Beneath Ceaseless Skies #83 Read online

  “Well, neither do I,” I said. Lady Merrion rolled her eyes with evident disbelief. “You didn’t even speak to her, Eveline. All she did was show you her gardens.”

  “Perhaps that’s her way of talking.” Lady Merrion roughly shoved a lock of hair away from her face. I had angered her more than she was willing to show. “It’s a moot point, mon cher, whether you want to talk to her or not, because I sent a message this afternoon to request that she see you. I don’t know what’s going on in your head, but I suspect it isn’t pretty, and the Viscountess Landler is the only one with a real chance of unlocking it. Good day.”

  Her messenger came into the solarium about an hour later. Lady Merrion, he said, had retired early, and the Earl had gone out to see the stable cat’s new kittens, an activity he judged less likely to result in bites and scratches than conversing with his wife. Besides, the messenger said, there was something in the way of a message from Viscountess Landler, and it was not addressed to the masters of the house.

  “It’s for you, Dr. Grey. Got your name right here.” He displayed a dirty scrap of paper that had been folded into quarters, with my name printed prominently on the front. “She weren’t at home, I don’t think, but I found this stuck up against the gates. Not in the gates, you understand, like it’d be if somebody placed it there a-purpose; but plastered against them, like it were carried on the wind.”

  I unfolded the paper. At the top and center were the flaming sword, olive branch, and open gate of the von Reis crest. Below, in blocky manuscript printing that took up half the page, was a single word: Come.

  * * *

  The fog over Landler Abbey was even denser than before, and the moonlight that fought to pierce it turned the common garden features into fearsome and fantastic shapes. A mat of clematis flowers draped over a trellis looked like a hanging body in the distance, and a statue of a cheerful peasant maid at harvest put me in mind of a far grimmer reaper. When I glanced at the jewelfish pond, I could not escape the resemblance that the ancient white fish bore to part of a corpse.

  But the real horror, of course, was waiting in the hedge maze.

  She was standing near the entrance when I first saw her—waiting. She was not very tall, but here the yew reached only to her shoulder. The hood of her cloak was drawn about her head, covering her indefinitely colored hair.

  She was not easy to follow. She moved with perfect silence in the fog, and soon we had descended so deeply that her shrouded head was no longer visible above the hedge-tops. Once, a sound like a woman’s scream echoed in the distance, and I crashed through the hedges in the direction of the voice. But the yews were thick, and the sound did not come again to guide me. I resigned myself to following the path, and hoped I would not arrive too late in the garden at the maze’s heart.

  But I did, of course.

  It was over in a matter of seconds.

  She was standing over the unused planting bed, her purple cloak billowing in an unfelt wind that did nothing to disturb the fog. I shouted Gethsemane’s name, and I swear I saw the black earth stir beneath the von Reis crest. She turned to me, silent as the moon. Where her eyes should have been, there was nothing but a puckered stretch of red.

  She raised her hand to me. She held nothing, but her long nails were caked with black earth. One skeletal finger pointed at me, accusing.

  “Yes,” I said. “Me too.”

  The dead woman beckoned to me. I slipped and stumbled across the wet grass, and she swept closer, closer, until her rotting face was inches from mine. She traced a line across my throat, her hand cold as ice. Her skin stank of damp. I held my breath as she reached for me, as her hands closed around me—

  And she was gone, in a blaze of crimson light that burned my eyes like iron.

  “Professor!” Lady Merrion cried, embracing me with the arm that was not supporting her lantern. She was wonderfully warm and solid, smelling of amber and rose. I openly wept, and would have fallen to my knees in relief, if she had not forced me to remain upright.

  “We have to run,” she said. “Something in the gardens is furious.”

  To this day, I do not know how we found our way out of the maze.

  * * *

  We returned to Landler Abbey the next morning, accompanied by the Earl and a large shovel, which—fortunately or unfortunately—we did not have to use.

  She had not been buried very deeply. I shoveled dirt out of the raised potting bed with both hands, stopping when my fingers brushed something solid. It was a military medal on a crimson ribbon, stamped with a sword and an olive branch and the letter G. The finger curved around it was shriveled and boney, more like a corpse several years dead than a woman buried the previous night.

  Without a word, Lady Merrion knelt beside me and swept the black earth back over the bones.

  * * *

  IV.

  Last year, the gardens of Landler Abbey were opened to the public. Lady Xavior and a number of ladies in the neighborhood set the date for the tenth anniversary of the battle that defeated Branfolk, “as a celebration of the peace that Viscountess Landler had so little time to enjoy” before her mysterious disappearance.

  As the caretakers of the Abbey, the Earl and Lady Merrion had little choice but to attend—though I hear the latter left scandalously early, and the former spent the whole of the evening shepherding guests away from the hedge maze. I suspect that this effort was unnecessary, considering that the maze’s new path ends within twenty feet of the entrance.

  Even if it did not, I doubt most strongly that anyone else would have been able to reach the maze’s heart. Lady Merrion and I, the guilty ones, had found it without trouble; but when the Earl went in alone, at the beginning of the new renovations, he could not even penetrate so far as the place where the limestone steps begin.

