by Jean Roberta
My fingers are already on the casket’s clasps. Ysoreen gives way—though does she notice I open the case with greater zeal than when I parted her lips? Does she recognize I pry and tug at it as I never did with her armor?
Recalling Areemu’s shape is simple. It’s in the material, in the core, and when I evoke that remnant the pieces slot together, clicking, singing.
In a moment she is complete, sapphire irises shut, platinum limbs corded with strength. Her loveliness does not move the Hall-Warden, whose gaze is for me alone.
“You’ll have to tell me,” I say. “I don’t read the manuscript’s language.” Practice alone allows me to control my tone; when you’ve used your voice as an instrument for this long, it is second nature to play it precisely.
“I’ll read it aloud. You’re familiar with the rite? I will be the princess’ substitute.”
The spell is no hardship either. Merely words, merely a rearranging of potential cupped within Areemu—this has never been difficult; it is the infusion of autonomy that eludes. I could always have had my daughter back a mannequin: no words but that of a parrot’s, no motion but that of routine. But with the sisters’ original formulae, their original words…
My puissance envelops Areemu’s frame, shimmering strands, cat’s cradle. Ysoreen takes Areemu’s fingertips—hesitates, before anointing each. It is more grudgingly still that she kisses Areemu’s golden lips and pours Areemu’s true name into that inanimate throat.
•
They wait for the golem to stir. According to the sisters’ instructions it will take until midday, and so Erhensa asks Ysoreen to share her bed.
She follows the sorcerer, her pulse like a wound. When she sheds her armor and not much else Erhensa crooks a lopsided smile. “You will wear the rest to bed?”
“I don’t think of you as a…a courtesan. I’m not—” That pathetic. Or that honest. A transaction with a courtesan or a refugee would have been frank.
“I do not invite you to think of me so. But don’t speak ill of paid companions, pricey ones in your marble brothels or elsewise. Some do it because they’ve no alternatives or because the laws of Scre confine them to the camps. Some do it for they want to, and that’s their choice as much as mine is to practice power, as yours is to administer the curbing of it.”
So Ysoreen takes off more until she is down to a shift. Under the sheets she lies on her side, Erhensa at her back, a fistful of sheet between them.
As the moth-lamps dim Ysoreen shuts her eyes, though she knows she will find no peace. Too many hours lie between her and dawn. Too much want lies between her pride and the ambush of Erhensa’s offer. There’s more than one bed in this house, and she could have refused.
Once, her hand—intent, accident, between—finds Erhensa’s. It is a contact so brief, brushing her knuckles, brushing the inside of her wrist. Ysoreen thinks that this will do; the lust has been sated and she can move past it, a return to the liberty of ambition, the clarity of a rise through Ormodoni ranks.
It does not do. It does not suffice.
In the dark, Erhensa’s chin against her shoulder. “Your flesh is iron. They train you to make a weapon of your body, don’t they?”
Ysoreen listens for the sounds of winter night. Hoots and howls. She evaluates the virtue of silence. “What of it?”
“I’m making a decision.”
“On what?”
“Later,” the sorcerer whispers, “when Areemu lives again.”
A terrible epiphany. This islander possesses control, a true ease of being. That is what drew Ysoreen: this thing she does not have.
They remain in the warmth of furs together long after dawn.
They hear her steps, first, and the chiming of her joints. When the door parts this is what Ysoreen sees: a wrist that gleams, a tress that glitters. The golem looks at them both, and says wonderingly, “Mother?”
Erhensa’s voice frays, the first faltering of her faultless poise.
Ysoreen makes herself absent.
•
If her daughter’s return made her weep, Erhensa has already wiped away the tears. She has changed to a layered, beaded skirt she says is of her home. “Sumalin,” she says, naming that island far to the west at last, a name that’s never appeared in documents of her past.
The golem is gone to roam the premises, bright-eyed and eager to move again.
“My mothers did not call me Erhensa,” the sorcerer says, distant. “They wove other things into my name, the aspects of Sumalin. Sand like turmeric, sea like emeralds. Girls like the sun.”
“Blinds when looked at, burns when touched?”
“I didn’t realize you had a sense of humor, Hall-Warden.” Erhensa’s gaze refocuses, here and now. “Will Ormodon not punish you for reassembling a golem, your family not shun you for wanting an immigrant spouse?”
“I was authorized to take the manuscript, and my family is…unconventional.” All too happy to accept a powerful sorcerer into their own, foreign or not. “I had no intention of throwing everything away to pursue you.”
“How determined are you on cleaving a path to the top?”
Ysoreen never mentioned that. Her skin prickles. Erhensa has read more than just her moods. “I mean to join First Command.”
“A long way from Hall-Warden.” The islander holds out her hand. “We each know where the other stands, don’t we?”
“When I’m First Command—perhaps Tactician Prime—what will you want of me, as a late wedding gift?” Ysoreen takes the hand; finds it as warm as Sumalin might be. Women like the sun.
