by Jay Lake
Perhaps it was the hand of the Lily Goddess that covered us. She has never told me, and much has happened since to draw a veil over the moment.
We staggered into an area of fewer cook fires and more scrub. Both of us knew we must be full away from the bandit train before the hue and cry went up. I did not imagine we would live long, but I was willing to run as far as my weakened body would carry me.
In time, we found a stream. I dropped to my knees on round-stoned gravel to drink. The Dancing Mistress knelt beside me, looking as much like a hunting cat as I had ever seen her.
“Can you walk amid these wet rocks?” she asked.
“Of course-” I stopped. There was no of course about it. That I even still moved was amazing. Losing my footing in the dark seemed highly likely. “My apologies. I do not know.”
“It will help your trail. They will not be so fast following you.”
“Can you find me a good-sized stick?” I was ashamed to ask it, me who could leap from rooftop to rooftop like a bat on the wing. Still, such a thing might save my life.
She slipped away into the darkness. I could see lights swarming far behind us. Panic? Or the torches of an army setting out on the hunt?
I sat with my boots in the running stream and wondered how I might survive.
Though it seemed like an eternity, only a few minutes passed before the Dancing Mistress returned. She had a solid stick in one hand. A rabbit twitched broken-backed in the other.
Then it dawned on me she had said your trail. Not our trail. “Where are you going?”
“Higher into the hills.” She handed me the stick and the rabbit. “It… it seems to me we must not be together. Whatever Federo wanted, he thought he could get from the intersection of the two of us. Moreover, I must carry word of all this to whatever is left of my people.”
I wanted to cry. I wanted to kill her. I wanted to beg her to stay. I wanted to lie down in the creek and let the water race to take my life before the pursuing army caught me.
But I did none of those things. Instead, I said, “I will miss you.”
The Dancing Mistress leaned close and kissed me, then passed her rough tongue across my face. “Follow the water. It will take you to the sea, and the city there. I will make a trail that may keep them after me awhile before they discover their error.”
Then, before I could entrap her with either logic or love, she loped off into the darkness. I almost pitied any one of the enemy who met her this night, with her blood on the boil and god-killing still fresh on her fingertips.
This was what the Lily Goddess had feared. I had helped unleash a deicide, for the Dancing Mistress’ love of me. Better that we had never set out at all.
Distant shouting reminded me I must be moving. As I clambered slowly down the creek, the surf was joined by the rolling thunder of a storm. I looked to see a hilltop behind me crowned with jagged streams of lightning.
So we had not killed him. Things would never be so easy.
For hours I crept. Twice I slipped and fell, the second time striking my kneecap so hard, I feared it broken. A wounded ass could be managed, at least for a while, but losing my knee would have been death.
The joint held, though. I kept going. Torches swarmed through the darkness behind me. Some passed in the distance to my left. They followed the Dancing Mistress. Watching that, I slipped again. This time I slid down a chute and over a drop into the darkness of empty air.
Water smacked me in the face as the irony of this death overwhelmed me. Losing my grip on my stick, I went down into cold. Twisting in the depths, I could not find the surface. No light guided me, though the burning pressure in my lungs urged me on. I flailed until my foot met something. There I kicked off hard.
Air came to me just as I finally lost control. So did my stick, which slapped me on the head to remind me how foolish I had been. The wood was thick and fairly light, and would float. For a very long while, I let it do the work while we spun in the pool at the bottom of the little falls.
No irony. Just more pain.
In time, I dragged myself over a shallow bar and into the current of the Greenbriar River. Once again, I let the stick do most of the work. The flow carried me away into the night, only sometimes forcing me to pause and crawl over rocks or sand or logs.
Somehow I managed not to further strike my head or knees.
Even more strangely, I seemed to sleep a bit. I could still see the new moon, her fingernail a little wider this night. Lilies floated on the water with me. Each one opened to show me a face, then closed again. Some were Mothers of the Lily Temple, others Mistresses of the Factor’s house. A few I did not recognize.
Then I was drawn through another race of the current. Without taking my life, it spat me out into a much wider pool, where I was spun awhile until fetching up against the hull of a boat.
A small girl leaned over, then clicked her tongue. “Mama,” she said, “there is a woman in the water.”
I heard a muffled voice answer her.
“No, I think she is dead.”
Opening my mouth, I tried to tell the child I was not dead. Not yet. The silly fool screamed to see my lips move, and fled the rail.
Her mother was there a moment later with a boat hook.
“I am not dead,” I said, or tried to. Mostly, I gasped.
“Corinthia Anastasia,” she shouted, “you are an idiot!”
Something darker than sleep finally claimed me as they pulled me aboard.
I woke with the sense that a great deal of time had passed. How much I could not say.
Corinthia Anastasia sat on a little chair eating fish from a bowl and kicking her heels. The odor made my stomach lurch. I watched the girl a moment. Pale curly hair, pale eyes, pale skin. A normal child living in the company of her family.
I wondered what that felt like.
Around me was the main room of a cottage. A decent-sized fireplace, two wall beds just beyond that. I could see a few pots in the rafters, and a loft as well. Clean enough, but there was little wealth here.
