neck.
The raw magic in its bones met her bare skin. Pain sizzled across her neck like a thousand tiny, stabbing needles. Kuolma grunted, cold sweat breaking out on her forehead. She tried to protect herself from both the chicken animate and the warrior, but every time she kicked, her foot only glanced off bone.
“Kuolma!”
The air parted near her hands, followed by the sound of a hundred tiny bones clattering across stone. The next peck never came. Kuolma lowered her hand in time to see Lammeët swing again, gaze focused, face flushed, stray hairs plastered to her forehead with sweat. Her sword took off the warrior’s head, but it wasn’t enough to diminish the magical load and stop the animate. Pain blurred Kuolma’s vision. Now all those thousand needles felt as if they were slicing through her neck. She couldn’t breathe.
But Lammeët wasn’t done. More bones flew. A ribcage smashed. The weight on Kuolma lifted, bit by bit. Finally, its grip weakened. Failed. The hands fell from her neck.
“Are you all right?”
Kuolma breathed in short, sharp gasps, the pain thudding around her neck like cursed jewelry, which was not far off from reality. When raw magic met living flesh, it left behind fractal scars that never fully healed.
Lammeët’s eyes widened, a mirror Kuolma didn’t need. She reached for Kuolma’s neck, her fingers stopping just short. “Does it hurt?”
“A lot,” admitted Kuolma.
Guilt flashed across those eyes. “I’m sorry I wasn’t faster—”
Kuolma took Lammeët’s hand. Then, because words failed her, she stood and closed the space between them and took Lammeët’s lips between hers. They tasted like sweat and rain, like a summer day spent watching the clouds gather, then burst, like running to feel the drops, not avoid getting wet.
They lingered together in that downpour for moments and weeks, hands tracing each other’s sides, mouths exchanging each other’s breaths.
Finally, reluctantly, they parted. The cold was bearing down on them, sapping away their strength and time. They still had a cave to finish exploring, an exit to find, and—
“Do you want to look in the pool?” asked Kuolma. Anxiety flew through her on razor-sharp wings, a fluttering of fight or flight in her chest stronger than when she’d faced the animates moments before.
Lammeët traced a finger down Kuolma’s neck, gaze full of hunger. “In a bit.”
But Kuolma had brought up the pool and now she couldn’t shake the cold churning in her stomach. While trying to hide the trembling in her hands, she took Lammeët’s and started for the pool.
Lammeët let her, but asked, “Why are you in such a hurry?”
Kuolma’s throat squeezed shut with anticipation and nerves. All she could do was gesture wordlessly at the pool and croak out, “We should look in the pool. They had to be guarding it for a reason.”
Now Lammeët glanced at her with wry suspicion. But she did as she was told, kneeling next to the glowing circle of water. Kuolma brought the purple-edged torch close, but it wasn’t necessary. The pool provided its own light.
The water was clear, the pool deep. It descended like another path, this one to another room, another cave, another system that could keep them occupied with exploration for months. Its sides were lined with a soft growth that glowed a pale blue—the source of light and probably the source of worship. And on a ridge of stone, just within reach, a piece of metal glinted in the light.
Lammeët pulled it out. Water spilled off the metal, soaked her gloves. Lammeët turned the piece slowly, eyebrows first furrowed with confusion, then lifting in surprise.
“I didn’t know the ancients used marriage bracelets,” she said.
“They didn’t.”
Kuolma plucked the bracelet from Lammeët’s fingers and knelt next to her, fingers and hands and arms trembling with the weight of what she had to say. She fumbled with the words she’d practiced until they slipped from her mouth, as awkward as fledglings.
“I haven’t always liked you,” said Kuolma, already regretting her words, regretting this. But the moment had started and it wouldn’t pass until she got out every word that had been bottled up within her for months. “But I’ve always respected you. You have astonished me again and again with your intelligence and kindness. I don’t know when I started to like you, but I do know when I started to love you. And I know I can never stop. I could live without you, but I don’t want to. I know”—she held up her hand to stop whatever Lammeët had parted her lips to say—“that as principal-elect, you won’t be allowed a wife. But you can take a consort. I have guarded you for as long as I have known you. Let me continue to guard you.”
Kuolma, eyes prickling with tears, took the biggest breath of her life. “Lammeët doulo Lassaofei—will you let me be your consort?”
Lammeët’s lips stayed parted, but no answer came. Her eyes glittered and her hand moved to cover her mouth, but she didn’t take the bracelet and the bottom of Kuolma’s world dropped away.
