The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “Our Queen is much abraded of late with worries for the absent Antler Crown. Uneasy is her claim to the throne so long as she rules bare of it. It is the icon of authority that will unite the Gentry divisions beneath her banner.”

  “Perhaps, sibling,” said Analise’s statue softly, “I may bring her word of its whereabouts. For I have met the Queen in Exile in the world where I was born. Before I crossed into the Valwode, it is possible Nyx the Nightwalker whispered her secret in my ear.”

  Analise swallowed hard, hoping the statue hadn’t said too much already. But the plan was proceeding apace, and at the moment she was outnumbered one hundred to one. Or two, if she counted her statue. She was not sure she could—or should. So she held her tongue, and allowed herself to be collected and taken to the place where Gideon was.

  Gideon came out of his fugue to see the door to his cell opening, and the small space he inhabited with the never-ending mountain of clay filled with the white shapes of his hideous creations. He realized that both his hands were bleeding freely, that he was terribly thirsty and sore everywhere. His head grew light, or he noticed it had been light all along. Barely attached. Then he fainted.

  When he woke, she was there.

  She was there, and she was tipping water down his throat.

  She was there, wearing his brown wool coat that didn’t fit her. With a ratty old backpack half on, half off her shoulder. With her hair like a bonfire where he’d burn all his regrets. And her hazel eyes so clear and grave, staring down at him.

  She was there. Here. In his cell. With his blood all over her. And the door locked behind her. No way out. No way back. In danger of her life. Or worse.

  Everything he feared.

  Gideon did not have the strength to roll off her lap. He scowled instead and summoned his most blighting drawl, and watched the chill effect of it burn across her concern like acid.

  “Saint Analise of the Forsaken. Have you come to save me?”

  “I’m not a saint, Gideon!” Analise snapped. Hurriedly she shucked off her backpack to rummage through it. “Rescuing you—if we don’t both die in the process—is hardly worthy of canonization. It might be the opposite. If I were religious, the Holy See at Winterbane would excommunicate me on the grounds that I didn’t just leave you to die like any reasonable person would do.”

  “By all means, Ana, abandon me here and go take orders. I would not stand between you and your gods.”

  She met his gaze for a second and flashed him a crooked smile. “I’m already here, you jackass. Not just for you. And since I’m here, I might as well rescue you while I’m at it.”

  She’d found what she’d been searching for at the bottom of her backpack. Her fountain pen. Gideon recognized it by its distinctive dark blue marbling and the smart accents of gold. It was a Cobalt Rapier, top of the line. A going-away gift from her mother. Analise would live on canned soup and crackers before buying cheap ink for that pen. She drafted all her early manuscripts with it. Gideon watched her unscrew the cap, take his unresisting arm in hers, and begin scribbling on his skin. She started at his right shoulder and wrote until she reached the base of his wrist, then took up the second line at his shoulder again. The nib of her pen tickled his skin. His cold fingers throbbed dully, crusted with clay and old blood.

  But her words refused to actualize into legible sentences for him. Though it was her usual bold black chicken scratch, which Gideon had spent months and not inconsiderable effort learning how to decode, those long strings of letters remained as remote and indecipherable as sacred runes. Gideon blinked and squinted until he could no longer bear his blurred vision, and bit out, “Coming here was the stupid act of a lovesick idiot. Deep Gods, you really are a glutton for punishment, Miss Field. How many worlds must I traverse until the message penetrates your troglodytic peasant skull? I don’t want you. Go back to Seafall and forget about me.”

  “Listen, you.” Analise jabbed the nib of her pen at Gideon’s nose until his eyes crossed.

