Chapter One Simran
Chapter One
Simran
This is how it begins
Long ago, a story was told, and land grew from it.
Tell a tale of wolves and a girl in bloodred, and somewhere a forest will grow, sharp-toothed and open-mawed for a foolish wolf’s bones.
Talk of monsters slithering through the darkness, and somewhere there will be caverns to hold them.
Speak a thing and make it live, on the land across the silver sea. That is a mortal gift.
But those stories are hungry, and they must continue to be fed.
Tell me, whisper the stories. Repeat me. Enact me. Embody me.
And so we feed them. One child at a time.
Source: A Monograph on the Laws of the Isle by Dr. Angharad Walsh (unpublished)
Archivist’s Ruling: Destroy. Publication barred. Interrogation recommended.
When you live in a land that feeds on stories, you soon learn to sense when one is about to rear its head.
Sometimes, if you’re foolhardy enough, you can make sure to set yourself on its path.
The witch from Elsewhere, with her ink-smudged brown arms and her bone compass, was not a fool, but she was hardy—a sharp, severe kind of hardness that radiated from every pore of her body.
The boys who stumbled out of the Starre Tavern to smoke, soused to the gills, gave her a wide berth.
Their eyes slid respectfully away from her.
Some of those boys were dressed in doublets and hose, their caps feathered.
Others wore vests and pocket watches under their great surcoats, their top hats tall and black and their boots polished to a shine.
Stories muddled together easily across London, but in no place better than taverns, where gossip—the most natural kind of tale-spinning—spilled as easily as drink.
That kind of magic changed things: It made the bones of a tavern stranger, stronger, and better at luring all sorts of people in through the door.
In the Starre Tavern, a boy raised to eat on a trencher and sup on mead could rub shoulders with a lad born under the shadow of coalsmoke and industry.
Even an Elsewhere-born witch with ink on her skin and magic writhing under her heels—the kind of woman who belonged nowhere by design—could buy herself a pint and find herself a sticky corner of the bar to lean on.
But the witch had no plans to step through the tavern’s doors tonight. Her work lay out here.
Her patience was beginning to wear thin when the cold wind finally changed, softening apple-sweet.
The boys smoking outside the Starre Tavern fell silent and stubbed out their cigars and cheroots; downed their pints and stepped quietly into the pub.
She watched the windows go dark as great candles of tallow were snuffed out. The door was softly closed and latched.
She was reminded of the way birds turned in a flock with the wind, or rats abandoned sinking ships. Sometimes animal instincts were the best ones.
Above her, the gas lamps dimmed, then guttered. On her palm her compass whirled, the little needle of bone spinning wildly.
Bone was a bad lodestone for direction, but it was good for snaring the edge of a tale. There was nothing a story liked more, after all, than flesh and blood.
She stepped back against the wall of the tavern. In her hastily mended cotehardie and her lambswool cloak, she was as good as written for the tale she expected to wend its way down Cloth Fair at any moment, but that did not mean she wanted to be seen.
They came in a group of three, as so many stories did: three knights astride three destriers, the Queen’s rose pennant fluttering above them. One of them was carrying a satchel braided in gold.
Her compass needle stilled.
There.
Do not see me, she thought, and felt magic bubble through her flesh. She was the tavern wall, or close enough to it. Gray stone melded with her cloak. She kept her eyes on them, as the first of the horses met her trap.
“Halt,” one said gruffly. “There’s a fairy ring here. Toadstools.”
“Fuckers,” said another. “They know they’re not allowed this far into London.”
Under the looming checkerboard shadow of St. Bartholomew the Great Church, the riders halted.
One dismounted and drew their helm from their head.
The neck that was exposed was almost as dark as the witch’s own—a warm tan underneath a mop of oak-brown hair.
She was surprised by their face when they turned.
There were darts of gold in their right ear.
And the face was girlish, despite the sharpness of the jaw and cheekbones, with long-lashed eyes and a giving mouth.
A handsome knight, yes. But also a pretty one.
Were there many tales of pretty knights?
She knew many tales of knights, but only one that dwelled on a knight’s shining beauty, and contemplating it made a kernel of poison bloom in her already rather bitter heart.
“—vinia,” one knight said.
“She’s not listening,” said the other. “Look at her.”
Something-vinia raised her head.
“Patience,” she said. Her voice was a lazy curl of smoke, a rich woman’s voice, beautiful and thoroughly obnoxious. She prodded the ground at the edge of the toadstool with her gloved knuckles. “Fuckers or not, I won’t tread over a fairy ring without offering it silver.”
