Issue #116 • Mar. 7, 2013

“A Family for Drakes,” by Margaret Ronald

“Bakemono, or The Thing That Changes,” by A.B. Treadwell

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A FAMILY FOR DRAKES

by Margaret Ronald

Bron was where she left him, but one of their blankets was not. “Here,” Netta said, dropping the boots where the blanket should have been. “What happened?”

Bron held one boot up to his foot, then hurriedly peeled off the remnants of his shoes. “Did you trade for these?”

“The boy who owned them had another pair,” she lied. Maybe he had; she hadn’t checked under his mother’s body. Probably she should have; she’d made the long trek out and back after spotting the two huddled bodies... but pulling the little boots off cold feet had taken longer than she’d thought it would, and she’d been shivering too hard to search for more. “Bron, where’s our blanket?”

He first pointed to the one underneath him, then, when that feigned ignorance didn’t work, to a fire apart from the rest of the refugees, closer to them than any other cluster of people had been for two weeks. A hulking shape sat next to the fire, blotting out most of its light. “He had meat,” Bron added, holding out a little sack. “I was hungry.”

Meat for a blanket was no proper trade. Netta turned away from the fire, waiting for her eyes to adjust. She could make out a few of the other groups—and yes, they were watching her. Waiting for just such a sign of weakness as this. She turned a little further and sure enough, there was Sieg, wrapped up in his heavy city official’s coat, watching to make sure she didn’t venture any closer to “decent people” than this uneasy distance. He’d failed to keep that sort of order in Alcaris, but the refugees were scared and scattered enough that one self-appointed shepherd could exercise a lot of clout. Netta sighed, then made a show of loosening Leir’s knife in its sheath at her belt. “Stay here, stay safe. I’ll be back in a moment.” Bron, fitting his feet into new boots, only nodded.

The man looked up just as she recognized the lump on his back: a huge maul, meant less for pounding iron than cracking bones. A smaller, smith-sized hammer hung at his belt, snagging on the blanket—their blanket. Netta swallowed. “Evening,” she said, stopping on the far side of his fire.

“Evening to you,” he responded. His head was shaved, or had been at some point; now it was mostly gray and black bristle, broken by old white scars. He didn’t look like a smith, for all that his strength appeared to be mostly in those shoulders. But he had a fire all his own, even if it was only a pale smudge of flame, and that was something smiths usually did.

Netta crossed her arms. “My cousin tells me you traded for our blanket.” He nodded, fine lines appearing at the corners of his eyes. “Well, he doesn’t really have the best grasp of trade in this situation—” her gesture caught the two of them and Bron, all the watching refugees, maybe even all the way back to the pillar of smoke that had been Alcaris, “— and it looks like neither do you. Not for a fair trade, anyway.”

The lines creased further. He was going to laugh at her, tell her little girl, you are twelve years old and I am twice your size, do you think I’m going to bother with your notions of fairness? Sieg hadn’t bothered with her, after all, saying that they should have known better than to trust Leir. He hadn’t cared two pins for Leir or Netta, not till one of them was dead. And where Sieg led, whether a different choice of route or an opinion as to who deserved shelter, the other refugees followed.

“How so?” the smith asked.

“Meat’s good, but it goes fast. Blanket, though, that’ll keep you warm till you reach Ceste.” If he was going to Ceste. She really hoped he wasn’t. “So that blanket’s worth a lot more than a sack of dried jerky.”

The stranger gazed at her a long moment, but he didn’t laugh outright at her. “Well,” he said at last, “only so much I can offer. Got a good knife, but it seems you have one too.” He reached into the shaggy vastness of his cloak and took out a bag—smaller, but bulging. “This cover the rest?”

He tossed the bag to her, and she caught it without thinking. Within were apples—little ones, hard and dry, but an impossibly sweet scent still clung to them, bringing back memories of her mother’s bakery. “Somewhat,” Netta mumbled, then cleared her throat. “Still not going to last to Ceste.”

“Then I’ll have to owe you,” he said. But it was enough, for now. The other refugees would have seen the trade, and that might be enough to keep them from thinking her weak.

Netta closed the bag, then hesitated. “You know,” she said slowly, trying to remember how Leir had said all this, back when she and Bron still had a wheelbarrow and four blankets, “seems you’re new here. Happen you might need someone to show you the ropes, teach you what’s what.” She swung the bag over her shoulder, trying for the same unapproachable confidence that Leir had shown, the attitude that said never mind Duke Tasso’s soldiers, never mind the firedrakes and the sorcery that fuels them, never mind that your home is ash; trust in me. If it had worked on her, it might work on someone else, and maybe twelve-year-olds weren’t the only ones who deserved to get swindled, regardless of what Sieg said....

But the stranger only shook his head. “I appreciate the offer,” he said, “but I’ll navigate this on my own.”

Netta nodded again, unsure whether she was disappointed or relieved that she hadn’t succeeded in pulling off Leir’s scam. She returned to Bron’s side, her breath clouding in the air.

“Did you get our blanket back?” Bron asked sleepily.

“No.” She crawled under the remaining blanket with him and handed him an apple. “Here. We’ll split it.”

He took a tentative bite, then another. “Netta?”

“Yes?”

“Aunt Salda will take us in, right?”

She’s your aunt, she wanted to say. “Of course she will. She’s family.”

“But—”

“No buts. If she’s there—” and that was the only worry she’d allow herself, “— then she’ll take us in.” She rolled over and curled up tight, clutching Leir’s knife.

* * *

The clot of refugees had started out as one group, tight as a sorcerer’s knot. But as time passed, the refugees had spread out and splintered, the older and sicker lagging behind—and Bron and Netta well behind that, shunned and pushed to the back by those who listened to Sieg. They might even have lagged this far if it hadn’t been for Sieg’s pious outrage driving the others ahead; Bron was small, even for an eight-year-old, and his short legs wearied quickly.

When they first left Alcaris, Bron had been full of his stories about his Aunt Salda’s shop and how she had two cats and a hearth with bright red tiles on it, but now Netta couldn’t even get that out of him. Some part of her was jealously glad—she no longer had a home to tell stories of, so let him shut up about the two cats—but it did worry her.

The smith moved just as slow as they did, for two reasons. One was the limp that worsened as day wore on into evening; the other was that he seemed not to be in much of a hurry at all. He picked up things as he walked, adding them to a heap in his hands, as if he were a needlewoman knitting.

Three nights after the smith joined up, he chose a spot close to theirs when they lay their blanket down for the night. Netta cast a glance back at him, one hand on Leir’s knife, but he ignored them, and after a while she was glad for the fire he started.

“I want bread,” Bron said.

“We don’t have any.” Even her clothes had stopped smelling like bread. It was difficult to believe she’d ever been sick of the smell.

Bron’s lower lip stuck out, but he’d learned not to argue with her, and tears didn’t bring bread. That had been a favorite saying of her mother: tears don’t bring bread, wailing won’t get you a coin, and not all the laments will make Duke Tasso stop sending his soldiers. She’d started leaving off the end of the saying over the last few months, after the duke’s sorcerer Vigil loosed the firedrakes and they started burning their way up the river.

“Excuse me.”

