Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (30 page)

Satisfaction flares in her eyes when I nod, and she holds the bundle out to me.

“
Here,” she says. “You take her. You’ll give her something better, eh?”

My paws twitch, but I don’t reach out for the bundle.

She tries again. “Think of your son.”

When I do, when I remember the perfection of his pudgy paws, of the needle-sharp kitten teeth, of the milk and flesh smell of him, I reach out. The baby is heavier than I remember.

“
You’ll take care of her, won’t ya?” the maid says. The anxious morning sunlight reveals her features. “You’ll give her a good life. Better than mine.”

It is, as always, easier not to reply. That is the way of my People. So she turns away, reassured, when she should have listened to what I did not say.

Lily:

After I’ve given her my baby, I go back to the attic and what I have there. The fairy baby and Mrs. Smith’s big blue bottle. The baby looks at me with its dark eyes. Its skin looks older, withering.

I sing to it while everyone sleeps, down in the darkened house. I pretend it’s my baby, that we will leave soon and go away to the country, to a little house, a little garden where there is sunshine and no soot. But even while I sing, I see it fading away.

Three drops, never more, never more, the doctor said. I put much more than that in the glass of water and drink it down.

On the bed, I curl up with the changeling, and pull the blanket and my coat around us in a nest of drowsy warmth. We lie there together, and I sing a song that sounds a little like Violet’s and pretend it’s my own baby there. The fairy baby doesn’t breathe, although it watches me, its features fading, and slowly the darkness swallows me, and it, and we are gone.

Mela:

I take the baby to a gate I know, a doorway that is watched by the fairies, and pay the watchmen there. They eye the infant in my arms with covetous looks, but they do not dare meddle with me. I take it to the Queen of the Old Country, and there I trade it for what she has for me: a tiny key that will unlock a drawer, a drawer full of sunshine and memories.

I slide the drawer open. It is narrow, one of many making up the brass-bound apothecary’s chest. The drawer’s thick walls make the inner compartment, lined with golden foil, smaller still.

The interior shimmers with a memory: mid-afternoon sunlight filtered through acacia leaves. My cub and I lay on the mudflats near the water, the chalky blue and gray water. The air smelled of the shift between rainy season and drought, when the sun-warmed mud begins to dry and curl at the edges. A big-headed baby baboon perched nearby, high in a yellow acacia’s canopy, picking at the bark to make it bleed sap—a sweet, sugary whiff on the wind.

We watched it because the pair of flat-headed basilisks that spent their days quarreling over the division of the tree’s many-branched territory were working together for once. They were creeping up from two sides, and between them, they might be its match, if the nearby mother didn’t notice what was happening soon enough.

But she did, she does. The baby is saved, and the two basilisks driven off with furious shrieks. All is well. All is well.

My hand trembles on the drawer’s knob. It wants to slide shut again, now that the last of its sunlight is gone. I keep it open as long as I can, but when my fingers’ strength fades, it closes and cannot be opened again.

The Fairy Queen held a black-haired, blue-eyed baby in her lap and sang to it. And when she had finished her song, she took it downstairs, for servants are scarce in the Old Country, and it was time for this one’s tenure to begin.

“
Rare Pears and Greengages” takes its title from Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” It takes place in Victorian times, in a world where Fairy overlaps the human world, and both worlds emerge the worse for the encounter. In flavor, it is somewhat influenced by Kipling and Dickens as well.

The narrative moves between two POVs, one a transplanted African shapeshifter who has lost her child, and the other an abused household servant faced with an unwanted pregnancy.

A Twine of Flame

Annie dreamed of fire. Where once she would have feared the dancing flames or stretched out winter cold hands to catch their warmth, now she felt only weariness and resignation and disgust. She counted the flames and thought of numbers, wondering how many deaths were credited to her now.

When she woke, she found herself in fire as well. The sprites had once again worked themselves loose from under her skin, and they circled her as though the air were full of flaming feathers, shedding waves of heat like chickens being plucked. The grass, already dry as last year’s noodles, smoked and smoldered. At the rock’s edges, leaves of lamb’s quarter succumbed to the heat, crumpling inward as they withered. Annie sighed and held her arms open.

The sprites flowed back into her like water, pouring along her wrists and elbows, wriggling in under the muscles like fading wisps. As always, she wondered at the sensation. She felt their movement, but not the heat that could have cooked her to the bone.

The sky overhead was autumn’s chilly blue, but she did not know if winter would come, not in these years of mingled deaths and miracles. Along the deserted road, corruption splotched the fields with spots like blackened sores, fringed with icy mushrooms, as though someone had been raising the undead.

Annie had little to fear from the zombies that might rise from those dark clusters. The flames that companioned her would kill them long before they could touch her. Still, they were unpleasant company. Two weeks ago, she had been trailed along the road by a pack of them, an entire village’s worth, it had looked like. After she’d killed two, the rest of them had the sense to stay back, but still they followed, staring at her and trying to talk. They expelled air from their rotting lungs, forcing it out in groans and phlegmy bubbles of single words. “Giiirrrlll.” “Fiiiiiirrreee.” “Please.”

Once she had stretched and peed among the ditch grasses, she took the road again. She no longer carried anything. She was lucky the flame sprites allowed her any clothing at all.