The girl saw me turn my head. “Awake this time?”
“Yes.” I tried to puzzle out her question. “Have I been awake before?”
“No.” She chewed slowly. “You been talking a lot in your sleep. Some furrin speak.”
“I hope I did not bother you.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t care. Some might say you was a witch, but Mama, she’s too smart for that.”
“Good.” I tried to ignore the fish. My stomach was a clenched fist. It seemed unlikely to accept even a sip of juice right now-yet, strangely, I was hungry.
“You are the ugliest girl I ever seen,” Corinthia Anastasia offered up.
I had to laugh at that, or try to. “You’ll go far in life.” Then I realized I was lying on my back. My buttocks mostly itched. As opposed to, say, pain.
How long have I been out?
What had become of the Dancing Mistress? Choybalsan? His army?
I tried to get up, but could not. My limbs had no strength. “Where is your mother? I need news of the world, and must find my way to Copper Downs.”
“She says I am to tell you the world is still here, if’n you ask.”
Panic peaked in my voice. “What about Copper Downs?”
“Still there, too, I guess.” She grinned around her wooden spoon. “We ain’t.”
Arguing with her was not worth the trouble.
Eventually her mother returned. The woman was a larger version of her daughter, with filled-out curves and sun-darkened skin, wearing an orange dress of some coarse weave. Big farmer’s boots stuck out below the hem. Under other circumstances, I might have found her attractive.
“The dock at Briarpool has been burned,” she announced. “My boat with it. It was you that lot of swordspointers was after.”
“Most likely,” I said politely. “My apologies.”
“They set fire to enough else, no surprise.” Her tone was brusque, but regret tinged her voic
e. She sat on the little bed at about my waist and reached out to stroke my hair. When she spoke again, her voice was soft. “You’ve been badly used time and again, my sweet.”
“Some was my own doing.”
“You might have held the knife in your hand, but I wager others drove you to it.”
“You could say that,” I admitted.
“Foreign girl,” she said. “From across some sea or another. I know what those out of the north look like, and you’re not one of us. But you talk as if you just stepped from a doorway on Whitetop Street.”
This woman had the authority of a temple Mother, but without the edges. I felt an irrational urge to trust her. “Someone in Copper Downs had the raising of me.”
“You ever know any teaching Mistresses?” Her voice was even softer.
The question startled me. “Y-yes.”
“I thought you might have that mark.” Turning to the girl, she said, “Go out and find me some windfall nuts.”
Corinthia Anastasia set the bowl of fish down and slowly stood up.
“And take your time about it!”
“Yes, Mama.”
Moments later, we were alone.
“I was trained up in the Peach Court,” she told me. “Perhaps twenty years before your time.” She touched her own belly where it sloped out a bit beneath her breasts. “I was a very pretty girl. You have to be, to find yourself there, but when my monthly bleeding came, my body wanted to put on more weight than I could work off, no matter how they pushed me. In time, the Factor cut his losses and sold me to a manor well outside the city. Wouldn’t do to have the world know they’d grown themselves a chunky girl.”
I would have described her as maternal, but I knew that in the young woman she had been then, maternal was not the desired impression. “Here you are.”
“Here I am. And I’m lucky they didn’t ship me somewhere I’d never return from.”
What happened at the manor? I wanted to ask, but this was her story. She would tell it as she saw fit. Or not. “I’ve been on a ship or two.”
“Of course you have.” She smoothed the covers over me. “You’ve been hurt bad. I’ve put what fluid in you I could, and dressed your wounds.”
Wrapped in blankets, I hadn’t thought how I was clothed. A simple cotton gown, from the feel of it. “Thank you.”
“An army roams out there. Before, they were troublesome. Now they’re angry.”
“I didn’t manage to kill their god.”
A smile quirked her face. “That you even tried says much.”
“Th-thank you.” Catching her hand, I clasped it close. “I must get back to Copper Downs. I know Choybalsan’s secret, or part of it.” And he knows some secret of mine that I do not. Within whose heart had the Lily Goddess truly seen the danger?
It all made sense, if I believed the first principles. Federo had captured the Duke’s magic. Or quite possibly the other way around. Perhaps the original conspiracy had contained a layer deeper than I’d ever known. Whatever, however, he was missing something. I was a part of it, key for a lock he hadn’t yet found, rooted in the pardines from whom the power had originally been stolen. Which was why Choybalsan had been killing them indiscriminately.
In hopes they held the missing piece.
I knew his secret. More to the point, I knew he could be fought. If not killed, at least ground down. At least, I hoped so. The boundaries in that strange territory between man and god were unclear to me.
“I can show you the road right now if you wish,” she told me. “You’re not fit to walk. There’s scouts and raiders up and down it already. The city’s even sent out a few riders.”
“Under what command?” Half a dozen major forces of guards and watchmen roamed the city, but Copper Downs had not maintained a standing army in centuries. There wasn’t really anyone to fight.
Hadn’t been, until now.
“They’re raising the regiments. Old banners dangle in empty halls all over that city from other times.”
“An army of grocer’s boys and clerks is not likely to strike fear in anyone but themselves,” I said. There was the problem, of course. How to defend the city.
