One. Two. Three…
Nita was there, kneeling at his side before the man even had a chance to uncurl. She grasped him by the chin and looked him deeply in the eyes. Lanie knew that look.
Three heartbeats passed.
“Easy,” Nita whispered. “Be easy. Be mine.”
And though the man was no longer a falcon, Nita had him hooded and jessed where he lay. He rolled over onto his side, groaning. He was not wearing any clothes.
Shocked at this new magic—it was like seeing a green sunset, or hearing a wolf talk to you—Lanie stammered, “But, Nita, I thought… I thought you couldn’t become a gyrlady. You have to be Quadoni. Not like ‘your grandmother was half-Quadoni’ Quadoni, but born and raised. You…”
Nita’s spiral curls bounced as she tossed her head. “Does he not have the finest shoulders you have ever seen? His shoulders are what first caught my eye. Or was it his calf muscles? Only see how shapely!”
The man’s calf muscles were safe enough to look at it—if anything about this man was safe. Lanie doubted it. But she managed to imitate Nita’s careless tone. “Yes. Indeed. Very shapely.”
This temporarily placated her sister, but Nita’s mood had started to darken. Lanie recognized the brittle quality in her sister’s voice.
“No, you know, I do believe his forearms first caught my fancy!”
It would be wisest, Lanie knew, to dutifully admire his forearms. His teeth. The sullen scorch of his hair.
The babble that burst out of her instead was as involuntary as vomit. “But, Nita! Is he… He is a gyrgardi, isn’t he? A Falcon Defender of Quadiíb? And that”—she pointed to the silver bracer—“that is his Bryddongard you’re wearing, isn’t it? The object that commands his change, that turns him into a bird and back? So… But that… Doesn’t that make you his gyrlady? But for you to be a gyrlady… it’s imposs…”
At her sister’s swift glance, Lanie bit her tongue. Stop, she commanded herself. Stop!
All the precarious mischief in Nita’s face was draining away, leaving it stark and icy. There she was. Amanita Muscaria Stones. Daughter of assassins and executioners. The nightmare.
“Run and fetch him something of Father’s to wear, will you?” Nita not-quite-asked her sister. “We had to leave Quadiíb rather suddenly.”
Fascination was Nita’s one talent in sorcery, for all she bore such flashy wizard marks. She had inherited it from their half-Quadoni grandmother, whom neither Nita nor Lanie had ever met.
The lady had either: 1) run away from Stones Manor after giving birth to Abandon Hope, or; 2) died in childbirth, or (mostly likely); 3) been murdered and secretly buried by her husband, Eleemosynary Stones, who’d hailed from a cadet branch of the family, and who was barely tolerated at Stones Manor as a freeloading sycophant right up until the day he just… disappeared1.
Stonesish magic historically ran to necromancy, not fascination. But until Lanie had made her appearance on the scene, no necromancer had been born to the family for over a hundred years. Nevertheless, Nita did her best to bend her own talent toward violent ends. Most people used fascination for political advantage; it was the magical art of imparting influence, implanting suggestions, and commanding adoration—or, at the very least, obedience. Not so with Nita; she weaponized it, as she did with everything she touched, including herself.
The Blackbird Bride, Queen Bran Fiakhna of Rook, had ridden the riptide of her own formidable magic all the way to the throne. So skillfully did she wield her powers of fascination that wizards from every realm flocked to her, to fling themselves at her feet, and pledge their own magics in fealty. Her Parliament of Rooks consisted of four-and-twenty of the most powerful wizards from all branches of magic, bound to her body and soul as her espoused kin.
Compared to Bran Fiakhna’s legendary fascination, Nita’s talent was but the slenderest splinter. She could only fascinate one person at a time, never for very long, and she had but the one technique with which she tapped her magic.
But with that technique, and for a limited time, Nita could make you do pretty much anything she wanted.
She called it “The Glance of Three Heartbeats.”
Lanie passed from the great hall, through the dining room, and into the circular morning room, exiting out the far side to take a short flight of stairs into the corridor that connected the main house to the northeast wing. She paused on the top step, squeezing her eyes shut for a second, like a diver about to plunge into a lake of swollen snowmelt. She wasn’t exactly afraid of heights. But ever since Nita had fascinated her right out of a window, Lanie had been just the slightest bit wary of them.
