1.
Once upon a long ago, I was born daughter to a mapmaker in a sturdy house overlooking the street. My mother died in childbirth, but Papa named me Pomegranate for the arils she ate from the moment she knew that she was with child, and the skin she bit between her teeth as she birthed me.
As a squalling newborn, my father clutched me to his chest and wailed out the loss of his wife and his love. But as no man can live forever screaming his wife’s name, he cherished me, and raised me as best he could.
Papa held me in his lap as a baby, and brushed back my hair as he traced out the lines of the world on his maps. I watched him for hours as I grew, holding still and silent as he dipped the pen and trailed its ink.
Silence was a virtue in the house of a mapmaker.
Silence is also a virtue in the houses of the dead.
When I was six, Papa set the pen aside and pushed the brown hair from my face. My eyes were the color of pomegranates, my father told me, like he imagined the inside of a heart to be—all red and pink and warm and dark. We did not talk about what hid inside that darkness.
“You look just like her,” he said.
“Like who?” I asked.
“Your mother.”
“Where has she gone?”
He did not know then that the lie he told me—the not-quite-truth a father tells his daughter when he thinks she is too young to understand—would set my feet on a road he could not map. But he said it anyway.
“She’s gone to the City of Stories,” he said.
“Why did you let her go?” I asked.
My Papa was quiet a long time.
“Because I couldn’t find the map to follow her. Because she couldn’t stay.”
He ran his fingers through my hair and held me close.
I nodded, as though understanding. I was a mapmaker’s daughter and knew with the knowing of a child that somewhere among my father’s maps, the thick stacks of vellum and palimpsest and papyrus, there would be a map drawn in ink for me, one that I could follow from my father’s shop across the world if I needed to.
2.
The home of a widowed mapmaker was a solemn one, a lonely one. There were lines to be drawn and lines to obey and never cross. Papa owned a thriving business. There were maps of our City—Orissa—spreading like a seven-petal daisy. His other maps showed the roads between here and there, some traced where the unicorn herds migrated or the phoenixes flew. On the far wall, above the table, he kept a framed map showing how a Fell Ship might ride the rivers to Cadien City.
By the time I was twelve, I had searched the stacks for my map. I imagined it would be thick parchment, from the skin of some rare beast. The ink would be red like my eyes, like the pomegranates that hung from a tree just outside our door. It would show a path from our door out across the square and up the City’s finger-hills in the distance.
Perhaps on the other side, I thought, there would be another little girl with eyes red and pink and speckled with black who thought my mother was hers. I would ask her nicely and come home to my father, who would smile more and be prouder of me than he ever was.
If I could only find the map.
But as I looked in the lopsided map-towers, in the drawers, carefully peeling my father’s work back and praying to the City, the Unicorn, and the Phoenix, it wasn’t there.
There were maps to homes inside Orissa, maps that outlined the appropriate pilgrimage in honor of a child, a dead brother. Many showed the intricate web of the aqueducts that fed Orissa its dreams.
Not a single one led to the City of Stories.
“Papa,” I called out from behind two great stacks of papyrus.
He looked up from his table pen poised to mark the borders of some other place—Gallica with its icy heart, or the City of the Road, or Kaddilae, nest-City of raven-maids. His eyes were the color of cobalt ink.
Papa did not smile often. Not since his wife died. Not since I had spoken words I could not take back.
“What is it, Pomegranate?” he asked in a voice that was as smooth and thin as his finest parchment. I had crossed a line in the border of our house. I was not to distract him from his work, no matter how much he loved me.
“I can’t find it,” I said.
“Find what?”
“The map.” A tear fell down my cheek. “I’ve looked and searched and there are a hundred to places, and from places. Not a single one to the City of Stories.”
My father pulled me to him, set me on his lap and hugged me close. “There is only one way to get there,” he said, leaning his head against mine. With his long-fingered hands he pulled my left hand upward. With the pen still in his hand he set its tip in the crease of my palm. “We each carry the map; we need only follow our feet.”
It was another almost-truth from a father to his daughter. Another line, another step closer to a place I could not see in my dreams, but wished for in the dark of my heart.
3.
