Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

"And what now?" she asks the high and unconsoling sun, the sun that might as well be the eye of God staring bitterly down at a fifteen-year-old suicide. The eye of a God who's finally washing his hands of her once and for all. A moment later, Julia gets a big mouthful of saltwater, and it strangles her and burns her sinuses and throat.

"Is that your answer?" she sputters weakly, and the sun continues to hang mute in the cloudless winter sky, however many tens or hundreds of millions of miles away from her it might be.

Much too far to matter, she thinks and shuts her eyes. The cold and the effort of swimming out this far have made her very sleepy, and so maybe that's what happens next. Maybe it's as simple as shutting her eyes and drifting on the swells until she falls asleep. Maybe there will even be one last dream, something warm and gentle that shows her another way her life might have gone, if she weren't insane and had never spoken to the angel that first day in the clearing in Shrove Wood. If the rattlesnake had never been burned to charcoal. If the angel had never started telling her stories about monsters. Julia uses the last of her strength to imagine a dream just like that, a very good dream in which she marries the handsome man with the guitar and they have children and even grandchildren, and she grows old and dies at home in her bed with all of them about her. She tells herself that the sound of wings close by is nothing but a curious seagull or a pelican, and only a few seconds later, too exhausted to tread water any longer, she slips beneath the welcoming surface of the sea.

She might have had a name once, distant ages ago, before the white men came with their noisy, stinking cities and their clattering railroads and their murderous highways, back when the Muskogee were the only men she'd ever seen and who'd ever seen her. But if she did have a name, she's long since forgotten it. She might have had a mother, too, and perhaps even a father, like all the other things that creep and slither and swim and fly through the bayous and sloughs spread out along the Flint River. The shadow things hiding in the old church at the edge of the swamp call her Elandrion, Daughter of the Great Mother Nerpuz, but she's pretty sure it's just some shit they made up to stay on her good side and Elandrion wasn't ever really her name.

On this summer night, she's resting in the mud beneath a bald cypress log at the very bottom of a deep, still pool, gnawing the last pale shreds of flesh from the bones of a great bullhead catfish. The bullhead was a giant, seven feet from snout to tail, and maybe it lived at the bottom of the pool for twenty years or more before she crept up and wrapped it in her strong arms and cracked it's skull open between her jaws. Nothing in this whole damn swamp that's even half a match for her, not the mud cats or the huge old snapping turtles, not the cottonmouth moccasins, not even the goddamned alligators. Nothing out here she can't make her dinner from, not if she's gone and set her sights on it.

She's using a claw to get at the last bits of the bullhead's brains when she hears the shadows calling out across the night to her, their voices tangling in Spanish moss and the limbs of the trees and dripping down into the black water.

Elandrion, she's finally come. She's here.

She's found us all, Elandrion. She's right here in the church.

For a moment, she considers ignoring them, leaving them to their own fates. She thinks about finishing with the catfish and then sleeping through the scorch of the coming day right here beneath this cypress log. Surely together they can handle one skinny human girl, even if there's any truth to the gossip she's heard from mockingbirds and egrets and a couple of red-winged blackbirds.

The albino girl. She's waiting here for you.

Deliver us, Elandrion.

Beneath the cypress log, she rolls her eyes and picks her teeth. She imagines the shadows doing their best to menace the girl, playing like they're the next worst thing under heaven, and all the while they're whining into the night for deliverance. Ought to leave the lot of them to whatever the kid's got in mind, she thinks, but then she hears another voice oozing down through the stagnant water and the slime.

– an old evil which lay a thousand years in the mud at the bottom of the river-something drew you here-that's the one I've come for-

And under all the bluster, the girl child's so scared she's about to shit herself, but still…

How long since anyone or anything called her out?

How long since anything dared come looking for her?

And, besides, there's really no point denying that she relishes the way the shadow things in the old church simper and bow to her and offer up all their darkest, most laughable prayers. Once, they even lured a couple of teenagers into the church and then kept them there for her. When she was done with them, the shadows buried what was left in the overgrown cemetery. It'd be a shame if the rumors were true and the albino girl went and killed them all off.

She has a knife, one of the shadows whimpers.

Elandrion, she's something terrible. Something mad. There's angelfire in her eyes, Elandrion.

She squints into the silt and gloom at the bottom of the pool, considering that last part and recalling that one of the egrets said something about angels, something about purifying fire. But she hadn't given it a second thought. Egrets say all sorts of crazy things.

– something drew you here-that's the one I've come for-

She pushes the bullhead's stripped and needle-spined carcass aside and disturbs a fat, tasty-looking slider concealed inside a thicket of eelgrass. Any other time, she'd have snatched the turtle as it tried to slip away to find some other hiding place. But she hesitates, listening to the voices filling the Georgia night, and the slider escapes. But that's alright, she tells herself. The albino girl will fill up the empty nook in her belly that the turtle would have occupied, that nook and then some. It's been years since she last tasted human flesh, which is almost as sweet as the wild boar piglets she finds in the swamp, from time to time.

Will you squeal for me, sweet angel child? she thinks and grins there beneath the cypress log. Will you squeal just like all the little pigs?

And then she kicks off with her broad feet and rises slowly towards the shimmering surface.

She who has no name, not that she can recall, the one the cowering shadows in the church call Elandrion. The ancient she-thing that the black-brown men and the pink-white men out gigging frogs or checking their traps for muskrats and beaver have glimpsed, moving swiftly between the trees. They've called her lots of things-the demon of Hopekill Swamp, witch, haint, monster, freak, the gator woman. They have no end of names for her. At least the red-brown men knew better than to give her any name at all.

She squats in the water lilies and rushes at the edge of the pool, considering once more everything the birds have said, the careless chatter of warblers and blue jays. The air is still filled with the whispered calls of the cringing church shadows. And that other voice, which must be the girl's, frightened but bold, the voice of someone who believes things she's better off without. Then, the one whose name is not Elandrion gets to her feet and, moving quickly on her long legs, follows a deer trail out of the swamp and up to higher, drier ground, and every living beast and insect falls silent as she passes.

Never before has one of the red witches been permitted within the walls of Kearvan Weal, and now not one but two of them have come, have been welcomed through its gates, after they slipped across the Dog's Bridge on horseback only four days before the Weaver's army streamed over the vast span of bone and wire. That alone is enough to make Kypre Alundshaw suspicious of their intentions and allegiances, despite the things he's told the Glaistig. That these two somehow managed to survive the journey from their far distant temples on the river Yärin, that they traveled the Serpent's Road unmolested, must either stand as evidence that they're in league with the Weaver or that their stone idols have more power than the alchemists of the hublands would ever have dared believe.