I should probably address the name thing first for those of you who are wondering who this is. I’ve decided to stop writing stories as Mara Colleen Banks and have started using the name Faye Jerod instead.
The story behind the change is long and boring.
tl;dr: I created the name with someone I’m not in relationship with anymore and I’d like to stop thinking about them whenever someone calls me Mara.
But what about the stories?!
It’s been a bit since I posted any new fiction, hasn’t it?
The reason is *drum roll* I’m writing something long.
I’m not quite sure what it is yet. (I’m a non-linear writer who starts with absolutely no plan, which works for Diana Gabaldon, so what could possibly go wrong? (Lots, actually, but I’m convinced a writer has as much choice in their process as they do in their nose. (And if they can afford to do something about either their process or their nose, their process must be working out pretty well for them and they should leave it alone. (And the nose, too.) (Probably.))))) This quickly not quickly enough growing beastie started as a thought that “Whose Woods These Are” has kind of a crappy ending and could maybe stand to be a bit longer and...well...now it’s a novella...and growing...and schlorping up all of the other Pandemonium stories I’ve written into it’s giant mushroomy gills and whispering, “Soon, soon, all of this will be mine.” By which it means the contents of my mind, of course, and not Pandemonium itself because I’ve heard a certain blue eyed protagonist has a sword and a sword can totally take on a mushroom or a novella in the Sword, Mushroom, Novella game.
Wait. Is that fair? Now I have to map out the rules of Rock, Paper, Scissors write. I will write more story. Relax, giant mushroom novella thing.
I have a new Freya story up on Dreamwalkers. This time it’s her origin story and the story of when she met Odin.
Excerpt:
I really started to become a person three months after I was made. I had the body of a woman and the mind and maturity of an adult in most things, but while Poseidon made me with most of the developmental stages of childhood integrated inside me, there are some things even the most skilled artificer can’t build into a construct. There are growing times a living sentient consciousness can’t skip.
On the day when he put his maker’s mark on me and called me complete, I had just enough energy to allow myself to be carried and plopped onto a chair for a once-over. He knelt in front of me and took the heels of my feet in his hands, stretching my legs out and examining my knees, admiring his own workmanship and the skill with which he’d been able to carve them in the end. There are challenges in every making, and my knees had been his challenge with me.
Pleased with himself, he looked into my eyes, and I reached out my arms for another hug. That was as much newness and stimulation as I could stand. I fell asleep with my head on his shoulder, and he carried me to bed.
Hey! I love your stories and your writing style. So, my question is how many words a day do you write? Do you think it’s important to hit daily word counts at all? Everyone’s style is unique I’ve found, but I’d love to hear yours!
Thanks for the compliment! I’m glad you enjoy my work.
I’m really passionate about the issue of word count targets, so I’m glad you asked.
Frankly, I think word count targets for fiction writers are dangerous. This is the part where I’m supposed to caveat and say that everyone is different, and some writers find them helpful, but I’m not going to caveat here. There are writers who *think* word count targets are helpful, but the product of art and process of making art are inseparable. If you treat yourself like an assembly line robot, you will produce assembly line work.
Fiction writing is an art. The measure of art is its ability to touch people. Writers who treat themselves like robots in the production of art are messing with the part of themselves that is capable of creating great art in the first place.
Humans are messy! We’re inconsistent. We create masterpieces one day and garbage the next. Any artistic process needs to be able to flow with the ups and downs of the artist.
And that’s the most tragic thing about word count targets. By trying to meet an artificial high, you miss the real highs because you’re too exhausted to take advantage of the passion that would lead you to, naturally, be really productive.
So, what is my daily word count? It depends. Lately, I’ve been going on a writing tear and have written the equivalent of two poetry chapbooks and a novella since April. (I’m writing this at the end of July.) Before that, I barely wrote anything at all for months.
That’s my cycle. The essential thing for any writer is that they find theirs and treat it like the sacred thing it is.
I have a new Dreamwalkers story up on Ao3 called “Kiss the Sky.” If you’ve read my stories “Unveiling the Goddess” or “The Wandering Eye,” you’ll especially want to catch “Kiss the Sky,” which features some of the same characters.
Excerpt:
The sky was blue and empty of clouds, and the sun beat down hot on the rolling hills of Venus and the river that threaded between them. The river stretched, feeling into her length from her source in a mountain spring to her mouth at the sea. Small ripples of pleasure tingled on the surface of her water, and she sighed contentedly.
“Enjoying yourself, Freya?” asked a voice from on high.
It was Freyr. He was speaking as either the sun or the sky. From her view as the river so far away, it was impossible to say which one, and that irritated her. It was true that he had purview in sun and sky, but everyone knew that gods were only supposed to conflate to one thing at a time. He said it was different for him. Since he was made by the sun, there was something about him that was sun all the time, so he could do things others couldn’t.
Something in Freya’s gut told her that his double conflation—even if they were only just playing—was a bad idea, but she couldn’t say why. Probably, she should have argued about it, but it would have been her word against his, and the most likely thing to happen was that he would prove it couldn’t be done.
Only, he wasn’t proving that it couldn’t be done—or, if he was, he wasn’t admitting it.
I have been on a writing tear recently, and I have six new stories and one revised one up on Archive of Our Own.
“Unveiling the Goddess” and “The Storms of Ragnarok” are initial forays into a new setting I’ve been working on called Ouroboros. On Ouroboros everyone lives on a ring world that encircles a solar system with the same planets as ours--only each of the planets is inhabitable and has thousands of versions of itself that are run by two gods each. It’s a nursery for gods where humans ascend and learn (by running a planet) how to do the god thing, and the humans who live there (and don’t care about ascending) choose what version of each planet they have “in their sky” and experience the planets a bit like a fully immersive video game. Going along with my penchant for putting Earth mythology into a blender, “Goddess” takes place on a version of Venus run by Freya and Freyr, and “Ragnarok” takes place on a Mars run by Ares and Aphrodite.
The rest of the stories are either set in Pandemonium or are about people on their way to or from Pandemonium.
All of this is part of a big shared universe project I’m doing with Siren Tycho called Dreamwalkers, which plays around with wish-fulfillment in post-scarcity societies. People keep on saying it’s kind of like a fantasy version of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series without all the Special Circumstances stuff, which is one of the highest compliments I can imagine.
There’s already a community of writers forming around Dreamwalkers and starting to work in the universe. If you’re interested in joining us, drop me a line here.
UK publisher Three Drops Press has released White Noise & Ouija Boards: An Anthology of Ghosts and Hauntings, which includes my story “Lilith.”
“Lilith” was born during a short obsession I had a few months ago with ancient Mesopotamia. It’s inspired by a Sumerian version of the Lilith myth in which she began life as a wind spirit and grew into a goddess who helped women through childbirth before she became a vampire.
I love that this anthology contains poetry and flash fiction. The poetry, in particular, is some of the most haunting I’ve ever read.
So, I hope you’ll check it out!
Excerpt from “Lilith”:
She arrives as a breath of wind. Breathing on the hot forehead of the mothering one is all she can do, though they honor her still, pinning bits of cloth with her name to the sides of the tent. This honor is a charm to flatter her into staying away. “Death comes where Lilith the vampire breathes,” they say, but she doesn’t mind. Memory drifts like dunes in the place between the rivers where the floods never reach. Their memory of her has drifted far indeed, for she is old. She is so old. She is as one who has returned to her own beginning, before she was old, before she reached the height of her powers, before she was a goddess of childbirth, when the heaviness of air was an unspeakable burden, when she was nothing more than a compassionate breeze carried over the desert between the Tigris and Euphrates on the songs of herdsmen.
