Short Fiction

Short Fiction, The Light Between Worlds

Winter Between Worlds

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Since my first novel, The Light Between Worlds, released two years ago, there’s one character I’ve been asked about by readers on a regular basis.

Tom Harper.

Born into a farming family in the Yorkshire Dales and sent to expensive schools by a wealthy uncle, Tom is a bit of a fish out of water. So he gravitates quite strongly to the novel’s other fish out of water, Evelyn Hapwell, a girl caught between two worlds. Sensitive and poetic yet also deeply practical, Tom’s been a reader favorite since the beginning, and everyone wants to know how he fares after being parted from Evelyn without any answers as to what happened to her.

I’ve always known Tom is alright. Tom is the sort of person who makes his own life alright, and the lives of those who are lucky enough to grow close to him. But I’ve never really known what to say to readers about him, beyond “he’s fine, he’ll land on his feet.”

Until now.

Because as it turns out, if enough people ask the same question over and over my brain will keep working on it, quietly, in the background, and eventually come up with an answer.

So here, dear readers, is a little glimpse at what happens to Tom. It’s not a particularly spoilery piece, if you haven’t read The Light Between Worlds, but I think your understanding and enjoyment of it will be greater if you have 🙂 Either way, I hope you like the following.

WINTER BETWEEN WORLDS
A Light Between Worlds Short Fiction

Image credit: Desmond McCarthy

There was a certain stillness that fell over the Yorkshire Dales on winter nights. The quiet sank down to your bones, untangling knots and righting old wrongs. It cut to the heart of you, leaving silence there as well, until you were no more than shadow and breath. And then, when you’d come to the very end of yourself, the lowing of a cow or bleating of a ewe or distant puttering of a lorry would cut through the calm and remind you that you were alive, in a world full of ordinary and astonishing things.

Tom had always loved the cold, clear breadth of winter nights in hill country—the way the sky hung so thick with stars that the Dales themselves seemed, vaguely, to shine.

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone, he thought automatically to himself as he ducked out of the kitchen and into the chilly outdoor air.

It had been a year of changes—even the farmyard hadn’t escaped untouched. Electric light shone, warm and yellow, from the open door of the barn. Tom stopped for a moment and surveyed the prospect with satisfaction and a touch of pride. He’d paid for the update himself, with some of the money he’d been left by poor Uncle Morris. His parents and Meg had been dead set against it, but Tom had insisted—he’d felt worse over Uncle Morris going than he expected to, and needed to do something that felt good and right and productive with what he’d been given.

There was still enough left over for school anyhow, though after a term Tom thought less of Oxford than he had of St. Joseph’s, even. But this was what Uncle Morris had wanted for him, so he’d see it through to the end. Jamie and his friend Arthur were at the same college and made it bearable, for the most part, and on the less bearable days, there was Ella to write to.

Stuffing his hands into his pockets and hunching his shoulders, Tom glanced along the lane. He could just see the lights from the Sutcliffe farm, down in the valley, and wondered idly what Ella might be doing. Overseeing the chaos of her younger sisters clearing away the supper dishes, perhaps, or brushing her black hair while one of the younger girls regaled her with a story from school. He was certain of one thing—Ella Sutcliffe would not be standing out in the cold, sentimentally staring up the hill towards the Harper farm. That wasn’t her way. She was practical and good and boundlessly generous and she felt, to Tom, like home. He liked her immensely. Might more than like her, if he gave himself half a chance.

But it was early days yet, and Tom had grown a bit cautious when it came to his heart.

Carrying on to the barn he looked up and down the center aisle, ensuring all was well. The cows had been milked by Meg and his father several hours back, and stood in their places, dozing or placidly chewing mouthfuls of hay from their racks. A jet-black barn cat blinked slyly at him from where it lay, paws tucked beneath it on one of the loft steps. Time for lights out.

The night comes in on little cat feet, Tom thought to himself, smiling at the misquote. Flipping the switch beside the door, he plunged the barn into deep shadow.

And hesitated.

Down at the aisle’s far end, one of the smaller doors stood open. It looked out onto nothing—only empty hills to the north that stretched for bare miles between the village and the farms of Edgethorn, and the market town that came next. A shiver ran through Tom—of cold and anticipation and something he didn’t fully understand.

Moving quietly down the aisle, he stopped on the threshold of the open door. Not far away—only ten paces or so, at the edge of the hilltop—stood a familiar and impossible figure. Her back was to him and moonlight gleamed on her fall of golden hair. The vision had a dream-like quality about it, for hadn’t Tom conjured up this meeting in his mind a hundred times? Yet it had never been quite like this. Never at home, outside the familiar environs of the barn. Never on a winter’s night, but always in a summer forest. And the Evelyn of his imagination was aloof or fey by turns, whereas this Ev spun on her heel and went wide-eyed at the sight of him, letting out a strangled gasp.  

“Oh, Tom,” she managed to say, and then one or both of them moved—Tom couldn’t be sure which—and they were holding tight to each other, as if they’d never let go. She smelled of woodlands and longing and other worlds, his Evelyn, and he would not have broken the quiet between them for anything.

So they stood together for a very long time, until she spoke first.

“I was thinking of you,” Evelyn said, face pressed to his thick wool jumper, her words coming out slightly muffled. “I was thinking of you and hoping so hard that you’re alright. It’s winter, back—back home, and I still get a bit downcast in winter, and I’ve been feeling ever so badly about you. About not saying goodbye. You have been alright, haven’t you Tom?”

“I am now,” he said roughly. “But Ev, what…”

His voice trailed off. He wanted to ask a hundred questions; so many that they all crowded together at the back of his throat and refused to be spoken. Looking at her, he didn’t suppose it mattered. She’d always been a step apart from the rest of the world—even if she gave him answers, he might not understand.

And anyhow, Ev had asked him something first.

Had he been alright, not just in this moment, but in the one before? Maybe not entirely, but he’d been getting there. It took time—he’d needed years to feel himself again, after losing his brothers in the war. Now it wasn’t just Ev’s absence throwing him off balance either—there was poor fussy old Uncle Morris who he’d thought little of in life, and now found himself unaccountably missing in death. Losing someone wasn’t the sort of thing you stopped feeling, it seemed, no matter how often it happened. But you did learn the shape of it. Learned that grief came and went in waves, that it got better just when you thought it might never fade.

I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never to have loved at all.

“I’m going to be alright,” Tom said with nod. “I’m not quite there yet, but I think it’s just around the corner. What about you, though, Ev? I don’t have to know where you’ve gone, or what happened, but I wish you could tell me that you’re alright, too.”

“I am.”

As Evelyn spoke she stepped back, out of the circle of his arms, and smiled. There was a softness and a gentleness about her, a fragility, that he remembered well. But she wore it better now. She stood carefully, mindful of her own borders and difficulties, whereas before she’d so often seemed anguished and unsettled, as if beneath her skin there lay nothing but splintered glass.

Evelyn glanced down the slope of the hill to where a copse of trees shook and swayed in a sudden wind. Shadows skittered about between the trees, dancing, colliding, forming the ghostly shapes of hinds and harts.

“You’re sure you’re not unhappy?” Tom asked desperately, because already, it felt as if she was slipping away. As if he’d blink and find her gone. And he realized, with a sudden pang, that this was the thing he’d been waiting for. To know that Evelyn Hapwell, wherever she was, was not unhappy, but glad. If he could be certain of it—certain down to his soul—he could get back to the business of living again. Back to being whole. “Promise me you’re not, Ev. I hated knowing you were unhappy before.”

