Beneath Ceaseless Skies #138 Read online

  Issue #138 • Jan. 9, 2014

  “The Year of Silent Birds,” by Siobhan Carroll

  “Enginesong,” by Nathaniel Lee

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE YEAR OF SILENT BIRDS

  by Siobhan Carroll

  Sometimes the dead come back.

  I returned on a dark night, a winter’s night, so cold that birds toppled lifeless from the trees. I saw their round gray shapes crusted with frost and thought they were stones placed to mark my way. Then one fell in a shower of snow, so close it grazed my arm. The bird had huddled into itself for warmth, poor thing, and died as it tried to sleep.

  I paused. There was something about the bird that distressed me, but I was pushed onwards. Here, whispered the summoning, and I stumbled forward obediently, taking care not to step on the small gray shapes hardening under the drifting snow.

  When I reached the bridge I began to remember. I had seen this bridge before, in happier days. I had jumped off it into warm water. I remembered children laughing and the darting shadows of minnows under our hands. I looked to the wall and saw it was still there, but the crumbling tower I’d hidden in during hunting games no longer stood against the moon.

  I wanted to pause here too, but the summoning dragged me forward. Like a red-hot hook in my skull: Here.

  I stumbled through the open forest gate, shielding my eyes from the glare. An ice patch crunched under my foot, and one of the weavers’ windows filled with firelight as someone pulled the winterscreen aside and peered out. But no one emerged from the cottages. No one called my name.

  The summoning pulled me past the strange houses of the village, up the slag path to the keep. When I saw the old door, my silent heart seemed to leap within me. Home.

  My fingers could not recall how to form a fist, so I slapped the door with my hand. For a long time, nobody answered. But I had the unwearyingly patience of the dead. In the end, somebody came.

  The servant who answered the door was a stranger. Her eyes took me in—my straggling hair, my wet shroud, the snow clinging to my bare feet—and went very wide.

  “Aider!” Her voice was high and unnatural in my ears. “There’s someone—”

  I pushed past her, into the warmth of the kitchen. A dog I didn’t know bristled at my entrance, then backed away, whimpering. Something was wrong. Katow had always slept here, by the fire.

  “By the Flame, woman, what have you opened the door for?” A large man had entered the room. “Do you want the house to die of cold?” He looked at me and his face went an odd color.

  “By...” The man made a noise, and shook his head. “Lady Rehlite... is it you?”

  At his words, I knew him. Aider, the stable boy, thin as a whip, riding the bay mare. And I remembered when I’d last seen him, bringing a posy of willowsweet to my sickbed.

  A strange feeling came over me. I sat down on the cook’s wooden stool. Water was pooling under me as the snow melted.

  Here, whispered the summoning. Then it vanished as swiftly as it had appeared.

  I looked up at Aider, so much older than I remembered him, his face browned and lined by sun.

  “Yes,” I told him. My voice was rusty with disuse; at the sound, the woman started and the dog yelped with fear. “It’s me. Tell them I’ve come back.”

  * * *

  “But why is she here?”

  The kitchen buzzed with noise—people talking in low voices, guards shuffling, keep children whispering to each other as they poked their heads through the doorway. I looked for my father and mother but didn’t see them. The village Craftsman wiped nervously at the ice still melting on his shoulders.

  “The dead... sometimes do come back, m’lady,” he said. “The cold winter and the Red Star’s crossing are signs of general evil... But only the dead know why they come.”

  The young woman in the nightdress—the one who would not look at me—frowned. A young man with a carefully clipped beard leaned forward and murmured in her ear. The ghost of my living self noted the intimacy of this act—her husband? But he wore a collar and had the coloring of a northerner. He could not be a lord.

  The jumble of bright snagging details tired me. I dropped my gaze to the water pooling underfoot, the old, slow dream of stone.

  “Sister.”

  The word yanked me back to them. The woman was looking at me now, her face vivid and afraid. She had my mother’s eyes.