Once there was a girl named Lorelei, who lived with her grandmother on the banks of the Rhine. She was a beautiful girl since the day she was born. In addition to this, as she grew, her grandmother taught her the beautifying ways of plants and herbs. Among other things, she learned how, on the night of the full moon, she could rinse her hair with river water infused with certain herbs, making her long curls full and soft and glowing with moonlight.
Lorelei loved her grandmother, so every month she took her grandmother’s little birch cup, stuffed with herbs. She left her grandmother’s house as soon as it was dark and went upstream and down to the river in the light of the full moon. At the river, she filled the little birch cup with the water of the Rhine and set it on a rock to steep in the light of the moon.
She waited on the banks of the river all night. While she waited, she waded in the shallows in her nightgown. She danced in the water and sang moon songs about loves and lost loves until the first rays of the morning sun mingled with the light of the moon and her little birch cup was full of moonlight and the essence of her grandmother’s herbs. Then, she strained the herbs from the little birch cup with her fingers, squeezing them to extract the last of their juice. The remains of the herbs she flung into the river, thinking, perhaps, the river might have use for them. (To Lorelei, who knew the river best at night, the Rhine was a woman with flowing black hair that rain all the way to the sea.) With the little birch cup, she waded out into the river until her nightgown was soaked to her belly, and she rinsed her long curly hair with the water from the little birch cup. When she felt it had soaked enough, she lay back and allowed the water to carry her down, down, down to her grandmother’s house.
Lorelei went to the river each month under the light of the full moon just as her grandmother said until she was no longer a girl but a woman grown, and her hair was soft as well-worn flax and shiny as a polished silver spoon. As she grew older, she grew quieter. She had sung all the moon songs songs she knew of loves and lost loves and danced all the dances she knew.
Some in Lorelei’s position may have refused to wait in silence all night for the little birch cup to fill with moonlight. They may have said, “I have done what my grandmother said, and now my hair is soft and sleek, and it will stay so forever,” and they would not go to the river at all anymore. Lorelei loved her grandmother, though, so she continued to go. All night she sat and all night she stared into the black water.
In all the years Lorelei sang and danced on the banks of the Rhine, the Rhine had grown fond of her. Seeing her there, no longer singing but quiet and thoughtful, the river floated before Lorelei on the surface of the water dreams of loves and new loves to replace the songs of loves and lost loves she had already sung.
Lorelei watched, entranced, and began to weave new songs that had never before been sung. While she sat and watched and weaved and quietly sang and waited for the moon to fill the little birch cup, unbeknownst to her, a new pair of eyes watched from the riverbank. These eyes watched her.
The eyes which watched Lorelei belonged to her grandmother’s neighbor, an old widower who had recently married Alice Down-the-Lane, a woman not much older than Lorelei. For a whole night the neighbor watched and the night of the next full moon, as well.
Alice Down-the-Lane loved her new husband. When in the second month she was woken by the light of the full moon and found her husband not in bed, she went out of the house in her nightgown and followed the sound of newly-woven songs to the banks of the Rhine, walking softly on bare feet. There she found her husband sitting high on a rock on the banks of the river watching Lorelei.
Hearing Lorelei’s songs of loves and new loves, Alice Down-the-Lane believed Lorelei must be singing for her husband, and she sounded the alarm.
The night watchman came and, hearing the story of Alice Down-the-Lane, he took Lorelei by the arm and dragged her to the house of the bishop.
When they arrived, the moon light was only just beginning to mingle with the first rays of the rising sun. The bishop was still in his night shirt, but he was persuaded by the story of the watchman (who told him the story as told to him by Alice Down-the-Lane) to consider Lorelei’s case immediately.
“She was singing in the light of the moon,” the watchman said, “of loves and new loves. She was preparing a brew in a little birch cup to seduce the husband of Alice Down-the-Lane. Lorelei should be burned as a witch.”
The bishop was a good man, good enough, at least, to meet Lorelei before he condemned her to death.
Lorelei told the bishop of her grandmother, of the herbs she gave her to wash her hair under the light of the full moon, of the songs she sang pulled up from the river.
Seeing that Lorelei was good and loved her grandmother and did not know for her self the crafty ways of seducing men, he sent her to live in a convent.
Once again, the watchman took Lorelei by the arm. He did not allow her to say goodbye to her grandmother or return the little birch cup. He wrapped his cloak around her nightgown and dragged her by the river road that lead to the convent.
They walked this road for miles until it met a bridge that met a path that went off and away from the river. Knowing it was unlikely she would ever see the river again, Lorelei tore herself away from the watchman and ran to the middle of the bridge. She leaned over the rail to yell her goodbyes to the black haired woman whose hair was the Rhine.
Down the river floated the dreams the Rhine had yet to give her of loves and new loves. In the light of the sun, they glistened and shone on the surface of the water, like lovers dancing, beckoning her to play.
Lorelei was so seduced by what she saw, she dove over the side of the bridge and into the river.
The watchman ran and snatched at her to catch her and pull her away, but he was too slow and too late. He managed to catch only the end of her shiny, long hair, which slid through his fingers, slick as a cat. He searched for long along the banks of the river for Lorelei, until the moon waned and waxed and was full again, but no one ever saw her again.
There are many theories of what happened to Lorelei. Most say she drowned. Some say she became a water spirit who sits under the bridge that leads to the road that leads to the convent, who still sings songs of loves and new loves, luring men like the husband of Alice Down-the-Lane who cross to jump from the bridge and dash themselves to pieces on the rocks.
The truth is stranger than this.
When the light is just right, visions dance on the black surface of the water of the Rhine. If the visions pull you, and you dive into the dream, Lorelei will greet you and pull you down, down, down to depths so deep you come out the other side into the True Sea that holds a world of loves and new loves, and you join the dance.
Lilim have a hard time with gravity in Sade Hall. Like that annoying “tk-th-tz” consonant in Infernal that has to be learned as a child if you’re ever going to have hope of pronouncing it at all, relativistic gravity is something one simply has to grow up with. Some Lilim are fortunate enough to be born close to the border with Sade Hall or in communities of those who know the secret ways of travel between realms. Of these who sneak across into Sade Hall for parties as teenagers, most eventually get a handle on the idea that all directions are equal. However, given the hard reality of life in a realm four and a half lightyears across, the best most of those Lilim who first make it to Sade Hall as adults can muster is a stubborn insistence that “my way is the True Down” that will not be relinquished no matter how sexy the potential new playmate walking on “the ceiling.”
Raldr was not from the borderlands. He was from a village of vampires in the Garden in the shadow of the mountains, thousands of miles from both the border with Sade Hall and the sea. There were rumors that a reclusive academic at the university in a neighboring town could step from the shadows of his study into a conference room at a university in Sade Hall, but no one in Raldr’s village had ever been to Sade Hall or knew anyone who had—not even his wandering (by local standards) Uncle Reed. So little knowledge of the place had reached his village, in fact, that when he finally got to Sade Hall himself he was completely unprepared to step through the door onto a street lined with houses facing sixteen different directions.