  Although Lady Merrion, who now frequents the garden unaccompanied, has found a great multitude of jewelfish in the garden fountains, she has never discovered the huge white creature that caused me such disquiet. She claims also that the dense white fog has never returned to Landler Abbey.

  And though she promises that she will always be there to rescue me, I, too, have never gone back.

  I suspect that when the day comes for my return—and it is coming; I know by the hooded, limping figure who follows me in my dreams—I will not desire rescuing.

  Copyright © 2011 Megan Arkenberg

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  Megan Arkenberg is a student in Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in Ideomancer, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Fantasy Magazine, among other places. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance and the historical fiction e-zine Lacuna.

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  PRINCESS COURAGE

  by Nadia Bulkin

  I remember when I was named. I was young, barely fourteen, and still had my tedious birth name: a long string of syllables that I never felt any connection to, especially since my mother had her own pet names for me and my father never called me anything. My father took me on a late summer boar hunt, and in the confusion of the dusky half-light, he and I were separated from all but one of his guard.

  It was a large, angry boar that came for my father and made his horse throw him, and it was I who dismounted and stuck the boar with my spear before it could hurt him. As soon as my spear found the boar’s underbelly it began to clamber toward me, spitting blood. It didn’t seem to care that it was wedging the point deeper and deeper into itself, and that disregard for its own life was sickening. I was desperate, it was monstrous, and I could tell it hated me.

  When I could feel the infernal heat of its mouth I did the only thing I could think of: I pulled out the spear, letting out a gush of innards and buckling the boar’s back legs, then stabbed it again before it could charge. I drove the grotty tip all the way into the grass; I watched it die. But it lived in my nightmares, first as The Boar and then as bigger monsters, cloaked monsters—I would dream about cousin
s who wished me dead and servants I had sent away and they would turn with a snort into wretched, skewered things.

  For this deed they named me Prince Courage, and after my father died when I was twenty-five I became King Courage, Reader of the Secret Atlas.

  I’m not a fast reader—I’m a careful reader, and I wanted to be sure of where to take the empire next. The contents of the Atlas were foretold, but the path itself was a mystery. My father had laid rightful claim to the mountain range to the west that he named the Blue Belt, as well as the cold plains to the north that he named the Span—he and his scribes spent many nights sketching rivers and settlements and the final hide-outs of old, undestined peoples into the Atlas. I had visited all the regions of our empire, but when I stood on the Blue Belt watchtower and looked upon our little cities and even smaller villages, I must admit that I had doubt. My visits were always overcast. I felt very far from the light of order.

  I could not see the way forward, so my wife Glory—that was not her birth name either, but the lord of her city had introduced her as The Glory of Ellake, and no name suited her better—asked Crossgold for counsel. Crossgold was a friend of my father’s: a wizened man, and a renowned first-explorer of the far reaches of the world. He told vivid stories about wild horses he’d tamed and canoes he’d carved out of trees. My father had shown him the Secret Atlas and now Crossgold went to its alcove all the time; he knew it better than I did. I was so lost in fog when he arrived at the palace that I couldn’t wait to fall in step behind him. I would have followed Crossgold anywhere, just then.

  “There is a beautiful forest to the west of the Blue Belt,” said Crossgold. “Trees greener than emeralds. Brisk weather, too chill for disease. Solid timber. Good hunting. Your people would be happy there. Summer is a good season for moving over mountains.” He tapped his folded chin. “Those pines are better than the spruces of Derraba Forest. See my cane?” It was stout and varnished with rosin—rough but noble, like Crossgold himself.

  “Better to tame this forest than take the empire south past Ellake?” My children were young, and I thought they might enjoy a warmer, saltier climate. I admit this was selfish, shallow logic, but I had no other logic to rely on.

  “Read the Atlas, son. It’s all foretold,” said Crossgold, a smile breaking into his face like a crack in porcelain. “The crowded forest, the wild knot, languishes in need of a marlinspike. You know the page. It’s calling out for order that only you can give. It calls for you. My King.”

  I made the announcement within a month, with our black and green banners fluttering two-by-two behind me. I associated that windswept sound with my father, and it made me look westward instead of down at the crowd—for a moment I actually felt lifted up by the spirit of progress and actually believed in my place at the helm of our expansion. People would whisper later that I’d received this plan from a divine dream—that I had seen a starry woman in green point west. I never corrected them.

  * * *

  I had to wait for the mist to lift to see it, but the forest was as beautiful as Crossgold promised. He’d traveled with us over the Blue Belt and the night before the journey’s final leg he raised his canteen to the still-distant trees and said he was leaving, because he had business in Halzi. To me, he whispered “Turn the wheel of order.” That is the mission of kings: to turn the wheel off paved roads and take our chariot into the wild. I couldn’t sleep after that.

  The next morning I walked into the rich and fragrant forest, staked a burning torch bearing our banner into the soil next to the violets and bloodroot, and so claimed it as our own.

  The forest was teeming with life: large-headed pigs with tusks long or short or helical, wild red dogs with cat-faces, deer with antler prongs knotted together into nets of bone, bears that climbed trees, birds that wept. There was also a tribe of primitives living in the canopy that pelted my men with acorns. These primitives were hard to spot, and skittish—cowardly, unresponsive folk, certainly not civilized, but that was no shock since they lived in a green sea of chaos.

