Beneath Ceaseless Skies #176 Read online

  Then one day I found the servant we had first glimpsed in the streets, his breath now still as mountain air. When I touched his chest, I felt only a faint murmur of heartbeat, an unheard whisper. I backed away, unsure what had done this to him but also never more sure of anything in my life.

  I drew Oovis a picture of her parents in the dirt so that she would see, would know my concern.

  “My parents will live and they will die,” she said, letting her hand pass through the temple flame. It did not burn her. It burned no one who ate of the root. “This is the great thing I was meant for.”

  I drew a cage around them.

  “Nothing can free them,” she said.

  I drew her, with X’s for eyes. I drew her hair. I drew unhappiness and failure.

  “A failure?” She touched her hard hair. The haze lifted from her eyes. She had not eaten that day, and the elation only lasted as long as the root coursed through the blood. “I can’t be a failure. It’s not what I’m meant to be.”

  I nodded, gesturing to the road we must leave upon.

  She shook her head. “I cannot walk,” she said. “I cannot walk away from this.”

  I knelt at her feet, so that she would know that I intended to carry her. And carry her I did.

  * * *

  In a pack around my waist, I carried two roots, enough for the Queen and enough for Oovis once she had fulfilled her destiny and saved her parents from the fate she had made for them.

  The road was a weak enemy, the banyo trees’ withered voices no longer frightening. They had aged. The forest had aged, grown taller in the time we’d been away. How long had it been? Longer than we knew.

  At the edge of the forest, we saw Mu. What was left of it. Ruins of crumbled stone. The stench of buildings no longer occupied, dusty, full of must and mold. The roofs caved in. Cracks in the ground, the dirt showing. Banyos toppled, their bark ash grey with death. There were no centaurs in the fields, no children in the streets. At the palace, too, no guards stood outside the window.

  “What’s happened?” Oovis said, dismounting.

  “Earthquakes,” said a familiar voice. The Queen stepped from the front door of the palace. “At first they were infrequent. Once a year or so, you remember.”

  Slight tremors in the ground. A crack or two. I remembered.

  “Then they grew worse. The last two years, they’ve happened every week, at least. Everyone has gone. Said the city is unstable, that there are better places elsewhere. I could not stop them. They did not invite me. They made the decision to leave without me, and I knew that they did not need me. And they told me that if I came, they would rise against me, would kill me in my sleep. My own people. I could not leave my city anyway. It is mine. It has been mine, the only thing I can call mine, for most of my life.” The Queen fell on her knees. “Did you bring it?” she cried. “The city will be mine forever.”

  The girl with golden hair reached her hand into the pack around my belly. I felt her grip hold of the root, but she did not pull it out.

  “It’s gone,” she said. “The root must have fallen from the bag on our journey home.”

  Oovis wants it for her own, I thought. Still, I did not tell the Queen that she was lying. I would give the girl with golden hair whatever she wanted. Or maybe, I told myself, I would toss the root into the river on the way to find the others.

  The Queen wept. She fell to her knees and pounded on the dirt, a tantrum befitting only royalty. When she brought her fists up, they were covered in dirt the brown of her hair. She did not notice.

  “Take what you will,” she said. “Steal what you must. I am done with. I will die alone.”

  “You could come with us,” Oovis said. “You might not be a Queen, but you could be happy.”

  The Queen shook her head. “It’s too late for me,” she said. “I’ve done things only a Queen can live with.”

  Oovis knelt and wrapped her arms around the Queen. Together they shook.

  I ventured into the palace of ruins. Holes in the ceiling had let rainwater leak through, creating little ponds on the stone floor. I stomped my hooves through them, letting the water splash onto my fur. It felt good to be clear of the root’s power. I searched through the palace rooms, vast empty halls. Bugs had eaten through the family portraits on the walls; they were grotesque as ghosts now, ugly things.

  In one of these halls, I found my voice cowering in the corner of a room. I bent down and blew the dust from it and swallowed it whole, unsure if the other centaur voices, too, would return, or if the voice, trembling in a corner, was for me and me only.

  I yelled into the room, a word indistinguishable from words. The sound echoed back, the greatest I had ever heard.

  My great thing was done. One destiny fulfilled.

  * * *

  Outside the palace I kept quiet before the Queen, whom Oovis had soothed into a stupor. Oovis wished her goodbye and climbed atop my back.

  “Take me to the river,” she said, “the one beside my hut.”

  I led her to the river, awaiting the moment when I would reveal my newfound voice.

  She climbed down and grabbed the roots from my bag. Stop, I started to say, but when I saw that she was tossing them into the river, I bit my tongue. We watched as they bobbed their way down, down, through the rocks and over the waterfall, where they would wash up on the fish people’s shore, if there still were fish people. If they still had a shore.

  “That was a good thing you did,” I said.

  Oovis jumped. “What did you say?”

  “Throwing the roots in the river. Comforting the Queen.”