  “All right. You want me to confess, Gideon? I confess. For about maybe five minutes of the entire year I’m hopelessly in love with you. Usually when you’re asleep. I can’t help it. It’s possible that you are correct, and I have somehow come to savor the pain and humiliation you inflict on me in some secret, degenerate chamber of my innermost soul. But most of the time, Gideon, I can’t stand you. And then,” she sat back a little to contemplate him, and her voice dropped to a whisper, “there are those moments between extremes when I consider you a friend. That’s at my most basic stratum of friendship, mind, which Mr. Wolfe who lives down the road from my family back in Feisty Wold once defined for me. He was a soldier in the Orchid Wars, and he told me that a friend is someone who will share the last sip of water from his canteen, and who will guard your back when you sleep. Despite your efforts to disguise this, Gideon, I’m pretty sure you’d do as much for me. That’s why I’m here in your foxhole, you jackass. I’m fighting at your side whether you like it or not. Because we’re friends. And this is what friends do in the darkness. Now hold still. Eat this sandwich. And shut up, I’m working.”

  Gideon looked away from her face before he lost himself in the promise of her freckles. He chewed the sticky peanut butter and apricot-slathered bread she forced on him and stared stonily at the walls of his cell, which held not an iota of interest. So he turned his head again and watched her finish his right arm, flinging it from her lap to begin on his left. Slowly, the scribbles resolved into words.

  “They say the great city of Seafall rose up from the waves one Gentry Moon, and settled atop the cliffs like a leviathan sunning itself on the shore. They say the stones comprising its towers and walls and fortresses were quarried from mountains that stand at the bottom of ocean trenches, and that they always appear glistening and wet, even in days of drought and dust. But this city I speak of was the first Seafall. This Seafall was long ago sacked by foreign marauders, burned, torn down, and buried beneath all the Seafalls that came after it. But a few of those most ancient buildings still stand, if you know where to look . . . ”

  It was the first paragraph of Analise’s first novel, Seafall Rising. Gideon had read her book so many times he sometimes recited it while he worked. He had always loved it—from the first glance at her first draft. Kitjay Sinjez of Lyrebird Publishing, for all her apparent flightiness and excessive use of italics in spoken conversation, was as fine an editor as they come, and Analise’s seminal first novel had sharpened and shone under her keen guidance.

  He never told her that, of course. She still thought he’d as lief use it for toilet paper than finish the first chapter.

  Ignoring him still, Analise tore his tattered sleeve from his shoulder in her haste to get at his flesh. She scribbled feverishly, the way she did when she cuddled up in her window seat, gripped by the urgency of some new narrative. He wished he might be the canvas she always worked upon, and she the clay he shaped to flickering life beneath his hands. Forcing his gaze away from her again, he said roughly, “Perhaps you haven’t noticed my circumstances, but I don’t keep a fresh supply of linen in this particular prison cell. This is my only shirt. What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Protecting you, jackass.”

  He twitched his arm from her grip. “One would think that a writer even of such minor note as yourself would find more variety in her expletives.”

  “Try poetic repetition, you jackass,” Analise retorted. She pulled his arm back into her lap and pressed the nib of her Cobalt Rapier into his skin a bit more viciously than before. “Besides, I left my thesaurus back in our garret. Which I’m very much hoping I’ll get to see again when this all is over. To that end—have another sandwich and hush. I’m almost finished.”

  “Not everyone in the world wants to be as fashionably chubby as you, Miss Field.”

  She stuffed a sandwich into his mouth and finished his left arm. He read on, helplessly.

  “You would not think that a single garret room, with the no
t very enlivening view of a brick wall, an alleyway, and the neighbors’ crisscrossing laundry lines, would in fact be itself the beating heart of such a fabled city as Seafall. But from the first night I slept there, I could hear the city breathing. There, and nowhere else. And I knew I had come home . . . ”

  He could not remember the first night she slept in the garret opposite his. She in no way registered to him until the day he woke up in her lap with her soup in his mouth. Yet at that moment, he knew that he, too, had come home.

  Gideon closed his eyes, and steeled himself to lie.

  Cut off so abruptly from his intent stare, Analise knew two things.

  One. Gideon Alderwood had been watching her with his whole body. It was the formidable, often harrowing, attention no one else in the world paid her, and in the moment he released her from it, she realized Gideon had always watched her like that. That from the first time she had interfered with his swoon, and he had opened the lightning strike of his black eyes upon her, that same look had been right there, comprehending everything that meant her, that meant Analise Field, and promising to forget nothing.

