“I would show you a marvel,” her father said, slipping into his stage patter. The hay cart creaked beneath them. Rain dribbled through the woven mat the drover had thrown across the two of them. “A secret—a most perilous and secret secret.” His hands, all thin fingers and scars and bitten nails, wrote curves in the air as if to cup forth magic for her. “Can I trust you with it? Will you swear to breathe not a word of it?”
The girl didn’t understand, at first. Despite the practice she heard behind the patter, he had never done this trick, whatever it was, before an audience, at least not in front of her. At last she nodded.
“Ah, but this is a serious thing.” His hands were fast enough to misdirect a crowd but not fast enough to fool her. She glimpsed the gleam of metal as he tucked it into the colorful kerchief he drew from his sleeve. Steel. Her breath caught. “Can I trust you with a matter of life and death?”
Her eyes flicked from him to the drover, a burly woman grumbling to herself over the slack reins, lost in whatever ancient injury had stung her heart today. Her father noticed her look and gave her a solemn wink. “Wise. But we must be quick. Do you swear?”
The girl felt the significance, the drop of danger in his tone, sudden like vertigo as the cart crested a rise and began its slow rumble down toward the river town. She nodded, faster this time.
With a flourish, he produced the rod of steel, and a flint he set in the palm of her hand. It was still warm from his coat. She caressed it with her thumb, finding the tracks in its glassy surface, but had eyes only for the metal. “From ancient times,” her father whispered, pausing a beat, as if a crowd below them could admire the relic. “Before the patents.”
He set his kerchief flat on the wood of the cart. He pulled together a pyramid of loose hay, still dry beneath him, atop it between his palms. “No matter how ancient, steel remembers its forging. It holds the heat’s memory close.” He plucked the flint back from her. Emphasizing his movements, making no effort to hide his hands, the way he always did when she needed to memorize a trick, he struck the end of the rod against the stone. Her heart skipped as a spark—fire!—jumped from the stone to the hay. He struck again, and this spark was larger, hungrier, rooting amid the hay and swelling as it found the food to its liking. He hid the stone and rod up his sleeve before shaking off the smoldering hay behind them on the path, into the rain, away from the cart.
He had spoken no incantations, used no spell, paid no patent, yet he had made fire.
Hands moving fast once more, he tucked the kerchief around rod and stone, and pressed the bundle into her hands. “Hide it, guard it, let none see it,” he whispered. Her hands shook with each beat of her heart as she slipped the bundle into the top of her boot.
The drover snuffled, her litany of complaints paused for the moment. “You smell that? Smoke!”
The man drew air into his lungs like a capsized sailor reaching the surface. “Why, you’re right!” he said in his stage voice, ringing out between the trees. “Are we so near to the town?”
His false cheer, like his stagecraft, could not fool the girl.
He traveled under the soubriquet Linden Byrne, Conjurer for Hire. She, his daughter and stage assistant, was never on the bills, but lately he introduced her in his patter as Delariver the Prophet Girl.
Neither name, of course, was a true name. In the past he had called her Willow, Gallerie, Sentforth. The girl was unsure what her true name had ever been—a confusion her father made no effort to fix. “True names,” he said once, uncharacteristically drunk and solemn, “true names are a curse. A handle. A way they control you and direct you. A spell you can’t scrape off. A patent on who you are.” He spat out the taste of that word, patent. “You’re better off forgetting yours. You can’t tell it to anyone else, that way.” His quick, delicate fingers tangled themselves, rubbed the tattoo around his left ring finger, stirring in the girl dim memories of her mother.
“You know my name,” she had said, blurting it out to muffle her own unnamed fear. She didn’t like it when he touched that tattoo. She didn’t like the word mother.
“Ah,” he said, and the first smile in hours flitted across his face. “But do I? There’s real magic in that. Magic does strange things around the nameless.” He said no more, but tapped a finger against his temple and winked down at her.
The girl and her father jumped off the hay cart well beyond the outskirts of town, the drover grumbling but eventually pacified with an extra two pennies for her tip. They set off along the path together, hunched in the last remnants of rain. The bundle was an uncomfortable weight in her boot. He hoisted their big satchel, the one that contained their costumes and makeup and all his tricks, over his shoulder, and whistled the news of his false cheer to all the Maytide birds awakening again now that the rain had passed.
