Dark Breakers

By C. S. E. Cooney

World Fantasy Award finalist for Best Story Collection
Locus Award finalist for Best Story Collection

 

"Welcome to a Gilded Era like you've never before known and will never be able to forget … If Titania herself were to commission a book, it would be this one."
—Fran Wilde, two-time Nebula Award-winning author of Updraft and Riverland

"Cooney's lush follow-up to Desdemona and the Deep offers five stories linked by an intricate shared world … Throughout, Cooney's descriptions are extravagant and gorgeous, and the musical cadence of her prose makes it exceptionally easy to be drawn into the worlds she weaves … Romantic fantasy readers will find a lot to love."
—Publishers Weekly

A young human painter and an ageless gentry queen fall in love over spilled wine-at the risk of his life and her immortality. Pulled into the Veil Between Worlds, two feuding neighbors (and a living statue) get swept up in a brutal war of succession. An investigative reporter infiltrates the Seafall City Laundries to write the exposé of a lifetime, and uncovers secrets she never believed possible. Returning to an oak grove to scatter her husband's ashes, an elderly widow meets an otherworldly friend, who offers her a momentous choice. Two gentry queens of the Valwode plot to hijack a human rocketship and steal the moon out of the sky.

Dark Breakers gathers three new and two previously uncollected tales from World Fantasy Award-winning writer C. S. E. Cooney that expand on the thrice-enfolded worlds first introduced in her Locus and World Fantasy award-nominated novella Desdemona and the Deep. In her introduction to Dark Breakers, Crawford Award-winning author Sharon Shinn advises those who pick up this book to "settle in for a fantastical read" full of "vivid world-building, with layer upon layer of detail; prose so dense and gorgeous you can scoop up the words like handfuls of jewels; a mischievous sense of humor; and a warm and hopeful heart."

"C. S. E. Cooney's prose is like a cake baked by the fairies—beautifully layered, rich and precise, so delicious that it should be devoured with a silver fork."
—Theodora Goss, World Fantasy and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series

"Dark Breakers is compounded of voluptuous invention and ferocious structural loves—for new romances and old friends, for the works of hands, for mortality and its gifts, and all the possibilities of worlds bleeding, weeping, wandering into each other's arms."
—Kathleen Jennings, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Flyaway

"Few people create worlds as lavish and sensual as those that spring from Cooney's effervescent imagination . . . gentry-magic spun into pages and paragraphs of glittering, fizzing, jaw-dropping beauty."
—Cassandra Khaw, British Fantasy Award-nominated author of The All-Consuming World


MORE PRAISE FOR C. S. E. COONEY

"C. S. E. Cooney is one of the most moving, daring, and plainly beautiful voices to come out of recent fantasy. She's a powerhouse with a wink in her eye and a song in each pocket."
—Catherynne M. Valente, New York Times-bestselling author of Space Opera

"C. S. E. Cooney's imagination is wild and varied, her stories bawdy, horrific, comic, and moving-frequently all at the same time."
—Delia Sherman, author of The Evil Wizard Smallbone
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781732644052

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Dark Breakers

Copyright © 2022 by C. S. E. Cooney

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover art and design and interior illustrations © 2022 by Brett Massé, brettmasseworks.com

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-7326440-6-9

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7326440-4-5

E-book ISBN: 978-1-7326440-5-2

Published by Mythic Delirium Books

Roanoke, Virginia

mythicdelirium.com

This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, locations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in an imaginary manner to entertain, and any resemblance to any real people, situations, or incidents is purely coincidental.

Introduction © 2022 by Sharon Shinn.

The Breaker Queen first appeared in 2014 as a Fairchild Press e-book. Copyright © 2014 by C. S. E. Cooney.

The Two Paupers first appeared in 2015 as a Fairchild Press e-book. Copyright © 2015 by C. S. E. Cooney.

Salissay’s Laundries is original to this collection. Copyright © 2022 by C. S. E. Cooney.

Longergreen is original to this collection. Copyright © 2022 by C. S. E. Cooney.

Susurra to the Moon is original to this collection. Copyright © 2022 by C. S. E. Cooney.

Story Notes © 2022 by C. S. E. Cooney.