She looked at him, and the force of her gaze ran through Tom like fire and water. She was as he remembered and imagined now—no longer just a golden-haired girl, but something untouchable and unknowable. At once too little and too much for him to hold onto.

“I swear it,” she murmured, her voice the low music of a November wind. “I swear it on the sun and the moon and the trees and the Great Wood’s own guardian. I’ll always be caught between places, and carry more joy and more sorrow than most. But I’m not unhappy, Tom. Not anymore.”

“Well, that’s all I’ve ever needed to know,” he said simply.

Crossing the little distance between them, Evelyn pressed a kiss like gossamer to his cheek. He caught a last hint of the scent of her, of old leaves and rich earth and briny air. Then she turned and made her way down the hill, and when she’d got halfway, he knew he ought not watch her leave. That it was not meant for him to see the manner of her going. Tom shut his eyes like a child, and waited.

When he looked again, Evelyn was gone.

Overhead, the stars carried on shining, passionless and white and pure. A frigid breeze went mourning over the heather, and one of the cows sighed heavily from within the barn. Tom took his hands from his pockets and blew on them, and thought of the impossible and of the ordinary, and how he believed, quite fiercely, in both.

He’d had the one tonight already, and found himself in want of the other.

It was a quarter hour’s walk down the lane to the Sutcliffe farm, and that was fine, because Tom wanted the cold and the still and the movement of his own two feet to clear his head. He set a brisk pace, and by the time he stood on the Sutcliffes’ doorstep, was red-cheeked and a little breathless.

His knock set off an explosion indoors—a chaos of barking dogs and gleeful children, and then the door swung open and Ella Sutcliffe stood before him, small and black-haired and merry.

“Do you want to take a walk with me?” Tom asked in a rush, before he could lose his nerve. It wasn’t that he’d never kept company with Ella before, but he hadn’t done it like this—hadn’t ever come to her when he needed someone with him, to help make sense of the strangeness and wonder of living.

Ella tilted her head to one side and frowned, as if pondering the request.

“With you?” she said doubtfully, but there was already a smile in her eyes and at her edges. “Of course. Wait here while I get my things.”

She was back in less than a minute, wrapped up against the cold, and when she slipped her arm through Tom’s it was comfortable, so comfortable, as if they’d always been this way. He liked that. He liked comfortable and worn-in and familiar, just as much as he liked the unknown and inexplicable.

“Penny,” Ella said, when they’d gone a short way down the lane in silence.

Tom frowned. “I was thinking…I was thinking of spaces between people. Not yet a breach, but an expansion, someone called them once. Like we never really lose each other. We just grow, and end up capable of holding onto more. I don’t suppose I make much sense.”

“Not always,” Ella answered honestly. “But I like your nonsense anyway, Tom Harper.”

“Do you really?” he asked in surprise, looking down at her. She was tidy and bright-eyed as a robin in a hedgerow, and every bit as quick and fine a thing.

“Yes.” Ella reached up with one gloved finger to tap his nose. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

A stiff gust of wind chose that moment to rush down the hillside and whirl about them, bringing a scattering of frost with it.

Ella shook her head. “Frosty wind made moan, indeed. Though truth be told, I never mind hill country on a bitter night—my Gran used to say the longer the dark, the lovelier the stars. Isn’t that pretty? And don’t the Dales just shine, with the snow and the moonlight on their peaks?”

“They do,” Tom agreed. And though there were parts of him that would always remain untouchable and unknowable, at once too much and too little to be spoken of or shared, he felt, in that moment, both known and understood.

A Treason of Thorns, Short Fiction, The Light Between Worlds

The House of Ruin and Starlight

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In just a few days, my second novel, A Treason of Thorns, will have been in the world for a year. October will mark the second anniversary of the publication of my first book, The Light Between Worlds. So to celebrate, I’ve started drafting a little crossover fiction about the characters and worlds of those two books. I may leave it as is, or I may add to it–I’m not sure yet. Either way, I thought I’d post it here for those of you who loved the Hapwells and Burleigh House.

The House of Ruin and Starlight
A Short Fiction
by Yours Truly

“Oh Jack, I don’t know about this,” Mum said doubtfully as we parked in the lane and peered in at the front gate of the House. I was already thinking about it like that—as the House, with a capital H. Dad had shown me grainy newspaper photographs of it, and it demanded to be set apart, somehow, from the more ordinary country homes we’d looked over.

Hence the capital.

Putting his arm around Mum’s shoulders, Dad kissed the top of her head, but he was looking down the weed-choked gravel drive ahead of us. I could see it on his face already—the anticipation he felt when something derelict and once-beautiful fell into his care. He loved damaged things, and of all the chocolate box cottages and friendly stone rowhouses we’d looked at, the House was by far the most broken.

It was enormous, to start with. Or enormous by my standards, having only ever lived in London flats. There were acres of walled grounds, and at the center of them the House itself, expansive and forlorn. A fire had burned out the entirety of the east wing in the 1880s, which seemed an impossibly long time ago. But it had already been empty then, poor old building, friendless and familyless, just staring out at its unkempt grounds with blank windows, like so many sad eyes.

“Can I go in?” I asked eagerly, and Dad nodded, giving me his particular, you-and-I-understand-one-another-don’t-we-Evie smile.

But when I had my hand on the gate already, Mum stopped me.

“Evie, wait, we don’t even know if it’s safe,” she fretted. I glanced back at her, looking like a fashion-plate in her tailored skirt and jacket, somehow free of even a speck of dust despite the dirt laneway. Mum was not one of Dad’s damaged, once-beautiful things. She took your breath away to look at, and seemed untouchable if you didn’t know her well. But there was still damage. It just hid below her perfectly-crafted exterior.

“Alright, I can stay with you,” I offered immediately, even though I wanted nothing more than to get through that gate and nose around on my own. But Dad and I had an arrangement, not to worry Mum, and to treat her like something fine and precious and breakable. We were her safe haven, Dad said, in a world full of difficult reminders, and we mustn’t trouble her if it could be avoided.

“The estate agent said that other than the east wing, everything’s fine structurally.” Dad sounded infinitely reassuring, and he’s very good at that sort of thing. At putting people at ease. “But we can’t even go inside today, I haven’t got a key. Just the grounds for now, and if that doesn’t scare us off, we can see the rest tomorrow. I think Evie’ll be alright to have a little wander.”

Mum faltered. “Well, if you think it’s fine, Jack.”

“I do.”

She gave me a hesitant smile. “Go on then, Evie. Run along.”

Stifling a squeal of delight, I pushed at the wrought-iron front gate. But though the House had stood empty for so long, the gate gave way easily, swinging open almost of its own accord. And then I was in, standing in the breathless silence of the manor grounds.

Burleigh House, Dad had called it.

“Hello, Burleigh,” I whispered. Wind rustled through the tall meadow grasses on either side of the drive, causing wildflowers to sway and bend. Reaching out, I ran a hand along the feathery tops of the grass and moved forward slowly, drinking in the country quiet—the little murmur of the breeze, the riot of birdsong coming from an overgrown tangle of apple orchard off to one side of the House. It was so very unlike the bustle of London. I felt as if I’d been waiting for such a place all my life.