By all rights, this should have unhinged him—especially since he managed to avoid the small army of Sade who dutifully cruise the border places between the Garden and Sade Hall looking for frightened Lilim. Many claim the greatest of all his mighty deeds was managing to walk all the way from the border with the Garden to the Library in Sade Hall without being “helped,” but he was determined to reach the library. It was inconceivable, after all, that a library would submit to the same chaos as the street. Lamp posts and even houses can be bolted down, but librarians, surely, would not stand for books flying everywhere, which was the only state of things he could imagine in a place where everyone gets to decide what Down is.
After only a few minutes of shock, he steeled himself. With a determined hope for order, he stepped forward, took a few steps and stumbled, took a few steps more and fell. From then on, he kept his eyes resolutely on the obsidian strip he decided was his walkway until he reached the library steps, reassuring himself in muttered obscenities that even Lilith herself, patron goddess of the Garden, wouldn’t stand for this.
It wasn’t until Raldr blundered into the library, pushed his way through the crowds of young scholars waiting for a tour, and reached the tunneled stacks that he stopped and looked up. Then his last hope for ordered laws of physics was stripped from him as he saw the tunnel of shelves, winding around without ceiling or floor, packed with books.
He dropped to his knees and wept.
“Sade’s balls,” a voice behind him said.
Raldr looked over his shoulder for the source of the profanity and saw a demon girl with grey skin tinged purple, curled horns, and a whip-like tail that lashed in agitation. Her fangs were shorter than his, but this didn’t reassure him at all. He’d heard of the demons in Sade Hall and the great magicians who bound them in thrall. His mother insisted before he left that he buy some anti-demon spray as soon as he crossed the border, but he had, of course, seen no such thing.
“You’ve got it bad,” the demon girl said. “Are you from the Garden?”
Raldr nodded and tried to discreetly wipe his tears away with his sleeve.
“How did you come all this way without learning to walk?”
“I walked,” Raldr said defensively.
“Lurched, more like,” she said. “I’ve been following you since I saw you outside Master’s house. You almost walked into the hibiscus, and I said, ‘That one’s not right, that Lilim.’ I’ve never seen a Lilim disrespect a sacred plant. It was a gift from Lilith herself, y’know.”
Most people would have apologized for endangering something so precious, but the casual mention of a demon-summoning magician getting a gift from Raldr’s own patron goddess made Raldr’s vertigo even worse.
“You’ve got it bad,” she said again and knelt in front of him and felt his forehead with her tail. “You’re not sick, at least. We’ve just got to get you walking Sade-wise. Can I help you?”
He nodded, and she held out a hand. He took it and allowed himself to be pulled up.
“It’s really easy,” she said.
“If you say so,” he said and started to tip.
She moved behind him and steadied him with her hands on his shoulders.
“It’s lucky you managed to get here,” she said. “The library is the easiest place for Lilim to learn, or so I’ve heard. They say the rivers goddess made sure when they were designing the place there would be a nice convenient path. See how there’s a strip of wood that goes in a spiral? Just follow that.”
“I can’t walk on walls,” Raldr said.
“You can, though,” she contradicted. “All you have to do is want it bad enough.”
Raldr whined.
“Or, you can jump over the books on this side, I guess,” she said. “Like rock hopping in a stream. You won’t be able to reach most of the books that way, though.”
“I think I have no choice,” he said.
“I’d stay and help you, but Master is calling me. We’re going on a ski trip, and he wants me to help him pack.”
Before he could say another word, a purple pentagram formed between them, and she was summoned off with reassurances that someone would be sure to come along to help the cute Lilim boy, waving her tail goodbye.
Raldr closed his eyes until the vertigo passed. Then, for the first time, he really looked around. The Library in Sade Hall was different than he expected. The way his family talked about it, he expected dripping castle walls and pale monsters hidden in black cloaks. Instead, the place was bathed in the cold, clean light of crystal lamps that illuminated walls lined with statues of literary and intellectual giants in artistically sensual poses. There were monsters enough, but most of them weren’t wearing very much at all, and many of them seemed as nice and approachable as one he had just met, far from the brooding monsters of shadow his Uncle Reed warned him about.
So, where would he find what he was looking for? Where were the candlelit stacks patrolled by yellow eyes that watched him from the shadows? He’d been dreaming of them ever since he cut his first fang. His dreams called to him, filled him with longing to leave the garden and roam the stacks with the thrill of dread that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
A place like that had to be in Sade Hall, and where else but the library? It was obvious the library was huge. It was possible that the atmosphere he was looking for existed in some remote corner. If so, he would definitely need help finding it.
He stumbled to the entrance and joined the group for a tour. This group, like every group of people in Sade Hall Raldr had seen on his journey, couldn’t agree on which way was up, and it was easy to tell who was comfortable with this arrangement. The native Sade seemed to prefer any Down but the direction Raldr thought was Down. They chatted comfortably on what looked to him like the wall and ceiling while the few Lilim huddled together in silence with green faces.
The tour began when the tour guide, a figure in a hooded cloak the color of smoke, floated up to the group. The guide’s hood was up, but Raldr could see under it just enough to see the empty eye sockets of a skull staring back at him.
This was promising, he thought.
The tour guide raised a skeletal hand and spun slowly so everyone could see from their angle. The chatter of the Sade died down to a murmur. When all was quiet, the guide stopped spinning and pointed with an open hand down a tunnel corridor labeled “Tall Tales of the Mountain People.” When it seemed that all interested parties had seen him, he floated off in that direction, spiraling effortlessly along the walkway as he went.
As soon as the group started to move, the Sade began to chatter again. This annoyed Raldr, who was far from the front of the pack and worried that he was missing what was being said by the guide. After walking for several minutes, they stopped in front of a statue of a woman in mountain garb climbing an ice wall, and Raldr pushed his way to the front and listened, but the guide gestured to the statue and said nothing. Raldr admired the statue while he waited for the guide to speak. It looked like the statue had been carved from blue ice. Standing in front of it made him feel like he’d been hit with a blast of cold, which was refreshing in the hot library, with its temperature tuned for those without clothes.
After a few moments of quiet contemplation from the tour guide, the group moved on without a word from the guide.
No wonder the Sade were talking, he thought.
From there, they passed a bright airy room labeled “The Counting Room.” In it were people consulting thick leather tomes, writing things down in ledgers with luxurious white feather pens. As Raldr stared, the people seemed to glow.
“Mostly scholars from Isla Virgo in there it seems to me,” a Lilim standing next to him said. He was fangless and seemed to be only slightly more comfortable in Sade Hall than Raldr. “Boring.”
Raldr agreed, but he wouldn’t have said so, though he admired the guy’s frankness. Straight-talk was a value among the Lilim he grew up with. With the Consent Protection active in the civilized areas of the garden, communicating your desires and intentions clearly and directly was a matter of great importance among his vampire kin. While those they called “foodies”—like the bored Lilim beside him—had no such requirement with their diet of fruit, most tended to see the value of “just say it and get on with it.”
The tour moved on, and Raldr was pleased to find he and the other Lilim, who introduced himself as Stayan, fell into uneasy step together.
“Have you been here long?” Raldr asked.
“Not long, but it feels like long, if you know what I mean.”
“I do,” Raldr said. “I walked straight here, and I feel like it took me fifty years.”
“Right? What are you here for?”
Raldr hesitated, not wanting to admit that he was there following a vision. “I’m not sure. Vague augury, I guess.”
“I’m here for the dragon,” Stayan said.
“What dragon?”
“You’ve never heard of the dragon in the library?”
“Never.”
“What rock did you crawl out from?” Stayan asked, and Raldr bristled. “Never mind. They say there is a dragon here. If you can convince the dragon to teach you, then you’ll come away with magic you can’t learn any other way.”