The first habitation they came to was a cabin in a field cleared from the edge of the woods. Small and isolated though it was, it had clearly been here some time—the piled rock fence grew moss and trilliums where it crossed damper spots, and the clever wooden gate that opened to the road was cracked and faded from summers of sun. A rock-walled well rose from a hill behind the house. The field had been newly turned. A farmer waved at them from the woodpile beside the cabin, the turf steaming around her boots.
“Halloo,” her father said, and sketched the sign of Abstention in the air.
The farmer narrowed her eyes at them, and furtively displayed the sign from the shelter of her shadow, before pretending to brush flies from her face. “A long walk yet into town,” she called out to them. “If town’s what you’re wanting.”
“Travelers are always wanting friends,” he said, pausing by the farmer’s gate.
“It’s few friends, maybe, you’ll find hereabouts. At least at present.” The woman set her axe against her shoulder and sighed, dusting a hand on her breeches before beginning the trudge toward the gate.
The girl tugged on her father’s hand—clearly the woman was reluctant to let them in. But he smiled his blandest stage smile and only tightened his hand on hers. He waited.
“There’s no spell,” the woman said, placing her hand on the gate and undoing the new leather thong that held it closed.
The girl’s father looked up and down the farmer’s land. “Not one? Aren’t you troubled with redcaps and bandits out this way?”
The farmer swung the gate wide and gestured them inside with obvious impatience. “Not one spell,” she repeated, then clattered the gate shut behind them. She whistled once, a piercing note that made the girl clap her free hand to her ear. A dog barked somewhere in response.
“Ah,” her father said, and his smile widened.
Before they reached the door of the cabin, the girl heard footsteps in the woods beyond. The farmer put her hand on the girl’s shoulder and the three of them waited. A large dog—a rarity, but not a marvel—lunged from the young ferns and growled. The farmer grabbed hold of some scraggly fur on his neck and spoke to it sharply. Behind the dog panted a man, fashioned from the same broad mold as the woman, a bow and some stone-tipped arrows in his hand.
“Wat gave me a run, he did,” he panted, as if it were all in good fun, but his eyes were cold, appraising the newcomers.
Her father made the sign, which the man grudgingly returned. “You’ve met Bess,” he said, almost petulantly.
“This is my Reece,” the farmer said, keeping her grip on the dog while he calmed.
Reece shifted the bow and arrows to his other hand, and offered his hand to shake.
“Tom will do for now,” said the girl’s father, gripping Reece’s hand with both of his and shaking heartily.
“And the little miss?”
“Claire,” her father said, giving her a quick wink.
“There might be some bits of potato and stock bones inside,” Bess said, rising from the dog as he wagged forward and sniffed at the girl’s boot. She quickly ducked behind her father. “No beer, though.”
“Clear water would be a blessing,” her father said.
Inside the cabin was dim but clean, smelling of fresh cut wood and old root vegetables. A small boy who had been eavesdropping behind the door scuttled back and pretended to sweep. A small hearth sheltered live coals, which Reece quickly coaxed before placing a pot above them. Bess spoke one word to the boy and he disappeared out the single open window.
Bess set her axe against the door and gestured impatiently in the direction of the river town. “Whatever your plan is, I suggest you clear out. Go back the way you came, Tom. These aren’t healthy precincts for such as you, not now.”
“Will there be a better time?”
“Wipe that grin off your face. This is my house, Tom, and when I give advice, I expect to be heard. It’s your life to so much as make the Abstainers’ sign.”
The girl’s legs felt weak. She found a warm stone shelf beside the hearth and sat down, gripping her knee with both hands so as not to touch her boot. Her father glanced at her, then narrowed his eyes at the coals.
“Were you told to find us, Tom?” Reece spoke from over the pot. He raised his eyes to the girl’s. She saw weariness there, a stone-heavy sadness.
Her father let his smile lapse, though only for a moment. “I swear upon the Old Wing that no one sent me. You have nothing to fear from me.”
