by Gwen Benaway
Her eyes fall to the dagger Denya still clutches in her right hand, and the fey woman’s eyes narrow and darken, and she says, “You will not need that here, Beauty. There are no wolves in our country to bite your pretty flesh.”
Denya slips the blade into her belt and the woman smiles again.
“You must be weary,” she says and takes Denya by the hand. “Come, sit a while and revive yourself.”
The woman’s hand is soft against Denya’s calloused skin. It is cold, also. Denya shivers.
She is led to a table and made to sit upon a crimson pillow, and a glass of rosewater is poured for her, and there is a plate before her of fresh bread and sweet butter and ripe berries and cream. Denya looks at the food while the short-haired woman sits beside her and smiles. An act of encouragement. A granting of permission to indulge. Denya spreads butter onto a piece of bread, slowly, as though she were in a stupor. Something pricks at her, a thought, a memory. Broth. She has come for broth, and there is a reason for it she cannot quite recall.
“Do you have any soup?” Denya asks. Her voice is rough and weak, as though she has not spoken aloud in days.
The short-haired woman smiles. “You’ve a craving, Beauty?”
She claps her hands and a human boy brings her a bowl of soup. The broth looks thick and nourishing, and it is full of bright, tender vegetables. Denya takes up her spoon and holds it. She does not dip it to the bowl.
“You may eat, Beauty,” the short-haired woman says. “It is good and hearty, just what you need to sate your hunger.”
Denya puts the spoon down.
She says, “I am—” and falters.
The woman’s features have grown bland now, and vacant. She has lost interest, Denya thinks dimly, and feels a pang of guilt, of embarrassment, and yet at once she is also relieved.
“Eat when you wish, then,” the woman says and stands and is gone so suddenly it makes Denya’s head spin.
There are other fey at the table, but they don’t seem to notice her, or else they don’t care. Denya looks at them, and there is something cruel now about their pale faces, a sense of patient hunger she had not noticed before. One face near the far end of the table flashes brighter than the rest—a blond woman with rosy skin. She is familiar, somehow, and Denya frowns and grips the edge of the table.
And she remembers—her village, her childhood, her friends, and Bren chief among them. And then a muddling as she ages, a wrongness. She is fourteen and her father takes her to Maro’s cottage and the old woman gives her a bottle of white powder and another of blue and tells her they will change her and ease the disharmony between her body and her mind. She takes a spoonful of each every morning and grows and blossoms and is right again in her skin, and her name is Denya, now, after her grandmother, and …
Bren. Her eyes, blue and close. Kind as her kisses, her touch. They dress in white, and smiles, and there is music for them. And then blood—too much blood on the sheets, and Denya’s heart beating so fast and fearful while Maro holds her hands between Bren’s legs to catch the baby. Eliya, they name her. Eliya, their angel, their light. And Bren leaves them, leaves her daughter and her wife and goes into the forest like some lost child, and then tears, and time, and the ache of Denya’s arms as she strikes hot iron until it is a twisted lump and she throws it against the wall and weeps on the ground by her anvil. And then … and then something. Then the reason for all this, why she came here.
Eliya. Her cold cheek.
Denya’s hands are white and shaking. She lets go of the table. Bren is staring at her with a look of dim confusion, and Denya goes to her and kneels beside her wife and draws her close. Their arms wrap around each other, as urgent and awkward as when they were seventeen and first admitting their love. Holding her had felt like hunger, then. Now it is like home, like safety, all warmth and comfort and rightness.
“Bren,” Denya says as her tears fall hot upon her wife’s shoulder. She says it like a prayer. As though a name itself could be salvation.
She pulls away smiling, but Bren’s eyes are still unfocused.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Bren says, but her tone is uncertain. “We get so few visitors here.”
Denya’s breath catches in her throat. On the table in front of Bren is a half-eaten slice of bread, a cup of water with faint marks from her lips upon the glass.
“No!” Denya cries and the dread inside of her is like ice.
