Beneath Ceaseless Skies #233 Read online

  Issue #233 • Aug. 31, 2017

  “Across Pack Ice, a Fire,” by Marissa Lingen

  “Gallows Girl,” by Mel Kassel

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  ACROSS PACK ICE, A FIRE

  by Marissa Lingen

  The icon of the saint glistened in the gaslight like a map of empire, and not Solveig’s own empire. The green and red mineral paints for the verdant background, the saint’s lips and wounds, were from her own lands, of course, iron and copper hauled by horse cart from the famous mines to the brand-new railways and then traded to the Veralduki icon painters to the east. Those pigments were usually used to ground spells, to anchor them.

  The blue, vivid blue, gleaming blue, marking the saint’s robe: that was ground lapis, from the Veralduki empire itself, as was the shimmering lead white of the spirit attending the saint as an ivory gull. One was for summoning, the other for cleansing. She had used both many times in the years she had been the prince’s personal sorceress.

  But the gold, the gold leaf that picked out the halo and made it shine—that was dragged out of the ground, at no small human cost, in the contested lands of the Kvenmark in between.

  That was where the trouble lay.

  It was fitting, Solveig supposed, that the troublesome gold part of the icon’s spell should come from the troubled Kvenmark. Gold was always a wild card in sorcerous workings, and the modern sorcerers who attempted to apply natural philosophy to their methods had not found a way around that. It would take her a great deal of study to work around the gold, with the spell she had in mind—and at the moment her mind felt hollow, emptied out by the very loss that sparked her desire for revenge, or justice, or both.

  Solveig swallowed her brennivin all at once, barely tasting the caraway as it burned its way down her throat. Behind her there was a tiny rustle, more felt than heard. She turned.

  The refugee girl Noora was there. Thin and sallow from her long illness, she would never have been a beauty at the peak of health, uneven features, snaggle teeth. The black silk mourning frock Solveig’s mother had bought for Noora hung on her like a pall. Her three-dimensional pallor made the icon on the wall look like humanity’s perfection, the actual child—sniffling, hungering—a copy.

  Several people had whispered in Solveig’s ear that they wouldn’t blame her if she hated Noora for carrying the Veralduki-crafted disease that had killed Per. A dirty peasant child was bad enough, they hinted; a diseased one, far more than anyone could be expected to countenance. But Solveig only saw Noora’s hunger for love, revenge, and as many good meals as she could put in front of her. Per had been the one who wanted to take in a refugee child. Solveig couldn’t betray his most loving impulses, even when they had betrayed him.

  Solveig put her arms out, but Noora did not come to them for a hug. Solveig turned the gesture into an open-palmed shrug. “I couldn’t stand the funeral crowds either. Have you eaten?”

  Noora shook her head miserably.

  “You must eat. I must eat.” Solveig felt the truth of it as she stood. A long day of sympathizers and well-wishers, shaking hands, having her cheek pressed by them, topped by brennivin, left her shaky and empty. If the child had only come for an embrace, Solveig could have leaned on her. But Noora was not like that. “Come. We will face them together, and fix ourselves plates.”

  Solveig knew that they could not help but make an entrance among the mourners. Only a few of them were talking of Per himself, what a good man he was, what a good doctor, what a good friend. The rest were speculating as to whether his widow the sorceress was taking it well, what she would do with the ugly sickly little foreign child, whether the neighbors should buy extra magic shielding against the grief of Solveig Martasdottir.

  Solveig knew that those who should fear her magic were not her immediate neighbors. But she could not blame them for seeing that she was holding herself together by the very narrowest of margins, even if they had not troubled themselves to understand precisely why. She put her hand on Noora’s shoulder protectively—steadyingly—and went in.

  Her mother, a grey and rigidly upright copy of Solveig, swept over to them. “My dear. My dears.”

  “We need food,” said Solveig. “We need food, and we need—” Her eyes scanned the packed salon. “Mama, I can’t, I can’t have all these people. It has been too much already.”