I left my father’s shop the next morning, as the sun dawned between the finger-hills and Orissa woke from its sleep. The city was cupped in the bowl of the mountains like a hand—a great gate on one side where the aqueducts poured water between the cliffs.
The tree outside our door was full of fruit and I picked one and placed it in the pocket of my dress. It might be strange, for a girl-child to wander the greatest city in the world in search of a place where no map led. Perhaps it was fate’s hand that led my feet to the city gates, where the cobblestone gave way to thick-pounded dirt and a wide avenue spread out across the fields.
I followed my feet, staring at my hand as I went. The creases of my skin did not match a single street I knew—not from Cobbler’s Square, or the clown markets with their bright and gaudy wares, or the lily-yards.
When I looked up, the city gates rose in the distance. The city walls were white marble and the press of people grew thicker as I walked. There were merchants, and workers, and artisans, all pushing through each other in their private rivers to their destinations. None of them cared that a girl watched the throng wide-eyed.
The ones who did notice me were the other children. I did not get on well with other children, and a crowd of them clustered next to one another near the gate. They were young and stood like fishers beside the current of people living their lives. A little girl with long hair broke from the group and I slowed as she walked up to a woman and spoke in a voice that didn’t carry over the noise.
But I did see her pass a coin to the girl.
They watched me as I got closer. Papa had brought me to the gates before. We’d watched the people, the wall, eaten ripe fruit from a seller. The children saw that I was alone this time, and the pack moved before I realized the danger.
The girl was the leader, a boy with dark hair and a mis-shaped nose stood to her right. “You don’t belong here,” she said. “This is our place.”
“I didn’t mean any harm,” I said. I tried to back away, but two boys stood behind me. They pushed me forward. “I’m just searching for my mother.”
They laughed.
“You’ll want more than your mother when we’re through with you,” the girl said. She clenched her fists and let them go. She reached forward and touched me. Where her finger met my shoulder burned.
I screamed. They laughed again.
The boy spoke into her ear and she smiled.
“You’re the mapmaker’s daughter?”
“Please, leave me alone.”
The girl crouched down until her face was in front of me. Her eyes were two different colors—brown and blue. She was missing a tooth.
“But I don’t want to leave you alone. I want you to show me your little trick. Everyone talks about it, you know, but no one sees you. Your Papa does too good a job hiding you.”
The City gifted me a spark of magic in recompense for the loss of my mother. A magic that tasted as much of death as it did life, and hurt twice as much.
“No,” I said, trying to scramble away. “I don’t want to. I’m looking for my mother. She’s in the City of Stories. Please.”
“I don’t care what you want. I want to see what you can do. So do it, or I’ll send you to your mother! I’ll even tell you the start of it.” She leaned forward, putting her face near mine. “Once, there was a girl whose Papa didn’t love her very much at all. She was found on the street and when she didn’t do what she was told, there was pain.”
Her friends grabbed me by the arms as I tried to pull away. She touched a single finger against me again. Magic burned through my shoulder, making my bones scream.
“No!” I yelled. It wasn’t true. “My Papa loves me!”
The magic inside me opened as the girl leaned forward again. I felt it answer to that pain and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Even as I cried and struggled. It was too late.
I wanted my Mama and my Papa, and but all there was, was magic and the girl, who could not look away from me.
I whispered in a low voice, and when the girl with mismatched eyes pulled away, the words followed her. I was not a cruel child. My magic was not a kind magic.
3.
The Queen found me there, on the ground beside the gates, where the gang had left me split-lipped and bleeding. I could not find the road to the City of Stories and I had never felt so far from home.
Her gown was the color of pollen, her hair like buttercups. She slowed her mount, and I could see that even her eyes were the yellow of old paper.
“Do you know who I am?” she asked.
“The Queen,” I said in a quiet voice. All around us cries were coming up; it was not often that one of the seven queens rode through their city. It hurt my mouth to speak. I had spoken the truth to the girl with the mismatched eyes and I wanted every word unsaid. I wanted my father. I wanted my mother.
“What are you called? Who are your people?” she asked.
“Pomegranate, my lady. My father is a mapmaker. Bezel Skin. I am his daughter,” I said and then added more quietly, “he doesn’t know I’m here.”
She laughed, and it was not as sharp as the children’s had been. She crouched beside me, her beautiful dress folded beneath her knees.