Bren looks confused, almost frightened. In a panic Denya leans forward to kiss her. Bren’s lips are soft and yielding, familiar, warm. Denya reaches up, cups her wife’s face in her hands while Bren leans toward her into the kiss. One of Bren’s hands comes gently to the nape of Denya’s neck, stroking her skin.
But it is wrong, somehow; Bren’s movements feel eager, but shy, hesitant. All at once it is like kissing a stranger, and Denya pulls away crying.
“What’s wrong?” Bren asks. “Did I upset you?”
The cold inside of Denya spreads further, deeper. It is in her bones, her heart, its barbed tendrils clawing at her mind. Bren’s face becomes blurry as Denya’s eyes well up with tears.
“It’s me,” she pleads. “Don’t you remember?”
“I’m sorry,” Bren says. Her voice is wounded, confused, and she shrinks back dejectedly.
Denya sobs. She leans toward her wife again, but this time she takes the strand of Eliya’s hair from the cord around her neck and presses it into Bren’s cold hand.
“Your daughter, remember?” Denya says through her tears. “She’s sick, she needs you—I need you!”
Bren stares at the lock of Eliya’s golden hair, the same shade as her own, which has grown long in the years since she left them.
She says, “Daughter?” and Denya’s heart swells, but then Bren looks up and says, “I think you must be confused. Here, won’t you drink something to calm yourself? Some wine to ease your sorrow?”
Denya cries out, an anguished, whimpering sound, and she pulls away. She stands, her body shaking and weak.
“What’s wrong?” Bren asks. “Won’t you stay with me?”
Her words tear at Denya. She longs to say yes, to stay, to wrap her arms tight around her wife and never leave. But already she can feel her mind growing dull again as the magic of this place gnaws at her memories, her purpose. If she stays, she will be lost and Eliya will die. But if she leaves now, if she turns away …
Bren’s features quiver on the edge of heartbreak. Even like this, some part of her must remember, must cry out for her beloved. A few tears spill free from her storm-grey eyes and run down her soft, perfect cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” Denya sobs. “I love you, Bren.”
Denya turns her back on her wife. She picks up the soup and walks with bleary eyes back down the path from which she’d come, and as the fairy music fades behind her she hears a new harmony caught up in its melody, the distant, familiar sound of a woman crying.
The glen is dark when Denya reaches it, and the stream has frozen and the air is cold, and as she hurries forward the first flakes of snow begin to fall about her.
The trees close around her again. She has lost her lantern somewhere—perhaps she dropped it before, or at the table—and so she stumbles through the dark and almost drops the bowl when she trips over a root and falls hard against a wide trunk. Denya leans against the tree for a moment, panting. She can hardly see. Her face has grown cold, and her head throbs, but her hands are warmed by the bowl of soup, and she steadies herself and straightens.
There comes a sound from someplace near, an infant’s wail.
Denya steps cautiously toward the crying. There is a baby on the ground in the middle of the clearing, small and naked, and just past it an old man sits on a stump with his arms folded.
“She’s hungry,” the man says. “She’s cold.”
Denya kneels before the baby.
“Where did it come from?”
“Mother left her,” the old man says with a tilt of his head. He has long grey hair and dark eyes and a thick beard of long whiskers that clump together like dried twigs.
“Poor thing,” he says pleasantly. “She’s so hungry.”
Denya swallows. The infant’s wailing claws at her, and she feels an aching in her breasts. When Eliya was born and Bren almost died, Maro gave Denya a potion that made her own breasts swell with milk, and though she had not carried her, Denya nursed her child all that first month while Bren recovered from the birth.
The ground is hard against Denya’s knees. The pain in her head has grown almost blinding from the cold and the sound of the baby’s cries.
The man says, “She needs broth. Hot broth, to warm her.” Denya’s heart skips and she looks up just as the man lunges for her neck with taloned hands.
She staggers back. The infant is gone and in its place there is only a large, smooth stone. The man stands—too tall, too thin—and lunges for her again. Denya draws her dagger and slashes wildly at his reaching arms. He shrieks like a cat and leaps back into a crouch.
