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On the monsters’ side stood the girl in her red cloak.
In that moment the boy loved his sister for slipping that outlandish thing into his pack—the girl’s lips were pale and her eyebrows white with snow, her long hair strung with flakes like pearls. She held the little jeweled bird with its long blue and gold tail in her hands and did not smile, or raise her eyes. He could not be sure if she was crying, but her breath was warm and misted on the air.
“I do not know any more stories,” she whispered.
“What? But you swore to tell me more!”
“There are no more that I can tell.”
“But if the tales are over—”
“I did not say they were over. I said I did not know any more.” The girl picked at the pearly beak of her bird.
“I do not understand.”
The girl looked up, and the rims of her eyes were red beneath the sweet, inky black of her lids. “I told you long ago that I read the tales of my eyes in cast-off mirrors, or in pools and fountains. I told you that it was difficult, that I could only read one eye at a time, and that I read them backward, slowly, as such tasks will go. I told you stories from the creases of my left eyelid, and my right. I told you all the stories that I could read in those mirrors and fountains and pools. I have told them all. All that remains now are the tales which begin on one eye and end on another, which cross creases and lashes and twist over each other—these tales I do not know, I cannot tell. I cannot close my eyes and yet still read them in the water, or in the glass. They are hidden from me.”
The boy opened his mouth, and closed it again. “But I want to hear more!” he cried.
The girl smiled, a long, slow smile he had never seen before. “Will you tell me a story, my prince? Will you read from my closed eyes and let me rest my throat, let me hear the last things which are written upon me?”
“But… I can’t do it. I can’t tell them the way you can. I’m not like you, I don’t know how to tell a tale, I don’t know how to speak in all those voices.”
“It is all there, already. Please. I want to hear them. I want to know what is waiting on my skin, waiting to be told, waiting to be heard. I have told you so many things—tell me a story, if you are my friend.”
The boy was blushing furiously. By the firelight he laid out his own cloak on the stiff, ice-scrimmed snow, and gave the girl a tiny vial of orangewine and a slice of hippopotamus, which they agreed was not entirely pleasant, and tasted something like chewed mud and river-water with a honey glaze. Finally, the boy leaned forward, until their noses were almost touching. He could see, as once before, the lines and letters of her eyes, and the closer he looked into the black, the more the words swam up to greet him, submerged alphabets and sigils. He became dizzy; he closed his own eyes, and righted himself like a little ship tossed on a violent ocean. He looked again, and the letters were still there, floating, serene. His voice was high and quavering as he began, unsure and frightened to his marrow to appear foolish before the girl.
“On a blasted plain where the Stars do not look there blew hot winds like bellow-gusts, and scrub sage crawled over white rock.” He read slowly, as if first learning his letters. “On this plain hung a great iron cage in a great iron frame, and the wind shrieked through it like a woman cut open on a slab…”
THE TALE
OF THE WASTE
THE MOON WAS A MOUSE SKULL IN THE SKY. THE blue of the air was dense and deep, the color of the ocean floor, yet it blazed with heat, and golden stones quavered against the horizon. Three long shadows were cast on the thirsty earth, whose dark cracks forked out in all directions like vines searching for the smallest trickle of water. Three long shadows lay black and sere on that fractured desert. The iron cage threw its bars down to the dirt in disgust. There it met the curious hadow-shapes of a woman and a leopard sitting with her ears bent forward, alert and interested. The woman held her cat on a long silver leash which swung back and forth in the wind. She was wrapped head to foot in heavy black veils that whipped and billowed behind her—only her eyes were naked to the air, yellow as withered lemons, her irises sickly red.
The cage was filled with smoke.
It blew out of wrought bars that had been bent into a crosshatched orb hanging by a chain thicker than a man’s waist from its frame. Black and acrid and stinging, it whorled and eddied and spun, caught and caustic. Within the smoke flashed two red-orange eyes, baleful and fringed in fiery lashes, tipped in fiery brows. The circuit of smoke snapped its tail around twice and a body rose partway over the soot, like a mermaid peering through her own scaly tail. Her face was full of fire, and her hair was the root of that exhalation of smoke—it blew and curled away from her dark and flaming features. But the smoke came too from below her waist, for her flesh ended there very much as a mermaid’s will, and nothing but blackness and red sparks striking snaked out where her legs might have been. She was naked, humiliated, her breasts tipped in angry fire, her navel a glowering, ugly ruby, everything that might once have been hers piled up beneath the cage like a funeral offering.
The two women watched each other for some time, like two vultures on a long and lonely branch. The leopard did not stir, except for the occasional wave of her tail across the blighted ground.
Finally, the leopard spoke.
“Who has put you here, friend Djinn?”
The creature thrashed her smoke again, obscuring her blazing eyes. The moon was setting behind her, dry and transparent against the blue, as if it too had been sucked dry.
“That’s a nice trick,” she hissed, her voice like the snapping of green branches as they first catch flame. “Doesn’t the tall one talk?”
The leopard yawned, her whiskers flaring, her pink tongue lolling out before the great cat remembered to put it back.
“Her throat is afflicted, if you’ll pardon her. Her name is Ruin, and I am Rend, and we travel together because it suits us to do so. We did not know that these parched wastes were a prison. We did not expect to find such a thing here.”
A tendril of smoke unspooled out of the cage toward the ve
iled woman in something like the shape of a slender hand, three of the fingers circled in flame like a rich woman’s rings.
“Please!” cried the leopard. “Do not touch her, you mustn’t touch her.”
