The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year Eight

Edited by Scott H. Andrews

All other rights reserved.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine

For literary adventure fantasy short stories and audio fiction podcasts, visit our magazine’s website at

Find BCS on Facebook and Twitter (@BCSmagazine)

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery · Catherynne M. Valente
Unearthly Landscape by a Lady · Rebecca Campbell
The Night Bazaar for Women Becoming Reptiles · Rachael K. Jones
The Three Dancers of Gizari · Tamara Vardomskaya
Geometries of Belonging · Rose Lemberg
Laws of Night and Silk · Seth Dicksinson
Fire in the Haze · Mishell Baker
In Skander, for a Boy · Chaz Brenchley
The Delusive Cartographer · Rich Larson
The Mama Mmiri · Walter Dinjos
Mortal Eyes · Ann Chatham
The Sweetest Skill · Tony Pi
Told by an Idiot · K.J. Parker
Foxfire, Foxfire · Yoon Ha Lee
A Salvaging of Ghosts · Aliette de Bodard
Blood Grains Speak Through Memories · Jason Sanford

Cover Art: Tortoise Caravan · Marek Hlavaty

INTRODUCTION

WELCOME TO The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year Eight! This eighth best-of anthology from Beneath Ceaseless Skies contains sixteen stories, by new and returning BCS authors alike, of complex characters inhabiting awe-inspiring worlds.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies continues in our quest to publish great “literary adventure fantasy”: stories set in amazing worlds yet focused on the characters. The eighth year of BCS saw the magazine receive its fourth nomination for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine and sixth World Fantasy Award nomination, with stories “Blood Grains Speak Through Memories” by Jason Sandord named a finalist for the Nebula Awards, “The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery” by Catherynne M. Valente a finalist for the Eugie Foster Memorial Award, “Foxfire, Foxfire” by Yoon Ha Lee and “A Salvaging of Ghosts” by Aliette de Bodard finalists for the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award, and the audio podcast of “No Sweeter Art” by Tony Pi (all included in this anthology) a finalist for the Parsec Awards, all alongside new stories and podcasts by Marie Brennan, Claude Lalumière, E. Catherine Tobler, Rose Lemberg, Mike Allen, Ian McHugh, Naim Kabir, and many other new and returning BCS authors.

Other milestones included our four-hundredth story, “Told by an Idiot” by K.J. Parker (included in this anthology), our third Science-Fantasy Month, which featured Yoon Ha Lee, Cat Rambo, Sarah Pinsker, and Aliette de Bodard, the release of our seventh best-of ebook anthology, The Best of BCS Year Seven, and our two-hundreth issue, a special double-issue featuring Catherynne M. Valente, Kameron Hurley, Yoon Ha Lee, and Seth Dickinson.

In May 2016, in conjunction with BCS #200 we held a Subscription Drive through our exclusive subscription partner, independent ebook retailer Weightless Books. The BCS ebook subscription, available year-round, offers a full year of the magazine (26 issues) for $15.99 and can deliver each issue automatically to an e-reader or smart phone. The success of this Subscription Drive unlocked a stretch goal to raise our word count for submissions to 11,000 words. Buying our subscription, anthologies, or bundles of back-issues is a great way to get the stories delivered in a convenient format and support BCS. Thank you for buying this anthology; all proceeds go toward paying our authors and artists.

The ninth year of BCS, already underway, has included a fifth Hugo nomination, a seventh World Fantasy Award nomination, “The Orangery” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam named a finalist for the Nebula Awards, and new stories and podcasts by Richard Parks, Carrie Vaughn, Caroline M. Yoachim, Tony Pi, Jonathan Edelstein, Sara Saab, and many other new and returning BCS authors, plus a full-length novella by Rose Lemberg and a special five-hour podcast of that novella for Episode 200 of the BCS Audio Fiction Podcast.

My continued gratitude to all who help make BCS possible, particularly Editorial Assistants Nicole Lavigne, Kerstin Hall, and Deirdre Quirk for their tireless help reading submissions; all our donors, large and small; and all our writers and readers and fans, for their interest and support and word-of-mouth about our great stories, podcasts, and anthologies of character-centered secondary-world fantasy. Thank you!

Scott H. Andrews, Editor in Chief/Publisher

August 2017

THE LIMITLESS PERSPECTIVE OF MASTER PEEK, OR, THE LUMINESCENCE OF DEBAUCHERY

Catherynne M. Valente

WHEN MY FATHER, a glassblower of some modest fame, lay gasping on his deathbed, he offered, between bloody wheezings, a choice of inheritance to his three children: a chest of Greek pearls, a hectare of French land, or an iron punty. Impute no virtue to my performance in this little scene! I, being the youngest, chose last, which is to say I did not choose at all. The elder of us, my brother Prospero, seized the chest straightaway, having love in his heart for nothing but jewels and gold, the earth’s least interesting movements of the bowel which so excite, in turn, the innards of man. Pomposo, next of my blood, took up the deed of land, for he always fancied himself a lord, even in our childhood games, wherein he sold me in marriage to the fish in the lake, the grove of poplar trees, the sturdy stone wall, our father’s kiln and pools of molten glass, even the sun and the moon and the constellation of Taurus. The iron punty was left to me, my father’s only daughter, who could least wield it to any profit, being a girl and therefore no fit beast for commerce. All things settled to two-thirds satisfaction, our father bolted upright in his bed, cried out: Go I hence to God! then promptly fell back, perished, and proceeded directly to Hell.

The old man had hardly begun his long cuddle with the wormy ground before Prospero be-shipped himself with a galleon and sailed for the Dutch East Indies in search of a blacker, more fragrant pearl to spice his breakfast and his greed whilst Pomposo wifed himself a butter-haired miller’s daughter, planting his seed in both France and her with a quickness. And thus was I left, Perpetua alone and loudly complaining, in the quiet dark of my father’s glassworks, with no one willing to buy from my delicate and feminine hand, no matter how fine the goblet on the end of that long iron punty.

The solution seemed to me obvious. Henceforward, quite simply, I should never be a girl again. This marvelous transformation would require neither a witch’s spell nor an alchemist’s potion. From birth I possessed certain talents that would come to circumscribe my destiny, though I cursed them mightily until their use came clear: a deep and commanding voice, a masterful height, and a virile hirsuteness, owing to a certain unmentionable rootstock of our ancient family. Served as a refreshingly exotic accompaniment to these, some few of us are also born with one eye as good as any wrought by God, and one withered, hardened to little more than a misshapen pearl notched within a smooth and featureless socket, an affliction which, even if all else could be made fair between us, my brothers did not inherit, so curse them forever, say I. No surprise that no one wanted to marry the glassblower’s giant hairy one-eyed daughter!

Yet now my defects would bring to me, not a husband, but the world entire. I had only to cut my hair with my father’s shears, bind my breasts with my mother’s bridal veil, clothe myself in my brothers’ coats and hose, blow a glass bubble into a false eye, and think nothing more of Perpetua forever. My womandectomy caused me neither trouble nor grief—I whole-heartedly recommend it to everyone! But, since such a heroic act of theatre could hardly be accomplished in the place of my birth, I also traded two windows for a cart and an elderly but good-humored plough-horse, packed up tools and bread and slabs of unworked glass, and departed that time and place forever. London, after all, does not care one whit who you were. Or who you are. Or who you will become. Frankly, she barely cares for herself, and certainly cannot be bothered with your tawdry backstage changes of costume and comedies of mistaken identity.

That was long ago. So long that to say the numbers aloud would be an act of pure nihilism. Oh, but I am old, good sir, old as ale and twice as bitter, though I do not look it and never shall, so far as I can tell. I was old when you were weaned, squalling and farting, and I shall be old when your grandchildren annoy you with their hideous fashions and worse manners. Kings and queens and armadas and plagues have come and gone in my sight, ridiculous wars flowered and pruned, my brothers died, the scales balanced at last, for having not the malformed and singular eye, neither did they have the longevity that is our better inheritance, fashions swung from opulence to piousness and back to the ornate flamboyance that is their favored resting state once more.

And thus come I, Master Cornelius Peek, Glassmaker to the Rich and Redolent, only slightly dented, to the age which was the mate to my soul as glove to glove or slipper to slipper. Such an age exists for every man, but only a lucky few chance to be born alongside theirs. For myself, no more perfect era can ever grace the hourglass than the one that began in the Year of Our Lord 1660, in the festering scrotum of London, at the commencement of the long and groaning orgy of Charles II’s pretty, witty reign.

If you would know me, know my house. She is a slim, graceful affair built in a fashion somewhat later than the latest, much of brick and marble and, naturally, glass, three stories high, with the top two being the quarters I share with my servants, the maid-of-all-work Mrs. Matterfact and my valet, Mr. Suchandsuch (German, I believe, but I do respect the privacy of all persons), and my wigs, my wardrobe, and my lady wife, when I am in possession of such a creature, an occurrence more common and without complaint than you might assume, (of which much more, much later). I designed the edifice myself, with an eye to every detail, from the silver door-knocker carved in the image of a single, kindly eye whose eyelid must be whacked vigorously against the iris to gain ingress, to the several concealed chambers and passageways for my sole and secret use, all of which open at the pulling of a sconce or the adjusting of an oil painting, that sort of thing, to the smallest of rose motifs stenciled upon the wallpaper.

The land whereupon my lady house sits, however, represents a happy accident of real estate investment, as I purchased it a small eternity before the Earl of Bedford seized upon the desire to make of Covent Garden a stylish district for stylish people, and the Earl was forced to make significant accommodations and gratifications on my account. I am always delighted by accommodations and gratifications, particularly when they are forced, and most especially when they are on my account.

The lower floor, which opens most attractively onto the newly-christened and newly-worthwhile Drury Lane, serves as my showroom, and in through my tasteful door flow all the nobly whelped and ignobly wealthed and blind (both from birth and from happenstance, I do not discriminate) and wounded and syphilitic of England, along with not a few who made the journey from France, Italy, Denmark, even the Rus, to receive my peculiar attentions. With the most exquisite consideration, I appointed the walls of my little salon with ultramarine watered silk and discreet, gold-framed portraits of my most distinguished customers. In the northwest corner, you will find what I humbly allege to be the single most comfortable chair in all of Christendom, reclined at an, at first glance, radical angle, that nevertheless offers an extraordinary serenity of ease, stuffed with Arabian horsehair and Spanish barley, sheathed in supple leather the color of a rose just as the last sunlight vanishes behind the mountains. In the northeast corner, you will find, should you but recognize it, my father’s pitted and pitiful iron punty, braced above the hearth with all the honor the gentry grant to their tawdry ancestral swords. The ceiling boasts a fine fresco depicting that drunken uncle of Greek Literature, the Cyclops, trudging through a field of poppies and wheat with a ram under each arm, and the floor bears up beneath a deep blanket of choice carpets woven by divinely inspired and contented Safavids, so thick no cheeky draught even imagines it might invade my realm, and all four walls, from baseboard to the height of a man, are outfitted with a series of splendid drawers, in alternating gold and silver designs, presenting to the hands of my supplicants faceted knobs of sapphire, emerald, onyx, amethyst, and jasper. These drawers contain my treasures, my masterpieces, the objects of power with which I line my pockets and sauce my goose. Open one, any one, every one, and all will be revealed on plush velvet cushions, for there rest hundreds upon hundreds of the most beautiful eyes ever to open or close upon this fallen earth.

No fingers as discerning as mine could ever be content with the glazier’s endless workaday drudge through plate windows and wine bottles, vases and spectacles and spyglasses, hoping against hope for the occasional excitement of a goblet or a string of beads that might, if you did not look too closely, resemble, in the dark, real pearls. No, no, a thousand, million times no! Not for me that life of scarred knuckles whipped by white-molten strands of stray glass, of unbearable heat and even more unbearable contempt oozing from those very ones who needed me to keep the rain out of their parlors and their spirits off the table linen.

I will tell you how I made this daring escape from a life of silicate squalor, and trust you, as I suppose I already have done, to keep my secrets—for what is the worth of a secret if you never spill it? My deliverance came courtesy of a pot of pepper, a disfigured milkmaid, and the Dogaressa of Venice.

It would seem that my brothers were not quite so malevolently egomaniacal as they seemed on that distant, never-to-be-forgotten day when our father drooled his last. One of them was not, at least. Having vanished neatly into London and established myself, albeit in an appallingly meager situation consisting of little more than a single kiln stashed in the best beloved piss-corner of the Arsegate, marvering paltry, poignant cups against the stone steps of a whorehouse, sleeping between two rather unpleasantly amorous cows in a cheesemaker’s barn, I was neither happy nor quite wretched, for at least I had made a start. At least I was in the arms of the reeking city. At least I had escaped the trap laid by pearls and hectares and absconding brothers.

And then, as these things happen, one day, not different in any quality or deed from any other day, I received a parcel from an exhausted-looking young man dressed in the Florentine style. I remember him as well as my supper Thursday last—the supper was pigeon pie and fried eels with claret; the lad, a terrifically handsome black-haired trifle who went by the rather lofty name of Plutarch—and after wiping the road from his eyes and washing it from his throat with ale that hardly deserved the name, he presented me with a most curious item: a fat silver pot, inlaid with a lapis lazuli ship at full sail.

Inside found I a treasure beyond the sweat-drenched dreams of upwardly mobile men, which is to say, a handful of peppercorns and beans of vanil, those exotic, black and fragrant jewels for which the gluttonous world crosses itself three times in thanks. Plutarch explained, at some length, that my brother Prospero now dwelt permanently in the East Indies where he had massed a fabulous fortune, and wished to assure himself that his sister, the sweet, homely maid he abandoned, could make herself a good marriage after all. I begged the poor boy not to use any of those treacherous words again in my or anyone’s hearing: not marriage, not maid, and most of all not sister. Please and thank you for the pepper, on your way, tell no one my name nor how you found me and how did you find me by God and the Devil himself—no, don’t tell me, I shall locate this lost relative and deliver the goods to her with haste, though I could perhaps be persuaded to pass the night reading a bit of Plutarch before rustling up the wastrel in question, but, hold fast, my darling, I must insist you submit to my peculiar tastes and maintain both our clothing and cover of darkness throughout; I find it sharpens the pleasure of the thing, this is my, shall we say, firm requirement, and no argument shall move me.

Thus did I find myself a reasonably rich and well-read man. And that might have made a pleasant and satisfying enough end of it, if not for the milkmaid.

For, as these things happen, one day not long after, not different in any hour or act than any other day, a second parcel appeared upon my, now much finer, though not nearly so fine as my present, doorstep. Her name was Perdita, she was in possession of a complexion as pure as that of a white calf on the day of its birth, hair as red as a fresh wound, an almost offensively pregnant belly, and to crown off her beauty, it must be mentioned, both her eyes had been gouged from her pretty skull by means of, I was shortly to learn, a pair of puritanical ravens.

It would seem that my other brother, Pomposo—you remember him, yes? Paying attention, are we?—was still in the habit of marrying unsuspecting girls off to trees and fish and stones, provided that the trees were his encircling arms, the fish his ardent tongue, and the stones those terribly personal, perceptive, and pendulous seed-vaults of his ardor, and poor, luckless Perdita had taken quite the turn round the park. Perhaps we are not so divided by our shared blood as all that, Pomposo! Hats off, my good man, and everything else, too. Well, the delectably lovely and lamentable maid in question found herself afflicted both by Little Lord Pomposo and by that peculiar misfortune which bonds all men as one and makes them brothers: she had a bad father.

Perdita told me of her predicament over my generous table. She spoke with more haste than precision, tearing out morsels of Mrs. Matterfact’s incomparable baked capon in almond sauce with her grubby fingers and fumbling it into that plump face whilst she rummaged amongst her French pockets for English words to close in her tale like a green and garnishing parsley. As far as I could gather, her cowherding father had, in his youth, contracted the disease of religion, a most severe and acute strain. He took the local clergyman’s daughter to wife, promptly locked her in his granary to keep her safe from both sin and any amusement at all, and removed a child from her every year or so until she perished from, presumably, the piercing shame of having tripped and fallen into one of the more tiresome fairy tales.

Perdita’s father occupied the time he might have spent not slowly murdering his wife upon his one and only hobby: the keeping of birds of prey. Now, one cannot fault the man for that! But he loved no falcons nor hawks nor eagles, only a matched pair of black-hearted ravens he called by the names of Praisegod and Feargod (there really can be no accounting for, or excusing of, the tastes of Papists) which he had trained from the egg to hunt down the smallest traces of wickedness upon his estate and among his children. For this unlikely genius had taught his birds, painstakingly, to detect the delicate and complex scents of sexual congress, and the corvids twain became so adept that they were known to arrive at many a village window only moments after the culmination of the act.

Now you have taken up all the pieces of this none-too-sophisticated puzzle and can no doubt assume the rest. My brother conquered Perdita’s virtue with ease, for no such dour and draconian devoutness can raise much else but libertines, a fact which may yet save us from the vicious fate of a world redeemed, and put my niece (for indeed it proved to be a niece) in her with little enough care for anything but the trees and the fish and the stones of his own bucolic life. No sooner than he had rolled off of her but Praisegod and Feargod arrived, screeching to wake the glorious dead, the scent of coupling maddening their black brains, and devoured Perdita’s eyeballs in a hideous orgy of gore and terribly poor parenting. Pomposo, ever steadfast and humbly responsible for his own affairs, sent his distress directly to me and, I imagine, poured a brimming glass of wine with which to toast himself.

“My dear lady,” said I, gently prying a joint of Mrs. Matterfact’s brandied mutton from her fist, hoping to preserve at least something for myself, “I cannot imagine what you or my good brother mean me to do with a child. I am a bachelor, I wish devoutly to remain so, and my bachelorhood is only redoubled by my regrettable feelings toward children, which mirror the drunkard’s for a mug of clear water: well enough and wholesome for most, he supposes, but what can one do with one? But I am not pitiless. That, I am not, my dear. You may, of course, remain here until the child. . . occurs, and we shall endeavor to locate some suitable position in town for one of your talents.”

Ah, but I had played my hand and missed the trick! “You misunderstand, monsieur,” protested the comely Perdita. “Mister Pompy didn’t send me to you for your hospitalité. He said in London he had a brother who could make me eyes twice as pretty as they ever were and would only charge me the favor of not squeezing out my babe on his parlor floor.”

Even a thousand miles distant, my skinflint family could put the screws to me, turn them tight, and have themselves a nice giggle at my groans. But at least the old boy guessed my game of trousers and did not give me up, even to his paramour.

“They was green,” the milkmaid whispered, and the ruination of her eye sockets bled in place of weeping. “Like clover.”

Oh, very well! I am not a monster. In any event, I wasn’t then. At least the commission was an interesting enough challenge to my lately listless and undernourished intellect. So it came to pass that over the weeks remaining until the parturition of Perdita, I fashioned, out of crystal and ebony and chips of fine jade, twin organs of sight not the equal of mortal orbs but by far their superior, in clarity, in beauty, even in soulfulness. If you ask me how I accomplished it, I shall show you the door, for I am still a tradesman, however exalted, and tradesmen tell no tales. I sewed the spheres myself with thread of gold into her fair face, an operation which sounds elegant and difficult in the telling, but in the doing required rather more gin, profanity, and blows to the chin than any window did. When I had finished, she appeared, not healed, but more than healed—sublimated, rarefied, elevated above the ranks of human women with their filmy, vitreous eyes that could merely see.

I have heard good report that, under another name, and with her daughter quite grown and well-wed, Perdita now sits upon the throne of the Netherlands, her peerless eyes having captivated the heart of a certain prince before anyone could tie a rock round her feet and drop her into a canal. Well done, say all us graspers down here, reaching up toward Heaven’s sewers with a thousand million hands, well done.

Now, we arrive at the hairpin turn in the road of both my fortunes and my life, the skew of the thing, where the carriage of our tale may so easily overturn and send us flying into mud and thorns unknown. Brace your constitution and your credulity, for I am of a mind to whip the horses and take the bend at speed!

It is simply not possible to excel so surpassingly as I have done and remain anonymous. God in his perversity grants anonymity to the gifted and the industrious in equal and heartless measure, but never to the splendid. Word of the girl with the unearthly, alien, celestial eyes spread like a plague of delight in every direction, floating down the river, sweeping through the Continent, stowing away on ships at sea, until it arrived, much adorned with my Lady Rumor’s laurels, at the palazzo of the Doge in darling, dripping Venice.

Now, the Doge at that time had caused himself, God knows why or by dint of what wager, to be married to a woman by the name of Samaritiana. Do not allow yourselves to be duped by that name, you trusting fools! Samaritiana would not even stop along the side of the road to Hell to wrinkle her nose at the carcass of Our Lord Jesus Christ, though it save her immortal soul, unless He told her she was beautiful first. Oh, ‘tis easy enough to hate a vain woman with warts and liver spots, to scorn her milk baths and philtres and exsanguinated Hungarian virgins, to mock her desperation to preserve a youth and beauty that was never much more enticing than the local sheep in the first place, but one had to look elsewhere for reasons to hate Samaritiana, for she truly was the singular beauty of her age. Black of hair, eye, and ambition was she, pale as a maiden drowned, buxom as Ceres (though she had yet no issue), intoxicating as the breath of Bacchus. Fortunately, my lady thoughtfully provided a bounty of other pantries in which to find that meat of hatred fit for the fires of any heart.

She was, quite simply, the worst person.

I do not mean by this to call the Dogaressa a murderess, nor an apostate, nor a despot, nor an embezzler, nor even a whore, for whores, at least, are kindly and useful, murderers must have some measure of cleverness if they mean to get away with it, apostates make for tremendous company at parties, despots have a positively devastating charisma, and, I am assured by the highest authority, which is to say, Lord Aphorism and his Merry Band of Proverbials, that there is some honor amongst thieves. No, Samaritiana was merely humorless, witless, provincial, petty, small of mind, parched of imagination, stingy of wallet and affection, morally conservative, and incapable, to the last drop of her ruby blood, of admitting that she did not know everything in all the starry spheres and wheeling orbits of existence, and this whilst believing herself to possess all of these that are virtues and eschew all that are sins. Can you envisage a more wretched and unloveable beast?

I married her, naturally.

The Dogaressa came to me in a black resin mask and emerald hooded cloak when the plague had only lately checked into its waterfront rooms, sent for a litter, and commenced seeing the sights of Venice with its traveling hat and trusted map.

Oh, no, no, you misapprehend my phraseology. Not that plague. Not that grave and gorgeous darkling shadow that falls over Europe once a century and reminds us that what dwells within our bodies is not a soul but a stinking ruin of fluid and marrow and bile. The other plague, the one that sneaks on nimbly putrefying feet from bedroom to bedroom, from dockside to dinner party, from brothel to marital bower, leaving chancres like kisses too long remembered. Yes, we would have to wait years yet before Baron von Bubœ mounted his much-anticipated revival on the stage, but never you fear, Dame Syphilis was dancing down the dawn, and in those days, her viols never stopped nor slowed.

That mysterious, morbid, nigh-monstrous and tangerine-scented creature called Samaritiana darkened my door one evening in April, bid me draw close all my curtains, light only a modest lantern upon a pretty lacquered table inlaid with mother of pearl which I still possess to this day, and stand some distance away while she removed her onyx mask to reveal a face of such surpassing radiance, such unparalleled winsomeness, that even the absence of the left eye, and the mass of scars and weals that had long since replaced it, could do no more than render her enchanting rather than perfect.