  “I can feed the child,” said Marta. “There’s plenty on the smorgasbord yet, I will take her to make a plate.”

  Solveig bobbed her head. “And I will clear the people out.”

  Marta looked dubious but focused her attentions on the refugee child, on thin slices of cheese and apple and crisp rye cracker breads, on trying to coax her into eating richer things, crepes stuffed with cheese and salmon, little nut pastries that had appeared without Solveig requesting them.

  Solveig forced herself to turn from marveling at the way that her servants had handled things, to speak to the guests quietly, politely, decorously. “So sorry,” she murmured to each. “Thank you so much for your support in this difficult time. But I’m afraid the family needs some quiet. There is so much to attend to. So sorry. So sorry.”

  They took the hint reluctantly, leaving in clumps and clusters, clucking to themselves about how thin she and the child looked, how pale. Whether it was safe, even now, for her to keep the child in the house. What she might be driven to do—though their speculation fell woefully short of her own plans.

  Finally she reached the secret heart of the gathering. On her own favorite deep red velvet divan, eating the last of the grapes he had sent for Per when Per was sick, was the prince. Solveig bowed her head into the least curtsy politeness required, feeling that she might tip if she bent any lower. Feeling that she would break.

  “My lord,” she murmured.

  “Oh, do not stand on ceremony, Solveig Martasdottir, not in your own house, not on this sad occasion,” said Prince Eugen. “Per Helgisson was our faithful servant. We mourn him as you do.” Though the prince was impeccably correct—even, by his own lights, compassionate—Solveig found his unctuous tone grating, and she had to force herself to respond graciously.

  “My lord, I fear that it has been a long day for me,” said Solveig. “While your presence honors us all....”

  Prince Eugen got to his feet in one smooth movement, kissing Solveig on both cheeks before she knew what was happening. His moustache was waxed, something Per had never done no matter how he had moved in the prince’s inner circles. It poked at her stiffly. She stifled the urge to slap it—and him—away.

  “Poor dear lady,” he said. “We feel your loss as our own. Think no more of it, but come to the palace again when you have decided that you are ready to serve again.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” said Solveig softly.

  The prince’s departure hastened the exodus of the rest of the mourners, sincere and otherwise, and soon it was only Solveig and her mother, and little Noora, who took the prince’s spot on the divan and earnestly munched her apple slices.

  “When will you serve again?” asked Marta.

  Solveig sank down next to Noora. “Mother, I don’t know.”

  Marta handed Solveig a plate with all the same things on it as she had given Noora. Solveig picked at the cheese. “The prince won’t forgive you the little intruder forever. For now Per’s death has wiped the slate clean.”

  “I cannot think right now.”

  Marta steepled her fingers together. “You are a sorceress. If there is anything I have taught you, it is that sorcery means you are never exempt from thinking. Not in illness, not in exhaustion. Not even
in grief.”

  Solveig closed her eyes, swaying a little as the room spun around her. She knew Marta was right. But it was too soon, far too soon. When Noora was fully well—when it had been more than a week since Per’s death—when she could eat cheese without someone having to hand it to her, tell her how much cheese was the right amount of cheese. When she could look at the prince without wanting to scream at him for not using his famed charm to intercede and stop the war between his neighbors, to keep the atrocities from spreading. When she was absolutely sure that her wrath would not fall on him instead of the Veralduki empire, where it belonged.

  In the old days, she had trusted the prince. She had thought that working for him and traveling with him would mean that he would listen to her and Per. But that had been before the Veralduki Empire had decided to take the Kvenmark lands for their own, before Prince Eugen and his parents had decided to let it happen without lifting a finger. Before a war had torn the neighboring countries apart while Solveig and her compatriots watched. The incomparable cold-weather gardens of Jakani burned, the Porvian waterdance troop held hostage to the Veralduki emperor’s sadistic whims. The suffering and disease that radiated from the trenches of the North Kven front. She had thought that being part of Prince Eugen’s entourage meant she could influence him toward greater justice in the world. She had thought that her years of service meant he would listen. At the very least, she had believed that the prince she served would have brought a smaller kind of justice to her husband’s killers.

