Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The Ties That Bind, The Chains That Break

First published in Galaxy’s Edge Magazine (March, 2015), edited by Mike Resnick

My first view of Alawea is bittersweet, as always. The beauty is breath-taking, from thin, blue rivulets that stream down the mountain, to the city itself, which leans back against the mountain’s rocky base as a ruler might lean into the high back of a throne. Spires rise as thin and fragile as a glass blower’s straw above the sweep and curve of villas that cascade down the terraced levels. Alawea, the city of my birth and wellspring of my nightmares.

I don’t return willingly but, like my parents, I am bi-gender and also a messenger. I go where I am sent. Though for many seasons I have lived in Zasna, serving the tetrarch of that city, if she bids me deliver a message to Alawea, then come I must.

The lowest level of the city is hidden behind the perimeter wall, and so it’s the elegant middle and opulent upper terraces that expand and define as I approach. Closer still and the wall looms largest. It blocks all else until I reach the city gate, where metal bars sketch thick black lines through my view of the jumbled shacks and mud-caked cobbles beyond.

Alawea may be my birth-city, but it’s the blighted Sabanach quarter, sprawling and stinking, that’s my true childhood home. I hate it more than the poor quarters of other cities for that fact alone.

The gate guard takes in the delicate, fair skin of my face with its wisps of dark beard and sideburns, finger-joint long but sparse, like the crest-feathers of a green finn. Her eyes sweep lower to the flatness of my chest and the narrowness of my waist, and lower still, to the Y of my legs where they meet the saddle, no doubt wondering, like all do, what lies beneath the brown cloth of my breeches.

I need no identification other than that which I present to the world each day. She nods to a boy inside who swings the barred gate wide for me to enter. I gather my breath and nudge my mount forward beneath the heavy arch of stone and into the city. Muck spatters from my horse’s hooves as I thread the narrow streets. Dung fires—and worse, the refuse burned within those fires—assail my nostrils after many days spent traveling under the canopy of open sky.

I suppose I should be grateful to the 14th Autarch, more than a century dead, who decreed that all messengers would be bi-genders, giving many, if not most of us, a profession. Perhaps I would be grateful if he’d also allowed us to climb out of the slums. Or if his incentive had been loftier than devising a means for bi-genders to access his palace to satisfy his well-known perversions.

Past the outer ring of beggar’s camps and temporary shelters lies the interior of Sabanach, where many of the short, boxy shacks flaunt strips of bright cloth hanging across low roofs or along either side of the doorways. The extravagant use of cloth is not as wasteful as it seems; it transforms the bleakness into a riot of rich reds and bright yellows, deep blues and emerald greens. It proclaims the uniqueness of the inhabitants and shouts to all who pass by, "I have not been conquered."

That my parents still make their home here gives me the opportunity to remove the dirt of my travels in private before presenting myself to the tetrarch. A rare respite from performing the duty under the eyes of palace servants.

I stop before a squat hovel with faded strips of cloth lovingly stitched into a rainbow of familiar colors. The open door indicates that at least one of my parents is in residence. Horses are rare in Sabanach, but to steal a horse with the trappings of a messenger would be to steal from the messenger’s master, which none would dare. I tie him without hesitation to the iron stake hammered to the left of the door.

My eyes fight for focus as I step over the threshold into the dim interior. Against the far wall of the single room a figure crouches on the dirt floor upon hands and knees, folding blankets at the foot of the sleeping pallet.

"Dallu?" It’s been three seasons since I was here last and I say the name more to identify myself, knowing I’m silhouetted by the light at my back.

"Jerusha." Dallu drops the blankets and comes to embrace me. My co-parent’s small breasts press against me, our cheeks rub roughly. I am bestowed a light kiss on the forehead. "You’re here on business." Dallu holds me at arm’s length to examine the brown breeches and shirt of a messenger that I wear.

I nod. "I thought to wash before going to the palace. I hope to visit afterward, but one never knows."

"Of course."

I strip off my dusty shirt and find a pitcher of water on the table and a cloth and bowl where I know they’ll be stored.

"Where’s Beldala?" The last two times I passed through Alawea my birth-parent was away, making it nearly seven seasons since we last saw each other.

"Gone."

Dallu’s tone implies deeper meaning than one syllable should possess. Turning with the dripping cloth in my hand, I wait for more.

"Beldala left to deliver a message to Glendower. That was half a season ago."

"Half a season?" The water from the cloth plops drip by drip on the toe of my boot as the news sinks in. "To Glendower and back should take no more than a fortnight; a fortnight and a half at most."

Dallu’s voice drops to a hush so low, even standing two arm spans away I strain to hear the words. "I think Beldala left to look for the insurgent army."

"You believe the rumors?"

"Beldala did."

I hope more than I can say that Dallu’s suspicion is true, but an attack on the road is far more likely. When the autarch decreed that bi-genders would be messengers the excuse used was that, being neither men nor women, we were safer from the violence men encounter on the road and the other sorts of brutality more often visited upon women. In truth, we’re more vulnerable to both. Mono-genders, both men and women, prove their superiority to all but a fortunate few of us in a variety of ways. It happened to me often enough in these very alleys.

A hard knot in my belly forms around the fear for my birth-parent’s safety. "What makes you think Beldala wasn’t waylaid?"

"I tracked down the one who should have gone to Glendower," Dallu says. "The messenger was not ill as Beldala told me. The errand was traded and the trade requested as a favor."

I digest this in silence. The wet cloth, gone from cool to cold in my hand, pebbles my skin in gooseflesh as I touch it to the back of my neck and face, to the warm skin under my arms. Lastly, I lower my breeches and rinse the rest of the stink of twelve suns' travel from my body.

Dressed again, I nod for Dallu to follow me to the back of the room. Leaving the chair for my co-parent, I take the three-legged footstool Beldala fashioned when I was a child.

"I’ve heard that insurgents gather to the east of the Barrier Wall," I say, my voice low. "I’ve also heard they welcome bi-genders to fill their numbers."

"Fantasy," Dallu snorts. "Why would they accept us when no others do? I tried to convince Beldala that what people wish enough for they will invent."

"Or create," I say.

The rumors excite me and I wish I possessed the fortitude of my birth-parent, risking all to seek the truth. I think not only of the lot of bi-genders, but the starvation in our quarters while those above us feast. The torture of innocents on the merest suspicion. The quashing of the old religion for the new. It makes me feel as the great prairie cats held captive in the palaces must feel, pining for the plains where mates and prides roar their defiance and freedom. I want the rebels to be real, the freedom to be real, so that I might someday roar my own defiance.

"My tetrarch has seemed nervous of late," I say. "Perhaps when the tetrarch opens the message I carry I’ll learn more. Maybe it holds proof we need."

"Do not say we!"

Dallu’s words are too loud and I look to the door, though I see no one lingering there.

"My mate left to chase dreams," my co-parent continues, standing so suddenly that the chair rocks twice before settling on four legs again. "I’ll not lose a child to them as well."

The conversation is over and I have made a poor homecoming, but ideas, no more than seeds before, have taken deep root. What if I could someday leave the service and the hatred? Make a new life among equals?

"I don’t wish you gone," Dallu says into the awkward silence, the words ironic in light of my thoughts, "but you should go. You’ll be punished if it’s found that you delayed delivering your message."

We both know this for truth. Dallu follows me from the dimness of the shack into the sharp, dusty sunlight.

"I hope to see you again before I leave," I say, pulling the reins loose and continuing to the rear of my mount to re-buckle the croup.

Despite a man, woman, and child walking toward us and three men close behind them, Dallu reaches out suddenly, taking me in a quick embrace. There’s no law against public affection between bi-genders; like campfires in the high grasses of the prairie one simply knows better. Perhaps Dallu thinks I mean to go looking for the insurgents that very moment. As if I’d know where to start, or have the nerve to try.

The family comes level with us just as the heaviest of the three men behind them shouts a challenge. The father turns and the woman grips the shoulders of what I now see is a bi-gender child. My hands clench into fists reflexively; the taunt and the setting evoking old habits.

"They’re new here." I hear sorrow in Dallu’s voice and an anticipation of the inevitable.

Though not all bi-gender couples can reproduce, mono-genders have been giving birth to bi-genders more frequently in recent generations. When a high-born child shows the signs—at birth, or later, when puberty reveals the androgyny that external characteristics had not—the family is cast down to live among the lowest classes. The hatred visited upon those both high-born and bi-gender is fearsome.

The child presses close to the mother’s body and the father steps in front of them. Memories of my own childhood howl as I watch. It was many years before I grew strong enough to dissuade individuals, old enough to discourage those younger than me, and before every detail of my body was common knowledge among the brutes of Sabanach.

The heavy fellow snatches at the child but the father loops his forearm under the man’s and draws a large circle, leaving him surprised and open. The father kicks, first to the belly and then to the face. He is trained in military arts, then. A shame, for he is outnumbered and will suffer for it. We have, most of us, learned when there is a chance of fighting our way free and when there is not.

The mother, and even the child, struggle, scratch, do what they can to fend off the arms of the other two that snake past the father. The fight boils nearer and my horse shies, forcing Dallu and myself away from his rear and into the street. I tell Dallu to get inside. I will follow once I retie my horse.

