Goldmouth’s cloud-hounds shot into the air, knotting around Mabry Muscat’s throat and tying off before he could gasp. The light blew out of his eyes and his body fell to the streetside.
The Leopard of Little Breezes roared so loud and long every soul in Fairyland clapped hands over their ears.
Goldmouth’s broken hand opened on the cobblestones beside the body of the Green Wind. In its golden palm lay a tiny, dazzling green leaf.
A great battle followed—but that is not important. To be sure, Goldmouth’s clouds frothed into a rage, and the Great Cats of Nephelo rose up to fight them in the great, stormy sky. In years hence they would call the battle the Nor’Easter, for its squalls turned the heavens black and brought rain onto every head. The Red Wind shot so many clouds with her scarlet pistols and Iago, her Panther, tore so many with his teeth that afterward she would be called Cloudwyf, and the cowed nation of clouds would be hers to rule and ride. A bonny knight, Mallow rode upon Imogen, the Leopard of Little Breezes. With her needle stitched cloud to cloud until a thread of wind pierced a hundred hearts all in a row. Great cries were uttered, loyalties made, and far below the people of Fairyland fled home or took up their brooms and bird-mounts and carpets to join the fray. Grandbabies would be told of the day, rest you certain.
But that is a battle story, and battle stories belong to those who fight them. How a battle feels is impossible to tell, except by nonsense: It felt like a long rip. It felt like a weight landing upon me, over and over. It felt like red. It felt like a bell unringing forever. What can be told is that when Mallow and her Leopard and the Red Wind and all her brothers and sisters landed, Goldmouth still lay in the wreckage of his black blood, dying in between his breaths. Beside him, two strangers stood whole and with so much sorrow in their faces that the Red Wind staggered to see it. But beside the sorrow lay a rueful humor, as though a joke had been told while the war raged, and only now did these two youths catch the punch line.
One was a pretty young woman with brown, curling hair and a simple white dress with a few pale ribbons trailing from it. She wore a bonnet of valerian and heartsease. The color in her cheeks gleamed rich as bread and sun-rosy, and her feet were bare.
The other was a man with a neat, pointed beard and kindly eyes which had become the most beguiling shade of green. He was dressed in a green smoking jacket, and a green carriage driver’s cloak, and green jodhpurs, and green snowshoes. In his hands he held a long green lance, quite whole.
“He died to save her,” the Leopard growled. “And now he must take her place. It’s different for each Wind. Red will need to be tricked by her replacement into putting on a white gown. Gold will be killed. So it goes. Long ago, a girl named Jenny Chicory loved a boy, and meant to be a water-duchess in the Seelie before going on the Great Hunt. She drowned saving a little boy in green, a boy she did not know from a stranger, from a pirate band with a whale on their side. She could not let him go down into the waves, and woke up all in green with a job to do and no more a happy maid with a suitor at her door. Now Mabry’s done it, and he can’t take it back, nor go home with her to Winesap any more than she could leave the sky windless. The gales of the upper Fairyland heavens would shatter her, as they would have shattered him. In the doldrums of summer, sometimes, they arrange to meet at sea, where the sails droop and crow’s nests swelter. I imagine they’ll keep that date.”
Jenny looked at her Leopard with a grand and sorry love. “We are used to it,” she said thickly. “And storms must sometimes come to Winesap, too.”
Mallow looked down at the dying King. His breath did not stop or slow—a clurichaun his age had reserves of will waiting to be tested. He might live years in distress but not die. She considered what to do. She considered the Gremlin and the Green Wind. She considered poor, crumbling Pandemonium. She considered the shattered goblet and that blue and cloudy blood, the wettest of all possible Wet Magics, mingling with all the other blood that had poured out onto the square, wretched, dull, of use to no one.
Mallow knelt. She drew her needle and pricked the thumb of King Goldmouth’s golden hand. Slowly, as slowly as he had pushed his fingers into helpless mouths, she pushed her needle in, pulled it through, and made her stitch. Beneath her hands, a thick, glassy thread appeared. She made another stitch, and another, hauling up the clurichaun’s feet to his chest and beginning to cry a little despite herself, so exhausted and revolted and determined and sorry was she.
“I told you,” she said as she sewed. “I didn’t want to muddle in Politicks—and there is always Politicks, even when folk promise it’s just a party, or a revival, or an exhibition of every kind of magic. I didn’t want to meet a Fairy boy or dance at Fairy balls. I only wanted to read my books and learn a bit of magic. Why couldn’t you have been a better King? Why couldn’t you have left that poor world alone? Why couldn’t you have been better?” She hit him with her fist and he did not protest. She had not hit him hard.
By now, Goldmouth’s knees covered his face. He could not speak. A very neat seam ran across his nose. His eyes pleaded, but Mallow went on sewing up the King, stitch by stitch, into a package no bigger than her hand. The last of his astrological tattoos showed on the top of it, and she handed the whole thing over to the Red Wind to close away. Mallow’s skin dripped starry streaks of royal blood.
The girl who would find herself, against long odds, Queen before dinnertime stood up and looked at her new friends, at her darling Leopard, at the glittering needle in her hand. Then she looked to the empty, hollowed-out city.
“Well,” Mallow said, feeling a wave of powerful practicality break on her heart. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
WALKING STICK FIRES
Alan DeNiro
On All Hallows Eve Eve, Parka sat on his motorcycle in the unending desert. The moon was a low-hanging fruit. The blue fires of Casino were off in the far distance to the north. Parka pulled an apple out of his jacket pocket, cut it in half with his claw, and offered one half to his fellow traveler, Jar.
“The apple has a pleasing scent,” Jar said before he ate it, crushing the apple into pulp with his mandibles.
“I would have to agree,” Parka said.
“Where did you procure it?”
“In a house outside of Casino.” He indicated the blazing pyramids and monoliths with his claw. “Two days ago. I forgot I had it. There it was, sitting on a kitchen table. Red and perfect.” When he finished eating the apple, Parka brushed off a posse of stick insects that landed on his shoulders.
“Hey, cool, walking sticks,” Jar said, brushing them off Parka’s jacket.
“Is that what the locals call them? I just don’t know where these bugs come from,” Parka said.
“They are everywhere,” Jar said, cleaning his mandibles with his fingers afterward.
Parka watched the walking sticks rattle on the hard desert ground.
“All right,” Parka said, kicking his motorcycle to life. The reactors shot into clutch for a second and then hummed. Jar followed with his. “Santa Fey then?”
“They are expecting us.”
Parka patted his satchel, the one containing the Amulet of Ruby Webs, which he had extracted from Casino at great cost.
“Yes they are. I do not expect traffic. Or to encounter those we disposed of.”