Looking at her, I forgot even my mother, lost somewhere I couldn’t find; she made me forget my father, and the girl with mismatched eyes.
“What brings you out where your Papa doesn’t know where you’ve traveled? He must be worried.”
I looked at her wide-eyed. Perhaps she would know.
“Please,” I said. “Do any of you know the way to the City of Stories?”
The smile faded from her face. She looked younger than I, barely taller than I was. Her hair was a long braid down her back and I couldn’t help but think that it would follow along behind her like a pet as she walked.
“Perhaps,” she said. She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth the way Papa did when he was thinking about something terribly important. “My name is Sybelline.”
“Mine is Pomegranate, my lady,” I said again.
“A strange name.”
“My mother died clutching a pomegranate, Papa said. It was the only thing she ate the entire time I grew inside her. He says my eyes look like one too, like the dark recesses of a heart.”
The Queen nodded.
“Do you know the way to the City of Stories?” I asked again.
She did not answer for a handful of heartbeats.
“Aside from the usual way? There is one other, though I do not know what it means that a girl meets me on the road and asks me for it.” She looked away to where the city spread out.
“Please? I must find my mother,” I said.
“I will trade you an answer for an answer, Pomegranate. I will tell you the way to the City of Stories. They call it Sabbaeus and I am the only person in all the world who will put your feet on its path.”
“What can I answer? What answer would a queen want from me? I will answer anything I can, my lady.”
Her eyes were the yellow of dandelions and pollen and if I thought she were a little girl, what looked out of them spoke of age and great magic. A splash of fear crept through my stomach. She reached forward and clasped my hands in hers. They were the same size, small, and cool while mine were wet with fear.
“Use your magic a second time today. Tell me how I will die, Pomegranate,” the Yellow Queen said. Sybelline’s eyes held me like amber, like the lines of a map that contained only she and I. “Tell me how I will die.”
4.
I tried to pull away from her, as I had when the street-girl had demanded the same thing from me. But the queen’s eyes had grown until they were yellow from side to side, like looking into the sun or the eyes of a cat.
Little girls, no matter their age or no matter that their mothers had been stolen away to a far-off city, must have a secret. The secret I had carried since the day I was born had grown inside me—a dark private thing. Orissa had given it to me, a spark to keep out the cold.
Sybelline saw it with her pollen-eyes. She scryed it with her hands clasped to mine and pulled the aril of magic into the light.
“I can’t,” I said. I could not tell her. I could not look away. I could not find a way to save my mother without doing what she asked.
“That’s the price. The city whispers to me even now. It gave you a gift the night you were born, the night your mother went to the City of Stories with a scrap of fruit skin clutched between her teeth. It set an aril in the unmapped recesses inside you.”
I looked at her again.
“Do what you did for the girl with mismatched eyes that hurt you, girl. Even now she stands in the shadows of the corner hating you for what you’ve said. She is as wrapped up in your story as I am, Pomegranate.”
“It will hurt,” I said in a quiet voice. Inside my chest, boxed in every line and border a mapmaker’s daughter could learn, my magic stirred. Father was the first to step accidentally into the uncharted space between my ribs. I had looked at him with my eyes like bloody amber, black specks of night time trapped inside them. I whispered his death to him.
I let Pomegranate fade away. The magic took me, pulling up from its hiding spot and into her light. It burned aching coils down my arms and when it met her, still saying my words were not my own. Orissa faded away and there was only the aching pain.
“The City is dead,” I said. “Orissa has fallen.”
“How?”
“She hunts you through the streets. The others have fled. She hunts you through the streets on four paws as the city burns. Her armies have broken the walls and her mate stands at the gates to watch Orissa die. She has caught your scent.”
Sybelline tried to pull her hands from mine, but the moment had come. I was a mapmaker’s daughter and in the dark depths of me I would make a map for her as I had for my father, and the girl, a map that lead to the moment of their death.
“She has found you,” I whispered. “You scream and you beg. She is the red of blood, it has soaked her through and she has only grown more powerful. More hated. She hates you. Hates you as she hated her sisters. She will rip out your heart and drink it deep.”
The Yellow Queen shuddered.
“It hurts to die,” I said.
The moment is gone a heartbeat later.