“It’s an absolute heap,” I could hear Mum say despairingly behind me, followed by the murmur of Dad countering with practicalities—what sort of repairs would be necessary, how they might be afforded.

“Just think what it would be like at Christmas,” I cut in, turning to look at them and beaming. “We could have everyone to stay. Gran and Grandda and Mims (that’s Dad’s mum), and Uncle Jamie and Arthur (that’s Mum’s brother and his—companion? Not friend, they’re more than friends, and they’ve been together for years. I don’t know what sort of word I ought to use for the two of them, and the grown-ups never say, but I love them both, and they’re lovely together). Oh, we could even have Uncle Tom and Auntie Ella and the girls!”

Uncle Tom’s not really an uncle. He was someone to Mum’s sister, Evelyn, who went missing, and who I was named after. But he and his wife Auntie Ella are my godfather and godmother, and their children Ivy and Lena are as close as I’ll get to cousins. The idea of having all the people I loved together in one place set me fairly giddy with excitement.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Mum warned. “And don’t get attached.”

But I was already off again, staring up at the boughs of a strange, purple-blossomed tree sprouting from the center of the drive.

“It’s a jacaranda,” Dad called to me. “They don’t really grow here, for the most part. I’ve certainly never seen one that size.”

Ducking beneath its trailing branches, I came out on the other side and got my first unobstructed look at the House. I think that moment is when I learned how Dad feels, when he sees a painting badly in need of restoration. As if he won’t be easy in himself until he’s done right by it. Seeing Burleigh House for the first time made me feel that way. Like I wouldn’t believe the world was quite good again, until I knew Burleigh had someone living in it, and loving it.

And oh, I wanted that someone to be me.

The east wing stood, black and burned out, like a vast, charred scar. But the rest of the House was warm yellow stone, rising three storeys to the eaves. The slate roof looked sound, even if it was all-over moss, and the chimneys were choked with rooks’ nests. None of the windows had been boarded over, and most of the glass was broken as a result, sharp splintery teeth jutting from the panes. There were ancient musty curtains visible from outside, beyond which lay tantalizing glimpses of the shadowy interior. Dad had said it was still furnished—that whoever left the place did in a rush, and took nothing with them. I wondered who it had been, and if the House was haunted. Were there mournful ghosts wandering the halls yet, remembering what used to be? If there were, I didn’t think they’d be frightening. Nothing about the place seemed eerie, just watchful and wild and sad, and so very lonely. It was awful, that loneliness. I could feel it, seeping into me through the air and the ground.

Climbing the stone steps that led to the front entry, I pressed a hand to the doorframe. It was second nature, to speak to the House—Dad talks to paintings sometimes, when he thinks no one’s listening, and Mum talks to Evelyn.

“Here now, my love,” I murmured, palm still flat against the doorframe. “You’re going to be alright. Don’t worry so.”

From the comparative height of the front doorstep, I turned to look back at the jacaranda and frowned. A nodding carpet of flowers lay between me and the tree, and I hadn’t even noticed them before. Starry and blue, they sprang up between the stones of the drive and nodded in the wind.

Forget-me-nots.

“No, I won’t,” I promised. “I couldn’t possibly, not now we’ve met.”

Behind me, a slow, rusty whine filled the air. Pivoting, I watched as the old front door hinges finally gave way. They pulled loose from the frame and the door collapsed inward, hitting the ground with a dull thud and sending up a cloud of dust. By the time Mum and Dad came around the jacaranda, the dust had settled. It looked as if the door had been lying there for weeks, not as if the House was all but inviting us in. I bit my lip and kept quiet about it as Dad smiled.

“Looks like we won’t need a key,” he said. “Phil, will you do me the honor?”

He held a hand out to Mum. She wrinkled her nose at him but reached back, and together, the two of them disappeared into the interior of Burleigh House.

Lingering on the doorstep and staring thoughtfully at the jacaranda, I felt it—the moment they crossed the threshold. All the loneliness that had been seeping into me evaporated, replaced by a luminous stab of intermingled sorrow and relief and yearning. And along the drive the blue forget-me-nots vanished, overtaken by ripples of spreading violets, each of them with a spark of gold at its heart.

I didn’t understand, but I didn’t need to. Because my own heart leapt and met Burleigh’s relief with a fierce and burning love, kindled by the sight of wildflowers like waves, and by the longing in this House’s very mortar.

“I’m going to stay with you,” I swore to Burleigh. “I’m going to live here, and look after you, and you will never be alone again.”

It was wrong of me to promise when I wasn’t the one who’d be deciding where we’d settle.

But I couldn’t help it, and I meant every word.

Short Fiction

Raised In Full

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I’m back with another short fic. This one you’ll possibly recognize if you participated in the preorder campaign for A TREASON OF THORNS–access to it was one of the preorder incentives. It’s a story that’s always felt special to me, about a peculiar necromancer and the once-dead love of her life and how they deal with darkness.

I hope you enjoy it. As always, it comes with content warnings, which you can view by highlighting the following:

(Raised In Full contains a brief depiction of miscarriage, and mention of infertility)

Gray Concrete Brick

Raised In Full
by Yours Truly

In truth, it was a miracle that Dulcie had raised so many dead this past year without renewing the Merchant’s interest in her sooner. Or so Dulcie thought, as she sat at Widow Wickins’ bedside and quietly traded her ability to taste in exchange for the Widow’s soul.

The trade had to hurt for it to work properly, you see, and Shep had arranged to have a lemon and rosewater cake brought to their lodgings that night, to celebrate Dulcie’s thirty-fifth nameday. The day itself had passed by unremarkably the week before when they’d been apart—Dulcie raising a pair of stillborn twins in Alster, Shep putting down a trio of haints who’d been following them on the road.

Dulcie had considered trading her ability to sing for the Widow, but she’d never had much of a voice anyway and the Widow had been dead two weeks by the time Dulcie arrived in her village—it was unlikely her singing voice would have been enough. And if she’d tried and it hadn’t, the raising would have gone wrong, and Shep would have had to put down the Widow’s haint. After that, there’d have been no bringing her back.

Dulcie hated that. She hated to fail, and so, as always, she hedged her bets and bartered away the ability to taste lemon and rosewater cake and Shep’s mouth on hers afterwards. She wouldn’t tell him what she’d given up—she never did. He’d guess anyway, though—he always did.

Next to Dulcie, the Widow stirred, and opened her eyes.

“Are you the nurse?” she asked faintly, voice crackling with age.

“No,” Dulcie answered, holding out her hands to help the Widow to her feet.

The old woman got up readily, steady and bright-eyed. It was like this with the older ones—the raising gave them a temporary flush of health, a new lease on life for five or six or sometimes even ten years. But Dulcie never could do more than postpone the inevitable. Death came for everyone, in the end.

At the sound of Widow Wickins’ voice the door to the adjoining parlor flew open and three women, a decade or so older than Dulcie, burst into the room.

“Mama!” one of them sobbed, and then there was the usual chaos of embracing and weeping, and things reached a fever pitch as half a dozen grandchildren tumbled into the bedroom as well.

In the midst of it, Dulcie slipped out the back door.

Shep leaned against a nearby wall, waiting and brooding, thin smoke from his antiquated pipe hanging on the frosty autumn air. He’d already collected their payment, and Dulcie preferred to leave as soon after she’d done her work as possible. It was dangerous to stay in one place for long, and besides that, getting caught up in the aftermath of a raising complicated things. She didn’t like the way people looked at her, or the gifts they gave, or the prayers they whispered and the signs they sketched with surreptitious hands.

