Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

His voice was bitter; but I knew it was finished. Miramar sighed and inclined his head as if praying. When he raised it he was smiling, and with a sardonic bow he stood and pulled me to my feet.

“If I may have the honor,” he murmured. He drew back the heavy indigo drapes that curtained off his bedchamber from the rest of the suite. “A farewell to my favorite nephew.”

“Thank you, uncle,” I said, and tears stung my eyes as we embraced for the last time.

“Y OU WON’T LIKE IT Outside,” Ketura whispered to me much later. She had returned from the Saint-Alaban’s Masque, and the two of us lay together in her bedroom. “When I stayed with Flora Pyracantha last year they beat me while I slept, until I left.” She licked her lower lip as if tasting old blood.

I yawned. “That’s stupid. Didn’t they know you’re good for better things?” I stroked her breast, but she pushed me away, sitting up and pulling the quilt tight about her bare shoulders.

“Dammit! You should listen to me, Raphael, before going with Roland. They’re so different …”

“How?” I yanked away my half of the quilt and slid beneath it. “How are they different?”

Ketura snorted in exasperation, grabbed a long plait of my hair, and tugged me so that I faced my reflection in the mirror. “How do you think?”

I shrugged. “Their hair is short?”

“Don’t be a fool.” She pulled my hair, hard, and I kicked her away.

“Roland has hair. Everywhere.” I laughed and hid my face in the pillow.

“He’s still young. When they get older—” She gathered her long red curls and pulled them from her face so that her white cheeks and temples gleamed in the candlelight. “Like this. They’re bald. They’re ugly, all of them.” She shuddered. “I never knew how ugly they were …”

“So close your eyes and think of me. That’s what I do.” I shut my eyes and reached for her, grinning.

“Idiot!” She pushed me away and I sat up, surprised at her vehemence. “You should learn to fight, catamite, before you think about leaving …”

I grabbed her then, wrenched the comforter away, and bit her shoulder until her mocking voice softened and her hands fumbled to loosen my hair from its long braid.

“Why fight when we can do this?” I murmured.

Ketura sighed and turned away.

“You just don’t understand, do you, Raphael? The Curators don’t think like that. They don’t want us around, really; they just want to use us, and then leave us. Flora used me, and then she grew tired of me, and finally she hated me for being young and beautiful, and there all the time to remind her of it. They all hated me. And these were tribades, Botanists! The other Curators are worse …”

I traced the whorls of her breast and kissed her. “Roland has always been kind to me, Ketura.”

“Because you’re still young. Because he never gets enough of you. Flora was like that, too: before I left here.” She shook her head and glanced out the window. “I have to meet Adolph Drake soon,” she said, and flashed me a rueful smile. “Well, you’ve never needed to have any sense before, Raphael, so I don’t suppose I can give you any now. But—” She slipped from my arms and crossed the room to her armoire. “I can give you this.”

A six-pointed anthemion embellished the wardrobe. She pressed one of its wooden blades and a tiny drawer spat open. For a minute or two she poked through its contents, broken candicaine straws and prophylactic feathers, a handful of old ribbons and the broken keyboard from an ancient computer; then she carefully drew up a small object wrapped in desiccated paper. “I want you to have it.”

The paper crumbled as she unwrapped and then handed to me a sort of open-ended bracelet. Drab gray with faint lavender stripes, its smooth surface etched with a network of tiny whorls. It seemed to me a crude and ugly ornament, and I shot her a puzzled glance. She returned the look impassively as I examined the bracelet, hoping to find some brilliant or cantrap concealed within its somber coil. Finally I shrugged and started to put it onto my hand.

“No. Let me show you;” She took the bracelet from me and carefully eased it over her own wrist. She raised her face to meet mine. “Now. I want you to hurt me.”

I laughed. “You sound like Iris Bergenia!”

“I mean it—do something to cause me pain.”

Uneasily I shifted on the bed. “You never used to want that with me, cousin.”

“I don’t now, either, really. But I’m trying to show you something. Now go on—” She tossed back her mane of fiery hair and glared at me, then pointed to the knout draped over her wardrobe. “Use that if you like.”

I took the lash—a pretty whip of light braided doeskin that her Patron Flora Pyracantha gave her at Semhane one year—and raised it, smiling ruefully. When I struck Ketura she gasped: the blow was harsher than she had anticipated. I dropped the knout and rushed to comfort her.

“No!” She pushed me away and raised her clenched hand. “Watch—”

On her wrist the stony bracelet glowed very faintly, the lavender stripes deepening to violet against the luminous shell. One end of the gray loop was open, with a small rounded lip. As I stared it grew brighter still, until— zzzkkk shining black spine shot out from one of the dark whorls. At its tip a cobalt droplet gleamed like a gem’s tear. I breathed in sharply and moved to touch it.

“No: watch.” Ketura drew back, still holding her fist rigidly in front of her. As I stared the spine slowly retracted. I turned to her, marveling.

“What the hell is that?”

Ketura regarded me through narrowed eyes. Then she carefully slipped the bracelet from her wrist and handed it to me. “Now you should be very grateful to me for giving you this.”

“I don’t even know what it is.” I held it prudently in my palm, waited for her to snake it about my wrist. It grew warmer, as though adjusting to my body temperature. I touched the gray surface tentatively.

“It’s a sagittal: an engineered mollusk. Very poisonous, very rare. It was made during the Second Ascension.”

“That’s its shell?”

She nodded. “It lives inside, curled around like a—like a slug.”

“It’s poisonous?”

“Yes. If I’d struck you with it I’d have killed you.”

“Who gave it to you?” ‘

“A boy I met at the Botanical Gardens during the Masque of Poppies.”

I raised my eyebrows. “A Botanist gave you this?”

Ketura shook her head. “No. He wasn’t a Botanist. I don’t know what he was, really. He was beautiful, but he wasn’t a Paphian. Flora told me afterward that she had never seen him before; no one seems to have known who he was, or who invited him to the masque.

“I didn’t even entertain him; only talked with him in one of greenhouses for a little while. He gave me that—” She pointed at the sagittal, gray and cold about my wrist. “He said that it might serve me for a little while, and if I tired of it to give it to a friend.” She shook her head at the memory. “Not really the sort of gift we usually exchange, is it?”

I held up my arm and stared at it. “No, not really,” I admitted. “It’s ugly.”

Ketura nodded. “I know. I’m sorry; but it seemed like—well, it seemed like it might be useful for you, where you’re going.”

I looked at her coldly. “It’s a weapon.”

She nodded.

“How does it work?”

She leaned back against the wardrobe, flicking the hair from her eyes. “It feeds off the dead skin on your wrist. And it responds to changes in your body indicating fear or aggression. That’s when it sticks its spine out—”