Up ahead a hamlet huddled in the road’s curve. The gates were closed, a good sign. They had not succumbed yet to the undead, but they might or might not welcome Annie. She was another hand against the encroaching monsters but she would be also another mouth to feed from ever-scantier supplies. And if they had heard of the Flame Plague, they would be watching her. It was risky, but there were so many lives there. Enough to free her? She didn’t think so but it would put her closer, much closer.

She checked her clothing: intact for the most part and the only burns along one sleeve, easily torn away and discarded. Smoke curled from three chimneys to join together in a single, reaching pillar. Perhaps there would be soup, thick bean soup with cabbage and chunks of sausage. Her mouth watered.

Two teenagers, all knobby wrists and haunted eyes, guarded the gate. She tried to bear herself like an asset, something of use, not something that would drain their resources. They looked at her and shouted as she came up the road. One motioned her back while another ran to fetch a priest.

The holy man’s hollow eyes were glittering pits set in a stubbled face. Townspeople leaned from the walls to watch. Their faces were like sooty, smudged fingerprints, hard to make out.

“
Where are you from, girl?” the priest asked. His breath stank with starvation. He was denying himself for the sake of his flock. He saw himself as their savior, that was his weakness. Could she play the part of a message from God? She was not sure what God would have to say to these abandoned people. Or to her. Or even if God existed anymore. He might have been torn apart, like these lands, by the ever-warring sorcerers.

She bowed her head to him and stammered. “I ran away from bandits. They took my horse and pack.”

“
She’ll lead them to us!” someone hissed, but the priest held up a hand.

“
Where are you from, though?” he asked again.

“
Canal du Midi, on the coast. My father sent me inland, to escape the storms.

He nodded. Everyone knew of the storms harrying the coast, none of them natural, leaving behind pools of tainted, murky water that poisoned everything that touched or drank from them. Wind elementals, twisted by sorcerers vying for power, drank the souls of those unwary enough to be caught outside at night or in storms.

The priest studied her. She dropped her eyes, trying to look subservient, meek. Unthreatening. She could see doubt warring with compassion on his face, and she let her head droop as though weary for a moment, hoping to touch his heart. At length he beckoned her inside.

They fed her onion soup and a single slice of black bread, full of grit that crunched between her teeth. Far fewer of them than she had guessed. Two dozen of them altogether, the youngest a babe in arms, the oldest a grandmother. Six able-bodied men.

After the meal, they told their stories. They took it in turns to patrol the walls and watch for zombies, four at a time. They had made it through months of hardship so far in this way. Every two hours they switched. She gathered that if she stayed, she would be a welcome addition to their ranks.

They laid out bedrolls in the common room and set no one to guard them while they slept. Convenient. She curled up with her eyes closed, feeling the sprites brewing beneath her skin. They were impatient. She let them wait until the next change of guards had passed and the two newcomers laid down to rest, their breathing become regular and rhythmic.

When she finally let the sprites loose, they flickered out into the darkness, each taking a separate person. She lay there, listening to the catch of breath each time a flame sank into its new host. They would not feel the building heat as anything other than an odd flutter, a touch of dizziness. The lucky would never know what had happened.

She pulled herself from her blankets and crept out, not bothering to close the door behind her.

The hungry flames would begin feeding soon. The bodies would lie slumbering, smoke tendrils curling from their nostrils, their ears, their eyes, their open and gaping mouths. Eventually some would collapse into ash. When the patrollers returned, when they stooped in horror and disbelief, the flames would rush them. This time they’d control their hosts better, to lurk for additional travelers or unwary refugees. Eventually, though, everyone in the village would burn, and her debt would be a little further along to being repaid.

Moonlight scrawled its impatient signature on the icy shingles. She didn’t see the priest coming until he lunged out of the darkness near the gate.

“
Fire-ridden!” His arm clamped over her throat, throttling her. Most of her flames were gone, she was weak, but the two she had left surged from her skin, flaring out to burn him. He released her and staggered back with a cry. Someone shouted in the distance.

She left him with the flames dancing in his eyes, blinding him, and darted down an alleyway. The gate was deserted—everyone was back tending to the priest or some other victim, no doubt. Her luck held—no zombies lurking close outside. The high moon shed a pure white light across the frosty landscape, but she slipped off the well-lit road and made her way to a huddle of haystacks. She curled into the farthest one, beneath a trio of beech trees.

By the time she roused in sunlight, the flames had returned to her. She pulled away from the haystack and let them dance in its depths. Within a few moments, the flames roared, reaching upward. A few raced off in other directions, wavering through the grass. She knew from experience eventually they would meet wall or brook and rebound to her, consuming what they could along the way.

She thought back about the tiny town. Two dozen souls, perhaps. So many, yet only a small portion of her obligation. So many flames to be fed still.

She continued along the road.

Annie neared the town of Barbaruile on sunset’s heels, the sun gleaming over her left shoulder, sitting on the horizon like a fat egg of red flame. The narrow road’s chalky stones led up towards the town through thickets of small, trees whose dark, waxy leaves rattled together in the wind, obscuring the upward view. The roadway wound back and forth, climbing the steep hill as best it could. She was panting hard by the time she was a third of the way up. Further on she sat down by the side of the road to rest, looking back over the landscape and its patchwork of small fields shaggy with untended growth.

The sun sank deeper and the dry leaves rattled like the clatter of rolling dice as her breathing slowed. The flames inside her leaped as though in recognition of some other presence and she cried out into the darkness as it advanced upon her, “Who’s there? Come out now!” The power of the flames was in her voice.