  “Your voice!” she said. “You’ve found it!”

  I told her of the corner and the dust.

  “I am glad that you have your voice again,” she said. She once more crawled upon my back. “I am glad that, now, we are equals.”

  “Do you want to look for your parents?” I asked.

  “They are gone,” said Oovis. “I know better than to wish.”

  “You did your great thing,” I said. “You deserve a wish.”

  “The Queen and the roots?” she said. “That was not my great thing. My great thing will come.”

  We rode, then, once more through the woods. We were going, we decided, to find our new home, where the girl with golden hair and her centaur friend would live and die in a city where stone came without the cost of blood, where people did not waste their lives on other people’s wishes, where a girl with golden hair could do many as many great things as she pleased.

  Copyright © 2015 Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Interzone, and previously in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily named cats: Gimli and Don Quixote. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and curates the annual Art & Words Show in Fort Worth. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or through her website: www.bonniejostufflebeam.com.

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  COURT BINDINGS

  by Karalynn Lee

  When I come across you, there are forsythia blossoms scattered unnoticed in your hair, as though the shrub leaning above you wooed you in such secret that you remained unaware. You’re unmindful too of how a daughter of a bloodline such as yours shouldn’t be lying on the dirt on your stomach, staring at a spiderweb. It’s so unthinkable that it has taken me a full hour to discover where you are; enough time for shadows to shift direction, or an assassin’s blade to find you. Besides that, it’s still early spring, and it is chilly outside. I chide you for being so careless, and you say indignantly, “But I was careful! I even drew the strokes in order—” and you show me your name as you have recently learned to write it, the characters spelled out perfectly within strands of spider-silk. Trembling along the last line, still spinning thread, is a spid
er.

  I have guarded you ever since your hundredth day, when you were dressed in colorful formal robes that you would never wear again because children grow so fast at that age. String and silver and calligraphy brush arrangedbefore you, to see what sort of life might lie ahead: longevity or wealth or wisdom. No one knows which you might have picked, for a messenger rushed into the room to tell your mother of her mother’s death. Those were his last words; he slumped across the table with a knife in his back, and you reached out and touched your fingers to his life-blood. An ill omen, especially for a girl who had just become the heir to the kingdom.

  Because I have guarded you since you were a hundred days old, the spiderweb doesn’t surprise me. But it will not do to be so obvious with your gift. I coax you into releasing the spider. The great art of the court is subtlety, I tell you as I pick the flowers from your hair. Do nobles not hire assassins rather than killing each other themselves? Don’t turn a creature so blatantly against its nature.

  You look at me and ask, “But then how else will I know that it’s doing what I bound it to do?”

  They say even children can speak with wisdom. Instead of answering, I brush away the web and tell you not to do this where others can see.

  When your mother scolds you over the dirt on your skirts and asks what you were doing, you say only that you like flowers. She reminds you that you are a royal princess, not a gardener, and forbids you to ever lose your guards again.

  You don’t listen, of course, although the next time I know where to find you. This time you bind a long-whiskered fish in the garden pond. It has always evaded your clumsy splashes before, but after you tell it not to be afraid, it bides quietly under the touch of your fingers and eats the shred of persimmon in your palm.

  When you finally release it, it swims to the bottom of the pool and hides among the rocks there.

  Then there’s the sparrow you set to chirping an alert whenever someone approaches your suite from the palace courtyard. After several days, it falls to the ground and is no doubt claimed by some hungry scavenger. It had too diminutive a mind to realize it could serve you longer by taking time to eat and sleep.

  With each binding you discover your limits: you can only bind one creature at a time. You can only give it a single command. And that command will last, even should you forget, until you lift it or the creature dies. But if you lift it the creature will remember, and sometimes that effect is just as useful as the binding.

  As you learn, so do I. You do not mean to be cruel to all the animals you practice upon, but you are.

  * * *

  There are a dozen clans who plot against your mother’s rule. They think her power is waning. But the assassins they send against her are all caught and executed. They finally turn their attention to you, and there are nights you wake to a stranger’s scream then my quiet, “Go back to sleep, Your Royal Highness,” as I drag out the body.

  One of the assassins is in the service of none other than your aunt. She is older than your mother and should have taken rule, but while she was heir, she publicly declared herself willing to step aside. She lives away from the palace now, but has come to visit you in your suite, treating you as a royal in your own right and not just a child. You’re excited. I’m warier, and I intercept the mug of exotic tea your aunt’s maidservant prepares.

  “Guardswoman,” you hiss, humiliated.

  I sip the tea and recognize the bitter aftertaste. I shake my head. “This is not appropriate for the royal princess’s delicate tastes. We have pure mountain spring water to offer instead, gathered from the melted snows of Sorak Peak.”

  Your aunt’s lips tighten only a little before she nods graciously.