Suddenly, I hear the unmistakable ricochet of thick bone breaking. The heavy man cradles one forearm in the other, bellowing his anger and pain. The older of the three, a feral-looking man, draws a knife that is half a sword and lunges for the father. Dallu steps closer, an impotent desire to help writ clear in eyes that are wide with concern.

"Get inside!" I hiss again. I grasp for Dallu’s sleeve but miss.

The child wriggles from the mother’s grip and lifts a broken cobble from the alley just as the father ducks under the attacker’s arm. Before the child can throw, the father steps back to counterattack, stumbling over the child’s shoes.

I refuse to believe this will go so far as killing. Thugs torment and abuse us—the lowest of the low—with impunity, but murder of any citizen is no mean thing. It would bring down the wrath of the soldiers. Many in Sabanach, participants or not, would suffer.

Dallu must see a different outcome. My co-parent grabs the collar of the off-balance father and pulls the man onto his ass. The knife’s trajectory is unchanged and Dallu stands now where the father stood a moment before.

The blow is indeed lethal. An upward strike, sinking the long knife nearly to the hilt.

The feral man freezes like one of the stone statues in the palace gardens. It is Dallu who removes the blade by sliding lifelessly to the ground.

The alley suddenly erupts in pushing, jostling panic. My eyes are fixed on the still face of Dallu, and the last flicker of recognition in those brown eyes, as I kneel beside my co-parent. I don’t see the cowards run.

Someone grips my shoulder hard.

"Get out of here," the father is saying to me, "before more people see you."

I hear the words but they wash over me like tepid water, eliciting no reaction.

"I’ll help you carry him," he says.

I distantly register the arbitrary pronoun he uses for my co-parent. The man squats and slides his arms under Dallu’s back, lacing them around the still and bloody chest. My mind and body are frozen in the moment of the knife strike, unwilling to move forward into the present.

"Soldiers will come soon," he repeats slowly.

When I move my joints are wooden, as if a puppeteer controls what I cannot. I lift Dallu’s legs. The father gives me a look like I have done something praise-worthy. He shuffles back and indicates the open door with his head. "This one?"

I nod.

We set Dallu on the sleeping pallet in the far corner. I try to still the torrent of emotions threatening to burst from my chest by arranging Dallu’s slack limbs. I brush the high, aristocratic cheekbones with my fingers. I wonder if the fact that Dallu once lived in the upper terraces somehow prompted this fatal rashness.

"What’s your name?"

I’m shaken from my thoughts by the man’s unexpected question. His wife and child stand behind him, mute with fear and shock.

"Jerusha," I reply, and close Dallu’s eyes as gently as possible.

"Was he your father?"

Co-parent and father are a world apart, but I have no strength to teach this man his new language. He will learn it soon enough, if he lives so long. "Yes," I say, standing.

"I swear to you, on my name, Finagor of house Aruldon, I will do anything in my power to repay his sacrifice."

I want to snort at the man’s belief that he possesses any power at all now that he is here among us.

Dallu’s still body draws my eyes back to the corner. I am overwhelmed anew that I will never again feel my co-parent’s embrace. The insurgents, if they exist, are right in seeking to tear the hierarchy apart. And if they don’t exist, they should.

The hatred I carry for our lot in life pushes out at my ribs, making my hands shake and my head pound. My life-long fear angers me even more. Like a tether under too much strain, something breaks. I move so suddenly that Finagor steps back, and I storm outside like Abab confronting the Lashans.

The streets and alleys are as vacant as I have ever seen them. People have gone to hole like the small prairie animals before a great thunderstorm. I strip my saddlebags from the horse with a jerk.

Back inside, I pull open one flap and yank the purple velvet package from within. Opening that, I remove the cream-colored paper, folded twice and perfect in its squareness. In my anger the entire seal tears from the paper below the flap as I open the message I have borne these past many suns. The reading skills needed to carry out my duties are sufficient to understand the words written within.

The rumors are true. My knees go weak at the verification.

There must have been an earlier communication from Alawea to my tetrarch in Zasna saying that Alawea’s spies discovered the insurgent army. The message I hold is my tetrarch’s answer. She advocates that both cities should unite their forces and strike at dawn on the day after the coming full moon. The location to join forces and the location of the rebels are both mentioned.

Finagor’s skin has blanched to the color of yellowed bone. "What have you done?" he asks.

The answer is so large I can no more distill it into words than I could distill the salt from the wide sea. I have taken action on my own behalf. I have confirmed my greatest hope. And I have ensured my own slow death by opening the tetrarch’s private message.

The paper drifts from my fingers to the dusty floor and still I make no answer. Finagor stares at the message lying in the dirt as he might at a deadly porah snake. At last he bends to lift it from the ground. His breath hisses between his teeth as he reads.

"They do exist."

In an unsteady voice his wife asks, "Who?"

He hands her the note. The child watches her read it.

"I planned to take my family east," Finagor says, a slow wonder in his voice, "as soon as I could secure food, weapons and mounts. We would have gone on no more than the hope, but you have given us the certainty. And more than that, the location."

And as suddenly as that, the rumors make sense.

Those cast out from the upper terraces would spurn living as I have lived, given any chance of an alternative. If the families defecting are comprised of men and women with Finagor’s education and military training, the new army would welcome them with open arms. Bigotry toward bi-genders would of necessity be suppressed or eradicated as the numbers grew.

My excitement falls to ash, however, as the implications of the message crash home. "Why celebrate knowing their location when they’re about to be destroyed?"

"I’d rather die a soldier than be ambushed by thugs in an alley." Finagor looks to his wife and she nods in agreement. "Besides, if this army is as large as rumor has it, they may have a chance. I doubt the Holy Autarch or the western cities have word of them yet."

What he says makes sense. Four of the five cities are widely spread out, standing at the corners of the land to protect the capital with the Holy Autarch in the center. Our eastern provinces would be held responsible for an army forming at our border and would likely keep quiet, hoping to deal with it before the autarch learned of its existence.

And what will you choose, Jerusha?" his wife asks me, finally speaking. "The watch will learn of the murder here and investigate before long. You had best go soon, whether it’s to the Barrier Wall or to the palace."

A short huff, nearly a laugh, escapes my chest. "I can do neither. My horse has been seen. If soldiers come and learn I haven’t gone to the palace, I’ll be hunted down. My mount is tired from the journey. I’d be captured long before I made the wall." I nod to the opened and dusty note in her hand. "My other choice is to deliver that to the tetrarch."

"You’re not trusted with your tetrarch’s seal, I suppose?" Finagor asks.

I indicate I am not.

"Bring me a light then," he says.

His tone, still that of one from the highest terrace, brooks no argument. I retrieve flint and striker and a small twig from the cookfire pit and hand them to him, wondering what he intends.

He blows what dust he can from the letter and strikes a spark to the twig. With the small flame he heats the seal and carefully begins peeling away bits of torn paper from the edges. I realize that he means to re-seal the message and hope kindles in me, catching like the dry twig.

"Wait!" his wife says, and Finagor extinguishes the tiny flame at once.

"Why deliver this message when Jerusha could deliver another in its place?" she asks.

He looks at her, then at me.

"Would you be willing to deliver a false message, Jerusha?" he asks.

It’s hard to imagine the suffering I would endure for such treachery, were it discovered. I look again to Dallu’s cold body. The conditioned obedience that broke inside me moments before remains broken.

"I would." My resolve hardens as I say the words.

"You carry stationery?" Finagor asks.

"Yes." A messenger keeps pen and ink as well as blank notes for aristocracy and a supply of stationery made especially for the tetrarch: the thick outer paper, a layer of the tetrarch’s color inside, and a fine layer for the message glued to that.

Finagor nods.

"What if the message were to urge forestalling any action?" I suggest. "I’ll likely be sent away with an answer, which would give me time to ride instead to the insurgents and warn them."

"The message could say that your tetrarch in Zasna had also discovered this army’s location as well as their leader," Finagor muses, "and has infiltrated them besides. Instead of advising a coordinated attack, we could make the message say that your tetrarch has an assassin in place and wants no action taken yet."

His wife smiles and so do I.

I remove a fresh piece of stationery backed with the tetrarch of Zasna’s deep maroon and hand it to him, then retrieve pen and ink.

Pulling the chair to the small table and sitting, Finagor rubs his sleeve across the table’s surface. He studies the original message, wipes his hands on his pants, and secures the blank message with thumb and middle finger.

"My tutor taught me my letters by having me trace the writing of scholars and then imitate it freehand. I believe I have not lost the talent."

The old gods I still pray to must have given me this man when they took Dallu from me, for even had I envisioned this course, I could never have managed what he creates.

"Sand," he says, when his artifice is complete.

I reach into the saddlebags and hand him a small pouch tied with a thin ribbon. He opens it and sprinkles a light dusting to dry the ink, then taps the paper edgewise on the table. Blowing off the excess, he holds it for the rest of us to examine. I myself would not know it for a forgery had I not witnessed the act.

He hands the message to me to fold with the ritualistic precision I have practiced since childhood. Relighting the twig, he sets to work on the original message again, this time to remove the seal entirely. Carefully prying it up with a fingernail, he shifts it to the new stationery with the delicacy of balancing a finn’s egg on the tip of his finger.

"If I press it hard I’ll distort the seal. Have a care, messenger, it won’t hold well."