“Ready?” Shep asked.

As Dulcie went to him, he put an arm around her shoulders. She was always cold after doing her work—something about the incantation and the trade chilled her blood. Shep knew it, and for fifteen years now, he’d been lending Dulcie warmth after she raised the dead.

“It went well?” he asked, halfway down the lane to the bare-bones inn they’d lodged at. The inn was a little, comfortless place that stood away from the village under the eaves of the forest’s skeleton trees. But Shep and Dulcie had stayed in worse, on more occasions than either of them liked to count.

“Mm.” Dulcie gnawed at a hangnail. “Quite well. And on your end? No one followed us from Alster?”

“No. I think—I think we may be in the clear for now.” Shep said it cautiously, because they were never really in the clear—not with the Merchant still viewing Dulcie as a lost investment. But sometimes his interest in her faded, or he grew too busy with other things, and the run ins with his henchmen and barterers stopped for a short while.

“I’ve got a surprise for you.” Shep changed the subject quickly, as if he didn’t want to push their luck by dwelling too long on the fact that the Merchant might leave them alone for a few weeks, or months if they were lucky. “Nothing big, of course, but it’s waiting at the inn. It was your nameday, after all.”

Dulcie smiled, and said nothing. She wasn’t supposed to know about the cake, but it had worked out well for Widow Wickins that she did.

As they approached the inn, everything seemed quite rosy. They’d a bed for the night, free of vermin, even if the mattress did have more lumps than a toad. They were together, after a brief and trying stint apart in Alster. And Dulcie had Shep’s surprise to look forward to. Whether she could taste it or not, it was a gift.

A few horses stamped in the innyard, and smoke rose in a welcoming plume from the chimney. All seemed ordinary and peaceful, but a few yards from the door, Dulcie stopped. A sinking feeling lodged in her belly, as the hair on the back of her neck rose and ice nipped at her fingers.

“Shep,” she breathed, and at the single word he had his sword out, the ensorcelled blade gleaming dully in the late afternoon light.

Only Dulcie’s deathsense gave her the creeping horrors like that. If she’d been a proper necromancer, the sense would have filled her with elation, but she’d never done her job quite rightly. She was meant to raise the Tainted Dead—haints and revenants and gaunts, foul and soulless creatures who’d witlessly do the bidding of whatever master Dulcie bound them to. But she’d lost her ambition and her stomach for the dark arts, halfway through a course of arcane study that had been funded by a shadowy patron. Dulcie knew now it had been the Merchant, and could hardly wonder at the fact that he refused to leave her be. She was, after all, profiting at his expense—making a living with the knowledge he’d purchased for her—though to be fair, Dulcie had made the magic her own. No one else in Ridelmar could raise the dead back to full life like she did, though Dulcie had tried a few times, over the years, to teach the knack of it to someone else.

As Dulcie’s deathsense sent warning after warning singing through her limbs, Shep took a step forward, putting himself between her and the inn, from behind which a pair of gaunts had emerged.

It had to be gaunts. Haints were straightforward, malicious creatures, all leftover ill-will and bad intention. Revenants were simpler yet—shambling things still tightly bound to their decaying human bodies, where haints were mostly vengeful spirit and teeth.

Gaunts were different. Manifesting as columns of shadow with gas-lamp eyes and yawning mouths made for gnawing living souls out of a body, they had enough wit left to be dangerous. They were clever, and vicious, and entirely without mercy. Raising her first gaunt and watching it wreak havoc was what had turned Dulcie irrevocably away from the work of a necromancer, and set her on her current path.

Shep waited, sword raised, every line of him tense with expectation and confidence. He’d been fighting the Tainted Dead for nearly three hundred years now, barring the time he’d spent in death himself, and he’d made an art of something that might otherwise be gruesome. Even from behind Shep, Dulcie could feel his welcoming smile as the gaunts came towards him. However clever they were, however vicious, they would soon find true and lasting death upon his blade.

The gaunts made a wild keening sound as they threw themselves at Shep and his sword cut effortlessly through the insubstantial stuff they were made from. They formed and reformed, twisting around him like a wreath of smoke, but however quickly they moved, Shep’s sword danced faster. At last, the tip of his blade found its mark—the first gaunt fell to ash as he pierced one of its staring eyes, the second as he thrust his sword into its yawning mouth.

Wiping sweat from his forehead with one sleeve, Shep turned to Dulcie. “Well, so much for being in the clear. He’s getting bold, isn’t he? Gaunts at a roadside inn—what’ll be next, haints roaming unchecked in the capital?”

But Dulcie only swallowed. Her deathsense hadn’t calmed. In fact, it had grown stronger when the gaunts turned to ash, as if their presence had only served as a mask for something worse.

And then, Dulcie spotted him. A stranger, in a long dark cloak, lurking in the shadows of the stable which closed off one side of the innyard. If it hadn’t been for a particularly difficult raising two years back where she bartered away her ability to smell, Dulcie likely would have caught the scent of his magic on first stepping into the yard—gunmetal and decay and grave earth.

The stranger was a Nightshade—a master of the arcane, who could both raise the dead and ensorcel the living. Dulcie knew it from the feel of his craft and the way the gaunts had made straight for Shep, rather than growing distracted by the warmth and life and sounds of ready prey emanating from the inn. They must have been recently raised, and still strictly under the Nightshade’s control.

This time, it was Dulcie who stepped in front of Shep.

“Dulse—” he said in an anguished tone as three more cloaked figures stepped out of the shadows around the innyard.

But Dulcie was beyond fear now, finally living in a moment she’d been caught on the edge of ever since scorning the Merchant’s patronage. She’d always known that someday he’d grow tired of waiting. That eventually, he’d reclaim her by force.

“What is it you want?” she asked the first Nightshade. “We’re only travelers. We’ve little enough to our name, but you can take what we have if you’ll let us be.”

It was a bold-faced lie, but all Dulcie had left to her was falsehood. They’d no hope of standing against four Nightshades, though Shep would surely try, and die yet again in the process.

The Nightshade laughed, a dry, brittle sound. “The blade your companion holds is worth my life twice over, yet you say you’re common travelers with little to your name?”

“It’s just a sword,” Dulcie said flatly. “A family heirloom. Do you mean to tell me it’s worth something?”

Weaponry that could put down the Tainted Dead was a rarity now, but during the Riven Wars two and a half centuries ago, blades like Shep’s had been far more common. He’d been buried with his sword, and raised with it, and it often seemed to Dulcie like an extension of his body.

The Nightshade pushed his hood back, revealing eyes that glowed like embers and a shorn head inked with the Merchant’s mark.

“Why doesn’t your companion speak for himself?” he asked. “Is he slow-witted?”

No. But they’d arranged things between them, Dulcie and Shep. He dealt with the Tainted Dead, and whenever possible, she handled the unscrupulous living. It was easier that way—less bloody. And Dulcie hated to see a death when she didn’t have to.

The Nightshade approached Shep, who stood with his unsheathed blade lowered, breath coming hard and fast. He’d never been able to hide what he felt, and while Dulcie loved it in him, it had proved a liability more than once.