The Queen did not burn so brightly as she had.
I stood with her nails biting into my palms.
5.
“You said it would hurt,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
The rest of it hung between us. She knew how she would die and I had offered up my end of the trade. I waited with a child’s waiting, wanting building from my toes. If I could have gone my entire life without the magic, I would. I would spare them and myself. But she had asked.
“Give me your name,” she said.
“Pom—”
She shook her head in a tiny motion. “No. From your hand.”
I pulled the fruit free of my pocket. It was still the same red and pink and black that it had been on the tree outside my father’s workshop. Had it really only been that morning that I’d walked away from the carefully built lines of my father’s store?
The Queen took the fruit in her hand and with a careful twist split the fruit in two. I was named after it and its fruit had been the first thing to pass my lips as a newborn child, cradled in my dead mother’s arms.
“Sabbaeus is the City of Stories,” she said. “It lies on the other side of the world and follows the sun. The only way to get there is to die. But you have a foot already on the path. That glimmer of magic you hate so much will get you there and back. You can find the city, if you are brave.”
Sybelline raked me with her eyes. I did not know what she saw, but by the nod of her head, she did not find me wanting.
“But you will need another to open the door.”
With her tiny fingers, she crushed half the fruit. Its juice bled for her a red that only pomegranate bleeds. It overflowed her hands and trailed down her arms. I watched, mouth open as it bled like Papa’s thickest ink onto the street.
It dripped three times pooling on the white flagstone beneath our feet.
Her magic stirred like sunlight on my skin. When she crouched I followed, staring at the juice as it spread, swirling and changing and drawing itself out like a living, breathing thing.
6.
A mapmaker’s daughter learns lines and distances, learns that a map might show roads or routes, Cities or the birthplace of caravans. What unspooled beneath us was something different. The pomegranate blood grew lines that twisted from its center, a dizzying spinning shape that curled and looped until it nearly ensnared our feet.
“Sabbaeus is not Orissa,” the Queen said as the map drew itself. “It is a place of grey darkness, of cloaking mist. No one has sat upon its slate throne in a long time. Sabbaeus is a jealous city, Pomegranate—no one has ever walked its streets and left again. Go back to your father and learn his trade. Maps will not want you as fiercely as Cities and when the day comes you will close your eyes and find yourself walking the Street of Forgotten Tales to the Citadel of the Dream.”
I watched her blink twice and then look up to meet my eyes.
“My mother is there.”
Sybelline nodded.
“How do I get there?” I asked.
“You will begin now, Mapmaker’s daughter. Have you come prepared?”
I looked at her and shook my head no.
The Queen smiled sadly, quietly. “Heroes never are. Perhaps you will find help along the way.”
Neither of us looked at the girl who still hid in the shadows. The one who had hurt me and left me bleeding. The girl whose death I had told to her.
“Now,” the Queen said, pointing to the map that still rose up from the flagstones. Beyond us, the crowd had grown to a throng, feeling the magic in the air. “What is this?”
“A map.”
“A labyrinth. A maze you must walk to the doors of the City of Stories. Will you, Pomegranate? Will you walk that far for a woman you don’t know?”
“She’s waiting for me,” I said with the simple faith of a child who had never ventured beyond a city gentle with the sound of falling water.
“A labyrinth then. Walk out from this place and this moment and turn left. When the road splits, turn left, again and again like a great gyre. At the end you will find the City of Stories. No matter how small the passage, how unassuming the alley or road or stair, turn left and your feet will take you there.”
“How do you know?”
“I am Orissa’s queen, at least for a little while,” she said, “and I have asked that your feet lead you.”
“What if I get lost?”
“Then the door is shut, and you may never find your way home again. Now take your gifts and go, your feet are on the path. And remember,” she said and pushed me away with gentle hands, “I can only get you to the city. Sabbaeus must open a road to get you home. And remember too, there is no magic in the City that is not hers. There are only stories, which are a magic all their own. Remember third and most of all, though, that no hero can find the way alone.”
Armed with a stomach full of fear, I walked away, my back to the growing crowds and stepped off onto the street.
“Pomegranate,” she called before pushing her way into the throng of people, moving toward the girl with mismatched eyes. “If you would do a kindness, mark the way for me to follow. I’ll be along in my own time.”