Taking it from him I place the ersatz message gently inside the velvet pouch.

"Give me a blank note," he says when I am done. "I need to write a message to a friend of mine in the palace proper."

My look must convey my thought, that he has no friends there. Not anymore.

"His son and mine are of an age," Finagor explains. "They played together. Martine began binding his son’s chest two moons ago."

It doubles my risk to deliver a second note, but our fates are twined now like the roots of a mayak tree; what endangers me endangers him as well. I do as he asks.

He scratches a note in his own hand, the letters narrower and finer than the last. I catch enough to see that he is requesting horses and supplies. He folds the note in half, writes "Martine of House Saber" on the front, and uses a tiny remnant of wax on the twig to glue the two sides together.

Finagor hands it to me. "If this reaches him, perhaps both he and I will see you east of the wall. And now you must go. You have delayed too long already."

He is right, though the events since my arrival have taken less than a tick of the sun, Dallu’s death adds yet another layer of danger. I pack the additional message and sling my saddlebags over one shoulder.

"If you’re still here when I return to take Dallu’s body to the cremation pit," I say, "then you will know all went well."

"You shouldn’t come back," his wife says over Finagor’s shoulder.

"She’s right," he says. "You risk enough already. Let me see to that burden for you."

I feel guilt but no sorrow that it will be Finagor throwing the body into the sulfurous refuse pit instead of me, but I must at least make my goodbye. I cross to the pallet and kneel to kiss Dallu’s cool forehead one last time.

Finagor follows me to the door when I am done.

"Fortune to you," I say to him, as I leave my childhood home for the last time.

He surprises me by reaching out. We grip forearms in the way of equals.

I walk out into a street that is as still and quiet as the prairie at midnight. Gathering the reins of my horse, I mount and ride for the uppermost terrace.

The stillness has rippled out perhaps four streets in all directions. Beyond that perimeter of fear, Sabanach hums with its normal activity as if nothing of consequence has occurred today. Children play in the muck; a few pile round rocks until they fall, others run and scream as one pushes an inflated pig’s bladder with a stick. Laundry flutters in the light breeze, absorbing the stench of the quarter into the drying cloth.

I ascend the hill and pass unchallenged through the middle terrace gate. The guards laugh and joke among themselves, sparing me only a glance. Bi-genders, being impossible to counterfeit, are not worth their concern; a fact, I’m sure has kept us as messengers generations after the death of the 14th Autarch.

The sky of the middle terrace is the pale, pearly pink of the interior of an oyster shell, though it can only be seen from the vantage of this terrace. By order of the tetrarch, a fine dust is sprayed upward daily from multiple points. It ascends no more than three times the height of the tallest building, and yet it appears to color the sky by catching the light in some way I don’t understand.

The road winds upward through the shops and villas. The brown clothes of a messenger protect me here, unlike Sabanach, where impotent anger at the world outweighs sense or caution. At last, I arrive before the third and final gate. Waved through again, I pass under the stone arch and emerge to a dome of pale lavender sky, the color most favored by this tetrarch.

The color is everywhere, in the piled hair of the gentry, in the stain of windows in the elaborate villas, and worked into the clothing of both men and women.

The palace of the tetrarch crowns the city with only the backdrop of the mountain beyond. The whole is gilded in a glittering gold material, the manufacture of which is long forgotten. Seven spires rise in the pattern of the seven stars of Agrenost and kiss the pale purple sky with needle-thin tips as delicate as crystal and as strong as iron.

My resolve doesn’t waver but anxiety toys with my breath nonetheless, catching at it as I enter the courtyard. I dismount and hand the reins of my horse to a boy who spares me no look. The horse belongs to the tetrarch, but I am less than nothing.

The palace halls are well known to me and I wend the maze of twists and turns to the heart of the labyrinthine building. The tetrarch is not in the throne room, but a soldier at the door knows his whereabouts and directs me to the Room of Dreams. One of the soldiers there confirms that the tetrarch is within and opens the door.

The walls and ceiling of the room are egg-shaped and the color is that of rich cream. Golden gilt bands the center of the room. The ceiling is painted the pale blue of a third season sky on the plains, with clouds rendered so realistically they seem to drift if one watches them too long. I enter, and my performance begins.

The tetrarch sits on the floor, as children of his age are wont to do, but I see why the soldier saw no need to escort me inside. Next to the tetrarch a giant prairie cat lies at his ease, propped on strong elbows. Eyes that were half closed in repose open, piercing me with orange and gold.

I have heard it rumored that the cats are prescient, if so, then perhaps I am doomed no matter how well I play my part. I do my best to mask my face with calmness, though the cat and the handler standing nearby—training stick in hand—make it more difficult still.

An attendant brushes the tetrarch’s brown hair. It has never felt the touch of shears in the eleven years of his life, and spills across the floor behind him. I sink to one knee by the door and bow my head as I have so many times before. Were this the Holy Autarch, I would prostrate myself. I reach into the pouch and withdraw the folded paper as carefully as possible. "A message, Exalted One," I say, proffering my lie.

Too late I see that the much abused wax of Zasna’s tetrarch is loosened and raised all across the lowest side. It remains sealed by the barest margin. Visions of the chambers of torment below the palace dance before my eyes, all the more vivid for never having seen them.

He nods and I approach, my arm still extended. I tense my muscles to keep from shaking as I hold the message and force myself not to stare at the defect in the seal. Both cats and children are sensitive to signs of uneasiness that adults might miss.

I hold my breath as the boy-ruler takes the message from my hand.

He will not fail to notice the defect when his attention reaches the seal and my dreams of freedom evaporate like morning mist. I spend a last wish hoping that Finagor will escape suspicion for his part in this duplicity.

In the heartbeat between the tetrarch slipping a finger beneath the fold and the imminent examination of the seal to break it open, the cat stretches forward to sniff the bottom of the paper. My heart lurches as I think he points out the falseness to his master.

Sweat trickles beneath my arms as the great ruff about the cat’s neck caresses the message, obscuring nearly half the folded paper. He nuzzles at it almost as if reading it with his near-sighted eyes. One hind leg extends as he leans forward, the joint reversed from other four-legged creatures. It’s said the cats can stand on their hind legs in the way of people, though I’ve never witnessed this.

The tetrarch glares at the cat and strikes the animal’s head with one thin elbow as he breaks the seal. The trainer is there in an instant. He jabs the cat hard in the hindquarters with the metal point of the stick. The cat jerks but suppresses a growl.

The message is open and no one has seen the defect. Relief leaves me lightheaded.

The tetrarch reads the message quickly and nods to a servant at the far end of the room. In the way that the most familiar and well-trained servants have, the man discerns his master’s intent and brings one of the small burning braziers, holding it carefully by its long, narrow stem. To my profound relief, the tetrarch tosses the message in and watches the flames devour it.

"I wish to reply," he says to me, and holds out one long-fingered and uncalloused hand.

The servant runs to a gilded box on a desk and returns with stationary and pen. The tetrarch disdains the offered board from my satchel and writes instead against the floor. I remain on bended knee until he has finished, then fold the message and wait while he seals it, marking the wax with the imprint of his ring.

Bowing my head once again I stand and back to the door, the new message in hand.

The Holy Autarch has noticed me on occasion, and the bright blue gems of his eyes disturb me. The tetrarch of my adopted city often acknowledges me. But this tetrarch has never once looked into my eyes. His cat does, though. He lifts that massive head, the chain about his neck clinking softly, and stares into my soul in a way that says he knows my secrets. I stumble but catch my balance, and am relieved to hear the snick of the door as the guard pulls it closed behind me.

Two hallways from the Room of Dreams my heart still labors. I wish nothing more than to run from the palace and ride from the city out into the empty lands and then to the east. But one last promise I must fulfill before I leave.

A tetrarch’s messenger may attract unwanted attention delivering a note to Finagor’s friend and so I spiral toward the outer halls, keeping watch for a local messenger. At last I pass one I know. My heart has slowed to normal and my voice, when I speak, is steady and matter-of-fact.

"I was given a message for Martine of House Saber by someone too rushed to find a palace messenger."

We are the only two in the hall and I receive a small roll of the eyes that some find us so interchangeable. The messenger takes the note and reverses direction, unaware of the seditious contents folded within that paper.

And just like that, it’s done. My last duties as a messenger completed. Zasna’s tetrarch will wait at least a fortnight for a reply; Alawea’s tetrarch even longer. I can be with the insurgents long before that.

The final set of doors loom ahead, leading outside and to freedom. My eyes are so fixed on that egress that I don’t hear or see the great cat step from the shadows of the cross hall until he is an arm span or two from me. His chain is still looped around his thick neck, but there is no handler at the other end.

I have never seen one of the great cats in any of the palaces absent a handler. His approach is unnerving, the more so for the odd motion of his forward-jointed hind legs. I wonder if I have come so close to freedom only to die within sight of it.

His yellow and gold eyes fix me, as if he reads me like my masters have read the written words I have carried. His mouth is open slightly as he pants, and fangs longer than my fingers gleam wetly.

I suppose it doesn’t matter if I die now. I would have liked to have tasted freedom even for a short while, but the only messages that have ever meant anything to me have been delivered today. Even if the beast perceives what has occurred, unless he possesses some way to communicate it, then it cannot be undone. I resolve to die content.