Netta turned to see the smith sitting with his back to the fire. The last light of day showed something in his cupped hands. “I said I would owe you. It’s not bread, but it’s payment of a sort.”

He raised one hand, fingers in a set of little wire loops, and a cat the size of one of the withered apples sat up on his palm. As Netta stared, he twitched his fingers, and the cat stood up, stretched, and leapt to the ground, guided by the wires. The smith made the cat walk up to the edge of the blanket and sit back, then smiled encouragingly at them both, waiting for their response.

Bron scrambled away and hid behind Netta, and the smith’s smile faded. “Here,” Netta said. “You’re doing it wrong.”

“Wrong?”

She glared up at the mountain of a man, bearskin shaggy around his shoulders. “You’re terrifying him. Let me.”

“It’s more complicated than it looks,” he said, but let her take the cat from his hand. “Are you sure—”

“Shut up. You’re not helping.” She slid her fingers into the complicated loops. It was difficult, but there was a sense to it, and after a few false starts she brought the cat walking up to Bron’s knee. “Hello,” she said in a squeaky cat-voice. “I was passing by, and I couldn’t help hearing you mention two cats in Ceste.”

Bron looked at her, then nodded.

“Are they pretty cats?” She angled her hand down, and the puppet bent as if to pounce. “The prettiest cats ever?”

Bron nodded again, this time watching the puppet instead of her. The smith, though, was watching her, and though his brows knit together he was smiling.

“Well, I think I’ll have to judge that for myself. They can’t possibly be as pretty as me.” She made the cat sit back and preen, not nearly as smoothly as the smith had, then made it stand up on its hind legs. “Right? Right?” It bumped its head against his knee, like a kitten demanding attention.

Bron gave a little whisper of a laugh, reaching out to touch the cat’s head. She danced it away, then made it bat at Bron’s finger, and a slow grin began to spread over her own face.

A man cleared his throat, and Netta jerked back, thumping the cat over the uneven ground. Sieg stood over them, too close not to have seen them, but he still looked past her as if she weren’t there. The smith glanced up. “Yes?”

“A moment of your time?” Sieg gestured toward where a few refugees had started a fire. The smith stood, but took only a couple of steps before stopping, arms crossed.

Netta put her head down, her breath coming in short huffs. It didn’t matter. They had the apples, they had this puppet, and anything Sieg could tell the smith would just warn him away, and that suited her just fine. “Two pretty cats,” she croaked, and cleared her throat, making the cat prance again. “Two pretty cats in Ceste.”

Sieg was never one for keeping his opinions quiet, and they hadn’t moved far enough away for her to ignore him. “. . . thought you could use a warning,” Sieg said. “The girl’s a bad one. Killed a man, not four nights past.”

He cheated us, she thought. He took all we had, and you did nothing.

“That’s why they’re here, at the fringes. No one else’ll have them. The boy might be all right—I’ve had some small acquaintance with his family, they’re kind souls—but her—” The smith murmured something, and Sieg stopped. “Well,” he said after a moment. “You’re risking a knife in the throat some morning, that’s all I’ll say.”

Night. It hadn’t been morning, it’d been night—Leir had thought he could come back and take what little was left. And when it was over, all she’d had to do was cry sorry, say she hadn’t meant to, say it was an accident. But if she had, then she and Bron would still be marks—easy prey for others like Leir.

But she had meant to. That was why she’d known to reach for his right side, where the fine knife had hung when he’d swindled them. That was why she’d leaned all her weight on the blade, even after the first cut had stopped him. And that was why she’d waited by the body till dawn, whispering to Bron that they were safe, they’d be all right. And in full view of Sieg and the other refugees as they woke and crawled from their tents, she’d deliberately bent down to first yank Leir’s knife out of his chest, then pull the boots off his feet.

Bron nudged her hand, and Netta jumped. “Make it go,” he whispered. She stared blankly at him a moment, then raised the kitten puppet again and walked it over to his knee.

Behind her, Sieg huffed a few times, then walked off, and after a moment the smith settled down where he was. “You’re getting the hang of that,” he said.

Netta shrugged. “It’s easy.” It wasn’t, really, but she wouldn’t say so. “Thank you.”

* * *

Sieg had moved his followers on by morning, leaving the stragglers to their own devices. They slogged through two days of rain that turned into thin snow by the end of second day, and the morning’s drizzle left a thin crust of ice over everything. Netta and Bron pushed on even as the sun sank below the horizon. “Traben’s Crossing is just ahead,” Netta told Bron when he started to protest. “They’ve got a wide-market there, with a roof and everything.”

“I remember,” he mumbled, shivering.

“Good. Then you can walk just a little further.”

The smith lagged even farther behind, either because the ice didn’t agree with his limp or because he’d spotted something new to make trinkets out of. Netta cast a glance back as the last light faded, but she didn’t stop.

Without moonlight their pace slowed further, and Traben’s Crossing was pitch-dark, the bridge and the houses and the wide-market all just shadowy lumps with their own crusts of ice. Someone shouted as they reached the market square, and Netta peered ahead. The stragglers had camped in front of the wide-market instead of going inside, and a few were thumping at the walls. Netta stopped, blinking, before realizing what was wrong: the doors were closed.

“Netta?” Bron asked, his voice high and quavering.

“Come on.” She grabbed his hand.

They ran the last few steps, and even though she’d seen the others already try it, she put her hands to the heavy latch and pulled, its cold biting into her fingers. The doors creaked and thudded, but remained shut.

“Netta?”

“They have to let us in,” she said numbly. “They have to.” Wide-markets had to be open to everyone. Even the most filthy traveler could enter and curl up in a corner. Open to everyone, save sorcerers, and... murderers.

No, she thought, yanking on the door again. Bron was freezing, and he’d die, they’d die without shelter, she’d say sorry, she’d say everything Sieg wanted if that was what it took—

But that wouldn’t help. The people of Traben’s Crossing wouldn’t have locked their wide-market against one little girl, and one little girl’s apologies wouldn’t make a difference. She put her hand against the bronze bands holding the doors together—then realized that she could see those bands clearly, could see the shadows of the imperfections in the bronze.

She turned to see red-gold light blossoming across the ice, coming up along the river. “Drake!” she screamed, and ran, dragging Bron behind her.

The first firedrake swooped down over their heads with a creak like a giant’s bellows and landed on the roof of the wide-market, the fire within turning its body into a lattice of black and red. It gave a short bark of a roar and fire shot from its jaws, setting the roofs of Traben’s Crossing alight. The stragglers ran for the bridge, but a second drake reached it first, crushing a man in its lacquered-bone teeth before giving that same coughing roar and wreathing the bridge in flame.

Netta stumbled, nearly falling onto Bron. Behind her, the wide-market echoed with screams. “To the river!” she shouted into Bron’s ear. “Not the bridge—the river.”

It might have worked, though how long they would last in the freezing water was another question. But Netta had forgotten the ice, the thin layer of it that refused her boots. The two of them went sprawling across the crackled crust, up against the scrub trees that lined the river.

She pushed up to her hands and knees as a third drake, this one smaller than the others, landed in front of her. It eyes gleamed, red glass in a mask of bone and black wood, and furnace-stink swept over them. The drake turned its head to regard her with its other eye, lipless jaws parting in a grin.