7.
I followed my feet.
The girl followed me. I saw her.
The first left was simple, crossing down past Orissa’s customs houses. The streets were emptying of people as they funneled toward the Queen. The first alley was trouble, though, crossing between two towering granite walls, so close together that my shoulders touched the side.
I stopped to catch my breath. The road to my right was the one that would lead me home. I could see my Mama’s pomegranate tree growing on the corner.
Papa would be looking for me by now, I thought.
But beyond the alley was the fruit market. Its stalls were piled high and the street was quiet. I turned and moved on, my heart beating faster. A small street broke off and I followed it past grated doors and empty windows. Left again and the path stretched bleakly before ending in a wide-paved court near the heart of Orissa.
Work crews were still hard at work laying in a fountain on the far side of the square. I turned left again past the great houses with their great pennants hanging in the breeze. None of the streets were familiar, Papa had forbidden trips beyond the cluster of artist shops—ink-makers, paper-folders, and pen shapers. I shouldn’t have gone to the city gates, should not be traveling toward the cliffs where the aqueducts flowed.
I slowed.
The girl slowed behind me, ducking behind the edge of a shop stall. I started to face her, to call her and have her walk beside me rather than as a shadow.
But before I stepped, I remembered Sybelline’s words. If I went off the path, I would never find my mother.
Papa wouldn’t notice me gone yet. With the Queen and the people, he would think I had joined the crowds. I could turn around and walk back. But I turned left again between two long fences and then left behind one of the towering houses. Left again and I walked carefully down another alley, left again and things began to change.
I could see the aqueducts above me, hear their water running down to the heart of the city. The tiny street I was on was empty. Below, Orissa had come alive. I could hear the cheering and watched as the Queen walked through the crowd.
Left again and again as the minutes turned to hours. My feet grew sore and the fear doubled inside me. Sybelline had only promised to put me on the road and if I’d turned wrong… I turned left again, between the plant-covered support columns and then one last time.
Onto a wide vacant square.
White stone spread out on each side, great flagstones weaving like the lines on a map. The shape echoed up into walls ten times as high as I was tall. But what made me stop and stare as was a creature unlike anything I’d seen before.
Orissa was home to all manner of folk—unicorns and phoenixes, raven-maids and quail-boys. But a man stood in the very center of the square. He was bare-chested, the planes of his muscles straining the skin as though what was in him struggled to escape. His arms hung at his sides, long fingers that ended in sharp nails. The man’s torso bled to scales beneath his hips. Where a normal man would walk on two legs, this had the sleek armor of a serpent, coiling down into a tail that trailed behind him.
He smelled like my Papa’s thinnest vellums—like parchment paper stretched thin and brittle. He was watching me. His hair was black like coal, his skin pale, the snake part of him echoing the darkness.
“Hello,” I said.
The man said nothing.
“I’m looking for…I’m looking for the City of Stories,” I said again. “My mother is there, and I must find her and bring her home. Sybelline, the Queen, said that I might find it and that the path…”
“I have waited for you, Pomegranate,” he said. He did not have fangs for teeth, though his eyes were black like the rest of him and where pink might flash from between his lips there was only blackness.
“I’m sorry if you’ve been waiting long.”
“You have found your way here to the city beyond the city to take back the mother that was stolen from you,” he said. “But you stand at the gate. I am Cyrus and I will not let you pass.”
“But Sybelline—”
“Is not the Queen of Sabbaeus yet.”
Little girls in stories must face a challenge, but I did not expect him. I thought crawling through the terrible space between places would be enough. At the heart of the maze of city streets should not have been a man who would not let me pass.
Behind me there was no path home.
“I have come too far,” I said.
Cyrus stood impassive, the end of his tail flicked back and forth. It was the only sound in the square.
“What must I do?” I asked. “There must be something.”
I did not expect hands to throw me to the ground and for the girl who’d followed me to step over. I did not expect to see the girl with mismatched eyes put herself between me and the doorguard.
“No,” she said and then turned to me. “You don’t get to have some pretty story.”
She pulled me to my feet until my eyes met hers.
“Take it back,” she hissed and shook me. “Take it back now.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I didn’t give it. I can’t change it. I’m sorry.”