  Two. He was about to lie.

  Sitting up and scooting back to lean against the wall, bleeding hands hanging loosely over his knees, he murmured wearily, “You overestimate my estimation of you, Miss Field. We were never friends.”

  Even knowing he lied didn’t prevent the double pinch of snakebite at her heart.

  “I was never yours perhaps,” she replied quietly, “But you are mine. The point is, Gideon, if friendship means passing my canteen over to you before the battle begins, this is my last drop of water. If we live through this—if we make it back to Seafall—I’m going home. You win.”

  “Why wait? Go now!”

  Knowing he had just been lying made Analise hear the desperate truth in his voice. He was trying to save her. Maybe he always had been.

  The bedrock beneath all her assumptions about him crumbled beneath her feet. She did not know if what was beneath buoyed her up into angelic altitudes or sucked her deeper into a morass she was in no way prepared to deal with. She looked at him in astonishment and blurted, “Now who’s the lovesick idiot?”

  His eyes flashed open in alarm, but almost immediately began to narrow. Before he could say a word, the bar on their prison door rattled. Analise took him by his lacerated wrists and hauled him to his feet.

  “Open your mouth,” she said, plunging her hand back into her backpack.

  “No more sandwiches, Ana.”

  “Do as I say.”

  For the second time in under a minute, Gideon astonished her. He obeyed.

  Analise shook open the silver box at the bottom of her bag. From it came flashing and tumbling and flickering a star the approximate size and shape of a mustard seed. It burned a tiny hole in her hand where it touched her flesh. This blazing blue-white thing she took between her forefinger and thumb, placed it under Gideon’s tongue, and shut his mouth over it. His eyes widened in pain, but he pressed his lips tightly together.

  “Not a single word till I say,” she hissed.

  Gideon nodded. She turned to face the palely glowing guards who flanked the threshold in mandatory invitation, but when she would have stepped in front of him, he grabbed her hand and held it fast. She squeezed back with the grimness of a swimmer who has only just discerned that the person she had hoped to rescue from drowning was probably going to pull her under with him.

  But there was no letting go. Not for her. Not now.

  Had he dreamt that with Analise at his side, Loreila the Winter-Touched would somehow diminish, become a fragment of the fearful monster that loomed forever tremendous in his shadow-shot mind? Had he thought he would be able to meet those gold-washed eyes at last, and stand without trembling or bowing, armed with Analise’s writing all up and down his arms, her hand as hard as stone in his, as though he had carved her himself?

  No, he hadn’t dared dream that.

  And just as well, for no sooner were they marched before Loreila’s silver throne, which seemed to be constructed all of razors and scythes and crescent moons, than he stumbled and went down before her, hiding his head between his knees, one arm bent up and back, limp in Analise’s stolid grip. Every bone in his body felt brittle to the point of fracture. His skin wanted to curl away in strips from the massive bruise of his musculature. And worse, worse was the infinitesimal thing in his mouth that burned and burned, like it wanted to eat a hole right through him, plummet through the soft tissues and jaw bone and the skin of his throat to sparkle bloodily on the milky stones of the throne room.

  In Day Breakers, this room was the Great Hall, where Desdemona had hosted her Gentry Moon Masquerade and taken out this year’s goblin tithe in master perfumers. In Dark Breakers, what had been tiled, pillared, and pilastered in limestone was carved instead from slabs of moonstone with the moonlight caught in it yet. Gideon could not see his own shadow for the shimmering. He wondered if this was because he was just a shadow himself.

  All around him he heard the vibrant hum of the Gentry court. There were more of them here today than had been at Desdemona’s masquerade, all of them frivolous and perilous and arrayed like butterflies that might at any moment snap you up with the jaws of crocodiles. Among them, like cold columns of silence, the statues. Loreila’s soldiers. The other Gentry gave them wide berth, as assiduous in avoiding gazing at them directly as Gideon was in trying to avoid her.