“Then offer it so we can be off.”
“I’m afraid I’m low on funds today,” the pretty knight replied. “Care to spot me?”
The men behind her cursed, and the knight raised her head, laughing a bell-like laugh even as she stared coolly through the dark. Her eyes were the brown of a doe or hare—lustrous, wild, and canny.
In her mind, the witch from Elsewhere cursed too.
The pretty knight knew the fairy ring was false.
What mistake had revealed the illusion? She’d worked ash and water-by-moonlight together to make those toadstools; rooted them with a song and a sinewy thread. How had the knight seen through it?
“Come out,” Something-vinia urged, and her voice was a hook that made the compass needle tremble.
“Who are you talking to?” another knight asked. “Vina—”
“If I place a coin in the ring, will I be snared here? You’ve built a clever trap.” Her voice was still lazy, glass-blown at the vowels, but pitched to travel. “I’d love to hear how you did it. Come out, Lady. Speak to us.”
Against the wall, the witch weighed up her options.
Something-vinia—Vina—was carrying the satchel.
One bottle of ink. That was all she needed. One bottle could stretch far in her scriptorium. The work it could bring to her door would pay her rent for a solid year.
She let the illusion around her fade and stepped forward. One of the riders made an abortive grasp for his sword, then lowered his arm with a clank of armor. Both riders looked at her and the thin, knife-whittled shadow her body threw.
“Are you a beautiful maiden wearing the guise of a hag?” the first rider asked dubiously.
“No,” said Vina. “She’s just a maiden.” Vina’s eyes hadn’t strayed from hers. There was something soft in the shape of her mouth.
The witch’s hood was deep, and magic held her face in shadow. And yet she had the keen sense that she was being seen and known.
“You’d know,” one man chuckled.
“I would,” Vina agreed, and that soft mouth bloomed into a smile. “Lady, will you lower your hood and tell us your name?”
“No, and no, fair knight,” she replied.
The knight’s smile did not alter one jot, but the witch thought she saw some strain in it.
“I am not fair,” said the knight. “Though I am certainly a knight. And you are…?”
“Willing to let you pass in return for a tithe,” said the witch.
“A tithe would be fair if you are a lady of the fae,” said Vina pleasantly. “And if you were not in the Queen’s city, on her soil, where fae law won’t hold…”
The witch snorted.
“I’ve met fae in Covent Garden singing along to opera and drinking plum wine,” she said. “I’ve watched them kill a man with burning coal shoes in Billingsgate right next to the water gate—like a taunt. Don’t tell me what the Queen does and does not allow on her soil, knight.”
“So you’re not a fae after all,” said Vina. She sounded smug.
The witch was immediately furious. She did not care for trickery that wasn’t her own, and the knight had tricked her—with a soft smile, and warm eyes, and words like a slithering noose.
“You’re lucky I’m no heartless maiden of the fae,” the witch said sharply. “You’re knights. One of you is surely an incarnate destined to wither at a fairy woman’s hands—”
“No,” said Vina. She shook her head. “The Tale of the Merciless Maiden isn’t one of ours.”
Perhaps not a one of them belonged to a tale of a knight cursed to fruitlessly love a fae woman, destined to pine their way to an early death.
But there was a tale around them. The witch could feel it thrumming in the air—in the scent of apples and sheaves of wheat, and the slow metal-drip scent of ink.
The witch could feel her compass thrumming in her palm, and something stranger still: a thrumming in her own heart, that ebbed and flowed like waves.
What tale, then? The Princess and the Dragon? Guy of Warwick and Felice? The Knight and the Wi—
She severed her own thought and thrust her left hand out, palm up.
“Ink,” the witch said. “One bottle. Then you can pass.”
“This ink is destined for the Queen’s archives,” Vina said. “We can’t give any to you, Lady. What other price will allow us to pass?” She cocked her head. “A kiss?”
“I don’t need to pay for kisses,” the witch said. “And I would not buy them from you.”
“Cut her down, Vina,” one of the knights said. “We’ve only got until daybreak.”
“Ah now,” said Vina. “She means no trouble.”
The witch, who absolutely did mean trouble, said, “One bottle and only one bottle. Your Queen won’t miss it. You know that just as well as I do. Please.”
Vina hesitated—or gave a good semblance of hesitation. Then slowly, regretfully, she shook her head.
Well, then. The witch had tried to bargain.
The witch clicked the fingers of her outstretched left hand.