Other Earths Read online

  She looked behind them. The barn was already filled with light, and a voice cried, “Sir, I found a handkerchief!” Which meant the voices knew they were here, and they would be caught, and their blood would form puddles among the stalks of barley. If I really were Fair Ilona, she thought, I would make the barley grow so that the Turks could not find me. But that’s only a story.

  “Margit,” said Judit ahead of her. Even Judit was moving slowly, carrying Deb’ra, who was whimpering and refusing to walk. “What’s that in the trees?”

  There was a light among the trees at the edge of the forest. Not like the light of a lantern, but pale and still.

  And then, although a dog began barking behind them, which meant that the farmer was awake, Margit stopped and stood among the barley, thinking to herself, can it be true? But D’nes said, “Look, it’s the White Stag.”

  He shone like the moon, and he stamped his hoof on the ground as though telling them to hurry.

  “I’m Imre, and the White Stag has come to save me from the Turks!” Now D’nes was dragging her forward, and all of them were running, with a breath they did not know they had. And then the forest was all around. They were following the glimmer of the stag through the trees, while the barking of the dog faded away behind them.

  “Look,” said Mrs. Mad’r. “You can see the moon.”

  “I haven’t heard that story,” said Csilla. “Is it true?”

  Mrs. Mad’r stared at the sliver of moon, pale against the darkening sky. “Judit was my best friend.”

  “Were you Margit? I mean, are you Margit?” Mrs. Mad’r nodded. “Well, what happened? What happened to Judit and the children?”

  Mrs. Mad’r sighed. “Judit stayed in Romania and was sent to prison—this was many years later—because her art was considered subversive. Deb’ra went to Israel with her uncle. She studied economics—but I have not heard from her in years. I was sent to Switzerland with D’nes and Magda, where other children of the T̈nd’r were sent as refugees. Magda is still there, in a good home. After the war, D’nes and I were brought to America. He went to a university and became a history professor. It was his idea to bring as many of the T̈nd’r here as we could, from the countries where they are oppressed and imprisoned. It was also his idea that your father should write a book. He’s the one who will be handling the petition to have you declared a political refugee. But you’ll hear more about that soon. We’re almost there.”

  “And—” Csilla hesitated. “Did you really see the White Stag?”

  “It was long ago,” said Mrs. Mad’r. “I’m not sure I really remember. But D’nes has always believed that we did.”

  The first person she saw in the clearing was Anne Martin.

  “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear you’re doing better,” said Mrs. Martin, clasping her hands in front of her. “Helga didn’t realize. I mean, most of you aren’t so affected by metal anymore. My husband had some Fairy in him, on his mother’s side, and he could eat with a knife and fork, just like ordinary folks. You wouldn’t even have known it, except he had hazel eyes. Such beautiful eyes! He died a couple of years ago, of lung cancer. No one knew about cigarettes when we were growing up. That’s why I do this, you know. For him and for Susanna. She’s so proud of her heritage! Really, I’m just a librarian. And of course Mrs. Mad’r is so persuasive. I mean the queen. Although she never lets us call her that, outside of the forest.”

  Mrs. Mad’r looked like a queen, standing in the middle of the clearing. Someone had put a crown of ivy on her head. I could be Princess Erzs’bet in the forest, thought Csilla. Except that the man talking to Mrs. Mad’r was wearing overalls, and the people standing and talking to each other, or sitting on the stones that ringed the clearing, looked ordinary, like people she might meet in a grocery store. But one boy who was building the fire had green in his brown curls, and a girl in a school uniform looked at her with eyes as green as a cat’s.

  “Are they all—T̈nd’r?” It felt strange, speaking English, and Csilla could not use the English word, as Mrs. Martin had done.

  “Or related to the T̈nd’r, though not by blood. Like me to my Henry.”

  “Csilla, can I speak with you for a moment?” Mrs. Mad’r was standing beside her.

  Mrs. Martin tactfully withdrew to speak to the girl in the school uniform. Csilla wondered if that was Susanna Martin. They were about the same age, although Csilla wondered why anyone would mistake Susanna’s picture for hers. They didn’t look that much alike. But perhaps they would be friends?