But she didn’t believe me. Not as she struck me again and I tried to bat her hands away. Even as she hurt me, I saw her death.
“My name is Sorrel,” she hissed. But what I saw was her a year older, clutching her empty stomach as she died. The City around her moved as though she were just a rock in a great stream. No one noticed when her mismatched eyes closed and she was no more.
“She told me you could change it. The Queen said if I followed you, you would fix it and it wouldn’t be like that. She said you could change how I died!”
“I can’t,” I cried.
She struck me again and when I fell, she turned to face Cyrus. The girl placed her hands on her hips and looked as though she were going to strike him as she struck me.
“Can she change my story?” she asked him. “If she finds her mother?”
“Many things are possible in the City of Stories,” he said. “But the girl is not a storyteller, she is a sibyl.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“A story,” he said. “That is the price.”
Sorrel turned to me, hate in her eyes. She looked at the blood on my face and there was no pity there. I was too young to know that the sneer was seeing someone she thought was helpless and how kind the world had been to me and how unkind it had been to her.
I did not want anyone to hate me.
“I don’t know any stories,” she said. Sorrel reached beneath the thin fabric of her shirt and pulled a length of string out from around her neck. On it was a little glass vial, and inside the vial was a lock of hair, held together with a little ribbon—blue and brown.
“I will trade you the only thing I have of my mother, if you will let us through,” she said. She did not look at me.
The snake-man did not move. The air was silent.
If there was a way to change what I saw, it was not standing in the empty square. And I wanted to. I did not want anyone to die. I didn’t want to see my father die or the Queen, or the girl who stared at me with hate and longing and desperation.
I knew stories.
“Once upon a long ago,” I said, “there was a girl with an eye the color of a robin egg. Its twin was brown, like—”
“Like a hound-turd,” Sorrel said.
It hurt to smile; I could feel a bruise blooming under my skin.
“She came to the Doorkeep of the City of Stories beside a girl in search of her mother. She came because she’d learned the end of her story and if no other place could change it, she might find one that could beyond the gate. They did not know their destiny, only to stand against the Queen.”
The last words came out in a whisper.
Cyrus still did not move.
Sorrel moved toward him, as though he were not so much bigger than she was. She faced him and her shoulders were straight and she was tall, though she was little.
“Once Sorrel was a street cur whose only magic let her hurt people. She had no mother. She had no father. She had no friend except for another girl with death for eyes. She had begged for nothing in all her life, no matter how desperate. Now open the door.”
“You have not even crossed into Sabbaeus, nor met its Queen, little girls. She sits upon a black amber throne and you will face her to steal back your mother,” he said. “You are the map, Pomegranate Skin. And mismatched Sorrel is the key.”
“Then let me through, Cyrus. Please. My mother is waiting,” I said.
“Not enough,” he said.
“My Papa didn’t follow her,” I said. The words burned as though I were telling him the secret of his dead. “He didn’t follow her. He didn’t bring her home so she would be with us. Let us through!”
His black eyes said nothing, his hands clenched and then he nodded. The pavers beneath us had begun to change, dirt pooled up between the cracks. I felt the air change, shift, transform as he held motionless.
When I turned, the white walls of the square were gone. The white flagstones faded as though some great darkness spread. My heart beat faster and I looked at Sorrel, whose face was calm. Her hands were wet when I grabbed them. The darkness pooled and spread, crawled up invisible walls until we stood on a street of shadows.
“Where are we?” she asked. “Are we there?”
All around us, buildings rose. They were made of dark glass—obsidian. Papa used it sometimes for his maps, stitching shards of it to his palimpsest. Above us, the stars hung like diamonds.
“I don’t know.”
There were no voices on the air. No people. I held Sorrel’s hand in mine, as though I did not ache from her fists, as though we were friends. I had never had a friend before. But I had come so far. My mother was somewhere. Waiting for me.
I began to walk, following my feet, hoping and wishing that we would find the right place.
“Can you do it again?” Sorrel asked. “The story? It was magic. The Queen said that stories had magic here.”
I shook my head. “You do it.”
“I hate you,” she said, but she did not let go of my hand.
She wet her lips and looked over the buildings. I thought they might have been shops or homes or palaces. But there was no one and the labyrinth of streets was unrelenting.