“I’m sorry, Bron,” she whispered, and clasped his hand.

Light bloomed before her—then receded as a huge shadow interposed itself between them. She looked up to see the smith, one hand out as if to shield himself from the fire that should have consumed him, the massive hammer held in the other. “No,” the smith said. “You might have killed the rest, but you can’t have these two.”

The firedrake gave a short cry, and the other two fell silent, turning to face them. It bowed its head, its long neck snaking around to peer at them. Its jaws parted, but instead of loosing another gout of flame, it rumbled a string of noises that made the ice shudder.

“For much the same reason as you’d kill them,” the smith answered.

The drake hissed, the noise accompanied by gouts of steam from the joints where its wings folded. The smith started to walk to one side, his eyes never leaving the drake, and it followed, turning so that the long leather sweep of its wing grazed the ice in front of Netta. Another hissed and rumbled somewhere in the burning town, as if joining the conversation.

“Go back to Tasso, then.” The smith shifted his grip on the hammer, holding it in both hands as if about to drive a spike into the earth. The drake shrieked and snapped at him. Netta let go of Bron’s hand. Talking won’t stop them. We have to fight back, scare them off, even if it’s no good. She pulled Leir’s knife free and leapt onto the drake’s wing. Gut and hide parted under her dragging weight.

The drake didn’t even seem to notice—but the smith did, shouting, and that caught the drake’s attention. Its tail whipped around, clipping her on the top of the head, and Netta fell.

* * *

She woke wrapped in warmth, and her first muddled thought was A drake, a drake swallowed me. As sense returned—and with it a lingering ache, as if she’d bumped her head on the underside of a table—that thought changed to Where’s Bron?

A whimper at her side answered that, but it wasn’t till she turned to see him curled up next to her that her panic faded. Cold moonlight turned the fluff of his hair silver where it poked up over the edge of the blanket—a heavy blanket, enough to keep him warm and alive.

Something crackled beside her, and she turned to see the smith drop a handful of dry grass onto a pile of wood. He spoke a syllable curiously like the ones the drakes had coughed, and the sticks blossomed into flame.

Netta drew a shaky breath. Everyone in Alcaris had heard the stories of where the firedrakes came from; how the sorcerer known only as Vigil had built them, breathed a mockery of life into them, and given them to Duke Tasso to use as he willed. And then the sorcerer had disappeared—devoured by his own craft, so Sieg had claimed, the fate of all sorcerers—and the drakes had only gone madder since their master’s death.

She hadn’t imagined that strange, one-sided conversation. And surely only one man would speak so to firedrakes.

As if hearing her thoughts, the smith turned and reached for her. Netta drew back, remembering Leir, remembering that man among the refugees who’d said good girl, good boy, if you need money in Ceste, come see me.

The smith sat back on his heels. “You’re in no danger from me,” he said. “Not of that sort, not ever. Give me your hands.”

For a long moment Netta was still, then one by one worked her hands out from under the heavy bearskin cloak and held them out. He took them in each of his, then turned them over, his brow furrowing. “No acid burns,” he murmured. “There should have been, from such a wound. How did you manage to land a hit on them without nicking a hose?”

Netta stared at him. “I cut the wing,” she said finally. “It was sewn together.”

He nodded slowly. “Gut and suture,” he murmured. “Design flaw, in the early variations... of course, for those first ones I was thinking more how to get them airborne....” He reached for her again, and this time she didn’t flinch, even when he took a folded cloth from her head. “Just a concussion,” he added, and wadded up the cloth; red smoke rose up from it, and her temple throbbed in remembered pain.

Sorcerer, she thought. Vigil. But she did not say it. Beside her, Bron snuggled closer. “Traben’s Crossing?” she asked.

“Half a mile south,” Vigil said, turning back to the fire and tossing the cloth in. The flames flashed white, then were ordinary again. “The crossing itself is destroyed, though. Like all the rest,” he added, gazing into the fire.

He was silent a long moment, and Netta silently named the towns she knew had fallen to the firedrakes: Alcaris, Ompete, Bilisford....

Vigil shook himself after a moment, turning away. “You were going to Ceste, weren’t you?” he said over his shoulder.

“Bron’s family there.” He was her cousin, but this was the side of his family that didn’t have anything to do with her. Good, kind folk, Sieg had said. She hoped he was right, even as it galled her to hope for anything that had come out of Sieg’s mouth.

“There’s a ford another two miles upstream. It’ll mean a trek back to the road, but it’ll get you to Ceste.” He picked up a stick and poked at the fire. “I’ll see you safe there.”

Why do you care? she nearly asked, but heard his response to the drake: for much the same reason as you’d kill them. Even sorcerers had their whims. “Thanks,” she said, and pushed the cloak back to him.

* * *

The ford was navigable, but only just. On the far side, Vigil said a few more words under his breath, and their clothes steamed as they made their way over the scrubland. Bron clung to her side even more than before, and though he didn’t ask about the drakes—perhaps assuming, as she did, that with Vigil with them there was less danger. He did keep asking about Aunt Salda. The locked doors at Traben’s Crossing had scared him more than the drakes, she slowly realized. The little puppet-cat sometimes helped, at night by the fire, but only if she kept from mentioning the “other two cats” in Ceste.

Vigil watched her manipulate the puppet, offering advice on technique after Bron slept. He even began to assemble something new, but that stopped after they found the burned husk of a farmhouse. Netta dug what food she could out of what remained of the cellar, but when she climbed back up Vigil was still in the ashes, staring at the slivers of white that were all that was left. Netta gazed at him a long moment, then took his hand and led him out. The half-finished, nameless puppet remained in the rubble.

The walls of Ceste were in sight by the time they reached the road again, and from the look of the road the first of the Alcaris refugees had been through here already. She hoped they had; some of them, anyway. There hadn’t been enough dead at Traben’s Crossing to account for all of them, just the last stragglers and outcasts.

That night she waited for Bron to fall asleep, then got to her feet and stood between Vigil and the fire. “Teach me,” she said.

Vigil sat with his elbows propped on his knees and would have been gazing into the fire as he had for the last two nights if she hadn’t been standing there. He raised his head, the fire painting his many scars gold. “Teach you?”

“The fire. The hammer. The—” she wiggled her fingers as if moving a puppet, “— making of those.” He didn’t respond. “The firedrakes.”

Vigil let out a laugh that was more like the drakes’ coughs than any human noise. “You’ve seen what they do; you think I want to teach that?”

“Yes,” she said simply, and his eyes narrowed. “You’re a maker. You wanted to know how I’d injured it, and you told me that wing was a design flaw. You care about your work. So you must want to share it.”

Again, he shook his head, this time smiling. “You are quick. And you’d be good at it, if your facility with puppets is any indication. But the answer’s still no.”

“Why not?” The girl’s a bad one, Sieg said in her memory. The boy’s all right, but her....

“Because I made them,” he said slowly. “And that means I made all this.” He gestured back the way they’d come. “And—and I cared how I made them. The best puppets I’d ever breathed a spark into, a challenge beyond what any maker had ever created.”

Her mother would have said one should always take pride in one’s work. Netta, though, kept silent.

He shook his head. “I didn’t want to destroy what I’d made, and I thought—I thought that cutting their strings, making them free to understand what Tasso wanted them for, would amend it.”