––––––––

Our gratitude goes out to the following who because of their generosity are from now on designated as supporters of Mythic Delirium Books: Saira Ali, Cora Anderson, Anonymous, Patricia M. Cryan, Steve Dempsey, Oz Drummond, Patrick Dugan, Matthew Farrer, C. R. Fowler, Mary J. Lewis, Paul T. Muse, Jr., Shyam Nunley, Finny Pendragon, Kenneth Schneyer, and Delia Sherman.

For Sita Aluna (my Mama) and Mrs. Louise Riedel (my Mima), the dark-eyed women of my line.

Acknowledgments

Of all the many people who made Dark Breakers possible over the years, I particularly want to thank Sharon Shinn, Julia Rios, Caitlyn Paxson, Patty Templeton, and Cassandra Khaw for their enthusiasm and insight, their warm and loyal love; Mike and Anita Allen of Mythic Delirium for all their support and friendship; the Silent Writers Shift and the Gumbo Fiction Salon for keeping me writerly company during the isolation of the pandemic; and the Bucks Elbow Mountain writing retreat group: Scott H. Andrews, Martin Cahill, Siobhan Carroll, Mike Allen, and (as always) (my beautiful own) (first reader, last reader) Carlos Hernandez.

I have dedicated this collection to my mama, Sita. She always lets me read her all my drafts as they take form, which, to me, is an essential and vital part of my process. In fact, she delights in it. I have never known so pure a patroness of the arts. I have also dedicated this book to her mama, my Mima, who gave me my first Georgette Heyer novel, These Old Shades, which sparked a lifelong love of a certain swashbuckle-y style of romantic fantasy.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

by Sharon Shinn

The Breaker Queen

The Two Paupers

Salissay’s Laundries

Longergreen

Susurra to the Moon

Story Notes

About the Author

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I tell people that Claire Cooney wrote the Dark Breakers stories for me. We had been exchanging a series of emails about the mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, and decided that they would make lovely settings for a series of romances—similar to Regency novels, except taking place in America in the Gilded Age. All those marble-floored reception halls, carved colonnades, gilt-lined ceilings, private loggias, dramatic views of the sea. Perfect for chance meetings and forbidden trysts and terrible secrets devastatingly revealed.

By far the most appealing setting would be the Breakers, the sprawling, lavish summer home of the Vanderbilts. I remember taking the tour one fall day and being stunned to silence by its size, opulence, and overstuffed grandeur. One tiny example of the excess on display: Each of the twenty bathrooms of the house is outfitted with four spigots, two for hot and cold freshwater, two for hot and cold saltwater. Every other detail of the house is equally extravagant.

As Claire and I discussed the possibilities inherent in the setting, she proposed adding a fantasy twist in which the great house existed in several overlapping universes and characters played different roles in each one. I replied, Yes, you must write this! I already love it, but I have to read it. I’m not sure I really expected her to follow through, but she did, sitting down to write first one story, then another, then another. Currently, the Dark Breakers world contains four novellas, one novelette, a short story, and a novel in drafts. All of them except Desdemona and the Deep, and the unfinished novel Fiddle, are collected here.

With the Dark Breakers series, Claire has created three nested worlds linked by Breaker House, where passageways open between realms at certain times in certain rooms. There’s one world for humans, one for gentry folk, and one for the goblin king and his people. A few inhabitants can move between domains, often at great peril, to fight for crowns or wealth or souls. Words possess power. Artists possess magic. Even in this most picturesque of settings, the denizens of every world are capable of the ugliest actions. Yet in the most unexpected places, there are moments of blazing beauty.

All the stories in this collection include the elements I think of as hallmarks of a Claire Cooney work of art—vivid world-building, with layer upon layer of detail; prose so dense and gorgeous you can scoop up the words like handfuls of jewels; a mischievous sense of humor; and a warm and hopeful heart.

One of the things I admire about Claire’s writing is the way she unflinchingly embraces the frightening and the frightful. Her characters are quite often flawed, homely, and motivated by questionable impulses. They might sprout tails and horns; they might be rats; they might be covered in boils or eyeballs. They might die somewhere in the middle of the tale but go on to continue their adventures in some smoky afterlife. In Claire’s hands, the grotesque have their own beauty. The dead have their own stories.

But what I love most about Claire’s writing is the joy she takes in the words themselves. You can almost see them shimmer with happiness as she sets them into the mosaic of each sentence until she has created a breathtaking design. When I’m reading her books, I often think of a passage in Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, in which Lord Peter Wimsey confesses he finds it so easy to get drunk on words that he is seldom perfectly sober. I picture Claire scribbling feverishly into the night (yes, she writes many of her first drafts in longhand), growing ever more inebriated from the elixir of language.