“Passage to Sumalin. A visit or two. As wife to one of the First Command I’ll enjoy certain immunities—but not as the spouse of anyone lesser. You do not know my home, but I will tell you that it does not fear Scre.”
“Every nation fears Scre. And when I ascend so high, with you my wife, you’ll forfeit your home. You’ll be Scre truly, Sumalin no longer.”
Erhensa thumbs the warped pearls on her skirt. “I will see the shores of my birth, barred to me otherwise. That will suffice.”
Ysoreen purses a kiss over Erhensa’s knuckles, their texture to her a rough thrill. “An exchange is all we’ll ever have?”
“I cannot promise love. Not immediately. Perhaps never, perhaps slowly, perhaps before the season thaws. I believe that I’ll grow fond of you.”
“Even though this is how it begins?”
“We begin in honest negotiation. Marriages have been knotted over less, over worse.” A smile, to soften what they have, what they don’t yet have. “At my age it will not be passion like the monsoons, ardor like the waves.”
“Teach me that,” Ysoreen says against the skin of her island bride-to-be. “Teach me to master myself, and I’ll do anything for you.”
“Very well. Let us begin.”
Outside, in the summer of Erhensa’s power, a golem-daughter lifts her voice in song.
•
Contributors
M. Bennardo’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others. He is also co-editor of the Machine of Death series of anthologies. He lives in Kent, Ohio. His website is mbennardo.com. Much thanks to Noyes, Byron, Poe, Browning, Eliot, and Shakespeare for their unwilling collaboration on “The Highwayman Come Riding,” and to the compositors of various treasuries of poetry for making the original introductions.
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Susan Jane Bigelow is a writer, political columnist, and librarian. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex magazine, Lightspeed magazine’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction issue, and the Lambda Award-winning The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, among others. Her Extrahumans series of novels is being reprinted by Book Smugglers Publishing in 2016, and her Grayline Sisters series is available from Candlemark & Gleam. Susan lives in northern Connecticut with her wife and their cats.
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Sarah L. Byrne is a scientific copy editor and w
riter in London, UK. Her short speculative fiction has appeared in various publications, including Ideomancer, Daily Science Fiction and The Future Fire. Her fiction and science writing can be found at sarahbyrne.org.
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Seth Dickinson is the author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant and more than a dozen short stories. During his time in the social sciences, he worked on cocoa farming in Ghana, political rumor control, and simulations built to study racial bias in police shootings. He wrote much of the lore and flavor for Bungie Studios’ smash hit Destiny.
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Ruthanna Emrys lives in a mysterious manor house in the outskirts of Washington DC with her wife and their large, strange family. She makes home-made vanilla, obsesses about game design, gives unsolicited advice, occasionally attempts to save the world, and blogs sporadically about these things at http://ashnistrike.livejournal.com and http://twitter.com/r_emrys. Her stories have appeared in several venues including Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Analog.
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Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, but now a dual US/UK citizen. Her novels are Ammonite, Slow River, The Blue Place, Stay, Always and Hild. Her essays and short fiction appear in an assortment of academic texts and a variety of journals, including Nature, New Scientist, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Among the awards she has won are the Washington State Book Award, the Tiptree, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, the Premio Italia, and the Lambda Literary Award (six times).
Nicola is married to writer Kelley Eskridge (they live in Seattle). You can find her at nicolagriffith.com, @nicolaz, and facebook.com/nicolagriffith.
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Vivien Jackson is still waiting for her Hogwarts letter. Don’t you laugh. In the meantime, she writes, mostly fantastical or futuristic or kissing-related stories. When she isn’t writing, she’s performing a sacred duty nurturing the next generation of Whovian Browncoat Sindarin Jedi gamers, and their little dogs too. She has a degree in English, which only means she’s read gobs of stuff in that language. With her similarly geeky partner, she lives in Austin, Texas, and watches a lot of football.
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Annabeth Leong wears high heels and frequents the former haunts of H.P. Lovecraft. One month, she is a baseball fanatic, and the next she’s reading about squid. She is frequently confused about her sexuality, but enjoys searching for answers. Her work appears in more than fifty anthologies, including the twentieth-anniversary edition of Best Lesbian Erotica and Summer Love: Lesbian Stories of Holiday Romance. Her latest erotic novel is Untouched, from Sweetmeats Press. Find Annabeth online at annabetherotica.com, and on Twitter @AnnabethLeong
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Darcie Little Badger is a scientist, comic book creater, and speculative fiction writer. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Mirror Dance, and other magazines. She studies phytoplankton genetics and is earning a PhD in oceanography from Texas A&M University. Her byline, Darcie Little Badger, is an English translation of her Lipan Apache middle name, Altsese Nagoosch’idn.
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Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He also translated the Hugo-winning novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, which is the first translated novel to win that award.
Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was published by Saga Press in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in March 2016. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
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Alex Dally MacFarlane is a writer, editor and historian. When not translating from Classical Armenian or researching narrative maps in the legendary traditions of Alexander III of Macedon, Alex writes stories, found in Clarkesworld Magazine, Phantasm Japan, Solaris Rising 3, Gigantic Worlds and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014. Alex is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (2014), and in 2015 joined Sofia Samatar as co-editor of non-fiction and poetry for Interfictions Online. Follow @foxvertebrae on Twitter for more.
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Seanan McGuire is an American author, born and raised in Northern California, which she remembers as being somewhat less on fire during her childhood. There were more frogs, too. She misses the frogs a lot. She would like a frog. When not trying to avoid being on fire, Seanan writes (an average of four books per year since 2010), reads (voraciously, across multiple genres), games (mostly Pokemon and related titles; she will one day catch ’em all), and wanders into corn fields, which can be quite unnerving for the people she is with. She lives in a crumbling old farmhouse with two enormous blue cats (both Maine Coons), one alligator lizard, and a remarkable collection of comic books, horror movies, and creepy dolls. As her girlfriend once put it, “So many eyes…”
Seanan was the 2010 winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, which came with a tiara. She feels all awards should come with tiaras. Since then, she has been nominated multiple times for the Hugo Award, including one nomination for an album of original filk music, titled Wicked Girls. Seanan enjoys travel, especially when there’s a corn field or a Disney Park on the other end. She also enjoys watching way too much television. If she canceled her cable, she could probably write another three books. This is why her friends are all glad she has cable. Seanan often claims to be the vanguard of an invading race of alien plant people. We really have no good reason to doubt her.
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Melissa Moorer is an Assistant Editor at The Butter/The Toast. Her work has been published in luminous zines and journals (LCRW, The Future Fire, FLAPPERHOUSE Hot Metal Bridge, Vestal Review, The Northville Review).
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B R Sanders is a white, genderqueer writer who lives and works in Denver, CO, with their family and two cats. Outside of writing, B has worked as a research psychologist, a labor organizer and a K-12 public education data specialist.
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Stacia Seaman has edited numerous award-winning titles, and with co-editor Radclyffe has won a Lambda Literary Award, a couple of Independent Publishers Awards medals, several Golden Crown Literary Awards, and the 2010 Rainbow Award of Excellence in the Short/Novella category. Their most recent anthology is Myth & Magic: Queer Fairy Tales. She has short stories in several anthologies and also has essays in Visible: A Femmethology (Homofactus Press, 2009) and Second Person Queer (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009). She enjoys the occasional single malt and rarely says no to a game of Cards Against Humanity.
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Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Phantasm Japan, The Dark, and year’s bests. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.
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Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily-named cats: Gimli and Don Quixote. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and curates the annual Art & Words Show in Fort Worth. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or through her website: bonniejostufflebeam.com.
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Writing by Shannon Connor Winward has appeared or is forthcoming in Pseudopod, Artemis Rising, Pedestal Magazine, Gargoyle, Strange Horizons, Stupefying Stories, Spinetingler Magazine, Star*Line, Scigentasy, Flash Fiction Online, Literary Mama, PANK and the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s 2012 anthology of Rhysling Award nominees. A Semi-Finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest, Shannon was also runner-up for an emerging artist fellowship in literature by the Delaware Div
ision of the Arts in 2014 and 2015. Her debut poetry chapbook, Undoing Winter (Finishing Line Press, 2014), was nominated for an SFPA Elgin award. Shannon lives and writes in Newark, Delaware.
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And
Steve Berman resides in southern New Jersey. As an editor of queer anthologies, he has been a finalist for the Golden Crown Literary Award, Lambda Literary Award, and Shirley Jackson Award.
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Jean Roberta lives on the Canadian prairies, where the vastness of sky encourages daydreaming, and the long winters encourage indoor communication. She has taught English at the local university for over twenty-five years, and now teaches creative writing there as well. She married Mirtha, her Chilean-born partner, on Samhain weekend 2010 in the local LGBT club, the only one left on the continent that is still community-run.
The “spooky stories” Jean used to tell to her younger sisters eventually led to several student writing awards and to a first book of lesbian short stories in 1988. With encouragement from friends who wanted to see more explicit sex in her fiction, she began sending out her erotica in the 1990s.
Since then, her diverse short stories (mostly erotic) have appeared in print anthologies from both sides of the Atlantic, including eight editions of Best Lesbian Erotica, and in several sadly-missed journals and websites that have disappeared. Her eclectic story collection, Obsession, is still available, as is The Princess and the Outlaw: Tales of the Torrid Past, and The Flight of the Black Swan: A Bawdy Novella (also in audio form).
In other genres, her play, Smoke and Mirrors, was performed in a festival of queer one-act plays by the local theater company in 2004. The opinion pieces she wrote for a monthly column, Sex Is All Metaphors (based on a line in a poem by Dylan Thomas), 2008-2010, are available as an e-book by that title from Coming Together, which raises money for various good causes. (Writers donate their work.)
