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“This is not that kind of story.”
The boy tried not to look as glad as he was, a rabbit who knows that he will be caught, but cannot help devouring the carrot. He wished, fervently, that he could find her, and carry her off, like a proper Prince. But she was like air streaming through silk, and he could not touch her at all. They stood for a moment, separated by the low stone sill.
“I will be very quiet,” she murmured, “so as not to wake your sister.” She settled outside the window onto the deep, dewy grass, and closed her eyes.
“When the beast-maiden’s ship had been bounding through the waves like a lioness through the grass for three days with Grog at the wheel, since no one would move her tub from that post, Eyvind found himself belowdecks with Sigrid, sharing a meager supper of seal fat and hard bread. They did not see Snow creep in behind them, as eager to hear their talks as a child who spies upon her parents…”
“WE’VE GOT A FARMER’S BUSHEL OF TIME, NOW, Sigrid,” Eyvind said, settling into a chair with a grunt and a sigh. He sliced off the heels of a loaf for himself and spread it with the salted grease. “And it’s been near ten years you’ve been making eyes at me and drinking my beer at the Arm, near enough to ten years that you’ve been looking like there were something you wanted to say to me—ten years that you haven’t been saying it.” He leaned in, his sandy hair flopping over his brow like a tuft of fur. “I’m thinking it’s long past time you tell me whatever it is you’ve been keeping locked up tight behind those teeth.”
She sighed, and stared at the grain of the table wood, unable to look the tavern-keeper in the eye.
“Eyvind,” she began, her voice cracking like a frozen broom, “I’m not sure I should. There was a time, I think, when I first came to Muireann, when I might have told you, and it might have been the right thing. But now—so much time has passed, so many things happened, I think perhaps it is best that this stay dead, closed into a chest between us, fastened with locks.”
“What are you talking about, woman? I’ve left my tavern for you; you might stop your shy-maid act—I know better than to think you’re just a net-mender. You talk to that albino girl like she’s your confessor, and you won’t tell me why you watch me like I’m likely to grow a tail and start howling at the moon?”
Sigrid’s face sagged, and she lifted her faded eyes to him, full of pity. She looked like nothing so much as a mother welcoming home a child who has gone far astray and become a stranger to her.
“Understand, please, understand that I never wanted to hurt you…”
WHEN I FIRST BECAME A WOMAN, THE LIMBS WERE as strange to me as the first taste of wine. For all my days until that one, I had been a bear.
I loved my mother and my Stars, and I loved a young bear with dark eyes, even after he left me. I was never strange, never different from my sisters.
The bear I loved disappeared, and the snow fell, the snow froze, the glaciers broke and re-formed without him. We knew nothing of where he had gone, and after a full turn of seasons without his tracking across our ice, mates were taken again, cubs were nursed. And life went on.
But one evening, when the blue lights of the heavens streamed through the prisms of the Temple, tracing shadows of cobalt and aquamarine across my thick fur, a vision came to me, glimmering on the ice altar with all the weight and depth of flesh. Laakea, the Harpoon-Star, stood before me, with his diamond spear slung over one shoulder, his skin whiter than light itself. His hair flowed over the altar like a frozen waterfall, and I trembled in his presence, terrified and exalted. I was a humble bear, not so very far past my cubhood, and the golden eyes of the Far-Flying Hunter were fixed on me. The honor was beyond bearing.
He told me, Eyvind. He told me that you had been made into a man, that you had sought to avenge the Snake-Star and been changed to keep you from it. It was not your vengeance to take, he said. But he also told me that you would never be bear again—or that it would be so long and at such cost that if you managed it, it would be worth less than ash. He told me, in a voice like snow, that I would never see you again, that you would never return.
And I wept, my love. I wept at his feet like an infant, and I could not raise my eyes to his beauty.
Laakea put his hands on my shoulders—the ecstasy of it!—and lifted me to his side. He said that if I wished, I could be made a woman myself, so that I could seek you out, find you again, find some happiness. Of course, I wished it! He drew for me a map in the ice, a map through the floes to a great wood at the othermost North of the world, where, he said, roamed a creature who knew something of trading skins.
And he told me nothing else. Not how to find you, or how to stand still while something unstitched my fur and lashed skin in its place.
Yet still, I loved you, and I believed you would want me to come to you. I could not stand the thought of you in misery, separated from your kind. So I went, into the
far northern wilds, and I floated across seas so blue they chilled my bones, and frozen trees encased in sheaths of frost. And I came to a wood more vast than any I had ever heard tale of, darker than caverns in its paleness, and deeper, white with snow and terrible in its cold.
I wandered in it, I became lost in it. Perhaps it was an hour, perhaps it was a year. Perhaps it was ten. In the white, time is nothing, and I knew nothing but the winter, the scent of it, tracking it to its source. I followed the smell of ice over pine, over holly berries, of snowshoes slushing through drifts. I followed until I came upon a hunched figure in a frostbitten vulture cloak, whose feathers were gone to crystal and frost. I lumbered up to its silvery form.
“You came looking for Ghassan,” the hunchback said. “But I’m not him. I’m Ghassan’s girl, Umayma.”
I frowned as best a bear can frown. “You don’t look like a girl.” And indeed, she seemed a wolfish, feral young boy with a cowl carved from a vulture’s head, and leathery black legs with talons like a raven’s. She stamped them in the snow and ground her pearly teeth, one against the other.
“The wonder of skins is that one need never wear one’s own face. You must be weary of yours, or you would not have come looking for Ghassan and found me.”
“Not weary, no, but I need another one.”
“What sort?”
“A… a human girl.”
Umayma pursed her lips. “That’s a hard one to come by. Girls guard their skins very well. But I do have one.” She pulled a bundle the color of good honey out of a fat leather satchel and held it up thoughtfully.
“Where did it come from?” I asked fearfully. “I wouldn’t want to wear a murdered girl’s body like a dress.”
Umayma smiled and fluffed her vulture-skin. “A skin is a skin, but if you must know…”