“Like what?” Raldr asked.
“Like flying, for one. Like our guide here.”
Raldr realized then that he had been distracted from the tour by the conversation. He looked for the guide and found him pointing to a sign over a door that said “Tamlin Root and Other Ecstasies.” Beyond the door was a greenhouse with its glass walls nearly covered in vines. He wasn’t missing much, he decided. His Uncle Reed grew better Tam’ than anyone.
“I assumed our guide was using magic carpet shoes,” Raldr said. “That’s the only way I know of to fly without wings.”
“They call them Light Shoes here, but no. Their way of flying is a secret. I think. Maybe, not even Sade knows.”
The thought of learning secret magic from a dragon was tempting, and Raldr almost asked if he could come with his new friend on his dragon hunt but the eyes in his dreams called him, and he said nothing.
The tunnel dipped in what Raldr and Stayan judged to be a generally downward direction and, for once, Sade Hall seemed to agree with them as the hall got darker and cooler as they walked. The subjects they passed got darker, too, and seemed increasingly to interest the demons. A few left the group when they passed the Hall of Night Creatures, which was so long Raldr couldn’t see the end of it. Then a few more peeled off to investigate Florentine Flogging.
“I think I picked the right tour if I’m going to find the way to the dragon,” Stayan said as he pulled an apple out of his pocket and bit into it with a loud crunch.
It had been a very long walk from the garden, and Raldr had only stopped long enough to fang a chef he’d seen smoking on his break outside a tavern in Maloy. Foodies eat well, so the chef was delicious and so into being sucked—or the hand job Raldr gave him while he did it—he had to abandon his shift after Raldr was done with his meal. Raldr could go for a long time on a meal like that, but that encounter was a very long time ago. It’d taken him weeks after that to follow rumors to the cave with the staircase that connected the Garden and Sade Hall. Even as he followed the spiral down in the dark through the roots of the mountains, it was several weeks more before he could be sure that they lead where he intended to the bottom of the sea and the door to Sade Hall. The whole time he was in that cave he saw no one until he found the wood and iron door that said “Sade,” and it was a full day’s walk from the cave to the library.
Raldr almost envied Stayan his apple.
“Are there different tours?” Raldr asked, trying not to think about his empty belly.
“Every tour is different,” Stayan said. “This place is so big, they pretty much pick a direction at random. Some people take a tour every time they come. This is my fifth tour. I think the guides have been on a botany kick. I’ve seen that greenhouse every time. Always makes me hungry just looking at it. Apple?”
Raldr barred his teeth to show his fangs, a common expression in the Garden that meant “I won’t eat food unless I absolutely have to.”
“Lucky you,” Stayan said. “If you go wandering off, you can stay in the library indefinitely. There’s a never-ending supply of ingenuous young Sade scholars, especially down here. Seriously, who learns about flogging by reading about it?”
The tunnel turned up again, and they both instinctually stopped.
“I don’t think a dragon is going to hang out any higher than here,” Stayan said and looked around. “Ah-hah, ‘Runes.’ That’s the first magic I’ve seen on this tour.”
He left the group and went a short way down the hall and picked up a book called “Healing Songs” and flipped through.
“This is in Draconic,” he said. “This must be the way.”
The group started to move away from them and Raldr hesitated. This didn’t look like the library he saw in his dream, but it could turn into it if the tunnel descended again. He peered down the tunnel of runes but couldn’t see the end of it or if it forked.
“What does your vague augury say?” Stayan asked. “Want to come? If you get hungry enough, maybe I’ll let you fang me.”
In his dreams, Ralder had always wandered the stacks alone, but there was no telling how deep in the library he would have to go. Maybe it would be better to have a friend. At least, for awhile.
Raldr jogged to catch up with Stayan who was already walking down the hall of runes.
This area of the library had the dusty vanilla electrical smell of dark magic and old books. It burned Raldr’s nose and made him sneeze.
“May the lust for blood and the fruit of the Tree preserve your health and keep you ever delicious,” Stayan said.
The words of the old Lilim Sneeze Blessing—blessings were always verbose by Lilim standards—made Raldr homesick.
“So, do you speak Draconic?” Raldr asked.
“I didn’t study Draconic in university or anything,” Stayan said “Since then, it’s been kind of hard to avoid.”
“I suppose, if you’re into hunting dragons,” said Raldr.
”Speaking of hunting,” Stayan said. “I’ve always wanted to know what it’s like to hunt as a vampire. My people were all foodies.
Raldr bristled. “Hunting” was a common enough term for what he did to get nourishment, but he preferred the word “fanging.” It sounded almost like “fucking,” which was closer to how he thought of what he did to get food than any of the predator-prey metaphors his relatives and neighbors used. It was easy for them to go on about the hunt and forget about “consent” and “ensuring win-win” when they literally took turns drinking each other. For him, it wasn’t so easy.
He had allowed a girl he liked to drink him once, but it felt wrong and made him feel no pleasure, just weak and sick. It took one look from the healer to determine that, while he had received all of the drinking and hunting ability of the vampire when he turned, something about his transition had left him without the gradual buildup of excess blood that made being drained feel pleasurable. After that, he allowed no one, no matter how much he liked them, to drink him. Everyone in his village said they understood, but they always looked at him funny after that, even if hunting-only vampires weren’t entirely unheard of. He invested a great deal of time and energy in learning how to make satisfying his hunger as pleasurable for his partners as possible, but facing the hard fact of his nature, that he needed blood without being able to give any in return, was never easy for him.
Still, it was obvious Stayan’s curiosity was just curiosity.
“I’m not really into hunting,” Raldr said. “At least, I don’t do the stalking element of surprise thing.”
To Raldr’s surprise, Stayan looked disappointed.
“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be hunted,” Stayan said, “I’ve always been too much of a wuss to go to the islands.”
Raldr couldn’t blame him. The islands were an oasis for hunters. They had a reputation for the fiercest predation in the Garden. The consent protection was almost all off even though they were miles and miles from the anarchy of the Wilderness, so you had to sign a waiver before you went in there. Raldr had wondered sometimes if that was where he belonged. It seemed to be the place for people like him to go, but he could never bring himself to do it.
His silence while he thought grimly about the islands must have given Stayan the wrong idea because Stayan said finally, “It’s the pain I’m afraid of. Vampires are cool.”
“It doesn’t have to hurt, you know,” Raldr said.
“No?”
“Not at all. If I spend awhile kissing your neck, you’ll—or my partner will feel kind of high. After awhile, my saliva makes their neck pretty numb. If I suck really gently, they aren’t even be able to tell when I stopped kissing and started fanging.”
They had reached a place where the tunnel split in two. They had to choose: “Draconic Poetry” or “Deep Word Magic.”
Raldr liked the sound of “Deep Word Magic,” but he knew Stayan would go for the Draconic section. Sure enough, Stayan brightened and walked toward it without thinking, but when Raldr didn’t keep up, he stopped and turned back and frowned at Raldr’s sad look.
“My vague augury says word magic is the way for me,” Raldr said. “You can walk with me for awhile if you want.”
“I would, really, Raldr,” Stayan said, “But I’ve been here five times already, and I’ve only got so many apples.”
Raldr held out his hand to say goodbye, and Stayan grabbed his wrist in the traditional way of the Lilim. Raider took his wrist in return and held it while they repeated together the Blessing Upon Parting for Those Who Travel:
May there be fruit worthy of your hunger
and beauty worthy of your lust
as you wander icy cliff faces or warm seas.