He comes close enough that his great ruff tickles my hand. Lifting himself with a casual show of back and abdominal strength, he stands almost as straight as I and taller by a head. I try to step back but one heavy paw slaps my shoulder and pulls me forward until my face is close to his. His breath is not rank, as I would have imagined, but sweet and earthy. His whiskers twitch as his mouth stretches and relaxes, and he makes soft grunts deep in his chest. Yellow-gold eyes fix my own, piercing me, willing me to understand.

I think I do.

"I won’t forget you," I say, "or your brothers."

Perhaps I’m wrong and he only wanted to wish me well in the freedom I can escape to that he cannot. Or perhaps he knows what Finagor and I have done today, or even what is yet to happen, and wished to advise me. But I choose to take this as a sign that our plans will succeed.

His paw pushes down hard on my shoulder for balance as he steps back and drops again to all fours. On impulse, I reach forward and touch the great head, though I have never seen a tetrarch or a handler so familiar. My hand strokes back, over the thick fur and to the chain at his neck. It is tight to the point that I cannot slip even a finger beneath it.

"I will unchain you myself if I can," I tell him.

He looks up at me and gives another soft grunt. Then he turns and disappears in the shadows of the cross hall. When I hear the drag of the chain no more I walk out the doors of the palace, lower than the lowest servant, for the last time. From the vantage of the palace I can see beyond the eastern wall, and the sight swells my heart.

Echoes

First published in Urban Fantasy Magazine (August, 2015), edited by Katrina Forest

Edward opened a side gate and followed the stone path to the servants' entrance at the rear of the house. Samuel lagged behind, staring with the wonder of an eight-year old at the hedges clipped into fantastic shapes. The house was less palatial than the homes on nearby St. James Square, but still the grandest that Edward had yet been invited to visit. He knocked at the back door and a man in the immaculate clothes of a head servant led them to a finely appointed sitting room.

Mrs. Winston remained seated as he and Samuel were announced. She was a stout woman in her middle years, with a large wig of brown hair, a heavily powdered face, and a stern countenance that dispelled Edward’s hope of an easy love potion. He felt for echoes in the room, but emotions usually changed as rapidly as thought and he found no clues to what she might be seeking.

“Mr. Ferris. Thank you for coming,” she said, when the manservant left. Her eyes blew a cold breeze over Samuel. “Perhaps your son would play in the back garden while you and I talk.” She rang a small silver bell without giving Edward a chance to reply. A young housemaid appeared. Her dark eyes swept the newcomers.

“Simone,” Mrs. Winston said, “take Master Samuel to the garden and entertain him while I speak with Mr. Ferris.”

“Yes, ma’am.” A subtle French accent colored the maid’s words.

Simone smiled at Samuel and her crooked teeth gave her a sweetness that tugged unexpectedly at Edward. He watched the swish of her narrow skirts as she moved, the bounce of her brown curls, her thin arm as she reached for his son. A kindness in her face, a vulnerability that followed her like a shadow, reminded him of his Mary. Memories of his wife drifted up from their hiding place, the happy recollections followed inevitably by the sad.

Samuel looked to see if he should go with her, and Edward nodded. He preferred Samuel to watch and learn, but not at the risk of displeasing a client.

At a gesture from Mrs. Winston, Edward took a seat. Coffee had been set out and Mrs. Winston poured for them both. Few of her station would have addressed him by his surname, much less offered him refreshment, but his skills provided him a unique status. He’d been inside many homes that would never have allowed him beyond the kitchen or coal cellar under normal circumstances.

Mrs. Winston wasted no time on pleasantries. “I believe you have something I need, Mr. Ferris.” She stirred her coffee with a tiny silver spoon and rested it in the cradle of the saucer.

“I have the means to get potions,” he said, equally cryptic, “as what some folks need.” In truth, what he sold weren’t potions at all, but clients preferred to think of them as such. Of course, the ripples that rolled from strong emotions weren’t echoes either, but that was what Edward had called them since childhood.

“I see.” She took a sip from her cup. “My needs, Mr. Ferris, are to drive a man to suicide.”

Edward nearly dropped his coffee. He started to protest, but she cut him off.

“Perhaps I should start from the beginning.” Mrs. Winston set her cup down and sat back in her chair. She laced her hands together in her lap like one large fist, crushing one of the bows running down the front of her dress. The frills seemed as out of place on her as they would on a man.

“My husband was a successful banker until he met a man named William Waltham. Mr. Waltham convinced my husband to invest in the construction of a new textile mill, then promptly disappeared with the money.” Her voice was level, her delivery matter-of-fact. “My husband was left with nothing. He drowned himself in the Thames three weeks ago.”

“Mrs. Winston, I’m right sorry for your loss, but…”

“Spare me your sympathies, Mr. Ferris. I tell you this only to convince you my reasons for wanting such a potion are just. I have located Mr. Waltham but he never delivered the promised copy of the contract to my husband, and so I have no proof of the crime. The penalty for grand larceny is death, but without proof the courts will not even investigate my charges, leaving Mr. Waltham free to do to another family what he has done to mine. I wish only to see justice served, one way or another.”

She unknotted her hands and placed them on the curved arms of her chair, like a queen giving audience from her throne. “I have some family money still, not enough to stay in this home, but enough to pay you well for your services.” Lifting her cup again, she watched him over the rim as she took a sip, defying him to deny her this justice.

He had never liked providing clients with echoes for revenge, but this…

Mrs. Winston noted his hesitation. “Mr. Ferris, I have made myself familiar with these potions that you supply. What I ask is little more. Sorrow and regret are close cousins to despair, are they not? Love potions make the paying party happy, but how have you affected the lover? You alter people’s lives all the time.”

Edward flinched at the truth in her words.

"I realize my ultimate goal may not be met," she continued. "If Mr. Waltham lives out his miserable life feeling only half the despondency my husband experienced, I must be content with that. Word of mouth, however, has given me much faith in the efficacy of your potions."

He tried again. “Mrs. Winston, the way this works is I have to find me someone of the mindset I need. Someone as has the exact right emotions.” He had never divulged his methods to a client before, but hoped this small revelation would dissuade her. “I don’t know how I’d start for somewhat like this.”

That wasn’t entirely true. Images of his mother flowed like tendrils of mist into his thoughts.

“I see.” Mrs. Winston heaved herself out of her chair and walked to a small box decorated with mother-of-pearl. Removing something from the box, she returned to her chair. “If my situation does not move you to aid me, Mr. Ferris, perhaps this will.”

She leaned forward and placed five gold sovereigns on the table in front of him. “There will be that much again on delivery of the potion. Perhaps that will help you to find what it is that you need.”

The most he had ever charged a client was one pound. She offered him ten. He and Samuel could live for a year on that much. The threat of eviction he received earlier this month could be resolved by this evening; the worry that he and Samuel would be turned out into the street, gone. More important than anything, though, the money could be used to ensure that Samuel learned a proper trade. His son could be spared the need to work with echoes.

He picked the coins up, felt the weight of them in his palm.

“I take it that’s a yes?” she said.

“Yes,” he whispered.

“Was she wanting a love potion?” Samuel asked on the way home. He picked up a stick lying in the street and tapped the cobbles as he walked. Edward didn’t answer and Samuel changed the subject. “Miss Simone stayed outside with me the whole time. She showed me the garden an’ we played with a white cat named Bangles. Miss Simone had a son, but he died little an’ her husband died too.”

Simone. She had offered them tea before their walk home and, uncharacteristically, Edward had accepted. She and the cook had chatted with them in the kitchen, yet she never asked why someone of his station had been entertained by her employer. Simone ruffled Samuel’s hair, smiled her crooked smile, and watched Edward with her chocolate brown eyes. It had affected him in a way that nothing else had in a long while. It was all foolishness, though. God had not allowed him to keep Mary and, with his strange life, he was not like to have another wife.

“Did you use a love potion on mother?” Samuel asked.

The question startled Edward from his thoughts. Samuel rarely asked about the mother who had taken her last breath as he breathed his first. Edward shook his head. “I didn’t figure how to make potions until after she passed. I didn’t need none for her anyhow.”

They turned onto Thames Street. Edward reached down and took Samuel’s hand as they entered the bustling crowds of central London. The smells of hot sausages and fresh bread wafted from stalls on the bridge, competing with the sour smell of raw sewage in the Thames. Out of habit, Edward scanned the myriad faces they passed, looking for donors; someone hinting at deep, obsessive emotions, someone he could shadow for days or weeks until the emotion was as ripe as a summer pear and the echoes from it strong enough to harvest. Samuel was quicker, though. Just past the bridge he squeezed Edward’s hand and nodded.

“He fancies her.”

Edward looked where Samuel indicated, to a trio of people standing at a carriage just ahead. A footman was holding the door as a gentleman helped a much younger woman up to the seat. Edward felt nothing from the man. They were nearly past the group when it struck Edward, the faint waves of yearning rolling from the footman.

“Did you see or feel it?” Edward asked Samuel, when they were beyond the carriage.

“I felt it,” Samuel said, swishing his stick at a rat in the gutter.

A chill skittered across Edward’s bones. He wondered, not for the first time, just how strongly their strange family trait ran in his son. For Samuel’s sake he prayed that it would not be too strong for him to bear.