She had been, what, all of six years old? Nita, twelve?
A three-second stare—that’s all it took. Three heartbeats. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-DOOM! And Lanie just… jumped. Defenestrated herself. Catapulted right out of that little casement in the back servant’s stair that led to the kitchen, and all the way down.
She could still recall with hideous clarity the gaseous golden giddiness that had effervesced through her every capillary. The longing that had filled her. How she had wanted to jump. How her desire to test the laws of gravity with her own body was fulfilled only at the bottom of her fall, when, reveling in two broken ankles and a sprained wrist, she looked up into the open window above her to see her sister peering down, black eyes dancing with strange yellow lights.
At which point, Nita had released the fascination.
Lanie remembered screaming. And she remembered Nita laughing, a sound as delicate and golden as her sorcery. Then she’d left the window. She’d left Lanie alone.
Goody Graves found her some hours later. Goody always found her eventually. But that was the day Lanie learned never to look into her sister’s eyes if she could help it.
It was a lesson her sister’s new… guest… could have used. Too late now, of course.
Nita must have thought a gyrgardi of Quadiíb the epitome of magic. Shapeshifter and warrior? The perfect addition to the Stones bloodline! She apparently had no idea that the transformative man-into-bird magic came from the bond between gyrlady and Falcon Defender—not the gyrgardi himself!
Gyrgardon weren’t innately magical. Just the opposite! Even if one was born with magic, they poured it all into their silver bracer during the Rite of Bryddongard, which not they, but their gyrlady wore.
As for Nita’s captive, his seed would produce nothing special. It would certainly do nothing to augment the magic in the Stones bloodline. Hadn’t she known that? Surely she’d had opportunity enough to inspect that naked body fore to aft and find no wizard mark upon it!
But catch Lanie trying to tell her sister any of that. No, thank you.
She clattered up another flight of stairs, into the second floor of the northeast wing, where what had once been guest chambers later became Unnatural Stones’s private rooms, and now were nothing.
She had not been inside them since her father’s interment. The door was massive, planed from titanwood, ironbound. She laid a palm flat against it, sighed softly, but did not push.
Something rattled beside her. Lanie looked up.
Goody, looming like a cairn, unhooked a heavily decorated key from her chatelaine and handed it over in silence.
“Thank you,” Lanie said gratefully. “I didn’t see you there. This whole day’s been very… distracting!”
Goody said nothing, which meant she was only a shade less talkative than normal. The corridor was too dim for Lanie to read the slow and subtle shifts of shadow that passed for expression on Goody’s face. It would do no good to press her now—besides, there wasn’t time. Suppressing another sigh, Lanie unlocked the door and pushed it open. Colors coursed out to greet her.
Unnatural ‘Natty’ Stones had loved the opera, and the races, and masquerade balls, and anything that was outlandish and costly. Fine art covered his walls, some overlapping, with no attempt at coordination or curation. His chambers were stuffed with gaudily cheerful furniture made of the richest and finest materials. Natty had never been happier than when parading about in jeweled brocades and lustrous moiré (when he wasn’t working, which of course required black—the deepest, velvetiest, gem-winkingest black!), smoking fine cigars from foreign lands, and killing people at the request of his liege lady: Blood Royal Erralierra Brackenwild.
He had loved the Blood Royal. More than his house, more than his children, more than his wife. His affair with Erralierra had been unabashed, indiscreet, and expensive. Lanie had seen just how expensive when Sari Scratch presented her with all the ledgers of their debt.
The lingering smell of her father, cologne and brandy and blood, overwhelmed her. She closed her eyes.
Natty and Lanie had not often crossed paths. That was to his credit. He had recognized his daughter for what she was when she was still a baby, and knowing that his presence in her life would only endanger it, he ordered that Lanie take her meals alone in her rooms in the southeast wing. He had brought in tutors for her who taught subjects other than the usual Stonesish arts (none of which Lanie could study without bleeding from eyes and ears or falling into convulsions), and allowed her free rein of the library (which he had moved, in its entirety, to her wing of the manor—a monumental task that required hiring ranks of strong servants and at least a dozen carpenters to build custom shelves). After that, he had pretty much ignored her—hoping that by doing so, he would ensure her survival.