Is it my problem?
“Give your body a few days.” She squeezed my hands. “At the very least, wait until you can eat decently. Even healed of your wounds, you won’t have any energy until you do.”
“Might I have soup?” I asked, suddenly feeling shy. “Without fish, if possible?”
“I will make you some.”
She rose from the bed and set an iron kettle near the fire. I let myself be eased by the bustle of her cooking and tried to think what I should do.
Go home to Selistan, of course. But I had not done what the Lily Goddess had set me to do. Choybalsan was loose, free. Whatever danger she saw had to be bound up in him. Certainly he had some tie to the coils of the Dancing Mistress’ heart. He’d all but confessed to an old love for her. Besides that, his current rampage had written fear large across her.
There had been no major theogenies in recent history that I knew of. Gods and goddesses were a conservative lot. Jealous of one another’s followers, craving prayer and sacrifice. They tended to prefer not to have new competition.
Some moved, coming with waves of migrants or travelers. Some were born, from time to time. Some died, even, of neglect or abuse or assassination. Wars among the gods were stuff of legend out of the deepest shadows of time. In many tales, such infighting was given as the reason for the fall of the titanics.
Did She fear the rising of a new god here, or did She fear one who would go to Her with sword in hand?
Federo had been a traveled man. Choybalsan knew the way to Kalimpura. And he’d known I was there, somewhere, carrying the missing fragment of his powers. I had stolen his measure of grace.
The Goddess had sent me to Copper Downs to keep him away from Kalimpura.
The only way I could go home was to end this threat. Stop the god-birth of Choybalsan, or slay him outright. Except killing a god did not seem a path back into the good graces of my own divine patron.
Thinking was giving me a headache. The woman brought me a simple corn soup with a few flecks of cress floating in it.
“Try this. If you want something with a bit more substance, I’ll bring you bread.”
“N-no. Thank you.” I sipped at it. The smell was divine, but the taste was difficult in my mouth. A few swallows, and my gut felt full to bursting, as if I’d just eaten an entire solstice goose by myself.
“You are right,” I told her. “I cannot leave yet.”
“The city will not fall today, nor tomorrow,” she answered. “They are not even trying to bring an army to the gates yet.”
“Am I safe here? Are you safe with me here?”
“Yes, yes. I am not a fool.”
“No. You have not given me your name, or asked for mine.”
She answered with humor in her voice: “Your name is not needed. There cannot be two women on the Stone Coast with your face. My name does not matter.”
I mulled that awhile, until sleep claimed me.
Awake but still weak, I had Corinthia Anastasia find me a piece of wood about the size of a good ham. “A whittling knife as well, please,” I told her.
“I ain’t allowed big knives.”
“For me.”
She went away awhile. In time, she came back with a chunk of softwood and a decent-sized blade.
I set to carving. I was bored, and still fuzzy in my thinking, and wanted to do something with my hands. Something specific.
It took me two days of working through most of the sunlit hours, but I created a crude version of Endurance’s bell. I had to twist some scraps to make the rope for the clappers that hung on each side of the sounding cup. This one did not have nearly the tone of the bell Papa’s ox had worn, but even this echo of my childhood reached into my soul and fed some hunger there.
The day after that, I was able to pull myself out of the bed and go w
alk through the orchards. Corinthia Anastasia trailed behind me, seemingly unconcerned, eating a green apple.
“I need to go to Copper Downs,” I told her again.
“South of here.”
“I know.” This child was so very irritating. “I meant I shall set out.”
“You ain’t never been no prisoner in Mama’s house.”
“Here, let me explain this a different way.” I resisted the urge to grab the girl by her curly hair and shake her. “Please tell your mother I would speak with her about my leaving very soon.”
“All right.” She grinned and tossed her half-eaten apple away. “All’s you had to do was ask.”
I was a bit weak when I returned to the cottage. Even so, I sat in one of the three chairs around the small rough-hewn table. I had spent far too much time abed. Especially given who-and what-was afoot out there.
Corinthia Anastasia’s mother returned in time. This day she wore a well-patched dress, which had once been dark green velvet. She carried a bundle with her as she entered the cottage, and deposited it before me.
“You will need these soon.”
I tugged at the folded cloth, a cheap print of trees in a reversing pattern. Inside were my blacks, repaired. “Oh.” I looked back up at her. “Thank you.”
“There was help,” she said shortly. “Some in these hills are far more interested in speeding you on your way.”
That implied there had been other options. I wondered who had been debating me, but as I did not expect an answer, I did not bother with the question. Instead I unfolded the clothing.
Not just repaired, but well repaired. Even my boots had been worked on. New soles and heels replaced what had been worn by fighting, fire, and too much time in water. I ran my fingers over the tightly sewn rents in the trousers, then looked back at Corinthia Anastasia’s mother. “My thanks to whoever did this work.”
“There are no names here.”
Except the child, but there you were. “I understand. May I stay until the morning?”
Now something in her voice opened up again. “Of course, my girl. We will eat well tonight. A feast to send you off.”
“I would prepare it for you, if you’d like.” Suddenly I found myself shy.
