Dead of Winter Page 3

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Orville chuckled. “I suppose that’s twice we’ve been together until the end, eh, old buddy?”

  Jed cackled again. He craned his neck toward Orville and crowed long and hard, his beak open wide. It took a moment, but the old man realized Jed wasn’t laughing with him.

  “It’s time to go.” Orville’s death was on her feet.

  “Hang on a minute,” Orville pleaded. “Come on, Jed, you’re not still sore about that, are you? It was decades ago!”

  “Caw!”

  “You took those decades from him,” she translated. “Those years should have been his.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says him, for one. I’m not here to judge, but I doubt anyone else would see it your way.”

  “Nonsense,” said Orville. “This is America! Plenty of people would see it my way. I worked hard to have this life. I’m the personification of the American dream!”

  “You’ve got the hubris,” his death granted him, “not to mention the disregard for the consequences.”

  “Consequences?” Orville’s voice quavered. He’d never had much truck with religion, in part because his parents had thumped so much of it into him. For the first time in years, visions of fire and brimstone danced in his head.

  “You didn’t think you could cheat death forever, did you? Or that there wouldn’t be a reckoning? You’ve only managed to delay the inevitable, and the late fees have piled up. So to speak.”

  “But you came back, Jed!” He searched the crow’s glossy black eyes for a hint of compassion. “Not as a man, I guess, but now you can fly. And you don’t have to wear pants. You always hated pants.”

  The crow blinked. He stared at Orville, a calculating glare brimming with daggers.

  “This is revenge.” The realization chilled his blood. “I thought I had a friend in you, but you just wanted to get even.”

  Jed danced and cackled at that.

  “He thought he had a friend in you, too,” said Orville’s death. “How’d that work out for him?”

  Orville buried his face in his hands. He looked miserable, on the verge of tears, but none came. Instead he let out a great sigh.

  “Is it going to hurt?” he asked his death.

  “Only at the moment your heart stops,” she replied. “But then you’ll feel nothing at all.”

  “And then what?”

  She shrugged, which was particularly unnerving without flesh. “Couldn’t tell you. I’m not dead.”

  Orville squinted at her.

  “I’m barely even death. This is a side gig.”

  “What if I don’t play along?”

  Popcorn growled like a submarine imploding. For once, Orville wished she wasn’t smiling. The juxtaposition made him nauseated.

  “You don’t have to,” she said softly. “Honestly, it won’t even make it easier if you do.”

  “What are they paying you? I’ve got a little something under the mattress, if you catch my drift. I could make it worth your while to—”

  “What, look the other way? You’re the criminal, Orville. Not me.”

  “You’re a murderer! Or you’re about to be. Think about your immortal soul!”

  “I’ll tell you what. Answer one question for me, and I’ll give you a head start.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “What’s my name?”

  Tears welled in Orville’s eyes. His hands began to tremble.

  “You’re scared,” she said. “I understand. Just close your eyes. It’s almost over.”

  “No!” Orville hugged himself and locked eyes on her, well, sockets. It was the last throes of a desperate man, clinging to life with everything he had.

  “Shhh.”

  The wind howled high above the trees, but the breeze on the forest floor was barely strong enough to rustle the dead leaves. The shadows of the figures around the campfire stretched back into the proper darkness among the roots of the surrounding forest.

  “Therein lies the essential conundrum of human nature,” said the old man. He gathered his toga against the chill. “We possess so few instincts, and that is what separates us from the beasts.”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” said Jed.

  “Survival,” the old man went on, “preservation of the self. It’s the one true instinct that we possess. It requires no thought.”

  “He knew what he was doing. And he’s still there, skulking around on time he stole from me!”

  “It’s tragic, to be sure.” The old man nodded. “But look at where you are now, eh? Not such a bad place to spend eternity.”

  Jed sighed up toward the treetops, watching the smoke from the fire curl skyward. Despite the rage thundering in his ears, he felt as though he’d sunk elbows-deep in warm tranquility. It reminded him of late summer nights around the campfires during apple picking season, when the sky stretched forever in every direction. But he hadn’t sunk deep enough to forget, much less forgive.

  “At least I got to watch him do it this time,” said Jed, the firelight giving his eyes an even madder gleam than they’d had to begin with. “He won’t do it again.”

  “Do tell,” said the old man.

  Jed found it off-putting, the way the old man hung on his every word. Jed had been a drifter in one life and a carrion bird in another. He’d been swatted away far more often than he’d been attended with any interest. Still, in the long dark of eternity, he supposed there wasn’t much that didn’t pass for entertainment.

  “You know sharks?” asked Jed.

  “I know of them.” The old man grinned, clearly amused by his own wit. The long dark of eternity, indeed.

  “They’re what you call ‘apex predators.’ That means they’re the top of the food chain. They’ve been around for millions of years, if you can believe it.”

  “There are stranger things under heaven.” The old man cast a curious gaze upward. The sky was full of stars, and Jed got the impression the old man could read them in a way he couldn’t.

  “Yeah, I suppose. Anyhow, I reckon God felt bad for doing such a great job making sharks, so he built in a flaw. See, when a shark opens its mouth to gobble up a fish, it closes its eyes. Just for an instant. It ain’t much, but if the fish is wily, I reckon he could use that second to zig while the shark zags and scamper off.”