It would seem that the Dogaressa danced with the Dame some years past. Her husband, the Doge, brought her to the ball, she claimed, having learned the steps from his underaged Neapolitan mistress, though, as I became much acquainted with the lady in later years, I rather suspect she found her own way, arrived first, wore through three pairs of shoes, departed last, and ate all the cakes on the sideboard. But, as is far too often the case in this life ironical, that mean and miserly soul found itself in receipt of, not only the beauty of a better woman, but the good fortune of a better man. She contracted a high fever owing to her insistence upon hosting the Christmas feast out of doors that year, so that the gathered noblility could see how lovely she looked with a high winter’s blush on her cheeks, and this fever seemed to have driven, by some idiot insensate alchemy, the Dame from the halls of Samaritiana forever, leaving only her eye ravaged and boiled away by the waltz.

All was well in the world, then, save that she could not show herself in public without derision and her husband still rotted on his throne with a golden nose hung on his mouldering face like a door knocker, but she had not come for his sake, nor would she ever dream of fancying that it was possible to ask a boon of that oft-rumored wizard hiding in the sty of London for any single soul on earth other than herself.

“I have heard that you can make a new eye,” said she, in dulcet tones she did not deserve the ability to produce.

I could.

“Better than the old, brighter, of any color or shape?”

I could.

She licked her lily lips. “And install it so well none would suspect the exchange?”

Perhaps not quite, not entirely so well, but it never behooves one to admit weakness to a one-eyed queen.

“You have already done me this service,” said she to me, loftily, never asking once, only demanding, presuming, crushing all resistance, not to mention dignity, custom, the basest element of courtesy, beneath her silver-tooled heel. She waved her hand as though the motion of her fingers could destroy all protestation. The light of my lantern caught on a ring of peridot and tourmaline entwined into the shape of a rather maudlin-looking crocodile gnawing upon its own tail, for she claimed some murky Egyptian blood in the dregs of her familial cup, as though such little droplets could mark her as exceptional, when every dockside lady secretly fancies herself a Cleopatra of the Thames.

“Produce the results upon the morrow! I will pay you nothing, of course. A Dogaressa does not stoop to exchange currency for goods. But when two eyes look out from beneath my brow once more, I will present you with a gift, for no particular reason other than that I wish to bestow it.”

“And if I do not like your gift, Clarissima?”

Puzzlement contorted her exquisitely Cyclopean visage, causing a most unwelcome familial pang within my breast. “I do not take your meaning, Master Peek. How could such a thing possibly occur?”

There is, it seems, a glittering point beyond which egotism achieves such purity that it becomes innocence, and that was the country in which Samaritiana lived. In truth, had she revealed her gift to me then, or even promised payment in the usual manner, I might have refused her, just to experience the novel emotion of rejecting royalty—for I am interested in nothing so much as novelty, not love nor death nor glass nor gold. Something new! Something new! My kingdom for something new! But she caught me, the perfumed spider, wholly without knowing what she’d done. I did indeed take up her commission, and though you may conclude in advance that this recounting of the job will proceed according to the pattern of the last, I shall be disappointed if you do, for I have already told you most vividly that herein lies the skew of my tale.

For the sake of the beautiful Dogaressa, I took up my father’s battered old pipe and punty. I cannot now say why; for a certainty I owned better instruments by far, and had not touched the things in eons except to brush them daintily with a daily sneer. Perhaps a paroxysm of sentimentality seized me; perhaps I despised her too much even then to waste my finer appliances on her pox-punched face, in any event, I cannot even say positively that the result blossomed forth from the tools and not some other cause, and I fear to question it now. I sank into the rhythm of my father and grandfather and his before him: the dollop of liquid glass, the greatbreath of my own lungs expelled through the long, black pipe, the sweet pressure and rolling of the globule against the smooth marver stone, the uncommon light known only to workers of glass, that strange slick of marmalade-light afire within crystal that would soon ride a woman’s skull all the way through the days of her life and down into her tomb.

The work was done; I fashioned two, an exquisitely matched pair, in case the other organ required replacement in the unseen feverish future. Samaritiana, in, so far as I may know or tell, the sole creative decision of her existence, chose not one color for the iris but all of them, dozens of infinitesimal shards chipped from every jewel in my inventory: sapphire, jade, emerald, jasper, onyx, amethyst, ruby, topaz. The effect was a carnival wheel of deep, unsettling fascination, and when I sewed it into her flesh with my golden thread she did not wail or struggle but only sighed, as though lost in the act of love, and, though her faults were called Legion, they were as yet unknown to me, thus, as my needle entered her, so too did my fatal softening begin.

The Dogaressa departed with her stitching still fresh, leaving in her wake but three souvenirs of our intimate surgery: one gift she intended, one she did not, and her damnable scent, which neither Mrs. Matterfact nor Mr. Suchandsuch, no matter how they scrubbed and strove, could remove from the premises. I daresay, even this very night, should you venture to my old house on the High Street and press your nose to its sturdy bones, still yet you would snatch a whiff of tangerine and strangling ivy from the foundation stones.

The gift she intended to leave was a lock of her raven hair, the skinflint bitch. The other, I did not perceive until some weeks later, when I adjourned to my smoking room with a bottle of brandy, a packet of snuff, and a rare contemplative mood which I intended to spend upon a rich, unfiltered melancholy as sweet as any Madeira—for it is a fact globally acknowledged that idle melancholy, like good wine, is the exclusive purview of the wealthy. To aid in my melancholy, I fingered in one hand the mate to the Dogaressa’s harlequin eye, rubbing my thumb over that strange, motley iris, marveling at the milky sheen of the sclera, admiring, unrepentant Narcissus that I am, my own skill and artistry. I removed my own, ordinary, unguessable, nearly flawless glass eye and held up the other to my empty socket like a spyglass, and a most thoroughly stupendous metamorphosis transpired: I could see through the jeweled lens of that artificial eye! Truly see, without cloud or glare or halo—ah, but what I saw was not the walls of my own smoking room, so tastefully lined with matching books chosen to neither excite nor bore any guest to extremes, but the long peach-cream and gold hall of the palazzo of the Doge in far-distant Venice! The chequered black and white marble floors flowed forth in my vision like a houndstooth river; the full and unforgiving moon streamed glaucous through tall slim windows; painted ceilings soared overhead, inlaid with pearl and carnelian and ever-so-slightly greyed with the smoke of a hundred thousand candles burnt over peerless years in that grand corridor. Women and men swept slowly up and down the squares like boats upon some fairy canal, swathed in gowns of viridescent green cross-hatched with silver and rose, armored in bodices of whalebone and opal, be-sailed in lacy gauze spun by Clotho herself upon the wheel of destiny, cloaked and hooded in vermillion damask, in aquamarine, in citron and puce, their clothing each so splendid I could scarce tell the maids from the swains—and thus looked I upon a personal paradise heretofore undreamt of.

But there were worms in paradise, for each and every beauty in the Doge’s palace was rotting in their finery like the fruit of sun-spoiled melons within their shells. Their flesh putrefied and dripped from their bones and what remained turned hideous, sickening colors, choleric, livid, cyanic, hoary, a moldering patina of death whose effusions stained those bodices black. Some stumbled noseless, others having replaced that appendage with nostrils of gold and silver and crystal and porcelain, and others, all hope lost, sunk their visages into masks, though they could not hide their chancred hands, the bleeding sores of their bosoms, the undead tatters of their throats.

Yet still they laughed, and spoke animatedly, one to the other, and blushed in virtuous fashion beneath their putridity. Such is the dance of the Dame, who enters through the essential act of life, yet leaves you thinking, breathing, walking whilst the depredations of the grave transact upon your still-sensate flesh, making of this world a single noisy tomb.

My breath would not obey me; my heart ricocheted amongst my ribs like a cannon misfired. Was it truly Italy I saw bounded in the tiny planet of a glass eye? Had I stumbled into a drunken sleep or gone mad so swiftly no asylum could hope to catch me? I shot to my feet, mashing the eye deeper into my socket until stars spattered my sight—closer, look closer! Could I hear as well? Smell? Taste the tallowed air of that far-off moonlit court?

I could not. I could not hear their footsteps nor inhale their perfume nor feel the fuzzed reek of the mildewed canals on my tongue nor move of my own volition. I apprehended a new truth, that even the impossible possesses laws of its own, and those unbendable. I could only observe. Observe—while my vision lurched forward, advancing quickly, rocking gently as with a woman’s sinuous gait. Graceful, slender arms extended as though from my own body, opening with infinite elegance to embrace a man whose head was that of a Titan cast down brutally into the pit of Tartarus, so wracked with growths and intuberances and pulsating polyps that the plates of his skull had cracked beneath the intolerable weight and shifted into a new pate so monstrous it could no longer bear the Doge’s crown, which hung pitifully instead from a ribbon slung round his grotesque neck. Those matchless arms which were not my own enfolded this hapless creature and, encircling the middle finger of the hand belonging to the right arm, I saw with my altered vision the twisted peridot and tourmaline crocodile ring of the Dogaressa Samaritiana.

I cast the glass eye away from me, sickened, thrilled, inflamed, ensorcelled, the fire in my midnight hearth as nothing beside the conflagration of curiosity, horror, and the beginnings of power that crackled within my brain-pan. In that first moment, standing among my books and my brandy drenched in the sweat of a new universe, an instinct, a whisper of Truth Profound, permeated my spirit like smoke exhaled, and, I confess to you now, all these many years hence, still I enshrine it as an article of faith, for it was with breath that God animated the dumb mud of Adam, breath that woke Pandora from stone, breath that demarcates the living and the dead, breath with which we speak and cry out and divide ourselves from the idiot kingdom of animals, and breath, by all the blasted saints and angels, with which the glassblower shapes his glass! The living breath of Cornelius Peek yet permeates every insignificant atom of his works; each object broken from his punty, be it window or goblet or cask or eye, hides the sacred exhalations of his spirit co-mingled with the crystal, and it is this, it is this, I tell you, that connects the jeweled eye of the Dogaressa with the jeweled eye in my hand! I dwell in the glass, it cannot dispense with me any further than it can dispense with translucency or mass, and therefore it carries the shard of Cornelius whithersoever it wanders.

Let us dispense with a few obnoxious but inevitable inquiries into the practicality of the matter, so that we may move along past the skew. How could this mystic connection have escaped my notice till now? It is only sensical: Perdita vanished away to the Netherlands with both marvelous eyes, and no window nor goblet nor cask is, in its inborn nature, that organ of sight which opens onto the infinite pit of the human soul. Would any eye manufactured in the same fashion result in such remote visions? They would indeed, my credulous friend. Does every glassblower possess the ability to produce such objects, should he but retain one eye whilst selling the other at a fair price? Ah, here I must admit my deficiency as a philosopher, for which I apologize most obsequiously. It cannot be breath alone, for I made subtle overtures toward the gentleman of the glassmen’s guild and I can say with a solemn certainty that none but Master Peek can perform this alchemy of sclera and pupil. Why should it be so? Perhaps I am a wizard, perhaps a saint, perhaps a demiurge, perhaps the Messiah returned at last, perhaps it owes only to that peculiar rootstock of my family which grants me my height, my baritone, the hairiness of my body. Grandfather Polyphemus’s last gift, lobbed down the ancestral highway, bashing horses as it comes. I am a man of art, not science. I ask why Mrs. Matterfact has not yet laid out my supper oftener than I ask after the workings of the uncluttered cosmos.

Thus did I enter the business of optometry.

When you have placed a mad rainbow jewel in the skull of a Dogaressa as though she were nothing but a golden ring, a jewel which drove the rotting men of Venice insane with the desire to tie her to a bridge-post and stare transported into the motley swirling colors of the eye of God, lately fallen to earth, they began to say, somewhere in Sicily, advertisement serves little purpose. I opened my door and received the flood. It is positively trivial to lose an eye in this wicked world, did you know? I accepted them warmly, with a bow and a kerchief fluttered to the mouth in acute compassion, a permanently sympathetic expression penciled onto my lips in primrose paint—for that moth-eaten scab Cromwell was finally in the grave, where everything is just as colorless and abstemious and black as he always wished it to be, so full of piss and vitriol that it poisoned him to the gills, and Our Chuck, the Merry Monarch, was dancing on his bones.

Fashion, ever my God and my mother, took pity upon her poor supplicant and caused a great miracle to take place for my sake—the world donned a dandy wig whilst I doffed my own, sporting my secret womanly hair as long and curled as any lord, soaking my face in the most masculine of pale powders, rouges, lacquers, and creams, encasing my figure, such as it ever was, in lime and coral brocade trimmed in frosty silver, concealing my gait with an ivory cane and foxfurred slippers, and rejoicing in the knowledge that, of all the men in London, I suddenly possessed the lowest voice of them all. So hidden, so revealed, I took all the one-eyed world into my parlor: the cancerous, the war-wounded, the horse-kicked, the husband-beaten, the inquisitor-inquisited, the lightning-struck, the unfortunately-born, the pox-blighted, and yes, the Dame’s erstwhile lovers, for she had made her way to our shores and had begun her ancient gambols in sight of St. Paul’s. And for each of these unfortunate angels of the ocular, I fashioned a second eye in secret, unknown entirely to my custom, twin to the one that repaired their befouled faces, with which I adjourned night by night to a series of successive smoking rooms, growing grander and finer with each year, holding those orbs to the light and looking unseen upon every city in Christendom, along with several in the Orient and one in the New World, though it could hardly be called a city, if I am to be honest. And Venice, always Venice, the first eye and only, her eye, gazing out on the water, the moonlight, the dead.

In this fashion, I came to know that the Doge had died, succumbed to the unbearable weight of his own head, long before Samaritiana appeared on my night-bestrewn doorstep, the saffron gown she wore in the moonlight, and every other in her trunk, torn violently, soaked with bodily fluids, rent by the overgrown nails of the frenzied rotting horde who had chased her from the palazzo through every desperate alleyway and canal of the city, across Switzerland and France, in their anguished longing to touch the Eye of God, still sewn into the ex-Dogaressa’s skull, to touch it but once and be healed forever.

But of course I aided the friendless and abandoned Good Samaritiana as she wept beside her monstrous road. Oh, Clarissima, how dreadful, how unspeakable, how worthy of Mr. Pepys’ vigilant pen! I shall have to make introductions when you are quite well again. I sent at once for a fine dressmaker of my acquaintance to construct a suitable costume for the lady and save her from the immodesty of those ragged silken remnants of her former life with which, even then, she attempted to cover her body with little enough success that, before the dressmaker could so much as cross the river, I learned something quite unexpected concerning the biography of Samaritiana, former queen of Venice.

She was quite male. Undeniably, conspicuously, astonishingly, fascinatingly so.

I called up to Mrs. Matterfact for cold oxtongue, a saucer of pineapple, and oysters stewed in Armagnac, down to Mr. Suchandsuch for carafes of hot claret mulled via the latest methods, and listened to the wondrous chimera in my parlor tell of how that famous Egyptian blood was not in the least of the Nile but of the Tiber, on whose Ostian banks a penniless but beautiful boy had been born in secret to one of the Pope’s mistresses and left to perish among the reed-gatherers and the amber-collectors and the diggers of molluscs.

But perish the lad did not, for even a grass-picker is thoroughly loused with the nits of compassion, and the women passed the babe one to the other and back again, like a cup of wine that drank, instead, from them. Now, it is well known to anyone with a single sopping slice of sense that the Pope’s enemies are rather like weevils, ever industrious, ever multiplying, ever rapacious, starving for the chaff of scandal with which to choke the Holy Father and watch him writhe. They roved over the city, overturning the very foundational stones of ancient Rome in search of the Infallible Bastards, in order, not to kill them like Herod, but to bring them before the Cardinals and etch their little faces upon the stained glass windows as evidence of sin. My little minx, having already long, lustrous hair and androgyne features more like to a seraph than a by-blow son, found it at first advantageous to effect the manners and dress of a girl, and then, when the danger had passed, more than that, agreeable, even preferable to her former existence. Having become a maid to save her life, she remained one in order to enjoy it. Owing to the meager diet of the Tiber’s tiniest fish, little Samaritiana never grew so tall nor so stout as other boys, she remained curiously hairless, and though she escaped the castrato’s fate, her voice never dipped beneath the pleasing alto with which she now spoke, nor did her organ of masculinity ever aspire to outdo the average Grecian statue, and so, when the Doge visited Ostia after the death of his first wife, he saw nothing unusual walking by the river except for the most beautiful woman in the Occident, balancing a basket of rushes on her hip with a few nuggets of amber rolling within the weave.

“But surely, Clarissima,” mused I, savoring the tart song of pineapple upon my tongue, “a bridegroom, however ardent, cannot be so easily duped as a vengeful Cardinal! Your deception cannot have survived the wedding bower!”

“It did not survive the engagement, my dear Master Peek,” Samaritiana replied without a wisp of blush upon her remarkable cheek. “Oh, mistake me not, I do so love to lie—I see no more purpose in pretending to be virtuous in your presence than I saw in pretending to be fertile in his. But there could be no delight in a deception so deep and vast. It would impair true marriage between us. I revealed myself at Pentecost, allowing him in the intensity of his ardor to unfasten my stays and loose my ribbons until I stood clad only in honesty before His Serenity and awaited what I presumed to be my doom and my death. But only kisses fell upon me in that moment, for the Doge had long suppressed his inborn nature, and suffered already to get upon his departed wife the heirs he owed to the canals, and though my masquerade, you will agree, outshines the impeccable, he would later say, on the night of which you so confidently speak, that some sinew of his heart must always have known, since first he beheld me with my basket of amber and sorrow.”

I did not exchange trust for trust that night among the oysters and the oxtongue. I have a viciously refined sense of theatre, after all. I made her wait, feigning religion, indigestion, the vicissitudes of work, gout, even virginity, until our wedding night, whereupon I allowed Samaritiana, in the intensity of her ardor, to unfasten my stays and loose my ribbons until at last all that stood between us was the tattered ruin of my mother’s ancient bridal veil, and then, not even that.

“Goodness, you don’t expect me to be surprised, do you?” laughed the ex-Dogaressa, the monster, the braying centaur, the miserly lamia who would not give me the satisfaction of scandalizing her! That eve, and only that eve, under the stars painted upon my ceiling, I applied all my cruellest and most unfair arts to compel my wife to admit, as a wedding present, that she had not known, she had never known, never even suspected, loved me as a man just as I loved her as a woman, and was besides a brutal little liar who deserved a lifetime of the most delectable punishment. We exchanged whispered, apocryphal, long-atrophied names beneath the coverlet: Perpetua. Proteo.

Samartiana treated me deplorably, broke my heart and my bank, laughed when she ought to have wept, drove Mrs. Matterfact to utter disintegration, kept lovers, schemed with minor nobles. We were just ferociously happy. Are you surprised? I, too, am humorless, witless, provincial, petty, small of mind, parched of imagination, stingy of wallet and affection, a liar and a cad. He was like me. I was like her. I had, after all, seen as she saw, from the very angle of her waking vision, which in some circles might be the definition of divine love. I have had wives before and will have again, far cleverer and braver and wilder than my Clarissima, but none I treasured half so well, nor came so near to telling the secret of my smoking room, of the chests full of eyes hidden beneath the floorboards. Samaritiana had her lovers; I had my eyes, the voyeur’s stealthy, soft and pregnant hours, a criminal sensorium I could not quit nor wished to.Yet still I would not share, I held it back from her, out of her reach, beyond her ken.

The plague took her in the spring. The Baron, not the Dame. The plague of long masks and onions and bodies stacked like fresh-laid bricks. I buried her in glass, in my incandescent fury at the kiln, for where else can a man lose his whole being but in a wife or in work? These are the twin barrels in which we drown ourselves forever.

It soon came to pass that wonderful eyes of Cornelius Peek were in such demand that the possession of one could catapult the owner into society, if only he could keep his head about him once he landed, and this was reason enough that, men being men and ambition being forever the most demanding of bedfellows, it became much the fashion in those years to sacrifice one eye to the teeth-grinding god of social mobility and replace it with something far more useful than depth perception. Natural colors fell by the wayside—they wanted an angel’s eye, now, a demon’s, a dryad’s, a goblin’s, more alien, more inhuman, less windows to the soul than windows to debauched and lawless Edens, and I, your servant, sir, a window-maker once more. I cannot say I approved of this self-deformation, but I certainly profited by the sudden proliferation of English Cyclopses, most especially by their dispersal through the halls of power, carrying the breath of Peek with them into every shadowy corner of the privileged and the perverse.

I strung their eyes on silver thread and lay in a torpor like unto the opium addict upon the lilac damask of my smoking room couch, draping them round and round my body like a strand of numberless pearls, lifting each crystal gem in turn to gaze upon Paris, Edinburgh, Madrid, Muscovy, Constantinople, Zurich—and Venice, always Venice, returning again and again, though I knew I would not find what I sought along those rippling canals traveled by the living dead. It became my obsession, this invasion of perspective, this theft of privacy, the luxurious passivity of the thing, watching without participating as the lives of others fluttered by like so many scarlet leaves, compelled to witness, but not to interfere, even if I wished to, even if I had liked the young Earl well enough when I installed his pigment-less diamond eye and longed to parry the assassin’s blade when I saw it flash in the Austrian sunset. I saw, with tremulous breath, as God saw, forced unwilling to allow the race of man to damn or redeem itself in a noxious fume of free will, forbidden by laws unwritten not to lift one hand, even if the baker’s boy had laughed when I offered him a big red eye or a cat-slit pupil or a shark’s unbroken onyx hue, any sort, free of charge, even the costliest, the most debonair, in honor of my late wife Samaritiana who in another lifetime paid me in hair, not because she would wish me to be generous but because she would mock me to the rafters and howl hazard down to Hell, begging the Devil to take me now rather than let one more pauper rob her purse, even if I saw, now, through his eye, saw the maidservant burning, burning in the bakery on Pudding Lane, burning and screaming in the midnight wind, and then the terrible, impossible leap of the flames to the adjoining houses, an orange tongue lasciviously working in the dark, not to lift one hand as what I saw in the glass eye and what I saw in the flesh became one, fusing and melding at last, reality and unreality, the sight I owned and the sight I stole, the conflagration devouring the city, the gardens, and my house around me, my lovely watered ultramarine silk, my supremely comfortable chair stuffed with Arabian horsehair, my darling gold and silver drawers, as I lay still and let it come for me and thee and all.

I did not die, for heaven’s sake. Perish the thought! Death is terrifically gauche, don’t you know, I should never be caught wearing it in public. I simply did not get up. Irony being the Lord of All Things, the smoking room survived the blaze and I inside it; though the rafters smoked and blackened and the walls swelled with heat like the head of a Doge, the secret chambers honeycombing the place contained the inferno, they did not stove in nor fall, save for one shelf of books, the bloody Romans, of all things, which, in toppling, quite snapped both my shinbones beneath a ponderous copy of Plutarch. Mrs. Matterfact and Mr. Suchandsuch fought valiantly and gave up only the better part of the roof, though we lost my lovely showroom, a tragedy from which I shall never fully recover, I assure you. And for a long while, I remained where the fire found me, on the long damask couch in my smoking room, wrapped in lengths of eyes like Odysseus lashed to the mast and listening to all the sirens’ mating bleats, still lifting each in turn and fixing it to my empty socket, one after the other after the other, and thus I stayed for years, years beyond years, beyond Matterfact and Suchandsuch and their replacements, beyond the intolerable plebians outside who wanted only humble, honest brown and blue eyes again, their own mortal eyes, having seen too much of wildness. And what, pray tell, did I do with my impossible sight, with my impossible span of time?

