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His face colored angrily. “The last girl came and went. This place is spent. It had a life, like any tree or beast. It was born when two sisters died here, and fed their gifts to a third, and ended when a horsewoman touched a Fox without permission. The Mare, as you call her, has probably already forgotten it existed. And Liulfr—my kin, not yours—went back to the Sky, to put those bodies in their graves, to do what Stars may do for sisters, and cousins, and kin. Go home. There is nothing for you here.”
“But I have looked for this place all my life!” I spread my empty, grubby hands.
“I do not care! Why do you awful creatures insist that we care for every little thing you do?” The Star let out a terrible wail, his beautiful face contorting in grief, his head thrown back, tears streaming from his eyes like lightning. “One of you killed my sister! If I could I would tear all of you apart for one glimpse of her whole again!”
“I did not kill your sister,” I growled.
“It does not matter. When you look into the Sky, do you see our faces? No, you see a multitude, all the same. So it is when I look at you. My sister’s body lies within, where the Sleepers were. She is more holy in her smallest blink than the lot of them, and she deserves this place no less than they. But I will not let any little girls drink from her like a cup.”
“I… I didn’t mean that. But I was young when I began, and now I am old, and if I do not take the light soon, I will die, and my family will perish in the dark.”
“It is not yours to take. It never was. This is not about your family; it is about mine.” He paused for a moment, his alabaster jaw set hard. “If you are unafraid of the dark, would you pay for the light your grandmothers took? I will give you, one last time, the light you seek, if you are willing to barter for it.”
“Yes, anything!” Well, that is a foolish promise, but foolishness is not only the province of the young. He knelt before me, and I did not know what to do, but his eyes were huge, vast pools of gold and pleading.
“Find her. Find her and tell me where we go. Tell me what happens to us, tell me she is at peace. Tell her I love her. Tell her I tried to protect her. I cannot bear to think of her alone!” His voice broke and he was as miserable as a child lost in a dark wood. “Tell her I miss her so.”
With that he drew his harpoon and thrust it into my heart.
THE TALE
OF THE CROSSING,
CONCLUDED
ZMEYA’S EYES WERE FULL OF GREEN TEARS. “I miss him, too,” she said.
“He put his harpoon into me, and more light poured into my chest than my grandmother ever knew. It burned me through and through, like scalding oil poured down my throat. I felt it screaming in me and called out my mother’s name, I felt it screaming in me and called out my brother’s name, and my grandmother’s, and all the names of my flock. The silver came bubbling up out of my mouth like blood and he drew back the blade.”
Zmeya was nodding. “He never gave up more than a cupful of his light. He still burns where he walks, as we all did in the earliest days.”
“It was enough so that I seemed to the ferryman a Star, and he brought me here, where I aimed.”
“How much did you pay him?” Seven asked. Aerie blinked. “Idyll. What did you pay him to ferry you across? How much did you bleed for the harpy?”
The witch-woman laughed. “Coins are for the living, boy. For those who shouldn’t be here, and for carrying back those who shouldn’t be there. Blood is for those who have no business on this lake. There are other ways of getting to this place—namely, by dying. Laakea offered to cut my throat as quickly as possible, but I knew a faster way. I loosed my Leucrotta-sash from my waist and fell down as dead as when my brother snapped my neck. And here I am, half-goose, as I always was. We have an agreement—I will ferry back to him what he seeks, and he will tie it on again at the new moon.” She looked the Snake-Star up and down again. “So, seeing that you require my more mundane skills, I hope it pleases the child to come out sooner rather than later.” She crouched down and spoke directly to the heavy bulge in the serpent-skin. “Do you hear that, little one?”
We showed Aerie the island, and cautioned her not to eat the red fruits if she meant to go back. She and Zmeya talked at length, cloistered together like novices, their heads bent, long wings folded around long scales. The serpent asked how she could possibly be with child; the goose asked if she had
pains, chills, aches in her feet. It happened that they were conversing in this way when Zmeya cried out, her voice in the mist like eggs cracking, and fell against one of the gray houses, clutching her stomach. The house yielded hurriedly, cupping her back in its wall. The Itto twins came running, their red feet throwing up pebbles, and caught her up in their arms, whispering to her and stroking her hair and cooing against her neck. They cradled her against them as she pressed her cool snake’s cheeks to theirs. Fourteen wan, wispy lights peered out from behind the thin trees, frightened and flickering. Aerie only shrugged and set to her work, her wings nearly as deft as hands.
“It did not hurt like this, before, with the others,” Zmeya said, shuddering.
“You are dead. Your body does not want to give up this hot little clutch of life. It wants to keep it.”
Seven and Oubliette looked on from a distance, and it seemed to them a terrible birth. Zmeya’s shrieking shot out over the shacks, bleak and rasping. Her feet kicked out on the ground, and a sickly light spilled from her as blood might from a living woman. Finally there was a child in Aerie’s wings, with great black eyes and a shock of dark hair, her skin gray and wet. Zmeya held her and smoothed her daughter’s hair. The fourteen lights looked curiously over her shoulders. One of the Itto twins put out his ruddy, grained finger, and the baby gripped it, her fist sure.
“What will you call her?” Aerie said. “Names are so terribly important, you know.”
“I shall call her Sorrow,” whispered the serpent after a long while. “I shall give her now a surfeit of sadness, and hope that it will pay in one stroke for happiness in all her days. Perhaps she will have more days than my other children.”
The fourteen lights dimmed a little, but not much.
But it was not to be. The child was sickly, ill, her cheeks hollow. No matter how the serpent tried to nurse her hatchling, her breasts would not fill. No light came filtering through the branches to illumine her, to feed her. The babe’s breath was hot in the air, her wails bright and cutting, the only living thing on an Isle of shades and Stars, and interlopers halfway between. The child had no light that anyone could see, and her little lips trembled in the cold, showing her pink gums, no more than a cold, hungry little girl. Sorrow could not be fed, and she slowly wasted, becoming thinner and thinner, while Aerie waited for the new moon.
“What is wrong with her?” Zmeya begged for answers.
Aerie sighed. “You are dead. You cannot feed a child with your hard, cold flesh. You cannot expect the child of dead Stars to glitter and gleam. She will die here, the only thing ever born in the land of the dead.”
