The Complete Riverside Omnibus Read online

  The Complete Riverside

  *

  Swordspoint

  The Privilege of the Sword

  The Fall of the Kings

  *

  Ellen Kushner

  with

  Delia Sherman

  “The Witch in the Wood” Copyright © 2012 by Delia Sherman

  First publication: Under My Hat. New York: Random House, (2012)

  “The Tragedy of King Alexander the Stag” Copyright © 1999 by Delia Sherman

  First publication: A Distant Soil #29, ed. Colleen Doran, Image Comics, 1999

  “A Wild and a Wicked Youth” Copyright © 2009 by Ellen Kushner

  First Publication: Fantasy & Science Fiction, April/May 2009

  “Red-Cloak” Copyright © 1982 by Ellen Kushner

  First publication: Whispers (August 1982)

  SWORDSPOINT Copyright © 1987 by Ellen Kushner

  First hardcover edition: February 1987

  First US hardcover edition: November 1987

  First paperback edition: September 1987

  First US paperback edition: July 1989

  Afterword Copyright © 2003 by Ellen Kushner

  “The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” Copyright © 1991 by Ellen Kushner

  First publication: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (September 1991)

  “The Duke of Riverside” Copyright © 20011 by Ellen Kushner

  First publication: Naked City: Tales of New Urban Fantasy, ed. Ellen Datlow New York: St Martin’s, (2011)

  THE PRIVILEGE OF THE SWORD Copyright © 2006 by Ellen Kushner

  First hardcover edition: August 2006

  First paperback edition: August 2006

  “The Man with the Knives” Copyright © 2010 by Ellen Kushner

  First publication: New York: Temporary Culture, (April 2010)

  “The Death of the Duke” Copyright © 1998 by Ellen Kushner

  First publication: Starlight 2 (1998)

  “Honored Guest” Copyright © 2007 by Ellen Kushner

  First publication: The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales. Viking, (2007)

  THE FALL OF THE KINGS Copyright © 2002 by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman

  First trade paperback edition: November 2002

  First paperback edition: January 2003

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, places, characters and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of Bantam Books, except where permitted by law.

  CONTENTS

  THE WITCH IN THE WOOD

  DELIA SHERMAN

  THE TRAGEDY OF KING ALEXANDER THE STAG

  DELIA SHERMAN

  A WILD AND A WICKED YOUTH

  ELLEN KUSHNER

  RED-CLOAK

  ELLEN KUSHNER

  SWORDSPOINT

  ELLEN KUSHNER

  THE SWORDSMAN WHOSE NAME WAS NOT DEATH

  ELLEN KUSHNER

  THE DUKE OF RIVERSIDE

  ELLEN KUSHNER

  THE PRIVILEGE OF THE SWORD

  ELLEN KUSHNER

  THE MAN WITH THE KNIVES

  ELLEN KUSHNER

  THE DEATH OF THE DUKE

  ELLEN KUSHNER

  HONORED GUEST

  ELLEN KUSHNER

  THE FALL OF THE KINGS

  ELLEN KUSHNER and DELIA SHERMAN

  The Witch in the Wood

  DELIA SHERMAN

  WHEN I FIRST SAW MY TRUE LOVE, he was lying by a brook at the foot of a bog oak. One foot trailed in the water, his eyes were closed, his nostrils flared with his panting, and his branching horns tangled among the roots of the oak. An arrow was buried deep in his haunch, fouling his pelt with blood.

  The arrow was mine.

  I did not know then that he was my true love. I thought he was a winter cloak, a pair of mittens, meat for my larder, fat for my fire, bones for needles and spoons and buttons and combs. I thought he was an eight-point stag.

  I’d been chasing him for some time; the sun, which had been above the mountain when I’d shot him, had sunk into the western valley. In my forest, it was already dusk, but I saw him clearly enough, his tawny coat pale against the dark moss. As I crept nearer, my knife ready to slit his throat, the sky flared crimson as the sun set. The air shivered; I blinked. When I opened my eyes, the deer was a man, his long dark hair braided with twigs and small, polished stones, naked and bleeding, with my arrow in his thigh.