“Would that it were so,” Bess said. “I’ve done my best to keep this land clear of spellwork. For generations, my family’s worked to keep it clean. But our gate abuts the open road, and countless eyes could have seen you come to my house. Birds come and go, Tom.”
The girl’s father found himself pinned by three sets of eyes—including hers. For a moment he moved not a muscle. At last he bowed his head, with exaggerated courtesy, toward Bess. “A fair point. What might I do to make amends, fair lady Bess?”
“Leave,” she said brusquely. “Go back to your own. We’ve troubles enough here.”
“Ah.” With rehearsed naturalism, he furrowed his brow and cupped his chin in thought. “May I make you a better offer, lady?”
The farmer snorted. “The one thing my heart desires of you, Tom, is the sight of you and your miss headed back along that road and never returning.”
He bowed to her again. “So you’ve made plain. But perhaps I can do more than that for you. Perhaps I can do you a good to repair the injury I have done.”
Reece tutted over the pot. “And what might that be?” The dog nudged Reece’s arm with his snout, then settled to the swept earth beside him with a patient sigh.
The performer swept his hand in a grand stage gesture. “Rid the town of a certain foul witch.”
The farmer and her husband met each other’s eyes. The girl’s heart hammered; her tongue felt gummy and dry. Her. The girl’s mother. This must be her town. This was something she had never guessed he would try.
Surely it was a con—yet he had always impressed upon her the necessity of never cheating those who showed the sign.
“All I ask,” her father said, his voice a stage whisper in the sudden quiet, “is for you two to provide a refuge for my daughter, should I fail.”
Once, and only once, the girl had come face to face with a Patenter. She had been removing her wig and wiping away her “face” in a quiet space behind a tent; the town’s common lands were filled with tents and wagons, donkeys and rheas, drawn there by the same revival meeting that had fired her father’s imagination with the promise of large crowds and piles of coins. The moonlight threw a shadow at her feet, noiseless as a moth. She looked up to see the pale robes of the Patenter, a kindly face peering down at her as his hands eased back his hood.
“Hello there,” he said, and his voice was like warm honey on fresh bread. “Willow the Wondrous, was it? I quite enjoyed your act.”
She opened her mouth but otherwise sat frozen. The Patenter laughed warmly, then squatted beside her, lowering his face toward hers as if to share a secret. He placed one fingertip to her cheek, and it was icy cold, like plunging into a lake after the first thaw of spring. The cold of it crackled into the bones of her face, made her eye bulge and water. “Hmmm. Hm. No especial talents. No registered abilities. No patented magics. How is it you see the future, girl?”
“T-tricks, sir,” she stammered. She blinked away tears. In truth, there was nothing magical about her premonitions. A life on the road had given her alert senses, shown her the value in recognizing patterns, in reading people and what they wanted to hear. In her stagecraft it passed for fortune-casting. “All for show. Just t-tricks.”
“Tricks,” he repeated, and his smile seemed hungrier, his teeth sharper. He seemed to bite the word. “Tricks. Just some fun, yes? Something for the rubes?”
“Yessir!” Her tongue was heavy; her teeth ached.
“You wouldn’t lie to me,” he said, and she knew it for a spell. She felt the cold magic pooling into her from her cheek, icy worms digging deep, rooting toward her brain and her throat. She sank slowly into the cold. “You will tell me your true name.”
“Hullo!” came her father’s cheerful voice, but even in the cold place, she knew his tone, knew the rage and fear beneath the public face.
“Wait there,” snapped the Patenter, scarcely awarding him a glance. So it was that he never saw what hit him. The girl, lost in the cold, came to with a shock like a punch to the heart, finding herself draped over her father’s shoulder while he trotted down dark wood paths well beyond the town.
They never spoke of it again. They didn’t have to.
Once. And only once. They both made sure of that.
In the dead of night, the girl lay in the farmer’s bed, her father snoring lightly beside her. Regular breathing suggested the farmer and her family were asleep in a bundle of bedrolls and blankets by the door. The only light came from the softly breathing coals. Her ankle itched where the fire-starter had pressed against it.
She sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. The dog whined in his sleep, scrabbling a single paw against the swept dirt floor. Her father sighed and shifted, his back hunched, as if hiding from enemies in his dreams. She slipped off the bed, found her boots, had a moment of panic before she found the bundle, safe and secure, in the toe box. With its weight in her hand, she felt safer, stealthier.
The girl stole forward and crouched beside the hearth. The coals dimmed as if eyes narrowed at her approach.
Not one spell, the farmer had said, but patents were insidious things. Patient things. You could forget how many things in your life ran on patented magic. The farmer and her husband were careful. Their fields were plowed with hard labor and wooden plowshares, which surely needed to be replaced far more often than their ensorcelled metal counterparts. Their seeds no doubt were ancient heirloom stock; they wouldn’t need to pay the Patenters with each planting. They avoided beer, with its patent of zymurgy, and cheese, with its patent of fermentation. Their clothing had been woven and stitched by hand, from spun wool and softened leather, patched and patched again. Their gate was latched with a thong, their door and window barred with heavy planks. Their fence had been piled up, one rock atop the next, by whomever had had the ill fortune to plow these fields when the woods had been broken. They took their chances with lightning and pixies, illnesses and ticks and unpotable water, ills which could have been ameliorated with spellwork.
They did all that, yet still they could not be wholly free of magic.
She had watched Reece tend the coals. He kept them going carefully, economical with fuel from long habit and skill. With such care, a family could keep a spark alive indefinitely, like votaries at a shrine. Yet that spark had come from somewhere. However many years gone, it had been roused by a spell. It carried that patent still.
Scarcely breathing, she unwrapped the marvel, as if performing one of her father’s sleights of hand.
She set stone and steel carefully on the flat of the hearth. She had seen the stores of fuel Reece kept nearby, the milkweed fluff and frayed twigs meant to coax coals to life, the sturdier wood to feed them, the large split boles to keep them going through the night. Navigating by touch, she took down a ball of dried goldenrod and grass, selected twigs. Her heart pounded in her ears.
How to kill the coals on the hearth?
Nothing of the original magic could remain. It had to be extinguished, cast out, thrown beyond the fence into the public path if at all possible. For too many years now the spell had lain waiting in the farmer’s cabin, woven so inextricably into daily life that she had forgotten that something so basic, so integral, had been patented. Had been keeping its sorcerous vigil on the family—and on anyone who had sought their shelter.
She took the coal shovel, carefully shaped from pipestone, and brought down the water pail from its nail on the wall, splashing half of it into the dirt at her feet. She stirred the shovel against the hard-packed earth until it began to drink, loosening it bit by bit until she had a small store of mud. This she spread, doling out more water as necessary, until she judged she had enough. Quickly now, she turned and shoveled the coals, bit by bit, into the mud, tamping them down, wincing at each sharp hiss of protest. The room dimmed with each shovelful. She scooped the cooling coals and mud into what water remained in the pail, satisfied with the last dying hiss of the spell. She blinked in the darkness, straining to hear over the beat of her pulse.
Quiet breathing. Her father shifted, then settled again with a sigh. All seemed normal.
Now the difficult part began.
She built the pyramid of twigs over fresh kindling. Her father had shown her how to strike a spark, as if it had been another stage trick. She coached her hands into the proper position, shaking slightly in the dark. A scrape—like this. Nothing but a tap that sounded much too loud to her ears. The dog stirred behind her, or maybe it was the little boy. Again—harder. A spark flew—her breath caught! But it skittered into the dry stone of the hearth like a falling star, leaving no trace.
Sound, motion behind her. She fumbled the tools into a fold of her skirt and sat hunched over them, trembling, until the dog nudged her arm with his snout, snuffled at her once or twice, then settled companionably against her side.
She remembered how to breathe. Her hands stopped shaking. Try again.
Shift the flint, here. Hold the steel, tense, expectant. Strike.
A spark flew, large and ravenous, into its nest of fuel.
The rest was quick work. To make coals, you need fire, and fire creates unwonted light. She felt vulnerable, but she worked as best she could, ignoring the feeling of eyes on the back of her head until the flames had settled into a contented shelf of coals in the hearth. Only then did she permit herself a look around.