  “Leave,” the collared man said over his shoulder. The servants and the old Craftsman and the villagers shuffled out, Aider darting one last look in my direction.

  The woman stepped forward. She placed a tentative hand on my arm. Her fingers burned.

  “Sister,” she said. “Why are you here?”

  Inside me was a white vapor. The sense of certainty that had dragged me out of my mountain tomb was gone; it had evaporated the moment I sat down. I searched for the thing I could remember; the thing I knew to be true.

  “I was summoned.”

  The collared man let out a hiss of breath. My sister clutched the back of her neck with her hands. Her name leapt into my mind—Fehle—and I remembered a young girl kneeling on flagstones, pulling up the tufted grass that had pushed its way up through the cracks. But the Fehle who looked down at me now was a young woman, a year or so older than me.

  “You,” Fehle said. The muscles in her jaw clenched tight and hard. “We didn’t ask for you.”

  * * *

  “So, this is your sister.” The old woman spoke with a Sula accent. Despite the hour, her hair was braided, and she wore a green sitting-dress with a silver broach at its collar. I shook my head, trying to clear it of the details my ghost kept whispering in my ear.

  Fehle nodded, twisting her own disheveled hair between her fingers. “The Lady Rehlite. We don’t know why—”

  “The Lady Rehlite,” The woman’s hard eyes flicked to me. “I’ve heard of you.” She paused, one of those venomous pauses my old self remembered from Court. But its meaning passed me by. “I have heard of the Mountain dead before,” she observed. “But I thought it mere legend. You are the first I’ve ever seen.”

  “We think she’s come about Lord Gaven,” my sister said. “We think there’s something wrong.”

  “Do you.” Death itself was not colder than the Lady Dal’s words. The room—my father’s old council room—glared bright with an angry, watchful silence.

  Fehle looked towards the collared man standing politely against the wall. The man—he must be her Steward—kept his face studiously blank.

  “Is this true,” the Lady Dal said softly to me. “Have you come to aid my son against his enemies?”

  I groped for the memories I must have had when I climbed the granite stairs of my crypt. Nothing. Dredging up some words from the language of the living, I said: “I have come to serve my house.”

  “Your house.” She stared at Fehle. “I thank the Flame my son has married into such a dutiful family.”

  “My lady,” the Steward said, shifting his weight. “I believe—”

  There was a muffled shout behind him. A thunderous banging. The heads of the living jerked upwards, looking towards the sound with a speed that unnerved me. Had I ever moved like that?

  “See who it is.” Lady Dal splayed her wrinkled hands on my father’s table as though the wood was strong enough to bear her up through whatever came next.

  The Steward returned with powdered snow melting into dark patches on his haesen.

  “A letter.” He handed the rolled fabric to Fehle, who stared at it as though she’d been handed a snake.

  “That’s
a Court tie.” Lady Dal’s voice was edged. “Open it.”

  Fehle managed little more than an unfolding when she gasped. The maid hovering in the doorway raised her hand to her mouth. A dead girl’s anger flashed through me like lightning. Doesn’t Fehle know better than to weep in front of servants?

  “Give that to me.” Lady Dal unfolded the letter with trembling fingers. Above her, time congealed on the ceiling. I wondered if the living could see it—the sudden reformation of history. This is why I’ve come, I thought. This.

  “Lord Gaven’s enemies have prevailed,” Lady Dal said. “My son has been sentenced for treason.” Her face had the same blank look my father’s had worn when Baylen died.

  Fehle lifted her head. “What about Brau?

  “There’s no mention of him.”

  The silence that surrounded us now was not the silence of snow. It was the shocking absence of noise.

  “I want Brau back,” Fehle said, her voice rising. “We need to get my son back.”

  “And Lord Gaven,” Lady Dal said. “Your husband. My son. We must get him back too. You must go and plead for them. A loving wife’s plea for mercy. That’s all that can save them now.”

  Fehle shrank back in her chair.

