Two and Twenty Dark Tales Read online

  Enchantments cannot be broken from the inside.

  In the hundreds of years I have been in this house, you are the only person who has ever managed to find me.

  Amarind didn’t doubt the Witch was capable of doing anything to seize this chance. Even depending upon a powerless boy-king.

  “You can’t,” Amarind said again, wildly. The king laughed at her silently, and she knew it would do no good, but she went on talking. “You don’t know what she is!”

  “Yet you went to her, didn’t you? How many times have you done her bidding, in exchange for some magic in your pathetic little life? I would never have found her cottage on my own if I hadn’t followed you there, when you were too eager to be careful. Don’t dare judge me, Cousin.”

  “I didn’t know what she would do,” Amarind whispered.

  “And you still don’t know.” Cedric shrugged. “Besides, if I don’t give her that knife, my bargain with her will be forfeit. I’d imagine the consequences of that would be… unpleasant. So I’ll be taking it now.”

  He advanced toward her. Amarind stepped back despite her best intentions, until her back was against the clock. She put her free hand to her side so that her fingers were brushing the polished wood. He didn’t look wary at that, either, which meant the Witch had told him little.

  The knife trembled in her hand as she lifted it. Cedric laughed.

  “You don’t have to worry,” he said. “She was quite annoyed when we couldn’t find the knife. I’m sure she’ll just kill you this time, rather than turn you into a rodent.”

  “That would be preferable,” Amarind said sincerely. The memories swept over her again, the fear and the hunger and the constant, scrambling desperation. “But she didn’t turn me.”

  Cedric lifted an eyebrow. “Then who did?”

  Amarind stared at him steadily, and he actually stopped for a moment.

  “Me?” Cedric’s lips twisted. “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t have that kind of power.”

  “I know.”

  He looked confused, and Amarind drew in her breath. No point in continuing to put off the inevitable. If it hadn’t been the Witch, and it hadn’t been Cedric, there was only one possibility left.

  “But I do,” she said, and slashed the knife across her palm.

  The pain was instant and terrible, but not bad enough to stop her. The hands on the grandfather clock began to move faster. She turned and slammed her hand against the clock, smearing her blood on the polished wood, crying out this time from the pain.

  Her cry lasted only a moment before it contracted into a squeak.

  She hadn’t been sure it would work, but suddenly she was small and fur-covered again, and the clock loomed over her. With the spell already set, a few drops of blood had been all it took to get it started again.

  Cedric’s face towered far, far above her, distant and colorless. He said something, but she couldn’t understand it. The hands on the clock face were blurred and fading. But they were not gone, not yet; just as Cedric leaned down, the minute hand touched twelve. The chimes rang out, clear and cold.

  The mouse turned and ran.

  By the time Cedric’s hand swooped down on the spot where she had been, Amarind was already inside the clock, through a crack between the glass and the wooden frame. It was a little tight, but once her head was through, the rest of her body flattened and slid in effortlessly. Something huge and shiny came swinging at her, and she gathered herself and leapt.

  Fortunately, the golden pendulum was scored with elegant designs, practically roads for a creature as tiny as she. Her tail lashed as she clung to one raised design while the pendulum swung across the clock, hung for one moment, then swung the other way. This time, she waited until the height of the swing, then dashed up and across the pendulum.

  It swung down more sharply than she had expected and she almost fell, claws scrabbling and slipping. Then, with a final surge of effort, she reached the top. Her claws scraped wood, and she squirmed upward through another crack, into a mass of sharp, turning gears. She dashed through them, twisting and dodging, and emerged up onto the clock face.

  She leapt and clung to the engraved number six, not seeing the second hand until it swept toward her like a knife. She leapt upward again, scrabbling at the designs at the interior of the clock face, feeling the magic pulsate all around her. The second hand touched her fur, and she inched backward, but there was nowhere to go.