A glitter of eyes swam in her fire-dimmed vision. As quickly as the girl saw it, the farmer’s head ducked back down into the huddle of blankets and bodies beside the door.
Even magic had been free of patents, once. A power shared with wind and tree and rock, free to hand, not a power to be bought or sold or hoarded.
At first light her father stole out of the cabin, enjoining her to wait quietly with the farmer. She sat long enough for Reece to refresh and bank the coals, watching him to see if he noted any difference. Bess bustled around, ordering her boy to perform this or that chore, and even gave the girl the broom and snapped at her to sweep the ashy mess before the hearth, but otherwise betrayed no sign of whatever she had seen in the night.
The girl swept the night’s leavings out the open door, then set the broom inside and grabbed the water pail before anyone could assign her another task. She dragged it to the woods behind the house, jumped the boundary wall, and there she dumped the ash and dried mud. She scoured the pail with a thatch of blueberry brush and some loose sandy pebbles she found. Once it was clean enough, she dipped it into the well and dragged it sloshing back into the cabin.
“Girl, wait a bit,” the farmer said, looming above her as she deposited the pail inside. Reece sat beside the hearth, his brow furrowed at her. Bess made a grab at her but she managed to duck outside and ran off without a word. Following her father. The couple watched her depart, exchanging only a glance. The dog, however, trotted after her as far as the gate, where he sat and howled as she disappeared.
Houses and farms grew thicker as the path wound toward the river town. The woods fell away to open a vista of rolling hills and bluffs above the vast muddy water. The path followed the crest of a rise, avoiding the wetter bottomlands where sycamores and maples mingled with young crops of goosefoot and squash, the last of the bluebells and the first of the waterleaf. Patent-magic steamers plied the reaches of the river, connecting the town to the cities and states beyond.
It was still early enough that the path was deserted, though already some farmers and drovers were harnessing donkeys to haul produce into town. Many gave the girl a sharp glance before turning away and focusing with conspicuous attention on their work. She resisted the temptation to run, restraining herself to a determined stride, as if she had every business being here.
The path became a road and joined a confluence of traffic into the town. Carts and wagons and farmers lugging sacks atop their heads wended alongside her. Bewitched battlements rose above the clutter of houses at the brink of the town, a palisade of split logs supported and reinforced with spells and lookout towers. She felt the icy needles of an entry spell as she crossed under a gate. She wondered if her father had found some other way in, and felt quite alone.
Almost at once she saw the robes of a pair of Patenters. They stood in the street, given wide berth by the morning stream of trade. A low beam of sun broke through the press of houses right where they stood; both seemed almost asleep, serene in its radiance, the scroll-and-quill badge of the Patent stitched in gold above their breasts. They murmured kind words of greeting to each farmer and trader and merchant who passed, their fingers gently weaving the air as if parting the threads of a spider’s web. The girl took a breath and forced herself into the character of a hurrying-but-awed farmgirl, scuttling around them with just the right mix of deference, curiosity, and fear. The nearer Patenter opened one eye and smiled at her as she passed. Only when their backs were turned did she allow herself to shiver.
Can I trust you with a matter of life and death? Her father’s words made her pause, tucked out of the flow of traffic beside a breadmonger’s cart. Was she betraying his trust?
This was her city. Which meant that this was a Patenter city; whatever her mother’s power, she was beholden to their patents. The girl never should have come.
She went on, drifting through knots of people toward the riverbanks and their towering warehouses. Just as she turned, a boy who had been trotting just behind her cried out. Looking over her shoulder, she saw the market boy snatched by the back of his shirt by a guard in dark clothes. Behind him shone the robes of a Patenter. The boy struggled until he saw the man smiling behind the guard.
“Good morning, son,” the Patenter beamed, then looked up from the boy, as if startled by a sound. She closed her eyes before she could meet his, and slipped down the alley.
It’s your life to so much as make the sign.