Why, I became the greatest spy the world has ever known. Would you have done otherwise?

Oh, I have sold crowns to kings and kings to executioners, positions to the enemy and ships to the storm, murderers to the avenging and perversities to the puritanical, I have caused ingenious devices to be built in England before the paint in Krakow finished drying, rescued aristocrats from the mob and mobs from the aristocracy by turns, bought and traded and brokered half of Europe to the other half and back again, dashed more sailors against the rocks than my promethean progenitor could have done in the throes of his most orgiastic fever-dream. I have smote the ground and summoned up wars from the deeps and I have called down the heavens to end them, all without moving one whisper from my house on Drury Lane, even as the laborers rebuilt it around me, even as the rains came, even as the lane around it became a writhing slum, a whore’s racetrack, a nursery rhyme.

Look around you and look well: this is the world I made. Isn’t it charming? Isn’t it terrible and exquisite and debased and tastefully appointed according to the very latest of styles? I have seen to every detail, every flourish—think nothing of it, it has been my great honor.

But the time has come to rouse myself, for my eyes have begun to grow dark, and of late I spy muchly upon the damp and wormy earth, for who would not beg to be buried with their precious Peek eye, bauble of a bygone—and better—age? No one, not even the baker’s boy. The workshop of Master Cornelius Peek will open doors once more, for I have centuries sprawled at my feet like Christmas tinsel, and I would not advance upon them blind. I have heard the strange mournful bovine lowing of what I am assured are called the proletariat outside my window, the clack and clatter of progress to whose rhythm all men must waltz. There is much work to be done if I do not wish to have the next century decorated by some other, coarser, less splendid hand. I shall curl my hair and don the lime and coral coat, crack the ivory cane against the stones once more, and if the fashions have sped beyond me, so be it, I care nothing, I will stand for the best of us, for in the end, the world will always belong to dandies, who alone see the filigree upon the glass that is God’s signature upon his work.

After all, it is positively trivial to lose an eye in this midden of modernity, this precarious, perilous world, don’t you agree?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. Her poetry and short fiction can be found online and in print in such journals as Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Electric Velocipede, Lightspeed, and Subterranean Online, as well as in anthologies such as Interfictions, Salon Fantastique, Paper Cities, Steampunk Reloaded, and featured in numerous Year’s Best collections. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

UNEARTHLY LANDSCAPE BY A LADY

Rebecca Campbell

A WINTER AFTERNOON when she was eight, and her tiny finger traced transoceanic voyages over the blue pages of our atlas. I taught her to recite the coasts past which she sailed: Malabar and Mandalay, Ceylon, Siam. Names like incantations, terminating always in Flora’s favourite specks of the south Atlantic: Ascension, St Helena, Inaccessible, the loneliest and strangest shores she could imagine.

These lessons in geography quickly became games of concentration, as I named cities and she responded with exports and shipping routes, the trails that ivory traces from wild elephants to billiard rooms. When I pointed at the Caribbean islands she knew to bring me a lump of sugar. When I held up a translucent teacup she pointed at China.

Until—this winter afternoon when she was eight—she answered my question not with tea from the box on the table but with silence, and then, “Ceylon is so far! I’ll never ever see it.”

“You might!”

She knelt on her chair and trailed her velvet rabbit to the floor. “Don’t be silly, Mina, you’ve never been so far from home. You’ve never been anywhere.”

Perhaps if I had been a different sort of woman, if I had been to Tahiti, or rounded the Cape of Good Hope, her life would have had a different ending. I wonder if with another mentor—braver, wiser—she might have flowered into something authentically strange, revolutionary in her beauty, or in her violence.

But I was not brave, nor wise, and this account is not one of revolution. It pains me that I only said, “and thus concludes the lesson, we should go out before it’s too dark in the garden.”

~ ~ ~

If I had paid more careful attention would I have found him even then, when she was eight; some trace of that other world that has so haunted me since? I have many of her things in my possession—two decades of Christmas and birthday gifts, painted teacups and toilet trays and miniatures. Their subject matter irreproachably conventional, until one looks and begins to suspect something hiding in the sinuous line of her ivy or the glowering red of her sunset.

The first I saw was a figure very like a man, despite the bronze wings riveted to his shoulders, on whose wrist was mounted the deadly machinery of something I can only call a Gatling gun, but miniaturized, shooting not bullets but something molten, something poison. Around his feet lay the remains of other creatures, very like birds, very like flowers, half-hidden under the violet leaves that border her teacup.

I cannot name them, but they are familiar from dozens of landscapes in her painstaking, microscopic style, her brushstrokes so tiny that I checked her work with a magnifying glass and feared not for her mind but for her eyesight. I remember her at thirteen, hunched in the window, building whole universes in the curve of a teacup.

~ ~ ~

At fourteen, little girls are found wanting—perhaps her skin is coarse, perhaps her waist thickens or her laugh is too loud—and they are consigned to tight slippers, to the corset and the parasol. Adulthood darkens the horizon, and at eighteen she is engulfed.

Flora’s girlhood was free, disturbed only by the irregular attentions of her guardians, a great aunt and uncle who spent their winters in Italy and their summers in Switzerland. She struggled, then resigned herself to a straitened world, her pale braids fearfully and intricately bound to her scalp, her body constrained by steel and baleen as over her skin crept the apparatus of bone and padded silk, the nets and cages.

It is a strange paradox: when such artifice is well-executed, one would think the girl-creature is a product of nature rather than an illusion made of metal and bone and a thin film of silk. Often I thought, as Flora crossed the garden or the marble floor of the hall, that she was the down-hanging blossom of some slight pink flower, drifting on the sort of breeze that floats a pixie through the colour plates in fairytales.

At nineteen she went to garden parties and riding parties and river-parties, and in the evenings the carriage often carried her away to enormous rooms, adjacent to verdigris conservatories where her pale gold dresses—gas-lit, candle-lit, fire-lit—glowed against the darkness outside. When she returned in the rising day she possessed the faint luminosity of pre-dawn flowers, as though the glow of a distant sunrise permanently lit her face.

I remember turning over the huge skirt of a gown sent up from the city, oppressive in weight but possessing the texture of a cirrus cloud, a colour halfway between pink and grey.

At the mirror she said, “They call this colour ashes of rose. A holocaust of flowers. Just think, Mina, of all the burning gardens to make one dress.” Lace foamed through her fingers and down into her lap.

“Mrs. Maryat will want to see you”, or not that—something equally empty that meant ignore it and she will know better than to say these things.

“There’s a new cup on the work table, Mina. Do you like it? Another garden,” she said. “Full of roses. And ashes, too.”

“It’s very pretty. It’s as pretty as that fan you painted last week. So pretty.”

The conventional subject: ruins, roses, forget-me-nots. How delicately she had tangled ivy around the slim line of her ruined tower. An arrowslit where an archer of old must have rested his bow. And there, executed with the single hair at the tip of her cat-fur brush, a figure, a man, more or less. Something strapped to his wrist, a dreadful commingling of the cross-bow and the cannon.

And around the base of the tower, among the roots of the flowers, in the shadows cast by dark stems, there were bodies—insectoid, five-armed, three-eyed, with green skin, or dark bronze, or a sickly woad-ish blue I did not like, one that bled into the forget-me-nots bordering the bottom of the scene.

“What does it mean?”

“Why should it mean anything?” Flora picked up the ashy pink dress. “Do you think lilies of the valley?”

It must have been the gleam of the window and the shadows cast by lace on silk, but I thought I saw—for a moment—a wriggling glimpse of that other world, into which we must stoop to look, at which we gaze only with the aid of the magnifying glance or the telescope, populated—a trick of the paint, or of shadows—by the three-armed, the greenskinned, and a strange figure who brandished something unnameable and deadly.

The creatures on the ground had the heavy heads of peonies, but no natural configuration of petals would look so like a fleshy body, punctuated by spiky leaves like teeth and thorns. “Who told you about these? The man in the tower, and the airships? Are these birds?”

She trailed a finger across the glittering beadwork of her sleeve. “They’re not birds, exactly. Insects, perhaps, is a closer analogue. Some have green shells, some gold. Some have seven legs, and some three. Their compatriots are on the ground, the flowers—”

For a long time she did not speak.

“The flowers—” she began again, her voice warmer. I hoped she would stop.

“—I don’t like them, Flora—”

“—the men in the towers eat them. At first I did not realize it, but the plants are sentient, and when they are in pain and afraid, they exude a substance from their central stem that is remarkably delicious. Somewhere between a mango and a new vanilla pod. That scent—it’s a perfume, too, they use it to scent the air in the sky-cities—made me think when I first saw them they were on some southern Island, somewhere very far away. So far that I cannot imagine. So far away that the sun is the wrong colour, distant and cold and tinted faintly green. There are airships that sail from the sky-cities, which float up high, tethered by long copper chains to the mountain peaks. The people who live up there are beautiful and gold-hued, and breathe the thin alpine air, and lie naked in the sunshine, which turns their skins a handsome metallic bronze.

“And wings are not their only remarkable technology. They travel far in their minds by way of strange apparatus. I do not understand it, dear Mina, or I would tell you more. I think they touch our world, sometimes, but perhaps that is only fancy on my part. I think I see them, flickering in the air above, those god-men wearing their copper wings, dressed in the skins of the singing insects. Perhaps if we were treated in the same way we, too, would exude something delicious in our death-throes.”

“Flora, please—”

“The plant-people are limited by their vegetable nature in where they may live, and are unable to run, though the adults—which can drag their stems a little—grow great thorns that snap shut around the throats of invaders. It is a challenge to find the youngest, tenderest shoots, to frighten them into silence and eat them there in a garden of their parents. I wonder if insects grieve, Mina. What about flowers?”

She laughed.

Should I have directed her more forcefully toward wholesome good deeds, or theological poems? Should I have drilled her in Latin verbs until she had no moment of privacy in which to think about this alien sky? I could not imagine that my charge—with her perfect composure, the blue of her eyes as shallow as an atlas’s ocean, the irreproachable whiteness of her complexion—could conceive something so strange, so unpleasant.

She handed me the teacup she held and said, “Look in the hearts of the flowers.”

The luck of a ringing bell—somewhere in the heart of the house—interrupted our uncomfortable tête à tête, and I was relieved to look away from the globular, fleshy petals, just as I saw—hidden among them—the bodies of infant flowers, otherworldly and sentient, destroyed by the gold-winged men for the tears they shed in death.

~ ~ ~

A party that evening. Another, another, and dozens more, each requiring fresh flowers and new silk slippers. She met young men in uniforms so exactly cut they might have been a secondary organ made of red wool and gold braid. She spent her days painting microscopic botanicals that seemed to crawl with detail I did not wish to examine. I wondered what I would see if, my nose close to the paper, I examined the stem of a wild rose, the delicate green of its sepal, the yellow pistol, the faint pink blush near the base of each petal.

Flora turned twenty. She was engaged to the second son of a Baronet, a coup, the great aunt said, adding “we owe some of that to you, I think,” claiming the bulk of the debt for her own. It is true, perhaps, that she made Flora what she became. Flora owed her fortune to her parents’ will, but her self-sufficiency had accreted in the long, lonely years of grief.

There were orange blossoms, I remember, and wisteria in the window. A carriage at the door, and her great uncle’s arm at the top of the stairs. The exchange of prayer books. The lych gate and the wedding breakfast. Champagne. Bridesmaids in blue silk.

All day Flora glittered, her breast a shield of seed pearls and hanging crystal, armoured with metallic peacocks; iridescent guardians so exactly matched to the hue of her gown they seemed not stitched in place but grown there, as a crystal grows from its mineral spring or the translucent eggs of insects grow in chambers beneath the earth. She was insectoid, scarab-skinned. Most dreadful, which drew my eyes even as I averted them, a ten-foot veil that possessed—somehow—the shadow of five-legged insects running down its margins, caught in the web of the lace-makers art.

They toured Italy. They returned to a sprawling house in the West Country, set in a valley of primroses and gillyflowers. There were children. There were parties on the river that ran past the foot of their garden. She painted when she could. I never saw her again.

~ ~ ~

When the third of the Misses Barclay turned eighteen I took my little savings and set off for the distant north-Pacific colony to which my sister’s family had emigrated twenty years before. In my retirement I would grow sweet peas in a little bungalow garden near the water. I would reacquaint myself with my family. I would take a few students in painting, or French.

Flora always remembered me. She sent photographs—portraits, the house, the gardens, tinted by a London artist. Flora in a pale gold moiré that glowed faintly in the artificial light of the flash, pearlescent like a lily’s thick glimmering petals. A fancy visited me as I examined the portrait, that it was not fabric she wore but her own elaborate skin, puckered and scarred and burnished into insectoid textures and gleams, the tightly braided and coiled loops of her hair another segment of that bony carapace, shining—incongruously—in the light of her green imagined sun.

For though I did not like to, I found myself examining the impeccable rooms and gardens in these photographs, fearing that they, too, betrayed another world. It was true that they seemed to teem with unwholesome detail. I am ashamed to say that I was happy to have shut the door on such rooms, on Flora herself. But I could not erase the memory of the man with the Gatling gun, and the five-armed green creatures lying on the ground below him.

I have seen—veiled by clouds in the empty green oceans of her sky—the shadow of an emergent airship, coalescing in curves and spikes from the cumulous tower along the horizon, as though she has built not the illusion of depth but true distance between the porcelain and her brush strokes.

I have learned something about her world. Of the three polities in that other world, the insects were the most loveable. The five-limbed creatures, remarkable in their asymmetry, that fluttered through Flora’s lace, within the tracery of her often-abandoned sampler; their long, segmented legs seemed to trail through her stitches. They are a social animal, who build enormous constellations out of kinship, rendered in the vast empires of song they sing both from the beak-like protuberances above their multi-faceted eyes and using the thin threads that run from wrist-bone to elbow; the human terms are only approximations. Their song so vast it filled the sky with echoes rippling tribe to tribe until they encircled the whole globe. Their dearest joy was in binding themselves in the harmonies native to their soul. The faintly greenish air, the pale sun burnished the vegetable-creatures, and the insect-birds with its glow, all rang with their communion.

So each society flourished in its separate quarters—the man-creatures up high in their floating towers and air-ships, the slow vegetable-creatures on the earth below, and between them, the creatures of the singing air.

~ ~ ~

The vagaries of Imperial Mail are such that the letter describing her first appointment with a London doctor reached me a month before the letter that told me of the first tumour. The next mail-bag held three letters describing their proliferation, her growing weakness, her plans for the children. I guessed much of what was unwritten, confirmed two weeks later by the black-barred note of her death. It contained only the barest outline of her existence, her parents’ early death, her own dates, the names of her survivors. I was not among them.

I read through the little stack of letters nearly hourly, parsing her weakness, her ennui, and—the only phrase that betrayed the nature of her condition—the strange distortions of her body. In her usual clipped and unsentimental manner, Flora said they had begun at the corner of her jaw, but further investigation revealed similar masses everywhere, in her organs, and joints, in masses beneath her skin. .

I knew enough to guess at the weight of this unnatural pregnancy, the cancerous spread of a shadow-child, a parasite, a little alien blooming inside her. I dreamed of her often, and when half-awake I seemed to feel the heavy masses beneath my own skin, fibrous like the roots of foreign trees, and others surfacing from the deep within her; these bulbous, heavy fruits, these vegetable infections, a steady imperial action beneath her skin.

Opiates to dull the pain but render her vegetable in mind as well as flesh, a chrysalis containing not Flora but the rapacious creature of her disease, gnarled and scaled, weeping, erupting.

Flora is the only charge I have outlived, and it is my grief that her illness was so sudden that she was dead even as I wrote my last letters of comfort and affection. She never received the words I sent, words I should have said to her when she was young and trailing her fingers across the wide, painted oceans of her vision. Plant-creatures blossoming and wilting and trailing their intoxicating distillate, while above them the artificial angels hunt the sky and insects fill the air with their laments.

~ ~ ~

I left this stack of papers in my little writing-desk for two months because I had no sense of how to finish the story. It was only this morning, when a box arrived whose contents—once revealed—demanded I return to my account.

It was a wooden crate, shipped at great expense from the West Country house where Flora died. It contained a sheaf of paintings she had particularly selected for me in her last illness, according to the curt note that accompanied them and china work in cotton. There is—on first glance—a richness of violets, beauties so slight they remind me of the feathered wings of a moth. The green fields and forests of her imagination, constructed in the finest brushwork I have ever seen; colours as fragile as the translucent porcelain on which she painted them, and admitting, through the thin walls of the cup, a faint greenish glow, as though from a distant sun.

I am afraid of what lies within them.

The paintings are, after her taste, tiny and scrupulously conventional. Icebergs, and Italian Villas. Roses. But what one cannot see one can still feel, and even before I took up my magnifying glass I sensed something in the green ripples at the base of the iceberg, in the shimmering whites of the glacier, in the chiaroscuro of the Italian villa, the three poplars against the gold sky, black hills scalloping the sunset. Something in the sepia shadows of the olive grove—airships and Gatling guns, and the gold-skinned denizens of her otherworldly sky. Building something elaborate and deadly, something made of bronze and iron.

Today I understand that a distant fire illuminates her paintings. It burns through even the most banal scenes: a ruined barn and a branch of apple-blossom, wild roses on a hedgerow. The terminal detonation of a weapon I cannot imagine, one that leaves only ashes in its wake, only ruined towers and the remains of a whole, dead world.

I have collected them in a glass-fronted case in my drawing room. I watch each little girl as she comes to practice her piano or to learn a new stitch. She dreams that one day she will have the honour of picking a teacup to drink from when she visits. And then she turns away.

There is one rare girl who stands a little longer, staring into the shallow surface of Flora’s world. Sometimes when her mother draws her away she seems struck, as though she has glimpsed the faintly greenish sky of a world described in no atlas, populated by the voracious cities of flying men and sentient plants, and insects whose high, sweet cry suffuses the air. A predatory sky, a secret world.

She lives not far from here, in a bungalow with her parents and sisters and brothers. I have taught her to paint flowers and insects, to sit so still in the wood that the creatures go about their duties in her presence. I have taught her to record her observations and collect them in a notebook. Of all my charges her eyes slide most often to the cabinet, and while her mother and sisters look with pleasure, say “oh, how charming!” Daisy, instead, is perplexed. I examine her work for evidence. I am determined not to make the mistake I made with Flora, and if Daisy is so inclined, I will give her the guidebook, open the door, let her through, even if the light on the other side is of a demonic kind.

And so I have selected my heiress. Her face is grave. She searches the cup for something she cannot quite grasp. Somewhere, somewhere she can’t reach, there are artificial angels, and a battle for the flowers. And its final termination with a weapon so deadly it casts a light that seems to illuminate the past as well as the future, to burn through the fragile objects that hold it; the porcelain so translucent it can hardly bear the vision, depths as strange and unwholesome as Flora’s own, so bright that perhaps she felt it burning through the casings of silk and stone, of metal and bone, that bound her.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer and academic. NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013. She can be found online at whereishere.ca.

THE NIGHT BAZAAR FOR WOMEN BECOMING REPTILES

Rachael K. Jones

IN THE DESERT, all the footprints lead into Oasis, and none lead out again. They come for water, and once they find it, no one returns to the endless sand. The city is a prison with bars of thirst and heat.

Outside the gates the reptiles roam: asps and cobras, great lazing skinks, tortoises who lie down to doze in the heat. Where they go as they pad and swish and claw their way through the sand, no one knows, save the women who look over the walls and feel the deep itching pressure in their bones, the weight of skin in need of sloughing.

~ ~ ~

Though Hester has sold asp eggs at the night bazaar for five years, she has never become a reptile herself, no matter what she tries.

She takes eggs wherever she finds them. She has eaten those of skinks and geckos. She has tasted sun-warmed iguana eggs. She has traced water-snake paths through Oasis and dug for their nests. She has braved the king cobra’s sway and dart, and devoured its offspring too. Once, she found an alligator egg, and poked a hole in the top and sucked out the insides. But no matter what she tries, Hester has never broken free and escaped the city like the other women do.

She even tried the asp eggs once, the ones that were her livelihood. It was the day after Marick the mango seller asked to take her as his sunside lover. Hester left home and dug asp eggs from the clay by the river. The sun spilled long red tongues across the sand, over the footprints always entering the city, never leaving, and Hester’s skin itched all over, and her flesh grew hot and heavy, and she longed for cool sand sliding against her bare belly.

One, two, three eggs into her mouth, one sharp bite, and the clear, viscous glair ran down her throat. The shells were tougher than she expected. They tasted tart, like spoiled goat’s milk. She waited for the change, but the sun crawled higher and nothing happened.

She has never told anyone about the day with the asp eggs. Not her mother the batik dyer, who spatters linen in hot running wax and crafts her famous purple cloth. Not Marick her sunside lover, who sells indigo cactus flowers and mango slices on a wooden tray. Not Shayna the butcher, her moonside lover, whose honey-gold verses roll from her tongue, smooth and rounded as sand-polished pebbles. Hester hasn’t told them, because they are why she longs to leave.

~ ~ ~

The night bazaar meets on a different street each week. Each morning before, at sunrise, Hester finds three blue chalk symbols sketched on the doorjamb behind the perfumed jasmine bush. Sometimes she sees a falcon, a crane beneath a full moon, and a viper climbing a triple-columned temple portico. This means We assemble where the Street of Upholsterers intersects the Street of Priests, when the Crane rises. Or it might be a hand holding an eye, a wavy river, and a kneeling woman, which would mean Meet where Oasis runs to mud, and beware the police. Hester memorizes the message and wipes off the chalk with her sleeve.

They meet in secret, because the night bazaar was outlawed when the emperor stepped down from her throne and became a snapping turtle. No one knew if she chose to change, or if a traitor had slipped her the eggs unawares. These days, vendors caught selling such goods moonside are made to drink poison sunside. Even possessing the eggs earns a speedy execution. But in Oasis, women at their wits’ end have always eaten the eggs, and fled.

Hester packs the asp eggs in damp red clay and binds them, in sets of three. Any more would be a waste, and any less, insufficient to cause the change. At the meeting point, booths have already popped up in the dark. Hester drapes her bamboo frame in purple and gold batik, fringed with the shiny onyx hair of some young customer who bought eggs long ago.

She lays out packets in three reed baskets and lights a lamp that burns tallow made from women’s fat. At moonrise, Hester’s chin lifts, and over vendors hawking their wares, she sings:

Eggs of the asp

collected riverside

in the new moon dark

Come, buy, and eat!

Opal-white eggs

cool as desert’s night

against your belly

Come, buy, and eat!

The customers arrive, ghosts cut from darkness by moonlight’s blade. They are no two alike. They are old and young. They are blind and deaf and whole of body. They have hats and sandals, sunburns and calluses. They come singing and weeping and completely silent. The vendors sing to them all, a cacophony and a tapestry. Hester’s bones buzz from the dissonance, her skin as a quivering lizard bolting from rock to rock.

On slow nights, Hester bargains for rare eggs, which she devours on the spot. They never work. A waste of good coin, the merchants say, clucking their tongues, but they take payment anyway. Traders should not eat their wares. Most vendors prosper from the illegal trade, but Hester barely makes ends meet because she spends so much on eggs. Shayna, her moonside lover, often teases her about her bad business sense.