  Living in the forest, I was used to transformations. Caterpillars become butterflies, blossoms become berries, tadpoles become frogs with the turning of each season. Deer becoming men, however, was beyond my experience. Before I could recover myself, he had seized the shaft of the arrow and pulled it from his leg with a hiss of pain.

  It was a brave thing to do, but not a wise one. Blood welled from the wound in a mortal stream that I knew would soon drain him. I crashed through the undergrowth that separated us and dug my knife into the moss, cutting out a handful to pack into the hole my arrow had made. I pressed against the moss to hold it firm, feeling the prickling in my hands that would stem the flow. Only when I knew the blood had clotted did I remove my hands and rip the sleeve from my linen shirt to make a bandage.

  Neither of us said a word.

  Very conscious of his eyes on me, I dug a fire pit and lined it with rocks and wood, then took up a dry stick and told it to burn. As it bloomed into flame, he gasped—the first sound he’d made since drawing my arrow from his thigh.

  “Witch,” he said.

  “No. Mildryth.”

  He huffed—a very deerlike noise. “I mean, you are a witch.”

  I wasn’t about to admit I didn’t know the word. He was a man, after all, and although I’d never actually spoken to a man before, my mother had always told me men respected only those stronger than they. So, “That’s as may be,” I said.

  “I cannot stay here, witch. You must heal me.”

  I have never liked the word must, even when said in a voice as sweet as birdsong. “I must do as I think best. I’ve stopped the bleeding, but the wound has to heal at its own pace. I’d like it best if I could get you under a roof, but here will do until you’re fit to walk.”

  He nodded. “I see. What would you have done with me had I been a deer in truth?”

  “I’d have camped here until I could get you cut up properly and made a litter to drag you home.” I thought for a moment. “I can still do that.”

  “Without the cutting up, I hope,” he said, and laughed, which made me so angry I did not speak again until the soup was steaming and fragrant.

  “It’s venison,” I said, giving him a pannikin-full. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  He took the pannikin in a blood-streaked hand. “I don’t mind.”

  He ate in silence, and when he was done, I ate what was left in the pot. As the fire burned low, he spoke again, soft-voiced. “When I am a deer, I have a deer’s mind. In the morning, I will run from you and open my wound again.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I will harm myself trying to break free if you bind me.”

  “You won’t.” I loosed my hair, which fell to my knees, and cut three hairs with my knife. “Look, here is the rope.”

  He was silent, his eyes fixed on my hand.

  One hair I tied around his
ankle, one around his wrist, and one among the narrow braids of his own dark hair. His skin was warm and smooth under my fingers, and his hair smelled salt and a little bitter, like wood smoke. Around his throat I saw a thick braided cord, bright crimson, like fresh blood. As I reached to touch it, he gathered my hair into his hands and, lifting it to his face, inhaled deeply.

  I retreated hastily. “It’s getting cold,” I said. “I should build up the fire. And you must sleep.”

  He buried his head in his arms and was still. But as I sat listening to the noises of the night, I saw the firelight glitter in his watching eyes.

  THE BIRDS WERE SINGING WHEN I WOKE, and the mist rose from the brook, pearly in the growing light. The man was still a man, and I watched him sleep, wondering whether I’d dreamed his transformation. The light warmed; the air shivered. Between one breath and the next, the man became a deer lying between the roots of the oak, his legs tucked up under his belly, my shirtsleeve bound around his haunch, and a crimson cord snugged around his neck.

  Long lashes lifted, revealing liquid, nervous eyes. Cautiously I stretched out my hand. Cautiously he sniffed my fingers, licked them for the salt, then began to tear at the moss.

  We passed a quiet day. I collected branches, bark, and vines, gathered grass and fresh leaves for the deer, shot a rabbit and put it to roast. While I made the litter, the deer nibbled, slept, lapped water from the pannikin, slept again. I wanted to stroke him, but it seemed unfair, when he could not escape.