But whenever Lanie had chanced to meet her father, the (necessarily) brief encounters had always been pleasant. He was friendly—even affectionate! He seemed to regard her with awe and pride, and a great deal of blithe bewilderment.
She missed his singing in the house.
He had not sung much, toward the end of his marriage. He and Aba grew estranged, and Natty began spending more and more time at Castle Ynyssyll with his lover, the Blood Royal. By the time of his death, he hadn’t visited Stones Manor in over a year, and without the head of the house to restrain her, Aunt Diggie’s excesses had run unchecked. She’d turned the northwest wing of Stones Manor, where she was installed, into a gambling saloon, while Aba, glassy-eyed and chemically distant, ignored everything. Aba practically lived in her workshop, leaving it only to fulfill her commissions as Royal Assassin of Liriat, and these in such increasingly vile and public ways that those who wanted rather more prudence in their hired help began to look elsewhere.
Lanie forced herself deeper into her father’s rooms, shattering memories with her body as she made a beeline for the wardrobe.
Stopped, as his ghost filled the full-length mirror.
No. Not a ghost. Only her own reflection.
If Nita, with her burnt-gold beauty, took after Abandon Hope Stones, then Lanie took after Unnatural. She was much shorter than he had been, but just as dark, her skin and hair black-brown—except for her left hand, which bore the largest of her wizard marks, and was entirely slate-gray, the color of a wet tombstone. She had another, smaller mark on her right thigh, also gray, but this one silvery, in a pattern like climbing ivy. Three of the toes on her right foot, and the great toe of her left foot, were also marked, as well as the dimples at the backs of both her knees. Her eyes were not black like Natty’s, nor gray like Aba’s, but a deep, clear brown. In her more hopeful moments, Lanie fancied she’d inherited her eye color from the notorious courtesan Delirious Stones.
Like Natty, Lanie was drawn to bright, busy colors—pinks and yellows, with touches of green and blue. (She never wore black.) When she released her hair from its everyday dozens of braids, it stood out around her head like a cloud—her father’s favorite style. Mostly, she kept her braids bundled at the nape of her neck with a big ribbon, not because she didn’t like wearing it undone, but because she wanted to save her unbounded hair for festival occasions.
Natty had been handsome though, which Lanie did not consider herself to be. She was scrawny, and—much to her dismay—had a tendency to break out into pimples about once a month. Nita had never had pimples. No Stones in the history of Stoneses had ever had pimples as far as Lanie could ascertain. Also, she perhaps had far too much forehead (on this, she was undecided; Delirious Stones had a lovely high forehead, so maybe Lanie’s own was all right). And her spectacles were scratched, and her fingernails ink-marked, and her trousers perpetually stained with grass.
But never mind that, she told herself firmly. If I lollygag any longer, gawping at myself in the mirror, Nita will surely hunt me down.
Marching up to the wardrobe, Lanie snatched one of Natty’s dressing gowns from the rack. An old forgotten favorite, a somethingth-anniversary gift from his wife, it had fallen into disuse long before his death. All his choicest belongings remained at Castle Ynyssyll, in the care of Blood Royal Erralierra Brackenwild—none of which she’d ever thought to return to Stones Manor or his family. The dressing gown’s silver-on-green brocade was worn to tissue-paper thinness, the lustrous lion and monkey pattern dulled and sullen, the braided cuffs frayed.
Lanie held it to her nose briefly, breathed in, let it fall. Then, flinging the dressing gown over her shoulder, she glanced up at Goody.
“After all,” she shrugged, “he doesn’t have to like it, does he? So long as it covers him.”
Among the nude studies and anatomies in Stones Library, Celerity Stones’s book of plates entitled Barely There: The Exquisite Art of Excoriation, With (Predominantly) Live Models, was the most infamous.