  She would have to find another way to get those kinds of justice.

  Solveig opened her eyes. Her mother and Noora were still there. Per was still dead. The plate still looked impossibly full, and far more distant than it ought to be.

  But between the icon upstairs and Noora on the divan with her, Solveig began to understand how, exactly, she might achieve her revenge on her husband’s distant and faceless killers.

  The icon was a relic of their travels with Prince Eugen. In those times, Solveig and Per had sailed the waters of the far north in the prince’s personal guard on his boreal exploration ship, and her skills as sorceress and his as physician had been indispensable to His Highness in ways she could never have predicted.

  One winter they were marooned in the pack ice off the northern Veralduki coast for several weeks.

  The peasants had heard that there was a rich Fendik ship, and three of them came together, trudging across the ice. The captain lowered a ladder down to receive the Veralduki callers, who were wrapped in enough layers to look like walking rag bags to Fendik eyes, in their tidy furs and sweaters.

  “They’re looking for a doctor,” the translator reported.

  Prince Eugen looked at Per inquisitively. “You don’t have to go. It’s filthy down in those little towns, you could catch anything.”

  Per drew himself up indignantly. “I am a doctor. And my wife is very good at disinfectant spells.”

  The prince shrugged. “Have it your way.”

  Solveig walked out of the prince’s cabin with Per, out on the cold deck with the interpreter and the ragged Veralduki peasants. “Do you want me to go with you?”

  He kissed her. “You can stay here where it’s warm if you like. If there are any magical illnesses I can send a runner for you, but in a village this poor, I expect it’ll just be malnutrition, filth, unlanced boils, unset bones. Nothing you need to stand around watching.”

  Solveig had been relieved, but only briefly. Soon she realized she had nothing to do all day but stand on deck in the cold, watching the ivory gulls wheel and waiting for Per to return. She did not consider this a grand bargain.

  Per came back hours later, bags under his eyes and a large rectangular bundle under his arm. He bade the modest among the crew not to watch, for he stripped to his smalls, whistling though the wind came across the pack ice, and dropped the clothing he had worn to be burned in a fire upon the ice rather than letting it on board ship. His smalls he sent to the galley to be boiled.

  “I could have decontaminated those,” said Solveig, surveying her naked husband with mingled dismay and satisfaction as he scrubbed himself.

  “A waste of spell ingredients,” he replied. “I’m glad you didn’t go, Sol. It was grim. It was dire. Those poor people.”

  “But you did some good.”

  “Oh, plenty of that. They insisted on paying me, poor wretches.”

  “With what? Contaminated eggs and their firstborn children?”

  He gestured at the wooden rectangle, whose rags had gone overboard with his clothes. Solveig turned it away from the wall and gasped. It was a glistening icon of Sankt Vidkun.

  “It was what they had. The village all together.”

  “You can’t take an icon from a village sorcerer. I am one, I know how dangerous our gifts can be. Even little children know, gifts from a sorcerer can be blessing and curse in equal measure. What if it’s a trick, a trap?”

  “Be calm, love, it was not their sorcerer. They are too poor to have one. It was in their church, and I healed enough of them—”

  “You can’t let them give you their church icon, Per!”

  “I can’t not let them, Sol. They were too proud to let me do it free, they were beside themselves.”

  Solveig turned to the icon, examining it closely. “Not exactly going to make a showing in the Academy, but beautiful in its way.”

  “We’ll keep it. Of course we will, we have to.”