  “This is my brother, Professor Kert’sz.” He didn’t look like Csilla’s idea of a professor. Her father had always worn a jacket and tie, even to the grocery store. This man’s overalls had grass stains on the knees.

  Professor Kert’sz held out his hands. Without thinking, she put her hands in his. “Csilla, I’m sorry to bring you such bad news when we’ve just met. Your father has been arrested.”

  Csilla sat down abruptly on one of the stones. Mrs. Mad’r knelt beside her. “Oh, my dear. I’m so terribly sorry.”

  A crack was opening inside her. She could feel it open, and everything was falling inside it: her grandmother’s gingerbread, her father’s jackets, which always needed mending, the city of Budapest. The night itself was falling into the crack, and Csilla thought, We’re all going to fall in, all of the T̈nd’r.

  There were whispers around her, as the story spread. “Yes,” said Professor Kert’sz, turning to the people around the fire. “Antal Szarvas has been arrested. This is, of course, the worst news I could have for you. But I am also sorry to say that we have been unable to locate his manuscript. We believe there were two copies, his personal copy and another that he was sending us. We searched his apartment after his arrest, but the police had already been there. We found nothing, and we do not know if the second copy was sent. I can’t tell you how sad I am to have a colleague in danger. To have lost Queen Gertr’d’s stories is a double blow. Translating them into English would have been the most significant work of my life.”

  “We haven’t lost her stories,” said Mrs. Mad’r.

  From the darkness into which she had fallen, Csilla suddenly saw what seemed to her like a flicker of light, bringing her back to the stone she sat on, and the forest. “My grandmother was queen of the T̈nd’r?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Mad’r. “Your grandmother was our queen. If she had told you, it would have put you in danger.”

  In the blankness of her grief, Csilla thought, I wish people would stop trying to protect me.

  Mrs. Mad’r looked at the people around the fire, ordinary people who looked like farmers and teachers and librarians but were, it turned out, not ordinary at all. “This is Csilla Szarvas, Professor Szarvas’ daughter and Queen Gertr’d’s granddaughter. She knows where the second copy of her father’s manuscript is located.” Csilla heard the people around the fire whisper to one another.

  “What do you mean?” she said. “I don’t know anything about a second copy. I just know about the one he was typing.”

  “Csilla,” said Mrs. Mad’r, “don’t you understand? You are the second copy—or rather the first copy, because what he was typing was really the second. You know all the stories that your grandmother knew—she made sure of that. We couldn’t understand your father’s message—was he sending us his daughter or his manuscript? It turns out he was sending us both.” Mrs. Mad’r put her arm around Csilla’s shoulder. “But don’t think about that right now. Just keep getting stronger. We’ll try to help him, I promise. Even in prison, we’ll try to help him and bring him out. We’ll never stop trying.”

  The people around the fire were turning to each other, talking. She heard a pipe begin, and then a drum. But Csilla could not stand, and she could not speak, because her father might be dead already, and who cared about a bunch of stories that were probably, anyway, a bunch of lies? Even the White Stag.

  “Csilla, there is someone I want you to meet.” Mrs. Mad’r squeezed her
shoulder and then stepped aside.

  The woman who stood before her was so small, no taller than Csilla herself, and so slender. Her bones were like the bones of birds. She was so pale, like white stones at the bottom of a stream. Her skin was wrinkled, all over her cheeks and around her eyes. She looked infinitely old, but the hair that hung over her shoulders was as green as grass.

  “Drink this,” she said in an accent so strange, so ancient, that it seemed to echo from a thousand years in the past. As the honey wine burned her throat, Csilla felt the crack in her chest . . . not close, but ease.

  “Csilla,” said Mrs. Mad’r, “I told you that the Daughters of the Moon were dead. That is what we would like the world to believe—the T̈nd’r have been feared enough, and an almost-immortal ancestress might convince even the twentieth century that we are the witches we were once thought to be. But this is Ibolya, the last of the Daughters of the Moon.”