“You’re the soldier, aren’t you?” the Nightshade murmured. “The one she raised by mistake?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Dulcie said from behind him, fixing her eyes on Shep. “His grandfather was a soldier, but he’s only an everyday cooper, aren’t you, my love?”

Tearing his gaze away from the Nightshade, Shep looked at Dulcie.

“Yes, of course,” he repeated woodenly. “A cooper from Marsh End, further north.”

The Nightshade hesitated. The thing about the arcane arts was that the further you immersed yourself in them—the more you wallowed in things no human should rightly be able to do—the less you could tell right from wrong. It didn’t only dull your conscience, either—it stunted your capacity to sense truth or falsehood in other people as well. So, though Dulcie’s lies were very thin indeed, they were enough to bewilder the Nightshade. And any hesitation on his part was a chance at freedom, because the Merchant liked things tidy. He did not like mess, or gossip, or collateral damage. He’d not dwelt so long in the shadows and amassed so much power by stirring up scandal and ill-feeling. He was clever and quiet and sly.

If Dulcie and Shep were only travelers, as she insisted, and the Nightshade harmed them in any way, he’d certainly be punished for the error.

“We’re only here because we’ve been visiting a cousin of mine in Alster. But you know what the roads are like these days, and that’s why he brought the sword, not that he’s much good with it,” Dulcie pushed.

Indecision wrote itself across the Nightshade’s hawkish face, and Dulcie began to think that perhaps the world was a fair place, after all. Though she’d given up much in her pursuit of bringing the dead back to life, the Merchant and his servants had lost valuable pieces of themselves, too.

With a jerk of his head, the Nightshade beckoned to his companions to step away. Dulcie and Shep stayed where they were, not moving a muscle, as the Merchant’s emissaries drew back.

But before they’d left the innyard, a wavering voice cut through the tension that still hung on the air.

“I beg your pardon?”

With dread turning her limbs weak as water, Dulcie turned and found Widow Wickins standing at the head of the road that led through the yard and up to the inn door.

“My girls told me you’re the one that worked my miracle,” Widow Wickins said, oblivious to the electric charge running between the figures in the yard, or the way despairing tears had already begun to pool in Dulcie’s eyes. “I came to tell you how grateful I am, and to give you this.”

She stepped forward, and pressed a small, beaten-silver icon on the end of a chain into Dulcie’s hand.

“It’s Saint Imelda,” the widow explained. “Patroness of remembering, and of forgotten things. She’s been with me all my life, but now I think you should have her.”

“Thank you,” Dulcie said, though she could not keep her voice from trembling.

The widow clucked, a small, reassuring sound. “Here now. It’s only a little thing. I’m sure you’ve plenty of troubles I don’t know of, but I hope Mistress Imelda can help you with them.”

Dulcie nodded wordlessly and slipped the chain over her head. She could feel Shep at her back—he’d shifted a few steps, putting himself once more between her and danger.

“Well, I’ll take my leave then,” Widow Wickins said, and began to make her way slowly down the road. As she went, the air grew warmer, heating with magic as the Nightshades gathered their power.

When the widow had disappeared among the skeleton trees, Dulcie spun on her heel and wrapped her arms around Shep’s waist. She could feel every line of him, taut and terrified and frustrated, and she whispered a prayer.

“Don’t move. Please. Just keep still, Shep. Do it for me. Please, please, don’t move.”

While she murmured to him, the Nightshades’ power built and built as they chanted an incantation that sounded like brushfire and started blood trickling from Shep’s ears.

“Don’t move,” Dulcie begged with more urgency as the Nightshades sketched figures in the air with their Merchant-marked hands. Shep was shaking now, hands on his sword white-knuckled as he fought against the instinct to surge forward and die in an attempt at cutting the Nightshades down. “I need you here. I need you to live. I’d be lost without you. Please, Shep. As you love me, don’t move.”

There came a flash of blue fire, followed by the unbearable searing sensation of raw magic, and then all went dark.

#

Dulcie woke in chains, with Shep shackled to her. He was unconscious still, but breathing. A familiarity with the arcane dampened the effects of sorcery on Dulcie, but Shep had no such protection.

Sitting up with a small whimper at the way her head ached, Dulcie bent over Shep and pressed a kiss to his forehead.

“Come back to me,” she pleaded. “Come back.”

And because time and trouble and fate had knit the two of them together in a way Dulcie could never quite explain, he woke. She helped him to sit up, with his back against a dry stone wall that cut across the barren, twilight field they’d wakened in. He was grey and sweating, eyes unfocused, but then his vision cleared and he took in their surroundings with a single devastated glance.

“Death’s hands, Dulse,” Shep said. “I know where we are.”

“Where?” she asked. There’d been so many fields over the years, so many barren campsites as they moved from place to place. They’d all run together in Dulcie’s mind, one much like the other.

“This is Bronnaward,” Shep answered in a bleak voice. “This is where I died.”

With a sinking feeling, Dulcie glanced over one shoulder. Yes, there was the thicket she’d made her camp by fifteen years ago, not knowing she’d stumbled onto the site of the Riven Wars’ most infamous battle. There was the little stone cairn she’d missed in the darkness that night, with its engraved reminder that in this place, many had fallen, casting down a great evil and defeating scores of the Tainted Dead.

There could only be one thing behind the mist ahead of them, then. The Mound. The earthen barrow where Bronn the Ever-Risen had finally been cast into death, and his name proved a lie. He’d been the greatest and most dangerous necromancer the world had ever known, and even in death enough of his power lingered that the Tainted Dead occasionally rose on Bronnaward, and drifted off to harry the living.

As Dulcie peered into the fog, the four Nightshades that had overpowered them materialized. Threads of sorcery still bound them to Dulcie and Shep, for Bronnaward was a four day journey from the distant inn and its overhanging, leafless forest. All that time, the Nightshades had been renewing their magic, keeping their charges in a bewitched sleep.

Dulcie watched numbly, one arm thrown around Shep in an instinctive, protective gesture, as the Nightshades stepped aside, forming an honor guard for another figure who stepped out of the mist.

“So here we are, Dulcie,” the Merchant said. “And it’s taken us long enough to get to this point, hasn’t it?”

Dulcie said nothing. The Merchant was not at all how she’d pictured him. She’d imagined someone tall, ascetic, emanating arcane energy. But this man of middling height and faded hair was entirely ordinary to look at. Forgettable, even. Had she passed him on the street, she’d never have known he was the cause of the half the trouble in Ridelmar. In fact, she likely wouldn’t have noticed him at all.

“What is it you want?” Dulcie asked, wishing she were stronger, braver, that her voice did not waver with fear. “Surely you’ve realized by now that I’ll never be one of your dirty hands. If you expect me to fall in line and raise the Tainted Dead for you, you’re better off killing me.”

The Merchant laughed, a commonplace laugh, a tinker’s laugh. “I have a thousand Nightshades across the country ready and willing to raise lesser dead things for me. Why would I go to so much effort to get ahold of you for that purpose, when any of them can do the same?”

“To prove a point,” Dulcie said. “To send a warning to anyone else who might cross you.”

“I’ve never been much of a one for proving points. Too expensive. Too much trouble. I’d have let you be, you know, if it weren’t for the fact that I need you.”

“Don’t ask him why,” Shep muttered to Dulcie. “It’s what he wants.”