Her voice was soft when she spoke, but the magic in it made the hair on my arms stand on end. “They came to the City and got really lost. The place was too quiet and the streets were dark.”
Sorrel faltered. I squeezed her hand.
“But they were determined,” she said quickly. “They weren’t really friends, but the girls made do. The streets, they opened up to the place they were supposed to go. Because one was searching for her mother, and the other was searching for her death.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“I don’t want your pity.” But she didn’t let my hand go.
As Sorrel’s words faded, the street opened and we came to a palace as dark as the city around us. The Citadel of the Dream. Its spires bled into the sky.
The gate was open, thin-barred and black. We walked up the thousand steps unspeaking. The air grew colder. Sorrel took the last step before I did. We came into a room bigger than the house of a mapmaker. I had followed our feet, as Sybelline had told me to, and I had found a friend along the way.
I missed my Papa.
A woman sat upon the throne.
Her hair was the color of jasper, pulled into a braid as Sybelline’s was. Her dress was black gossamer, her skin pale moonstone peeking out between the gown’s sheerness. When I met her eyes, I stopped and stared.
They were yellow amber, flecked like mine—as though seconds of midnight had been caught there, like the lines on a map or the blots of ink that showed where Cities had come to roost.
“Are you the queen?” Sorrel asked.
“I am,” the Queen said. “Hello, Pomegranate.”
I blinked before speaking, then let go of Sorrel’s hand.
“Hello, Mama.”
8.
She didn’t smile.
I watched her face, waiting for it to break like the dawn. But it didn’t. The solemn woman on the throne did not move. My mother didn’t rush down from her chair to hug me, to fold me in her arms and whisper the words a mother tells her daughter. I had come prepared to bring her home so that Papa might be happy again. So that we could be a family.
“Come home,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“And be a mapmaker’s wife, Pomegranate? That is not a vocation,” she said. “Sabbaeus needs me.”
“You-you could be my mother.”
Mama laughed at that. It was brittle, like ink gone dry in its pot, or…it didn’t matter. Not her perfect hair and yellow eyes and mist-silk dress. The woman who had birthed me, left me, sat on the throne and laughed.
Sorrel had stood quiet, but her silence broke away. “Are you crazy?”
Mama turned her eyes away from me.
But Sorrel’s fists were clenched. She stared down the Queen of Sabbaeus unblinking. She moved forward, into the space before the dais.
“Your daughter goes across the world for you. She spends her days searching for you while people treat her like she has a disease. All she wants in the world is for you to come home. I would die for someone who wanted me to come home.”
Sorrel shook her head. I could see tears in her eyes that matched mine.
“I would die for a home to come home to.”
She spoke:
“So the girls, who were not friends, came to the Citadel of the Dream and found the Queen—Black Amber—there. And she was cruel like people who are cruel when they don’t want for anything.”
There was magic in it. But instead of breaking, pooling the magic against Mama and around her, it hung mid-air like a piece of abalone and green apple glowing in the dark. The Queen of Sabbaeus didn’t laugh.
“Do you think your magic will work, daughter? Do you think that you can change things, take things? I am Black Amber and Sabbaeus is the City of Stories. When the story has ended, it comes here. What comes here is mine.”
“That’s not your name,” I said. Sorrel’s words lost their color as I watched and then faded into the dark air. “You’re my mother. You should be home with Papa and I.”
“It is mine now. I would not leave this City, this Citadel, this throne, to be a wife and a mother and a nothing. I died and I came here. It needs me. Whatever came before, I left behind.”
“I need you.”
The Queen’s amber eyes caught mine.
“You are being stubborn,” she said, “and I am being cruel. You have spent so much time dreaming of this moment, Pomegranate. I haven’t. I heard the City’s call the first day I knew you grew inside me. I ate the fruit every day and clutched its skin between my teeth when you were born. I woke up here and found my place.”
“Your place is with us,” I said.
“It is not. My place is here. You shouldn’t have come.”
“But we came,” Sorrel said. “She wants you to come home and be her mother.”
“And what do you want, girl?” Mama asked.
Sorrel was quiet, as though she were piecing together words. “I want to not die. I want my life to mean something. I want you to go home with your daughter because I’ve never seen someone care as she does for you.”