Denya runs. She drops the dagger and grips the bowl in both hands, trying desperately to keep the soup from sloshing out onto the ground. She bursts out of the forest and into the empty land beyond. There is snow falling, light and soft, and already there is a fine dusting of it all across the ground. Denya stands heaving for a moment, trying to catch her breath.
There is a cracking sound behind her, and she whirls. A figure steps out from the shadows of the forest, pale and thin. Her golden hair is full of leaves, and her clothes are dirty and torn.
Denya stares. She is trembling, her breath still heavy and uncertain.
“Denya?” Bren asks and Denya cries out and runs to her wife and hugs her tight with one arm.
“Is this real?” Bren asks. Her breath is hot against Denya’s ear, and they both begin to cry.
“It’s real,” Denya weeps. “I’m real. I’m here.”
“It was like a dream,” Bren whispers. “I couldn’t wake up. I couldn’t … couldn’t remember you.”
They stand for a time wrapped close together, breathing each other in, sharing their warmth. When they kiss this time it is like waking, and their bodies move in the old, familiar rhythms of their love.
Denya is the first to pull away. She takes Bren’s hand, still wrapped tight around the lock of Eliya’s hair, and the two hurry back toward Maro’s cottage. The old woman must hear them coming, for the door opens before Denya can knock and the two rush inside. They kneel beside her daughter and Denya lifts her head and helps her drink the still-warm broth from the bowl of fairy soup. When Eliya has had a few sips, her eyes flutter open and she takes a long deep breath. Denya puts her hand against Eliya’s cheek.
“My light,” she says, her voice thick with tears. “I found your mother. She’s home!”
Eliya looks up to where Bren kneels wide-eyed beside Denya, and the girl coughs and begins to cry, and for the first time in too long her cheeks warm beneath her mothers’ hands.
The Vixen, With Death Pursuing
Izzy Wasserstein
The river roars past me on its way down from the mountain, fed by a long winter and a rain-soaked spring. It is a white foamed torrent, radiating a cold so profound that I can feel it, even though I stand ten yards away. I force myself to take deep breaths. The cold is so sharp that it hurts my lungs. The scent I’m following is ahead of me, past the fury of the river. I have no choice but to cross, or Ravenna will die, and many others with her. The revolution needs me to succeed, so the fight against the Clenched Fist can continue. But, I need Ravenna.
I pace back and forth along the bank, seeking the best way across and gathering my courage. I have seen the masked soldiers of the Clenched Fist march in lockstep and pull children from their parents’ arms. I have seen two pyromancers duel, leaving a whole block scorched to glass. But the river reminds me what true power is. I am awed before it.
Water does not usually frighten me, but this is a ferocity I have never encountered, a torrent that would, if I slipped or misstepped, sweep me away to my death, drowned or broken against the rocks.
The wind shifts, and my nose twitches. With my enhanced senses, I smell it: the stench of corruption, of plague. The pestimancer pursues me, to ensure my failure, Ravenna’s death, and the revolution’s collapse. He is disease incarnate, and I’m nobody, not truly a revolutionary even though the pestimancer’s masters would not agree. All I have against that is my fear for the woman I love and a bit of vulpemancy.
I call on what little of the fox-magic I dare use, adding a bit of confidence to my sharpened senses. The magic flows through me like a shadow on the edge of sight, like a flash of orange disappearing into a hedgerow. It steadies me, blunts the sharp edge of panic, but I’m still only a human woman, far clumsier than any real fox.
I take two sharp breaths, tug nervously at the strap of the pouch looped around my neck, and take my best option: a line of rocks jutting from the water, mostly dry. I step toward the river and feel a chill run through me. The cold of the water or my own fear? If I fall, I would freeze almost as fast as I’d drown.