Celerity Stones had been Aunt Diggie’s great aunt. (And Aunt Diggie—Digitalis Stones—was really Natty’s mother’s second cousin, but Natty always called her ‘Aunt,’ so Nita and Lanie had too.) A known genius in her day, Celerity had been much in demand for her pen and ink drawings, her sanguine sketches, her oils, watercolors, and illuminated calligraphy. Later, she won renown as an anatomical scientist. Very precise with spreader, saw, clamps, probes, and pliers was Celerity Stones. Not, however, very easy on her models2.
Lanie could barely look at Barely There; she got blisters just from touching the book’s binding. But she had peeked. And, of course, it was never easy to ignore her most famous work, The Flayed Ideal, which hung on the wall of Stones Gallery and had a way of glaring at you. Its exposed and accusatory eyeballs, rendered in oil on canvas with exquisite delicacy, followed you around the room—and very often out the door and down the hall.
When her father had left Stones Manor, Lanie’s line of tutors dried up, and her studies became mostly autodidactic (if you didn’t count Grandpa Rad’s ranting and Goody’s cooking lessons). This meant more death magic in Stones Ossuary (hurray!), not as much math (hurray!), Quadic whenever she could spare the time (mostly at night before sleeping), and sporadic forays into art history and biology (always enjoyable).
One thing that Lanie had learned while studying the latter was that there was definitely a difference between nudity and nakedness. It was that very difference that was thwackingly borne in upon her now.
The naked man looked up when Lanie galloped down the short staircase from the dining room back into the great hall. The force and fire of his glare, more awful even than that of The Flayed Ideal, petrified her in place. She stopped one step shy of the main floor, Natty’s old dressing gown slithering off her shoulder and onto the paving stones.
There was not such a green as his eyes in all the pages of all the books in Stones Library. His hostility stood out in every sinew, every line of his body. Lanie did not know how a man could keep all his skin on yet still look completely stripped. Had Nita called his shoulders fine? Lanie thought they were disastrous.
Nita. She had forgotten Nita.
The pitiless grip she still dreamed about closed on her wrist, and a dangerously dulcet tone inquired, “What are you thinking, Miscellaneous?”
Lanie breathed out, willing her wrist quiescent, her expression carefree, her voice light.
“I think your guest doesn’t care for my choice of dressing gown. Does he fancy something finer?” She glanced doubtfully down at the heap of brocade at her feet. “It’s a bit shabby, I guess.”
Nita loosened her grip and laughed. “Oh, don’t mind him. He’s probably just used to being naked by now. I’ve kept him in his falcon form for most of our journey. He’s half-feral.”
Half? thought Lanie.
She fought not to roll her shoulders. If she rolled her shoulders, Nita would know she was tense and trying to relax. She had to relax without visible effort. “What’s his name anyway?”
Nita regarded the man at their feet. “He has one of those stupidly unpronounceable Quadic names. But I suppose it could be shortened to something like Mak.” She gave a short, sharp laugh. “Mak Cobb—that’s Stonesish enough for going on with, don’t you think?”
“Snappy.” Lanie bent and scooped up the dressing gown, which she lobbed at the gyrgardi as if careless of where it fell. It fell within his reach.
He made no move to put it on. His gaze flickered to her hands instead: to her fingertips, which were, each one of them, tied up in bandages. Lanie squinted at the expression on his face—what was it? In his way, he was as difficult to read as Goody!
Fighting an urge to hide her hands behind her back, she flexed them instead. She had nothing to be ashamed of: the practice of death magic—off-surge—required a great deal of bloodletting. Her own, specifically. Only a necromancer’s blood, when mixed with dead matter, could make ectenica, the undead material. Ectenica was the raw stuff of her medium, like clay was to a sculptor. But what was that look he was giving her? Recognition? Horror? Pity?
Gone now, whatever it was. But that glare was back, and Nita was laughing again.
“Snappy? So he is—if I don’t stuff him full of rodents and rabbits. I can only feed him when he’s in his falcon form. He doesn’t… He won’t eat when he’s like this.”
Lanie looked sidelong at her sister, whom she suspected was having some trouble holding this man to her will. Given half a second free from Nita’s fascinating attention, this ‘Mak’ of hers would set his naked shoulders to the cornerstone of Stones Manor and collapse the walls atop their heads.