  “And that’s what your friend Orville did.”

  “He ain’t my friend. Not for a long time now. He just proved it a second time.”

  “So he did.” The old man nodded thoughtfully. “And you have your revenge.”

  “How do you figure?” Jed didn’t attempt to soften his sneer of incredulity. When a man says something that dumb, it does him a disservice to let him indulge in the fantasy that he’d said something useful.

  “Take heed,” said the old man. He leaned in, locking eyes with Jed. “You are here despite the revenge you sought against your brother. You should count yourself fortunate you did not attain it.”

  “Fortunate.” Jed ground his teeth.

  “There is a place worse than this for the vengeful,” warned the old man. “Worse yet for traitors. On its face, what happened to you was a tragedy twice over. But the torments that await Orville? Eternity is a very long time, and he’s more than a traitor. He’s unrepentant.”

  “He’s a son of a bitch, that’s what he is.”

  The old man shrugged. “Had he seized the opportunity to make amends, he might have earned himself a lesser torment. Some degree of absolution. Who knows? He can’t run from death forever, but that’s all he’s got now.”

  “And it’s better than he deserves!”

  “Your life ended in the summer.”

  “It was January.”

  “Metaphorically speaking. Orville lived out the rest of the summer of his life, through the
autumn, and into a very long winter. Death at his heels through unending winter. If that’s not revenge, I don’t know what is.”

  Jed was thankful for the silence that followed. Philosophers can be relied upon for the occasional contemplative silence, if nothing else. He watched the flames dancing in time with his own raging heart, and cursed Orville for a coward. He knew he should let it lie, but every breath that traitor drew was another dagger in Jed’s back.

  Lesser hells be damned. If reincarnation came around again, Jed hoped the weight of his soul was worth something with teeth.

  THE TINKER’S SON

  Cassondra Windwalker

  The power of a Bane-Witch doesn’t reside in a wand or a potion. The power of a Bane-Witch, like the power of a Boon-Witch, resides in her grimoire.

  I hope you aren’t making the same tired assumption so many people do, that Bane-Witches are inherently evil and Boon-Witches inherently good. It’s a simple matter of balance. If justice is to mean anything, there must be curses to counter those who would squander and abuse their blessings. Although Bane-Witches and Boon-Witches tend to be fairly insular in their communities, it’s more about scholarship and devotion than any aversion to the company of the other. There are at least a few festivals every year when they all come together, and even the occasional handfastings between the villages do occur.

  As it happens, though, the tale you are reading is written in the grimoire of a Bane-Witch.

  You’ve probably heard that no book will write itself, but that’s precisely what I’m doing. I’ll own it’s a rare enough occurrence. Accomplishing a curse on herself is not something Bane-Witches are prone to do. Magic seems to be an inoculant to despair. And Margritte wasn’t in despair. Her last act was one of love, not suicide. At least, that’s what she thought. She probably fancied I’d be some sort of vessel for her soul, my pages a window through which she could still look out on her husband and remaining son. She believed when she poured her blood into my ink, her voice would script the words here. She didn’t realize she was surrendering her life to give me my own.

  I’ve known Margritte since she scrawled her first spell on my parchment at the age of four. Back then I was only a conduit: I received and passed on. The words she wrote when I became myself gave me back all those messages as memories. As if I had been merely sleeping all those years and had arisen at last.

  Still, some of her pain lingers as my own, like the ghost-agonies of a dream whose edges mist away in the dawn light. As I bump along in the tinker’s wagon on this bitterly cold morning, I cannot help but recall that other cold morning, the beginning of Margritte’s end.

  Bane-Witches. However benevolent their intent, even their gifts are curses. So now I possess life and longing and even love, but have no voice or arms with which to act. Only this endless scribbling on page after page. And what will become of me when the pages are full? I cannot tell, and still I cannot slow the pace of these words, any more than a mortal can cease their breathing and yet live. So I will put on Margritte as my dress to tell you this tale, pretend for these few minutes that I am more than this bundle of leather and parchment.

  Winter’s Turning. Not that anyone could tell, up high in the mountain wood, where even beneath the trees snow lay heaped in huge drifts that swallowed the boys whole as often as not. Margritte thought the happiest sound in the world had to be the high-pitched giggles and squeals of Peter and Jacques as they tumbled in and out of the white stuff. Their father had melted a clear path down to the valley village, but they would much rather disappear up to the tops of their knitted caps than take the easy route.

  Still, even in the dark heights of the storm-topped mountain, Margritte imagined she could smell the jasmine promise of spring’s return. The whole world celebrated this day, when Winter turned over the ash scepter to Spring and began his long dream. When morning broke, every day would grow a little longer, a little brighter, as Spring wielded her staff and began rousing the life sleeping in the frozen earth. Tonight, Margritte and her little family would feast together in the great stone hall of Goldgrym, and tomorrow they would join the village in festival, in dancing and spelling and songs. Bane-Witches would curse the padlocks of ice laid on the great river, and Boon-Witches would bless the somnolent salmon.

