Tears slicked my face. My nose began to run. My throat tightened till I could do no more than squeak. A few skips more, and the rope tangled my legs. I stopped to extricate myself, puffing for breath.
It came to me then, doubled over, that I’d been a rhymer for nearly as long as I’d been a prisoner. True, my couplets had all been curses like the one Torvald and Lissa had lain upon the Witch’s Son. I’d never tried to compose a countercurse to coax a shy thing from the Veil. Point was, rhymes meant something to the Gentry, where a song was life or death depending on which you followed through the bog. Rhymes could make a broken baby dance with pain, or a twisted mouth flash out with laughter in the dark. My golden rope glittered in the moonlight as I got my breath back. I began skipping again.
The ruins of Lirhu vanished. The Witch with one eye vanished (but a second before she did, I saw her smile). So did the night disappear, and the chill, and my weariness. I could not breathe. My innards turned to soup and streamed out of holes in the soles of my feet. Then the world steadied. My body unjellied. I stood in a sunlit cow pasture—near enough the sea to smell it, though I did not know in which direction it lay.
My cow Annat grazed not far from me, her brown-dappled hide agleam. My heart jumped for joy in my chest.
“Annat, my love! You’re looking fat and happy!”
In a distant corner of the pasture, my good red bull Manu trotted back and forth, a tiny white figure clinging to his corded neck and giggling.
Now, I knew time moved differently in the Veil, that Gentry children did not develop as mortals did, but oh! I feared for her! She was so small, both her worlds so unsafe. I thought of my fox twins, and others like them. The war was not over—not by many a long mile and a longer year. King, Archabbot, Prickster, peasant, Gentry warrior, mortal soldier: our battles would rage ever bloodier before we knew an end. Such a tangle. Such a terror. If only the children were let to reach a reasonable age, perhaps together they might build a more reasonable world. But they had to survive it first!
“Be careful!” I shouted, “Manu, not so fast!” and set off at a run. Not two steps I’d taken before someone had caught the back of my skirt. People were always stopping me this way. I should start wearing trousers.
“Peace, Milkmaid! She won’t fall. We’ve taken to calling her the White Raven. If we don’t tie a thread to her ankle and tether her to something solid—like Manu—she’ll fly right up into the air and only come down again when she’s hungry.”
My body strained forward, not quite caught up to my ears.
“But—she’s—just—”
“A child. Our child. Seven days old and stubborn as the sea.” He released my skirt abruptly. I splattered into the dirt as was my wont—charmingly, just shy of a cowpat. This was so reminiscent of the moment we’d first met, I laughed.
His long black eyes danced as he gazed down. His hair was wild as a thundercloud. Clad like a farmer but for the opal on his finger, the ivory at his throat, the green flame on his brow, he looked…healthy. His shoulders still hunched, his torso still torqued, but his brow was unfurrowed, free of pain. No farmer or fisherman, prince or soldier had ever been so fine and fey, so gladdening to my eyes. Wiping my face briefly with the hem of my skirt, I took my first true breath in what seemed like a lifetime.
“If our Raven can fly, Ricadon, she gets it from your side of the family. Me, I’m mortal to the bone—remember?”
“Not anymore, Gordie Oakhewn,” said my friend and lifted me from the ground.
The Big Bah-Ha
For Bea LaMonica and Gillian Hastings
Beatrice did not wake up in Heaven.
She lay flat on her back. The surface beneath her was hard as concrete, maybe bouncier, like those playgrounds made from recycled tires. Bitter crazy cold out, but she could not see her breath.
“Dead, then,” said Beatrice.
Not panic. Not exactly. A pang, maybe. Best not to pay attention to that. Might begin to gnaw holes in a girl when a girl most needs to be whole.
So Beatrice sat up and patted her head. Pigtails still held, thank the Good Goddess Durga, as Dad used to say…although Dad hadn’t believed in any pantheon predating Darwin, had gone gravy to the slaprash an atheist and a scientist and taking in vain the names of all fiend-eating ladygods sharing cross references in the ’cyclopedia.
’Spossible, she thought with an inward sparkle of enthusiasm, I meet up Dad in this place. We’ll discuss gods, or death, or breathing without breath, or whatever, like we used to do in the olden days, except…
Except this place seemed to stretch out forever like an elastic elephant skin. Empty. Or—not empty? There. A gleam of red and white, listing not too far from where she sat. A striped barber’s pole. A fat white glove at its pinnacle wriggling HELLO. The arrow of its index finger urged her down a path.
The path, Beatrice saw, was the same gray as ground and horizon, easy to miss. Just a thin groove to be picked across like the wirewalkers used to do under the big tops. Or a girl might elect to stroll with more dignity along its side. If a girl followed it at all.
But standing still invited the biting chill, and Beatrice shivered. The pointing glove reminded her of the Flabberghast’s hands, which were just as white, but much slimmer. Slim and graceful, nearly transparent, the fingers too long and the wrists too bony. He was the last thing she remembered: his long painted face peering at her through the bushes, his eyes shining black as beetles.
“He killed me!” Beatrice said aloud, startled. “Him and his diamond teeth.”
Well, she didn’t remember that part, not ezzactly. Not the getting gobbled part, only the part where he smiled.
But she was here, wasn’t she? And here could be anywhere, but it could also be in the Flabberghast’s stomach. And even if here were really elsewhere, she’d bet she’d left her bones behind to undergo eternal digestion. Danged Flabberghast! Old carrion eater. Old clown.
But how’d he get close enough? Beatrice had lived by the same command she’d drummed into her little Barka Gang. If she’d told Tex, Diodiance, Granny Two-Shoes, and Sheepdog Sal once, she’d told them a kajillion times: “Beware the Flabberghast.”
And when they asked her why, she’d said, “Well, because he’s a Tall One. Because he appeared in the gravy yard with the other eight after the world ended. Because he’s here to eat the bones, and he’ll eat yours when you go.”
“So?” Diodiance always asked. Diodiance liked the Flabberghast, liked his cardboard hut, his yellow shoes, his little way of bowing low. “We ain’t dead yet, so he can’t rightly eat us. Till our slaprashes show, Queen B, mayn’t he come over to play?”
Quick as a slung-shot rock, Beatrice always parried, “What if Ol’ Flabby don’t feel like waiting till your slaprash shows? What if he picks up a crushing stone with his weird white hand and caves in your skull, strips your flesh to stretch upon a great moony drum, and sucks your bones good and fresh? The Flabberghast’s not contained like the other Tall Ones. The gravy yard gates don’t hold him. Lives outside the arch in his cardboard hut, don’t he, while his friends slaver and babble and gobble up crypt-crunch behind the black iron bars, those white lights on their shoulders a-shinin’. And don’t he smile to be so free, aiming his big, bright teeth at any kiddo strayin’ bold from her gang.”