“You set them free.”

“And they decided they liked this better. Liked it.” His leg twitched, as if in memory of pain. “I won’t. I’m sorry.”

She should be glad, she thought as she lay back down beside Bron. If killing Leir made her an outcast, then sorcery would be even worse. But Bron’s aunt would take them in, and in Ceste, no one knew who Leir had been, and no one would know that she’d asked a sorcerer to teach her.

Still, she lay awake a long time, watching the fire.

* * *

Refugee shacks and lean-tos clogged the gates of Ceste, some from Alcaris, some from towns further downriver. It was there that Vigil stopped. “Go on to your family, then. They’ll have missed you.”

Not my family, Netta wanted to say, but instead she glanced at the shacks and the tradesmen who’d ventured outside to sell to the refugees. “What about you?”

He gestured to the shacks. “I’ll find a place and rest up before I move on.”

Bron pulled on her hand. “Come on,” he whispered.

The people of Ceste had heard about Duke Tasso’s progress up the river, even if it hadn’t reached them yet. Half the men who passed wore patched-together armor and carried weapons from swords to pikes to sticks with knives tied to the end. But the arches of the city were unmarred by smoke, and dozens of signs in brightly painted wood proclaimed shop after shop: weaver, tinsmith, potter. Netta lingered a moment in front of a baker’s sign, but Bron pulled her on.

He came to a stop outside a little brown house with a spindle painted on the door. A tabby cat stretched out in the window, ostentatiously incurious. “Here?” Netta asked.

Bron nodded, but didn’t move. Netta sighed and dragged the door open. “Hello?”

Bobbins of brightly colored thread nestled together on warm wood shelves, filling the little room with color. Another cat, this one patched in gray and white, jumped off a shelf, gave them a look, and yawned.

“Not a good day for business, love.” A tall, rounded woman with frizzy brown hair stepped out from the back, brushing something from her hands, then stopped. “Bron?”

“Aunt Salda!” Bron flung himself against the woman as she knelt.

“Oh, Bron, we thought you were lost, we thought—” She hugged him closer, tears spilling over her pink cheeks. “You look half-starved! I heard how bad it was on the road, and I thought—we never dreamed—”

Bron said something incomprehensible and burst into tears himself. Netta smiled, but the smile froze as another person emerged from the back: Sieg, his heavy wool coat replaced by a fur-collared jacket, the expression on his face the same as when he’d seen her standing over Leir’s body.

Salda wiped her cheeks. “I’ve been trying for weeks to get any reliable word from Alcaris. We didn’t even hear that there were survivors until the city official turned up.” Here she nodded to Sieg, who returned it with a gracious smile. “I swear, Bron, if I’d known how bad it was for you—” She stopped, looking up to see Netta standing at the door. The tears slowed, and she rose to her feet, one hand protectively holding Bron next to her. “Are you—”

“That’s the one,” Sieg murmured. “The one I warned you about.” He gave a theatrical sigh. “I suppose you could try to reform her, with my help.”

Netta tugged her cloak over Leir’s knife, only drawing attention by her attempt to hide it. Bron was still smiling happily at her, but Aunt Salda wore an expression somewhere between forced friendliness and horror. Murderer, Netta thought, and felt again the cold bands on the door at Traben’s Crossing, the door that was shut and locked against the likes of her.

She opened her mouth, but any sound she could have made was drowned by the clanging of a bell in the street, loud as any forge. Salda looked up, her face paling. “It can’t be—”

“They burned Traben’s Crossing the night after I left,” Sieg said. “They could easily have made it here.” In the street, the patch-armored men were now running.

Netta cast a quick glance out the window, then back at Salda and Bron. She unslung her bag and fished the puppet-cat out of it. “Bron,” she said. “Stay here. Stay safe.”

He nodded proudly, holding out his hand to clasp hers. She closed his hand over the puppet instead, then slid out of Sieg’s belated grasp and ran.

The gates hadn’t yet been closed, though the militia were doing their best, splintering boards and knocking down shacks as they pulled the gates shut. But the fight and fire seemed to be all outside the walls, carts and unfortunates on the road cowering or already aflame. Netta scrambled past the men struggling with the gates, slashing at the arm of one who tried to hold her back. She tumbled outside and darted behind a fallen wagon for cover.

There were only two this time—but it had only taken five to destroy Alcaris. One crouched in front of the gates, while a second landed on the walls, hissing and smoldering. What few soldiers remained outside the walls retreated back through the gate, leaving the larger drake to menace those who hadn’t made it inside in time. It wasn’t the same one Netta had wounded; its wings were held together with iron staples, and the eyes in its head were stone rather than red glass. As she watched, it coughed a gout of flame at the walls, using the same word that Vigil had spoken to spark their campfire. Soldiers screamed, but instead of pressing the advantage, the drake sat back, churning the ground with its claws.

“I said leave them!” Vigil advanced from behind the smoldering remnants of a cart, between her and the drake. The drake snorted derision and swayed its head back and forth. “They’ve done nothing to you!”

The drake spat a smaller flame at another shack, then peered back at Vigil. He had unslung the huge hammer from his back, but he carried it as if forgotten, its head dragging in the mud. “Why are you doing this?” he asked, his voice barely audible. “Why do you care where I go?”

Netta rose and edged out from behind the wagon. “Because you’re their family,” she called.

The drake’s head snapped round, and Vigil stumbled as he turned to look at her. For a moment iron and flesh shared the same expression. “Netta, no,” Vigil said.

“You are,” she insisted, taking another step closer. “You’re the closest thing they have. And family takes you back. Family cares for you, no matter what.”

The drake was silent. Clouds of oily vapor rose from its joints, joining the smoke that wreathed them.

Netta shifted her grip on her knife. “But they don’t always have to. Not if you’re a murderer. And you are!” she shouted, at the drake, at Vigil, at herself.

The drake snarled, furious as a thwarted child. It drew back, jaws open, and fire blossomed in its mouth and spiraled toward her, too fast to evade. Netta stood up straight before it, taking one last gasp of furnace-hot air before it struck her.

The fire collapsed in mid-air, drawn back into itself like a rose withering. Vigil closed his hand around the remnants of the fire, drawn to him as easily as he’d sparked their campfire. “You are quick,” he said, raising the hammer. “Damn me for being so slow to see.”

He charged, striking not at the narrow line of the drake’s body but at the iron joints, drawing a startled shriek that the other drake echoed. Netta followed him, slashing at the wing as it tried to claw at them both. Her actions did nothing but distract it, but that was enough for Vigil to raise the hammer for a mighty blow.

Steam billowed around them, hot enough to scald, and Netta cried out just as Vigil struck. He spun, catching Netta against himself to shield her from the blast, and the drake gave a last squealing cry.

Iron and stone and stranger things rained down around them, and Netta risked a glance to see Vigil’s tear-streaked face next to hers. She staggered forward, dragging him with her, out of the collapsing drake, until the heap of leather and iron lay behind them. On the wall, the second drake rose keening and circled its fallen sibling before flying off.

She took another step, peering back, and Vigil collapsed, first to his knees, then full-length on the burned ground.