I force myself to move, to dart across on the balls of my feet. My instincts may be partially a fox’s, but my body is very much human, and though my phantom tail delights Ravenna, it does nothing to help with balance. Halfway, one of the rocks turns under my foot. I sway, try to balance, but my momentum carries me forward and I feel myself falling. I leap to the next stone, waver, then crouch, fighting back vertigo. I force myself to stop, to breathe. The river rushes past me, indifferent. Even the stone that nearly killed me shows no sign of my passing.
I reach the far side and feel immediately exposed along the riverbank. I can’t help but imagine the pestimancer watching me. When I close my eyes, I still see him looming over Ravenna, her eyes rolled back, her tongue lolling, while bloated flies buzz about him, and the air reeks of his taint. I still see the moment when he turned and fixed the dark pits that should have been his eyes on me. His voice was like tar pulling at bare feet:
“The Clenched Fist will not be defied. Behold the power of devotion—”
I push the memory aside, and dart into the forest, but I can’t help but look back, and something rises through the trees, like heat off summer streets, like an oil slick: miasma. He still pursues, and his power grows. I do not know how he keeps himself intact, how little of the mage must remain now that he has given himself so completely over to his art.
There aren’t many of us true mages. Anyone can do small stuff—light a candle with a bit of pyromancy, push themselves through a sleepless night with fortimancy. But true power, and true risk, comes by following a single path. If a mage follows their path too far, embraces their subject too fully, they become what they study. Some magical tomes were once bibliomancers, and they say that thunder is the scream of a fulmenancer.
Most people lack the desire and focus to pursue one kind of magic, to give up cantrips for deep understanding. And most of us mages are careful. I know better than to rely too much on my magic. I like life in my human body, thank you kindly, and only use enough magic to get by. I never dreamt of doing more with my art. Until I met Ravenna, until my world unsteadied.
The pestimancer, though, shows no fear, seems to revel in what he will become. He has embraced his power fully. That level of devotion awes and terrifies me. He will stop at nothing to see me fail.
The smell I seek is on the wind, the root-and-musk scent I pray leads me to the arbouromancers, and I run after it, hoping to put distance between myself and my pursuer.
I follow the scent further up the foothills. Gardrun City is only a few hours from here, nestled in the valley, but the forest plays strange tricks with sound, so that I can’t hear the city-noises at all. Everything in the forest is far quieter than the c
ity, and each crack of a branch or bird call feels ominous.
Up in the hills the trees are a mix of evergreens and flowering trees whose white branches are only beginning to bud with spring-green leaves. Everywhere I look, nothing but trees, undergrowth, rocky outcroppings. Without fox-senses I would be hopelessly lost. I should call on more power, but I’m already risking as much as I dare.
When at last I reach the source of the smell, I stand blinking, despairing. The forest here doesn’t look any different from the rest, at least not to my city-dweller’s eyes, and there isn’t so much as a footprint to suggest the passing of anyone. The smell is here, but it is strange, alien—
You have brought pestilence here, human. I whirl around, seeking the source of the words, but I can see no one. You have violated this sacred place. The voice—or is it voices?—sounds like the rustle of leaves, but also, somehow, like the wind whipping through a tunnel. Quiet, yet powerful, multifaceted. Relief floods me, and the tight grip of fear on my heart eases.
“I didn’t bring the pestilence,” I say, trying to sound like Ravenna would, confident and unyielding in the face of danger. I try not to sound like the woman who wants to dart back to her warren, who for months was too afraid to attend rebel gatherings. “I hate it as much as anyone.”
It seeks you, human, the voices say. Even now it brings sickness and blight to the forest. Do not pretend this is not your doing.
Knowing the mages are here somewhere, I take in my surroundings anew. Some of the trees here aren’t old growth, like the rest—they are shorter, younger, grouped in a circle. A circle with me at the middle.
“I’m trying to cure the plague, not spread it,” I say, unable to keep the urgency out of my voice. Even if the pestimancer may have struggled to find a place to cross the river, he cannot be far behind. “The sooner I can do that, the sooner he’ll be out of your forest.”
What do we care for the problems of your city, human? The voices ask. You come here, cut trees, cloud the air with filth. You care nothing for us.