“When’ll I get to harvest echoes?” Samuel asked, looking up at him.

“I’ve told you afore, not for a long time. Emotions is powerful things.” Echoes he had harvested and carried in his breast came to life again in his memories—powerful lust, painful yearning, crushing sorrow and regret. Gathering them did nothing to the donor, like absorbing heat from the rays of the sun did nothing to the sun, but the thought of Samuel filling his small body with the intensity of those obsessive emotions was horrific.

The lamplighters were firing the oil wicks in the streetlamps by the time Edward and Samuel arrived at their narrow row house in the East End. Edward took his coat off and hung it on a nail by the door then held out his hand for Samuel’s coat. Samuel fished a canning jar out of the pocket before handing it to him.

“What’s that, then?” Edward asked.

Samuel looked guilty. “Miss Simone said I could keep it.” He held up the jar for his father to inspect the contents: a green rock and a black cricket.

“O’course you can keep it,” he said, handing it back.

Samuel grinned and ran for the kitchen. He set the jar on their small table and threw an armful of wood on the coals of the kitchen fire. He swung the iron kettle over the flames for tea and set out plates and salt cod for dinner. Edward sat at the table, careful not to rock the uneven legs and tip Samuel’s jar.

It had been hard raising Samuel alone, but at least he was a better father than his own had been. His father’s violence had been hard enough, but the echoes had made it so much worse. Both Edward and his mother had relived the anger and fear of each event over and over, sometimes for days before the echoes dispelled. Over the years, his mother became increasingly withdrawn, though she refused to leave her husband. Edward hadn’t seen her for nearly a year now, not since she’d tried to hang herself.

He wracked his brain for any donor for Mrs. Winston’s potion other than his mother. Harvesting echoes had no ill effect on the donor—no more than collecting their tears or bottling their breath would—but the cost to Edward would be dear. Feeling the echoes of his mother’s hopelessness when he was young had been heartbreaking; to absorb the depth of her current despair into his own body would be hellish. Donors weren’t easy to find though, even for love potions. The emotions had to be strong enough to do the job. It could take months to find someone just right for this. Someone else, at least.

The following morning Edward opened the under-stair cupboard and pulled a wooden box from its recesses. Two blue phials containing love and a single green phial holding sorrow were all that remained of his potions. Not only were they challenging to collect, but he didn’t dare sell them frequently enough to attract the attention of the law. Among the empty containers in the box were some clear phials for the occasional odd request but, in general, few people sought anything other than love or revenge.

Edward placed an empty phial in his pocket and left Samuel in the care of a neighbor, then stopped at his landlord’s and paid the surprised man a year’s rent in advance before beginning his journey. He weighed again the personal cost, body and soul, to collect this potion against his and Samuel’s need for the money. Again the scales favored need.

An hour later he crossed Moorfields and the outline of Bethlem Royal Hospital appeared beyond the open fields. Bedlam—as most folk called it—loomed heavy and foreboding, like a pale, stone monster unable to move for the sheer mass of victims it had gorged upon. Multiple eyes of black barred windows dotted the walls, and the shrieks and moans drifting from those windows sounded like nothing human. Somewhere within the bowels of that monster lay his mother.

Edward had never been able to bring himself to visit and dreaded doing so now. The judge had ruled her suicide attempt a moral insanity. He hadn’t believed she was mad then, but she surely would be now—locked for months in this wretched place with the echoes of lunatics all around her.

The front door was open, but just beyond the forecourt stood a metal gate. The smell wafting through the bars was a potent mix of unwashed bodies and human waste, feathered over the odor of dirt and mold that clung to the walls of the old building. Edward stood at the gate, watching the lunatics in the long gallery cavort and cry. There were only men that he could see, but he could hear women’s voices off to his right. Peering that way, he made out a set of bars dividing the inmates by gender into east and west wings.

The echoes drove into his brain like iron spikes. Anger. Fear. Despair. Hate. They pounded on his body like hammers. The inmates were obsessed with their private hells, and the echoes of their emotions filled the long gallery, reverberating again and again off the thick walls. The urge to run from the asylum nearly overwhelmed him. Instead, he rang a small bell hanging at the upper corner of the gate.

The man who approached wore a dirty linen shirt with no coat. His long trousers of faded blue had the look of old sailor’s clothing. Even Edward’s worn black coat and wash-water grey stockings were in better repair.

“Visitors come ‘round Tuesdays and Sundays, mate,” the guard said. “You can watch the lunatics anytime for a penny, though, if that’s what you’re after.”

If he left now, Edward wasn’t sure he would ever return.

“I’m of a need to see someone today. Etta Ferris.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a shilling. “This for your trouble of letting me in on an off day.” He pushed the silver coin through the bars, glad he had thought to bring it.

The guard grinned a wolfish smile. He lifted a hand that was truncated to a thumb and the first two fingers, angling from the second knuckle to the wrist in a long, puckered scar. Grabbing the small coin awkwardly, he slipped it into a pocket and pulled a key from under his shirt to open the barred gate.

At the squeal of the hinges, an inmate in the center of the room stopped pacing and stared. He was silver-haired but sturdy. Suddenly he was moving, grunting wordlessly, legs pumping as he rushed for the gate. Edward stepped back, alarmed. A burly man, another guard judging by the keys he carried, hit the lunatic in the chin with his elbow and the old man crumpled.

“Is she curable or incurable?” Edward’s guard asked, turning back to him from the commotion.

Edward stared at the old man on the floor. Waves of frustration radiated from the inmate as he rolled into a ball and sobbed. “Incurable,” Edward said faintly. That had been the doctor’s diagnosis on her admission.

“Right, then, I think I know her.”

The guard led Edward across the room and unlocked a door just in front of the bars to the women’s side. Edward followed him up a set of stairs, through another locked door to the right, and into the incurable women’s ward.

The smell hit him like a fist, sour and far stronger than below. Some women were chained to the walls or the floor, others were loose. Sores were untreated, feces was smeared about, and Edward’s shoes peeled from the sticky floor with a crackling sound. The echoes beat on his mind and his nerves until he thought he would begin raving as well. He wondered if even ten sovereigns could be worth this hell.

The guard walked ahead, oblivious to Edward’s torment. “Here y’are, mate.” He stopped and pointed. The woman was not chained but lay on her side on the filthy floor, unmoving, eyes wide. She was skeletal. “‘Fraid she won’t last much longer, she won’t eat no more.”

Tears stung Edward’s eyes as he took in the familiar pattern on the torn and faded dress that had once been her best, the brownish-blonde hair unwashed and matted with dirt, the narrow back that had cringed at echoes, but had been straight and strong when protecting him from his father’s drunken outbursts. He crouched down next to her, wondering if Bedlam would be his fate as well someday. He smothered the thought before it turned to Samuel and what his future might hold.

“Mum?” He said it quietly, as if not to disturb her. There was no response, no sign she recognized him.

“She ain’t spoke a word since she come here,” the guard said.

Edward didn’t need to wonder why. He could feel despair tolling from her like a great bell, ringing in his bones and chiming the sadness of her life. At least she wouldn’t suffer much longer. The will to die pulsed within her, stronger than blood. The echoes of it buffeted at him like a sad wind.

He wondered if he was strong enough to handle the intensity of her despair. Taking an echo of yearning or lust into his body was enough to muddle his brains and fill his heart with desire until he could exhale it into a phial; the prospect of taking in a sadness so deep that death was preferable terrified him. He felt for the phial in his pocket, reassuring himself he would only have to carry the emotion in his body until he was out the front door.

Edward kissed his mother gently on the forehead and said a silent prayer for her soul. Anxious to be gone from here, he tipped his head back and unlocked that strange place deep in his chest that he had discovered. The place that allowed him to harvest and hold the echoes.

He took a cautious breath, terrified that the emotions of two hundred lunatics would flood into him like a river finding an open weir gate. He knew his mother’s emotions well, though, and narrowed his focus on them. Her despair sifted into his lungs, sinking naturally to the spot beneath his breastbone. No other echoes followed. He breathed deeper, harvesting her sad bounty. When he had taken all he could hold, he locked the echoes in his chest.

Relief at his success lasted only a second before the echoes took effect. The terrible desolation of spirit was stronger than he could have imagined. It threatened to crush him to the floor. Despair and hopelessness overwhelmed him, suckling on his energy and will. He knew if he didn’t leave quickly, he might not leave at all. Edward pushed himself up from his knees, standing unsteadily.

“I’ll go now.” His voice was a whisper. The guard had seen nothing of his struggle; he nodded and led him back down the stairs.

The distance to the front door seemed twice what it had been before. Edward was despondent beyond tears, beyond words—beyond life. He held fast to the reason he had undertaken this awful task, the money that would help Samuel. He wondered if experiencing this despair was his penance for selling the echoes, inflicting them on the criminal, even if it was the man’s just due. When he finally reached the barred gate, the guard fumbled with the key.

Without warning, Edward was struck from behind. His body crashed into the bars and there was a sickening crunch from his coat pocket where he had placed the small phial. A sharp pain needled into his hip as a sliver of glass pierced the skin. His guard turned and swung at the old man who had run for the door when Edward arrived. The lunatic fell backward and the second guard wrestled the man to the floor.