  Witches were social creatures, who drew power and wisdom from the covens. But when Margritte had joined hands with a dragon-lord, she’d resigned herself to the relative solitude in which they lived. Unlike witches, the long-lived dragons thrived in space and silence. Handfastings between their races were rare. Witches possessed only the normal span of mortal years, while dragon-lords usually lived 600-700 years. Some might even be older. Every death of a dragon-lord ever recounted was a violent one: they were a martial species, so perhaps time was never an enemy of theirs, only the sword.

  But Gregor had fallen for Margritte from the first time they met, when she was gathering mushrooms near his hall. Already ancient and strange and fierce, he knew he would have to watch her wither and die, knew he would have to watch their children and their grandchildren do the same, but he ached for every gray hair she would grow. Hungered to see time carve her face with its incautious fingers. Yearned to taste every inch of her skin, to recount to himself her secrets on dark nights after she had long left, to bury her sweet gold deep beneath his scales and feel its cut every time he flew.

  This isn’t a fairytale, after all. Dragon-lords cannot share their great age through a kiss or an exchange of blood. We all are what we are. And dragon-lords are the perpetual hoarders of all treasures and wisdom and the vagaries and foolishness of men. Gregor could only be Margritte’s mate as a man. As dragon, he could carry her memory, build her library, add her stones to his towers, but he could grant her not a single extra day. And his children would be fully mortal, too—born only of the man, not the dragon.

  Another Bane-Witch might have found her new existence, islanded on the mountain peak with the great quiet dragon, lonely, but not Margritte. She flourished there, like the tiny purple asters that peeped under every fern and bounded over the clinging moss. She buried herself in Gregor’s massive library, learned old tongues mortals had long since forgot, became gardener and historian and astrologer.

  Became mother, too. As a witch, all her schooling had been spent with other girls, so boys were such bizarre and mysterious creatures. She devoted herself to their taxonomy and fed all their wild impulses with more wild, more weird, more wonderful. But something went wrong. Or something had been wrong all along.

  Perhaps some strain of the dragon did seep through their consummation. Perhaps Jacques’ little heart beat too hard and fast for a mortal boy. Perhaps his breath blew like the winds of war that his father provoked with the great gusts of his wings. Perhaps he was simply stronger than he knew.

  Winter’s Turning. A day of delight, of rejoicing, of triumph over the darkness that every year seems so all-encompassing. On this Winter’s Turning, though, something darker than the night rose in Jacques’ heart and choked out that first trembling inhale of awakening spring.

  Margritte and Gregor were never sure exactly what happened. Had Peter snatched a toy from his older brother? Had the four-year-old taunted the six-year-old, teased him into a rage with some small childish feud? Had a simple irritation flashed into an ungovernable fury?

  They heard the howling. Jacques’ voice, they instinctively knew, but inconceivably altered into something terrible and tragic, something too sorrowful to be dragon, too mad to be mortal.

  Gregor had leaped from the window, taking his dragon form in a flash as he soared to answer his son’s call. Margritte ran down the tower steps, caught in a nightmare in which every step came more slowly even as the distance lengthened. When at last she arrived in the forest clearing where violet-tinged smoke drifted in ominous warning, Gregor remained all dragon, as if he had lost his man somewhere inside himself.

  The trees around the c
learing lay flat-out in a scorched circle. Gregor hunkered over something, his outstretched wings a fantastic gate of gold and silver and green. The air was filled with the sound of running water from the melted snow, interspersed with Jacques’ undulating howls. Margritte searched for her husband in the dragon’s bloodshot eyes, but all in the beast was fierce, feral, ungiving.

  “Let me see,” she pleaded, but he turned his great scaled back on her, drew whatever lay under his wings closer in.

  Desperate to reach her children, she at last turned him to stone. It would have been an unforgivable act of betrayal, to use her art against him, but between them, as it turned out, nothing was unforgivable.

  She crept forward, her boots squelching in the icy mud, bent nearly double beneath the stone wings to reach what lay at the dragon’s feet. Her little Peter, barely recognizable but for the coat she’d sewn him of caribou hides Gregor brought her. His face, his head, was crushed, a mass of blood and swollen flesh. Beside him, curled in a tight spiral of despair and grief and self-loathing, lay Jacques, his howls reduced now to broken, hoarse-voiced growls of hopelessness.

  Margritte fell to her knees in the cold sodden earth, her fingers scrabbling uselessly at her baby’s limp shoulders, his shattered cheeks. Gregor was lost to the dragon because no man could bear this. No more could a mother. Margritte’s womb emptied of all the pieces of her children she had kept, all the cells that made her mother, and became nothing but avenger, devourer, bane-bearer.

  But first, she sobbed. Ugly, tearing, sobs that wrenched her stomach and left her throat raw. She sobbed until all her air sighed out of her in a long, exhausted exhale, and with it, all her mercy.

  Jacques had struggled to his knees. His wiry little boy body shivered and sung like a fiddle string drawn too tightly. Desperately he hunched against his mother’s side, his small, dirty, bloodstained hands clutching at hers. She could hear his voice, pleading, begging, asking for help no-one could give, but she pushed away the words.