The Merchant ignored him. “You see, I want a raising done that none of my Nightshades can manage. Two dozen of them have already died attempting it over the years, but I know you’re the one for the job. And if you do it for me, I swear to you I’ll let both you and your ill-mannered soldier alone, to live out your lives in peace and grow old, and someday die with your children and grandchildren about you.”

Dulcie winced as the Merchant struck a nerve. There’d be no future like that for her and Shep, whether she did as she was ordered or not.

“And if I refuse to do what you want?” Dulcie asked.

The Merchant shrugged. “Then I will keep you in chains, and cut your soldier’s throat while you watch. When that is done, I will raise him as a gaunt and you will continue to watch as he becomes everything he’s hated and fought against, and does unspeakable things to the living.”

Shep was absolutely silent. Motionless. Breathless.

Dulcie let out a sigh. “It’s the Ever-Risen you want to bring back, isn’t it? There’s no other reason for us to be here.”

“Of course,” the Merchant said. “But it’s been so long since he died. None of my Nightshades have been able to bear up under the cost of raising someone who’s been two and a half centuries in death. You, though, my wayward lamb. You’ve already done it.”

“That was an accident.” Dulcie glanced at Shep. He shook his head, nearly imperceptibly, and mouthed a few words to her.

Don’t do it. Let me go.

She turned back to the Merchant. “And if I do as you ask, you’ll let both of us be?”

“On my honor,” the Merchant said. “If you raise Bronn as a gaunt and bind him to me, I will never trouble you again.”

“Dulcie, no,” Shep rasped. “You never saw him in life. He was…a horror. Anything good in him, he’d traded away for power, and he brooked no rivals. Brought back like that, he’ll be the wickedest and most powerful dead thing the world has seen since the wars.”

“I’m counting on it,” the Merchant said.

“Alright,” Dulcie answered, before she could falter in her resolve. “I’ll do as you ask.”

“Then let’s get you to your work,” the Merchant said briskly. “I’ve waited near twenty years for this, I see no reason to wait any longer. Virien, watch the soldier. If he tries to escape, kill him.”

The Nightshade Dulcie had spoken with in the innyard stepped forward, releasing her from her shackles and casting a wary glance at Shep. Ignoring the sorcerer, Dulcie knelt before her one happy accident, her single stroke of good luck, and cupped Shep’s face with her hands.

“Listen to me,” she told him, voice tense with the import of what she had to say. “I love you now. And I will love you again. Remember that, my darling.”

Shep opened his mouth to speak, but Dulcie leaned forward and kissed him, and the words were lost between them.

“Alright,” the Merchant groused. “That’s quite enough. I’ll have a great deal to do after this.”

“I’m sure you will,” Dulcie said quietly, as she got to her feet and went to his side.

The three remaining Nightshades fell into pace behind them and they stepped into the fog, beyond which lay the burial mound.

#

The night Dulcie raised Shep had been the worst of her life.

For three years after fleeing the Arcanium, she’d drifted from place to place, entirely alone, living off her strange ability to raise the dead in full. It set her apart in people’s minds—they were afraid of her, in a way they were not afraid of ordinary necromancers, who were dangerous, but a known quantity, at least. Dulcie was different—she did something undeniably good with a skill meant for wickedness and avarice. It made people suspicious, or overawed, and so she kept in constant motion.

There was the matter of the Merchant’s messengers too, who’d begun to dog her steps. They never did her any harm, but it unsettled people even more, to see her arrive in a town with haints following in her wake, or a Nightshade arguing the Merchant’s case at her side. Dulcie wanted nothing more than to be rid of the Merchant’s emissaries, yet she could not shake them. Between her uncanny talent and her deadly followers, she found herself utterly and abysmally alone.

And then, on her twentieth nameday, in a fit of self-pity, she let a man whose brother she’d raised take her to his bed. She’d thought it would show him that she was no more or less than anyone else, but the whole thing was a disaster—his every touch was an act of worship, and at the end of things, he wept. Dulcie left before he woke, unable to bear another wondering glance, another prayerful acknowledgement of his good fortune.

Four months later, she hadn’t bled, and her belly was swelling. The prospect of attempting to manage her rootless, hand to mouth existence with a child tarnished her every waking moment. So she wandered aimlessly, in the wild places between towns, until one night she bedded down near a thicket on a barren, fog-shrouded field.

Lying in the darkness that night, with no more to her name than a handful of coins and the future stretching long and bleak ahead of her, Dulcie wished for death. And when she fell into sleep, she dreamed of it. Of the incantation that burned her throat like fire when she raised the dead. Of the trades she made to bring them back to full life, bit by bit chipping away pieces of herself in exchange for a miracle. Of the life-sapping cold that followed a raising.

She woke chilled to her core. Blood was slipping down the insides of her legs as she lost her child, and, though she would not learn it till later, the ability to carry another.

Shep sat nearby, with his head in his hands.

“Send me back,” he’d said bitterly. “I don’t want to live again.”

Dulcie had been able to do nothing in response but curl up on her side and sob. It was the sight of her entirely undone that brought Shep the rest of the way into life—into the will for life. He’d banked Dulcie’s fire, and made hot tea, and changed and washed her linens when she bled through them. They stayed together for three days on the cheerless heath of Bronnaward, and by the end of it there was an unbreakable bond between Dulcie, who could raise the dead, and her soldier, who could put them down, and who had known death himself for over two hundred years.

No moment in which Shep walked the earth could ever be quite as dark for Dulcie as the time before he came to her. She held to that, as she followed the Merchant deep into the heart of earth, traveling down and down through a tunnel whose doorway was set into Bronn’s burial mound. At last they came out into a great, subterranean chamber, and Dulcie caught her breath at the sight of what was waiting there. An army of Nightshades, and of the Tainted Dead, their eyes glowing like balefire, all preternaturally quiet in this nether world.

Torches guttered as the Merchant and Dulcie passed through the gathered horde, to where a stone tomb stood at the center of the chamber.

“Is there anything you need?” the Merchant asked, as Dulcie stepped up to the tomb and pressed a trembling hand to its ponderous cover.

“No,” Dulcie said. Everything she needed was aboveground, waiting on the heath.

“Go on, then,” the Merchant urged. “Do what we’ve come for.”

Dulcie cast about herself, taking in the stone chamber and the silent, waiting army. She thought of how long the Merchant had laid his plans, shored up his power, ensured that in the end, he’d be given what he wanted. One final, terrifyingly strong dead creature, to bend to his will. To use as a weapon, though for what, Dulcie did not know, nor did she care to. She’d heard enough from Shep about the Riven Wars—that dark and hopeless time when the dead fought the living, and life was often only a slow way of dying. She could not return the land to such brutality.

But neither could she bear to see her soldier tormented for disobedience on her part.

Dulcie pressed one palm flat against the surface of Bronn the Ever-Risen’s tomb. With the other, she clutched the charm she’d been given by the Widow, of Saint Imelda, mistress of remembering, and of forgotten things. And she began the incantation to raise the dead.

At the first words, tension and anticipation rippled across the chamber. Soon all Dulcie’s attention was absorbed by the task of speaking the necessary syllables, of forcing them from her mouth when her lungs and throat rebelled, scorched by the heat of the incantation’s power. She spoke for what felt like a lifetime, power rising around her to a maddening crescendo.

When it had reached its height, everything stilled. Dulcie found herself caught in that silent, eternal moment within which she made her choice. To give of herself, rather than taking from death. To sacrifice something worth an act of restoration. This was the precipice. This was where she might give the Merchant his dark heart’s desire, or turn aside.