May there always be fixed stars to guide you
and wandering stars to inspire you
and the life that is our light attend your way.
The pulse of Stayan’s blood pounded against Raldr’s palms they said the blessing. He could have handled a quick goodbye, but Stayan’s steady pulse and the time it took to say the blessing was too much. A growl of hunger escaped Raldr’s lips as they finished speaking the blessing together.
“I’m sorry, Stayan,” Raldr said.
“You must be really hungry.”
Ralder nodded but wouldn’t meet Stayan’s eyes. He didn’t want him to think he walked with him because he saw him as a potential meal.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Stayan said. “You can fang me if you can catch me.”
“Sure!” Raldr said with surprise.
“But you have to do that numbing thing.”
“Okay.”
“And I’m going this way,” he called back as he ran toward the Draconic Poetry section.
Without pausing to grieve “Deep Word Magic,” Raldr took off after him.
Raldr sniffed the air. The smell of magic had followed him here, too, to the stacks of poetry. If anything, it had gotten stronger. As he walked, it got stronger still until he could barely smell the fresh sweat of his friend despite his hunger. The books, as he walked, got progressively older, too, until the space itself seemed to believe he was walking back in time. The crystal lights gave way to giant guttering candles that were placed further and further apart the deeper he walked into the library.
He was all need and so he did not notice how he instinctually put out his hands, feeling for body heat every time he reached a place where the tunnels forked. He didn’t even notice enough to be grateful that the tunnels branched like a tree, making it easy to find his way back, even though he had never been so far from home or the abundance of the Tree and his mother’s house.
His friend was tiring. Though he would not own them consciously, Ralder had the instincts and endurance of a hunter. He paced himself, trusting his senses to guide him if he lagged far behind. Stayan had no such instincts and sprinted as fast as he could and, when he tired of that, ran fast for the joy of running rather than any great strategy.
Stayan wanted to be caught. He had always wanted to be caught.
It was true. He had been chased many times by those chasing rumors and power, and they had traded with him—those who had something suitably precious to offer—but he had never encountered someone like this, someone who, he would later learn, caught the smoke of his desire for a hunter in the web of dream and followed it with the longing for that musty bookish darkness and his looming presence. He had seen this desire in Raldr’s eyes when he first asked what brought him to the library, and he knew it was a true longing that would drive a country Lilim away from the fresh Tamlin root and across the Garden and halfway across Sade Hall.
He was tiring and knew he would soon get clumsy, so he slowed and listened. Raldr was coming up fast. If he ducked into a fork in the hall, there would be just enough time to change.
Eventually, it got so dark, Raldr was forced to slow and feel for obstacles with his feet. If he could have seen himself, he would have been amused to find that in the darkness he really didn’t know which way was up or down, and he walked in a spiral while he thought he walked in a straight line.
He lost the heat trail and scent of his friend, but still he walked forward, too invested now in the hunt to stop. Then he heard the gruff pant of exhausted breathing and sniffed. The smell was wrong: lust, anticipation. Lovers, maybe, in the dark. Then he saw in front of him the yellow eyes from his dream, glowing in the candlelight. His nostrils filled with smoke and the scent of desire.
“Drink, Raldr.”
Hunger and instinct took over. Before he could think, Raldr sprang at the glowing eyes. Like a predator, he went for the neck instinctually, pulling them both to the floor. Only when his mouth was full of blood did his consciousness reel back and consider what he was doing: The voice was Stayan’s, but the blood he drank definitely wasn’t human. The skin against his lips was smooth and cold.
He pulled back and looked into the eyes of his friend and saw the cat-like pupils of a dragon.
Mara Colleen Banks thinks that author bios are usually pretentious and off-putting, but her student loans compel her to mention that she has an MFA in fiction whenever possible.
When she isn’t writing stories about naive vampires and Viking detectives, her current obsessions are: Growing the world’s most delicious sleepy-time herbal tea blend, asking her Tarot cards when the sun will come out in Portland, Oregon, and visiting every river in the Pacific Northwest.
Olav reached the chapel too late for spoils. It was obvious before he’d even stepped through the big red door that his brothers and cousins had stripped the place of anything portable and glittering while he raided the wine cellar and then the scriptorium, but he didn’t mind. He was content with the bottle of wine in his off-hand and the gilded pages and book covers under his arm.
Olav stepped into the chapel and took in the carnage: women and children and monks. Some were dead on their knees. Most were stacked in piles, bodies searched. The gold the raiders craved was in the monastery on the edge of town, but the violence was worst in the chapel.
It was always worst in the chapel. His people had been raiding along this coast for decades, but, wherever they went, the not-fighting and religious folk always gathered in the chapel. It puzzled Olav. The boats of the raiders were fast, but this village was close enough to the sea that they must have had warning. Why didn’t they run and hide in the woods?
At Olav’s feet, one of the monks, with his brown hooded robe and perfectly round bald spot, lay face down on the floor. His left arm was twisted at an odd angle and blood pooled at his right side. The monk didn’t move. The only way Olav knew he was still alive was his breath, exhaled in a hiss through clenched teeth. Olav raised his ax and sank it into the monk’s back as easily as if he had been lodging his ax in a log after a day of chopping wood.
It was an act of mercy. The cherry trees and rye fields were burning. The stores of food—meager for a village on such fertile land at midsummer—were raided and would barely keep the raiders fed through the long voyage home across the North Sea. Death for anyone left behind was inevitable. The only question was if death would come for the survivors fast or slow.
In truth, the entire raid had come too late—or too early. They’d carried away all the wealth from this village themselves only a few summers before, and the village and monastery hadn’t recovered a fraction of what they’d carried away last time. Olav had advised against the raid at the Thing, but his lord was a nostalgic man who liked doing what he’d done before, especially when what he’d done before filled his hoard with gold. This monastery had been surprisingly rich last time.
There were becoming too many last times for Olav. His arm was ax-weary, and he sat on a bench with his back to the wall and took a swig of wine, holding it in his mouth to fill his nose with alcohol to cover the stench.
In a room to the right of the altar there was a crash, and he stood quickly and raised his ax, but the noise was quickly followed by singing, and he sat back down. He recognized the voice—or lack thereof—of Snorre, his older sister’s son, and he sat back down. It was Snorre’s first raid, and Olav decided Snorre’s inevitable disappointment in the meager haul could wait until he’d worked off some of the heat of battle by throwing things around.
Olav would wait, he decided, for that moment to come and break the news himself. While he waited, he considered the treasure he’d taken from the scriptorium. It was book covers, mostly, a few beautiful pages illustrated with bright colors and gold ink, but the treasure that held his attention the longest was a page that was relatively unadorned. It contained only a single symbol drawn in blue and red that took up the whole page. Only the inside of the symbol was decorated in complicated knots and cords.
The people they raided were as fond of puzzles as Olav’s own people, and he searched the page for the hidden image that was likely twisted into the cords. The artist had, apparently, little faith in the intelligence of those who came after him and the riddle was given away immediately by two green dots representing eyes. The rope-wrought creatures were meant to be birds of prey fighting. The only question was if they were hawks or eagles, and that puzzle, Olav decided, came from lack of skill rather than the cleverness of the monk who drew it.
The ease of the riddle’s solving would have disappointed Olav were it not for the puzzle of the page’s central symbol itself. It was this puzzle that inspired him to take the page. The symbol was a bind rune, two characters from the runic alphabet laid over each other to make a single sign. The larger symbol looked like a P made with all straight lines. The smaller was an X centered on the stem of the P.