When the two-fingered guard finally opened the gate, Edward threw himself out into the cool, fall air and stood on the front lawn, shaking. The fright of the incident was nothing to the horror of the broken phial. He slipped his hand gingerly into his pocket and pulled out the shards of glass, dropping them onto the lawn.

The journey home was torture. His mother’s hopelessness and misery dragged at him like a weight, trying to pull him to the ground. It whispered at him to give up, to give in, to lie down and die. It mercilessly nurtured every sorrow he had ever felt and revived them as if they were new. Near home he tripped and stumbled, falling to the gutter. Unwilling to get up again, he lay with his face against the horse piss and offal of the streets, and wished the sludge deep enough to drown him.

A hand pulled at one coat sleeve. “Ist tha’ druffen o’ yonderly?”

The northern accent was almost too thick to understand. “Ill,” Edward managed, crawling to his knees. “Not drunk.”

Strong arms tugged him to his feet. “Tha’s bist git ter ‘oome.”

Home. Samuel.

Edward nodded and waved off further help. He moved forward once again.

When Edward finally reached his house, he groped for the skeleton key. Throwing the door open, he stumbled to the under-stair cupboard. He dropped to his knees and rummaged for the first bottle he could find.

Lifting the glass to his mouth, Edward exhaled the dreadful echoes. Instead of flowing out easily with his breath, they came out reluctantly, thick and sticky. He corked the bottle, folded himself on the floor, and wept.

The next morning, Edward was unable to rise from bed. He needed to deliver the potion to Mrs. Winston today to collect the rest of his fee, but even that failed to motivate him. His mother’s despair had been too heavy and he had carried it too long. It had formed a bond with his loneliness, with unhappy memories of his childhood, his wife’s death, and with the gloom that poverty brought. He had become a victim of his own potion, the echoes blending with his native emotions until there was no telling one from the other.

Guilt plagued him over the thought that Samuel would live now with his depression, just as Edward had lived with his mother’s. Samuel brought him tea and pleaded for him to rise. Edward knew he had to get up; he had to get the money for Samuel.

When they arrived at Mrs. Winston’s, Samuel went with Simone to the garden while Edward was shown to the sitting room. He handed the phial to Mrs. Winston.

“And now?” she asked.

“I take no part in giving the potion,” Edward replied.

“Yes, Mr. Ferris, I am aware of that. How do you suggest I proceed?”

“The man must breathe the potion in. It’s best done by placing the open bottle close under a person’s nose when they’re asleep, and whispering them a suggestion.”

“I see,” Mrs. Winston said. Her steely gaze pinned him. “Do you believe this will work, Mr. Ferris?”

“I do,” Edward said, chilled by the thought of the strength of the echoes in that tiny jar.

Mrs. Winston strode to the mother-of-pearl box and returned with the remaining five gold sovereigns. They gleamed when she placed them in the palm of his hand. She saw him to the hallway where the manservant stood waiting, having just called Simone and Samuel in from outside. Samuel was shoving something into his pocket.

“What do you think?” Samuel asked the maid, eyes shining with a happiness that Edward rarely saw.

“I think it smelled like summer,” she replied in her lilting accent, smiling at the boy.

Edward wondered what new treasures Samuel had collected from the garden, flowers perhaps. Simone looked up then and saw him, as did Samuel.

“Come now,” Edward said. “Time to leave.”

“He’s a lovely boy,” Simone said. Her gaze lingered on Edward a moment longer than necessary, appraising him and making him self-conscious. She smiled her crooked smile at him.

They followed Simone through the kitchen. “A cup of tea before you go?” she asked.

Samuel looked up at him with pleading eyes.

Despondency rang inside Edward like a funeral bell and he was in no mood for flirtation. Even if he mistook the look in her eyes, he was not fit company for conversation of any sort.

“I cannot,” he said.

She ruffled Samuel’s hair in farewell and stood watching from the door as they left.

Edward awoke the next morning to find Samuel staring at him. The boy was already dressed, standing at his bedside with an anxious expression.

“Can we visit Miss Simone today?”

Simone. The name stirred something warm inside him. It sounded sweet on Samuel’s lips, familiar, as if Edward had just heard her name a moment before. Perhaps he had been dreaming of her. Of her sweet, crooked smile.

“We’ll not be going round to Mrs. Winston’s anymore.” The thought disturbed him. He realized that he wanted to see Simone again.

Samuel continued to stare at him. Edward looked into his young face, tight with hope. “We don’t see clients afterwards, you know that, and anyways they’ll be moving soon.”

“Maybe you could have a note sent afore they go, an’ we could meet her at a tea shop or somewhat, as you could pay with the money you made.” It tumbled out in a fountain of hopeful words.

Yes. What would be so wrong with that?

Edward sought inside for the despondency of the past two days and felt it lessened, diluted. Instead of a depression he had believed would drag him down the same well as his mother, a buoyant anticipation overlay it now. He remembered the appraising look Simone had given him before they left, and smiled to himself.

And then he remembered waking to Samuel at his bedside as he dreamed of Simone.

Edward sat up in bed and stared at Samuel. The boy’s face went wide and guilty.

“I just thought it would be nice to see her again. I liked her so much and she reminded you o’mother.”

How did Samuel know that? He couldn’t have felt the echoes of such a flitting emotion. Or could he?

Edward threw off the bedcovers and hurried downstairs in his nightshirt. He pulled open the under-stair cupboard and yanked the box out. Both love potions were there.

Samuel appeared at his side, looking as contrite as only an eight year-old could. Edward rested on one knee in front of the cupboard, confused. “Samuel, what have you done?”

The boy answered in a mumble. “She liked you, an’ you’ve been so sad.”

“Did you use a potion on her, Samuel?”

“No.” He shook his head emphatically, looking surprised at the accusation.

“Did you use one on me?”

Samuel studied the toes of his boots.

Edward reached forward and fished in Samuel’s pocket, coming up with a blue phial. “Where’d this come from then?”

“I took an empty to Mrs. Winston’s yesterday,” Samuel confessed without looking up. “I talked about you to Miss Simone an’ then told her I was smelling the flowers I held, and then I said I was breathing the flowers into the bottle I brought.” He looked up, pleading. “She’s a’feared to lose her job an’ her home. An’ she does like you. She likes me too.”

“Samuel,” Edward squeezed the phial in his hand nearly to the breaking point, “you’re telling me you harvested echoes from her?”

The boy nodded, tears welling in his eyes.

“What could you o’possibly harvested?” Every echo Edward had ever harvested, even love, had been obsessive, nearly violent in strength. He had felt nothing from Simone.

“The liking you and the hoping I guess,” the boy mumbled.

Edward pushed himself off the floor and sank into the hall chair. He should rage fit to match one of his father’s rages. He should beat the boy for using a potion on him, even though he had sworn he would never raise a hand to his son. Instead, Edward sighed. He was the one who had taught the boy after all.

When he let go of the anger, other feelings drifted to the surface and he recognized them now—hope, desire and anticipation—the gentle aspects of early infatuation. They muted his despair until he hardly felt it. He had never imagined such quiet emotions could counter such brutal ones.

So Simone liked him. Unlikely as it seemed, perhaps it was possible. After all, she had touched something in him just in their brief time together. She missed her son and her husband, and genuinely seemed to like Samuel. Perhaps tea was not such a bad idea.

His voice, when he found it, was gentle. “Put that bottle up where you found it.”

Samuel put everything away and closed the cupboard door. Edward stood, his heart lightened with possibilities. With hope. He pictured Simone ruffling the boy’s hair and felt an urge to do the same.

“Let’s see about having a note sent ‘round to Miss Simone, shall we?”

The Clouds in Her Eyes

First published in Writers and Illustrators of the Future, Vol. 30 (May, 2014), edited by Dave Wolverton

A breeze caught at the blades of the windmill, producing a groan of protest from the hub. Amba glanced up at the weathered shaft and cracked wooden blades, both unlikely to see repairs with the well nearly dry. Above the windmill, a great sheet of heat lightning crackled purple and yellow across the dark sky; the sky that promised rain every day as if unaware that it had no moisture left to give.

Looking anywhere except to the fields, Amba returned to poking the ground with the point of her copper herding rod. Eventually, the vastness of the land drew her eyes across the acres of dirt, flat and featureless, punctuated only by the containment poles.

The ship was there, closer each day. Its sails billowed and the great wooden hull heaved on invisible waves that rolled between the ship’s dry keel and the dirt of the farm. It had advanced nearly to the top of the second field, the one where the grubs matured into young sparkers. By tomorrow the ship would be in the first field.

It was no use running for Father. She had done that when it first appeared as a speck on the horizon, at the waning of the last moon. Father had seen nothing. The speck had grown steadily larger, and still he had taken no notice. By the time the Wind Moon was waxing, the sails and the hull had been distinguishable and she had pointed it out again. He’d stared unseeing and unbelieving at the horizon, then grunted and turned away.

He never mentioned it afterward; never said if he thought she was lying or teasing or, worse, hallucinating, as she had during her illness. If it concerned him, he fostered it in silence, as he did all his worries.

Amba had worked hard to take over her brother’s duties in the fields after Jass died. Her father did his best to accept her as a surrogate, but telling him that a ship he couldn’t see was sailing over their fields threatened her fragile progress with him. She had resolved not to mention it to him again, no matter what.