I should never have written her, Lanie thought. Better to be homeless than to have him here. Better to be married to Scratten, Cracchen, and Hatchet Scratch!
Nita crouched on the floor beside Mak. She fitted the silvery-green dressing gown over his shoulders, grabbing him by the chin when he twitched away from her touch, and murmuring until he grew calm again. When he was still, she cinched the dressing gown shut with the sash.
“I shouldn’t keep him so long a falcon.” Nita regretfully smoothed the brocade over his shoulders. “But there’s nothing else to do. He won’t eat! And he keeps trying to harm himself… Oh, he is intractable!”
Taking his face between her hands again, her nails biting deeply into his cheeks, she whispered, “Just you wait, Mak. Three days.”
Mak’s back was to Lanie, so she couldn’t see what was in his eyes when he met Nita’s gaze. But she did see his hands curling into fists, and Nita jumping to her feet as if snapped from a slingshot. Breathing sharply through her nose, she turned and stared directly into Lanie’s eyes. One. Two…
Lanie looked down just in time.
“I am glad to be home,” Nita said simply. “I can’t tell you how much. Or what your letter meant to me, Miscellaneous—begging me to return. I would have returned for less, you know.”
Lanie eyed the claw-like tension in Nita’s hand as it stroked her silver bracer. She shifted her weight onto the step behind her, preparing to leap backwards in case Nita—or Mak—spontaneously exploded.
“You asked how I could possibly be a gyrlady,” Nita went on. Lanie raised her eyebrows, surprised at the turn of subject. “You were right,” she continued, “I’m not. Though I wear a Bryddongard and command a Falcon Defender, I am not and cannot be a gyrlady of Quadiíb. Mak”—she indicated the naked man—“did have a gyrlady once. My mentor at the Caravan School. Gelethai. She is dead now. So Mak is mine.”
Lanie’s nose began to bleed silently, copiously, dolorously. From the ferocity of her allergic reaction, she deduced three things.
One: Gyrlady Gelethai had died, violently and abruptly, at her sister’s hand.
Two: Since it was antithetical to the sworn beliefs of the gyrgardon of Quadiíb that they would stand by and permit their Gyrladies to come to harm without trying to stop that harm with their own bodies, then Mak had not only arrived at Stones Manor against his will, but he was only still alive against the sworn vows of his vocation, his religion, and the laws of his country.
Three: Nita would have ensorcelled Mak soon after receiving Lanie’s letter late last fall. She had probably set her trap for the high holy fire feast at Midwinter, when the panthauma in the atmosphere surged, and the magic of the gods boosted the smaller magics of mortals. Probably she had meant her fascination to last an entire season. But Nita never had much magic to begin with—and now, with three days to go till Spring Equinox, her spell of fascination was beginning to fade.
Mak was fighting it. Fighting her. Bending his whole being to it. Nita must be renewing her fascination spell constantly, exhausting herself with each small, strenuous act of will—bleeding out will the way Lanie drew blood from her veins in order to make ectenica—as she awaited her next surge.
Lanie stepped away from her sister, stopping up her nosebleed with as little drama as possible. Being a necromancer meant needing as many handkerchiefs as hairs on your head, which, in Lanie’s case, were innumerable.
“From the beginning,” Nita murmured, lost in the gyrgardi’s green glare, “Gelethai made it clear that I could never be like her. No matter how hard I studied, nor which of her high arts I mastered. She was never bold enough to say it to my face—but every day, in every way, she deliberately demonstrated her superiority. Flaunting her languages, her graces, her grasp of politics and trade. Her Bryddongard. I might have bested her in sports, had she deigned to compete in the field—but Gyrladies leave athletics to their gyrgardon. That’s how I met Mak. He allowed me to hawk him—Gelethai had no interest in hunting, and he saw how restless I was. We spent hours together, bringing in meat for the Traveling Palaces. But he never looked at me the way he looked at her. The way they looked at each other, as if they knew all each other’s secrets. As if they were inside each other’s minds. They were never even lovers—can you believe it?”