There was nothing unusual about runes, not even on this side of the water where the kings were all converted to Christianity longer than anyone alive could remember. Here the runes had been reduced to a local alphabet, but everyone in Olav’s village knew the magic of rulelore. They all had basic knowledge. They knew how to recognize the symbols. Young children sang the Futhark song and knew how to write their name and recognize the names of family members as soon as they were old enough to hold a knife and carve them.
Olav, though, was probably the only man in the raiding party capable of recognizing the symbol on this page as being made of runes at all. The runes that were bound together to make this symbol were old, terribly old. Year by year, it seemed the alphabet known to his people shrank, but his father and his fathers before him had, being especially dedicated to Odin, preserved the old letters for their own use in working spells.
He knew the bind rune he held in his hand was a spell of great power. He could feel it humming in his hand like the air before a thunderstorm. What it meant, however, eluded him.
He had never seen these runes combined in this way before. He knew they meant “peace” and “gift,” but what did that really mean? How could “peace” or “gift” protect your mead horn or your ass in battle. Most importantly, why would a Christian monk do Heathen rune magic?
His puzzling was interrupted by Snorre. Satisfied that he had raided what there was to raid of the room next to the chapel, Snorre crashed into the chapel, throwing an empty bottle of communion wine against the wall.
“You didn’t tell me this was a women’s cult, uncle,” Snorre said. “I searched the whole place and found nothing but dresses.”
“Last time we were here, I raided that room with your mother,” Olav said.
Olav’s sister, Vigdis, was a powerful healer who had, in her youth, traveled all over the northern lands and abroad, offering the skills she learned from their mother in exchange for hospitality. Now that she was older and her sons were grown or nearly grown, she accompanied them on raids, hanging back from the fighting until the worst of it was over. She was no fighter, but she knew things and was wise. She had traveled among the Christians, and she and Olav had spent a long time in that room while she showed him ritual objects and explained their significance.
“Your mother found a heavy cloak in there, stitched all over with gold thread,” Olav said.
“I don’t remember anything like that from the takings,” Snorre said. “I’d remember something like that.”
“You don’t remember because you weren’t there and I burned it before we got on the boat,” Olav said. “It reeked of magic.”
Snorre snorted. “I’m not afraid of Christian magic. If their magic was any good, we’d all be dead.”
Olav would have agreed with Snorre usually, but the page with the bind rune he still held in his hand made him feel uneasy. He frowned and didn’t answer. Snorre started to sing again and searched the altar. Olav studied the page for a moment and then flipped it over. There was nothing on the back. The book had been open to that page when he found it. A monk must have been working on it when the boats had been spotted. The page after it had been blank, too.
Then, Snorre stopped singing and shrieked. Olav looked up and saw Snorre was kneeling in next to the altar, hands in front of his eyes.
“I can’t see, uncle,” Snorre wailed. “I can’t see!”
Olav carefully tucked the mysterious page into his belt, but the half-empty bottle of wine and the rest of the book pages and covers fell to the floor as he ran to Snorre.
Olav crouched down to examine his nephew. He took his chin in his hand and tilted it up toward the light. Snorre’s eyes were milky white, like Olav’s grandmother’s had been when she went blind in old age.
“What did you get in your eyes?” Olav asked.
“Nothing!”
“You touched something and then touched your face,” Olav said, trying and failing to keep an accusing tone out of his voice.
“I didn’t touch anything!”
It was easier to blame the boy than admit the possibility that the Christian god had heard what Snorre said about his magic and struck down Snorre in his anger. Olav wasn’t like his sister. He didn’t know much about magic that wasn’t rune magic, but he knew this wasn’t elf shot. He suspected, even if a god was involved, without a lightning bolt or some other display of natural power, you didn’t catch a curse like this without touching something charmed.
“You touched nothing?” Olav asked.
“Nothing,” Snorre said. “Nothing but the cross on the altar.”
The altar cross lay on the floor next to Snorre, but crosses didn’t concern Olav. He had pulled a dozen crosses off a dozen Christian altars, and he had never been harmed for it by the Christian god or anyone else. The monastery still hadn’t replaced the gold cross that had adorned the altar last time they raided, and the brightly colored wooden cross they’d used to replace it had been broken in its fall, the arms of the cross lay on top of the back slanted like the rune Naudhiz. It was an omen for sure, but Olav didn’t think it was an ominous one. Naudhiz was just a protective rune. Olav himself was in the habit of carving it on his fingernails before a feast to protect himself from the morning after effects of too much ale. He was certain it hadn’t been the cause of Snorre’s blindness.
He looked around for spells, and he saw, carved on the altar three characters: IHS. The symbols weren’t exactly right. The S should have been angular instead of curved, and the bridge in the H should have been slanted instead of straight, but the magic was unmistakable. These, too, were runes: Isa, Hagalaz, and Sowilo. Ice. Hail. Sun. If the Christians knew what they were doing and carved these runes to cast a protective spell after the last raid, it would have worked against the Northmen with sick irony: It would have caused snow blindness.
He doubted Christians were capable of working a spell that complicated. His sister might know, though, and she was the healer.
Olav pulled Snorre to his feet and dragged him from the chapel, tipping over a stand of candles on their way out.
Seeing what had happened to Snorre, the raiding party fled with them, a few more torches thrown into the burning chapel for good measure.
Back at camp, Olav took Snorre straight to Vigdis’s tent. Seeing them, Vigdis snapped an order to her daughter Gudrun, who started frantically throwing herbs into a wooden bowl.
“What caused this?” Vigdis asked.
“Christian magic,” Olav said.
Vigdis looked into Snorre’s eyes and frowned.
“There is no such thing as Christian magic,” Vigdis said. “All those years in Francia, I never once saw one of their priests do a spell that was the least bit effective.”
“Their magic might not be effective,” Olav said, “But they’re learning ours.”
“Nonsense,” Vigdis said.
Olav pulled the page with the bind rune on it out of his belt to show her, but Vigdis was distracted teaching Gudrun. Why she was doing this now was beyond him. Their mother always said the first hour is the most critical time in an illness, and it had taken them nearly twice that long to drag Snorre back to camp. When Vigdis was satisfied with the herbs she and Gudrun had chosen, she added a few drops of water and started grinding the leaves into a green paste.
This part would take time, so Olav judged it safe to show her his find.
“Look,” he said, holding out the page with the bind rune on it. “These are ancient runes.”
“Wunjo and Gebo,” Vigdis said. Olav’s eyes widened in surprise to hear his sister say the names of these ancient runes. “What? You didn’t think I was paying attention when our father taught you? Those aren’t runes, though. That is the sigil of Constantine the Christian emperor.”
“I thought all emperors were Christians,” Olav said.
“In Francia, yes,” Vigdis said, “But Constantine was emperor in Rome, years and years ago, back before the Romans pledged fealty to the Christian god. That one, Constantine, pledged fealty first.”
“How do you know that?” Olav asked.
“I stayed in a monastery in Francia,” Vigdis said. “One of the brothers there was writing a book of history and wasn’t quite as interested in his vows of celibacy as he was in Roman emperors.”
“Even if what you say is true,” Olav said, “I’m telling you. I know a bind rune when I see one.”
“I’m telling you,” Vigdis said. “It’s Constantine’s sigil. The Christian god gave it to him before a battle and told him to have his men paint it on their shields. They did and they won the battle, and Constantine promised to convert.”