“I—I know you said you didn’t want a consort—” she began, lowering the bracelet, which had become very heavy all of a sudden. All those weeks away, all that distance growing between them—she should’ve taken the hint, should’ve known—
Lammeët shook her head and fumbled at
the pouch at her waist. After a heartbreaking moment, she found what she was looking for and pulled out something rounded. Metal. She held it out to Kuolma, tears now streaming freely down her cheeks and sobbed a laugh.
“You idiot,” she choked out. “You’re not going to be my consort. You’re going to be my wife.”
She plucked the silver bracelet from Kuolma’s unresisting hands, replacing it with hers. Lammeët slid the bracelet over her hand and onto her wrist, where it fit as if it had been made for her. Of course, it had. Kuolma was still kneeling, reeling from the reversal. She held the new bracelet and rubbed the silver with her thumb. Stylized wolves chased each other around it, their coats made out of snowflakes. Then tears blurred her vision and she couldn’t see anything else.
Lammeët pulled her close and met her startled gaze, her smile so wide it could fill the room. “Yes, yes, a hundred times yes, Kuolma. I will marry you and only you.”
“But—the principal-elect—”
“I’m not going to run,” stated Lammeët. She kissed the corner of Kuolma’s mouth.
“But it’s been your dream.”
Another kiss. “Dreams change. I’ll be able to do more if I stay in the Council.”
“But... these last few months... then where did you go?”
Lammeët kissed Kuolma’s top lip. “To your village.”
Kuolma pulled back. “What?”
“To ask your family for your hand.”
“An elect doesn’t need to ask—”
“Not in the past,” said Lammeët. “But today? Things are changing. Things should be changing. And I wanted to start with respect. Besides,” she added, “your family’s lovely. I can’t wait to see them again.”
“How long have you been planning this?”
“How long have you?” returned Lammeët. “How long did it take you to find this cave? To get the approval to explore it? And then again, to bring me along? I have to admit, you had me convinced for a while that this was the first time you’d been down here.”
“What tipped you off?”
“The marks,” said Lammeët. “Kids don’t think ahead like that. Which meant someone else had been here recently. Someone like you.”
“Months,” admitted Kuolma. This time she kissed Lammeët.
“Thank you,” said Lammeët, against Kuolma’s lips. “That was the most fun I’ve had in years.”
“I’m so glad you liked it.”
“You know me.”
“I do.”
A pause, the world forgotten for another few moments as they shared each other instead.
Then,
“Can we do it again?”
The Sweet Tooth of Angwar Bec
by Ellen Kushner
When Angwar Bec grew too old to fight blood duels, she was still in great demand. She took every gig that came along, from ritual guard at nobles’ weddings to demonstration bouts at their coming-of-age parties; the money was good, and it kept her in steel and sweets, her two great passions.
Angwar Bec had a collection of blades that anyone would envy. Her love of cakes and pastries was so well known that her noble patrons would vie for the chance to amaze her with something new at the wedding feast after the ceremony, to which she was nearly always invited. One enterprising city baker had even named a cake after her: the “Angwar Bec” was a startling concoction of anise-scented sponge cake and burnt-sugar icing, filled with chestnut cream.
She did prefer chestnut to chocolate, which made the resident Kinwiinik cacao traders say that, whatever Angwar Bec’s mysterious parentage, she certainly wasn’t one of theirs.
All her life, people had asked her, What are you?
She knew what they meant: Who are your parents? And your parents’ parents? Did her tawny skin come from Danbar stock? Was her iron-straight, shiny raven hair a gift of some Chartili merchant prince, or his freed bondwoman, or perhaps a refugee from the wars of distant Seren? Had her Riverside whore of a mother found a Kinwiinik trick who actually didn’t like chocolate?
She knew what they meant. But she would answer:
I am Angwar Bec.
It wasn’t her real name. When she was a kid hanging around the docks below Riverside, she saw Angwar painted on the side of a ship from who-knows-where. She had no idea what it meant, but so far no one had come sidling up to her to tell her it was Serenish or something for Big Ass or Sea Snot or something. It had, to her, the feel of Victory.
Bec, she had just made up because it sounded good.
The truth was, she had no idea where she was “from.”
“One of my many lovers” was the way her mother had airily expressed it. Her mother enjoyed the phrase, used it a lot. It drove her crazy.
Her real name was Sophie Snell. Her mother—she of the many lovers—had been a singer in a Riverside tavern, who also helped out with cleaning when the boss needed it. Sophie had grown up playing under the tables of the Maiden’s Fancy and observing the clientele.