A woman stepped in front of her and gripped her arm before she could duck aside. She placed a finger over her lips, winked at the girl, and hauled her bodily into what appeared to be a hawker’s booth. It happened before the girl could get a good look at her. She had an impression of quality clothes and eyes sunken from worry and pain. The woman pushed her through a curtain, into what proved to be a dank pathway between warehouses, concealed behind the false front. A crow sneered somewhere, unseen. The woman squatted before the girl and whispered, “Your father’s in trouble, missy. You’re the only one who can help him. Please, come with me.”
Her arm ached in the woman’s grip. The woman kept twisting and looking up and down the gap between buildings; scarcely any light filtered through the tattered canvas and old sails rigged above the pathway. Nothing about her seemed familiar. Everything about this said danger.
Yet premonition—that sense of pattern, that instinct of what needed to happen—told her to go on.
“Please, girl. We need you.” The urgent sincerity in her voice was unmistakable.
The girl gritted her teeth, then nodded. The woman tightened her hold and pulled her along, into darkness.
The woman brought her by hidden paths to the riverfront, where a steam barge awaited. It bore no insignia, but the girl quickly took in the quality of the wood, the spell-varnished sheen, and she panicked. She dug her heels in and tried to fling her weight back. Her boots lost purchase on the slick wood of the dock and all she managed to do was wrench herself around in the woman’s grip, smashing her face against a piling. She tasted blood and spat out a piece of tooth. To her surprise the woman was breathing just as hard as she. The woman stepped over and hauled the girl to her feet as if she feared something, murmuring, “Not long, come along, not long now.”
Heavy boots clumped on the boards, and the girl found her feet hauled into the air. Magic. The woman yelped and stammered, “She’s safe, just took a spill, I brought the girl, just as promised—”
A gruffer woman’s voice snapped, “Tell her.” Rough arms lifted her bodily. She was draped over the new woman’s shoulder, her face pressed into a fine woolen uniform, the cold acrid stink of spellwork woven through its threads. She struggled to get free, but the gruff woman placed the flat of her hand over the back of the girl’s head and whispered an incantation of sleep.
She awoke upon a throne.
It seemed as much to the girl: a chair carved all of one enormous bole of wood, curved in beautiful approximation of spreading branches, its surface polished enough to gleam in the near-darkness. Something rushed and hissed like the canopy of a forest. She felt the chair sway beneath her, as if she had been rocked to sleep by the wind through the trees.
Sleep. She touched the back of her head, then winced as an unwontedly sharp tooth cut her lip. She tasted blood again. She swallowed it this time. Blood was powerful in the hands of a mage. In her mother’s hands.
The thought pushed her to her feet. She slipped off the throne. Her boots hit wood, and she knew from the wobble in her legs that she rode in the belly of a boat. She crouched and touched the deck beneath her, all smooth wood without join or seam, as if grown into shape. Her fingers numbed from the magic that twisted within. Patents burned cold, woven deep into the wood.
“What does it feel like to you?” came a voice in the dark, a voice like moonlight on waves, a voice like rain in the treetops. It was the most beautiful voice the girl had ever heard.
“Ice,” she said.
A light grew, a spark feeding itself from the dark, from its own absence. A hand fleshed itself out beneath the light, growing into an arm, a lovely sweep of gown, a gleam of face so beautiful the girl almost felt pain. A woman walked toward her, soundless, carrying the light in her palm.
“When was your last good meal?” she asked, her voice low and kindly. “You look half starved, my dear.” With her other hand, she touched the girl’s face; the girl flinched, and the woman stepped back, looking her up and down, sadness growing in her lovely eyes.
“This morning,” the girl said, stepping back, bumping up against the throne.
“And what did you have?”
“Porridge.”
“Ah.” The woman came no closer, but the light grew, spilling out and revealing the shape of the boat’s hold, empty save for the two of them and the chair. The girl saw no way in or out, no hatch, no ladder. The woman made a gesture and even the faint rocking of the vessel was stilled, as if the two of them shared a universe all to themselves, grown in place in the heart of a tree. As if it had always been the two of them, there in the tree, since the birth of time.