* * *

The surviving refugees helped her carry Vigil to one of the remaining shacks and then left the two of them with the other injured. There were more important things for them to bother with, like how a firedrake could possibly have been defeated.

Netta took a rag from her pocket and pressed it to the angry red weal where Vigil’s sorcery hadn’t shielded him—not a sorcerer’s clout, but a cold cloth nonetheless. Her own scalds were thinner, hurting no more than a day’s blisters. After a long while, long enough that the sun began to warm the far side of the shack, his brows drew together, and he opened his eyes. “Alive?”

Netta nodded. “You are. The drake—” She pointed to the cluster of soldiers, so many of them she could no longer make out the crumpled mass they examined. One of them raised a broken iron joint, pointing excitedly to something she couldn’t see.

He closed his eyes for a long moment. “An end to all makings, in time.” He sat up, cast a glance at the soldiers, then shook his head and took the cloth. “I’m going south,” he said, pressing the cloth to his head and wincing. “To Duke Tasso, I think, if I make it there. I think.... I think the drakes will try to find me. And when they do, I’ll have to do that again—” He stopped, then ran his hands over his head. Singed hair crinkled and crinkled away, leaving his scars a harsher white against the burns.

Netta got to her feet and held out both hands to him. The little lines at the corners of his eyes reappeared, and he let her pull him to his feet. “Maybe they’ll learn not to come back to you,” she said.

“Maybe,” he said. He gazed at the cloth a moment, then folded it and tucked it into his pack. “You’re welcome to go south with me. That is, if you—if your family won’t mind.”

Netta glanced back at Ceste, with its bakeries and shops and two pretty cats. Stay here, stay safe. “Bron’s with his family,” she said. “I don’t have any family.”

Vigil was silent a moment. “That’s not true,” he said slowly, as if amazed by it. She met his eyes, and he nodded. “Come on. You should learn calling and closing fire first, if you’re going to work with it. That should keep you busy till we get to the next town.”

“Maybe,” Netta said. An end to all makings, she thought, but everything that ended had to have a beginning somewhere. Even family. “Maybe I’ll learn it sooner. Mother always said I was a quick study.”

Copyright © 2013 Margaret Ronald

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

Margaret Ronald short fiction has appeared in such venues as Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and Clarkesworld Magazine. She is the author of “Dragon’s-Eyes” in BCS #9 and BCS Audio Fiction Podcast 007, and the series of stand-alone stories all set in the same steampunk world that began with “A Serpent in the Gears” in BCS #34 and includes “The Guilt Child” (BCS #52), “Recapitulation in Steam” (BCS #61), “Letters of Fire” (BCS #69), “Salvage” (BCS #77), “The Governess and the Lobster” (BCS #95), and “A Family for Drakes.” Soul Hunt, the third novel in her urban fantasy series and the sequel to Spiral Hunt and Wild Hunt, was released by Eos Books in 2011. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston. Visit her website at http://mronald.wordpress.com/.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

BAKEMONO, OR THE THING THAT CHANGES

by A.B. Treadwell

The Emperor of Japan punched through the soft belly of Russia on the day of my birth. My father’s men were the iron girding the fist. He showed me how it was on a rotting melon. The flesh caved in, and seeds spilled out.

“All that is left of it is sagging flesh and a vile, clinging stench.” He dandled me on his knee. “A clean land for you to claim.”

I knew better than to ask or correct. But he had also taught me to observe the ways of nature, the things that change, and the way each change shifts the balance of every other thing it touches.

As he led me away, I glanced back at the spattered pulp and scattered seeds my father had left in his wake.

* * *

The empire and I were eleven the spring my father rode north into the hills against the uprisings. He left his handprint on my shoulder the day he left. “Victory, Katsuro,” he said. He had chosen my name to reflect his past and my future. Victory: katsuro.

He put on his antlered helmet and mounted his great horse. In his leather armor, he looked like an animal spirit. My mother knelt beside me and pressed her cheek to mine as we watched him and his men grow small against the landscape.

My mother trembled, though I did not know then that anticipation could resemble fear.

We walked with proud backs through the town, bowing slightly to farmers bending over new rice seedlings and women carrying wicker baskets on their backs. Inside our house, we closed the wooden screens brought all the way from Edo, and my mother took down her long, heavy hair and knelt with me beside the low table my father had carved from a single cedar tree.

By that time, my heart was racing, for I knew what next would come. I helped her open the box where we kept the special paper.

It was behind the double screen of my father’s absence and our devotion to the old ways that my mother brought me into the floating world, the world of sumo and geisha, of kabuki, and all the urban pleasures she had left behind in Edo. With knives she taught me how to cut paper into lace, into mountains and samurai and kitsune. We built elaborate paper puppets that spun and leapt and waved swords on strings.

My favorite puppets were those of the bakemono, the ones that transform. The bakemono appeared at first as beautiful young women or kind old men or even household items like tea kettles. Only in a mirror or in their shadow did they reveal their true form: cats or badgers or nine-tailed foxes.

I loved these games because they were secret. It did not occur to me that perhaps my mother constructed these paper worlds for her own reasons, to bring color and movement into a primitive outland.

“One day, you will return to Edo,” she murmured into my hair. “Then you will see true kabuki, and our puppets will seem like a handful of paper lanterns beside the moon.”

My father, who loved simplicity, would not have understood.

We always fed them to the fire before my father returned.

* * *

The gun crack of ice breaking along the Lena marked the beginning of school season. In Edo, we were told, the plums were blooming. I went with the children to drape paper blossoms around the shrine of Inari and her messenger, the stone fox, but my heart was far across the steppe where men hunted the hinin.

I dreaded school, for it was only at school that we were forced to rub up against the children of the Russian captives.

We were not allowed to call them by the name they call themselves. Most of us called them hinin, which meant things not fully human, like animals. Before we conquered them, they had never known the simple act of writing, let alone balance, movement or brush energy. In classrooms hung with carved ivory mountains and soft watercolor gardens, they scratched quietly in their notebooks. I stared out into the steppe and tried to imagine the sea.

That year, Takami and I shared a desk under the watchful eye of our uneven-legged teacher, Ito Haru. My father had taught me carefully that as a man is, so will his son be. That is why I knew when Takami rose to the top of our archery and rifle classes, he must also be a faithless, dishonest coward. He and I kicked each other under the desk whenever Ito-sensei wasn’t looking.

We were there the morning my father returned with new captives, he and his men riding tall and proud behind them on captured horses.

In sidelong glances, we watched them through the window. The way they trudged down the rutted street, wrapped in fur, with loose, tangled hair and downcast eyes; feral women who had never lived outside caves in the hills. My father would give most of them to his favored soldiers as second or third wives.

I stiffened when Takami’s elbow found my rib, and then I saw. A girl, my age. She sat astride my father’s second horse, her hands tied to the saddle. She turned her eyes everywhere, as if she had never seen a house, or an artillery shed, or a squadron of soldiers training with long spears.

Whispers rustled around the room. Even the captives had never seen a feral child. Her skin was the color of local dust, and her brown, wooly hair hung past her waist.

We all jerked to attention when my father’s guard opened the door.

“A new student, Sensei.” The guard led her in.

Her narrow face seemed even thinner beside the wild tangle of her hair. Beneath the fur that draped her shoulders, she wore only ropes of beads above her skirt, and these clicked when she moved. Her eyes were a color I had never seen before except in animals. A restless, livid amber.