Marick never asks what she does moonside. By this, Hester has come to fear him. He does not ask because he already knows.

~ ~ ~

Hester has to wait for sundown to pack for the next bazaar, since Marick won’t leave for work before then. People often compliment her attentive sunside lover—how he won’t leave her side until sunset requires it. When they are alone, he keeps his distance. He has not once touched her, not as a lover does. Perhaps he mistakes her distance for demure shyness, the way she lies still in bed, how she curls into herself during the midday nap.

Ever since they met, Hester has a recurring dream where her body is a golden pot with an amethyst lid and she an asp inside it. In the dream, Marick plays the oboe, charming her out with music. She slithers to him, and he grabs her and devours her.

When she wakes, she feels hollow and hungry inside. Her mouth tastes sour, like the eggs that will not change her.

Truthfully, her shoulders relax when Marick leaves for moonside life, and she can go to the night bazaar. Hester wonders if Marick’s moonside lover is any different from her. Perhaps he loves Marick better. Perhaps he likes mangoes. Perhaps Marick touches him. Perhaps he is less afraid than she is.

~ ~ ~

Hester’s first customer that night wears a priest’s robe tied all wrong, knotted at the shoulder like they do on the Street of Blacksmiths to keep their sleeves from the hot anvil. People often pretend to be another thing when they come to the night bazaar. The woman’s fingers stroke a linen packet, thumb caressing the round bulges.

After payment, the woman unwraps the eggs and eats them. The moon glints on her teeth. Hester cannot hear the eggs burst above the din, but her insides quiver anyway.

The woman falls into a heap before Hester’s booth. Her flesh splits open and she slithers out from her own breastbone, her shining black length cutting crescents in the sand. The newborn asp slithers through the gutter, making westward toward the desert.

Hester drags the blacksmith’s sloughed-off body behind her booth for later processing. There will be more before the night’s end.

They seem so sure when they approach the booth, like they know it will work for them. They often stop to browse the other wares, but their eyes slide until their fingers find the asp eggs. They do not waver. Assurance steadies their voices. She used to ask them why, back when she first started selling. Why the bazaar? Why tonight? Why this shape?

“Because this body has grown too tight around me.”

“Because breathing weighs me down, and I am exhausted.”

“Because each night, I dream of walking into the desert and not returning.”

“Because each morning, I watch the merchants pass into the gates, and I want to scream, ‘Stay away!’“

At the night bazaar, they shed their skin and leave as asps and tortoises and crocodiles. They pass the gates unimpeded. They go out into the desert and erase the footprints leading inward.

~ ~ ~

The night Hester met Marick, the bazaar assembled where the Street of Cobblers bisected the Street of Zither Players. Someone must have betrayed them. Perhaps a sharp-eyed officer traced the steady stream of determined lizards and serpents and tortoises scampering through the gutters and under the gates and out into the darkness. A cry cut through the selling-songs: Run! Run!

It had happened before. It was why the booths collapsed so easily. Hester grabbed her basket and yanked the batik down. The crowd surged toward the Street of Cobblers, pressed from the rear by police with battering sticks. The cloth sheet tangled in the bamboo bars, and Hester wrestled with it.

“Hester?” It was a young policeman, stick in hand. “The batik dyer’s daughter. I would know you anywhere.” She knew him too: Marick the mango seller. Now moonside, his crooked teeth became a cobra’s fangs. “Wait. I need to speak with you.”

His boot pinned the batik sheet to the cobblestone. Hester yanked harder, heart thudding against her ribs. Poison, she thought. Bloated bodies at the wall. The sheet ripped, and she fled into the crowd.

The next day, Marick arrived at her mother’s shop with six ripe mangoes wrapped in a tattered batik scrap, and a proposition.

To mark her as his sunside lover, he gave Hester a gold earring shaped like a pot set with an amethyst for a lid. It was heavy for its size.

Marick never mentioned that night at the bazaar. What happened moonside wasn’t discussed sunside. She could not tell if the coercion was deliberate or accidental on his part.

It all amounted to the same for Hester. Marick’s love was a prison. His smile tightened when she glanced out the window to check the sun’s position. Test me, and you shall learn my nature, said that tightness. His gaze followed her everywhere. She always checked the doorjamb for the chalk signs before sunrise and erased them. Propriety forced him to stay away until dawn touched the rooftop.

When they were alone together, she mirrored his smile, and the woman who gathered asp eggs curled in on herself, deep down where no one could ever find her sunside. She dreamed and dreamed of being consumed, of escape.

~ ~ ~

Near moonset, as the crowd thins to a trickle and the reptiles depart, a hand rests on Hester’s shoulder. “Never trust a woman who gathers asp eggs, for she may become one,” Shayna whispers, breath warm and licorice-scented.

“They don’t work for me, I’m afraid.” Hester turns so Shayna’s kiss falls on her cheek.

“You cannot become what you already are,” she jokes. Shayna stops trying to steal kisses and counts the shedded bodies. Eight women lie bisected and cold: a good night. Shayna’s blades flick and twist, opening seams, probing apart joints. The hair goes to the weavers, the bones to the lemon tree growers and to the scribes, and the meat goes to the vulture breeders and the candlemakers.

The two women work quickly, distributing the haul to runners who buy for the sunside merchants. If any time remains, they slip off to Shayna’s bower on the Street of Butchers for a few hours in the dark together before sunrise. Their infant son, too young for a name yet, sleeps in a basket nearby. He has hair like damp sand. “He gets it from his father,” Shayna explains when Hester pets his soft head. Shayna talks about her sunside lover more than anyone Hester has ever met. It was especially tiresome during her pregnancy last year.

Hester rolls over in the hammock in the dark. “Shayna, have you ever wished to leave Oasis?”

Shayna turns, and the hammock sways. “I prefer not dying of thirst and exposure, thank you. I like my life here. I have my family, and business. Why?”

“Sometimes I wonder where the reptiles go. They say there is an ocean out there, beyond the desert.”

Shayna yawns wide. “You spend too much time at the night bazaar. You should start a proper family. When are you going to give me a moonside baby of my own?”

“You sound like my mother.” With Marick and Shayna in her life, it is what everyone expects. Children thrive best with two mothers and a father. Hester only has one mother, though. Perhaps that is why she cannot become a reptile.

“You haven’t answered my question,” Shayna points out, stirring, and the baby wakes and cries.

Hester climbs from the hammock and rocks him until he calms. Outside, the dark sky is gray and heavy. Softly it starts to rain. Too late, she realizes her mistake. “Oh, damnation! It’s morning, Shayna.” She dresses and sprints out the door, through the rain, toward the Street of Dyers.

An oil lamp sits lit on the stoop when Hester gets home, and the door is ajar. Marick, home from his moonside life, curls in bed with his back toward the door. Hester listens to his breathing for ten heartbeats, slow and regular like wind in the olive tree branches. When she is sure he is asleep, she stows her basket of asp eggs beneath the bed and lies down beside him. Marick always smells like incense and cinnamon at dawn, the way Hester smells faintly of butcher’s blood. In this way, they bring their moonside lovers home with them. At sunrise, the scents make a family.

She dreams of Shayna and Marick and the unknown men who love them. Of her mother, alone by sunside, and Hester a child only half-mothered, now half-mother again to the nameless baby with the damp sand hair. If only she had hatched from an egg. Reptiles needed no mothers or father. They birthed themselves and named themselves and no one kept them from the desert.

She is dreaming of the desert when she wakes in the evening, the day’s heat slipping away. Marick isn’t in bed, nor is he in the kitchen cutting up mangoes. It is only then she realizes: in her hurry to return from Shayna’s home, she forgot to erase the chalk from the doorjamb. Marick’s muddy footprints squat below that spot, the jasmine branches forced back, but he is already gone.

So is her bundle of asp eggs.

~ ~ ~

The moment Hester notices, she ransacks their home, searching for the missing eggs. She strips the bed and shakes out the linen sheets. She dumps the reed baskets piled by the door. She plunges both hands elbow deep into the refuse heap outside the window. Worms ooze around her knuckles.

Never in all this time has she left evidence of the night bazaar. Never so much as a glance toward the doorjamb and its tiny chalk symbols. Her bones quiver inside the bag of her skin. The sky is streaked angry red, and moonrise bears down with vicious weight. Marick could return at any time with the other policemen, with the poison.

Her fingers dig into her palms so hard they draw blood. It is against every rule for him to police her by day: against law, against custom, against decency. But poison makes no such distinctions, and if he found the eggs, she would have no defense. She could beg Shayna to hide her, but how would she explain it without exposing her sunside life?

Hester wraps her head in batik and hurries to the western wall, where the reptiles emerge in a thin, long line across the sands. Above them, bodies swing to and fro over the gates, dry and mummified by weather and time. It was always a major affair when they hung out a new one. Marick took Hester to watch once. He held her hand, and neither smiled.

If she could be that kind of creature. If she could cross the desert. If she could break free of the spidersilk bonds Oasis imposed, the thin invisible obligations tying woman to man to woman to child, a web which caught and snared.

Hester finds herself at home again, standing before the darkened door. Behind the jasmine bush, she finds the chalk symbols: a pot, an oboe, and an egg.

We gather in the alley on the Street of Midwives where the Emperor was born.

She considers going into the house, lying down in the dark, and waiting for Marick, but her feet are already drawing her back toward the night bazaar.

~ ~ ~

Hester’s money buys her half a dozen crocodile eggs, two cobra eggs, and a large speckled monitor lizard egg still warm to the touch. She swallows them down and will not let her stomach vomit them up, no matter how much her guts twist. Her head buzzes like when she drinks too much palm wine. Her hands tingle as if the poison courses inside her veins already. She hurries from booth to booth, begging for more eggs, but her colleagues only cluck their tongues and offer her rose petal tea, or silken shawls, or cool hands to the forehead.

“I am not sick,” Hester insists. “I need to buy more eggs.” But they will not sell them to her.

At last she hunches behind her booth, shivering in the chill, waiting, hoping yet for transformation. She has no asp eggs to sell, so the customers pass her by, until at last one does not.

Despite his broad-brimmed veiled hat, Hester recognizes Marick, when he sets the missing eggs on the booth’s counter. He smells like incense and cinnamon. “Do not try to run now. Not this time.”

Fear twists her gut hard, and all the raw eggs roil in her stomach. She gags and vomits into the sand behind the booth. The slimy white glair pools with her bile, studded with chunks of undigested shell. Her last hope of transformation, absorbed into the sand. The desert will take even this before it will take her. As her hope dribbles away, so does the fear. Hester laughs a short, sharp hyena bark.

“Everyone pretends to be something different at the night bazaar, Marick. What are you supposed to be?”

He hesitates, then twitches the veil up. Rose-colored moonlight bathes his face, a rare lunar eclipse. He looks small and fragile as a pressed flower, not at all like the man she has feared for five years.

He leans forward, voice low and secret. “I need to know how the eggs work. Is there a spell?”

Hester snorts. “You want our secrets before you betray me. You think you can ask, and I will tell you, as if this is not my bazaar and you are not a customer. As though the price is not my life.”

Marick shakes his head hard. “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong, Hester. Have the police found the night bazaar since we became lovers? Do you think that is a coincidence? Whatever I am, I am no traitor.”

It has the ring of truth to it, though she does not want to trust him. “What do you want from me? You take me for a lover and do not touch me. You follow me here and do not arrest me. You say you’ve been protecting me. What do you want?”

He casts his eyes toward the gutter, which is littered with tiny reptile prints. When he speaks, his voice is not a mango-seller’s cries or a policeman’s growl but trembling and weak, a flute cracked and leaking air. “I am done, trying to live in this body. It doesn’t fit. Not with dayside lovers, or nightside lovers. Touches do not reach me. I wear my own flesh like a cloak, and I am alone inside. It isn’t mine. Maybe I was supposed to be a reptile? A woman? Half a mother to complete some child? I do not know. I only know that if I don’t shed this body, I will suffocate in it. Do you understand?”

He sounds just as sure as every woman who has come before. “You just eat them, Marick. There is no spell. The eggs don’t work for men, though.”

He shrugs, and the corner of his mouth lifts. “I will try, anyway. I don’t know any other way.” Marick unwraps the eggs and rubs off the clay. He cracks them one by one, sucks out their insides, chews and swallows the shells. Around his ankles, women skitter and slither westward on scaled claw and belly.

Hester waits for his disappointment, but instead he collapses before her booth. An asp springs from his breastbone, a fine golden-eyed creature damp from heart’s-blood, and it joins the reptile exodus in the gutter. As she watches him go, a hollow place inside her rips open, as though the last of her hope has also left her and slithered into the desert.

Mechanically she drags his unwanted body behind the booth. It has been many years since this chore unsettled her, since a customer’s discarded eyes fixed upon her face, but Marick was her dayside lover, the only one she had. For the first time since she joined the bazaar, a body becomes a corpse.

~ ~ ~

When Shayna sees Marick, she steadies her head between her hands. “Oh, Hester, what have you done? The law might turn a blind eye to the night bazaar as long as we’re discreet, but it won’t ignore a dead policeman.”

“He isn’t dead. He became an asp, Shayna!”

The two women slump together behind the booth while Hester confesses everything. “What did he do? Why did it work for him?”

Shayna jerks her chin toward the sky. “Eclipses are strange. Moonside and sunside join hands and pass. Perhaps the desert calls to its own.”

Hester curls up tight and tries not to retch. No eggs for her, because she is already empty inside. She does not say, Why won’t it work for me?

Shayna holds her at arm’s length. “You think I don’t know. You think I don’t pay attention.” She undoes Marick’s earring, holds the matching golden pot to Hester’s ear. “Tell me, lover, what makes you so afraid? Afraid enough to piss away your profit on all those eggs? Scared enough to leave me too?”

“You are so happy here,” Hester manages through hitching breath.

Shayna’s eyebrows pinch together like when she is considering the best way to slice open a ribcage. “Maybe the eggs do not work for you because you do not need them. You’re practically an asp already. You spend enough time among their nests.”

Somehow, the thought comforts her. “And you, Shayna? What are you?”

Shayna’s smile is all teeth. “I am a butcher, of course.”

They drag Marick’s shell into an alley. In the night bazaar’s bustle, no one notices. Hester grabs the booth’s batik fabric and drapes it over the ground. Shayna is a good butcher, well-practiced and quick, skilled at separating muscle from skin and meat from bone. The waxed batik absorbs the blood in brown-bordered swirls.

Shayna cuts, and Hester sorts the pieces. Hester lays Marick’s heart in the pile for the vulture breeders. It is soft and round like a ripe mango on a plate, plum-red as an amethyst, tattered where the asp ripped through the flesh.

As the heart drips onto the batik, Hester sees maybe there is another path to freedom, one she never considered before Marick transformed. How she could leave behind the mass of bodies—the heralds, the upholsterers, the weavers, the potmakers, the herbalists, the papyrus-rollers, the inksetters—all the close, warm mammalian musks, the raised voices, the songs and tambourines. How she could slip beneath the gates, slither into the desert, the sand burning her belly into hard scales; her tongue flickering, testing the air. Some irresistible pull inside knows exactly where lies the ocean she has never seen, beating on a far shore. Her flesh feels heavy and cumbersome, and she thinks she could shake it loose, leave it behind to mummify in the heat and sand.

If this other path will work for her.

Hester saves Marick’s heart carefully, wrapped tight in stained batik until the blood no longer soaks through. They sell the meat and bones to the vendors, but the skin they burn at Shayna’s bower on the Street of Butchers. Its wetness makes the fire smoke and sputter.

“I can hide you for tonight, but you’ll have to leave tomorrow,” Shayna says as they wash up at home. “We can slow down their investigation, but they will find you. There were witnesses. Someone will talk eventually.”

“Yes, of course. I understand.” Hester inhales Shayna’s familiar licorice smell, and longing prickles down her back. If this path works for her, there will be no more sunside or moonside, no lovers to fear and tend to and worry over. There will be no night bazaar, because in the desert, everyone is a reptile. Asps are asps by day or night.

~ ~ ~

Hester waits until Shayna sleeps before she draws her last gift in chalk on the doorjamb: two stones, a dead woman’s eye, and an asp. Find me at the wall where criminals are made to drink poison, and come alone. Then she kisses her sleeping lover and their moonside baby, and she leaves.

At this hour, the night bazaar must be packing up. A few snakes and lizards skitter through the gutters. Hester follows them to the gouge in the sand where they have dug a hole beneath the wall. They slither and wriggle and just slip through. Overhead, ropes creak as the mummified corpses swing.

Before she can lose her courage, Hester unwraps Marick’s heart, sliced into strips like a mango, her final hope on a wooden tray.

Hearts are eggs, she realized when Shayna slit open Marick’s body and piled his organs on the stained batik. Hester wonders what will hatch from hers.

Hester eats it, piece by piece. If this fails, the police will find her. Her body will swing overhead with the rest, always within sight of the desert but never able to go there.

The heart slides into her belly, easier than glair, and settles in the empty space which once held fear. The quivering in her bones becomes a violent shudder. A change is coming, churning her like a sandstorm. She slips and twists inside her own flesh, full to the brim, a straining wineskin, a sated leech, an egg about to burst.

It does not hurt much, the hatching, the shedding. No worse than picking off a scab. When it is over, she slides free onto her segmented belly, the sand warm, the wind drying her damp newborn back. Her tongue tests the air, and tastes water far to the west, beyond the husk of her old body, through the gouge beneath the wall.

Over the wall the bodies swing and creak on their ropes, but they are only shells, and the poison rests between her teeth now, a gift for those she chooses to kiss. Oasis shrinks toy-like under her unblinking reptilian gaze. It is a nest, a golden pot with an amethyst lid, trapping asps until the music plays, but it cannot hold her anymore. All over the city, people pitch and turn inside themselves, sliding against the smooth walls of their prison, but only a few buck against the shell and break it.

But the desert is a city too, vaster than Oasis, and the reptiles are its people. Hester tastes them on the wind. Blood and incense, jasmine and mango, they call to her, all the ones who went before, the peasants and merchants, the old women and the young, the Emperor and Marick all, now fully themselves, unchanging day or night. Their prints erase the footsteps trailing into Oasis. Their bodies are arrows which point to the sea. They are waiting for her. It is almost time to go.

Hester waits beside her cooling body until sunrise breaks upon the city. Oasis turns over in its old familiar rhythm. Moonside lovers kiss and part. Footsteps hurry from house to house, and chalk symbols are found and read and quickly erased. And then, for the first time sunside, Hester sees her: Shayna the moonside butcher, come to unseam her body.

Hester knows Shayna will sell the parts piece by piece, a last providence for her Oasis family. A family can live for a month on the price a human body would fetch. Her hair will go to the weavers, her bones to feed the lemon tree groves, her fat to fuel the lamps, everything given back to the city that bore her.

Except her heart.

Shayna saves it in the same scrap of bloodstained batik that once held Marick’s. Hester hopes it will be enough.

But now, the part of her that cannot be bought or sold slips beneath the wall, tastes the distant water, and goes to find it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Rachael K. Jones grew up in various cities across Europe and North America, picked up (and mostly forgot) six languages, an addiction to running, and a couple degrees. Now she writes speculative fiction in Athens, Georgia, where she lives with her husband. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in many venues, including Shimmer, Lightspeed, Flash Fiction Online, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Crossed Genres, Diabolical Plots, and Daily Science Fiction. She is an editor, a SFWA member, and a secret android. Follow her on Twitter @RachaelKJones.

THE THREE DANCERS OF GIZARI

Tamara Vardomskaya

“AND FOR THE main ballroom,” Nahemiah Froll said, tossing the latest issue of Arts Today in our direction as she paced heavily over the mosaic floor, “I want that piece that Estorges made for Hestland’s Public Opera. The Three Dancers of Gizari.”

I tried to forget that I knew to the penny how much that thousand-year-old mosaic she was stomping on had cost (1,023,048.18 thalers sterling, not counting shipping it across the sea and all the wrangling with the insurer), something Nahemiah had not cared to know when she ordered it for her architect and curator, Izida Charteret, to fit into her palace.

Izida now stood near me, half-lit by a rose window of her own design. We both knew exactly what Nahemiah was talking about, as she expected us to. But this time, for this sculpture out of all the paintings and sculptures and transfigurations and works of magic described in Arts Today, I did not trust myself to reply. Let Izida, the artist, the aristocrat, comment.

“The one that the Public Opera then rejected as obscene? If you want to branch out into modern artists at last, Chief, why not Tammen? He’s all the rage right now. If. . .” she paused, “what you desire is fine female nudes that emanate sensuality.”

I had never understood how Izida, older and university-educated, could so blindly fail to anticipate the effect of her words. Or perhaps my time in the theater looking at faces gave me the advantage there. Or perhaps it was that unlike her I had been born and raised an underling, always watching the subtle signs of my lady’s displeasure—such as knowing that using “my lady” instead of “Chief” to her would be grounds for dismissal. Especially when the veins in Nahemiah’s forehead just below her ornate cloche hat (40ts.; the imitations on the street went for 3.50) bulged as they did now.

“You look at Tammen’s paintings, sculptures, transformations,” Nahemiah said in that ice-cold tone that masked white-hot rage, “and you see men doing things and women—looking bored. Nude, clothed, all his women have no expression on their faces at all, and any sensuality of theirs hasn’t a hen’s tooth of true emotion behind it. And men hail him as a genius! You know why the men at the Public Opera rejected Estorges? Because he dared show women looking happy, unabashedly, unashamedly happy!”

She opened Arts Today with a sudden movement; the spine had clearly been broken at the spread with the dynamic-captures of the “obscene” sculpture. That was striking: all of the newspapers from her chains that Nahemiah read every day, she sent back in pristine condition, only their content copied to her formidable brain. But then, Arts Today was not yet in her chain, even as she bought a profiled work after nearly every issue.

“I got you to show these men what women can do”—she pointed at Izida, though not at me—”and I will now get these men to see and feel women being happy.”

I sighed and silently began making notes. Costs of journey to Halispell (32ts. by ship, then between 0.25 and 0.5 ducats by train), ship schedules, Nahemiah’s contacts, or rather, mine. My Chief wanted the Three Dancers of Gizari. All through the years of building and rebuilding the elaborate palace we now stood in, Izida, and later I, had done what the Chief wished.

The flare of Izida’s nostrils now showed a skeptical distaste. I had seen it many times in front of a design that she wasn’t pleased with, whether drawn by another’s hand or her own. It had always made me yearn to do all I could to change her expression, that nose and cheekbone doing more than any of Nahemiah’s shouts.

But, looking at the spread in Arts Today, I instead found myself gripped by the energy in the women’s expressions, indeed by their unabashed joy. Joy that I had never seen in Izida or Nahemiah, for all the beauty one had wrought and the other had bought. Joy that I would never feel from any allatir sculpture adorning Nahemiah’s collection, acquired by me but not meant for me.

As always, it would be Nahemiah’s thalers sterling that I would count out on green-edged checks and assignation notes to pay for the sculpture, and it would be Nahemiah’s palace home, amid mosaics and paintings and tapestries, that it would stand in.

But it was I, Bethenica Morning, Nahemiah’s financial manager, who truly wanted it.