“You are both quite selfish,” Mama said.
“Then send me home,” I said. “I walked the City to find you. I’ll walk the City home.”
Black Amber shook her head from side-to-side.
“Mother—”
“What comes to the City of Stories is mine, Pomegranate.”
“I’m not yours.”
Sorrel grabbed my arm and pulled me away.
“Stay,” Mama said, and her words held the sleep-weight of a bedtime story. “Stay and be my princesses. There is room enough in the City of Stories. You can have you Mama, Pomegranate, and Sorrel, I will change your story. You will not die a meaningless death.”
Her words became a lullaby. My Mama had never sung me to sleep before. She had never brushed and braided my hair before. I had never had a sister.
I wanted to believe her. And in that moment, I was caught in the magic. I could imagine myself beside her in a faded pink gown, my hair done up, Sorrel beside me. We would be sibyl and storyteller. We would be sister princesses and Mama would love us so much, as Sabbaeus loved her.
My not-friend slowed and almost let me go, her fingers loosened their hold.
“Be my little girls,” Mama said. “I have missed you. And you’ve walked so far, tried so hard. Come to me.”
“I—” Sorrel said, dreamy. “Mama?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling, “My darling girls. We will be happy. I promise. You and I and Sabbaeus. I will teach you all the things I couldn’t.”
I grabbed Sorrel’s hand in mine, weaving my fingers in hers. She looked back at me. I tried to smile, I tried to be brave like her, I tried to show her that I cared about her even if she didn’t.
“We can’t stay,” I said. “Papa will miss me. He will miss me as much as he misses you, Mama. And the Queen—”
Black Amber stood, her gown falling behind her in a black wave. I watched a sad smile cross her lips and a tear pool from her eyes, glowing in the gloom.
“You will stay, I do not care,” she said and I was bespelled again. “There will never be another Queen in Sabbaeus.”
Sorrel backed away then, holding onto my hand. “But you have to care. You’re her mother.”
“Then let her be with her mother,” Mama said. “Stay. This is how your journey ends, my daughters. Here, safe and at peace. Stay.”
“We can’t,” Sorrel said, and jerked me back farther away. “It’s not real, Pomegranate. Don’t you see? This is a story. It’s the story you told yourself. That at the end of the road would be a battle that would free her. She’s gone, Pomegranate. She’s gone.”
“He never combed your hair, Pomegranate, not the way I would have. He did not sing you my songs, or tell you my stories. He never understood what dress would be prettiest. No, he only thinks about his skins and his inks. His maps. You are more than a map, daughter. Stay.”
“Mama?” I cried. “Mama!”
“The girls left the black palace,” Sorrel said, her fingers dug into mine. She wouldn’t let me go. I tried to go to my mother. “They learned something of themselves and each other,” Sorrel said. “They learned that love is both free and so terribly expensive.”
“Pomegranate. Sorrel,” Mama said.
And the world faded.
9.
I stood outside, staring up into my father’s tree. Sorrel leaned against the trunk. The fruits were full and round and looked like the inside of a heart. I did not know if my heart looked like that—red and black. But I knew, with the quiet knowing of a girl who’d walked too far, that the world had changed.
“Why didn’t you let me stay?” I asked.
“Because I’d give anything for someone who loved me as much as you loved your Mama and Papa. And it wasn’t real. Not really. The City of Stories—”
A parade had formed around Orissa’s Yellow Queen and she moved up the street on their mounts. Papa’s door opened and he walked out to see the commotion.
“Where have you been?” he asked. “And who is this?”
“Walking,” I said, crying when he wrapped his arm around me. “And this is my friend. Sorrel.”
When Sybelline passed, she saw me. Her pollen eyes held a question.
I thought of the spark of magic inside me that was all my own and the price I had paid to walk the path to Sabbaeus. Sorrel stood beside me and watched as well. Her hand found mine.
“It was never as real as what was here, waiting for you” she said.
“And in the end, they were happy,” I whispered, hoping there was magic in the words. “The girl, and Papa, and I.”
| Sean Robinson is an author and educator living in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire. His speculative fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Betwixt, The Future Fire, Apex Magazine, Non-Binary Review, On Spec, Diabolical Plots and elsewhere. seanryanrobinson.com. |  |