  I am sick later, but I have carefully built up my resistance to all manner of poisons, and this one will not kill me as it would have you. You watch me sweat and retch, and you understand.

  * * *

  When you next see your mother, you tell her, “My honored aunt tried to poison me.”

  Your mother looks sharply at me, and I nod. She sighs. “Clumsy of her. My elder sister is a bitter woman who craves the throne.”

  “But she gave way for you willingly,” you protest.

  “She gave way because she knew I would be a stronger queen. She must not think the same of you.”

  You flinch.

  “You have time to learn, my daughter. As long as you trust your guard and don’t take foolish risks.”

  Where I hear concern, you hear criticism. You have no siblings, and your mother is perhaps harder on you than she should be. In return you flout propriety at every opportunity, knowing how much it means to her. I spend as much time teaching you the traditional ways as I do guarding you.

  To my surprise, sometimes you listen to me.

  * * *

  There is one time when you save me. I’m riding alongside your palanquin on the way to a local temple when my horse suddenly spooks. You slide aside the window to see what is happening, and I shout for you to stay inside as I fall to the ground.

  “Be still,” you cry out, and when I disregard you to roll away from the lash of hooves, I find myself right in front of a snake, coiled to strike. I recognize the pattern of color along its scales. Its venom could be diluted and used to paralyze a dozen people, their breath frozen in their lungs.

  It’s a vicious breed, but it doesn’t strike. Then I notice that the forked tongue is still extended in the air instead of flickering back into its mouth. You’ve bound it not to move.

  I kill it quickly. The other guards never notice anything strange, as they’re distracted when you jump out of your palanquin and rush to me. “Are you hurt?” you ask.

  I’m embarrassed by the fuss. “Please return to your palanquin, Your Royal Highness. I’m fine.” Because of you. I don’t know what to make of this reversal of our roles.

  You’re still thinking about the incident that night. “I nearly bound your horse instead,” you fret. “I almost didn’t see the snake. But then I realized something must have startled the horse in the first place.”

  “You did well,” I say.

  Your eyes, brimming with tears, are bright in the moonlight that slants through the bamboo shades. “I could have lost you!”

  I hesitate, then gather you into my arms and shush you. You cling to me as I whisper that I will always protect you.

  * * *

  By your sixteenth birthday you are old enough to marry the young man who was engaged to you at birth on the strength of his bloodlines and birth sign. You rail against your mother, but she sits stone-faced and tells you that this arrangement is what’s best for you, your clan, the kingdom. You must bear a child, an heir. Her expression softens as she looks at you and says that some duties bear gifts, but you don’t notice.

  It’s not the kingdom you’re worried about. You ask me about the wedding night. What I tell you does not reassure you. You’re pale against the resplendence of your robes, and I don’t like the look of your new husband’s face as he looks upon you at the joining ceremony.

  I’ve never spent a night away from you since you were first given into my care, but this night I am sent away. Sleepless, I prowl the garden.

  The next morning I’m standing in the courtyard outside your suite. When you slide open the door, you look tired but happy.

  “Jinho-ya,” I say, forgetting myself and using your name instead of your title.

  You gesture for me to lean close. Into my ear you say, “It works on men.”

  I am too relieved for your sake to ask questions. Afterward, your husband always looks at you with trepidation, and you never do catch a child.

  * * *

  You attend when your mother holds court, and thus so do I. We’re not allowed to speak, of course. Afterward, you talk to me about her decisions, struggling to understand the intricate dance of court politics, where no one says what they mean.

  The clans are growing more restless. They send representatives to court, and your mother turns away
their elegantly worded demands with even more elaborate refusals.

  They heed her at first but soon grow bolder. There are more assassins than usual, but your mother only chooses the best guards. Soon it won’t matter: open rebellion is only a matter of time.

  “A civil war will destroy the kingdom,” you say. “Why won’t she negotiate?”

  “A queen does not negotiate,” I say. “She rules.”

  “I could make the clan leaders obey, you know that. If only I could talk to them...”

  But you’ll never get the chance. In court you wear plain white robes to symbolize your status as a non-participant in the proceedings.

  You seek out your mother in private for the first time in a long while. You suggest that she send you as her representative to the clans, but she rejects the idea as too dangerous.

  “I’ll take my guard. I’ll be safe.”

  She sighs. “I don’t have time for this. My spies tell me that the clans are already mustering their armies.”

  “You can’t let this go to war!”

  Your mother asks, “Are you telling me what I can do?”

  Even you recognize such perilous ground. You murmur a formal leave-taking.

  When we return to your suite, you begin to pace restlessly and say, “I tried to bind my mother.”

  I don’t know why this surprises me. You should have first tried long ago.

  “As you saw, it didn’t work. She must have some sort of protection. She’s always so careful about protecting herself. But what of the kingdom? There’ll be only pieces left for me to inherit if she’s so set on this war.”

  “It would be a difficult time for any queen,” I say.

  “But not me. Not with my gift.”