  Sometime during the long afternoon, a horn’s mournful lowing broke the forest calm. The deer started awake, floundered, and tried to rise, blowing and panting with terror. Dodging his flailing horns, I laid my hand on his brow.

  “You’ve nothing to fear,” I said. “That’s further away than it sounds, and bearing to the west besides.”

  He fell back onto the moss. For a moment I thought he had understood me. But he only mouthed at the leaves again, and I knew he was just a deer.

  At sunset I was cutting up the rabbit when a sweet voice said, “Is that rabbit I smell?” startling me nearly out of my skin.

  “It is,” I said, and gave him half on a dock leaf. “Eat up. We’ll have to leave before moonrise to make it home before dawn.”

  “Home.” He sighed. “I can never go home again.”

  I chewed rabbit and swallowed. “Why not?”

  “Politics. Religion. Wizards.” He made a face. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  I did not know those words, either, so I concentrated on finishing my portion of rabbit and thinking about how best to bind my awkward catch to the litter. It was not an easy task, he being alive and hurt besides. He called me a clumsy slut and I threatened to leave him to die. When he doubted, aloud, that a mere slip of a girl was strong enough to move him, I heaved the head of the litter up to my back and dragged it over the uneven ground at a fine pace, with him calling curses down upon my head with every bounce.

  Before long, the curses trailed off and he began to moan. Repentant, I went more gently after that, but by the time I reached my home glade and my cottage, the bandage around his thigh was stained with fresh blood, and the man himself had fainted.

  I made a nest for him by the hearth, stanched the wound, packed it with cobwebs, and bound it anew before he woke.

  “If you were trying to kill me, you failed,” he murmured.

  “If I’d been trying, I would have succeeded. Drink this.” He lifted one brow—I hadn’t known that was possible. “It’s a sleepy drink—valerian and chamomile and licorice root. It will soothe the deer as well as the man.”

  “Those hunters hunted me,” he said. “Sooner or later they must find this place. And a full-grown deer is hard to hide.”

  “I have an idea about that,” I said. “Drink now, and sleep.”

  WHEN I WAS LITTLE, my mother taught me many things. She taught me how to coax seedlings to grow by the fire in winter, how to knit flesh and bend living wood into rooted chairs and leafy tables. She taught me to call animals to kneel before me and birds to roost on my shoulders. And she taught me not to use my knowledge unless I must, to survive.

  I knew she would not have considered the safety of my deer-man a matter of survival—she had a very low opinion of men, with or without horns. But my mother had lain buried under the holly bush beside the door for three long winters, and I did not want my deer-man to die. So I stood at the edge of the glade and called a true stag to me.

  He was an eight-point buck with a tawny coat only a shade darker than my deer-man’s. When he knelt before me, I looked into his eyes and cut his throat, catching his blood in a pan. Then I went inside, where my deer-man slept uneasily, and laid hold of the crimson cord around his neck.

  It stung me like a nettle.

  I glared at the cord, then reached out to test it with that sixth sense that had awoken in me five years ago when first I began to give my blood to the earth. I worked out how the threads were twisted, and when I’d unraveled them, strand by strand, the cord dropped from the stag’s neck. He sighed and shifted on his pallet of bracken, then slid deeper into sleep.

  While he slept, I skinned the stag I had called, cut him into pieces, and was pinning the heavy hide onto the drying-frame behind the cottage when I heard a commotion of voices and dogs. Hastily I gathered around me an illusion of a woman of middle years, brindle-haired and stern of face, her arms thick with muscle—my mother, in fact, as she’d been before she died—and strode around the house, wiping bloody hands on my deerskin apron.

  Twelve men stood in my glade, as alike to my eyes as leaves on a birch tree, tall and supple, their skin darkened by the sun, their hair braided, like my deer-man’s, with leaves and feathers and polished stones. Unstrung bows were slung across their shoulders, and long knives thrust through their braided belts. They looked trail-worn and nervous as rabbits.