  The Steward said, “But, my lady—If they should accuse her too, then Gray Tower will lost. Lady Fehle holds the title,” he added as Dal glared at him. “If she is accused, all that remains may be lost.”

  His words brought the brutal reality of the treason taint into the room. It wasn’t just that Lord Gaven stood accused, or that his son’s fate remained unknown. The abyss yawned under my family’s feet.

  “I will go,” I said, simply. The time seemed right to say it. I kept my eyes on the possibilities that formed and reformed on the walls. “I will go and plead for Lord Gaven. I will go reclaim your son.”

  “Lady Rehlite...” The Steward struggled to find words. “Will they meet with you?”

  “Not with me. With my sister. I will go in her place.”

  Across the table, Fehle looked at me with glistening eyes. Relief showed on her face, and something else, too. Not gratitude. Definitely not that.

  * * *

  “Why didn’t Father come?” Fehle said when we were alone. “I did everything right. I poured the wine. I petitioned his tomb.”

  I shook my head. I had no memory of the discussions that had taken place in the land of the dead. It was tradition, I knew—the border between life and death was not lightly crossed. But I was not used to knowing so little, and the absent memories gaped unnervingly in my mind.

  “He could have fought,” Fehle muttered. “He could have raised the marches. Now we’ll have nothing to fall back on if the army comes.”

  Even the mountain-folk do not like to follow the dead, my old self would have said. But Fehle was already looking away from me, from the necklaces her servants had spread out before us, watching the door of the space she called The Green Room.

  Once this had been my brother Baylen’s room. Once I’d stood here, looking down on Baylen’s body while my mother sobbed. And while grief had clutched me hard in that moment, looking down at him, a sudden, dizzying thought had crossed my mind: “Now I am heir.”

  And so I had been, for a twelvenight, before the plague took me too.

  Now my younger sister was heir. Had been heir. And she had married the man who was now lord of my father’s land, and she had borne him children, all while I was lying in the dark.

  My thoughts were strange. I pushed aside a string of pearls, searching for something to talk about.

  “You gave your children mountain names.” I’d met Fehle’s second son in the family assembly that morning—a sleepy, puzzled child who’d screwed up his face when I was introduced to him. “Brau. Hale.”

  “Well. You know what the simplefolk say.”

  I nodded. The simplefolk had always whispered against my father for giving us Dahlen names. Nurse had said that such names might please the Court but would not please the spirits. Perhaps she had been right.

  “Father never did make peace with your deaths,” Fehle mused. “You and Baylen.” When I glanced at her, she added, “all your training, all his plans—and for what? The plague came and carried you two off, and the king’s second mistress as well—do you remember her? I suppose you must.” She laughed, a pretty sound, like a glass breaking. “Poor father. All alone, and his enemies whispering against him—”

  “What did they say?” The words escaped before I realized my lips were moving.

  If Fehle was surprised by my sudden interest, she didn’t show it. “You mean you don’t know? I suppose if you’ve forgotten whatever you knew in the dead lands... Well, I wouldn’t know, would I? I only heard rumors.”

  “What did they say?”

  “I have no idea.” Fehle smoothed out her woolen dress and smiled at the floor. “Father never told me anything, remember?”

  A ghost-halo of anger burned in my chest. I reached down into the comforting thrum of stone underfoot and steadied myself inside it.

  “I suppose it must have been hard with Baylen and me gone,” I said, measuring my words. “What happened?”

  Fehle held a diamond pin to her temple and turned towards the mirror. “Oh,” she said vaguely. “Father married Terren off that autumn, and me off the next summer. He wanted more heirs, I suppose. Or allies? Maybe both.” She discarded the pin and fished through the jewelry box, magpie fingers snatching up color.

  “Both of you? So quickly?” Father had always spoken of getting the best matches he could for his children. Just that summer he’d politely deflected Lord Tarth’s request for my hand while I sat by the Queen’s fountain, watching old Tarth pull at his beard.