The thing is, Claire writes exactly the sorts of stories you would expect of her if you’d ever met her. Often, people are disappointed when they encounter a favorite author for the first time. The man who writes bright, witty repartee is quiet and ill-at-ease in public. The woman who describes glamorous assassins wears yoga pants and shapeless T-shirts. The author whose prose is full of heartbreaking insights is, in real life, a loud and egotistical boor.

But Claire and her stories are a perfect match. She is exuberant and enthusiastic and effortlessly creative; she walks about garbed in a sparkling glamour. She wears silks and corsets to visit the post office. She braids ribbons in her hair to stroll through the park. Color and words and ideas spill out of her with a joyous intensity that is exactly mimicked by the way she puts them on paper.

It hardly comes as a surprise that she is also a performer—a singer and an actress—and she draws on all her considerable stage presence to deliver a reading. If you don’t believe me, check out a video of her reciting her poem The Sea-King’s Second Bride, which is a pure distillation of her talent, energy, love of the mystical, and sense of humor: https://bit.ly/SeaKing2ndBride. Oh, and it’s a poem for which she won the Rhysling Award, which annually recognizes the year’s best poems in science fiction, fantasy, or horror.

It’s not the only honor she’s received. In 2016, she took home a World Fantasy Award for Bone Swans, a collection of short stories and novellas that are amazing for their richness, variety, and inventiveness. My favorite in that collection is Martyr’s Gem, in which an awkward, unassuming young man receives an unexpected offer of marriage from a prominent young woman—though her reasons for seeking the union are bleak indeed. It’s a beautifully told tale of grief, vengeance, magic, and family.

My favorite piece of hers that appears in neither that collection nor this one is Braiding the Ghosts, which was published in Clockwork Phoenix 3 and is available to read online. Skating the line between fantasy and horror, it offsets cruelty with sorcery, loss with love. I shivered as the lonely young girl read the words inscribed on a young man’s gravestone: Son, Brother, Friend. So many possibilities there for a writer who wakes the dead.

In this collection, the story I love most is The Two Paupers. A tortured artist creates and destroys sculptures so staggeringly lifelike that one of them, in fact, comes to life. The writer next door, with whom the artist has an intense and complicated relationship, is determined that this statue will not meet the fate of its fellows, but she doesn’t understand how its very existence puts Breaker House in jeopardy. And so they both descend to the Valwode, the gentry kingdom, to try to undo the harm they have already set in motion.

The Two Paupers and two other Dark Breakers stories—The Breaker Queen and Desdemona and the Deep—have already appeared in print. For this collection, Claire has added stories that are just as imaginative, just as complex, and just as perfectly balanced between the fearsome and the sublime. So put on your silks and velvets, your ribbons and pearls. Ward the doors against ghosts, and remind yourself not to make a bargain with anyone from either of the underworlds. Then settle in for a fantastical read.

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1. The Voluptuist

Elliot Howell considered the glittering company about to assemble in the dining room below, and sighed.

This was his first night of a three day stay at Breaker House, and his only good evening wear. But even in his best blue-velvet smoking jacket, the pride of his wardrobe, he knew he would present a shabby figure. His hair, flyaway and fair, needed cutting, and his trousers were shiny at the knees and showed his clumsy darning besides.

Charles Chaz Mallister had already jostled him on his way downstairs, lightly teasing, Nice threads, Professor. So very last century! It lacks merely a ruffle of antique lace at the throat. By the by, my beauty, you’ve still got a bit of pigment on your nose.

Then, with one of his winks that never failed to make Elliot feel complicit in a flirtation he had not instigated but did not altogether mind, Chaz pushed ahead and clattered down the stairs. His glossy white evening pumps rapped against the rosy marble like pistol shots. One end of his ascot, yellow polka dots on bright apricot silk, fluttered over his shoulder, like it wanted to fly off and float gently to the floor of the main hall—to be swept up by some knight errant, perhaps, for use as a favor. Alas, an emerald pin the size of a crocodile’s eye kept the ascot firmly attached to Chaz’s person.

Peacock, someone muttered savagely.

Elliot turned to address the speaker. Chaz, he said, is a brightness.