“The Christian god gave battle runes?” Olav asked. “The Christian god isn’t a god of war. That sounds more like something Odin would do.”
Vigdis shrugged and applied the paste to Snorre’s eyes.
“The Christians have only one god. I guess he has to be a battle god and bless the crops and everything. It sounds like an awful lot of work for one god to me, but why wouldn’t he know a little battle magic?”
“If you believe the Christian god knows battle magic, why won’t you believe it was one of his follower’s charms that did this to Snorre?”
“Why? Did you find a rune stave?”
“No,” Olav said, “But there were runes carved on their altar. Isa, Hagalaz, Sowilo. It looked to me like it could have been a spell to cause snow blindness.”
Vigdis looked at him for a long time and laughed.
“Those aren’t runes,” she said. “They’re one of the names of their god. You’ve seen them on all their altars, haven’t you?”
“No,” he said.
“Then you need to pay more attention. If you had, then, maybe you’d be able to tell me what got in Snorre’s eyes.”
“I got nothing in my eyes,” Snorre said.
“Nonsense,” Vigdis said.
“If they aren’t runes, then why do they look exactly the same as runes?” Olav asked. “Do you think the Christian god stole them from Odin like Odin stole the mead of poetry?”
“I don’t know,” Vigdis said. “I don’t care about who stole what from what god. What I care about now is that this ointment is going to itch if Gudrun doesn’t go out there and get me some balm. Go with her and watch out for her, will you, brother? When you come back you can galdr for Snorre.”
“The hill over there looks more promising, uncle,” Gudrun said.
The hill she pointed at was in the north, but Olav wanted to go back to the village, which was in the west. He was determined to go back and find evidence that he was right, that the rune spell on the altar had caused Snorre’s blindness, and night was coming on soon.
“I saw some along the path to the village,” Olav lied, and Gudrun scampered after him.
They saw the smoke from the village from far off, and Gudrun made a great show of being brave while reaching for Olav’s hand.
“Was the balm very close to the village?” she asked.
“Just outside it,” he said.
She said nothing but held his hand a little tighter.
When they reached the village, there was no balm. He lied and said he’d mistaken a patch of mint for balm in his haste. Gudrun urged him to go back with her to the promising hill, but he said there was something he wanted to get in the village, and it would wouldn’t take very long.
Normally, he would have instructed her to stay outside the village. There were no survivors. He was certain of it, and those who had survived and were capable of harming her were unlikely to still be around. After what had happened to Snorre, though, Olav was feeling more cautious and instructed Gudrun to stay close to him.
She had seen death before. The previous winter, a fever had burned through their village and killed many of the elders and babies, but that death had been clean. It had done nothing to prepare her for so many villagers in various states of dismemberment scattered around on the dirt paths around the houses.
“You can close your eyes if you wish,” Olav said, “But it’s well you see before you get much older what keeps your lord in gold rings.”
She stubbornly kept her eyes open and looked, brave like her mother.
It had been only a few hours since they left, but the chapel was already a smoldering ruin. The torches and candles must have sparked an inferno. Here and there load-bearing pillars stood holding bits of roof, but most of the roof was gone, reduced to ash and charcoal with the walls and bodies and wooden statues.
“What was this place?” Gudrun asked.
“This is where they worship their god,” Olav said. “Where they used to worship, anyway. I don’t think they’ll be worshipping much anymore.”
Here and there small fires still burned, and he and Gudrun threaded between them.
“Will they go to Valhalla?” Gudrun asked.
Olav gave her surprised and questioning look and then saw behind her that he was in luck. The covers and pages he collected had just happened to fall on a bare patch of floor, and the fire hadn’t caught them. He stepped over the rubble to collect them.
“Why do you ask that?” Olav asked.
“They died in battle,” Gudrun said.
“It wasn’t much of a battle,” Olav said, “And even if the War Father would take them, I don’t think they’d want to go. They’d want to go to their god.”
“Does the Christian god have a mead hall and battles every day?” Gudrun asked.
“I don’t know,” Olav said, glancing through the pages again, stopping on an image of a woman holding a small child. The child’s face was haunting. It looked too old to be the face of a child. “He might have mead halls and battles. I don’t think these folk were much for battles, though.”
“What are you looking for?” Gudrun asked. “Maybe I can help you find it like you’re going to help me find balm.”
“I’m not quite sure,” Olav said. “This is where your brother was injured, and I want to know what caused it. If we’re going to find it, it’s going to be that way.” He pointed to where the altar had been. “Don’t touch anything.”
She jumped deftly over the rubble and up the steps to the remains of the altar. There she walked in tight circles with her hands behind her back, bending over gracefully to examine the floor.
“I think I found the runes you were talking about, uncle,” she said.
He joined her and looked. The altar had been smashed by a falling beam, but the IHS had stayed together on a single piece of wood. Olav took out his knife and carved warding runes into the backs of his hands with the tip of his knife, cutting deep enough to draw blood. Thus protected, he wiped the blood off his knife with his shirt and picked up the piece of wood with IHS on it.
If his sister was wrong, and these were runes, and they had caused his nephew’s blindness, he knew how to fix it. This he did, scraping the letters off of the wood in a few quick gestures with his knife and threw what remained of the broken piece of wood into a nearby fire.
When Gudrun and Olav arrived back at camp, the whole place was full of excitement.
“Your sister is a great healer,” the blacksmith called to Olav from his makeshift travel forge. “Less than a day, and her boy’s already cured.”
“He’s wrong, isn’t he, uncle?” Gudrun asked. “I saw you carve those runes into your hands.”
Olav said nothing. The blacksmith was inclined to exaggerate, and he would see for himself.
Inside his sister’s tent, though, Snorre was as healthy as the blacksmith said he was. He looked up as soon as they entered the tent and called out to him, “Uncle!”
His sister sat next to him by the fire, grinning proudly. Then she saw Olav’s bloody hands and sighed.
“If you told me you were going to be doing that,” she said, gesturing at his hands with her pestle, “I would have saved some of Snorre’s ointment for you.”
She grabbed a handful of leaves from Gudrun’s basket and began grinding them.
“It was uncle,” Gudrun said. “Uncle did a spell and healed Snorre."
"Nonsense," Vigdis said. "Those on your uncle's hands are just protective runes."
Mara Colleen Banks thinks that author bios are usually pretentious and off-putting, but her student loans compel her to mention that she has an MFA in fiction whenever possible.
When she isn’t writing stories about naive vampires and Viking detectives, her current obsessions are: Growing the world’s most delicious sleepy-time herbal tea blend, asking her Tarot cards when the sun will come out in Portland, Oregon, and visiting every river in the Pacific Northwest.
There are very few dragons in the dictionary, any dictionary, even the ones written in Draconic. In the Old Draconic Lexicon (Standard Edition) there is only one dragon. She is referenced in the entry for “valkimlischstutlimkeit,” a word that roughly means “portentous” in the language of the Vena but which in Old Draconic literally translates “one who is like Valkhara.” Even here, Valkhara is buried deep in etymology because she is an old dragon, and even Old Draconic had a long time to evolve after she came into the fullness of her power.
Language itself seemed to flow around Valkhara while she stood before Princess Caitlyn’s throne in the courts of Isla Virgo. She wasn’t always the bearer of bad news, but it was, as her word in the Old Draconic Lexicon implied, an event when she deigned to leave her tower and her gardens and engage in what she privately called the “frippery of court.” Most courtiers only saw her make an appearance once or twice in their entire lives. While the dragon was a great friend of Princess Caitlyn and Dyeus, Valkhara much preferred to enjoy their company conversing in private, taking long walks in the flowering labyrinths or ensconced in her library surrounded by leather-bound books and old maps of Pandemonium and instruments for tracking the movements of the starry seas.