Lanie swallowed, her throat too dry to answer. But Nita required no reply. She simply went on, “Gelethai laughed when I asked her how that was—laughed at me! She said it needn’t be like that between Gyrladies and their Falcon Defenders; it was already more than that. She pitied me. She dared pity me! Because I could never be a gyrlady, never understand the bond she had with him. But she never understood that I didn’t want her paltry title—not if she were giving it away. I didn’t need it. I am Amanita Muscaria Stones.”
Lanie’s gaze roved desperately for something to alight upon that was not Nita or Mak. There: Goody Graves, standing beneath the Grand Staircase. Goody’s gaze cut to hers, the blue glow of her eyes the exact color of ectenica. It cooled her, like a breeze cutting through a conflagration.
“I am a Stones,” Nita spat. Lanie’s head whipped back in her direction. Her sister’s face blazed like a golden inferno. “And I made sure they all knew it by the time I left. Every patronizing, falcon-flashing, high-priced whore of Quadiíb.”
With that, she snapped out the arm that wore the Bryddongard—“Mak! To me!”—and spoke three words in Old Quadic. A silver flash, and Mak melted from man to bird, leaving the old dressing gown in a forlorn puddle. He arrowed straight up from the floor to her left arm, where he mantled her silver bracer broodingly, as if it were prey. Face wreathed in a strained rictus that lacked joy or even satisfaction, Nita nodded to Lanie.
“We will see you tonight for dinner, Miscellaneous. Make sure Goody prepares meat. Venison stew—she can leave out the greens. No spices. Plenty of onion. I have been starving for proper Lirian food these last four years. Most Quadoni are vegetarians!”
Then she padded, stalking-quiet in her stockinged feet, over the glittering black flagstone. She did not, Lanie noted, head in the direction of her old bedchamber, but up the Grand Staircase towards Aba’s rooms, workshop and all. No hesitation. No backward glance.
“Phew!” Lanie blew out her breath. Goody did not, but then, she never did. Picking up Natty’s ancient dressing gown from the floor, Lanie strolled over to the staircase, where she leaned against Goody like a dog who wanted petting. “Well, Goody. We survived first contact.”
Slowly, slowly, Goody’s hand moved up to briefly press her braids. Lanie leaned in, hoping for more, but Goody let her hand fall again.
“What was that, do you think? That whole gyrgardi thing, I mean?”
“That?” Goody Graves’s voice seemed to sound from the very bottoms of her feet. A flat, bone-cracking bass, with an echo at the bottom. “That, Mizka, was a travesty.”
“What do you mean?”
For the flicker of a splinter of a second, Goody looked like she was about to say more. Instead, she shrugged her boulder-heavy shoulders and shambled off to the kitchen. Lanie hung back a second, glancing after her sister who had disappeared up the Grand Staircase.
If she liked you, Goody was the best cook in all of Liriat. And Goody loved Lanie. These blissful last few months, Goody had taught her hundreds of recipes—most of them Quadoni, all of them blessedly without meat. Without Natty and Aba and Aunt Diggie around, whose cumulative presence had caused in Lanie, since ever she could remember, low-grade nausea and a constant headache that made eating a repugnant duty, she had found herself—for the first time in her life—really hungry. She had been eating hugely, trying and tasting everything, and taking great pleasure in it.
But now Nita was back. And so was Lanie’s bile.
Nevertheless, she thought she had better help Goody prepare tonight’s dinner, or Nita was bound to get scorched bread and a rubbery stew of last year’s apples. Which would make Nita furious.
Nita wanted dead deer; dead deer Nita would have. The last thing Lanie needed was her sister lashing out at the one person in the world who cared if Lanie lived or died.
Even if that person wasn’t, precisely, alive.
1 His disappearance went unmourned and uninvestigated. Rumor had it that his daughter and son-in-law had put their newlywedded heads together and done what Stoneses do best, before getting on with the business of conceiving Amanita Muscaria.
2 Indeed, the widow of the model for The Flayed Ideal became so distressed at the loss of her spouse to the cause of Art and Science that she had sneaked into Celerity’s studio one night and left her own work of art: Portrait of an Artist, Eviscerated. Mixed media: flesh, scalpel, hurdy-gurdy, a few nails, a wooden frame. Thus, the end of Celerity Stones.