In student evaluations, his most frequent critique was: Speak up, Professor Howell! But Breaker House seemed to lock onto any whisper within its purview and then gleefully hyperbolize it. Elliot winced as his voice bounced back to him from the walls: mild and familiar—but much too loud.

You’re too good for this world, Howell, said Gideon. His friend was standing on the second-floor Gallery, looking down at him over the balustrade. Be careful. Show some claw—or the gentry will drag you through the Veil and eat you up like candy.

Elliot’s mouth twitched. And you think your cousin won’t?

Ah. That’s another matter. Sauntering down the steps at his schoolboy-on-exam-day’s pace, Gideon joined him on the landing. They stood together on that liminal platform between second floor and first, and peered over the bannister into the main hall below.

Breaker House had three floors, not including attic and basement. First thing after they’d arrived that morning, Gideon claimed his studio space in one obscure corner of the third floor, where he would not be disturbed during the day by any nosy passerby. For purposes of the commissioned portrait he was trying to finish, Elliot needed to set up his easel outside on the lower loggia, facing the sea—which he preferred anyway.

After a sideways glance at his friend, Elliot realized with some relief that he would not be the only shabby one at dinner. Gideon Alderwood’s narrow, ascetic face was irritable as he finished shrugging himself into a frayed formal frock coat. There was a ripping sound as the rotted silk lining inside the sleeves tore further. Elliot imagined those clinging silk tatters as the ghost of the tuxedo’s former owner, who suffered and degraded every time someone else donned his old attire.

I hate this demon monkey jacket, Gideon said sourly. Chaz once proposed we start a tradition of dining in our bathing drawers—the only sensible suggestion he ever made. That, he added, was eighteen years ago. We were nine.

Elliot smiled, but shook his head. Chaz was so playful, and Gideon… Gideon was not. He could not ever imagine the two of them being friends, even as children.

Before my time, I’m afraid. I never met any of you until university—and just after.

Gideon pushed a black tangle of curls off his brow. Chaz was almost bearable back then. So was I, if you can believe it. Desi never was, of course. Not at nine or nineteen. Certainly not now. Eighteen years ago, he muttered. I wonder, was that before or after I…

Elliot waited, but Gideon had trailed off into one of his pinched-brow silences, his lips pressed to fishing-line thinness.

After a dark moment, his head snapped up. He glared at Elliot, demanding, How can you be sure of anything I say, Howell? I could be lying to you. Or mistaking dream for remembrance. My memory has holes. Or I wish it did, which is almost the same thing. The Desdemonster has a sharper recall of our remote childhood. Best ask her.

Elliot hadn’t asked in the first place. And he wouldn’t trust Miss Desdemona Mannering’s version of the truth any more than he would the latest gossip in the society pages of the Seafall Courier. He liked Gideon’s cousin, the way one likes a tigress at feeding time—from an appreciative distance and, preferably, on the other side of a very strong fence. He changed the subject.

Which do I prefer, he wondered, gazing over Gideon’s bedraggled ensemble and uncombed hair, your scarecrow finery, with that raven’s nest up top? Or Chaz’s emerald-green pinstripes and pomaded red crown? I wish I could sketch a study of both you two, side by side.

An image of Gideon as a knight in black armor, riding a black horse and carrying Chaz’s apricot ascot on the tip of his lance, galloped across his vision. He sucked back a smile, and fought a strong urge to whip out his sketchbook, sit on the stairs, and skip dinner entirely in favor of capturing the vision.

Gideon grunted. Catch me voluntarily staying at Chaz Mallister’s side for any length of time—and you have my permission to jab a charcoal stick through my eye.

Why are you so cruel to him?

Oh! Gideon gave one of his jerking shrugs, surly as a paladin in ill-fitting chainmail. As children, we were all cruel to each other. That’s how we knew we were friends. Chaz is…he’s not bad. Spoiled, like Desi. That same sandpaper tongue, that flays as it licks.

Elliot raised his eyebrows. Gideon might have been describing himself.

"But not bad, Gideon went on. Not like…"

When it was clear he would not continue, Elliot ambled closer and pointed to a spot, white as pigeon soil, on Gideon’s worn satin lapel. Gideon looked down and gave a long-suffering sigh, but did not flinch when Elliot went to scratch at the mark. Gideon did not like people touching him unexpectedly—or at all, really. But for some reason, sometimes, he suffered Elliot’s touch. Elliot did not know why. And he would never, not for all the gentry gold in the Veil, ask.

