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And indeed, it was not long before the mist cleared and a long silver shore spread out before them, glistening gray pebbles washed by weak gray foam. A small, paint-peeled dock jutted into the still-sulking water. Lashing the ferry to it, Idyll squinted into the murky forest that began just beyond the beachhead. He did not step onto the dock.
“This is the Isle of the Dead,” whispered Seven, gripping the dock post with white knuckles. The ferryman burst into laughter, a short, shocking sound that echoed across the shore like an ax blow.
“There is no Isle of the Dead! The geography of this place is more complicated than you could possibly imagine! Why do you think these docks are needed, and a ferryman? I am no mere psychopomp—I am the lake-pilot. I know all the waterways, all the Isles. There are as many as there are whales in the sea, and more, whales and sharks and tortoises together. Perhaps whales and sharks and tortoises and anemones. I know them all, I know the navigable paths, I know where to take each wretched soul that comes to my dock. You wanted to go after her? This is where she came. This is where I brought her, and she paid as dearly as you, never think she did not. She wanted to come to this shore alone of all the others. This is where I take the Stars, it is the Isle of Lost Light, and I would not take you beyond it—you are not qualified, and neither are they.”
Out of the Garden
DINARZAD FOLDED HER HANDS IN HER LAP. ON EVERY FINGER WAS a ring of gold and tiger’s-eye, and so her hands seemed to look back at her, baleful and fiery and sad. The braziers flickered and warmed her shoulders, and through veils the color of a peacock’s head she watched the banquet which seemed to whirl around her like dishes around a mute centerpiece, or dancers beneath a tall, elaborate lamp that has no choice but to shine. The ivory circlet cut into her skin, and in the morning her forehead would be red and chafed. The man beside her had a thick mustache, and had brought her as the sixteenth in his parade of gifts a tiny bird of paradise carved from a single huge pearl, with a tail of trailing sapphires and topaz. Its eyes were dead and shimmering, and when you pulled the tail, some mechanism deep in the bird’s throat chimed like a clock. She thought it was meant to be more like a crowing or singing, but to her it seemed nothing more than a clock marking the time. She pulled its tail. It chimed. She delicately placed her napkin over it, so that she would not have to look it in the eye.
She was thinking about the girl in the Garden.
It was the pirate ship that she remembered when she thought of the girl’s stories, the pirate ship and the sad, broken Papess. She thought she understood that, how to give up and give in to the inevitable. She knew what inevitability felt like, how it tasted. It felt like the mustached man’s hand on her knee. It tasted like his kisses. She wished that she could cut her hair like a Sigrid, so that they would stop stringing it with jewels and brushing it straight. She wished she could cloister herself away from inevitable kisses.
She wished she were an orphan with endless tales to tell and no one to love her enough to bring her birds of pearl.
But she was not her brother, she could not bring herself to sit at that girl’s feet and listen to her openly, she could not bear the possibility that the girl was not a bird of pearl, that she could not simply pull her tail and hear the chime she longed for. But she did long for it.
“And where is the little Sultan tonight, your brother?” said her suitor amiably, his voice like thick liquor, flowing over her and into her skin whether she willed it or no.
“He is hunting in the country, my lord,” she said, not lifting her eyes under the deep blue veil. “After all, when he is not so little a Sultan anymore, he will not have time for such noble pursuits. He took our father’s ebony bow and went to shoot a lion in my lord’s honor, as a wedding present.”
She wondered at how easy the lie was. Is this how you tell a tale? she thought. You open your mouth and chime, let whatever seems lovely pour out, and hope it sounds more like singing than the tolling of a clock? She warmed to her story and lifted her eyes demurely.
“My brother is most impressed with my lord. He prefers you infinitely to the younger man who brought all those ghastly roosters. He is most interested in the mechanism of your birds, which he feels is superior to the golden clockwork of that other man.”
“Why, I should be happy to show him how it is done!”
“I am sure he will be most grateful, my lord—how generous of you, to marry his sister and show him such wonders! He will surely reward my lord beyond measure. My brother is a prodigy in the ways of diplomacy—he spends his nights in contemplation of the movements of nations and governors, and in the perfect halls of his mind he moves them as deftly and surely as shatranj pieces. He thinks so often and with such intensity that I have with my own eyes seen steam pour from his head as from a kettle. He will be a great Sultan, when he is grown, and he will always remember the delightful singing of my lord’s birds.”
“Your voice is sweeter than all of my birds chiming at once.”
“But not, I think, sweeter than those of all your wives chiming together.”
But there she had gone too far, and a shadow passed over the oiled and perfumed features of her bridegroom. She coughed and summoned up a maidenly blush, lowering her eyes to her plate again. The gold was streaked with goose fat, and she had no appetite. Somewhere far off on its own long table was the spotted carcass of the giraffe neck, which was so rich and marrow-sweet that she could not stomach it. A few sapphires peeked out from her napkin. She pulled the strands, and shuddered at the sound.
When the night was over and her neck ached from keeping her head bowed, she went to the tower room and folded her cloak in half, then in quarters. It was red, dyed over and over until it was so dark that to call it red beside other reds was to call the sun bright beside a lamp. It was lined with deerskin, from some country so far off that the deer were shaggy and thick-pelted. Its lower hem was trimmed with black wolf tails. It was the simplest, least ornate cloak she owned. She pushed it slowly into her brother’s pack, and with it the little pearl bird.
“I don’t know where it came from,” the boy said. “I certainly didn’t bring it. You told me not to.”
The girl ran her fingers over the fabric soft as ink. The wolf tails flopped over her small hands, and the deer fur ruffled back from the hood. “It’s all right if you did.”
“I didn’t! I brought quail eggs and cinnamon candies! They were having goose tonight—I didn’t feel right about that.”
The girl considered it for a while, and decided that if he could not work out the clickings and whirrings of his sister’s mind, it was far beyond her to do so. She unfurled the coat, and the boy helped her heft the thick, heavy thing over her thin shoulders. The prickle of the deer fur on her skin was strange and thrilling, something akin to the slick tang of the cinnamon in her mouth. She smiled a little, and her teeth were cold in the air. As she arranged the folds around her by the side of her lake, which was strewn with leaves and duck feathers, the little bird fell out into her hands. She looked at the boy curiously, but he shook his head. She pulled the string of sapphires and topaz, and the pearl bird opened its intricate mouth, letting loose a loud, clear chime, like the tiniest church bell in the world.
The girl laughed.
THE TALE
OF THE CROSSING,
CONTINUED
SEVEN STEPPED OFF THE DOCK ONTO THE WET beach. Idyll was already punting away from him, the flash of lizard tails peeking out from his cloak every now and then. The young man walked up the shoreline, gingerly, trying not to look down—for the beach was strewn not with gray pebbles, as it had seemed when he saw it from the lake, but with thousands of closed eyelids, glistening silver and wet, which opened wherever he stepped, their irises pale and accusing. They wept constantly, and their tears mingled with the lake foam in salty waves. He clutched his empty s
leeve and did not look down, though his stomach lurched with each wet and yielding step. He was relieved when the coast of eyes gave way to gray loam and skeleton leaves, and the forest spiked up around him, bare and thin-branched, birches and larches and gnarled oaks with no leaves clattering in the lackluster wind.
But he did not know how to find her. He wandered in the wood, and no bird called, no deer chewed acorns, no mouse scurried past. There was no sun, and he could not tell where he went—but he went on. He was frozen and numb with a damp that crawled over him like a pair of lizards.