~ ~ ~

Nahemiah Froll. People have called her mightier than queens. To some, a visionary, a builder, a challenger to the aristocracy, a new baroness of modern print. To some, an art connoisseur, collector, and patroness of peerless taste. To others, a tyrannical despot, who had built her newspaper empire by simply buying up newspapers that dared publish criticism of her. To others, a whim-driven bitch, who tore down million-thaler creations because she didn’t like them today, and threw away friends, entertaining guests, lovers just as easily.

If they asked me to describe her, I would simply say that if her fancies were volatile because she loved the process of change and creation, she always paid my 30ts. a week fully and on time.

~ ~ ~

Just before I headed for the motor-car to take me to the ship headed across the strait, I went to see Izida, up in her naturally tasteful apartment. The drapes of pure white velvet, the carpets also; her paintings, and those of artists she admired—most of them from Halispell, most of them men—provided the only color. No sculptures.

Simplicity and elegance, she would say, saving the intricacy for my Chief. As if a bleaching in color could hide that the materials (20ts. a yard) were still fit for the Count of Schellerbide’s daughter she once was.

Twenty years ago, she’d had enough of the Count not understanding that his daughter’s passion and genius lay not in governing estates or bride-market balls with eligible noblemen, but in turning designs to stone and wood and gardens. No occupation for a lady, the Count had said. But in Tavalland, by Hestland’s standards still the wild colonies half a century after the Independence Act, titles meant nothing, and so his heiress had bolted there, finished her schooling and found Nahemiah Froll’s patronage, and stopped being a lady. Or claimed to. Her taste in drapes, her high speech, her refined yet thoughtless manner, her unconscious expectation of obedience, all told otherwise to me.

She had never carved allatir stone, never tried to make art that swayed emotions directly rather than merely through the eyes. But Nahemiah had set an allatir statue on the landing leading to her suite. An elegant panther (485ts.).

As always, I silently cringed passing by the panther emanating luxury. Thoughts floated up in my mind. You are important, they assured me. You are wealthy. You are worth it all.

You are worth thirty thalers a week, I retorted. Stop lying to yourself. I hastened my step, then had to pause before entering Izida’s suite so she would not note my rapid heartbeat.

“Just so you know,” I said, “I depart.”

“Find out the prices on Tammen paintings, while you are there,” she said without looking up from her drafting table. “The Chief can still change her mind. As she is wont to do.”

As usual, she would not ask me for news about any family or friends in Halispell, not about the fine townhouse where she had spent her childhood winters. The Count had never forgiven her, naming a distant male cousin as heir but seemingly keeping himself alive and hearty by the blaze of anger at his disowned daughter. She in turn never mentioned his name, not even in our most intimate hours.

“I will. Goodbye, Izida.” I knew not to expect her to soften, to show more of her secrets to me than I learned from servants’ gossip. She had everything I lacked, and so our inequality was only right and proper.

Estorges’s art was the first I’d seen, in seven years working here, that outshone hers in my mind.

~ ~ ~

The village of my childhood lay down by the sea, below the hill where Nahemiah’s palace was then just rising from the ground. My own father had sold fish and squid for the tables in Nahemiah’s builders’ camp, and had not possessed much beyond a hut and a stove (worth maybe 10ts. on a good day) to disinherit me of when I ran away at seventeen with a traveling theater. Of my inheritance, I took only his family name, Morning, refusing out of perverse honesty to assume a better one. If Nahemiah Froll could rise from a prospector’s daughter, so could I, I had thought then, not realizing how much lay in the Froll married name, or in her father’s silver vein that she inherited—what cost there is to overcoming a name.

The stage, its painted sets and lights and music and drama, seemed my passion, but I soon learned I had little acting talent beyond “third citywoman from left.” Instead, almost unconsciously at first and not thinking that my knack for numbers and details was anything special, I fell into being the one who actually knew what was going on. From painting sets and stitching costumes, I became stage manager, remembering all the director’s changing whims during rehearsal, and all the cues for the actors and stagehands and lighting hands that they couldn’t remember themselves, and where in the script we were. I was the woman they went to, the small but mighty household god behind the footlights. None of the theatrical people had any idea how the cost of breakfast that day or of thread to mend the curtains fitted into their budget. I turned their finances around and made them the most successful traveling company in all of western Tavalland, such that in five years they—or rather, I, for I was the one negotiating and writing the checks, although I was only twenty-two and had never set foot in a university—were able to purchase a permanent theater (3,215 thalers, with 1,000 down and the rest amortized over ten years, plus 1,823.45 adding up in repairs and renovations) in Dies Incanti, the largest city on the western coast.

Six other theater companies and two Dies Incanti newspapers approached me discreetly in the next year trying to purchase my skills as a treasurer. It was after I rebuffed the second newspaper that its owner, Nahemiah Froll, arrived at my office herself.

And the price she named, 20ts. a week with room and board and raises yearly, was one I was willing to sell myself for. Or rather, not for the money itself, but for the chance to be part of a theater far grander than any in Dies Incanti, of a drama greater and more real than any theater could give, and where, again, I was the god behind the footlights, knowing all the cues. Nahemiah was the producer, Izida was the director, but no director can do without a stage manager. I could live my life surrounded by mosaics and music, sunken pools and thoroughbred horses, dynamic-picture stars and poet laureates, enjoying almost all the comforts my Chief’s heart desired, no matter that not a penny I was counting was my own.

And walking among Nahemiah’s allatir statues, I thought, would give me pure joy and passion in a way that the theater could not, with all of its empathetic trickery drawn from stories not about my class of people. At least the sculptures did not lie.

Except that I learned that if they spoke truth, it was not to me.

~ ~ ~

To the music of the rattling train and the engineer’s whistle, both so subtly different in rhythm and pitch from the Tavalland rail, I arrived at the Halispell Central Station with its famous mosaic walls and ceiling. Nahemiah had never been interested in Queen Ethelburga-style mosaics, so I did not know their price. The train journey in first class had cost three eighths of a ducat (nearly 12ts.), and the cup of tea and piece of orange flan I had purchased, an additional three pennies. In Tavalland they would have cost half that. But my Chief allowed me to draw on expenses, if I were not extravagant in my mission—which was to follow two farwrites to Estorges’s lodgings in the Artisans’ Quarter, these days crowded with painters, writers, and musicians rather than artisans’ guilds. And to return with the money exchanged and the sculpture wrapped in felt for shipping across the sea.

In my purse lay Nahemiah’s check, the amount left blank. Start with five hundred thalers, she had said. That is a good price he should be grateful for.

And what is your ceiling? I had asked.

We won’t need it.

I need a ceiling, Chief. For my peace of mind. I had written the numbers on a check for that mosaic now in the great hall, all seven digits of them to the left of the decimal. My hands had shaken.

What is the most I am willing to bid to get the Three Dancers of Gizari before I give up? Before I give up? Her mouth seemed to taste the phrase like a sample of an unfamiliar dish. It’s not a thousand years old. If he asks for ten thousand, farwrite to me first. I have my aeroplane ready to fly to bargain myself. But. . . She left the consequences for me unsaid. Flying the aeroplane itself from Palace Froll to Halispell would cost nearly 500ts. in itself, and that was if the aerodrome authorities were lenient on paperwork.

I once again inhaled the scents of inland Halispell, the smells of their beloved cured ham and sharp cheeses replacing western Tavalland’s fish and sea-scent, lemon blossom and myrtle replacing the northern island’s pear orchards and pines. And the dust, the road dust and motor-car fuel everywhere the same, whether one paid in ducats or thalers or was ruled by Queen or President.

The cab (11 pennies) left me at the porch of the Estorges Atelier, and the maid took my card. “Miss Morning? An unusual name.”

I had heard that before, though rarely from servants, but Halispell servants may think themselves so much above even the rich from the colonies that they presume to draw attention to low-class family names. I did not dignify her insult with a reply. With my own saved liquid net worth of 1211.37ts. with interest at 4.5%, I could afford to hire and fire her, no matter her pay.

I wondered, looking at the simple and worn if well-cared furnishings in the front room, how much its rent was. If Nahemiah were to buy a town house in Halispell, it would not be in the Artisans’ Quarter, so I did not know the going prices.

Then I stepped through the door of the studio, and all thoughts of this flew out of my head. Before me were three graceful women, nude, one stocky, one slender, one curvaceous, three shapes as different as women come in, arms outstretched and embracing, the two raising the central dancer up by her naked hips even themselves rising on their toes as if the earth could barely hold them. The Three Dancers of Gizari. The right one seemed to give me a welcoming wink. Join in the dance!

Joy they radiated, but more than that another feeling I had so rarely felt before that for a few minutes I couldn’t even place it, but I felt nearly faint with desire for these women.

I made myself look around—at the preparatory maquette studies of their heads, a dozen identical ones looking at me with that joyful smile; at the hands of clay and plaster and limestone that seemed lopped off in the middle of their greatest delight; at the other mockups of nudes and elephants and men for other projects. A block of raw allatir lay in the corner, squat and white; even though I knew that uncarved allatir was very limited in power, I dared not approach closer, in case this block was the kind emanating primal fear rather than primal safety. Fear-inducing allatir stones had been used for arrowheads by ancient armies, I’d heard, before they were superseded as even the warriors themselves found them too draining to carry, and artists took to them to make works draining in other ways.

I barely noticed the man, shorter and younger than he’d seemed in Arts Today’s pictures. Possibly used to visitors’ reactions, he stepped right in front of me.

“I am Nouet Estorges, madam. You are the. . . emissary of Nahemiah Froll?” Politeness slid into sarcasm on that word.

“Yes.” With an effort of will, I got my breath back. “She wishes to buy this. For. . .” For perhaps the first time in my life I hesitated at recalling a number, and the sum, astronomical compared to my own pay, seemed absurdly low in the light of the dancers’ smiles. “Five hundred thalers.”

I caught myself at once that I had broken all rules of bargaining by going straight to the point, not getting him into conversation, asking him about his studio, his work, his family. What had gone over me? What was the sculpture emanating?

He stepped back three careful steps, and I realized that he was himself getting out of the dancers’ aura. Prudently, though my heart clenched at this, I followed.

“Well, I am very sorry,” and he did not sound sorry at all, “but she can’t.”

Hastily, too hastily, I named higher numbers, in much larger increments than I normally would. He just shook his head at each, a smirk on his face. One thousand. Two thousand.

It dawned on me that he enjoyed watching me squirm; a proud competent woman but to him just Nahemiah’s commoner puppet, below his own housemaid. Watching me beg, and him saying no.

“Ten thousand!” I spat out the words intentionally in the heaviest Tavalland accent that the theater had eradicated in me twelve years before. “Ten thousand thalers for your measly sculpture that the Opera rejected!”

“Does Nahemiah Froll, the richest woman on earth”—he laughed—”really think that she can buy me?”

My shout sank back down my throat as I blinked. “Of course she does,” came out, stupidly.

“Well, let her learn I’m not selling this piece, of all pieces, to the highest bidder. After I got your farwrite, I arranged for another buyer.

“And don’t ask me what his price is so Nahemiah can top it. I don’t need money, and it won’t help her here.”

My fingers searched in my pocket blindly for something to hold onto and found a forgotten Tavalland penny, small and almost worthless here.

~ ~ ~

FARWRITING OFFICE, HALISPELL, HESTLAND

BETHENICA MORNING TO NAHEMIAH FROLL, PALACE FROLL, TAVALLAND

ESTORGES SELLING DANCERS TO SCHELLERBIDE STOP

DELIVERY NEXT WEEK STOP

SORRY STOP

BETHENICA.

Cost: 0.96ts.

~ ~ ~

One hour later:

IZIDA CHARTERET, PALACE FROLL, TAVALLAND

TO BETHENICA MORNING, HALISPELL, HESTLAND

BASTARD STOP

FLYING OVER TOMORROW STOP

WILL FIGHT SCHELLERBIDE IF NECESSARY STOP

IZIDA.

Izida had been against Estorges’s art, arguing for Tammen all along. She never saw in that sculpture what Nahemiah had seen, and would not feel in it what I had felt. Now, I knew, and Estorges knew, he had found the one price that would move Izida to Nahemiah’s desire.

~ ~ ~

As soon as reasonable visiting hours began the next morning I was back ringing the bell of Estorges’s studio door. I had walked, carefully trying to keep the street dust from my low leather shoes, but I would not indulge in another cab ride. Not when I was not certain if I would have my job once my Chief’s flight landed, Izida with her.

The street looked normal that morning rather than the way the afternoon light had painted it the day before. No, not the afternoon light—the fact that, since leaving Estorges’s studio, I had forgotten to ponder the price of anything I saw.

The maid allowed me in, seemingly to both her own surprise and Estorges’s. “Nahemiah Froll’s emissary wishes to try to persuade me again?” he said, now in his smock and work gloves snowy with allatir dust, chisel still in his right hand, chewing his moustache.

“No,” I said. “Bethenica Morning wishes to see you. And not you, but the sculpture.”

He froze as still as his allatir dancers. “The sculpture.”

Just then I sneezed from the dust. Eyes watering, I fumbled for my handkerchief. With equal awkwardness, he offered his own from his pocket, only to realize that it was already smudged with dust and dirtier than mine.

We couldn’t help it. We both burst out laughing, and for a few happy seconds I noticed our poses echoing those of the dancers above us. Was that what they were laughing about, the ridiculousness of life?

No, it must be something deeper. I thought of the cool-eyed women of Tammen’s paintings, of the still, expressionless nudes of antiquity. To work in allatir required exquisitely refined empathy. “How did you do it? Capture women looking so. . . at ease?”

“Capture?” He stepped over to put his hand on my shoulder, looking at his sculpture as if for the first time. “I didn’t capture it. Nor did I buy it, as Nahemiah Froll would”—he made a face at me, almost joking. “It was given me freely.”

“What were your models feeling?” I said. When was the last time such a look had transformed my own face? I tried to shape my face, still warm from ironic hilarity, into an imitation of that radiant smile.

As my theater proved to me, I am a bad actress. But Estorges’s gaze seemed to want to break down every inch of my face into planes and facets, to trap it in allatir stone forever. He took off one of his gloves and with his finger traced the line of my hand, from wrist to fingertips. I hadn’t even noticed what my hands were doing. His hands would have shredded and shattered stone, but his touch was remarkably gentle.

“I just asked them to think of a moment of delight. Doubtless it was different for every woman.”

What was Nahemiah’s delight? Izida’s? What would they look like, lit like this?

“I think that if I were your model,” I said, trying to control, to appraise the feelings in my heart and set a fair price for them out of my own coin, “I would think of being here now. With the dancers.” And even before he spoke, I realized what it was they emanated, and why it drew me so much.

And his face transformed too.

~ ~ ~

We must have talked for an hour or more, forgetting the time. His mother had been a lapidary in Halispell, teaching her son from childhood to cut gems and appraise them. He himself had been a boy soprano in the Halispell Boys Choir, until his voice broke and he, broken himself, changed to another art. I told of the theater and my own disappointment on realizing that I could not act. Of how I had always been able to remember how many fish my father had gotten, when and for what prices, to advise him on his strategy.

“What were your mother and sister like?” Estorges asked. In twelve years, this was the first time anyone had ever asked me that question—conversations about my family, even with Nahemiah, always started and ended with my father.

I was sitting on the end of the bench by the dancers, basking in their gift to me. I took a light breath, knowing that I did not have to worry about selecting my words, that what I said would be right.

Just then the girl—not a maid, he’d told me, but his cousin who had a studio of her own for watercoloring prints in another room of the house—knocked again. “Er, Nouet,” she stuttered, all of her hauteur gone. “Madame Nahemiah Froll, and Lady, er, Miss Izida Charteret.”

As I sprang from the bench, he bent over and picked up a small object near my foot.

“A Tavalland thaler penny,” he held it up to me with a teasing smile, brushing off the stone dust to make it shine. “Are you counting them? Do you want it?”

It must have fallen out when I took out my pocket-handkerchief. Normally, I would want it. Even after I became a fashionable professional woman I had a trick to pretend to drop my gloves just so I could pick up a penny lying in the street. A penny meant candy at the soda shop. A penny meant costume thread. A penny meant a ribbon or pair of shoelaces that would make my shoes look newer. A penny meant one less penny I had to work for.

But an accountant counted pennies, not an artist. And right now, an accountant, a woman who failed at the arts but was left counting the artists’ pennies, was the farthest from how I felt sitting by those dancers.

“Keep it,” I said. It was only one-fourth of a Hestland penny. “Consider it payment for services rendered.”

And then Izida and Nahemiah came in.

The greetings and formalities, during which both Izida’s and Nahemiah’s eyes kept drifting to the sculpture. Then Nahemiah spoke.

“I will take you as a guest to my palace in Tavalland. For two nights, and a full day. You will return on my aeroplane the day after tomorrow.”

1500 thalers, I thought. I went to stand beside Izida, just the accountant again.

“You expect to buy me with a three-day holiday?” Estorges asked, arms crossed.

“I expect to overwrite your yellow-press bar-gossip prejudices about me. I want you to learn for yourself who I am. And why I want that piece.”

Guests would beg and wait for years for an invitation to her palace six months hence, not that very day. I would have been more surprised if she had groveled on the floor and kissed his foot. Or rather, the foot of the Three Dancers.

“Nouet,” Izida said, for the first time using his first name that I had not dared to use, “I think you will appreciate the art that I’ve worked so hard to collect.” I and not my father, she left unsaid.

And that was something that I, Bethenica the penny-counter, could not offer him at all.

“Will you?” Nahemiah was gentler than I had ever heard her. “My aeroplane is waiting on the aerodrome just outside the city. We will take a first-class cab.”

Nouet Estorges said slowly, “Give me two hours.”

“To pack?”

“To speak to my solicitor.”

~ ~ ~

On the grounds of Palace Froll there are seven glittering fountains, each in the style of a different era, costing from 250 to 1300 thalers sterling to carve out of marble and rig the pipes. There is a tunnel system, dug at the expense of 300 thalers per foot, excavated and reinforced with marble; lining the tunnel are fifty statues of ancient gods, carved on commission at a cost of 300ts. each; it cost an additional 50ts. per statue in labor to lower them via block and tackle and set them up. The pride of the stables was Wings On Water, the championship racing stallion bought for 7300ts. plus transport, commanding 200ts. as a stud fee, a beautiful horse dancing on springy legs with his mane rippling in the wind, not knowing how much he had cost.

But my favorite place is the pear orchard that had been on that hill long before Nahemiah’s father had bought the property. They were low-grade green pears of the half-feral unnamed variety that grew everywhere along the coast, but that was the only place on the grounds that I did not know the price of, that never had a price, that never cost anything but only gave.

So I hid there while Izida guided Estorges around the grand rooms with the mosaic floors and the fan-vaulted ceilings she had designed herself, around the galleries and the tunnels. Up into the bell tower built just because Nahemiah had seen a Caltavan bell tower when she was a little girl and had fallen in love with it, and so Izida had done one for her. Izida did. Not me.

After an afternoon and an evening and a breakfast where he kept sighing in awe at Izida’s handiwork, at Nahemiah’s taste, I fled to the pear orchard. I had no place on that tour. I was not an artist. I was just the woman who counted the artists’ money and kept them from bankrupting themselves, and as a courtesy, got to talk to them for a while.

I was a village girl who had climbed pear trees (mindful of the thorns) where no one could find me and make me gut and scale fish, and had sat in them, crunching on the sour woody fruit, and dreamed of running away with the theater and becoming an actress, with a mink coat and my name in lights and dazzlingly handsome men and women I had seen on silver screens pouring me champagne, and me never having to think, for an entire night, how much any of this cost. That was what wealth was, really—to be able to buy something without ever worrying, because you have people to do that for you.

I never got that. I only grew old enough to know that my dress had cost 20ts. out of my own wages and I could not afford to tear it on the thorns climbing the pear trees. So I sat under the tree on a spread towel, leafing through the broken-spined Arts Today handed down from Nahemiah, returning again and again to the Three Dancers of Gizari.

“Is this where you escape to?” he asked, and I dropped the magazine face down, wrinkling the page against the grass.

He was dressed in tennis costume; Izida, or Nahemiah herself, must have challenged him to a tennis match. His forehead beaded perspiration, as marble or allatir cannot.

“It’s private,” I said noncommittally.

“It also seems to be the only place on these entire grounds that is not proudly stamped as Nahemiah-Froll-owned, Izida-Charteret-made.”

“It’s within her property line. Her father paid for it.”

“All she has, she has relied on others to get for her,” he said, leaning towards me, “and she rations it out to those who are already rich and fortunate, just like the Count of Schellerbide. Except she favors women more. Yes, everyone in the art world knows that she takes women to her bed, not men. Have you ever slept there?”

“No,” I said honestly. “Never. I do not sleep with people who pay me.” Izida never paid me.

“Because it puts a whore-price on your body? Yet you skulk here like an abandoned lover.”

I realized that he was holding my hand, and I pulled it out of his grasp, even though half of me was very reluctant. Nahemiah rationed things out to me, who was neither rich nor fortunate, but no force could make me admit that aspect of me to him. “Because there are other things that women desire than being wedded and bedded,” I said tartly. “And you of all men should have understood that if to craft that allatir you needed your models’ moment of delight. Nahemiah wants to make the world see women’s joy, as do you. Why don’t you see that?”

“The world—of people I did not intend this statue for. We lock a piece of our soul in our art, and we gift it to kindred souls, not to the largest pile of thalers or ducats. You deserve that sculpture more than she does, or that silver-spoon-gobbling Izida or her stubborn old man, for you can feel the difference when it raises you to a wealth where money doesn’t matter.”

I found tears in my eyes. He knew my station, and he valued me despite it, or for it. But he mistook my expression.

“Think again on your delight at the foot of the sculpture, Bethenica,” he breathed. “Here, it makes you more beautiful than any stone art.”

And he kissed me.

And I responded.

And then we did more, in the tall grass.

~ ~ ~

The Three Dancers of Gizari was rejected from the Public Opera for indecency because they were naked and yet emanated not just joy but sufficiency. They had enough. They did not fear their lack. They wanted to give, not count or be counted.

And if his seduction had in it something hard and cold as marble, flat as a projection screen, I did not notice it until later. Because after all, it was not him that I truly wanted but the work of his hands.

~ ~ ~

“The aeroplane has radioed a flight path for a 10:20 departure to take you back to Halispell,” Nahemiah said, setting down her breakfast spoon.

Nouet had been silent all through the simple elegant breakfast of exquisite coffee and flaky biscuits (5ts. it would be, in some prestigious cafe and worth it, too), served at the small table of teacup-delicate porcelain in the southern corner of the Great Hall. Nahemiah and Izida chatted about upcoming exhibitions, about Tammen’s work, about everything but the blank dais at the other end of the Great Hall braced for the weight of the Three Dancers of Gizari.

I was silent too. I had forgotten to add the fresh cream and sugar to my coffee, as I sipped without tasting it.

“Very well,” said Nouet. “I thank you very much for your hospitality. Your art collection took great skill and great taste, and,” his voice went just a bit dry, “a lot of money.”

He rose from the table. But even he stopped when Nahemiah spoke, just as she assumed he would.

“So am I outbidding the Count of Schellerbide?”

Tick, went the great clock (214.23ts., plus 12ts. a visit for the only man in Tavalland skilled enough to tune it once a month). Indeed, it was so quiet that I could hear the ten-foot grand piano, custom-made at 2286.45ts., softly echo in resonance with it.