What? Are we primates, Howell? Gideon scoffed as Elliot worked, slowly, meditatively, to eradicate the white mark. Will you also eat whatever you groom from my person?

"We are primates, Alderwood, Elliot responded affably. He’d managed to scratch off the surface crust of the plaster, leaving a pale, dusty smear. And I wouldn’t have to groom you if you’d just look in the mirror once in a while and apply soap and water to the sticky bits."

Says the man with a streak of vermillion up his nostril.

Panther-quick, Gideon stepped back from Elliot’s grooming and examined his hands. Both were speckled in plaster from his afternoon in the studio. Frowning, he held out both arms and stared down the length of his sleeves. These, too, were smudged with white prints—more than Elliot would be able to remove before dinner. The sight seemed to tickle Gideon’s unpredictable sense of humor. One half of his thin mouth dragged up.

"Well, Howell. If people insist on interrupting my work with their little dinner parties, the least I can do is bring some down with me."

A half-smile from Gideon was about as resistible as a riptide. Elliot returned a shy one of his own.

Gideon, why did you accept Miss Mannering’s invitation? It’s obvious to anyone that you’d prefer to work at home, alone, in your garret—that the last place in Athe you want to be is here at Breaker House.

Gideon grimaced, leaning his elbows on the bannister. As to that.

Yes?

"Miss Mannering’s mama, Mrs. Mannering—or should I say, ‘my dear Aunt Tracy’?—told Desi that if she did not lure me to Breaker House for Desi’s three-day natal fête, she would forthwith furnish my personal address to the daughters of her five closest friends. Furthermore, she would inform them all that I’m always on the lookout for live models. Oh, and that I simply adore when young women ‘drop by’ to ‘watch me work.’"

Elliot laughed outright at the lightning-strike look in Gideon’s black eyes. If dear Aunt Tracy had been present to fall under that scrutiny, she’d have been flash-fried on the spot.

Was she serious?

Gideon shrugged again. "Hard to say. Probably not. Aunt Tracy’s got far more important threats to carry out. But the Desdemonster would. It’s her birthday, after all. Though why she wants me here, I can’t say. Except that she enjoys torturing me, and would consider my present torment another birthday gift to herself."

So… Elliot guessed, …you’re determined to misbehave?

Gideon flapped a shapely, brown, plaster-spattered hand at him. As long as Desi doesn’t make me play tennis, and leaves me my work days, I will make an effort at mealtimes. At least, he amended, "at dinners. At least, he amended again, more sourly, I’ll show up. But I’ll be damned, Howell, damned and tithed to the King of Kobolds on his ever-darkening throne, if I have to choke down port and cigars afterward. Or force myself to endure H. H.’s political tirades. Or suffer Chaz Mallister’s polka dots without comment."

No, Elliot agreed, in his calm, helpful, address-a-student-in-crisis voice. How could anyone ask that of you? Instead, he suggested, let’s sneak out to the Milkmaid after dinner. See what summer ales are on tap. Drag Ana out with us. Poor, patient Ana! By dessert, she’ll be more than ready to escape Miss Mannering’s caresses.

A frown like a squall line thundered across Gideon’s forehead. Analise Field, he growled, "should not be here."

I thought you invited her.

"Desdemona invited her."

Miss Mannering would not have invited her if you had not introduced them.

So?

So, Elliot explained, you introduced Ana to your cousin because you thought she would be useful to Ana’s career. You told me so.

Gideon shook his head, not in denial or disagreement, but like a child refusing to take the medicine he was told would be good for him. A business acquaintance is one thing. A houseguest is quite another. Especially in Breaker House.

Ana makes friends easily, across all kinds of cultural and class lines, Elliot pointed out. You of all people know that. She is the best neighbor a misanthrope like you could ever hope to have.

That was a direct quote from Gideon himself. Gideon hunched as Elliot began listing all the things that Gideon had ever told him (and now regretted telling him) about Ana.

"She brings you soup when you’re sick. She knits you scarves when you’re too stubborn to light a fire. She even cleans your shared bathroom, which… Well, you know my opinion. You really should pitch in, Gideon, because that’s just not fair. Everyone knows that you helped get her first novel published—and that’s no small favor—but that toilet seat, Gideon!"