For fifteen years, Dulcie had chosen sacrifice. She’d given her true name, her ability to see colors, her shadow, the memory of every book she’d ever read. The capacity to sleep through a night without waking, to be greeted with kindness by a dog, to feel the wind against her face. So many other pieces of her, left along the way, when the only thing she truly wanted to be rid of was this terrible gift, of cheating death and bringing those it had claimed back to life.

But Dulcie could not trade her talent away, because it would have been the purest relief to her, and a trade had to hurt. As long as she possessed it, too, she felt an obligation to use it—to do what she could for those around her, who grieved for their dead in a way Dulcie could not yet understand.

Her incantation hung on the air, pulling at the veil between life and death. It would be so easy, to let the magic choose for her, and raise Bronn as a vengeful gaunt. The sorcery would steal from her for the raising, taking as much of the good left in her as it required.

Or she could cut her power off, let the magic die, and the Merchant would ensure that Shep died with it.

You never saw the Ever-Risen in life. He was a horror, Shep’s voice said in Dulcie’s mind. Anything good in him, he’d traded away for power.

And he brooked no rivals.

So Dulcie made her choice. She completed her work and stepped away from the tomb. The Merchant surged forward eagerly, gesturing to the nearest Nightshades to push the stone cover aside.

When they did, it was no gaunt who rose from that long and cursed resting place. It was Bronn the Ever-Risen, restored to himself, raised in full as only one person in all the world could have managed. The cost of her sacrifice and the force of his power was enough to drive Dulcie to her knees.

He was a horror.

And he brooked no rivals.

Through the chaos that ensued, as Nightshades and the Tainted Dead fell upon Bronn at the Merchant’s orders, and were scattered or broken by his sorcery, Dulcie crawled away. The cavern shook with blast after blast of arcane fire, dust trickling from the ceiling, pieces of stone falling, until the earth roared, and collapsed in on itself, and Dulcie fell into a place like death.

#

Somewhere, a bird sang.

The sound of it was grating—tuneless and unmelodic.

Dulcie knew that birds sounded sweet to other people, and that there was a reason their song turned to discord for her, but she could not remember what that reason was.

When she opened her eyes, she saw a shaft of sunlight cutting across the clean white coverlet of a bed. Her hand lay on the counterpane, though the sun did nothing to warm her skin, and she knew there was a reason for that, too.

“Dulse?” a ragged voice said, and she turned her head to find a man, seated in a chair beside her. A sword rested on his lap, and there was a charm around his neck—it took Dulcie a moment to make out the figure. Saint Imelda, Mistress of remembering, and of forgotten things.

“Yes?” she answered.

“Death’s hands, I thought you’d never wake. What happened down there? Everything caved in from up above, and it took us two days just to get you out. There was nothing and no one else left, living or dead.”

Dulcie frowned. “I don’t know what you mean.”

The man leaned forward. “The Merchant? The Ever-Risen? Bronnaward? Don’t you remember any of it?”

“No.” Dulcie gnawed at her lower lip for a moment as the man searched her face with concern. “Who—who are you?”

The man went dead-white, and for a moment she thought he might be sick. “Dulse, it’s Shep.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know a Shep. I know a James Shepton, who’s to study at the Arcanium with me come spring…” Her voice trailed off. “No. That’s not right. There—there’s been more since then, hasn’t there? But it’s just gone, when I try to think of it. I’m sorry, should I know you?”

To Dulcie’s horror, the man at her bedside, with his capable look and stern air, buried his face in his hands and began to sob. She waited a moment, torn between discomfort and compassion, but the softer side of her won out in the end.

It always did.

“Here now,” she said gently, reaching out to brush his fingers with her own. It felt like habit, that reaching, though she couldn’t have said why. “Whatever’s gone wrong, I’ll help. You’re going to be alright. We’re going to be alright.”

Outside, the bird continued to sing, its jangling music tuneless but joy-filled. And though the sun that shone on Dulcie did not warm her, the absence of warmth made it no less bright.

“I know,” Shep said, his voice breaking on the words. “Believe me, Dulse. I know.”

Short Fiction

Nothing Noteworthy

Posted on

So I’ve been wanting to do something for all of you. Something above and beyond just goofing around on Twitter, or recommending my books as quarantine reading. I don’t have a whole lot of mental energy at this point, though–between homeschooling the girls and just keeping abreast of the state of the world, I’m pretty tapped out by the end of the day.

But the one thing I always have, and can always dredge up energy and enthusiasm for, even when I’m running on fumes, is writing. It’s my refuge and my solace and a light for me in dark places. I thought about serializing one of the novellas I have underway in my folders, but I’m not sure what my follow through would be like on that. I thought about posting an old manuscript, chapter by chapter, but frankly, that would just be embarrassing.

Instead, I decided I’d share some free short fiction here on lauraeweymouth.com, as I have time and am able to come up with new things or polish old ones. I’ve got a bit of a backlog of short fic at this point–I love to write it, and occasionally submit it, but it never really gets anywhere. Which is alright–I think in a lot of ways, both in long form and short form, the market and I have dissimilar tastes.

But maybe some of what I’m going to post will be to your taste.

The following story is one that’s been with me for a lot of years. I’ve written it over from scratch probably four times now, but the characters and concept and setting remain the same. It’s about the moments of brief connection that change us; about the fundamental importance of reaching out to others; about how we can be our best selves and do good even in the midst of despair, even when the right actions we’re undertaking seem too small to be important. It felt appropriate for this present moment.

I hope you enjoy it, and that it offers you a little glimmer of hope.

I love you all, and wish you health and happiness today and every day after.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall Nothing Noteworthy. As always, it comes with a content warning for readers who’d like one, which you can view by highlighting the following:

(Nothing Noteworthy comes with a content warning for potential suicide, but I promise you everything turns out alright)

Monochrome Photography of Bridge

Nothing Noteworthy

By Yours Truly

It was like breaking through the surface of clear water and hauling yourself up onto dry land after spending hours of weightlessness. Everything felt muddled and heavy, all at once too loud and too indistinct, too sharp and too soft. As if the world had become a vapor, and you were the only solid thing in it.

Or so Traveler had always thought. He thought it now, breaking through the surface of yet another time and place and waiting for everything around him to learn the trick of being. To grow substance, and meaning, and heft.

Was that right, though? Perhaps it wasn’t the world that needed to become more, each time he Traveled. Perhaps he was the one who needed to become less. His Temporal Therapist would undoubtedly have numerous pithy things to say on that score, but she was elsewhere, or elsewhen, or both, and Traveler wasn’t meant to be thinking of her now. She was the one, after all, who’d told him he needed a holiday. In retrospect, she might have meant a trip to somewhere warm and sunny, but this was all Traveler knew. This constant shifting through space and time.

Everything rippled in front of him, and he began to make out an astonished face. Whoever it was, they were much too close for comfort, and that was no good, he wasn’t meant to materialize in front of people like this. The proximity scans must have glitched, or the technician had overlooked a life sign.

Traveler attempted to say something reassuring, aware that he must appear quite alarming as he wavered in and out of focus. But the words came out all wrong, sounding like nothing so much as whale song. That was the problem with the newer subcutaneous translators—they worked marvels once you got somewhere (somewhen), but they malfunctioned in the in between.

