Fearsome Journeys (The New Solaris Book of Fantasy)

by Jonathan Strahan

  The day before, his daughter is in the small council chamber he used himself. She sits at the blackwood table where his wars were planned, and her kings are with her as once they were with him.

  “Do not do this,” King Tennan of Redwater says, and his voice cracks on the words. “We will find another way. We are strong, my queen. We are hungry, but we are strong.”

  Her eyes are calm. She is in both places at once, as is her dreaming father.

  “What would we be?” King Abbot of Harnell asks. The voice that had been strong and rolling once is wet. His eyes are rheumy.

  “Changed,” the High Queen says. “We would be changed.” And the next day, at the same time, “In return, I will take your son as my husband. He cannot be king, for only my father’s blood may sit this throne, but he will be the queen’s consort. And your grandson will be High King.”

  Dreaming, the High King calls out. In the sepulcher, his mouth opens for the first time in years. Young Cormin of Leftbridge slams his hand upon the blackwood table. “We need not do this. We are strong. Your father would not have asked this of you. We can take what we need by force.” When he is needed, he shall rise creaks and whispers, makes the air rich as if it were the scent of blood and smoke.

  “We could take it by force. Would that be justice?” his daughter asks, mildly.

  “You would take my son?” the hraki asks. His voice is torn between amusement and disbelief.

  “I would,” she says, looking down from the throne.

  “Gracious queen,” the horned man says, “I thank you, but this cannot be.”

  “There have been such unions,” his daughter says. “They have been fruitful.”

  “Our honor does not permit that we lay with those not of our kind.”

  The High Queen smiles, lifts her chin. She looks like her mother. Sounds like her.

  “Make an exception,” she says, and the day before turns her eyes to the old men at her table. Would that be justice? still hangs in the air. That they cannot answer is also an answer. “Mine is not the only way, it’s true. We could take to the field. Or we could accept the loans offered by the bankers in Pallan Syrai. One would mean the deaths of the innocent. The other would mean selling ourselves in all but name.”

  Two silences mix. Grief pulls at the High King’s dreaming heart. Grief and shock and something else.

  “My father found five kingdoms shattered by war,” she says to the kings of the black table, “and forged them into one. You who would have been my rivals are my brother, my sister, my uncles now. My father was strong and he was just, and you changed for him. Will you not also change for me?”

  “I will not command my son to do this,” the hraki says. “But I will speak with him.”

  The dream shifts, and the High King is aware of a pool of still water. The stink of its stagnation fills his nostrils, and he knows it is not real. It is an image his mind has conjured to see what is too large to see. A drop of blood falls in the pool’s center, and where the ripples pass, the water is made pure and sweet. A small black insect floats on its surface, its wings spread like the arms of a drowned man, and he knows the blight is gone. Not defeated, not conquered, but endured until its natural death takes it. Someday, in the way of all plagues, it will return, but for now it is sleeping. It is dreaming. This is not the need, and never was. The unbroken dream goes on. And more than that, it deepens.

  Like the ripple, its movement is in all directions at once. All history remains before us, the cunning man says. The dream is unmoored in time now. What has been and what will be reach around like arms around the trunk of a great tree, and their fingers interlace. He dreams that he is dreaming, and that he will wake in his rooms. His child is being born, and fear has exhausted him, but the doors will open and the cunning man and the physician and the midwife will wake him with word of the birth. He cannot stay. Redwater’s forces are almost at Hawthor, and if his enemy takes the Bloody Bridge all that he has fought for will fail. He knows that he should not be here, and it gives the dream a sense of terrible urgency.

  The woman’s cries are not of pain, but of purpose. The pain is there as well, but secondary. She is in a place of extremes, a place between being and not being, and her work is vital and profound and punishing. He loves her more than his body can contain. His teeth grind against each other, but he cannot wake. He cannot help her.

  There is a desperate choking sound, an unfamiliar cough, a thin wire of a wail as much animal as human, and he weeps. The worst is past. He holds the girl wrapped in soft cloth, looks into eyes that have not yet decided what color they will be. “I will make this world deserve you,” he says. He remembers having said, as if it were a thing he had done years ago. And then it is a different baby he is holding, black-eyed with dark lips pulled back in a wide, joyful grin. For a moment, the babe’s swimming gaze seems to find him and it shrieks with delight before it looks away again.

  “It seems I have a son,” his daughter says. Her voice is a tissue of exhaustion and satisfaction.

  “We have a son?” a man’s odd, musical voice says. He sits at her side. His horns are curved back, and not so large as his father’s. His black eyes are wide with wonder.

  “Well,” the High Queen says, “You likely have a son, but it’s certain that I do.”

  The horned man’s expression flickers through confusion, to comprehension, to indignation, and then bursts forth in laughter. “You are a wicked, wicked woman,” the queen’s consort says, as he cradles her hand to his breast. The love in his black eyes is unmistakable. She chuckles with him, kisses his knuckle, lays back spent from her efforts. Her face is wide from the months of carrying her boy, and her hair is dark with sweat, and she is joyful. The mother of her family and of the land, the center of her people and her kingdom.