I know.

"That toilet seat is a thing."

I know.

"Anyway, you like Ana!" As much as Gideon liked anybody. Which was not much.

I know! Gideon’s frown slashed down with the force of a rapier. "But she doesn’t belong at Breaker House!"

With that, he bounded past Elliot and down the remaining flight of stairs, taking too many steps at a time. Elliot watched, heartbeat suspended, until Gideon reached the safety of the first floor.

When he rounded a corner and disappeared, Elliot’s heart seemed to stutter back to life. He followed his friend, sweating lightly, a sheen of dread turning him clammy inside his velvet jacket.

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2. The Maid, the Moon

Breaker House had many branching corridors, many doors opening into halls with still more doors. Elliot—whose reluctance to attend yet another of Miss Desdemona Mannering’s formal dinners (especially with Gideon in this dangerous mood)—was more slow-footed than usual, and soon lost his way.

He bumbled into the billiard room first. It was dominated by a green-felted table the size of his entire efficiency apartment, and a monstrously carved mantel clock depicting a scene from the Sacrifice of the Hunter God. From there, he made his way into the morning room, all done up in ivory brocade, ivory velvet, and enough ivory knickknacks that the pale place seemed more a mausoleum for doomed elephants than a cozy gathering chamber. He found the music room after that, stuffed to the rafters with a gilded harmonium, the grandest of all grand pianos, a concert harp, and several delicate couches that would collapse under Elliot’s weight.

And, eventually, he found the library. And a maid.

I am so glad to see you!

The maid looked up sharply as Elliot blurted the words. He stopped, and blushed in confusion.

His first thought was that the wine she was pouring out from her dark bottle had somehow spilled up into his cheeks instead of down into the cut-crystal decanter. But, no. No, it splashed onto the glass-topped table and began to spread, to drip.

His second thought was her face. Only that. He blinked, bewildered. He could not summon a third thought.

He felt like he did on those rare sultry afternoons when, after succumbing to a nap, he woke to the fullness of night, momentarily confusing moonlight for day. She was like that. Just like that. A moon-time thing, come down from the sky to stand before him.

Her flashing eyes assessed him with brief ferocity. Whatever she saw made her lips curve slightly. She glanced at the spilled wine. Her little finger drew a symbol in the burgundy puddle. For a moment, Elliot thought the symbol glowed, shimmering on the surface of the spill.

I think, said the maid, that I am glad to see you too.

Her voice was deep. It was the color of Elliot’s smoking jacket, the color of spilled wine. Blue velvet wine and wine-dark brine and a horn blowing far out at sea. Immediately, Elliot felt his feet double in size, his tongue swell up like a pustule, and sweat spring from his pores. If she spoke again, he was afraid he would burst into a rash of pimples like a newly fledged teenager.

Sorry, he said, apologizing for everything. For himself, and the state he was in.

The maid’s pinkie finger drew another symbol in the wine. Another flashing rune, floating like a beacon on a red lake. Then she lifted her hand to her lips and licked a drop of wine from the tip of her talon.

No, not her talon, her…her nail. Elliot squinted, his eyes awash in wine, in moonlight, in the rake of raptor claws and the blood they left in their wake. A renewed blush scorched him for his fancy.

S-sorry, he stammered again.

The maid gestured to the tremulous wine at the table’s edge. We have made a mess, you and I.

My fault. I… Elliot lunged across the room, tripped on a deep-piled Damahrashian carpet, and righted himself. The spill, I mean. I startled you.

"You did startle me." She met his flustered gaze again, raising her hand like a mother soothing a fretting child.

The anxiety in Elliot’s chest eased. She patted the air between them, and he felt the air move, like a butterfly nuzzling his chest. His hand moved over his heart to cup the sensation closer.

I thought I knew this house, the maid mused, staring down at the spill. I thought I knew its ways, its walls, its updrafts and echoes. Its—her eyes scanned him again—denizens. But, obviously, I have not been thorough in my investigations.

Straightening his shoulders and trying not to loosen his collar, Elliot approached the table more slowly. He bowed to her, wondering why this felt so much like asking for permission. But when she gave it, with an amused nod, he leaned over and sopped up the spilled wine with the sleeve of his jacket.

The maid drew back to watch him, eyebrows quirked, eyes kind.