The guard prodded her toward the front of the room. When she passed my desk, I shrank away.

Sensei thanked the guard, but as soon as the man left, he sucked his teeth and rocked on his uneven leg as if it pained him. There was only one desk with room for another girl. It was near the back door. Megumi sat there and murmured to herself. Megumi, who had a habit of biting. She scowled and hissed as Ito pushed the feral girl her way.

It was strange to see the feral girl settle next to Megumi, whose body was so heavy and awkward she should have been strangled at birth except that her father must have been both powerful and softhearted. The feral girl moved as if she balanced on a drop of water. Her eyes flicked from window to door, the way birds trapped in houses fly.

Takami leaned around me to stare until Sensei brought the stick down across his wrist.

* * *

It was for the Emperor’s honor that I fought Takami. It happened when the new girl stood apart in the yard, all furs and beads and her hair blowing in the wind.

They should not have been behind the school, away from the other students. I rounded the corner, but neither saw me yet, so focused were they on each other. She pointed to herself and growled in her raspy, senseless dialect, and Takami repeated it.

She repeated the sound slowly, and Takami said it again.

The shock of what they were doing held me in place. Learning any language besides Japanese was not just forbidden in school. It was an act of treason against the Empire.

I lowered my head and ran at Takami. I hit him in the stomach. His breath rushed out. He was on me then, and I was on him. We grappled in the dirt. The rest of the school came running, circling us. One of them went for Sensei. Blood flowed from Takami’s lip, and still I kept wrestling him, trying to get in another blow.

Sensei pulled us apart and shook us by the collars. What he said was lost in the red haze. Takami and I stared at each other, panting, ready to go again. Sensei sent us to wash. The feral girl had disappeared into the crowd. When we were done, all that connected us was the single thread of blood staining the corner of his mouth.

* * *

That night I picked at my noodles while my father ate dumplings for all the days he had been traveling. I waited until he put his hands on his full belly.

“I fought Takami today in defense of the Emperor’s honor.”

My mother’s back, always stiff with courtesy, stiffened the slightest degree more. “Katsu, your father is eating. Show him I have taught you polite manners.”

I frowned at her, but her tight lips silenced me until my father finished cleaning his hands.

My father turned to me. “How would the Emperor reward your defense of his honor?”

“The defense of honor is its own reward.”

The skin around my father’s eyes tightened, the only sign of his smile.

“In Edo, he would not be roughhousing with eta. He would not be distracted with hinin.” My mother’s voice was low.

My father let silence cover her words. My mother bowed her head, but the tension in her delicate jaw betrayed a smothered response.

He said at last, “These long weeks of fighting to break the rebellion among the outland tribes made me long for the serenity of home.”

Color bloomed in my mother’s cheeks. She bowed to him and rose, her spine remaining stiff as one of my father’s staffs.

I fixed my gaze on his sun-darkened face, so different from my mother’s, and I wondered what it was to ride into the steppe knowing you had conquered it.

* * *

The feral girl’s eyes were yellow-green the next day. Ito-sensei stood her in front of the class and told us her name was Midori, our word for green. She blinked as if she could not stop. Tears dripped off her chin. Someone had subdued the storm of her hair into braids, and her bare shoulders had disappeared under a plain white blouse.

Takami raised his hand. “What happened to her eyes?”

Sensei rested his finger tips on the desk. “Have you seen the eyes of a newborn darken with time? It happens with some light-skinned people. Blue eyes darken to green or brown.”

“Does it hurt?” asked Takami.

“The notion of pain varies by culture.”

I raised my hand. “Maybe her eyes can’t stand the sun, since she’s never left her cave.”

She didn’t know our language, but when some of the other students laughed, I saw she understood.

Sensei led the girl back to her seat, but paused next to me. “One day you will join your father’s warriors and see for yourself the hinin caves.”

While Sensei spoke, I saw the girl sneak something from the waist of her skirt. A bundle of cloth and feathers that disappeared into her closed hand. My mind jumped to stories I’d heard the other children tell of primitive magic charms and curses the hinin witches made from the hair of their enemies.

Perhaps she ensorcelled me in the space of that breath, but whatever it was that disappeared into her hand, I didn’t tell Sensei to take it.

* * *

My trouble with Takami was overshadowed by new uprisings in the hills.

“We slaughtered every man in the stronghold,” my father said to my mother, “but now their brothers ride against us.”

My mother bowed her head, but her back challenged my father. “Where will it end, Tadashi? Will you kill every man in Russia?”

My father raised his hand, and my mother cringed. My heart leapt up. A ten-count passed before he let that hand fall.

“Forgive me,” my mother whispered. “I am only thinking of Katsuro, how he will follow in your footsteps.”

“You make him weak and womanish,” said my father. “Do you think I cannot see how stories from Edo have shaped his mind? It was to escape the excesses of old Japan that we came here. Do not speak to me of propriety when you work like a termite at the foundations of this household.”

“Yes, my husband,” she whispered.

My father bowed to her, and she bowed to him, and both of them left without seeing me hide behind the paper screen, my arms wrapped around my stomach as if someone had hit me there.

* * *

Ito-sensei seated us across the room from each other after that. I watched Takami watch the girl, who watched Sensei. He made us stay late on alternate days. It crept under my skin, the certainty that their private meetings continued. I watched to see if the bundle of crushed feathers and cloth would reappear, and when it didn’t, in my mind that made it all the more sinister.

I could not understand how Takami could risk his family’s reputation and his own life by defying the emperor. Especially when his father had left him so little honor to begin with.

Meanwhile, the girl’s presence distracted even the best of us. She lifted her head at strange times, as if she could hear what no one else could. Sometimes she growled to herself and shifted in her seat as if she had never learned to be still. She chewed her nails into points.

One day I hid behind the outhouse until Sensei released Takami. I waited until our teacher gathered his coat and cane. As soon as he hobbled down the path to his house, I bolted after Takami.

“Where are you going?” I shoved him from behind.

Takami quickened his pace. The color came high on his cheeks, but it might have been the chill of the wind.

“Not to see your girlfriend?”

He walked faster. His legs were longer than mine, which forced me to run to match his pace.

“Going to kill a chicken so she can make more of her charms? It’s no wonder you like her, you Russian-loving son of a whore.”

He turned and caught me by the lapels. His breath came hard. I waited for him to hit me, to shake me, to throw me down, and then I would be on him. But he only held me, my coat bunched in his fists, both of us steaming in the cold.

His eyes were two different colors. One, dark brown, the other, hazel.

I stared. “What happened to your eyes?”

He released me. He looked away, and then I saw that his lighter eye wasn’t tracking. “I had to know if it hurt.”

“If what hurt?”

“The eye drops.” His voice grew soft. “They use a chemical to destroy the pigment in amber-colored eyes, so the captives can’t attract us.”

I stared at him. “That’s crazy.”

He gazed at me with his two-colored eyes.

We heard the door of the outhouse creak, and Takami hurried away, jacket flapping, head bowed into the wind.

* * *

My father returned with a fresh slash on his cheek and a smoldering look in his eye. When my mother leaned in with a damp cloth to clean the wound, he jerked away. “Leave me, woman!” She retreated to her cooking.