“You’re still bloodied, child.” The girl looked down, saw dark old blood in a cascade down her dress. “Garmery appraised me of your slip on the docks. Let me clean you.” The woman beckoned with her fingers. The girl felt a stir, as if flurries of snow tickled her hair, but nothing else happened. Her dress remained stained. The woman frowned so slightly it almost seemed a trick of the light.
“Where are my manners?” The woman straightened, and swept the girl a courtly bow, extending the hand with the light to one side. “I am called Lanius, child. I am your mother.”
The girl’s fists clenched behind her. She gritted her teeth, but her broken tooth pained her. She said nothing.
Lanius watched her daughter, face pensive, then gestured with her free hand. “Gloria,” she said, her voice layered with overtones of power. An amniotic shape extruded from the floor, forming itself into the woman from the alley, bursting free from the wood in a wet spasm of coughing and retching. She trembled on her hands and knees before Lanius. “I brought her,” the woman gasped.
“You did,” and in her mother’s voice was the harshness of a January wind, the rattle of dead branches. “You have fulfilled the bargain.”
“Please,” the woman whimpered. “My wife.”
Lanius waved her hand impatiently. “Martine.” A second sac bulged from the floor beside the woman, bursting forth a stocky dark shape to which the woman immediately latched herself, her voice an incoherent babble of comforting words and sobs.
“Martine and Gloria.” The command in her voice made the very room they were in tighten, as if expectant. The air felt dense, too rich to breathe. “Forget the abstainers’ sign, now. You are free of it. You may go.” With a wave of her hand, the two women vanished as if they had never existed. She and her daughter were alone in the universe once more.
“As you can see, child, I am fair. Whatever lies your father told you, whatever grotesque fantasies he spun for you, understand this: The universe is a balance, and I work within that balance. I am neither capricious nor cruel. No mage can be. A bargain fulfilled brought those two forgiveness. They had worked against magic, they had flouted the patents. They were abstainers. They thought themselves clever, cleverer than every patent they broke, but the Patenters caught up with them, as they always do. A bargain fulfilled gave them a new start, child. A bargain fulfilled means life. A bargain broken…” With a gesture, Lanius released the light, and it floated in the air between them. Again Lanius spoke with the timbre of command. “Cordeliere.”
Again a sac swelled from the floor at her mother’s feet. The girl rushed forward before she had even consciously realized what she had seen. She ripped the sac apart and held her father’s head as he spilled forward against her.
“Oh,” he panted, and his voice broke into a sob.
“Silence,” Lanius said. Her father—Cordeliere—suddenly retched, his face almost comical, but no sound came forth. He trembled against the girl. Knowing his name felt wrong, something like the cold sweat before nausea. “He offered himself to me,” Lanius said, her voice hardening with anger. “His sorry self, coated in rags. As if I cared for him and his mummery. He could have beggared himself and made a clown of his heritage for all I cared. What I cared about, child, was you.” She swept forward, standing over them. The girl clung to her father, as if she could shield him.
“He offered himself,” and there was the crack of straining limbs in her voice, the howl of the storm, “when the bargain had been for you. My daughter, my heir. For that, he must suffer. He must face his punishment, so that you may see that punishment, too, is fair.”
Lanius swept her hand down. Cordeliere sank once again into the deck, his mouth moving silently, his eyes full of an unspoken plea. Life and death. Not a matter of his life, but of hers.
The girl scrambled back to her feet and backed away once again to the chair.
“Sit,” Lanius said, seeming lost in thought.
The girl stood, breathing hard, staring hate at her.
Lanius flicked a finger, her eyes hardening when the girl made no move to obey her.
“I had hoped we could talk as equals,” her mother said, the faintest hint of frown crossing her face. “You will grow into it with time. Amelia.”
She felt frost around her heart, a grip as flighty and as stern as a blizzard gale. She felt some part of her pulled toward the chair, insistently, commandingly, but she squared her feet against the deck and refused to move.
“Amelia,” her mother shouted, and thunder rumbled within it. The boat groaned around them. The girl stood up straighter and clenched her fists and stared back at her.
Mother and daughter glared at each other across the width of the universe. “Cordeliere,” Lanius spat, and again he bubbled up out of the deck, gasping without sound. “Speak. Tell me plain. How is it she does not answer her name?”