  One of them stepped forward—a pale-haired man, with gold around his arm. “Greetings, good woman. We seek a deer.”

  I folded my arms to still their shaking. “Then you seek in a good place,” I said in my mother’s voice. “There are a plenty of deer in these woods. My man killed one yestereve.”

  The twelve men stiffened, like foxes scenting prey. “Your man, say you?” their spokesman said.

  “A hunter, like yourselves. He left me with the butchering. It was a fat buck, with a fine rack of horn. It will serve us well this winter.”

  “Let us see it.”

  I shrugged. “The joints are ready for the smokehouse. The hide is pinned to the frame. The head is boiling in the pot.”

  They exchanged glances. “We will see what is to be seen.”

  They trailed me to the drying-frame and surveyed the fresh hide with their heads to one side and their mouths screwed to the other. They reeked of fear and confusion, but the spokesman’s voice was steady as he asked, “Did you chance to find anything around the stag’s neck?”

  “I did. A braided crimson cord, as like to that around your waist as one hair is to another. I wondered at such a thing on a wild animal, and told my man, I told him, ‘I hope you have not bagged some rich man’s pet.’”

  The spokesman closed his eyes and sighed. “Bring it to us.”

  “Wait until I get it.”

  In his nest, the deer lay white-eyed and quivering. I stroked his soft muzzle and blew into his nostrils, then took up the cord and brought it out to the waiting hunters.

  “I hope it will not bring grief to me and mine,” I said as the spokesman snatched it from my hand, “seeing as my man killed your deer in ignorance, on common land.”

  The men muttered and cut their eyes at me, but the spokesman silenced them with a look. “It will bring grief,” he told me. “But not to you. The deer escaped his bounds.”

  I could not read his face, but it seemed to me that his body spoke more of fear than sorrow. Questions crowded my mouth, but I shut my teeth upon them. I wanted the hunters to leave more than I wanted answers.

  The spokesma
n bowed. “Farewell, good woman. I wish you and your man joy of the stag. He should make a kingly feast.” And to my great relief, they ran into the wood with their braids bouncing on their backs.

  That night, the deer-man was feverish and restless.

  “They’ll be back,” he said when I told him, with pride, what I had done. “He’ll know it’s a trick. He’ll send them to fetch me. He may even come himself.”

  I laid a cool cloth on his forehead. “Hush now. Those men believed me. How could someone who wasn’t even here know what they did not?”

  “Oh, he’ll know. He knows everything.” He gripped my hand, stared into my eyes with mad intensity. “Heal me that I may fly this place, for your own sake if not for mine.”

  “I’m doing my best,” I said tartly. “It’s all your own fault, you know. If you’d left the arrow for me to cut out properly, you wouldn’t have done so much damage. As for your fever, that’s your body fighting against itself.”

  He gave a bitter laugh. “It is as he said: those marked for death shall die.”

  Wounded as he was, I could have shaken him for pure frustration. “Marked for death? I’ve never heard such foolishness. There’s nothing wrong with you that willow bark and cobwebs and time won’t mend.”

  He shook his head wearily. “There is no time. Could I but cross the river back into the Land, if I could lie on her earth, drink of her water, eat of her bounty, my wound would be healed. To die in exile, useless and barren, is no more than my just punishment for trying to escape my destiny.”

  I knew the river he spoke of. It was only a day’s journey north, wide and rocky, easily fordable. My mother had taken me there after my first blood had come, to show me the boundary of our land. I will never forget how she looked on the flowing waters and on the trees that lay across them, her face as bleak as the rocks we stood on.

  “Beyond this river lies the Land that was my home,” she said, “until I fled it for my life. There’s nothing for me there, nor for any daughter of my body, save grief and death, dark magics and blood.”

  I had never heard her voice so stern, not even when I had disobeyed her and broken my leg hunting on a moonless night, and did not wish to hear it again. When she required my oath never to cross the river, I gave it to her readily.