He turned to me. “Never let them get to close to you, even when they are bound and beaten and stripped naked.”

His eyes made me afraid. I glanced at my mother, her shoulders hunched over the stove. Something squeezed inside me, a tight, breathless feeling.

“Look at me, Katsu. Look at what they did to my face.” He turned my chin and forced my head up. “One of the captives hid a knife in her hair.”

His rough fingers held my head so still I dared not even swallow. It was a side of my father I’d never seen up close. The warrior side.

“We shaved them all.” His mouth curved up in grim satisfaction. “They looked like plucked chickens, all huddled together.” An image flashed unbidden into my mind: the feral girl’s hair falling in soft tufts, her bald head emerging, naked as a plucked chicken. My father released my face and sat back on his heels. I watched the cut on his face glisten as he smiled. Then it broke open and overflowed. Two thick drops hit the table.

My father reached for the cloth my mother had left and pressed it to his cheek.

My mother appeared like a ghost and placed a cup of sake beside his elbow. My father downed it.

Thoughts of the girl and my teacher and Takami and all that had happened these last days bubbled up and spilled over into words. “Father, do they use magic to attract us? The captive women?”

He went still. “Who told you about that? Your mother?”

“No!” I pushed my trembling hands under the table. My father’s anger blazed out with such heat I feared my skin would flash into cinders. “She—there is a girl in my class, and I noticed her eyes.”

“Ah.” My father’s shoulders relaxed and his eyes glinted. “And more than her eyes, too, if you’re any son of mine.” He winked at me.

My skin went tight. “No, Father, I was just curious—”

He clapped me on the shoulder. “It sounds like it’s time for you join the men.” He pushed back his chair, swung on his coat, and nuzzled my mother’s neck, surprising her into spilling miso over the coals. “Our boy’s growing up.”

Silence fell the moment the door closed behind him.

My mother slammed the bowl on the table so hard it cracked. “You are no son of his.”

I felt all the air had left the room with my father. What came out of my mouth was pure reflex. The desperate kick that follows the gut punch. “Maybe I should let him beat you.”

Her face went white as the painted women hanging below the house shrine. Her eyes reminded me suddenly of my father’s, except that seeing his cold fury on her face drove my courage deep into the hollow place where feelings went to die.

“Never speak to me that way, Katsu. I am Sakai Amaterasu, granddaughter of one of the four great generals who placed Tokugawa Ieyasu on the Chrysanthemum Throne. You know nothing of my sacrifice.”

Soup dripped onto the floor.

“When you were born, I cut out the midwife’s tongue.”

Drip, drip. My mother’s words were hard drops of water eating away the stone beneath my feet.

“I hid you for eight weeks. When you cried, I smothered you into silence.”

Drip.

“I knew if my husband lived, if he returned to find you born at the wrong time, he would kill you. Just as he killed this woman who sprang at him with a knife in her hair. And for the same reason. You were not his, and never would be.”

My ears filled with a roaring that swept my mother’s words away before I could understand them, protecting me from the hail that was still falling from her lips.

“I secured for you an imperial lineage so that when the time comes, you can challenge the Daimyo, and then Tokugawa—”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“You cannot unhear it.”

My mother’s voice stopped me. I could not catch my breath. The rocks of my world, my parents, had suddenly become two islands spreading rapidly apart, leaving me with one foot on each.

“Walk carefully, my son. Think before you go running after your father for affirmation. You are the seed of his two most powerful rivals. All your life I have hidden you in your enemy’s shadow. One day you must undo all that he has done, you must return to Edo—”

My face throbbed. Without a plan, I sprang up and fled the house. Across the northern sky, colors bloomed like chrysanthemums. I felt as if I were caught in one of my mother’s stories, where beautiful women unstitched their skin and stepped out as monsters. No one stopped me. No one stops a spark in a comet’s trail.

* * *

I found my father in Sensei’s house. Both of them looked up when I burst in. Between them, Sensei has the feral girl sitting on a table. She turned toward me, but her face shows only fear. Her eyes are milky jade. Sensei stood next to her holding a dropper full of clear fluid. One shining drop fell to the floor.

I turned to my father. The slash in his cheek has been neatly sewn, more of Sensei’s work. For no reason at all, my hands became fists. My shoulders would not relax. My mother’s words had burned a hole through me, and anything could fall out.

“What are you doing to her eyes?” I jerked my chin toward the girl.

Sensei wiped his hands on a cloth and glanced at my father. He carefully returned the dropper to a small glass jar.

My father cleared his throat, and she sank back like a dog that fears its master. “She’s as uncivilized as they come, but with time and training...” My father pulled me closer. “Amber eyes are a mark of witch blood among the hill tribes. We have never before taken one alive. In these backwards hills, men follow the amber-eyed women. This one would have grown into a hell-cat to devil our borders.” He spat on Ito-sensei’s floor against ill luck. “The captives tell stories about their magic, but every tale is more unlikely than the last. Can you imagine this one using her moonblood to transform into a wolf? They spread these filthy lies almost as much as they spread their legs.”

“Bakemono.” The word falls from my lips, and all my mother’s stories come back, dancing figures catching fire, stolen moments, burning paper leaping out of the flames.

The girl turned in my direction while my father and Sensei laughed. She leaned toward me suddenly, as if she’d just become aware I was in the room. Something clicked into place. “The drops have made her blind.”

“That happens when we remove the pigment. The source of her power.” Ito-sensei’s words are lost in the roaring of my ears. Like waves on Edo’s shore, my mother would say. I will never know. I have never seen the sea.

”How many girls have you blinded getting the color just right?”

“Apologize to Ito-Sensei.” My father...no, my head spun...the man I always thought was my father...ordered me.

Sensei made a placating gesture. The girl followed me with her whole head. I went still. Silently, I stepped behind my teacher. Her head moved with me. An odd shiver tightened my scalp. She was tracking me by scent.

My father grabbed my wrist. “Stop that.”

“Does she have her moonblood?” I’m not even sure what that means, only that it means the moment when the girl’s wolf-colored hair cascades into velvet pelt. I can’t stop thinking about the way she moves, so quick and lithe. She could cross the room in one leap.

“Her moonblood!” My father laughed. “So eager! Soon, I think, if I’m any judge of women. With any luck it will come near your birthday.”

My birthday. I closed my eyes. If my mother’s story was true, I don’t know my own birthday. The room was too warm, the floor unsteady.

“Katsu, I want to give you a very special gift.” My father slid his arm around me. “This one is for you.”

My eyes snapped open. “What?”

My father snorted. “Surely you know what goes on between a man and a woman?”

“She will be your yujo,” said my teacher.

My woman of pleasure.

My face went numb and tingly. I could not look at the girl, or my father, or my teacher. I desperately hoped she didn’t understand. Surely Takami had not taught her that.

“You are my son,” said my father. “Imagine the power they will attribute to you for mounting their she-wolf.”

The world turned upside down, and I turned, almost falling, and caught myself on the hearth. My stomach reversed its course.

Sensei made a tut-tutting noise. “Gently, Tadashi. He’s still a boy.”

My father yanked me up. “No warrior can lead with a weak stomach.”