“I chose to alter the deal with the Count of Schellerbide, for the appropriate price,” Nouet said, so casually that the clock counted a few more ticks before victory registered on Nahemiah’s face. Only Izida was biting her lips as she leaned forward; she still knew her father better than anyone, and she felt something was wrong. But Nouet ignored this and said smoothly, “I have the papers ready for Bethenica to review.”

Out of his briefcase resting by his chair leg, he drew a leather portfolio and handed it to me.

It contained a contract, opened to the back where his signature already filled in one of the blanks. The ink was dry, I noticed subconsciously, having seen enough wet-ink signatures. There was the name of the solicitor. In wet ink was today’s date, and the name, with a blank beneath it for the signature. Bethenica Morning. No space for Nahemiah Froll.

He had palmed me a pen as well. “Sign it,” he mouthed, his eyes meeting mine the same way they had in the pear orchard.

I flipped angrily to the first page. “Do you think me such a fool as to not read contracts I sign?” I was about to snap, and then I bit it back.

Because this was not a bill of sale.

It was a bill of lease. The sculpture known as the Three Dancers of Gizari, allatir stone, emanation: contentment, dynamic-captures from all angles included on p. 4, was the property of Nouet Estorges under contract to the Public Opera, transferring possession, but not ownership. The possessor could display the work wherever she wished, but had no right to resell it without the permission of Nouet Estorges.

The possessor was Bethenica Morning. The leasing fee was one Tavalland penny. One Tavalland penny—and my body, unmentioned by the solicitor who had drawn this up in the missing two hours from two days ago. But I had no doubt that yesterday’s seduction was part of the contract, part of the offset price.

The empathy it takes to carve allatir—how well he saw through us. He’d lied to everyone, including me, in the aim of humiliating Nahemiah—yet he also offered me my heart’s desire. With my signature, the Three Dancers of Gizari would be mine. Not Nahemiah’s, not ever again. Once again I was the stage manager, the little god behind the footlights, the only one, other than the author, who actually has the script.

“But,” I whispered, “the Count of Schellerbide. . .” Nahemiah, my Chief, was waiting for me to handle the cues as I always did, before passing it to her and letting her have the credit. Izida was waiting for me to ensure that she got her art. I had always been but the executor of her desires.

“I lied,” he replied casually. “Do you really think the old man could appreciate this? I just knew what rival would shatter Nahemiah and Izida the most. Until I saw an even better one.

“Come with me to Halispell, Bethenica. You need the Dancers, not her. Not this.”

I had 1211.37ts. to my name, with interest at 4.5%, standing between thirty thalers a week and two women, and the offer of carved-stone contentment beyond wealth.

He had not put in my place of residence as Palace Froll, Tavalland. He knew that the moment I signed this, it would not be true. If he had guessed my price.

My pen hovered over the signature blank and dripped one single black drop.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Tamara Vardomskaya is a Canadian writer and a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Besides Beneath Ceaseless Skies, her fiction has also appeared on Tor.com. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D in theoretical linguistics at the University of Chicago.

GEOMETRIES OF BELONGING

Rose Lemberg

OFTTIMES I LIKE to be alone in the healing room. It is a small place, and the low ceiling-boards smell slightly of damp. The candlebulb, a floating magical light I have created, is weak and does not jar the senses. Small square windows of tourmaline glass are the only hint at means, installed here only because I need privacy. The tenants in surrounding rooms keep quiet at my request. It is a fair price for them, to be this close to a holy place. I feel their emotions sometimes, when I work—a subdued kind of awe that spreads through the people like warmth, brown-yellow and tinted at the edges with soft orange.

But holiness is often just unholiness purified; silence sighs from the gaps of any great power, from the spaces in-between the deepnames as they nestle in the mind of a named strong. What a body learns from wounds, it cannot easily unlearn. Crude tears of the flesh and breaks of bone can be erased with magic if one acts quickly, but subtle damage is so difficult to repair.

A person knocks. It is an old woman made frail by hard work, her fingers swollen. Even though I have not yet extended my deepnames, I can feel how her joints ache with the damp and the early autumn cold. Laundry. The river, its water unheated by the passage of magic. The kind of work that women do in my neighborhoods, where named strong are a rarity.

I make her tea with birch syrup, warm enough to hold without dropping. I ask after her name, her grandchildren’s health, and finally, her permission.

She gives it, even though she does not quite remember why she made it here.

I extend my deepnames. Three, four, and five syllables—long and feeble, inconsequential. It is a marvel that I was able to take more than one, let alone as many as three. In Mainland Katra University they teach that a three-named strong has nothing to fear, but that is other people—professors, builders—those with short deepnames, real power. When I was younger, fear was all I knew of life. The fear of beatings, ridicule, of helplessness, of cold, of hunger. The fear of never earning attention, the fear of losing it. That fear has lasted and lasted. Two decades after my lord took me in, that fear is still with me—an old friend, an acknowledgment of my emptiness.

Slowly, patiently I align my names along the old woman’s naming grid, the foundation of every mind upon which magic may alight. She has no magic, but that does not matter in my work. The strands of her naming grid have warped themselves out of place.

My work is all resonance. Slowly, I make my deepnames vibrate. Slowly, the grid realigns itself. She will remember more now, pay attention to her surroundings, speak with clarity. But in a year, I gauge, maybe two, the warping will reassert itself and she will start slipping. Her mind is too used to this pattern; comfortable like an old, torn blanket.

The work done, I thank her and bow. This gesture is perhaps what I cherish the most about healings. She remembers to thank me in turn, and the empty porcelain teacup is gripped with newfound firmness between her fingers. I tell her to come back when she needs it. Maybe she will. Maybe she will forget. In every mind-healing, its undoing is already embedded.

My work contains within it not only its undoing but also my inaction. When patients leave, they imagine I busy myself writing a learned treatise or inventing new methods of healing—but mostly I sit, on the black walnut bench near the window that looks out into a small courtyard, its glass too opaque to see anything. I sit, too often too inert to pour myself a cup of tea, or even to want such a cup; and I don’t go anywhere. I think those thoughts, but the writing of them happens only at home, and only when my lord sits by me and writes and orders me to write. He has always honored me so, before I was anyone, before I had this room and even my full deepname configuration, before my insignificance could even be disputed.

Beneath the surface of the land, as we have learned so many years ago, embedded in the earth, there is a naming grid. Inert, it shines too softly for most minds to discern. It is unto this grid that the first people spoke their magic. They created deepnames for the land, watched them alight upon the land’s naming grid like fireflies; and it is those ancient deepnames that we see, those of us with enough power to do so, when we go out beyond cities, where the land is quiet, and draw on our senses and attend. The mind, too, is much like the land, a land that lies within each of us—so I have postulated, these many years ago, shortly after I was expelled from Mainland Katra University. Each mind contains a naming grid, each of a slightly different nature, as no two people are exactly alike. And it is these grids—in strong and simple people both—that take to ailment, and it is with these grids of the mind that I work when I heal.

I take no payment from the poor. I was raised in a neighborhood close this one. I take no payment, and no pride. It is hard to understand.

The Governance is in session in the autumn, and so we are in the capital. Each morning, my lord leaves. I do not want to move, but I cannot abide to loiter in the rooms where others may pass in his absence; I cannot abide the art he has so carefully chosen to please the eye—his eye—to remind him of moments and lovers and acts of great magic he has committed elsewhere. I cannot abide the absences between the gaps of his very great power. He tells me to go back to sleep, but I grow restless as his presence cools off the sheets. He becomes impatient with me, tells me to come with him to the Oligarchy Governance. But there he is busy and brusque and would rather not be disturbed, and the high nobles beset me. Somebody always ails. They offer me money, startlingly large sums of it to work in absolute secret, in side rooms tiled with marble and mortared in gold. They whisper to me, voices mixing hope with condescension; and when I am done, they call me ragi behind my back, confident that I will never report them to my lord.

And so each morning I walk instead in the opposite direction. I cross the bridge above Katríu River that separates the rich neighborhoods from my old haunts, the tenement buildings unsupported by deepnames or other infrastructure, their paint long since peeled and replaced by graffiti. Mists float below the bridge, mists made up of vapor as delicate and quiet as my magic, powerless to shift anything much, useless if not for this work.

Every morning I am in the healing room, waiting for patients. I sift through my thoughts, finding nothing in them that is worth writing down. My insignificance is vapor covering the river, infinitesimally small droplets of water that disappear with the heat. And at the end of the day I will be again beside my lord’s heat, which is more than I ever wanted, and certainly more than I ever deserved.

It is growing late. I can feel the approaching sunset in the slight darkening of the glass—a change of mood, a subtle shift in the dampness that permeates the walls. If I wanted, my lord would imbue the structure with deepnames, reinforce it to maintain an even, pleasing temperature in all seasons, allow no moisture or dryness beyond the amount established as the strong builders’ standard. Even now he frowns sometimes, coming here, and I feel his fingers itch with the desire to act. I asked him to leave it like this, and he does, but it makes him unhappy. He wants everything that is his to be beautiful.

I don’t know how he doesn’t put me aside after all these years. Perhaps the beauty he craves is in what we’ve been through together—a complex perfection created by memory, by story, rather than by my many inadequacies.

As always, in the evenings I crave to return, to be by his side once again, and as always I dread that moment, the possibility that he will look at me and see me as I see myself, as everyone saw me before him. I fear that he will turn away from me, indifferent and cold, his gaze already moving on to other matters.

I have nothing to take with me. When the knock comes, I have already put on my coat and waved off the single candlebulb light.

“Come in,” I call from the darkness, relaxing once again into this new direction. A patient comes; I heal. Reacting is restful.

A person edges in. I cannot fully see them in the gloom, but I can feel their hands shake. Their voice, when it comes, is tentative and young. “Mister. . . Healer Parét?”

I draw on my three-syllable deepname to create a new candlebulb, and call again, “Come in!” Releasing a magical light is easy for me, but it is a waste as I have just extinguished another. I do not want to do magic that is unnecessary, to imprint the world with my will. I seek to pass lightly, unnoticed, perhaps to adjust what has gone warped out of shape, here and there; but in my lord’s shadow I have been called to such deeds that went beyond me, great healings and remakings that I’d rather unremember.

“Your pardon, Healer Parét. . .”

I lift my eyes to the young man. He is agitated, unhappy. I have not seen him before, but the simple pants and pleated shirt under a patched jacket identify him as respectable within this neighborhood—perhaps a petty trader, or an artisan. He is a simple, and thus unable to draw on magic. I wonder what ails him, but nothing seems seriously amiss. I bow to him, and as I do so, I get from him a feeling of fear, the familiarity of it sweeping me into its grip. Whatever is wrong with him, it is temporary. “Someone in your family. . .?”

My visitor whispers, “He is old, and cannot come here. . .”

“Why are you afraid?”

“That you will say no. . .”

There is more to this, I sense. This old man he wants me to see—a father or a grandfather, perhaps an older relative—has he turned violent? Did the family send a representative here, unbeknownst to the one whose healing they so desire?

“I do not turn patients away.” No, never. I walk to people’s homes to see those too frail to come here. Out of respect for my station and out of shame, families go to great lengths to conceal from me how they live. But I have lived it all, and I have seen it all—families cramped in a single room, elders and youngsters who become suddenly violent, children with only shirts for clothing, decrepit apartments scrubbed painfully clean for me. People dying of illnesses of the flesh which could have been easily treated by magic, but I am the only free option available. And I only heal minds, and that under certain conditions.

I say, “Please understand, I do not heal anyone who does not, in full consciousness, consent to the healing.” If they are not conscious, I do just enough to enable them to make that choice.

“Would you consent to come and ask?” His voice has a breathless quality to it, and I wonder why there’s been no ease to his fear.

“Yes,” I say. “Of course.” I wonder how long this will take, and whether my lord would worry for me, but he knows that this kind of thing happens.

As I cross the threshold of the healing room and step into the street, my lord’s wards wash over my head. For a moment I am afloat in this warmth, the caress, my lord’s secret heart and all it contains.

The young man calls my name and I hurry away from the feeling. The candlebulb floats after me, its feeble light heartening but only barely helpful in the afternoon’s dimness. I do not have the heart to extinguish it. Candlebulbs are easy to make, the first act of magic every named strong learns. I have always had a weakness for them, a feeling that they are on some level alive, as alive as deepnames in the mind and lights beneath the earth, just in a more simple fashion.

“Where do you live?” I ask as I walk. It is chilly, and I huddle in my woolen coat. My visitor has only a scarf, old and patched.

“Not far now. . .”

A subtle change in his voice makes me suddenly wary. Certainly he would not dare to rob me or harm me, to anger my lord—

I wonder whether to activate the wards now, but what reason is there to alarm him, to tear him away from his work? Certainly a slight tremble in a stranger’s voice is no reason for panic. I stop, wondering whether to draw on my deepnames, but there is a peculiarity with my configuration, something only my lord knows about, which prevents me from constructing a defensive stronghold. A three-named strong has nothing to fear, because a three-named stronghold cannot be collapsed—at least in theory, but I. . .

The young man turns around and beckons, his face looming pale and frightened out of the swaths of his scarf.

“Where are you leading me?” I ask.

He grimaces, and suddenly a cloud of scent, spicy and floral and strangely comforting, envelops me. I inhale, I stupidly inhale. There is a presence behind me. I try to sense for menace but feel nothing; I am floating in the brown soft cloud of peppery gray rose and alyta blossom as the stranger’s deepnames shine behind me, through me. My legs buckle. I struggle, but my world dims too quickly for me to draw on my names or to activate the wards. As resistance and consciousness leave me, my body floods with shame. So easy—I have grown too careless, too secure in thinking no one in their right mind would cross my lord.

The last sound I hear is a hiss as my candlebulb fizzles and dies.

~ ~ ~

I come to in fits and starts. I am in a moving—vehicle?—that rattles over lumpy ground, cobblestones. My head is too fuzzy to draw on deepnames or wards, and the taste of the rag—bitter mint and verbena intensified—still churns in my mouth. Somebody’s voice floats above me.

“Please, Healer Parét, I beg for your forgiveness for this.” A new voice, masculine and deep. “My father would agree to see you only in utmost secret. You are our last hope.”

My sight clears. I am in a carriage, softly and pleasantly lit by five candlebulbs and the ruddy light of sunset that streams past a half-open curtain. No attempt is made to draw the blinds or to apply bonds, to make in truth a prisoner of me. We are moving across the bridge, out of the slums and towards the richer neighborhoods north of the river. No more than ten minutes must have passed since my abduction, likely less.

I turn my head towards the speaker. It is a middle-aged man, about my age, dressed with understated elegance in a midnight-blue velvet long jacket and pants. A lacy pale-green shirt peeks from under the jacket. My lord, in fact, is responsible for bringing this color to the height of fashion in Katríu, but what looks impeccably sophisticated against my lord’s dark olive skin makes this nobleman look as pallid as a fish three days dead and out of the water. “Mind healings are such a delicate matter.”

It troubles me that I don’t understand why he did not ask me quietly in the healing room, or better yet, arrange it the usual way. I shuffle my lips, more comfortable with speech with every passing second. “You should have asked my lord to arrange the visit. He is always discreet.”

My hand itches to touch my earring, concealed under delicate invisibility wards when we’re not on the Coast. I can pull on it now, alert my lord—but what would be the point? This isn’t a plot against him or a political kidnapping. Just a rich old man too ashamed to admit his need for a mind-healer, too self-conscious to reveal a weakness to a peer. I, of course, am not a peer.

“Forgive me.” The nobleman looks pained, embarrassed. “My father is especially wary of Tajer Kekeri. It took me years to convince him to see you.”

“I understand.” I don’t exactly, but it does not matter. There are a dozen reasons for a Katran noble to fear or mistrust my lord. He, a Coastal nobleman in a sea of Katrans, represents the political power and influence of his homeland. The Coast, on the books an annexed province of Katra, supplies most of the country’s grain and wine, as well as the mightiest of its named strong. One of my lord’s titles is the Strongest of the Coast, but he is so much more, and he never forgets anything.

“Who is your father?” I ask.

“Lord Mezará Brentann.”

“Ah.” If the Katran Oligarchy Governance were a dining hall, my lord and Brentann would be seated as far from each other as possible. Of course the old Brentann would never ask for any favors from my lord, nor ask for me—unless the need was truly great.

“Thank you so much for not alerting him.”

“You took some risks,” I say. Delicate political balance notwithstanding, my lord would march down to retrieve me with all the accompanying floodings and earthquakes, and I only wish I could jest about such things. I would much rather pass alongside life, unobtrusive and quiet. One day I will find the strength to say no even to healings, even to my lord when he tells me to write down what I know.

“We are desperate, Healer Parét. The situation is not getting any better.”

The Brentann family has grown so eager for a cure they have kidnapped me off the street. But cures are always an illusion. No transformation is complete and perfect in itself; a true change in the mind is gradual and requires a continuous application of will. The healer is only a catalyst.

“I told your servant—” probably not a servant but merely a local they bribed to lure me in, then discarded—”that I do not heal without the patient’s consent.”

The younger Brentann shakes his head sadly. “You will understand when you see. Please. . .”

I shrug. I am weary and I want to go home, but I’ve never yet refused a patient. “I will take a look.”

I could demand release, even threaten, but it is simpler to just go along. Rich people are strange around mind healings; everybody is, just in a different fashion.

I do not speak more, and as the carriage passes through the middle neighborhoods and climbs towards the Oligarchy district, the younger Brentann makes no effort to draw me out. His head is half-turned towards the window, and a muscle jumps at the corner of his mouth. Grief, hopelessness—I wonder how bad it is going to be. Does he think his father unlikely to consent? And yet his father asked for me. . .

The carriage stops in front of a gray heap of a structure, its marble arches chiseled with vines. The younger Brentann leans out to give instructions to servants, and the carriage continues around the building. Of course they wouldn’t admit me through the main entrance.

I am taken in through the service entry, then through the narrow, tall-ceilinged corridors into a surprisingly comfortable sitting room dark but for a cluster of candlebulbs in a tiled hearth. The space is old-fashioned, with walls striped in some dark color, purple or blue. Clusters of flowers adorn the molding, where candlebulbs would float to greet better visitors. The armchairs look comfortable, but the pale pink brocade of the covers has not been in fashion since before the second Katra-Araigen war.

Servants bring in heaps of clothing, a basin with water to wash, and elaborately painted screens for changing. Another servant carries in a small flat chest, which is presented to me. It contains jewels—fine emerald pins shaped like feathers; lapis lazuli and sapphire brooches that depict Bird as a titmouse, a finch, a sparrow. Thought has gone into this—the goddess takes many shapes, but for me she is always small, a bird that shivers through a winter’s night and waits, thin claws delicately clasping a frozen branch, for the first rays of dawn.

“We do not wish to shame you, Healer Parét,” says the younger Brentann. “You had no time to change. Please, choose what you will of this, or if it does not suit you, please let your will be known to the servants.”

The younger Brentann is painfully courteous. No, there is no strong in this land who would wish to provoke my lord. And yet I do not feel safe here. Fear, an old friend, raps its knuckles against my ribs.

I bow low enough to soothe myself. I am grateful that at least they have not offered me earrings. My pants, shirt, and jacket are of Katran fashion, plain and unadorned, but of good quality. A servant’s garb. I hardly ever wear anything else.

“With gratitude, lord, I would remain in this clothing.”

“As you wish.”

I wash my hands in the proffered basin and leave the room, with one last glance at the still-open jewelry box. There, the wings of a blue finch glitter with tiny aquamarines. As ever, the goddess reminds me that holy spaces seldom remain empty, that small creatures nestle in the crevices of any great power.

I let Brentann lead me where I am most needed.

~ ~ ~

He takes me up a winding staircase, its maple balustrade chiseled in the same vine-and-flower pattern that adorns the marble façade. Garlands of candlebulbs hang under the ceiling, wind around the cut-crystal arms of chandeliers, cast their brilliance upon gold-painted walls. I draw on the four-syllable, and then on the five-syllable, to construct a very thin weave to tune out some of the glitter. It is very subtle, unobtrusive, and the younger Brentann does not seem to notice. The old service room, with its darkness and almost no lighting, was so much better.

He knocks on a tall door, then opens it, motioning me to enter. It is another dazzling room with even more crystal and gilt and innumerable candlebulbs, and I am grateful for the protection of my weave. In the middle of the concentric space, under the largest chandelier, there is a settee of gold brocade. The master of the house reclines upon it.

He is older than my lord by a decade or more—late sixties, I guess. His eyes, sharp and blue in a sunken face, latch upon mine as I enter. “Ah, hah, HAH!” he exclaims, and I perceive. . . I do not perceive. My senses are dampened by the weave.

The person—Mezará Brentann, I assume—waves a hand, the gilded lace of the sleeve like clumps of sunset-colored foam, and his son nods and leaves. We are alone.

“So, so, so. The famous Parét. How much did my good-for-nothing of a son promise you, for me to take a good look at Ranravan’s ragi?”

I draw my weave down and stand defenseless before the high lord Brentann. The room’s brilliance threatens to overwhelm, but I concentrate on the old man’s mind. Such turbulence. I wonder if he sees visions—I am quite confident he does, and it is nothing he likes. He wakes at night, I see. Dissatisfaction, anger, shame, the kind of yearning that can bend the mind’s naming grid out of shape. I wonder if he has the shakes, and how bad, and whether the shakes are caused by the moods, or the other way around.

I can do many things to help this man—

He just tried to insult me, and called my lord by his old name, Ranravan, a name my lord has asked the world not to use anymore. It does not seem like the older Brentann would consent to a healing.

I bow, low. The courtesy calms me. It is for my lord, whose presence permeates the world in which I walk and for whose sake these acts of respect I give others will always comfort me. “Lord Brentann,” I say, “there is no shame for me in serving my lord. I do so by choice, and with love.”

I was born in Katra, in this city. I am local. But my home is no longer here. My home is with my lord, on the Coast, or wherever else he wishes to go, and his law is my law. The law of the Coast, where people take many lovers or none, where women, men, and ichidi live unashamed of their desires for each other. I have been called ragi, and worse, here and in other places. And yet, I am here to perform a healing—

Lord Brentann sneers. “I don’t care how he fucks you. You are here to perform a healing, get paid, and go.”

I wince. For all the nobles speak of me behind his back, most care to be polite—if not for me, then for my lord. . .

He seems to sense my thoughts. “My son took you off the street, why didn’t you call on your master? Afraid of another fiasco, like when the river flooded?”

“Please. . .” I whisper, unwilling to think about that day, unwilling to remember.

“I hear you lost your wife to some random drunk. How helpful was the flood to you?”

“There is no need for this,” I plead. “I will perform the healing and go.” I do not want his payment, his bird pins, his clothes. I am so, so grateful for my own clothes. There is a tear in my left eye. I swipe it off, and my left hand twitches to continue, to touch the invisible earring, but that would alert my lord.

But, I remind myself, there is much I can do for this man. Draw some of the imbalance out, release some of the tensions that spread like waves and affect all in his vicinity.

“Please allow me to examine your mind more closely, lord. I will gladly help you.”

“Me?” He half-rises, then falls back on the settee. His laughter is a shrill thing, like the call of the hunting marshbird. “Me? Are you blind? Why in Bird’s guano-encrusted cloaka would I need a healer? I do not need a healer. It is for her.”

He claps. Almost immediately the grand doors of the chamber open again. Two burly servants lead another, a thin short person of about fifteen—perhaps sixteen. The young person wears a boy’s long woolen pants under a girl’s overdress, an especially frilly one. The servants hold the young person by the arms.