  The fifth chime rang. The hand slicing toward her vanished, a moment before it would have swept her off her precarious perch, and Time whirled around her.

  Her memory was flung back to a time when she had been human, wearing her green gown, kneeling over her sister’s body. Lily’s face was turned away, her mass of light brown hair covering her face, and Amarind was glad of that.

  She looked up at Cedric. He stood several yards away from her, his face white, holding the knife in his hand. In his shaking hand. He had probably never killed anyone before.

  The deathblood of a royal virgin.

  Impossible to tell how much Amarind had known, back then, of what the later Amarind had figured out. The Amarind in the green gown hadn’t been capable of figuring out much of anything, with her sister’s scream still ringing in her ears, her legs sore from running, her mind reeling from the horrors she had run through. She knew about the coup. She knew the knife in her cousin’s hand was covered with her sister’s blood.

  That was all she needed to know.

  She called upon the power of the clock. It wasn’t difficult. The Witch hadn’t told Cedric everything, and he was expecting a helpless princess. He didn’t even dodge the blast of wind from her outstretched hand, and he went down with a thud, hitting the end of the couch and then lying still on the floor.

  Amarind was glad of an excuse to step away from her sister’s corpse. She pried the knife from Cedric’s hand, which took a surprising amount of effort. It wasn’t until she was holding it that she realized.

  There was no blood on the blade. It shone clean and bright.

  She looked down instinctively, but there was no blood on the floor, or on Cedric’s sleeve. There was no blood anywhere.

  It had soaked into the blade.

  She held it up, noticing suddenly the runes carved into its hilt, the glimmer on its blade. She was so stricken that she didn’t hear the footsteps outside until they began battering at the door.

  Soldiers. But now she knew the coup had been arranged as a cover for this.

  She wanted the knife.

  The Witch had engineered all of this. The Witch, who held the power of Time. Perhaps the knife had to be given to her freely… but that would be easy enough to arrange. Now that the knife existed, there was no place on earth where she wouldn’t find it.

  Except…

  The door shuddered. The frame splintered. Amarind reached for the power of the clock and drew the knife sharply down her palm, right below the flared green edge of her sleeve.

  It hurt, but the blood didn’t make it past the blade. The steel soaked it in almost before it welled up past her skin.

  She scrambled for Cedric’s body as the room began to tilt around her, yanking up the legs of his breeches. He actually had two knife-sheaths strapped to his left leg, each holding its own blade. She tugged one off and managed, with only seconds to spare, to tie it around her own leg and slide the knife in.

  The door slammed open, but it was too late. There was nothing in the library but a dead princess, an unconscious man, and a mouse they couldn’t see, trembling behind a bookshelf.

  And a clock without any hands.

  ***

  Time shifted and tilted. The clock still had no hands—or had no hands again, it was hard to tell the difference—and the mouse was trembling, but that was different, because now it was trembling so hard it could barely cling to the clock.

  The library door slammed. Cedric was gone. To the Witch? Probably, Amarind thought. If she emerged human from this clock, with this pow
er still strumming through her, there was no telling what she could do to Cedric.

  But she wasn’t fool enough to think she could do anything to the Witch. The Witch who had killed her sister for the sake of a knife. A knife that didn’t exist as long as Amarind was a mouse. That would never exist again, if she died as a mouse.

  She hesitated for a moment. She still remembered what it was to be a mouse, small and helpless and afraid. And with that memory came a similar one, of how she had felt in that house in the woods, staring up at the Witch’s predatory smile.

  If the Witch was freed, everyone in the world would know what it felt like to be prey.

  The mouse turned and ran down past the number six, through the gears, and, half-sliding, down the pendulum. When it reached the floor, it turned and looked up at the faceless clock a great distance above it.

  It knew that if it touched that clock again, while it struck the hour, the mouse would be human again. But before long its human memories would shrink away, too large and vast for the tiny thing it was now. It wouldn’t remember that it had ever been anything else. The mouse hesitated for a second, paws tensed, body coiled.