  The High King looks into his arms, and she is red-faced, stunned, and confused. She is barely formed, helpless, and so vulnerable a chill might take her away. Curled into herself, she fits in his two hands together. The wars must end. Redwater is coming to Hawthor, and he must be stopped. If she is to live in a world that is not rocked by constant battle, Redwater must be defeated. And so, the High King dreams that he will be. For her.

  And in the meadow, King Tennan of Redwater bends his knee to the new High Queen. No acrid stench of pitch competes with the wildflowers’ perfume. The cunning man in his bright, celebratory robe capers and laughs and spills wisdom in jokes too subtle to fully comprehend. In her young face there is the echo of the babe that has gone before and a promise of the woman still to come. She leans forward, touches the weeping Redwater’s shoulder. When he is needed, he shall rise.

  In the street, men such as he has known mix with the new black-eyed, horned strangers. Unfamiliar dishes share the plate with the foods that once passed his lips. Around the winter bonfires, strange and musical voices rise with the smoke. They who never knew him sing songs he does not know, and also they sing of the High King who once brought peace. They sing of how he shall rise again in some coming age when he is needed. No one sings of the Bloody Bridge or of making peace with Holt, and the man they sing of seems less and less like him.

  He dreams of himself in the sepulcher. No rot has touched him, but his skin is drowned in dust. The great blade Justice has rusted away to nothing. His fingers cup the shape of a hilt that has fallen away from between them. The world has moved on. His daughter has moved on. As she should.

  The High King is not dead but dreaming. He dreams of his daughter and the dangers that grow from being his child. From being any man’s child.

  He dreams of an age that knew him. When he was not only loved, but also needed. He dreams that when she needs him again, he will rise, and he dreams that she will need him again.

  He dreams, and the dreams go on forever.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Daniel Abraham (www.danielabraham.com)was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, earned a biology degree from the University of New Mexico, and spent ten years working in tec
h support. He sold his first short story in 1996, and followed it with six novels, including fantasy series The Long Price Quartet, SF novel Hunter’s Run (co-written with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois), the Black Sun’s Daughter dark fantasy series (as M. L. N. Hanover), the Dagger and the Coin fantasy series, the Expanse space opera series (as James S.A. Corey, co-written with Ty Franck), which included Hugo Award nominee Leviathan’s Wake, and more than twenty short stories, including International Horror Guild Award-winner ‘Flat Diane’, Hugo and World Fantasy award nominee ‘The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics.’ Upcoming are new solo fantasy novel The Tyrant’s Law and James S.A. Corey space opera Abaddon’s Gate.

  Saladin Ahmed (www.saladinahmed.com) was born in Detroit and raised in a working-class, Arab American enclave in Dearborn, MI. His short stories have been nominated for the Nebula and Campbell awards, and have appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy and numerous other magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, as well as being translated into five foreign languages. His first novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon, was published in 2012 to wide acclaim, earning starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. Saladin lives near Detroit with his wife and twin children.

  Elizabeth Bear (www.elizabethbear.com) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She divides her time between Massachusetts, where she lives with a Giant Ridiculous Dog in a town so small it doesn’t even have its own Dunkin Donuts, and western Wisconsin, the home of her partner, Scott Lynch. Her first short fiction appeared in 1996, and was followed after a nearly decade-long gap by fifteen novels, two short story collections, and more than fifty short stories. Her most recent books are Norse fantasy The Tempering of Men (with Sarah Monette) and an Asian-inspired fantasy, Range of Ghosts, and short story collection, Shoggoths in Bloom. Bear’s Jenny Casey trilogy won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. Her stories ‘Tideline’ and ‘Shoggoths in Bloom’ won the Hugo, while ‘Tideline’ also won the Sturgeon award.

  Trudi Canavan (www.trudicanavan.com) lives in Melbourne, Australia. She has been making up stories about people and places that don’t exist for as long as she can remember. While working as a freelance illustrator and designer she wrote the bestselling Black Magician trilogy, which was published in 2001-3 and was named an ‘Evergreen’ by The Bookseller in 2010. The Magician’s Apprentice, a prequel to the trilogy, won the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2009 and the final of the sequel trilogy, The Traitor Queen, reached #1 on the UK Times Hardback bestseller list in 2011.

  Glen Cook grew up in northern California and served in the U.S. Navy with the 3rd Marine Recon Battalion, an experience that fundamentally affected his later work. Cook then attended the University of Missouri and the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. His first novel in the Dread Empire series, Silverheels, appeared in 1971 and was followed quickly by a broad range of fantasy and science fiction novels, including the humorous fantasy Garrett PI series and others. His most important work, though, is the gritty Black Company fantasy series that follows an elite mercenary unit over several decades, and which brought a whole new perspective to fantasy. Cook is currently retired, and lives in St. Louis, Missouri where he writes full-time.