  “Welcome, child,” said Ibolya. Her voice sounded like the whisper of leaves overhead. “You have lost so much, we have all lost so much. That is why you must help us find ourselves again.” She turned to Mrs. Mad’r. “Show her, Queen. Show her what we are doing here, in this new land.”

  “Den’s,” said Mrs. Mad’r to her brother, “I think we can begin.”

  It was a song Csilla’s grandmother had never taught her, and it sounded as ancient as Ibolya herself. Mrs. Mad’r sang the first verse, then Professor Kert’sz joined in, then the others, one by one, until even Mrs. Martin was singing. Csilla watched firelight flicker on the singers’ faces.

  First came a doe, with its fawn. They looked at the firelight and the circle of singers before slipping away again into the forest. Then came a fox with a mouse, its dinner, hanging from its jaws. Then a porcupine curled into a ball by the base of a stone, like a small stone itself. An owl swooped over the fire, adding its cry before it flew off into the forest. And the forest around them was growing. Csilla could feel it, the thickening of trees, the flowing of their sap. The ferns uncurling fronds, sending their spores floating into the air. Moss climbing the tree trunks, covering the scars where there had once been saws.

  Ibolya put her hand on Csilla’s shoulder. It felt as light as a dry leaf. “Someday, this forest will be like those I knew in my youth, so long ago, and the T̈nd’r will care for it. Perhaps this new world will be better for us than the old. And perhaps we will restore what has been damaged. That is what we are, my child. That is what is means to be T̈nd’r.” Then the Daughter of the Moon slipped silently into the trees, so that for a moment Csilla wondered if she had actually been there. But she was still holding the cup of honey wine in her hand.

  One by one, the singers stopped, and she could hear the forest around her, the sounds and silence of the night.

  “Csilla,” said Professor Kert’sz from the other side of the fire, “will you tell us one of your grandmother’s stories?”

  No, she started to say. What did the stories matter? All they did was show how often the T̈nd’r had lost. How often they had hidden, slept on straw, begged for scraps of food. But the stories had mattered to her grandmother and to her father, and they mattered to everyone here. She could see it in their faces, all the faces in the firelight looking at her, waiting. Susanna Martin nodded, as though to say, go on, I know you can.

  “Shortly before Istv’n was to be crowned king of Hungary,” said Csilla, “one of his huntsmen came to him and said, ‘I have been hunting in the forest and have seen a marvel: a stag as white as snow.’ So Istv’n determined that he would hunt the stag. He set out in the morning with his retinue, but he soon lost them and rode on through the forest alone. At noon, when he was growing hungry, he came to a glade, at the center of which stood a woman with skin like milk and hair as green as the leaves of an oak tree. ‘Lady,’ he said . . .”

  Around her, the forest listened.

  WINTERBORN

  Liz Williams

  We watched as the drowned woman walked through the palace of Coldgate. Her hair was a sodden mass; her skin as white as birch bark, mottled with blue shadows. Damp footprints appeared behind her, and swiftly vanished again.

  “She isn’t the first,” Oldmark said to me.

  “So you said in your letter.” That’s why they’d come to me, after all, and I had to confess it was flattering. It’s not easy building up a reputation in a city as big as London, crammed with weather-readers, wind-listeners, earth-healers. And river-speakers. Not easy, especially if you are a woman, and young.

  You’d think having a queen on the throne, in this year of our Lady Sixteen Hundred and Two, would make a difference. But then again, Aeve wasn’t entirely human, and perhaps that made a greater one.

  “You see, Mistress Dane—” Oldmark broke off. For a courtier, he seemed to have some difficulty in expressing himself.

  “You may call me Mistress Isis, if you wish. We’re to be working together, after all. And I’ve seen the drowned before, you know. Part of my job is to find the bodies of those who have been unfortunate enough to meet their deaths in the river.”

  “I suppose you work principally with the Thames?”

  “Yes, but also with the Wye, the Tyne . . . And I grew up on the banks of the Severn, near the Welsh border at Lydd’s Ney. That was where I first found I could river-read.”