  I thought then of a different day, of a tiny box of ivory cradled in the palm of my hand. No.

  “Fehle,” I said. “If there’s something I should know, you need to tell me. When I go to Court—I’ve been gone all this time—I need to know what happened.”

  Fehle glanced at me—a ferret-dark slip of eyes. “You’re posing as me, sister,” she said sweetly. “Remember? You’re not expected to know anything.”

  A rap at the door. Fehle’s bearded Steward entered, his eyes lowered and respectful. “Lady Rehlite?” he said. “We’re ready to depart.”

  “There you go.” Fehle closed the lid of the box with a decisive snap. “Steward Rogan will tell you everything you need to know.”

  But as we watched the servants carry the bundle of clothing and jewelry towards the door, she caught me by the crook of my elbow. The shock of living flesh flared up my arm.

  “Do you know, Rey,” she said, “nobody else died of plague that year. Not in the mountains. Nobody but you and Baylen. Why do you think that was?”

  There was a sour, acrid taste in my mouth. I thought desperately of my sick-bed, the cloying smell of willow-sweet in the air.

  Something moved across Fehle’s face, like a shadow underwater. “Be careful at Court, Rey.” She leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the cheek. But when she stood back, she was a stranger again. Her face gleamed like an ivory box: serene, polished, and perfectly closed.

  * * *

  On the fourth night of our journey, Rogan, tiring of the sullen guards and the maid’s apprehensive silence, took advantage of a wider stretch of path to join me. His horse whickered and tried to shy away from my presence.

  “When were you last in the city?” he asked.

  When I was alive, obviously, my former self would have said in a cutting tone.

  “The year that followed that of the New Peace,” I said. “I never learned what they named it.”

  “That would be the Year of Golden Sails, for the trade fleet that arrived that autumn from the Ribbon Sea. Much has changed since then.” Rogan sounded relieved to have something to tell me about. I suspected that he was used to playing this role for my sister.

  As he listed the lords who had fallen in and out of the king’s favor since my death, I
allowed my mind to drift back to that gleaming summer. I remembered the giddy excitement of the day I dared Salef to climb the Iron Tower, in my strange pride, knowing that he was climbing its fearsome trellis because I was watching; that he, and Lord Hegart, and the other young lords were trying to impress me.

  A name caught my attention. “Lord Darren is still at Court?” I almost said “Lord Darren is still alive?”—though of course we could not all be dead.

  “He is on the council of judges.”

  I nodded, absorbing this information. Darren, with his careful courtier’s tongue. Darren, his boot thudding into the side of the stable boy who’d slighted him—how I couldn’t even remember. Darren, nights later in the Vault of Words, his cruel smile easing into a dangerous blankness: “Is there anyone there?”

  “No,” I’d said. I’d thought he’d believed me.

  “We should go carefully with Lord Darren,” Rogan said. As if remembering something, he added, “I hear he showed you favor once, but m’lady, he has changed. He is a dangerous man now.”

  “He was a dangerous man then.” My mare laid her ears back at the sound of my voice and tossed her head. She quelled when I laid a hand on her side, but not because I had calmed her.

  Darren was still alive. And Baylen and I—and Vara, the king’s second mistress, who was to owe us favors—we were all dead. I thought again of my sick-room, the sour taste in my mouth, the steady stream of Craftsmen with their glass vials and expressions of concern. Had any been visiting from Court?

  “Come,” I told my mare in the pitiless tones of the dead. Digging in my heels, I urged her down the rain-pitted path, towards Darren and other things I neither wanted to think of nor remember.

  * * *

  When the walls of Alasu rose in the distance, the maid, Harmony, gaped. Truly, the Summer City was a grand sight: its stone walls shone like a sunset lake; beyond those red-gold walls, the Iron Tower reared like a thorn in the eye of a god.

  “We must go to the Resting House first,” Rogan said, “to make ready for your petition.”

  We must disguise you, he meant. I pulled Fehle’s purple shawl tightly across my face.