  Kate Elliott (www.kateelliott.com) has been writing stories since she was nine years old, which has led her to believe either that she is a little crazy or that writing, like breathing, keeps her alive. Her most recent series is the Spiritwalker trilogy(Cold Magic, Cold Fire, Cold Steel), an Afro-Celtic post-Roman alternate-19th-century Regency icepunk mashup with airships, Phoenician spies, the intelligent descendents of troodons, and revolution. Her previous series are the Crossroads trilogy, The Crown of Stars septology, and the Novels of the Jaran. She likes to play sports more than she likes to watch them; right now, her sport of choice is outrigger canoe paddling. Her spouse has a much more interesting job than she does, with the added benefit that they had to move to Hawaii for his work. Thus, the outrigger canoes. They also have a schnauzer (aka The Schnazghul).

  Jeffrey Ford (jeffford2010.livejournal.com) is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His short fiction has been collected in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, and Crackpot Palace. Ford’s fiction has been translated into over 20 languages and is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and the Grand Prix de l’imaginaire.

  Ellen Klages (www.ellenklages.com) is the author of two acclaimed YA novels: The Green Glass Sea, which won the Scott O’Dell Award, the New Mexico Book Award, and the Lopez Award; and White Sands, Red Menace, which won the California and New Mexico Book Awards. Her short stories, which have been collected in World Fantasy Award nominated collection Portable Childhoods, have been have been translated into Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, and Swedish and have been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and Campbell awards. Her story, ‘Basement Magic,’ won a Nebula in 2005. She lives in San Francisco, in a small house full of strange and wondrous things.

  Ellen Kushner (www.ellenkushner.com) first novel, Swordspoint, introduced readers to the city to which she has since returned in The Privilege of the Sword (a Locus Award winner and Nebula nominee), The Fall of the Kings (written with Delia Sherman), and a handful of related short stories, most recently ‘The Duke of Riverside’ in Ellen Datlow’s Naked Cities. Kushner’s own narration of her Riverside novels has just been released by Neil Gaiman Presents for Audible.com. Kushner’s novel Thomas the Rhymer won the Mythopoeic and World Fantasy Awards. With Holly Black, she co-edited Welcome to Bordertown, a revival of the original urban fantasy shared world series created by Terri Windling. A co-founder of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, Ellen Kushner is also the longtime host of the public radio show Sound & Spirit, and a popular public speaker. She lives in New York City, and travels a lot.

  Scott Lynch (www.scottlynch.us) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1978 and is the author of the Gentleman Bastard sequence of fantasy novels, beginning with The Lies of Locke Lamora. He currently lives in Wisconsin, where he has served as a volunteer firefighter since 2005. He spends several months of the year in Massachusetts with his partner, fellow SF/F writer Elizabeth Bear.

  K.J. Parker (www.kjparker.net) was born long ago and far away, worked as a coin dealer, a dogsbody in an auction house and a lawyer, and has so far published thirteen novels (the Fencer, Scavenger and Engineer trilogies, and standalone novels The Company, The Folding Knife, The Hammer, and Sharps), three novellas (‘Purple And Black’ , ‘Blue And Gold’ and ‘A Small Price To Pay For Birdsong’, which won the 2012 World Fantasy Award) and a gaggle of short fiction. Married to a lawyer and living in the south west of England, K.J. Parker is a mediocre stockman and forester, a barely competent carpenter, blacksmith and machinist, a two-left-footed fencer, lackluster archer, utility-grade armorer, accomplished textile worker and crack shot. K.J. Parker is not K.J. Parker’s real name. However, if K.J. Parker were to tell you K.J. Parker’s real name, it wouldn’t mean anything to you.

  Robert V S Redick (www.robertvsredick.com) studied English and Russian, before earning a Master’s in tropical conservation and development. He has traveled extensively in Latin America, and has written a study of park ranger training and management practices. He has also worked as a baker, translator, horse handler, lab technician, and stage critic for the Portland Phoenix and Valley Advocate. His first novel, Conquistadors, is set in 1970s Argentina, is unpublished, but was a finalist for the 2002 AWP/Thomas Dunne Novel Award. His first published novel, The Red Wolf Conspiracy, launched the Chathrand Voyage series of seafaring epic fantasies, which continued with The Rats and the Ruling Sea, The River of Shadows, and The Night of the Swarm. Redick lives in western Massachusetts with his part
ner Kiran Asher.

  Ysabeau S. Wilce’s (www.yswilce.com) first story, ‘Metal More Attractive’, was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2004. Like all of her work to date, it was set in Alta Califa, an alternate California, and is heavily influenced by her military history studies. A second story, ‘The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror’, appeared in 2005 and ‘The Lineaments of Gratified Desire’ appeared in 2006. Wilce’s first novel, a young adult fantasy with a preposterously long title, Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, was published to considerable acclaim in 2007, and was followed by sequels Flora’s Dare and Flora’s Fury. She currently lives with her family and a large number of well-folded towels in Northern California.

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