The youngster screams and screams. Their deepnames become activated—two names, one short and one very weak, long. The young person flails, struggles with all their might against the guards, and one by one the candlebulbs begin to snap out, and a large piece of crystal falls down and shatters. The young person screams in words now, over and over. “I do not want to be remade! I do not want to be remade! I do not want to be remade!”

Mezará Brentann yells “Shut up! SHUT UP!”

The old man half-springs, half-falls from his seat and grapples with the youngster, helped by the guard who has not been injured by the falling crystal. Brentann’s two short deepnames wrestle with the young person’s deepnames, and triumph. The young person is sprawled on the floor, with Brentann grasping their arms and the guard is affixing some type of restraint.

Rasping, Brentann says, “And this, my dear, is your patient.”

All this time, I have not moved. Fear has possessed me, paralyzing, choking. I have survived worse. Catastrophes. Deaths. I have looked the world’s destruction in the eye and found the strength to make a healing. But this I cannot face. In my mind I am a child again, cowering in the corner of the kitchen again, and my father’s looming shadow, huge, relentless, coming closer.

I shield myself with the memory of my lord’s words, spoken to me all those years ago. Wherever you walk, you never walk alone. Your past, your future, I am by your side. I will always protect you. Whatever it takes, Parét. Whatever it takes.

His voice reaches me from above, from below, from in-between spaces where I’ve scattered myself. His voice pushes me back into myself.

I take a deep breath, and another, until I am steady again. If I want to walk out of here right now I will, and Brentann will have to deal with the resulting flood, the marsh, the wildfire, the scourge of mosquitoes, or whatever shape my lord’s rage will take this time.

I speak. “Does my patient have a name?”

“This is my granddaughter, Dedéi.”

The young person starts to scream again. “I do not want to be a girl! I do not want to be a girl! I do not want to be a girl!” Their deepnames are not engaged. Defeated. It is much darker in the room, and glass is thick on the floor.

“You see how she is,” gasps Brentann from where he holds her. “Healer after healer could do nothing. My son swore she’d grow out of it, move past these things with the nametaking, but it only gets worse. Her second deepname was a five-syllable! A good-for-nothing five-syllable, not-even-to-light-a-candlebulb five-syllable! My only granddaughter—”

Dedéi suddenly speaks, fast and flat. “It’s a two- and five-syllable configuration. Called the Odd Angle, one of the world’s rarest and more impossible to take. Surpassed in rarity only by the two- and four-, the so-called Square Wheel, but it is too unstable. The Odd Angle is stable. Maruta Gostano, Postulating the Improbable in Magical Geometry, imported from Laina and translated into Katran in. . .”

“Shut. Up.” Brentann’s hands lock around Dedéi’s arms, and push.

“Can you please stop,” I ask him, “and let her go?” The Katran pronoun slides easily from my tongue, but if I were on the Coast, I would be using zha, an unmarked pronoun used by young people who are yet undecided on gender. My native tongue does not easily allow for such variation.

“Are you out of your mind? Perform the healing while I hold her. You’ll never have a better chance.”

“I do not heal without consent,” I say, slowly, patiently, as if to a child.

“What are you talking about? She cannot give consent. She is insane. Warped. Look! She cannot walk from her bedroom to breakfast without breaking something. Try to say something to her, and she will forever repeat the same Bird-pecked thing, or rattle endlessly from books. She cannot speak like you and me. She cannot write, she cannot even hold a pencil. One minute of your time, and you can remake her—”

The child starts to sob again. “I do not want, I do not want. . .”

I shake my head. “Dedéi’s desires are clear. I do not heal without consent. Just as I would not heal you without your consent, I would not heal her.”

“There is nothing wrong with me,” he snarls.

“There is nothing wrong with her, either.” It is not true, of course. I have seen people like Dedéi before, in my practice. If I could take a look, I would see nothing wrong with the shape of her mind. A different shape than usual, of course, but whole within itself. No, whatever is wrong with Dedéi Brentann has nothing to do with her mind, and everything with the world.

What’s wrong with her is you.

“Get out of here.”

“I want to help,” I say, “but not without consent. I’d like to talk to her. . .”

Lord Brentann half-rises, still grasping the child, and his deepnames rear up, ugly and short, over his head. His face is a grimace of hate. “GET OUT!”

I flee.

~ ~ ~

The younger Brentann is all apologies. He tries to explain about his daughter, how they kept the secret all these years. How he brought healers, how he pleaded with his father. I wave him off. He begs me to take the carriage, but I cannot face—I cannot be in this house, or anything associated with this house, for another moment. I mutter about Little Hold being close, about liking to walk. Brentann makes no further move to stop or convince me. He sees me out through the front door.

The streets of upper Katríu are too wide, too clean, too full of finely tended shrubbery and flowers. The houses are too far apart from each other, huge palaces of marble and limestone shrouded in glittering deepname veils. I draw on two of my own deepnames, the four- and the five-syllable, and pull concealment over me like a cloak.

A good-for-nothing five-syllable, not even to light a candlebulb—

They teach this at the Mainland Katra University. A five-syllable deepname is a disgrace, a joke. If one cannot take something shorter and stronger, one is better off without power. Five-syllables are for country bumpkins without any training—stupid commoners who do not know better, who will struggle all their lives with a deepname that does nothing.

Over the years, I have gotten more use out of my five-syllable than out of my other names. If only my Primrose had had a five-syllable when—

I feel anger stirring. I do not remember being angry in years. Not even when she died. Not—

I run where my feet take me. They take me down the hills to middle Katríu, where the streets narrow almost enough for comfort, where the houses stand closer together, almost touching, not yet touching. The smell of the river is close, damp and potent, with a bitter undertaste. In my pain, I have run away from upper Katríu, away from Little Hold. From my lord.

lost your wife to some drunk

Brentann was goading me. He wanted to throw me off-balance, and here I am, running around the city without aim or purpose. In a space of one hour or less, Mezará Brentann has made lewd allusions to my lord’s preferences in pleasure, ridiculed his power, forced me to remember Primrose’s death, and made a person suffer in my presence in such a way that her consent, and thus a healing, would be impossible to obtain.

My steps slow down, and yet I walk. I chase all thoughts away, fill my head with the seaweed smell of the river. I remember the water, licking pieces of capsized boats and iron hooks torn out of piers in that great flooding, long since polished to smoothness. Beneath the surface of the wave, the bodies of last night’s suicides are nibbled away by tiny translucent fish. As a child I stood on that bridge, on nights like this, having barely escaped my father’s moods, too frightened for the leap, too frozen for any action at all. I remember returning later to these damp stones of the bridge’s railing, moss-covered and slippery under my hands—later, when I was thrown out of the university. I was admitted by chance to begin with, on a scholarship for especially talented commoners—but then I did not take more power, as expected, could not master disciplines for which the rich children had prepared all their lives. My funding was stripped from me, and I. . .

I lean over the bridge, contemplating the leap as I had in the past. Was this Brentann’s intention? He is my lord’s enemy. Would he avenge himself upon my lord in such a fashion, make me feel again what I have silenced myself from hearing, knowing full well that I find it nearly impossible to heal myself, to fix—

But if he knows me this well, he should know that I’ve always been too much of a coward to take the leap.

No, this isn’t about my fear. This is about his. He, Brentann, was afraid that I would heal him against his will. He knew—had to know, despite his arrogance and his superior maneuvering of me, that there is much within himself that needs fixing.

I do not want to be remade!

He had told Dedéi, who was what?—sixteen?—that I would force a healing, and that brought her to panic. The first, dark room offered a subdued kind of comfort. The room in which he received me was made to sparkle so as to overwhelm, likely adding a layer to Dedéi’s distress, as it did to mine. I suspect the visit had been orchestrated by the younger Brentann, a desperate ploy to better both father and daughter. Outsmarted by the old man, of course. . .

lost your wife to—

It wasn’t a drunk, Lord Mezará Brentann, and you know it. It was a person, a man, much like you in fact, only younger—a man with visions, with painful voices and tremors, a man who both hated and feared himself. A poor man who wanted, unlike you, so much to be healed. So much. He did not want to lash out anymore. He came to the healing room, he begged Primrose to help. I was away, helping my lord with the aftermath of the second Katra-Araigen war. She did not want to turn the patient away. She thought she could handle it.

I do not want to write down what I know. I invented the discipline, my lord says, and I have an obligation to document it. I taught Primrose, and I taught our son. Such disasters my choices have caused.

I never want to teach anyone else. But my lord tells me to write, and I do, even though it is painful. For mind-healing, one has to have long names. Inconsequential and feeble long names, four- and five-syllables, which are for most people almost impossible to acquire. A theoretical exercise—for who would want names so humble they can do practically nothing? But mind-healing requires a gossamer touch.

I remember my hands on the man’s head. The river has flooded. My lord hovers over my shoulder. His breath is heavy on my neck. His rage encompasses worlds, his vision has gone red with the need to kill. I do not look at my lord. Do not speak. I focus on my wife’s killer. That man did not want—he did not want to kill—

It is not his fault. It is not anyone’s fault. He lets me touch his head, hold it, as I go in, extend my deepnames to finish his healing that Primrose started.

I push the memories away. My veil of deepnames discarded, I cry openly now, and my tears are swallowed by the damp stones of the bridge railing. Always the coward, too scared to die, too scared to let other people be carried away into Bird’s domain. How many more hurts will I let overlay this pain before I turn towards myself with healing? How many more times will I need to heal this wound, align myself to where the pain would be easier to carry, only to feel myself regress, unwilling to maintain the newfound peace? I resist my own medicine. I do not want the pain gone. It’s my fault—my fault that Primrose was alone, my fault that I had taught her.

A rattle of wheels alerts me to an approaching carriage. It is a small one, beautifully formed of blue basine hardwood and stretched leather, its green so dark as to appear almost black in this lack of light. A single deepname lantern swings from the bow, illuminating the driver’s head in a soft glow. Like my lord, Merudar is Coastal, with darker olive skin and long brown hair braided in a five-way fashion that identifies them as ichidi. There are many ways to identify oneself as ichidi, if one chooses to do so at all, and Coastal courtesies are different from Katra. Nonetheless, I bow to Merudar.

They don’t laugh it off this time. Their voice is serious. “He begs you to come home.”

He begs?

“He is worried—but if you cannot come, he says, just convey a word.”

I sigh and wipe my damp hands on the sides of my pants, then climb into the carriage. I do not want to think. I do not want to remember my losses, my various failures, all the empty spaces of me.

The carriage takes me back north, towards Little Hold. The name is a misnomer—like other houses in upper Katríu, it is a pile of carved marble built to impress, to stake out a territory for one of the two Coastal nobles allowed to participate in Katran governance. Our real home is never here. It is on the Coast, which at this time of year is bathed in smells of quince and persimmon. The Kekeri estates are famous for their vineyards; my lord has spent many years teaching me about the pleasures of wine, but still I remain indifferent, content to drink what he chooses and to praise it, even if it is vinegar. How much of a home has the Coast been to me? As a young boy, I wanted little—a humble job, a place to sleep, and not to be bullied. Later I learned to want what he wanted. He wanted a big Coastal family with lovers and wives and their lovers, and children, and friends who would visit from all the lands where he had once walked, and a large dining hall to feed this throng. How often has the dining hall stood empty, since those early days; how often have I poured for him alone, in brittle silence?

He waits for me in near-darkness, in the drawing room by the side entrance. It is made comfortable with softly glowing candlebulbs, and real fire, burning logs in a tiled fireplace. Age has added heft to his frame. His configuration is fully engaged, and lights run up and down its complex, steely length. His hair, more silver now than black, is braided in the five-way fashion. He does not go by ichidi pronouns or other ichidi language, but tonight, I can see, he will keep no secrets from me.

“Parét,” he says, with that old tenderness he keeps for me, only for me, between the darkness and the flickering flames. He has not turned away. Of course, he has not turned away. My mind has been tormenting me.

I start crying as his power and his arms reach out to embrace me.

~ ~ ~

Come morning, he refuses to leave for the Governance session; instead he lingers in bed, tracing the paths his power carved on my skin the previous night. I want to stay like this with him, floating forever. So many times I’ve refused myself healing, turned my power away from my own ailing mind, denied myself even his feelings—but now, in his domain I don’t need to think of anything. My lover holds me in the net of fire that he constructs out of his need and mine, a bondage as powerful as the earth’s naming grid, as strong as the invisible lines that tie the stars together and string them up across the firmament.

I rarely wish for pain in the body, and he does not press, but last night I begged him for it. He does not wish me any harm. He takes the injuries away, later—short deepnames to erase fresh wounds. I am unhurt. Only the memory remains to comfort me.

He asks me to talk, he waits for me to find the words, but they do not come. He sighs at last and tells the hired Katran servants to take the day off, and asks the Coastal retainers to serve and to share. A sitting space is cleared in the bedroom, and we eat an enormous formal breakfast of Coastal cold dishes—redgrain flatbread rolled with vegetables and smoked fish then sliced thinly into rounds; quail eggs with a filling of minced meat and figs; pickled grape leaves stuffed with millet and pine-nuts; sweet crepes with quince jam from the Kekeri estates. About a dozen people sit around on cushions family-style, war-style, but unlike in the early days of the second Katra-Araigen war, there is very little joking. I long to tell my lord more than I managed to squeeze out of myself last night, but time in which to be alone with him has slipped away from me.

It is almost noon when he is ready to depart. He insists I come with him to the session, and I gather from his hints that he is badly pressured by his peers; whatever’s wrong, Mezará Brentann is at the heart of it. There is more to what happened last night than the scheming of his enemies, but I am not ready to—not sure how to—share the story. Whatever else is going on, I’ll have to find a way to speak to Dedéi, whose life is crushed between the wheels of powers grown too large and self-absorbed to see her as a person, to see her as anything but a flawed possession which must be remade. But my lord needs me now, and so I do not argue.

It is a short ride uphill from Little Hold to the Governance building, an imposing round structure of gold-veined gray marble in which the oligarchs make decisions on Katran affairs. He leaves me in the Kekeri seating box, a high and half-concealed room with a balcony that overlooks the argument hall, from which I can observe the proceedings. Each of the sixteen oligarch families has such a box, and the Kekeri one is familiar to me from many a visit I’ve paid here over the years since my lord took the oligarchy seat at the customary age of forty. I came here with Primrose in the past, and I came here with the children; but for the last two years I have been alone in this room.

I see my lord below, where the other oligarchs greet him. At least two others wear pale green. Of course, he abandoned the color as soon as the others adopted it. Today he wears a Burri-style flowing dress of bleached linen minutely embroidered with sandbirds, and I am amused into pondering what it would take for Katran men to adopt this fashion. I am feeling light-headed, somewhat elated, and troubled by these sensations. He has taken good care of me, but am I truly myself when I feel this way, or is it only my body’s reaction to the push and pull between us?

The giddy feeling is quickly dampened. The high nobles have waited for my lord to arrive, and now they have no patience. I pull on the four-syllable, and then on the three-syllable, to enhance my hearing.

“Have you thought it through?” Lady Maziket, the finance oligarch. “This is our chance and we must seize it.”

Brentann hovers, a stooped vulture. I recognize the sharpness of his voice, balanced precariously between triumph and dissolution. “A short, decisive campaign. We will take back the borderlands—”

“You will not take back anything,” my lord snaps.

All that I’ve told my lord about last night is that I had difficult patients. I have concealed Brentann from him, and I now see that my lord has done the same, has told me nearly nothing of his trouble. The Katra-Araigen borderlands, the bone of contention between the two great political powers of the central north; the reason for the first war, in our grandparents’ generation, and the second, ended these fifteen years ago. Certainly the oligarchs wouldn’t want to reanimate the conflict—don’t they remember the last?

I remember.

I refuse to remember.

“With General Aggriu lost to Bird-knows-where, our forces will meet little resistance in Araigen. . .”

“Fools!” my lord bellows. “Anda-Aggriu cannot be lost. If she is gone from Araigen it is with a purpose, and she will return.”

They teach in schools here that Katra was victorious in the war. The fighting never came to the capital. But in these early years I worked in the healing room day and night. I worked myself sick trying to help the simple people returning home, foot soldiers conscripted who went gladly for the promise of regular meals and a modest sum of money at discharge. They did not bargain for the battlefield sickness; for the horrors of war to embed themselves in their minds, to bend their grids out of place as easily and carelessly as a flood bends the iron railings of a bridge.

They came and came. There was no end of them. I was already working with Primrose, eager to train more healers to help those in need. And years later the soldiers came and came again, for me to renew the healings over and over until the changes took. Fifteen years later I am still seeing some of them, too hurt to heal completely even with my efforts.

“According to our reports, the general went East to Laina on a diplomatic mission.” The speaker is Lady Gezála, I think, or her assistant—I sometimes confuse them. They deal with information gathering. “Royal Araigen lost all contact with her. Whatever happened to her in the People’s Republic of Laina I cannot say, but Brentann is right that we must strike now, if we are to strike at all. She is the only one who could oppose you. The borderlands—”

Rage hovers around my lord like a swarm of red-hot stones. To speak of Anda-Aggriu with him is dangerous. That relationship burned through hatred, friendship, passion, and hatred, to emerge on the other side as something unspeakable. “Nothing can bring down Anda-Aggriu, not the Lainish, not me, not anything.”

Brentann says, “Nothing can bring her down? She won the war because you were too cowardly to kill her—or was it because you became infatuated with her, like you always do with anything that moves!”

I grasp the railing of the box, holding my breath for an explosion, but it does not come. My lord’s voice grows cold instead. “Nobody won the war, Brentann. We came to an agreement over the borderlands. I remember you signing the treaties alongside me.”

“What does it matter what I signed fifteen years ago? The time is now!”

“The war was an abomination then, when you twisted my arm to get my consent to lead the troops. You will not get it now.”

“You filthy, ragi-loving, Bird-pecked, provincial arazéi!”

“Brentann!” shouts Maziket, and others. Arazéi is a word in Katra for a man who dresses in women’s clothes, a man who’d rather be a woman. It is an insult as bad as ragi or worse, an insult for which there must come a reaction.

“If you’re too soft to serve as general, I will. . .”

I see it now. Brentann wants to goad my lord to destruction during a session, to remove him—perhaps temporarily—from his position as the war oligarch. But it’s no use to call him arazéi. There are no insults like this on the Coast. You choose your gender at the first formal gathering you attend as an adult. Ichidi is not an insult. Ichidar are a part of society.

No, there’s only one surefire way to provoke my lord. His family threatened. A feeling of helplessness.

They would have gotten a better result if they asked him to help Aggriu.

The session ends many hours later, with no agreement in sight. We take the carriage home. His face, strained by the effort of keeping his power in check, is bloodless and morose.

“Brentann. . .” I begin.

“Brentann.” He wipes his dry mouth with his hand. “I should have seen it coming. He is sixty-nine. In a year, he will have to legally cede the seat.” The oligarchs serve only between forty and seventy, and now Brentann is running out of time. “This is his last great chance for glory.” He spits the last word out like a rotten olive.

“The borderlands must remain fallow. The land still struggles there, the grid. . .”

“Yes, Parét. I know.”

I do not speak again. In Little Hold we eat a simple meal, the two of us alone. He does not care to select the wine. He drinks my choice without expression and ignores my clumsy pouring of it.

Later, he asks if he can hurt me. I consent.

~ ~ ~

At night I lie awake by him, waiting for my thoughts to return. The frozenness melted from his face before the end, and now he sleeps—sprawled, with limbs outflung. His long unbound hair fans his body. He grew it out again a few years ago. I will never get tired of looking. It is the silver-black of it, and how it swings when he moves, so different and similar to when we met. It eases me to see him this relaxed.

I was wrong to think that Brentann’s goading would slide off him like water. I see now how it has cut. At his first Coastal gathering, my lord chose to be known as a man. He has never made a different choice in public. He does not go by ichidi pronouns and other language forms. He’s shut that part of himself away. It is an old wound, of the kind few people on the Coast experience, a hurt so rare that it is unspeakable. He’s shared that hidden place with two people only: Anda-Aggriu, and myself. Perhaps there is a third, a wise and old person deep in the sands of Burri, who learned the truth from him.

I know that one day he will ask me to heal him.

The day I heal him is the day I’ll heal myself.

That day the goddess Bird will come down from the sky and perch on the iron balustrade outside the bedroom in our Coastal home, the one that overlooks the sea. My lord will be asleep—not deeply like now; perhaps simply too exhausted to move. When I go out to talk to her, she will be tiny—a finch glistening with all the colors of the wave, with beryl and diamond and aquamarine. I hope I will find it in me to be kind.

Gently I draw on my four-syllable and five-syllable, weave for myself a concealment so delicate my lord would easily tear it if he stirred. He does not stir. I slide out of the bed, tiptoe across the vast expanse of tile where we breakfasted last morning, slide out of the room. In the adjacent dressing room I pick out fresh clothes, as dark and nondescript as usual. Little Hold is huge, but nobody notices me as I slip out into the darkness.

Brentann’s residence is in Upper Katríu, and if I don’t take a detour across the river, it will be a short walk from here. I notice, bemused and annoyed, a certain spring in my step. When my lord heals my wounds, he’s always tempted to improve. He breathes vitality into my flesh, draws out the small hurts from the joints—he knows I don’t like pain, and my health is important to him.

I’d rather he leave me as he found me. I do not want unnecessary changes, do not want his power to be wasted on me. Do not want these minor improvements to remind me of my mind and how it ails, untouchable, untouched.

He does not ask for my consent in this, and I say nothing. I often wonder if he even notices his work, or whether it is simply a side-effect of his power.

But I suspect he knows, and shrugs off my hesitation as trivial. He protects me in all things—and I need it, I beg him for it; except sometimes I don’t. Perhaps it is because of this that I have not told him about Brentann.

With some difficulty, I recognize Brentann’s house from before, the gray and chiseled marble structure. My lord could probably name the architect and the year it was built, but the oligarchs’ houses all look alike to me. I circle around the building, a safe distance away as to not activate the wards. Here, in a side garden full of brush and autumn blooms, I remove my ward and see, perceive without obstruction the magical defenses around the house. It is an old trick of mine—in a defensive net of any power, there would be for me gaps to squeeze through. I send a vibrating weave of my own to widen just such a small opening, and I slip through the perimeter.

Only inside do I realize that I have acted, and have not stopped to think or hesitate, since I left my master’s bed. He has improved more than my joints; but that, I’m sure, is only accidental spillage of his spirit that will wear off, will be washed off me shortly. I will do what I need, while I can.

I walk alongside the house, calf-deep in decorative grass. Brentann likes his gardens wild, overflowing. It is beautiful, lush, and it reminds me uncomfortably of the university, of the night I got in trouble and first met my lord. I was barely seventeen when I’d sent that probe to listen in on a secret conversation and heard, for the first time, that the land’s naming grid is ailing. It took me a decade to send another such probe, and after that only at times of greatest need—but I will have to do so now to find Dedéi’s room and talk to her.

How will I get up there? I eye the vines that cloak the house with doubt. I’ll find the location of the room first, I decide, then change my plan as needed, maybe even go through the house, though this is bound to be more dangerous. I draw on the five-syllable, too long and delicate to be useful on its own. I draw on the four-syllable next, and breathe power through it into the five-syllable. To be on the safe side, I draw on the three-syllable as well. Thus the configuration is complete, three increasingly shorter names stacked and relying on each other. I have named it the Healer’s Trapeze. Never before have I seen a description of multiple long names, but the book Dedéi named is unfamiliar to me.

