AllFreeNovel
Share Us
In fact, it was so quick, and so many slivers fell that day, that when the storm had passed, I stepped away from the prairie and onto the road again, and to my surprise, a girl of glass stepped out of the girl of skin. So much glass, so quickly! More of me was glass than flesh in that moment, and so it has been ever since.
My mother was frantic. She culled lizards from every kingdom, even fresh stock with nothing at all on their backs. Clutch after clutch of eggs were laid in the hopes of finding a cure. She sent letters to every doctor and wizard and witch, begging them to turn her daughter to flesh again. They even—I hesitate to say it!—fed some few of the breeding lizards which seemed to have glass-lore on their backs slices of my old skin, which had been gingerly carried from the field. It did not matter. I remained glass. They tried rolling me in pollen, or clouding the glass with oil and paint, or mud and grass. But I am made of rain; it all slides away.
Finally, on a day when it was so clear that roaming squirrels were blinded, a drifting snow fell on those fields, and walking with my sorrowing mother, her silver hair limp and strung with flakes, I felt my skin frost over, forking lines of frost shooting over my cheeks, my arms, my belly. My breath fogged in the air, and the sun shone through my hair just as it would through a real girl’s curls.
My mother threw her arms around me and her warm fingers stuck to me, but she only laughed and wept and called me her darling. We strode through the fields, and she picked crocuses for me, and gave me honey cakes to eat. We talked of the lizards, of the Rain, of silly things which we always talked about when I was only a voice and a weight on the couch—but they seemed brighter and more important, now that she could see my frost-fringed eyes close when I laughed.
But it cannot snow all the time.
On those few days when the sun and snow join hands, my mother and I go walking in the high and brittle grass. When all the other days dawn snowless, we weep, and tend the lizards in silence, and I try to spare her the pain of hearing my voice without seeing me. I am the ghost of her daughter, and I am sorry, I should not have run off. That silly old lizard. I should not have done it.
But in secret, I think glass is very beautiful, and I among all possible village girls may stand in the Glass Rain and look into the clouds as they weep their hard, cutting tears. They cannot hurt me anymore. And I became the breeding mistress in my mother’s place, long before I ought to have inherited it—the lizards love me, and they can bite all they like. My glass fingers never feel it; their teeth leave no mark. I am good at it, better, even, than my mother, and it was I who discovered the way of rendering jewels to food, for which I was much praised.
But my poor mother, she cries out for me at night, and cannot see that I am there.
THE TALE
OF THE
LIZARD’S LESSON,
CONTINUED
“I AM A GHOST-LIBRARIAN,” THE VOICE SAID. “A shade who carries lizards to and fro, opens and closes pens, but no more. I will become a glass crone with wrinkles like prisms, but I will never be Queen. I will haunt my wretched, mourning mother and make sure the eggs are dry, and that is all.”
We gawked a little, I admit. That is not very good manners, but perhaps we can be forgiven.
“What is it, then, that you wish to barter from us, Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening?”
I cleared my throat. “It is a matter of roses, Ostraya who-was-born-in-the-rain,” I said, shyly.
“Oh! Roses are very interesting, are they not? Did you know that if you feed one nothing but sugar water and a mash of honeybees, it becomes sweet and thick enough to be fried for sandwiches, like boar meat or fish? We have lunched on rose and leek sandwiches for most of this season!”
We expressed some interest in this, and were shown the parent lizards for that recipe, one grafting process so complex there hardly seemed to be a lizard beneath the markings, one anatomical diagram of a large pike. They lolled about in their pen, proud of their children, their thick legs and flamboyant tails, and knew nothing of what was on their skins. We were shown by invisible hands all the lizards which had a thing to do with roses, and spent many months there in contemplation. Yazo was beside herself, her breath thick and fast, her water jostling in her skull. I kept away from her when she spilled herself, and the days after when she could not remember who she was. It was too disturbing, and I did not know how to ask again how she could torture herself so.
Only once did I stumble upon her at that grisly ritual. I had a theory regarding ink and yolk production I wanted to share with her, and I admit that contrary to manners I burst into her room to find her on her knees on a white mat, with a silver bowl before her. I grimaced, and would have left her, but she turned her black eyes to me, and the green bags beneath them were so terrible and deep. I knelt at her side.
“Yazo-who-was-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter, please do not do this. It is an obscenity; I cannot bear to witness it. Do you not see your webbing? Your hair?”
“I am teaching myself a lesson, Yoi. Myself and all Kappa. Of course I see it.” She brushed my tonsure fondly. “I am sorry it distresses you. But you must understand—the others think that to lose one’s water is only a matter of a few days’ bleary eyes and stumbling into things. It is much worse. No one will believe it, and so I show them in my skin. When I am far gone enough, they will understand that we must find a place where the water can be kept safe, and never spilt out for the amusement of a village oaf.” She coughed and took my hand. “I do not even rememb
er now how to grow the pomegranate-ant. I have done nothing of note because I cannot remember how. One day I will not remember when I was born. But that is all right. Then they will see.”
I helped her. Forgive me, I helped her to bend forward into the bowl, and listened to the blue water splash in the silver, and looked into her skull when she had finished, empty and dry, the color of old weeds. I laid her in her bed, and sang to her while she slept insensate.
In only another month, while Yazo was stumbling in the dark and crying and even I could not reach her, I asked Ostraya—I had a little glass bell which let her know I wanted her—to bring me the glass lizard, which is to say the lizard which first carried on it the way of making glass, of blowing it into shapes. I held under my arm an enormous red female who would absolutely not stop licking her eyeballs. She was a rose-lizard, the very simplest one I could find. On her back was nothing more than a minutely fine, infinitely detailed image of a rose, perfect in every petal and thorn. It was red—red on red, the rose itself a deeper and bloodier shade than her skin. Ostraya was quiet for a long while, but I could hear her breathing and knew she was not gone.
“He is an ancient fellow,” she said finally. “And a miserable, hoary old monarch besides.”
“If it is too much to ask in the Glass Country to see this beast, Ostraya-who-was-born-in-the-rain…”
But she brought him, in a wicker basket on his own blue pillow, a gray and green and crusty bull, his crest flopped over as though exhausted with the effort of staying upright for so many years. His eyes were milky and filmed; his throat emitted a constant rattle. But he was covered in instructions, and so I felt generous toward him.
He bit me, of course, when I placed him in the pen next to my scarlet female. Lizards are vicious.
By the time Yazo was herself again—though she looked strangely at me when I used that phrase—the red lizard was getting her nest ready and looking very pleased with herself. We waited, and waited, and ate rose and leek sandwiches and rose steaks and rose roasts and poached rose until we had to say, very politely, to be sure, that rose was no longer quite to our liking, begging the pardon of all our estimable hosts.
When we departed the wide prairie, we had passed through the warm season and into the cold again. The next Glass Rain was still weeks off, according to the latest lizards. We had in our packs a very curious young thing with coral skin and a stark black lesson snaking across his back, and even Yazo was talkative.