  Midnight in summer, the soft stars above, and a child staring at a woman standing on the river shore, her hair weed green, the ghost of water swirling round her. “My name is Severna.” A genius loci, a spirit of place, a goddess, once, when the Romans were here. And she told me what I was and what I would be able to do. Later, I came to Oxford, then London, moving eastward as the power of Aeve’s throne grew, with triumphs over the Spanish, the French.

  “Do you think this is to do with the Thames?” Oldmark asked. The woman was gliding through the wall. A moist stain showed briefly in her wake, and then there was nothing.

  “I’m not sure.” Some mages pretend to know everything, all bombast and certainty, even if they couldn’t tell you whether it was day or night. This would not, I knew, be the right tack to take at Aeve’s court: the queen had half-faery blood, could smell out a lie as easily as if it were a rat under the floorboards. She hadn’t kept her throne for ninety years for nothing. It was hard to explain to Oldmark, but this did not feel like the genius loci of the Thames: Thamesis, that bearded, weedy, silty presence, a spirit old when the first hunters had come to his shores, before history began.

  “Can you find out?”

  “I believe so. Tell me, Lord Oldmark, what is the lowest point of Coldgate?”

  Oldmark thought for a moment. “It would be the cellars, where we keep the ale. They say the foundations date from the days of the Romans. I do not know whether that is true, but certainly there are a great many steps leading down to the cellar . . .”

  “Please take me there, Lord Oldmark, and I will see what is to be seen.”

  He was right about the steps. I counted forty, leading in an arc down into the musty depths of the cellar. The floor was made of flags, a glossy gray stone. The cellar smelled of wine, of moss, of rivers. Oldmark left me in a small pool of light cast by a candle; when he had gone, I blew the candle out and stood alone in the dark.

  At once, the drowned were all around me, sensing my presence as they might sense the spirit of water. I felt a chill breath on my face. Damp fingers trailed through my hair.

  “Hush now,” I said, softly so as not to frighten them. “I don’t mean you harm.” The spirits of the water-dead are rarely hostile, tending rather to a fluid sadness, and they must be treated gently.

  One of the spirits floated into view, releasing her own phosphorescence, a green-pale glow. A girl, only a little younger than myself, with a purple mark around one eye.

  “Who are you?” I asked. I put ritual weight behind my words, speaking in the Tongue of Water rather than my native English. “Why are you here?”

  At the sound of the Tongue, her face grew still and slac
k, and I felt a little guilt at that. “My name is Sarah Mew. I was told to go with the others and wait for the boat.”

  “Which boat is that, Sarah?” Had she been left on the shore, been taken by the waves? But she answered, “The boat that is coming. The one that leads the fleet.”

  “Sarah, you must tell me what you mean. Which fleet?” It struck me that, for all her mention of the future, she might still have been speaking of the past: one of the interminable skirmishes with the Spanish navy off the shores of Albion, for instance.

  “The fleet that is coming,” she whispered. Her drowned face contorted with the effort of speech: she was enspelled, I saw, and my own magic was trying to counter that which had been placed upon her. And that other magic was stronger. I felt it sweep through the cellar like a tide, washing her away. She spun through the dark air and through the wall, no more than flotsam, and was gone. I was alone in the cold chamber.

  I went slowly back up the stairs and found Oldmark. He was standing disconsolately by a window, staring out at the rain streaking down the leaded panes.

  “Mistress Dane! Is everything well?”

  “I am well, Lord Oldmark, but I’m afraid that I have some bad news. I have spoken with the drowned. They tell me of a fleet that is coming, a fleet of ships, and from the magic that was placed upon the spirit with whom I spoke, we face considerable danger. This was not an ordinary spell. It swept my magic away; only now is it beginning to creep back.” This was true. I could feel it starting to seep into my soul again, refreshing its parched ground.

  Oldmark blanched. “Danger! From which quarter?” “I could not say.” This, on the other hand, was not true. In that moment when the tide had caught the spirit in its grasp, I’d sensed something distinctive, familiar—a mossy greenness, a sudden dank and earthy taste in the air. The magic of Aeve’s cousin and mortal enemy, the Queen-under-the-Hill.

  Faery magic, then. No surprises there. But Aeve would not be pleased.