An appearance in court meant that Valkhara had news that could not wait. Since she mainly concerned herself with cycles that took decades or even centuries to unwind, a discovery that could not wait a few days to be shared in private and then announced in a suitably organized and official manner was news indeed. In the beautifully regimented court of the Vena, news that did not fit into the natural order of things was generally very bad news.
And so, even though it took only a minute or two for Valkhara to greet the princess, it seemed that aeons passed while the court waited. The “oh shit” feeling in the core of every courtier’s stomach sprouted, put down roots, went to seed, and produced three generations of offspring in the time it took her to speak.
“Highness,” she said and bowed her head to such a small degree courtiers would debate about whether or not she actually bowed for fifty years—though, none of this wondering would happen within earshot of Princess Caitlyn because she was bored of the Great Question of the Bow immediately.
“Auntie,” she cried and flew down from her throne and tackled the venerable gold dragon, wrapping her arms around Valkhara’s neck.
The tittering of court echoed off the gilded floors and alabaster walls and mile-high diamond windows. Auntie? Who would have thought? They say the dragon was her tutor once, but “auntie?” I wonder what I would have to do to warrant such familial affection. Perhaps, the princess is also a dragon?
Even the most stately dignitary would have been able to justify rolling her eyes at this gossip, but Valkhara merely flicked her eyes to the left and right, and Caitlyn got the message. Regaining her dignity and poise, she straightened her tiara and clapped her hands.
“There will be tea for my friend,” she said.
“Actually,” Valkhara said in Old Draconic. The word shook the windows and fell with gravity sufficient to completely silence the court. “I need to speak to your father.”
This she said in the old language because there were few without scales who bothered to learn the language of the dragons, and those few with reason to know the old tongue were close enough to the throne to know the true order of things.
Caitlyn was the true ruler of Isla Virgo, but her father Dyeus delighted in managing the minute details required to keep the beauty and elegance of the realm delicious for all, and these tasks—which would have been pure drudgery for Caitlyn—he performed in private while she joyfully performed the public work of court diplomacy, work which would have filled him with annoyance.
It was an arrangement that pleased the two of them, but word of it would have greatly scandalized the courtiers who preferred to believe that the culture and refinement they all enjoyed came to them from the Tree of Knowledge as effortlessly as breathing.
Caitlyn, however, spoke Old Draconic flawlessly and asked in the ancient tongue, “Is it very bad?”
“Rocks fall,” Valkhara answered.
Caitlyn looked grim. There was no word in Old Draconic for planet because Old Draconic was older than planets. Every time something in the sky moved, Auntie was reduced to the ridiculous “rocks fall.”
“Really, auntie,” Caitlyn said in Slightly Less Old Draconic, “We need to get you a new dictionary.”
“I am a walking encyclopedia, my dear,” Valkhara said, and Caitlyn smiled. Humility was not one of her family’s values.
Caitlyn clapped her hands again.
“Tea for all,” she said, returning once more to the language of the Vena, “Except for my friend and me. We visit Dyeus.”
Dyeus was in his inner courts counting. He counted most things most days, but today he was counting the couples in Isla Virgo. It was finicky business this counting, for it was difficult to say what exactly counted as a couple. Was it better to count a closed triad as a single couple or two couples or three? Three technically was the most accurate counting since three distinct relationships existed in a closed triad, but it threw his accounting all off because one couple implied two people. With three couples, one would assume six people, but in a triad there were half as many, which made it very difficult to know exactly how many new Leaf Born to order for those who lacked affection.
“How may these align?” he wondered, “And need I direct simply ones with missing partners into contact with each other or order new?”
He mused on this question and how he might order his books when Valkhara lumbered into his inner chamber with Caitlyn in tow and then stopped and stared. And stared. And stared.
“Greetings, dragon,” Dyeus said.
Most dragons would have been insulted by being called “dragon,” but Valkhara was touched by the gesture, believing (rightly) that this term of address coming from Dyeus was meant to imply she represented all that was civilized, ordered, and counted in dragon-kind.
“I would invite you to sit,” he said, gesturing to the cushions that luxuriated at precise angles to his throne so that the one who reclined had a pleasing view of both himself and the rose garden through the diamond walls that wrapped in a perfect arc behind him, “But I know you prefer to stand.”
“You may prefer to stand, too, when I have delivered my message, my friend,” Valkhara said.
This was what he was afraid of.
“Very well,” Dyeus said. “Speak.”
“I have been following the movements of that star,” she said. “The one that wanders.”
The star in question was not a star exactly, and it was not usually in Valkhara’s nature to be imprecise, but Dyeus knew she refused to speak the name aloud—though it sounded almost noble in Old Draconic—because the pun displeased her. There were many planets in the skies of Pandemonium, so technically there were many wandering stars, but he knew when she spoke of “the wandering star” she meant one wandering star in particular.
Dyeus sat up a little straighter. He had a particular fondness for this star.
“I have been calculating that one’s movements,” Valkhara said.
“Just so,” Dyeus said with surprise. “And what have you learned?”
“Much of its cycle,” she said.
“You are mistaken,” Dyeus said. “That one has no cycle.”
He counted all things, but even he didn’t count the movements of this star. Everyone in Isla Virgo, especially one as attentive to the movements of the stars as Valkhara, knew the motion of the star was entirely erratic, though, only he knew why. This common knowledge, apparently, was not enough to keep her from trying to see order in its movements.
“You are mistaken, highness,” she said. “Its cycle repeats every 6.7225 million years. It has completed nearly three complete cycles in my lifetime. I have counted two and a half of them.”
Few things shocked Dyeus, but this revelation left him momentarily speechless. There was a very good reason for the chaotic nature of that one’s movements, but he could not doubt that if Valkhara said she learned the cycle of the wanderer, she was old, irascible, and thorough enough to find a true pattern even in this.
“Very well,” he said. “I congratulate you on your great discovery. We will declare a holiday.”
“You may wish to wait,” Valkhara said. “The discovery of that ones orbit is not the reason I bring you news in this way. My news is of its sudden true erratic movement.”
“You have my sympathies for the sudden loss of a theory so long in the making, but I suspect it may be the wandering star truly is erratic.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “I will keep counting. In the meantime, I have come to tell you of an irregularity that—you see, it is not generally erratic in this direction.”
“Where is this direction exactly?”
“The rose garden behind you in approximately fifteen seconds.”
Dyeus stood and turned to look behind him. A roaring like the sound of a thousand bass guitars ricocheted off the curved diamond windows and alabaster walls and labyrinths and precisely trimmed rose bushes as a great gray sphere plummeted toward the rose garden, picking up speed as it went until it suddenly stopped 8.253 feet above the ground. Through the windshield, two sets of arms were just visible, flailing mad waved greetings.
“Greetings, Twins,” Dyeus said.
Mara Colleen Banks thinks that author bios are usually pretentious and off-putting, but her student loans compel her to mention that she has an MFA in fiction whenever possible.
When she isn’t writing stories about naive vampires and Viking detectives, her current obsessions are: Growing the world’s most delicious sleepy-time herbal tea blend, asking her Tarot cards when the sun will come out in Portland, Oregon, and visiting every river in the Pacific Northwest.