  The pigs were brought on skewers and the dogs were brought on leashes and the deer were brought on men’s shoulders and one bear head was placed at my feet, but the birds I only heard. They were too fast for our archers. As for the primitives: a dozen men in my guard, led by my top lieutenant Turner, sniffed out one of the tribe’s dens and came back tired and muddy and satisfied. I was eating breakfast. They presented me with neckwear woven out of leaves and strips of hide. “One of the females was wearing it,” Turner said. I took it in my hands and frowned when I noticed dried blood on the leaves.

  “They’re not more than animals,” said Turner. I remembered the wolf that the men in my father’s guard had strung up in the palace grounds when I was a child—it was partially skinned, with its guts hanging out. They said it was a warning to other beasts. My father congratulated them on the successful hunt, because this wolf had eaten two palace fawns and my mother was afraid it would eat me next, but I vomited. I thought about those guts coming out of my father, or out of me.

  “Don’t go out of your way to be cruel,” I said, and my guard smiled amongst themselves. “You’re not barbarians.”

  “We’ve been traveling for weeks, King Courage. Helping the settlers up and down the mountain. Staking tents. Days and days crossing empty plains. The guard needed some sport. We were losing our minds.”

  I understood that. Despite the three months I had spent with our battalion safeguarding a city in Ellake, Turner was the warrior of the two of us. My father always told me, let warriors be the judge of battle. So with another gentle reminder—”brutality is beneath you, we are the people of the Secret Atlas”—I thanked them for their reconnaissance, and decided to give the necklace to my daughter Faith.

  * * *

  Two years passed before I met Isadore the Blue.

  I returned to the capital city and held Glory’s hand as she gave birth to our third child, a daughter named Chastity—after Valor and Faith, Glory and I decided to stop waiting for a child’s virtue to define itself. In the forest, our people were busy collecting timber, forging roads, building settlements, drawing and re-drawing maps. Each week I received energetic, anxious updates from the frontier. Glory urged me to pay them another visit to show them solidarity, to boost their morale.

  “Who can give them hope but their King?” she said, her voice breaking. She was herself a settler’s daughter—it was during the siege in Ellake, when I wore armor, that she first laid eyes on me. How those eyes had smoldered! But I suspect it led Glory to believe I was a man like my father. She showed me a letter from the governor of a new settlement deep in the heart of the forest (if indeed forests have hearts). The man pled for me to come break its ground, and Glory urged me: “Go.”

  So I went. I named the settlement after her. “Glory-Arn,” I called it, and went on, “May it be a prosperous beacon of the Secret Atlas.”

  I looked at the settlers because I didn’t want to look at the wall of trees-like-towers surrounding their settlement, and it is true, what they say: settlers love their kings better than do city-folk. Some in the capital derided me, but not here, never here. These people knew what mattered. They understood the simple truth of our mission. They didn’t have the luxury of bickering about irrelevant passages of the Atlas’s appendices—they were living the Secret Atlas simply by planting themselves here, and all they wanted from me was reassurance. Their unquestioning adulation shook my knees. That is love. I told myself protect them, protect them—the weight was terrible. The woods shot up like teeth out of the soft, gummy earth. We were near a massive swamp, the governor told me. “But no need to worry, King Courage,” the little man said, “We will drain it!”

  The settlers of Glory-Arn were showing me the wheelbarrows and shovels they would use to dig these drainage ditches when I saw a young girl standing just beyond the circle of cleared earth, under the veil of foliage. There was nothing to her. Just a thin waif, with a blue handprint on her face—it l
ooked like a stain. Long fingers, that handprint. The blue index finger stretched from under her right eye to over her left eyebrow. Her smaller sister had the same mark, only in bright pomegranate red. It was the same hand, I realized. I imagined some occult ceremony where children marched one by one to a painted chieftain, who’d hit them in the face and brand them as his own. What savagery, I thought, what coarseness. I knew immediately that they were part of that primitive tree tribe.

  “Oh! Little ferals!” cried the settlers—the sort of coo my children used to call puppies—and several women began trying to coax the two girls to come forward and pay their respects to me. The governor bowed toward me and explained, “You see them from time to time. They’re harmless. The women have been teaching them words. They call themselves Night Deer.”

  “Doe-in-the-Dark,” said the blue-faced girl, startling all of us. She stepped closer despite her sister’s protests, but hesitated after she put one bare and soiled foot in the clearing. Her eyes were locked on mine. Maybe it was my jeweled crown—no doubt they had no riches of their own. As she stood there frozen, one brave settler grabbed her wrist and wrenched it up and around as if her arm was a boneless vine.

  “What’s that on her hand?” I saw a dark glimmer before he threw her wrist back in disgust. “She’s covered in blood!”

  The settlers gasped and I first thought that the girl was injured. But she didn’t stumble and she was staring right at me, holding out her hands as if she thought that was what we wanted. The settlers reeled away from her when she showed them her palms, and I saw that the blood couldn’t have been hers. She’d probably killed an animal.