  Then it scuttled across the floor and was gone through a crack in the wall.

  – The End –

  Blue

  Sayantani DasGupta

  Little Boy Blue

  Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,

  The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn.

  Where is the boy who looks after the sheep?

  He’s under a haycock, fast asleep.

  Will you wake him? No, not I,

  For if I do, he’s sure to cry.

  – Mother Goose

  I am inking ancient fables upon the dying woman’s brow when I hear the Boy call to me, loud and clear as a shepherd’s horn.

  My story-needle stops short in the middle of a rhyming lullaby, splashing my fingers with a deep indigo. It is the color of a young night, the color of sleep in the early dawn.

  “Maiden! Maiden!”

  He does not know my name, of course. I would have none to give him, at any rate, for my people lost that right long ago.

  We who are called the Children of Ink hold memories for others that they would not keep safe themselves. We who travel only under cloaks of darkness have nothing to call our own, save the story-needles clutched like talismans in our ageless hands. We who are nothing in our own right are called only by the duty to tell, tell, tell, until our fingers and tongues bleed from the telling.

  We watch over the memories of the living like shepherds watch over their sheep. But we are exempt from public haunt ourselves. We are non-persons, no one, nobodies, no bodied. We do not walk, but float, like wisps of breathy yearning escaping a lover’s lips. We do not touch, except in our ancient ways—and only then, under cover of darkest sleep. The living have long lost their songs, their rhymes and lullabies; and so it has fallen upon us, the damned and nameless, the foot servants of time, to keep the story ink streaming beneath their skin, even if they cannot see it anymore.

  But every now and then, a century, a day, a second, an aeon, there is one who awakens to us, one who can see our markings, and sometimes even our faces as we visit them or their loved ones, sewing our stories into flesh and bone.

  Never me. I am too swift to be seen. My etchings twist and curve along the seashore, stain the sand and stone, swirl about the bark of the telling trees—more runes than letters, sometimes. When I am called to mark a newborn on her mother’s breast, a bride or groom on their wedding eve, or an old man on his fever couch, I mark their body-stories swiftly, my needle moving with the speed and ferocity of a hundred moths’ wings. These are the only touches I have known. But they have never known me.

  But now, the Boy calls. He has seen me, as I mark his grandmother, and he searches with the desperation of one who has lost something most precious in his keep.

  I close my mind to him, bidding him away, as I know I should. But the longing to be seen is fierce, and it frightens me.

  Although the lighthouse of my presence is dark, that longing makes a tiny firefly’s glow, a spark that the Boy follows, and follows, until at last, he finds my telling tree deep in the mossy wood.

  He comes with his animals and his bow, a horn at his belt and a quiver on his back. He sings to keep the lambs calm as they pick their way through the shadows of haunted woods.

  He is beautiful and dark and I take great pleasure in his form.

  But when he sees me, the Boy’s song chokes in his throat. I feel the silencing of his music like the thrust from a knife. For a moment, I had been lost in those warm sounds. Bathed in his voice and words, I had become something other than what I was. Now, I must again remember.

  Whoever made that song-mark on him had great skill, I think. And suddenly, I am aching with jealousy at this other of my kind who has touched him, changed him, kept his people’s memories alive on and through his very body.

  “Are you real or am I dreaming?” His voice makes the leaves rustle and the buds green.

  The animals bleat and stamp but I take no heed. As if looking in a mirror, I see my own hazy face in his eyes, and the feeling makes me want to weep.

  I flee on the fog, of course. What else can I do? But I hear him calling behind me, “Maiden! Maiden!”

  I do not come back to the wood until nightfall, and only then following the footsteps of the fox and badger, keeping well to the shadows. The Boy will have gone by now, I think, gone to a fire and a home, a bed and a dinner, the comforts and rituals of the living.