He wheezed air deep into his lungs, and at once laughter began to spill out of him. “She has no name written upon her heart, dearest. The chains of family and name have no pull on her.”
Lanius made a dismissive gesture. Cordeliere’s laughter was choked off. “There is more.” Lanius weaved her fingers in the air, just as the Patenters had done back in the river town. “She has been touched by no spells. No patents have marked her. Nothing tracks her. Impressive, Cordeliere. That must have taken considerable effort. Oh, such sad lives you two must have led. Adrift, alone, cold to the bone, outcast from civilized society. On the run from everywhere. Hungry. Performing his silly acts to get bread, and never being sure your food was fit to eat. However did you endure it, child?” Something like grief and compassion colored her words. But the girl knew a performance when she heard it.
Suddenly Lanius seemed to come to a decision. “The name is just a matter of time, and of familiarity. She will learn to answer. Family, however…” She flicked a finger and Cordeliere’s chin jerked upward, as if from a noose. The girl cried out and darted forward, but her father was already being swallowed back into the deck, twisting in soundless agony, slipping away from her just as she pressed her hands to where he had been.
“This is our bargain, child.” Command had left Lanius’ voice, leaving it sweet and beautiful, just as the girl had first heard it. Silent tears pattered the wood around the girl’s hands. She did not look up. “You may lessen your father’s punishment, and someday even free him. In exchange, you will remain with me and forget his lies. You will embrace my tutelage and take your rightful place as my heir, with all the glory this man had stolen from you.”
The girl felt the woman’s approach before she heard it. She flinched back but Lanius caught her hair in her hand all the same, her grip gentle but unbreakable. “You are my daughter, Amelia.” The icy hold around her heart returned, stronger this time. “You will learn your name. You will wear it on your heart. You will learn magic. If all else fails, I will buy magic for you. And if you do well, you will end his suffering.”
The summer wood hummed with magic. It poured over the girl like the sunshine, coaxing her to uncurl in its warmth like the young fiddleheads along the bank of the stream.
How tempting, to let just a little in. How easy it would be.
Lanius let her roam free in the woods and the town. Her eyes seemed to laugh at the girl each morning, whenever she refused her lessons or slipped past her mother to gain the freedom of the outside air. As if to say, Go where you will, Amelia, your father will be waiting with me.
But she wasn’t Amelia. She wasn’t Delariver the Prophet Girl.
She was a lost thing, alone in the wood.
Magic did strange things around the nameless.
Magic whispered around her in the fresh green leaves, in the swirl of pollen from the late-blooming bergamot and vervain.
She didn’t want to move. She had chosen wrong, had only gotten herself here, her father entombed in torment. She would never escape her mother, never escape the convocation of Patenters who lurked behind her mother’s throne, poised to impress their patents into her should Lanius lose patience with her obstinance.
Her feet carried her anyway, drawn by a half-formed idea. Forest paths shadowed by summer leaves, a turn here, a familiar bole there. At last: a small cottage at the edge of the woods.
Smoke piped from its chimney despite the warmth of the day.
The girl watched for a time, saw other farmers, drovers, merchants arrive in ones and twos, say polite hellos, never stepping over the threshold of the gate. A scatter of crows and jays watched from the oaks beyond the fence. The farmer Bess and her husband Reece nodded and waved and minded the business of their farm. But every so often, the boy emerged from the cabin cradling a clay bowl, lidded, which he set on the stone fence. And in their ones and twos, the farmers and drovers and merchants would take the clay bowls and carry them along as they walked on their way.
Bowls full of embers, clean of all patents.
The steel remembers its forging, she thought. She watched only a little more before she turned and made her way back to town.
She knew something no one else knew: she knew who she was.
She knew a certain foul witch needed to be dealt with.
| Rick Hollon (they/them) is a genderqueer author from the American Midwest. Their stories and poems have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, ALOCASIA, Stanchion Zine, the Dudes Rock Anthology, and elsewhere. Their first poetry collection, Time Travel Is Easy, will be published later in 2025. Find them online at mimulus.weebly.com. |  |
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