I send a probe to circumnavigate the house, and follow it through gardens drowning in blossom until the location is pinpointed—high above me. Dedéi is in a tiny room, more of a closet—I can’t believe an oligarchy family would put a child there, even a child whose very life shames them. Within the room, Dedéi’s mind is wide awake. I feel her pace, hear a latch being carefully opened—careful for her, I gauge, but loud enough to wake an observer, if such could be found.

I freeze where I stand, torn between pulling my names back to construct invisibility for myself and maintaining the probe. While I dither, she climbs out the window, grabs the vines, and begins to descend. Her deepnames are engaged. The short one latches to the vines and secures her hold. The long name flails about, thin and insubstantial as vapor, its aimless swinging only aggravating the short. Every time the long name makes an impact, the shorter one shudders with what I perceive as disgust. Below I am frozen in a contemplative reverie about the nature of deepnames, the semi-sentience I perceive in them, how they might work together or be at odds with each other. My lord’s spirit has evaporated from me.

“Pluck-pluck-pluck—” Dedéi whispers, fierce and desperate. The vine Dedéi hangs on swings about, and a loud creak of a nearby shutter reawakens a flock of pigeons asleep under the eaves. I pull my probe back and reform the structure, sending a noise-dampening bubble to where Dedéi swings. The pigeons fly away as she regains her grip on the vines and shouts, within my noise-dampening bubble, “I do not want to be remade!”

I speak inside it. Nobody else will hear. “I am not here to remake you, Dedéi. I swear I will do nothing. I just want to talk about deepnames.”

“About deepnames,” she echoes.

“Yes.” I wonder for how long she’ll keep her grip, how long the vines will hold without a stronger reinforcement. “You seem to know a lot about deepnames. I have never read the book you mentioned, about rare configurations.”

“Maruta Gostano’s Postulating the Improbable in Magical Geometry. Most named strong only take one deepname, a three-syllable. Everything else is rare.” She slides down a bit, still too far from the ground. “The most common two-deepname configuration is the two- and three-.”

“I just want to talk. You do not know me, but I very rarely do anything except when people ask.”

Dedéi has stopped moving. “Configurations are either stable or unstable. An unstable configuration is prone to change. In such a configuration, the longer name would be shortened. So a two-four, which is unstable, will become a two-three.”

I give up and follow her lead. “But you took a two-five. I have never heard about such a configuration. . .”

“Took a two-five. Yes. The Odd Angle. It is stable—and rare.” Her hands give out and she slides a foot lower, then another; regains her grip. I do not interfere. She has not asked for help.

“Why did you take it?”

“It is stable, and rare,” Dedéi reiterates, and I can see now she is proud of it. She adds, “It’s cheery.”

I smile despite myself. It’s been a over year since the children left, and I miss the young people’s language, I miss—but I cannot allow myself these thoughts.

“It’s cheery,” I agree.

In darkness, Dedéi feels much less agitated to me. She is not calm—her hands shake a bit on the vine, but she is strong, and she maintains her grip. Her speech is mostly flat, but there is intonation. She speaks clearest when she is uninterrupted, and says the most about a topic she loves. She repeats, yes—it seems easier for her to repeat than to make new sentences—but it is not nonsensical. We are having a conversation. She attends to my words and responds in turn.

I see nothing in Dedéi that would merit shame and secrecy and threats of remaking. And just how isolated has she been?

“Have you attended school, Dedéi?”

She’s silent. The longer name flails about. My dampening bubble prevents this from affecting anything outside its sphere, but that only intensifies the reaction inside the bubble. The vines snap, and she slides down in an avalanche of stripped leaves. I reform the structure to dampen her fall. So much for not meddling.

Dedéi is on the ground. I reform the structure once more to reestablish the dampening bubble.

She gets up shakily, kicking the torn leaves off her pants. I step back a bit, giving her more space, and bow. “Forgive me, please. I said I would not interfere.” I feel guilty for this—if I wasn’t here to distract her, she wouldn’t have lost her grip on the vines.

She does not look at me. “Last year they had to bring a doctor to fix my knee. She called me names and talked about ligaments.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I always fall, or smash into something.” She digs the ground a little with her left foot. “I like the garden at night. It is quiet. Nobody yells.”

“Do you want. . .” I stop myself. I will not offer to heal her. I am not sure if clumsiness can be healed. She was like this before she took her configuration, and now her magic reinforces it.

“Ligaments are cheery, but not as cheery as deepnames. I like deepnames.”

I’ve told Brentann that there’s no problem with her mind. But it is of an unusual shape, positioned at an angle towards the world. I am sure there are things that I can help her with, but she fears to be remade, fears her self taken away. Whatever help I can give her, I cannot offer it callously. “I like deepnames too.”

“What kind of a configuration you have?”

I hesitate. My secrets, and my lord’s, churn on my tongue. She trusts me—does she trust me? But I, do I trust? How can I trust any Brentann after all that has happened?

At last, I give her a truth of me. “I have a three, four, and five-syllable.”

“The Foundation!” Dedéi jumps up and down, excited.

“I call it the Healer’s Trapeze. I wasn’t aware it is described elsewhere in literature.”

“It’s rare, very very rare! Gostano never met anyone with it!”

I notice that Dedéi has not repeated a sentence of mine in a while. Perhaps she only does so when she’s upset or frightened?

For whatever reason I feel slightly light-headed, as if the air I breathe does not quite reach my lungs. “My son wields it. He took his last, the five-syllable, while on his quest.”

He wrote to me. It is too painful to recall. I have not written back.

Dedéi sounds hesitant. “I’ve read about quests. What kind of quest?”

“A Kekeri quest. It’s a coming-of-age ritual in my family, a long journey alone to learn one’s truths. . .” So easily had my family slipped from my tongue. The children went together, or as together as they could. All four of them. I push the thoughts away.

“They don’t let me out of the house.”

So much for schooling. “Will they let you attend university?”

Her gaze is on the ground. “Grandfather says the other kids will beat you bloody because you are broken.”

I do not contradict. I remember my own university days all too well. “I was expelled,” I say.

She is silent.

“They hated me. I thought I was broken.” I often still think so, but this I do not say. It is a word, a word that says nothing. We’re all broken, all of us who’ve ever lived a life. Even Brentann, a man with money, station, power, ease, whose desires align with what is proper in Katra; yes, even Brentann. We’re all in need of healing. Me, my lord, the wounded soldiers who came to me begging. Brentann. Dedéi. My wife’s killer. The children. We all are vessels of our brokenness, we carry it inside us like water, careful not to spill. And what is wholeness if not brokenness encompassed in acceptance, the warmth of its power a shield against those who would hurt us?

“The world is wide,” I say. “There are other places where you can learn about deepnames.” And then, “I can teach you how to slip through the wards.”

I’m feeling more dizzy now. The world is ever so slightly abuzz.

“Teach,” she says, and claps her hands.

There is a reason for everything in magical geometry. Shorter names are blunt and powerful, longer names are weak and delicate. A five-syllable is too weak to work well on its own, but with the Healer’s Trapeze, I can use the shorter deepnames to breathe power into the five-syllable and perform the most delicate tasks. But the Odd Angle is odd because the two deepnames are too different from each other. The two-syllable is too far from the five.

I show her how to breathe power into her longer name. It thrashes, as the channeled power almost too much for it—but it can be made to work.

There is buzzing now all through my body. I figured it out; it is a byproduct of her magic. I’m sure she does not want to cause distress, but the way she wields her power generates too much noise, and it clashes against my dampening bubble and vibrates it.

I say nothing of this. I teach her to use the five-syllable to gently push the wards apart.

“Come to my healing room if you want,” I say as I slip out. “I’ll be there tomorrow night, and after.”

“I do not want to be remade.”

I bow to her. “Just to talk.”

Dedéi does not look at me, does not acknowledge the bow. Unsure how to interpret the lack of reaction, I wait a bit longer for a goodbye, for any acknowledgment, but it does not come.

I leave the premises and walk, as fast as I can until I cannot take another step. I let the dampening bubble go and lower myself down to lie in the grass between some buildings, where the brilliant wards do not quite reach. With my face mashed into the grass, I let the buzzing slip away from me into the ground. I lie like this, blissfully immovable and thoughtless, until my clarified vision begins to perceive, underneath Katríu’s many lesser grids, the brilliance of the land’s own naming grid, its soft and subtle call.

I turn onto my back. Above, the naming grid of the sky is invisible to my senses, but the stars that stud it buzz with their own power, immense even at this distance. I think the stars are made of deepnames, millions and millions of them; the stars are balls of magic woven tightly together; the stars are sentient and sovereign in themselves.

I close my eyes, but there’s no hiding from the light.

~ ~ ~

My plan is to return to Little Hold as unnoticed as I left it, with more than enough time before the dawn to sneak back into the bed. It is impossible. The master’s rooms are brightly lit.

Did he miss me? I have not even left a note. . . How angry will he be? I haven’t slept, and exhaustion and guilt wash over me.

I should have left a note. Something.

Servants tell me to find him in the paneled dark-blue sitting room, the one in which he receives trusted visitors. He is there. He sits, his legs spread wide, in one of the carved blue basine chairs. A dozen people sit around him in similar chairs and at his feet. They are all Coastal—retainers, allies, and advisors.

He wears an open, jet-beaded black robe of rough spidersilk over a pair of dark trousers. His chest is bare. He wears no adornment. His hair is pulled into a tight knot at the nape of his neck.

I take a step forward, and my mouth goes dry with desire and pure, undiluted panic. What happened? Are the children—

He looks up at me, and his face is stricken with an all-encompassing rage, but he keeps himself in check; his body is stiff, immovable. His voice is cold. “Explain yourself.”

I kneel. “Master. I visited a difficult patient. . .”

He looks at me for a while, then snarls and makes a motion with his hand, to wave it all away. “I found out how they found out that Anda-Aggriu is lost in Laina.” He grabs a rolled-up scroll out of the hands of one of the people closest to him, waves it in the air. I half-expect him to throw it at me, but he does not. “Apparently she wrote me a letter. Two months ago! Gezála’s people stole it.”

“Intercepted,” says a woman, a noble I’ve met once but whom I do not really know.

“The plot is to declare me traitor. To say that I have collaborated with the crown of Araigen, and with Anda-Aggriu in particular.”

“My lord, I do not think so,” says Merudar, who is seated cross-legged at his feet. “If they wanted to implicate you, they’d have copied the letter and let the original fall into your hands.”

The woman—I suddenly remember her name, Talasín of house Goshed—speaks up again. “I agree. They cannot accuse you of what you did not know.”

“They can accuse me of Anda-Aggriu asking for my help.” And to me, “You do not want to know?”

I bow my head to escape his gaze. I am still kneeling, too close to Merudar and not close enough to my lord, but I cannot bear this scrutiny. My body shakes. He takes me by the shoulders, lifts me up to stand, and his eyes latch on mine.

I feel the tension in him, tighter and tighter as a wound string. I do not care what happened to Anda. I want to embrace him, to draw the rage out of his bones, beg him to bleed the power off into the ground.

People. We are surrounded by people.

His face twists with the desire to destroy, to do something, anything other than this inaction.

Talasín speaks. “Anda did not ask for anything.”

He looks back at her, hands still firm on my shoulders. “She did. She asked exactly for what I am doing now.”

“What are you doing now?”

He snarls back, “Nothing. I am doing nothing.”

I feel him take a deep breath, and he says, “All right.” His hands leave my shoulders. He turns back to the people, inclines his head, and clasps his hands in front of his forehead. A lord to friends. “I give gratitude for your counsel and your presence.”

As one, they press their clasped hands to their foreheads. “We thank you for your leadership. We thank you for your life.”

“I will see you, those who would come, in the morning before the session. We will breakfast and journey together to assembly. I do not wish to be alone.”

They file out, some bidding him a restful night, some saying nothing.

He embraces me while they are still leaving. Speaks into my shoulder. “I do not blame you for wanting to run.”

“Master, please. . .” I did not run from him. Did I run? “This patient. I cannot explain it. She is young and needs me very much. . .” The pronoun I have used for Dedéi in my thoughts feels utterly wrong now, with him. Dedéi did not want to be a girl. I have been echoing Brentann. “Forgive me. Zha. They. They are ichidi, but in Katra nobody understands, and I can—”

Does Dedéi really need me? We did not even talk about their desire not to be a girl; and I have certainly not performed a healing. “I am not even sure how much I can help. . .”

He pushes me away from his embrace, but his hands are still on my shoulders. “How can you stand me? I hurt you. From the very beginning, all I do is hurt you. I’m sorry, Parét. I shouldn’t have snapped, and in front of people. . .”

But you needed me, and I wasn’t there. I slipped away in the middle of the night without even a note, and you worried, and I put on a weave so you would not be able to trace me.

“Everybody is broken,” I whisper.

He draws me close to himself, and I lean into him, too exhausted for anything but the stronghold of his touch.

He holds on to me as we walk to the bed and lie down. He cradles my head under his arm. He has not undressed, and the rough spidersilk of his robe scratches uncomfortably against my cheek. His chest rises and falls in ragged breaths, and I wonder if he will cry. My own eyes overflow with moisture.

“Do you want to hear?”

“Yes,” I say. “Please. . .”

“The land’s naming grid is weakening again in Laina. They have not maintained it.”

“I am sorry. . .”

“It is not your fault. We’ve always known that the great healing you wrought would not resolve this, that the people of Laina themselves would need to do the work. . .”

“But the revolution forbade deepnames.”

“The revolution excised all magic.”

We lie in bed, grasping each other desperately. No great deeds of healing should be performed without the patient’s consent. No great deeds of healing can be maintained without the patient’s continuing work. And if the patient is the land, its people need to do the work.

“She wrote that she’d go, to butt heads with the leaders of the People’s Republic. To convince them they need to do something.”

I understand now. She did not ask for anything, except between the lines. I can hear her laughing voice in my mind. “Hold the fort, best enemy, lost friend. Hold the fort.”

After I sleep I’ll find it in myself to care about Anda-Aggriu’s fate in Laina, and about the land. But now, right now, I cannot stop caring about the future soldiers, who sleep tonight unhurt and unsuspecting in their beds—those who will breathe their last, those who will make it to my healing room, breaking inside, desperate for the slightest breath of relief. They will come again and again.

I say, “With or without Anda-Aggriu’s quest, this war is an abomination.”

“There will be no war.” His body is tight with it, his mind vibrates with unreleased power. He carries the war in himself.

I am not angry anymore. Just sad, bone-weary, and I know he will not sleep—unless I draw on my long names and cast a calming weave over him. He hates with snarling hatred any outside interference with his mind, even mine; but there are only hours left until the dawn.

“Master,” I say. “May I help you sleep?”

He consents.

~ ~ ~

In the morning he makes a formal apology to me in front of the people, then leaves with them. I crawl back into bed exhausted, and sleep until noon.

Later I go to the healing room. Between seeing patients, I sit, not speaking, fretting about my lord at the assembly and about Dedéi; but Dedéi does not show up.

When I return home, my lord is already there. Brentann has made no move to accuse him. In fact, Brentann has asked to be excused mid-session due to sickness; he will be taking the next day off to recover at home.

We are at an impasse. I feel the heaviness of it, a storm that hangs over our heads, dipping ever lower without spilling a drop of rain. I get a splitting headache, and I make no move to heal it.

The next day is a repeat. My lord leaves for session, somewhat cheered by the expected absence of Brentann; I leave for the healing room and see a few patients there.

The knock on my door comes in the early afternoon. I recognize the already familiar buzz of Dedéi’s magic even before I open to let them in. Dedéi wears girl’s clothing, a pale yellow dress that sits incongruously on their slightly tilted frame. A large black purse is slung across it.

“Come in, come in,” I say. “I worried.”

“I do not want to be remade.” It has become a greeting, a hello and goodbye, and it is now spoken without heaviness.

“I will not remake you. I will not do anything without your consent.”

Dedéi smiles and nods.

But if you do not want my help, why are you here? “What would you like to talk about?”

“Geography,” they say.

“Your pardon?”

“Grandfather says the Coast is an abomination. One does not get to simply choose a gender.”

Ah. I understand. Of course. “You do not want to be a girl.”

Dedéi nods, head tilted slightly to the side. That night, hanging from the vines in a shirt and a pair of simple pants, they looked less incongruous than the times I’ve seen them wear frills. “The world is wide. I want to go.”

“Yes, there are places where what you are will be recognized. The Coast—”

“Grandfather says the Coast is full of arazéin. I am arazéi.”

It startles me to hear such a strong word from them. But all the words for ichidar I know in Katran are insults. “Do you want to be a boy instead?”

“A boy instead,” Dedéi echoes. “Maybe not. Maybe. I do not want to be a girl.”

“It is all right.”

On the Coast. It is all right on the Coast. It is all right to be both a woman and a man; it is all right to be neither. It is all right to be ichidi. It is all right to be chidaru. It is all right with any kind of body to be either a woman or a man.

“The Coast is beautiful, and they like deepnames there. I read that in a book, Lammet Tabagi’s travelogue of the Western shores. . .” Dedéi launches into a minute description of the book, and I slide back into my thoughts. Yes, on the Coast everything is permitted—as long as the others agree. It is all right to desire men, women, both, neither. It is all right to desire many, or only one.

It is all right to be like me, to be eladin. It is all right to be eram. There are no words like that in Katra. If a person submits to another, that person is disdained. The desire to inflict pain is considered a perversion. On the Coast, consent is the only measure of what is permitted.

“And they even put deepnames into the ground, to make the gardens grow. . .”

I sigh. “I do not recommend the Coast to you.”

Dedéi looks at me startled, then hurt. “Because you are wrong.”

I realize, after a moment, that by ‘you’, Dedéi means themself. Somebody has said this to them, and now they repeat it. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

They shrug. “You are insane and cripple. Which is why you need to come to Healer Parét’s room.”

“No. No! You are a talented person. It is just. . .”

I stop myself mid-sentence.

“Dedéi. Who said this? Was it your grandfather?”

“Grandfather. Yesterday. When I broke the ward and made so much noise.”

My stomach knots into horrible, twisted shapes. “Dedéi, it is very important. What exactly did he say?”

Dedéi yells, “Tell me who showed you how to do this!”

“Did you?” I whisper.

They nod, miserable. I have not asked them not to tell, and under stress it would be too hard for them to lie.

“You are insane and cripple and you need to come to Healer Parét’s room because he told you to. I will let you go, but you must go only there.” They bite their lip, but do not cry. “I do not want to be remade. Just to talk.”

I understand. In a flash, I understand everything. I draw on the three-syllable to give me strength to overcome indecision. There is no time to waste. “Dedéi. Listen. . . There is something very important I need to tell you. Will you trust me?”

“Trust me,” they echo. And then, “You do not yell. And you like deepnames. You showed me how to open the weave, but I mangled it. You do not grab. You do not yell.”

I nod, breath catching in my throat. You trust me. Nobody should trust me. “Dedéi, your grandfather wishes you ill. He sent you here because he wants to hurt you. Hurt you bad.” Trust me, please please trust me.

They nod.

“You must run. Run now. Do you have money?” I grab my purse and shove it into their hands, a stack of ilaria from last week’s healing I performed while at the Oligarchy Governance. “The Coast is not a good place—not because of who you are, but because. . .” I struggle to put it in words—the struggle between my lord and Brentann, between the Coast and Katra; the politics which grudgingly allow a few Coastal nobles to participate in governance; how this fragile balance could so easily be disrupted by Dedéi’s sudden appearance on the Coast. “. . .because it is too close to your grandfather. The Coast is a part of Katra. It is too small for you to hide. You will be found and brought back.”

Dedéi nods, and stuffs my smaller purse clumsily into theirs. “Then where?”

I think quickly. Araigen? No. Laina? Merciful Bird in heaven, no. Which country recognizes ichidar? Which country recognizes ichidar and will not harm Dedéi for being tilted oddly towards the world?

“Listen, there is one place that is good, but the road is dangerous. It is Burri, the desert. In the south.” My lord traveled there in his youth, and judging from the reports, that’s where the children went.

“The capital of Burri is Che Mazri,” Dedéi says. “It means Eleven Wells. I read a travelogue. . .”

I interrupt. No time left. I can feel the edges of my master’s wards begin to tremble.

I speak fast. “The ruler of that land is wise and old and an ichidi like you. The sands are old and have seen everything; these changes and choices are not strange in Burri. Tell the Old Royal in Che Mazri that Parét of the house Kekeri sent you.”

My master’s wards begin to vibrate in earnest. Brentann is almost here.

“You must go. Go now.” Dedéi hesitates. I say, “Your grandfather is here to kill you. I will protect you, but you must go.”

Dedéi hesitates.

I say, “The Old Royal loves deepnames. They know more about deepnames than anybody in the north. And they have books, geometry books that have never been seen in Katra.”

Dedéi claps their hands. I expect them to say “cheery,” but they reply simply with “All right.”

“Can I protect you?”

They nod.

I construct a hasty weave. It will not last more than a few hours, but there is no time for something elaborate. “Don’t draw on your deepnames for as long as you can, the weave will snap when you do.”

My master’s wards creak under the pressure of somebody else’s magic. But it will take more than what Brentann has got to break these wards.

I breathe power to unveil the back exit, the one that leads into the service alleyway and which I never use except in such emergencies. It is not visible from the front of the building.

The alleyway is narrow and filthy. Two scrawny calico cats miaw at me, demanding scraps.

I push Dedéi out. “Run. Run and do not look back.”

I slam the door and pray to the goddess that Dedéi will do what they must to get out, to get to safety. The pressure on the wards mounts, and I hear Brentann shout, “Dedéi! Dedéi! You rascal, Parét, what are you doing to my granddaughter? You criminal, you. . . Open up! Dedéi! Dedéi!”

I count until fifty before I call out, “Come in!” I extinguish my candlebulbs and let the wards go.

~ ~ ~

Mezará Brentann bursts in, then latches the door behind him and applies wards, thick and powerful. He looks around in the gloom, the chamber lit only by sluggish afternoon light that streams through the tourmaline glass of my single window. “Where is she? She was here!”

He releases three candlebulbs, large and angry with his power, to circle around me like wasps. “What have you done with her? What have you done with my granddaughter?”

He is taller than me, and taller than my lord. He is broad. In his youth, he was powerful in the body, athletic, and it still shows. His magic, too, is powerful. Against this man I am nothing. A ragi. A weakling. A man who submits to another’s advances, a spineless coward who forever cowers behind his master’s back.

Here is the man who can easily snap me in half.

“You do not have a granddaughter.” My voice is quiet, but my room is small, so it carries. “You have a grandchild.”

Brentann takes a step forward.

I have thought the word “broken” so many times in the last few days, but so few of us are ever truly broken. The mind’s naming grids are resilient. They bend and warp and twist, but only rarely do they break outright. And what’s been bent and warped can be adjusted, can be healed; even in the absence of a healer, what has been bent can adapt, can change and grow. Humans may ail in their minds, but it is very rarely that they do not have a choice in how to act.

He takes another step forward. Not much now, before he can grab me.

I do not move. Not moving is easier than moving. I am still.

“She is insane and malformed. You are a worthless ragi.” He looks around, looking for Dedéi. I know his plan includes us both, but I want to make sure.