The Beauty
17 Summer 218
She worked to avoid thinking about anything more fraught than the possibilities held within the skyfolk pyramid and the odd foreign runed weapon, but the thoughts she left behind during the day followed her into her rest at night.
“I didn’t want anyone to get hurt,” Vanja said calmly, the skin sliding off her face and the fat beneath bubbling, charring muscle curling and splitting to show blackened bone beneath.
“Fewer people get hurt when we get involved,” a familiar gruff bellow sounded from the other side. She spun to see Arjuvh’s skeleton sitting up beside the charred, shattered trebuchet. His left arm skittered over and climbed up to reattach itself the wrong way. “At least on our side. Tough on the enemy, but you can’t think about them; you have to focus on your folk, the ones depending on you.” His words were swallowed up as the assault tower next to him exploded in a thunder of splinters and rope.
“Depending on us,” the dark-skinned lieutenant agreed. “Protect them against the witches,” he said, as fanged darkness tore away the lower half of his body and his innards slithered from its containing skin, bouncing like pulley ropes.
“The witches who wield power scraped from dark places,” declaimed a voice only half-remembered. Sav spun, gaze landing on a stage where a man stood, one foot braced on the slumped corpse of her mother, other hand raised to the light mirrored and focused upon her. Sav’s brow creased. Reis had never performed; he’d been set director, not player. “Scrabbling for drabs to fill their emptiness, loathing those guided by the Torch’s light.”
“The torch,” Kelwin mused, pacing forward through the viscera as Reis burst in a spray of gore and ash, his boots rending deep cracks upon her mother’s dry, fine skeleton. “Such a useful tool, in so many situations.” He smiled, and she found herself touching a torch to the cannon before her. A deep bell-like tone rang out, and pain tore through her body, incandescent and burning her eyes away into white.
She floundered awake in suffocating silence, her voice lodged in her navel, every muscle tensed and frozen. For agonizing minutes she could only stare at the clouded sky, her breath whistling between clenched teeth.
Then, in one lurch, movement flooded back into her body and spilled her over onto her side in a tangle of elbows and angles, her knees jamming up against the bars of the nest. Aloysius hooted in alarm at her sudden movement, wings flaring. Panting, she stared at the deck of the Beauty swaying far below, the wind cold against sweat-sheened brow and the scent of wood and tar in her nose.
“My dreams,” she said to no one in particular, “ha’ apparently never heard of subtlety.” Dragging herself into a sitting position, she rubbed a knot in her back and folded her knees into her chest, sinking her head into her hands. “Perhaps Sylas has a point,” she muttered to Aloysius, who cocked his head at her quizzically and hooted. “Ach, ye’re right, ‘tis unlikely.”
Unbidden, the images arose again. The blackened, bubbling bodies. The smell of cooked pork and charred wood, and the peculiar acrid tang of powder. Swan uniforms on bodies strewn around, some in pieces. She dug the heels of her palms into her eyes, but it did nothing to stop the images or the tears.
Furiously, she tore out a wrinkled piece of paper and a grease pencil and began to scribble, hand crabbed and more awkward than usual with the cramped space and the shivers that she couldn’t seem to control.
.
flame candesce an spittin tendons stretch in silent screams whilst seamless part the lips that scream cannot
air sucked hot fae searin lungs an at the source: a single hand
the witch they cry a witch most fell who falls an falling further yet
above the sky tae chase a light to which not one might haud her flightsoldiers ten an ten an twenty more burst an spume an char beneath
the weight o’ secret forces shapèd to engulf the gloam
“I meant no harm,” a cry whose lips in greeting bled
“I only murder to preserve,” a thought which no more honor hauds
if ‘tis a lie, a truth, a query, all are mooted matters now
intentions crack an outcomes wrack beyond a single howlin mindgreet for conscience strangled ‘pon the stem
an hark the screams that ring in endless wringing nighttimes still
justify the thoughts of deaths forecoming ‘til
monsters bred an blesst we ‘come an dance the set bespoke
myth stalks myth an kith lies rent beneath the beaks of crowsnaif beyond belief tae think that sinking claws
intae the seams that bind reality wid leave a wean beyond
the first of many sweet an giddy lines o’ truth
the micht to save an maim burns scars inside your heid
an hollows out what once a normal person stoodO Hunt
Grant me micht to slay my flaws my foes
O Harvest
Give me strength to succor others
O Torch
Gift me will to wield this power wise
As she wrote, her shaking stilled, her writing growing less wobbly, though no less crabbed. When she put “wise” to paper, she dug in so hard the pencil tip broke through the paper and stabbed her in the thigh. Flinching, her hold loosened on the paper and the skirling wind, rushing through the crow’s nest, whisked pencil and paper both away into the darkness. She reached out reflexively to yank on the connection between her and the errant pieces, but only the pencil remained close enough to wheel around and spin back, smacking into her outstretched palm.
She stared glumly after the path of the paper. “It figures,” she said to her familiar, who had no answer to that. Despite the abrupt, premature halt, she did feel calmer, the sick roiling in her stomach lessened. It had been some time since she’d poured feelings out onto a page, but as ever verse cradled emotions that seemed overwrought and laughable in the words of everyday speech and turned them into something comprehensible and normal.
The burned bodies of Swans. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen it, and it likely wouldn’t be the last, either. She thought back to the time she’d tried very hard not to think about, until Ethan’s requests for a plausible backstory had dredged it up again. At least that time it hadn’t been her doing. At least this time it didn’t mean her world ending yet again.
Arjuvh, and Lenn, and Skelta. Minara, Temios, Kalikka. Lt. Stronghill, a figure she mostly knew by his ramrod-straight posture and the meetings he’d had with Arjuvh, but who had only yelled the usual amount at his troops and never beat the baggage handlers and camp followers, even tipping if they did well. Cut down where they’d worked the engines and weapons that formed the reason for their unit’s existence, the ropes and beams fallen astray—
She frowned a little, probing the edges of memories she’d flinched from before. The edges were blunted now with time, no longer sharp enough to cut, though heavy enough to bruise still. They were fuzzy, filled with the shock of waking in a sea of blood, but she remembered—splinters. Charred splinters. A warped cannon barrel, the tube peeled back like the petals of a massive flower. Beams spread outward in ragged chunks, not hacked to pieces from blades. And the last thing she remembered before the disorienting moment of waking—touching the fuse on the cannon to fire into the charging ranks of Lord Harven’s soldiers, and an explosion—
At the wrong end, she realized, rage dawning. Like it had been rigged to burn faster and blow out the sides instead of channeling through the mouth of the cannon. The way the cannons at the ambush site of the fallen star had been.
It didn’t change anything. Kelwin was still a fucking cunt marked for death. He’d still betrayed the soldiers under his command to score a victory for himself. All this did was shed further light on how he’d chosen to prevent their engines from being used against the fort by the attacking lord barred from his home.
Still, she found herself pulling out another scrap of paper and writing on it:
O Lady of Ravens,
Let me be the one to send the traitor Kelwin to you.
This one she held up between her fingers and kindled a flame, watching as the wind whipped the cinders away. They eddied into the darkness, tiny points of light that winked out like stars, carrying her half-wish, half-prayer into the ether.
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