  But I am wrong, for here he sits, asleep beneath my telling tree, his animals scattered far and wide like all my proprieties. If I remembered my duty, I should worry about him. Is there a mother or sister weeping for his safety? A father with a lantern even now searching for his lost boy in the darkness?

  His breast rises and falls with an easy sleep, and I can see that he is as near a Man as a Boy. His arms, even in their relaxation, are strong, and his back broad as if used to carrying the sun. Though I have not been called to mark him, I want to touch him more than I—for all my stories—can say. And for the first time in my many years, I realize there is something stronger than words, something beyond even my deft needle’s abilities to darn images and memories.

  As if hearing my desires, he opens his eyes. “You!”

  I shake my wordless head, opening and closing my lips to show him that there are no sounds for my spending.

  But he does not need them, he has enough in his own pockets for us both. “You are the one who came to my grandmother as she breathed her last; you covered her skin with letters that faded in the morning sun.”

  I nod. Yes, I think, studying his dark locks, the old woman was so like him. Yet I—who remember every tale I traced on every root and heart—cannot recall the stories I sewed into his foremother’s skin, nor if my visit to his house was yesterday or a thousand yesterdays ago. It is as if I have caught the forgetting sickness of the living in my desire for this one of them.

  “I have been searching for you ever since.”

  I nod again, but pull myself from his gaze enough to look around the sleeping forest. I should not be letting him talk to me. I am no temptress Calypso, no Circe of the sun and sea. But like those enchantresses of another time, my wanting is so great. My wanting to be seen. My wanting to be heard. My wanting to keep him here with me, in the forest of storied trees.

  “What is your name?” he asks, and this seals his fate. No one has ever asked me this question.

  I flap my lips again and again, willing something to come, from where I know not—that infinite stream of stories begun on mountain high? But my tongue cannot work without my needle and I feel myself wither and fade in frustration.

  “Wait!” He reaches for me but I evade his grasp. There is nothing here for him to touch, and I cannot bear it.

  I wrap myself in the thick fog, cloaking myself from the Boy’s attention.

  “Wait.” He t
hrusts his arm—bared now, his shirt high over amber skin—through the mist.

  “Can you mark me as you marked her?”

  What does he say?

  No. No. No. This is not the ancient way. We come to the living as they sleep.

  What is he asking of me? The trees whisper and moan, and I feel my essence shiver, as if I, too, was mortal-made.

  “Can you mark me, Maiden? Can you?”

  He is so near now that I can smell his flesh. That pungent smell of living warmth; skin and bone, muscle, hair, sinew. There is blood pumping, an ocean of life-waters beneath that placid surface.

  He is not mine, to touch and to mark. He is only Boy, Boy with his arrows and horn, his runaway charges, his forgotten home and duty.

  “Please.”

  The word, a doorway, hangs between us. There is something like a snaking arm of fire that pulls me through, out of the darkness and toward him.

  My needle, of its own accord, quivers. It wants to sing its song on his flesh.

  But awake? With eyes of coal boring into mine?

  I grasp my story-needle and feel myself become more real, more present in time and space. I am in the story forest, I think, with a Boy who has lost his charges even as I have lost my way.

  I begin. The first pierce makes him wince and his eyes widen, a bride on her wedding night.

  This thought makes me laugh, and it is the first sound he hears of me, and for this I am glad. My tongue is loose now that my needle flows, fast and fierce with its blue-black tales. His skin is warm and firm beneath my touch and I am drunk with the story-making. I sing him the ancient songs that run deep within me and now, through him.

  “I want,” he says, his voice faint at first.

  “You want?” The moss and stones prompt him.

  I dare say nothing, but wait. I am a clock with frozen hands. A whisper out of time.

  “I want to hear your story,” he finally says. “I want to hear you sing your name.”

  A beat. A pause. A breath. A cry. Then, with his witness, I name myself, crying out like a new mother as I give birth to the she that I am.