An unbearable weight settled over Traveler, and he let out a sigh, of both relief and resignation. There. Everything would solidify now, and he could stop feeling the seasick elation Travel always brought with it.

The relief lasted only a moment, though, before being replaced by acute embarrassment. Because in front of him, and somewhat above him, stood a young woman. Bewilderment was etched across her face, but notably, none of the shock or horror Traveler had found in Bystanders on the few occasions he’d been involved in a Temporal Incident before.

“Please remain calm,” Traveler said, as he was supposed to. He glanced briefly down at his shoes before resolutely forcing himself to maintain eye contact. Doctor Eileen, she of the Temporal Therapy, had told him he spent too much time looking down and away. Well, he was certainly looking up now. Perhaps too far up, he realized with a dull shock as his surroundings grew less muddled, cohering into a sense of vast space.

They were standing on a bridge, he and his inconvenient Bystander. It was the sort of soaring steel construct favored in the mid-twentieth century. Beneath them was a moody grey harbor and above them, a moody grey sky, and the Bystander wore a moody grey, calf-length dress, the sort that could only be a uniform and that was, in and of itself, rather a timeless thing. The bridge gave him more of the sense of groundedness he looked for than this wide-eyed, unexceptional woman.

“Hello,” Traveler tried again, deviating slightly from the approved script as he grew painfully aware of how this Bystander stood, bare-footed, toeing blank space on the safety rail of the bridge, one hand resting gently on a steel girder for support. Without that broken bird’s wing of a hand, a single gust of the salt breeze might topple her, sending her over into the foaming breakers and cut-tooth rocks below.

“I’m sorry about all this,” Traveler went on. “You’re not supposed to see me, usually. At least you’re not supposed to see me if I’ve done my job well.”

He was rambling. He had a hard time with Bystanders. Well, not just Bystanders, but unexpected circumstances and potential conflict in general. Which was an unfortunate trait in a Traveler. A liability, the Bureau had called his anxiousness; hence the Temporal Therapy.

The woman looked down at him and at his words, recognition sparked in her, replacing the bewilderment.

“No, I know,” she said with a gentle nod. “If I do my job well, you’re not supposed to see me either. I’m meant to be invisible.”

A strong eddy of wind surged over the bridge, and she swayed. Traveler caught his breath.

Carefully, he cautioned himself. Carefully.

“I know it’s upsetting, what you just saw,” he told the Bystander, trying to sound as reassuring as possible as he returned to the script. “It’s the sort of thing that could cause no end of trouble for you. But I can make it so you don’t remember. I’m…I’m supposed to make it so you don’t remember. So if you come down, I’ll sort things out and you’ll be much happier having forgotten all this.”

It was Temporal Protocol, and normally, Traveler believed fiercely in it. But now, for the first time, the words tasted like a lie. And the woman above him, her bare feet gone blue with cold, obviously did not believe him.

“I don’t know what happy is anymore,” she confessed, the words like a waterlogged thing dredged up from the depths of the harbor below.

Traveler faltered. Every Bystander he’d met before jumped at the chance to forget. No one ever wanted the complications remembering an Incident would cause.

“Maybe not happier then?” Traveler offered. “But you’ll go back to the way things were, just a moment ago, before I turned up.”

The woman, standing on the rail of the bridge, suspended above that breakneck drop to the harbor, only looked at him.

Guilt uncurled in Traveler’s stomach. The sort of guilt he wasn’t supposed to feel, because he wasn’t meant to identify with Bystanders—they were only set pieces, after all. Just little chips to move across the vast gameboard of time, to be born and reborn, snuffed out or brought into existence with the wave of a Technician’s hand.

“I’m so sorry,” Traveler whispered, his words nearly eaten up by the wind. He spoke the apology in earnest, not as a matter of habit. He was sick with guilt, and that was more than half his problem. You’ve got to find a way to distance yourself, Doctor Eileen always said. Put up some walls, Traveler, or the stress will kill you. “It’s just, those were the things I’m meant to say. I don’t…I don’t know what else to tell you.”

The Bystander was still looking at him, dark circles like bruises beneath her eyes.

“Tell me something honest,” she said. “Tell me something true.”

And then,

“Please,” she added.

There was a world of longing in the single word. A fathomless yearning for real connection, and Traveler knew it at once because it was the thing that lay at his own center.

“I’m tired,” Traveler told her.

And he was. Tired to exhaustion, tired to despair, tired of the endless succession of wheres and whens, the distance and the separation and the need to never identify, because to do so would be to shatter, and what good was a broken Traveler? It was his job to stay the course, to do what he was told, to rearrange the building blocks of history until they came out as something better, and maybe, possibly, someday, as something perfect.

“I’m tired, too,” the Bystander said softly.

And she was. Tired to exhaustion, tired to despair, tired of the endless succession of days filled with worry and hardly getting by, with working till her head spun and her body cried out but never letting herself really feel any of it, because to stop moving might mean never getting up again. It was her job to say nothing, to do as she was told, to rearrange the inadequacies of her life until somehow the eternal conflict between rent and the need to eat and the desire for even a hint of joy resolved themselves into a happier whole, into the sort of dream worth striving for.

But they never did. They never did, and so here she stood with blank space above her and blank space below, and nothing but this moment between her and an ending.

The Traveler swallowed. Inside him, all the many conflicting voices of Technicians and fellow Travelers and Temporal Therapists were chattering away. For once, he shut them off, and out.

“Come with me,” Traveler said, and held out a hand to the woman above him, with the bruises beneath her eyes and the emptiness beneath her feet.

A siren shrilled somewhere in the city beyond them, its sound a high, wild whine. Far across the water, the rhythmic thrum of a helicopter became audible, and grew closer bit by bit.

“Where will we go?” the woman asked. Traveler shook his head.

“I don’t know.”

“Will we be alright?” she pressed.

Traveler put his free hand into one of the pockets of his long, Temporally-Benign coat. “I don’t know that either. I’m not…I’m not supposed to be speaking to you. Not really. You’re supposed to agree to forget, and then it’s like I’ve never been.”

“I want to remember you,” the woman said, her chin jutting out stubbornly, and Traveler couldn’t breathe. No one had ever wanted to remember him before.

“Come with me,” he offered again.

And then,

“Please,” he added.

There was a world of longing in the single word. A fathomless yearning for real connection, and the Bystander knew it at once because it was the thing that lay at her own center.

Without a word, she reached out, and before the wind could take her, Traveler caught her hand in his own and held it tight. He could not remember the last time he’d felt another person’s touch. She could not remember, either.

“There,” the woman said a little breathlessly as she stepped down onto the firmer ground of the bridge’s walkway. Her socks and shoes were nearby and she bent to pull them back on, a small prosaic detail that the Traveler locked up inside himself, for safekeeping and for further reflection.

When she straightened and looked at him, there was still a lostness in her. Still a sense of groundlessness and despair. But she’d reached out, and that was something.

“What’s next?” she asked Traveler.

He held out a hand again because he wanted that touch, that wordless and indefinable connection, and half-eagerly, she stepped forward, twining her fingers through his own.

“I’m not sure,” Traveler told her honestly. “I’m meant to be on holiday. Do you want to come?”

The woman wrinkled her nose, taking in their less than beautiful surroundings. “On holiday? Here?”

“Mm,” the Traveler said, as they stepped off the bridge and onto solid earth, still hand in hand. “They told me nothing noteworthy happened this year.”