“Do you want to debrief them, or shall I?” Sare said.
“You can do it,” Iaris said. “Report to me afterwards, will you?”
“Yes,” Sare said. “I will.” Thuan held Kim Cuc’s hand, and said nothing. Sare hadn’t seen anything. He’d barely used any magic, and he’d smooth it over. He’d have been worried in other circumstances: but if she wanted him dead, he’d already be.
“And once the wing is shored up, we’ll have to reschedule the tests.” Iaris sounded annoyed.
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Sare turned, briefly, to look at them. “I know exactly who passed.”
Iaris raised an eyebrow. “That’s… unusual.”
“You have objections?”
“None. It’s your own business, Sare.”
“My responsibility. Yes, I know.”
“So these three?”
Sare shook her head. “Two.”
Two. Leila and him. Thuan looked at Kim Cuc. “Sare—” he said.
“I told you,” Sare said. “Resourcefulness. And strength. I appreciate your loyalty to your friend, but—”
But, from Sare’s point of view, she’d been nothing but trouble.
He needed Kim Cuc. He couldn’t possibly take on the House by himself, couldn’t make it far without her support. He needed her jokes at his expense, her reminders of his failures in bed and elsewhere—and, more importantly, he needed to not be alone in Hawthorn. Leila, for all that he liked her, wasn’t from the kingdom, and could never fill that role.
He…
He’d gone through this all, without her help—and now he’d have to do much, much more. The breath in his lungs burnt, as bitter as ashes and smoke. “I see,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Good,” Sare said, briskly. “Welcome to the House, Thuan.” She smiled mirthlessly. “I’m assigning you to the kitchens to start with. Your pastries were too soggy, but not that bad, considering. Never fear, you’ll have plenty of classes to learn better cooking skills.”
Thuan forced a smile he didn’t feel. He remembered darkness flowing to fill his entire world, that feeling he would never escape the corridors.
“I’m glad I passed,” he said, smoothly, slowly. He stared, in silence, at the looming shape of the House before him, at the fading imprint of thorns on the handles, and wondered how many secrets it still held—how many things waiting to bite and grasp, and never let go.
The Thule Stowaway
Maria Dahvana Headley
The dreamer, born bleak, invents an existence elsewhere. He tosses in his sleep, his hair tangled. His hands grasp at nothing, and his nightclothes oppress him. He roams a land of chill seas and stony cliffs, and when at last he arrives at a kingdom, he passes through its gate cautiously, seeking a fire, but finding only silvery surfaces surrounded by cliffs. It is a frozen place, no metal, no wood. It is a place where even the knives are made of ice.
There is a tower before him. The dreamer enters the tower and climbs the staircase.
In the tower there is a creature, and in the creature there is a heart made of lost love. The heart takes flight from the creature’s breast, and a raven rises against the frozen gray sky, over a coastline bordered in coffins, a world of women with bound hands and blindfolded eyes.
As the heart departs, the dreamer wakes a poet.
He stumbles to his desk and opens a pot of ink. He dips the raven’s feather in it and begins to write, sleep still half upon him, his mind full of creatures that fade as he commits them to paper, caging them line by line, his pen drawing their prison.
He wrings the night into dawn. He covers pages with calligraphed serpents, a poem twisting into a story filled with another story, a novel pushing against the edges of the paper. As he writes, his kingdom comes into being, and he breathes life into it, his fingers leaving prints on the pages, his companion beginning to take shape, an appetite made of points of light, a creature made of the hours of an insomniac.
If a man makes a monster, he wonders, is he responsible for it? If one is the master of the monster, what happens when the monster is left alone? Does it wander in wrath? Does it rage? The poet does not consider his monster’s future. He makes it and sets it free in his kingdom.
The poet is a young man when he begins to build the kingdom called Thule, and he builds for years.
He dreams alongside his dreamers, and in the waking world, he wanders, writing roads alongside his own, sometimes crossing them. A dream within a dream, he thinks. Thule and its king with his dark heart and longing for love, Thule and its ruler, its forests, its floods of ghosts. Dream-land, he thinks, embroidering the edges of a realm stitched in silver.
Into the drawer of the desk the poet puts his Thule, locked and keyed, while he goes into his own life, a marriage, a misery, years of scrimping and sickness, a beach, a bride, a breaking.
Thule continues about its business without its god, and when the poet returns to it and publishes a map of its boundaries, the companion he invented as a young man has been roaming the earth for years.
There has been a dead wife washed up on the shores of Thule, her name Annabel or Lenore, or…
Call this body Virginia. Call this, that was a girl, a ghost with violet eyes and black hair, dead at the age of twenty-four, consumed.
The poet opens his drawer, and finds his kingdom of grim comforts. He looks into the distance, seeking the raven-shaped heart, the starry skin, the sharp teeth, but the creature is nowhere to be found.
The poet remembers a ship left sailing into the line of the horizon, but he can’t recall the direction, not with a compass, not with the sun. Dim, the land he made as a boy, and darkness abutting the edges. But out of that land, in the brightness of the world, there is something he made, and he must capture it.
He writes a trap for the monster, a story filled with dreamers. A woman, a demon, a journey, a town by the water and something floating out in the harbor. He writes a tale for himself to inhabit, a dream within a dream.
This tale.
There are certain stories, any reader knows, that recur in towns boundaried by water. A captain’s wife stares into a gale, and suddenly her husband’s face appears in that green-gray miasma, a vision of his wrack and ruin. Ghostly sailors struggle from the waves, only to fall back again. Ships are found adrift, crews missing. Messages in bottles are discovered ten years after their sender’s drowning, inscribed with predictions of futures unlived.
I need not remind the reader, gentle or no, that these tales are fictions made of desire, that the act of missing a beloved may conjure miracles. For myself, I never held with such. I held with hope, and so I came to Providence for a worldly version of Salvation, in the year eighteen hundred and forty-eight, carrying an umbrella and wearing a long dress, my hem draggling in the mud.
No one turned head to look at me when I emerged from my carriage. I was no longer a girl, but a woman of nearly thirty-five. I’d had money, and then I had none, or at least none in hand. A cutpurse I never saw, and that was gone, though in the hem of my skirt I’d sewn enough to carry me. I was no innocent. By all accounts I was a lost cause and a fallen woman.
The mistress of the inn was slender, with bones that ridged through her skin in distinct knobs.
“I am Mrs. MacFarlane,” I informed her, with as much dignity as I could. “My husband is delayed on the road.”