There! Elliot unbent from his labors. Now no one need ever know about our…mess. They’ll smell wine on me and think I’ve indulged in an aperitif. Or five. No one will even be surprised. Not, he added hastily, that I indulge like that. Not often, anyway.

She reached out and laid a hand on his wine-wet arm. He could feel her talons, blue-black, sharp as sickles, right through the sodden fabric. That touch. Some kind of benison. Some rare thing. As if, out on the lonely shores of a less inhabited island than Seafall—White Raven Island, perhaps—Elliot had stumbled by chance on a she-wolf, who deigned to approach him, to sniff politely at his knuckles before trotting away. He did not dare breathe.

Boy, she said, staring up into his lumbering boorishness, his enormous awkwardness, his shabby gigantic Elliot-ness, and smiling like what she saw pleased her. Your sacrifice will not go uncounted.

And then, she released him.

So a falconer might feel when the falcon releases him, when she launches herself up and away from him, and wheels off into the welkin, disappearing into the dizzy blue. How bereft and doubtful must she leave that lonely falconer. How willing he must be to wait forever in the shade of the sleak oak tree, searching for that speck in the sky, asking himself one and only one question, over and over again:

Will she ever return?

Perhaps if he kept talking, his voice would keep her tethered to his side. Perhaps if he never blinked, never tore his gaze from her face, she would consent to look at him once more. He would make himself easy company, a welcome perch, a friendly shrub, shelter. And then she would stay.

But Elliot loved a wild thing, and took courage from their freedom. So he shrugged his ploughman’s shoulders, far better suited for farm labor than the delicate work of paintbrush and education, and laughed, if nervously.

"It’s nothing. No sacrifice, I mean. I bought this jacket for a dollar at the flea market out back of the university. Antique, don’t you think? Smelled awful too, at first. Mothballs, mildew, you name it. But I’d fallen in love with the color, you see. I’d only encountered it in nature, or in my favorite paintings, never in clothing. Plus, it fit—which was almost a miracle, for my size. So I bought it. Stank up my apartment for a week. Even Ana said she wouldn’t drop by again until I got rid of it. But I wrote to my mother for advice, and she told me to hang it outside my window for as many sunny days as Seafall can provide. And it worked!"

The maid bestowed on him another of her approving smiles. I had wondered at your scent, Man of Athe. Now I know. You smell of sunshine and sea-salt. But you are dressed in the colors of a Valwode sky—and this pleases me as few things do on this, or any, side of the Veil. How useful you have been to me, and so swiftly upon my arrival! I had forgotten, you see, she confided, what it was to love our sky. Too long has it been since the warp and weft of it have imparted any joy to me. When next I dream the sky into being, it shall be just this blissful blue.

Her gaze caressed his smoking jacket, her nostrils flaring in a mighty inhalation.

Just this smell, she continued, of spilt wine, and sea salt, and sunlight.

Elliot quickly sketched her in his mind: the curve of her cheekbone, the tip of her nose, the line of her chin. But the sketch twisted and shifted even as he imagined it. He could not keep the imaginary lines of her face straight.

From woman to fawn, she changed. From fawn to lioness to hare to mare to wolf. Wild. Wary. Suddenly, his invisible sketch resolved itself. It settled like a net over the woman before him, and he saw both images at once: how she seemed, and how he would portray her in one of his paintings. Like an Eerie Wife out of some old gentry tale, she seemed a combination of both woman and beast, with long, sensitive ears and a wide-bridged nose. She wore her black and white uniform, but a crown of antler horns burst from her brow like a tower of thorns.

She was tiny, but also somehow bristlingly immense. Her hair was hidden beneath her mobcap, but her eyebrows and eyelashes were a dark, sparking blue, like her eyes. Blue? No, Elliot amended. Black. So very dark and shining. Or…blue-black? And speckled. Iridescent. Grackle eyes. Starling eyes.

His thoughts wheeled off in a kaleidoscopic tumble of black-winged, blue-sparked birds. Might she be a bird in woman’s shape? He wouldn’t put that—or anything—past her.

Then he gasped, for she had taken his sodden cuff between her fingers and was rubbing the wet nap. Elliot knew then what a kitten felt like when his mother caught him by the nape of his neck. He knew also why the warmongers of olden Damahrash had capitulated the moment their mates took their pricks in gauntleted fists, demanding an end to their endless