  It had hung in their house for seven years, the beginning of a war, the arrival of a child—but not their own—and Per’s death. Solveig had tried not to think of the way that Per and the prince had fought, long into the night, after the icon came on board. About what to do about the Veralduki. About whether the prince could continue to sail around regarding the world at an impeccable distance. Per had lost. The prince, inevitably, had won. And now Solveig looked to the icon for her answers.

  But there was still Noora to tend to, in the month it took Solveig to crack the puzzle that occupied all her days: how to use the icon to house the spell that would avenge Per. Despite the gossip of half the malicious souls at the funeral, an eleven-year-old girl was not an inconvenient parcel to be shipped back and forth between countries as it became politically expedient. She had to be fed, though she did not want to eat after her long illness. She had to rebuild her strength, though she was listless after the death of her protector.

  Nor did Solveig herself have much more interest in these activities. It was Marta who marched them outside into the bracing winds for walks, Marta who made sure the servants had instructions for preparing all of Solveig’s childhood favorites, simple things that might not daunt Noora’s foreign tongue.

  It was Marta who confronted her daughter in her workshop as she tried to solve the problem of the icon.

  “Not more lapis,” said Solveig out loud. “More lapis would give them an actual plague. No plague. We have had enough of plagues.”

  “Solveig,” said Marta.

  “And not phthalocyanine blue, that’s too modern, too contained, it’s got to be contagious.”

  “Solveig!”

  “In a minute, Mother.”

  “Whatever it is can wait until you and Noora have had a walk in the fresh air with me.”

  Solveig blinked at her. “Oh dear no. You take Noora for her walk now. I have to apply—ah, ochre, yellow ochre—and then I will have this all finished. And I can go to see the prince about Noora’s and my journey.”

  “You and Noora are going on a journey? To the country, perhaps? It would be good for you to—”

  “To a country.”

  “You’re not taking her back to Kvenmark.”

  “No, Mother.” Solveig took a deep breath. “To the Veralduki Empire.”

  It took three diagrams and an hour and a half to convince her mother that she had not taken leave of her senses, by which point Noora had taken her coat back off and was building a fort with the beautiful tasseled pillows in the sitting ro
om. Marta decided that a game was close enough to the kind of healthy exercise she wanted for the child and joined her at it.

  Prince Eugen took less time and fewer diagrams than Marta, which was a great relief, as Solveig did not intend to offer him any, nor anything like the truth. He greeted her with smiles and a samovar of chocolate.

  “Prepared to rejoin my service, Solveig Martasdottir?” asked the prince, once again bristling her cheek with mustaches.

  “I have one final task, but I think your highness will approve,” said Solveig.

  He raised a well-manicured eyebrow and circled his hand for her to continue.

  “I fear that my husband and I—members of your highness’s retinue—taking in a refugee was politically inexpedient for you, for the country,” said Solveig. “I would like to make a gesture toward retrieving your neutrality, if I may—or rather toward demonstrating that yours was always there, that any lapse in neutrality was ours alone. I would like to return the icon given to my husband by the Veralduki people when we were trapped in the ice.”

  Prince Eugen clapped his hands. “What a thoughtful gesture! Return to them the icon that your husband received, demonstrate to them that you bore no ill will toward the Veralduki people or their government, merely that your husband felt a sentimental attachment to an orphan child.”

  Solveig forced a smile. “Just so, my lord.”

  “Brilliant! And then you will return to service?”

  “Stronger than ever, my lord. And to further the cause of diplomacy, I will bring the child with me. A Kven child bringing a gift to Veralduki people—surely this will help her people to understand that they ought to sue for peace.”

  Prince Eugen gave her a long look. “We cannot take a position in this conflict.”

  “Peace is always the goal of a neutral state, my lord.”

  “I suppose it is. Well then. Return safely, and further the goal of peace.”

  Solveig curtsied neatly and took her leave, her divided skirts swirling around her. She managed to suppress a smile of triumph in case anyone was watching. There was a long and arduous task ahead yet, so triumph was premature in any case.