Night after night they came in: the students in their black robes from across the river; the true Riversiders stopping in at their local; the Middle City’s aspiring apprentices; slumming nobles from the Hill, all seeking the thrill of rubbing elbows and maybe more with each other.
The ones with the swagger, though, the ones everyone else made way for, those were the swordsmen. No one rubbed up against them without invitation, though everyone stared.
She decided she would be one of those.
* * *
Angwar Bec had trained long and hard to get where she was. She wasn’t too proud of what she’d had to do to pay for her earliest lessons, down in Riverside, but that was behind her now.
Now she had a snug little berth above a celebrated baker’s in the Middle City. She’d wake in the dark to the smell of baking bread, inhale deeply, roll over, and sleep until the bells of the shop’s first customers sounded over the door. Then she would rise, stretch, and begin her drill. She knew she need never go hungry again.
What had set her on the road to this comfort was her notorious and unquestionably ill-advised duel with Katherine, Duchess Tremontaine.
It was her very first paid gig, and it began as a joke: Angwar Bec the unknown swordswhatever, lucky to be invited to run practice bouts with some of the more experienced blades in the courtyard of the famous tavern the Sword and Cup, where they showed off their moves to draw the attention of possible patrons. For her, of course, it was always just the drills, never a genuine duel to get her name up on the betting boards, like the men.
And then some drunken young nobles, country mud still stuck to their boots, new to town and looking to make their mark, saw her and decided it would be hilarious to have this fiery dark girl challenge the young duchess at her own midwinter party.
So it was there, in the great courtyard of Tremontaine House, at the highest and most gracious point of the Hill, with the midwinter torches flaming and flaring, the nobles of the city glittering with jewels amid their floating furs, the smells of hot wine and bonfires on the air, the crackling wood eating up everyone’s wishes and regrets as fast as the duchess’s guests could throw the scraps of paper into the fire, that Angwar Bec bade farewell to her old life once and for all.
* * *
The first thing she noticed after she’d passed through the high, iron gates of Tremontaine House, spiked with gilded, wrought-iron flowers, was the cakes: tables of pastries, beautifully arranged on platters everywhere you looked. The nobles were ignoring them in favor of flirtation, conversation, and alcohol. What was wrong with these people? She lusted after those confections the way she’d lusted after the sword she bore, a perfectly balanced rapier of folded steel. She had spent her money on that, and not on the other, and so she had a blade to be proud of, but not much to eat lately.
Her mark, Katherine, Duchess Tremontaine, stood in a ring of flambeaux, receiving her guests. Most were coddled against the night cold in furs the colors of forest creatures, but the Duchess Katherine wore layers of broc
ade in bright jewel colors, laced with ribbons, fringed with bullion—her costume looked as if it would stand up by itself if the duchess stepped out of it. Impossible to fight in such a get-up.
The duchess didn’t look old enough to be the holder of so much money and power. She was so young! Twenty-five, if she was even that, the age when a working swordsman would still be at the height of their powers. She was not homely by any means, with a fine-drawn face and pointy chin; an intelligent face, set in an expression of cautious benignity; but the Duchess Tremontaine did not rank among the great beauties present. Her light brown hair was bound up on her head in an elaborate confection of ribbons and gold cord laced with jewels. It spoke of rank, not of availability.
Angwar Bec squared her shoulders, settled her cloak on them, and stepped forward into the circle of light around the duchess. This was it: her first paid challenge. There was an immediate hush, as everyone waited to hear what she would say.
“My name is Angwar Bec,” she announced, and oh, that sounded good. “I bear challenge to the Lady Katherine Tr—er, Talbert.” She’d practiced and practiced, but she knew she was going to screw that up! “To the Lady Katherine Talbert, Duchess Tremontaine of this City.”
The young duchess looked at her, long and evenly. She was shorter than Angwar Bec, but that did not seem to trouble her. “Upon what charge?” Katherine asked.
Here it comes, thought Angwar Bec. It was going to sound so stupid, especially now that she’d seen the lady so splendidly clad out here in the open among the glittering bonfire sparks, the glittering noble guests. She steeled herself to speak clearly and loudly.
“That she is really a man in a dress.”
There were gasps, and hoots, and chuckles. At least no one would think she’d come up with that herself. It was clear provocation from one noble to another, with a hired sword to deliver it properly.
The Duchess Tremontaine laughed with genuine merriment, throwing back her head so the light from the jewels danced. “That’s a new one,” she said. Without moving, she addressed the crowd: “Is anyone going to own it?”
Silk & Steel Page 18