  But she came upon him anyway. A chill tightened the skin around his skull as he sensed Loreila’s approach. The ragged yellow hem of her dress brushed his ear. Even through his own rankness he could smell her, a scent as faint as a field of wildflowers frozen in a flash of frost. Then her hem twitched back. A creature of snowflake coming face-to-face with a creature of sunlight and shrinking from it.

  Gideon’s fear did not fall away. If anything, he grew colder.

  “What is the writing on his arms?” Loreila asked, the sound of ice cracking.

  His shoulders knotted to hear Analise reply, as if making dinner conversation, “Oh, that? That’s from my book. Gideon likes to use it as toilet paper. Is there any greater punishment to someone of taste and refinement than to cover them in the equivalent of ass wipes?”

  Loreila laughed, but the sound was angry. She retreated a few steps from the inked-on text, and turned from it as though it scalded her eyes. When she was too far from him to lash out, Gideon lifted his head again and watched. Now her statues flanked her. She, nestled amongst them, was impervious to the deadly thrall that held the rest of the Gentry court in check. The statues were, after all, quickened by her magic.

  “Why should you wish to punish him, child?”

  “Because he’s Gideon Alderwood,” Analise sighed. She let his hand fall and he cradled it close to his body, where it became part of the general throbbing.

  “You do not bear writing on your arms. Do you come here warded by greater powers than your words?”

  “I didn’t think I needed warding, Your Majesty,” Analise replied. “I came only to bring you back your property. That beautiful statue Gideon made. He likes to smash them, you know, and I just couldn’t bear it. Does that merit punishment in your eyes? I’d hoped you’d be pleased.”

  “More than you know.” That white-spackled hand stretched up and back like a swaying branch to stroke the statue standing closest behind her. Gideon’s gaze dropped again. He could not look that statue in the face. It was the last one he had made in their Seafall garret. The one Ana had stolen. The weight of his guilt bent his head.

  “Execute him,” whispered Loreila the Winter-Touched. “There is nothing more to be got out of him.”

  Analise cried out as the statue she had saved stepped forward. It set its cold marble foot against Gideon’s shoulder and kicked him out of his curl and onto his back, exposing his belly and throat. Gideon’s vision filled with one thing and one thing only: the monster Analise had rescued, tall and cold as a mountain peak, a new length of purple s
ilk and thread of gold draped about its pure nakedness. Its eyes were like the wings of beetles. Its mouth was perfect, and perfectly unforgiving. That face held Gideon in thrall. A single thought crystalized out of the soup of fevered fragments, and it was, “How could my hands have brought forth anything so beautiful?”

  The statue raised its fist. A single blow, Gideon knew, would fall like a sledgehammer and shatter the bones of his skull. It was no more than he expected. Or deserved. Indeed he hoped for it.

  And then Analise interfered.

  Again.

  She threw herself upon him and took his face in her hands.

  “You don’t get to die until I give you leave, you bastard,” she snarled, and kissed him.

  Gideon felt the starlight leave his mouth.

  The statue lifted Analise off of him. He was afraid it would hurl her to floor, or pass her off to its siblings to be torn limb from limb at Her Majesty’s pleasure. He tried to scramble to his feet, but slipped in his own blood and crashed down, able only to watch as the statue turned Analise in its arms until she faced it. To his utter shock, the statue was smiling at her. Gideon knew that smile, for he had felt it on his own face whenever he woke from a fever dream to find Analise there with him.

  Analise responded to the statue’s smile much as she always had to his. With both hands she reached to stroke its face, her palms cupping the curves, her fingers following the lines, and Gideon could not see her expression, only the back of her head, but even the red rats’ nests of her tangled hair, even the grime on her neck, and the determined set of her shoulder blades, bespoke her awesome tenderness.

  She bent her head and kissed the statue where it smiled. Gideon’s bleeding hands clenched.

  The cool white column of the statue’s throat convulsed, as it swallowed the seed of the star that Analise had breathed into its mouth.