I wiped my mouth and looked past my father and my teacher to the girl who is to be my yujo. Her gaze is as steady as the foothills of the great mountains that mark the Empire’s edge. She knows her homeland, as I had never known mine.

I realized in that moment that even my name is a lie. Katsuro, victory. But I was not born with the Empire.

* * *

When the riders came, cloaked in the dust and ceaseless wind blowing out of the hills, it was Takami who first saw them, or actually saw how the girl went still. Before we heard a sound, before anyone sensed them, she knew. Then I felt the drum of hooves vibrating through the floor.

One of the girls pointed to the western window.

Our teacher shot one glance toward the feral girl, and then he was shouting instructions. There were rules for every emergency. We had practiced. We knew where to go.

Everyone watched the western window, except the girl, who stared straight ahead as if she had gone deaf as well as blind, and Takami, who sat nearly as tense as she, and whose eyes kept slipping away to the eastern window.

Sensei was calling us up by row, hustling us through the door. Something hit the thatched roof. The girl’s nostrils flared. I caught the scent of fire.

The pounding of hooves intensified, and now we heard war whoops and wild ululations. Gunshots marked my father’s answer. His men were mounting the defense. Students queued up at the door, jostling to exit. Gusts from the open door carried the scent of smoke, and the feral girl’s stillness looked more and more like the stillness of a drawn bowstring. Sensei hustled past on his uneven legs, pushing students out and shouting directions.

A whoosh came from outside, and the smell of smoke intensified. Sensei darted out.

Takami bolted toward the window, but I caught his wrist. He’d seen something. He swore at me and dragged me when I wouldn’t let go. The feral girl sprinted past us toward the window. She fumbled with the latch. Her head swung toward the rafters, and it was then I heard the crackling.

Takami jerked free, and we sprinted to the window.

The girl turned, her mouth full of words we didn’t understand. She dropped to her knees and caught our legs. We fell over her, sprawling. Above our heads, the window shattered. An arrow buried itself in the opposite wall. Through the window came a hand, followed by a well-muscled arm.

The girl threw back her head and let out a piercing ululation. An unshaven face and a blood-smeared torso rose into view.

I was up and moving toward the window, faster than Takami, faster than thought. The knife my father had given me found its way into my hand. The girl shouted something urgent.

The door flew open, Sensei yelling for us to get out. The attacker dropped out of sight.

Sensei’s clothes were dark with sweat and his voice was almost gone. He shouted, but all I heard was the thunder of hooves and my father’s bellowing commands. “Move, now!” Sensei shouted. “The roof is on fire.”

My arm shot around the girl, again, with no thought, and I pulled her tight against my chest, heaving us both toward the door and safety. She kicked and twisted. Takami caught her legs, but in a low voice he whispered, “Let her go! They came for her!”

“You traitor!” My grip relaxed from pure shock. The girl bit my hand and kicked Takami hard. She pushed off his chest and overbalanced me. We fell hard. She scrambled up and toward the window. I caught her ankle. Now Sensei was running to his desk, searching inside. Takami rolled on the floor.

More gunshots, and my father’s booming commands.

The girl and I grappled on the floor, my hand locked on her ankle as she kicked my chest. I lunged and caught her legs. She arched back and twisted, but I pulled myself up her body and pinned her with my whole weight. Her eyes, in the wild tangle of her hair, met mine. An image came from my mother’s stories, the fox caught in a trap, her fate and the hunter’s hanging in the balance.

Her scent was very strong, a warm musk, but overlaying it, a contrasting fresh sharpness, like the wind that sometimes blew in with the rain from the steppe.

“Hold her!” Sensei hurried toward us with a bottle and a small cloth.

A piece of burning thatch fell from the rafters.

Takami’s leg shot out, and Sensei fell on his bad leg. The bottle smashed under his chest. A strange odor filled the room. Our teacher lay in a pool of liquid, fumbling at his shirt. The liquid vaporized even as it spread. He went still.

The girl’s chest rose and fell beneath me. The warmth of her, the musk and camphor scent of her, which suddenly I recognized as sagebrush after the rain; the strong beat of her heart where my hands gripped her wrists.

Takami shouted something, but all I could hear in that moment was her breath and my heartbeat. Perhaps it was her scent at work on my mind. Perhaps it was something on the wind blowing in from the steppe.

One of her braids had come undone, and the storm of her hair swirled around us. I saw her then as she had come to us, with clinking beads the only cover for her bare skin. Then and now. Her storm smell. I wanted to let go of her wrists, to touch her face so close to mine. I wanted to know all of her.

A strand of wild hair blew across her ruined eyes.

Pain. I gripped her wrists, and she drew a breath at my force. The pain had come so suddenly, I had hurt her by accident.

My father once had told me there is pain at the moment the soul recognizes beauty, wabi-sabi. We feel the spirit’s longing to hold on to that which is impermanent.

Her beauty was like the wings of the butterfly beating itself against the walls of a jar. She would never be that girl again.

A stillness settled in my stomach. Softly, so softly, I leaned down and brushed my cheek against hers.

Then—

I let go.

She bolted for the window, leapt without a sound, without a glance. She was gone.

Takami ran to the window. His voice came to me as if underwater. “They have her now.”

I slid to the floor. My hand hit something, a bundle of cloth and feathers. It was a doll, such as any child might have. I held it on my open palm.

Takami grabbed me by the shirt and hauled me outside. I sat in the grass with battle sounds all around while Takami dragged our teacher to safety. There was no room in my head for more. We found our classmates, sitting neatly on a small hill while half the town burned.

Takami nudged me, and we glanced back toward the hills, where a small band of riders streaked away from the battle, riding low and fast and already disappearing into the grey winter grass. “She’s all they wanted.”

The tide of the fighting had turned, the tribesmen falling back away toward the hills, my father’s formation giving chase.

I held the doll in my open hand. A stray breeze brought a hint of musk and sagebrush. I thought of my mother, how she fed her treasures to the fire.

Takami’s two-colored eyes met mine, and something passed between us. I knew we would never speak of what had happened. We would never see her again.

I offered him the doll, but he closed my hand around it.

My heart caught on something sharp and jagged, a pure, private ache. We sat there a long quiet moment, his hand around mine.

My father had taught me to observe the ways of nature, the things that change, and the way each change shifts the balance of every other thing it touches.

My mother had taught me the power of a story and the art of concealing an inner world, and how nothing is set before the ending.

This was not the ending.

I had become the thing that changes.

Copyright © 2013 A.B. Treadwell

Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

A.B. Treadwell is a nomadic wordsmith who has hailed from Moore, Oklahoma, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Fairmont, West Virginia, and that’s just in the last two years. Her stories have been published in Flash Fiction Online, Bards and Sages Quarterly, and the Triangulation anthologies. She is also on staff at the Alpha Teen Writing Workshop. Her website is www.abtreadwell.com.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

COVER ART

“Marching Off,” by Maciej Wojtala

Maciej Wojtala is a Polish concept artist who works in the video games industry. For the last seven years, he has been working at People Can Fly, the studio responsible for Bulletstorm and Gears of War : Judgment. He creates environment concept art, prop designs, illustrations, and graphic design elements. View more of his artwork at www.wojtala.com.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Copyright © 2013 Firkin Press

This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.