The ship was close enough now that she could see men on the deck and details of the figurehead: a body, an upraised arm holding something. She wondered if the ship would sail right up to the house, or through the house. She wondered if she would drown when the unseen ocean washed over her.

Mustering her resolve to walk into the field, she went first to the corral to collect her mallet, then scanned the dirt in the top field until she spotted a ripple in the soil. Approaching the disturbance, she tapped her slender rod into the ground just behind it. The ripple surged away from her. Father said the copper tasted as bitter to sparkers as immature haza beans tasted to Amba.

She pulled the rod from the ground and tapped it in again at a safe distance behind the sparker. Mature sparkers were the most dangerous. Even with the herding rod’s leather grip, they could give a nasty jolt if she came too close. Zigzagging with the erratic path the creature took, she herded it toward the opening in the small circle of poles that made up the corral. Once the sparker entered, she jammed her herding rod into the ground and hurried to replace the missing containment pole before the sparker wriggled out again.

I have one ready,” she told Father when she found him in the shed, already changed into his heavily padded harvesting clothes. His only reply was to bend and take one handle of the glass cage. She lifted the other side of the container and together they carried it to the corral.

Her father’s quiet manner had been peaceful and comforting when Amba was young, but after the fever killed Mother he had become more distant than quiet. When Jass died, her father had withdrawn further still. Amba wished that she knew how to find the old him, wherever he had gone, and help him find his way back. She needed him. She was broken in her own way, with an emptiness since her illness, since Mother’s death, that had never filled up again. It ached sometimes, in the hollow just below her breastbone.

They reached the corral and set the cage down. Amba braced herself to watch Father harvest. She hadn’t been there when Jass died, but she had seen him afterward, his eyes frozen wide with pain, the burnt and flaking skin that she had scrubbed from his chest and hands before they buried him.

Her father was slipping on his heavy gloves when she turned suddenly at the sound of a deep voice shouting behind her. For a moment, she had forgotten about the ship. A large man stood at the wheel and the men on deck scurried to follow some order. The ship was too far away to make out what he’d said, though he had raised his voice, as if over the roar of wind and waves.

Amba turned back to find her father staring at her. She flushed under his silent, probing gaze. He held her eyes for a long moment—not searching for clues to her thoughts—but looking at them, studying the clouds in the dark brown of her irises. The clouds that the fever had left behind. His brow furrowed in concern before he turned, wordlessly, and stepped into the corral.

Amba hurried to push the cage against the containment poles to make up for her lapse. She stood well back, holding the heavy glass lid ready. Her father moved around the edge of the corral, staying close to the safety of the poles. He pushed his hooked rod into the ground and angled it to tease the sparker from the soil. When the back of the creature broke the surface, he swept the rod deftly under its twisting body.

Once wrenched from the soil they were ugly things—grayish-brown, like giant eyeless slugs, but with nublike tails and a multitude of tiny legs that propelled them through the soil. This one was a monster, as long and as thick around as her thigh, its many legs clawing at the air.

If any of the spines on those legs connected with her father’s clothing, the sparker would cling to him, charring his skin and stopping his heart. Father kept the sparker well away from him, though, and in one smooth motion slipped it between the poles and into the glass container. Amba quickly slid the top into place.

The creature thrashed against the dry glass of its confines, sparking like a mirror image of the heat lightning flashing in the sky. Those sparks lit lamps and powered the great wheels and fans in town, though water and food were what made them most valuable. Bereft of soil to soothe it, the sparker began to secrete water into the container even as Amba and her father carried it back to the shed.

They harvested the remainder of the mature sparkers all the rest of that day. Amba tried to ignore the ship sailing ever closer as she worked, though she stole quick glances at it when Father wasn’t watching.

By evening, the first field was cleared, and she felt exhausted. Father went to the shed and set up the siphons that would keep the sparkers from drowning in their own water while Amba headed for the house to clean up and begin supper.

Do you think there’s still an ocean?” she asked him that evening as they ate. Sparkers tasted like snails and were tough, even when stewed all day, but at least they were plentiful.

His eyes narrowed briefly, no doubt wondering why she asked. She had tried to be subtle—everyone thought about water after all—but the ship was foremost in her thoughts. She chewed a crust of bread and lowered her eyes so that he wouldn’t be reminded of the clouds there.

“Don’t know,” he replied, scooping up a spoonful of stew. “Never seen it, but I suppose it’s still there. They say there’s still water in some of the rivers and such. The ocean must be harder to dry up than those.”

He lapsed into silence again and Amba tried not to think about where the ship might be now. After dinner, she cleaned the dishes, swept the house, and started a new loaf of bread to rise for morning. The sack of grain in the pantry was their last, and the jars of vegetables they had traded for were dwindling. Soon, like many already, they would have to live on nothing but the sparkers.

Amba enjoyed the feel of kneading bread. It reminded her of her childhood, when they had kept a garden and grown grain instead of sparkers. Father hadn’t been so sad then and the house not so lonely. She and Mother always had the cooking and cleaning and sewing done before Father was even aware of the need. He used to ruffle her hair and spend his rare words complimenting her baking or his new shirts. Amba had even caught Mother and Father kissing one day, out by the shed.

She and Father did the work of four people now, and life felt somehow incomplete no matter how hard she tried to fill the holes in her world. Amba pressed her hand to the ache at the hollow below her breastbone, as if she could push her fist inside to sate the emptiness.

The next day, while Father worked in the shed, Amba was sent to gauge the grubs in the second field, to see if they were large enough to herd forward. He couldn’t see that the ship was now halfway up the first field, or that to reach the grubs, she would have to walk right past it.

She could have skirted wide of the ship, and perhaps it would’ve stayed its course up the field and sailed away. She didn’t believe it would, though. If she was the only one who could see it, then it must have come for her. She had been frightened and curious too long; if there was no avoiding this thing, she decided, she may as well meet it head on.

The banister of the deck stood nearly three times her height above the ground, and the ship loomed hugely as she approached it. She strained to hear the splash and roll of waves that gently rocked the hull, or the wind that tousled the men’s hair, but she heard only the silence of the farm and the creak of the windmill.

The figurehead turned out to be a woman, naked to hips that melded into the lower part of the bow. Her right arm was raised high, and in her hand she clutched a metal lightning bolt painted gold. Wooden hair that may once have been red streamed back into the point of the prow, as if blown by a strong wind. On the deck of the ship were half a dozen men. The man at the wheel was tall and broad shouldered, sporting a thick shock of ginger hair, and a reddish beard and mustache trimmed short.

“Lower the sails,” the big man called as she neared. Ropes whined as the sails came down, folding like ladies’ fans onto the crossbeams of the masts. “Drop anchor,” he ordered.

Amba heard the rattle of thick chain and saw a huge anchor tumble from a hole in the hull, though she never heard a splash or saw it hit the ground. The anchor disappeared, leaving only the chain hanging taut above the dirt. The ship rocked to a halt.

Her legs felt as if they had no more bones than a sparker as she closed the last few feet. The big man came to the railing and leaned into it, elbows locked, looking down at her. “What’s your name, child?”

Once he acknowledged her directly it all became too real. Amba’s heart fluttered as fast as a thrummer bird’s wings. She wondered if he was a spirit, or maybe a king or a god, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask. She reminded herself that she wasn’t a child, but nearly a woman grown. With an effort, she kept her voice steady as she answered, “Amba.”

“Not your given name, girl. Your true name. What’s your family name?”

“Storm-bringer.”

Her father’s true name, Stalwart, was one of the newer ones—his mother’s name for six or seven generations back—but the name she and Jass had inherited from their mother was one of the old ones, like Bone-healer or Wheat-singer or Wave-tamer. It had been passed down from a time so distant that no memory of those days remained.

The ginger-haired man nodded, as if this was something he already knew. “Why haven’t you brought the storms then, girl? Your land is in need.”

“It’s just a name,” she said, taken aback. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

He bent his elbows and crossed his forearms on the railing. It seemed to bring him closer to her. “It means everything, girl, especially when the land needs you. Don’t you feel it calling to you, like an emptiness inside you? Like something’s missing?”

There was an emptiness inside her, but it was for her mother, her brother, and the lost days of her childhood.

“It’s time you remember your heritage, Amba. I’ve brought you something that might help.” He reached beneath his shirt and lifted a chain over his head. He dropped a necklace over the railing.

Amba bent to retrieve it but couldn’t find the necklace where she thought it had landed. She began to wonder if it had dropped into the invisible ocean when, finally, she spotted a few links poking out of the earth. She tugged, and the chain came partially free. With a little digging, the rest of the necklace emerged from deep in the soil. There was an ornament at the bottom of the chain, but it was caked with dirt. She was certain it had been shiny gold as it fell through the air. Her fingers rubbed the dirt away to find a lightning bolt, the gold metal dark with age.

She rubbed the lightning bolt clean with a corner of her dress, leaving smudges of dirt and black tarnish on the fabric, and slipped the chain over her head. The bolt was the same design as the one on the wooden figurehead. The storm symbol reminded her of snippets from her fever dreams that she had thought of only occasionally in the six years since her illness—vague memories of great winds and wild storms raging; lightning striking ferociously and thunder that shook the bones of the earth. There had been a storm outside as she lay delirious with fever, the first big storm in years. It was what had caused the nightmares, her father told her.

“Amba.” Her father’s voice pulled her from her reflections. He was walking toward her across the field. She wondered if he had seen her talking to empty air and digging in the dirt for the necklace. Shame flooded her. She was not at her duties, and she had probably given him yet another reason to doubt her sanity. Face burning, she ran to the second field without waiting for him to ask why she hadn’t come to let him know if the grubs were ready to move.

That night, for the first time in six years, the storm dreams returned. She was outside, in the fields, barefoot, and wearing only her nightdress. The Wind Moon was full above her.

“Storm-bringer,” the earth called to her in a voice as dusty as the soil. A breeze rustled the fabric about her legs and carried the scent of death and decay to her nostrils. Through her bare feet she felt the thirst in the soil, and the pain of the earth became her own. The hollow beneath her breastbone burned like hot coals. Empty. So empty. Not empty for her mother, she knew now. That pain was in her heart. This place waited for something else to fill it.

In her dream, she knew what she must do, and she knew how to do it. She turned her face to the sky and breathed in the air, as if pulling it all the way inside her mind, down into her lungs and down further still. She rooted her feet to the ground, feeling the soil between her toes, and drew the energy of the earth up through her legs and into her middle. When the sky energy and the earth energy met in that hollow place, she called on her power.

It came.

Amba’s mind soared with the wind and her legs grew deep into the soil. Her hair lifted in a nimbus around her head as she became the conduit that connected earth and sky. The tremendous forces of nature were no longer a mystery to her. She stood, arms upraised, exalted, filled with a terrible power that could command the heavens to her bidding. She pulled moisture from the air into the dark clouds and tugged the impotent heat lightning into a single bolt that she hurled down to the earth. It hit the ground like a great hammer, and the thunder that erupted shook the ground. The wind blew mightily and the rain started. A storm that could drench the whole world.

People came to her then, all her distant neighbors, all the folk of the county, all the people of the land. They begged her to stop but still she brought the rain. Every creek bed, gully and valley flooded; peoples’ homes washed away. Sparkers died by the thousands, drowning beneath her feet or struggling to the surface only to drown in the heavy rain. The lights went out and the fans went off. People were hungry; then they starved; then they died.

Amba woke, screaming.

Liath looked at Amba’s tongue, then felt her cheeks and between her shoulder blades. Father had been unable to console Amba when she woke from her nightmare and had summoned the herb woman when she remained afraid, even in the light of day.

“There’s no fever,” Liath told Amba. She stared at her eyes a long time before adding, “The clouds there are unchanged.” She had tended Amba and her mother when they fell ill, as well as many others that awful season. Some had died and some had lived, but Amba was the only one on whose eyes the fever had bestowed clouds.

“Are you sure you won’t tell me what’s been bothering you?” Liath asked again. Her expression was strong but kindly, the lines in her face as coarse as the black hair shot through with gray. Amba felt tempted to confide in her.

What could she tell Liath? That her name might be more than just a name? That a man on an invisible ship was trying to wake an ancient power inside her? That using that power would bring such storms that it would kill all the sparkers? People that Liath cared for would suffer and die if that happened. Maybe Liath would as well. Amba just shook her head and retreated to the same silence where her father carried all his burdens.

“Get dressed,” Liath said.

Amba pulled her thin work-dress over her shift, leaving the necklace hidden in the folds of her nightdress. She had woken from her nightmare holding the lightning bolt in such a grip that her palm was sticky with blood.

Liath opened the bedroom door. Father waited in the other room. “She’s not ill,” Liath told him, “and I see no sign of fever. Or madness.” The deep worry lines in her father’s face softened slightly. “Perhaps she’s just been working too hard,” she said, patting him on the shoulder maternally, though they were of a similar age. “Perhaps you both have been. Let her rest a few days and see how she does. Send for me if you need me again.”

With that, Liath let herself out the front door to ride the borrowed donkey back to its farm and then walk the rest of the way to town.

Father told Amba, “Go to bed and rest.”

She obediently climbed into bed, and he surprised her by bending suddenly to ruffle her hair before he left for the fields. He had lost most of a day’s work taking care of her, she knew. She lay back, but she feared to sleep, feared to dream. At last, stress claimed its price, though. Her eyes closed. She slept. And the storm dreams came again.

This time she woke before she started screaming.

Amba lay awake, her heart slowing to normal before she got up. The gray light of dawn was just easing into the sky. She tiptoed into the main room of the house, listening, but heard no sound. This was the time of day that she and Father usually arose, but she suspected he had worked late into the night and had not yet woken.

She had to make the ship leave, had to tell the ginger-haired man that she would not do the things he wanted, and she had to do it when her father wouldn’t see her talking to the air. She eased from the house still in her nightdress and still barefoot.

The tilled soil was rough and uneven under her feet. One hand clutched near her throat and she realized that she was gripping the necklace, though she didn’t remember putting it on.

Amba knew what she meant to say, but her mind remained half in her dreams and the place beneath her breastbone felt full and heavy and warm. It was confusing. Like being two people at once, the girl of the storms and the girl of the farm.

The ship was bobbing at anchor in the first field, as she had known it would be. She neared the ship, and the ginger-haired man came to the railing. He smiled. “You have awoken your birthright, Storm-bringer. I can feel it.”

“I can’t do it,” she said. “I know what you want, and I can’t do it to Father. I can’t do it to any of them. We need the sparkers more than we need the rain.” Perhaps he was an old spirit, and didn’t understand the world as it was now. If the sparkers died, people would starve.

“You can’t decide the fate of the world until you have knowledge of the world. Use that power of yours. Feel what’s going on around you, and then make up your mind what you will and won’t do.”

“It won’t matter. I can’t bring the rain if it hurts the people.”

Amba turned to walk back to the house when a jolt shocked through her bare feet. Father must have moved the larger grubs to the first field, and one lay beneath her now. Everything about the creature felt wrong in a way that made her stomach clench as if she might vomit. Almost without thought, she tapped her power.

It swept through her—just as it had in her dream—out the top of her head to the sky and down through her feet into the earth. Her legs were on fire with energy, and her scalp prickled as her hair lifted. Her entire body became a conduit.

Unlike her dream, this time she truly connected to the earth and sky. And suddenly she understood. Everything.

She felt the energy of the sparkers moving through the soil and that of the heat lightning above. She understood the dry earth and the perpetually angry clouds. She understood that people farming more and more of the sparkers kept lightning from reaching the ground—like rubbing two cloths on amber and trying to bring them together—and that was what held off the rain.

The earth was barren, the crops gone and the animals dying. Her people stood on the brink of destruction. The sparkers weren’t saving people, they were killing them.

Even more importantly, she understood her power now. It wasn’t striving to unleash the storms for the sake of violence. It spoke the language of nature and had heard the land screaming out its need. It ached only to bring balance and healing to her world.

Amba distantly heard the bang of a door. She glanced back toward the house and saw her father standing on the porch. She wondered what he thought, seeing her in her nightdress in the middle of the field, her hair flying about her. She wondered if he could see the glow of power she felt burning her skin.

Her heart broke for him. He would never understand if she did this thing, none of them would, but she could see now that their world was dying a slow, dry death. She knew it as surely as she knew that she held the key to their survival, if only she had the courage to begin. With an effort, Amba turned from her father.

She didn’t bother to step clear of the ship. The ship couldn’t be harmed by the storms. It was a part of them as much as she was. Perhaps those men sailed the clouds in the sky as well as the clouds in her eyes.

Amba lifted her arms, tipped her head back, and allowed the power to explode from her. Releasing it was a sensation as familiar as breathing. She laughed, all else forgotten, as the heavens answered her with a rising wind and a bolt of lightning that streaked down from the clouds toward her. She recognized the voice of the wind. She knew the lightning like a friend. It struck the ground at her feet, and the peal of thunder that accompanied it was majestic.

The rains began, fat drops, pelting from the sky. The smell of moist air and earth filled her nostrils. Rain ran in rivulets down her face and arms. It continued to intensify, falling with a force hard enough to sting.

“Amba, have you done this?”

Her father had to shout over the storm. He must have run to her when the rain started. The pounding water slicked his dark hair to his head. The roar of rain cascading to the ground made him hard to hear, though he stood at her side. In his voice she heard the plea that things were not bigger than his understanding, that her strange behavior and the storm were no more than a coincidence.

She reached out and took him by the shoulders. “It’ll be all right, Father. Everything will be all right.”

The grubs were the first to die, drowning in puddles no larger than her hand. The sparkers stayed underground longer, but finally they, too, had to emerge from the sodden soil to take their chances above. Amba stayed outside for hours, reveling in the rains that lashed her. Never had she felt so whole.

Once the rains began, the ship weighed anchor and sailed back the way it had come. Beneath the roar of the storm, Amba finally heard the quarter winds in the sails and the splash of the ocean beneath the hull.

Father left too, on the task she had assigned him. The people had to start building waterwheels and repairing their windmills. Grain stores needed to be gathered in a central, dry place. Most important, Father had to see that word got to the Wheat-singers and the Wave-tamers and all the other old families in the county. They needed to come to her so that, together, they could learn the true meaning of their names and discover how to tap their powers.

There was much work ahead for them all.