Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

“I miss it,” she confesses. “No one wants to fight me anymore. Sometimes I poison the hounds out of boredom. But then I serve them their breakfast in unicorn skulls and they slobber and yap on through another year or nine. Come, tell me what’s in the soup course. I have heard you’ve a new way of boiling crab’s eyes to mimic the Whistling Plague. That’s how you killed Lord Vervain’s lad, isn’t it?”

“You flatter me. That was so long ago, I hardly remember,” I tell her. She and her husband take their seats above the field of war – our dining hall, sparkling with fire and finery like wet morning grass. They call for bread and wine – the usual kind, safe as yeast. The proxies arrive with trumpets and drums. No different, Yew , I think. My blood prickles at the sound. She is coming. She will come. My castle fills with peasant faces – faces scrubbed and perfumed as they have never been before. Each man standing in for his Lord wears his Lord’s own finery. They come in velvet and silk, in lace and furs, with circlets on their heads and rings on their fingers, with sigils embroidered on their chests and curls set in their hair. And each of them looks as elegant and lordly as anyone born to it. All that has ever stood between a duke and a drudge is a bath. She is coming. She will come. The nobles in the stalls sit high above their mirrors at the table, echoes and twins and stutters. It is a feasting hall that looks more like an operating theater with each passing war.

Henry sits beside his king. We are only the castle agreed upon – we take no part. The Hyacinth King has put up a merchant’s son in his place – the boy looks strong, his chest like the prow of a ship. But it’s only vanity. I can take the thickness from his flesh as fast as that of a thin man. More and more come singing through the gates. The Hyacinth King wishes to take back his ancestral lands in the east, and the lands do not consider themselves to be ancestral. It is not a small war, this time. I have waited for this war. I have wanted it. I have hoped. Perhaps I have whispered to the Hyacinth King when he looked tenderly at me that those foreign lords have no right to his wheat or his wine. Perhaps I have sighed to my husband that if only the country were not so divided we would not have to milk our own unicorns in our one castle. I would not admit to such quiet talk. I have slept only to fight this battle on dreaming grounds, with dreaming knives.

Mithridatium is in the east. She is coming. She will come.

And then she steps through the archway and into my home – my Yew, my emerald dust, my manchineel tree, my burning rain. Her eyes find mine in a moment. We have done this many times. She wears white and pale blue stitched with silver – healing colors, pure colors, colors that could never harm. She is a candle with a blue flame. As she always did, she looks like me drawn by a better hand, a kinder hand. She hardly looks older than my first daughter would have been, had she lived. Perhaps living waist-deep in gentling herbs is better than my bed of wicked roots. Her children beg mutely for her attention with their bright eyes – three boys, and how strange her face looks on boys! She puts her hands on their shoulders. I reach out for Dittany and Mayapple, Passiflora and Narcissus. Yes, these are mine. I have done this with my years, among the rest. Her husband takes her hand with the same gestures as Henry might. He begs for nothing mutely with his bright eyes. They are not bad men. But they are not us.

I may not speak to her. The war has already begun the moment she and I rest our bones in our tall chairs. The moment the dinner bell sounds. Neither of us may rise or touch any further thing – all I can do and have done is complete and I am not allowed more. Afterward, we will not be permitted to talk – what if some soft-hearted Horn gave away her best secrets to a Lily? The game would be spoilt, the next war decided between two women’s unguarded lips. It would not do. So we sit, our posture perfect, with death between us.

The ladies will bring the peacock soup, laced with belladonna and serpent’s milk, and the men (and lady, some poor impoverished lord has sent his own unhappy daughter to be his proxy, and I can hardly look at her for pity) of Mithridatium, of the country of Yew, will stir it with spoons carved from the bones of a white stag, and turn it sweet – perhaps. They will tuck toadstones and bezoars into the meat of the curried doves and cover the blancmange with emerald dust like so much green salt. They will smother the suckling lion in pennyroyal blossoms and betony leaves. They will drink my wine from her cups of unicorn horn. They will sauce the pudding with vervain. And each time a course is served, I will touch her. My spices and her talismans. My stews and her drops of saints’ blood like rain. My wine and her horn. My milk and her emeralds. Half the world will die between us, but we will swim in each other and no one will see.

The first soldier turns violet and shakes himself apart into his plate of doves and twenty years ago Yew kisses emeralds from my mouth under the manchineel tree while the brutal rain hisses away into air.

ROBERT REED(www.robertreedwriter.com) was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He has a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the Nebraska Wesleyan University, and has worked as a lab technician. He became a full-time writer in 1987, the same year he won the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest, and has published twelve novels, including The Leeshore , The Hormone Jungle , and far future SF Marrow and The Well of Stars . A prolific writer, Reed has published over 200 short stories, mostly in F&SF and Asimov’s , which have been nominated for the Hugo, James Tiptree, Jr., Locus, Nebula, Seiun, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and World Fantasy awards, and have been collected in The Dragons of Springplace , The Cuckoo’s Boys , Eater-of-Bone, and The Greatship . His novella “A Billion Eves” won the Hugo Award. His latest book is major SF novel The Memory of Sky . Nebraska’s only SF writer, Reed lives in Lincoln with his wife and daughter, and is an ardent long-distance runner.

FRUITS RIPEN AND worlds ripen.

If not taken at the right moment, any ripe prize falls from its tree and rots away, and nothing is gained.

That was how They looked at the situation.

Call them ‘alien’. The word isn’t ridiculous, yet by the same token, no label does justice to their origins or far-reaching powers. And after four and a half billion years of slow, often irregular growth, the Earth was deemed ripe. In the parlance of universal laws, that little orb had grown just soft enough and sweet enough. That’s why They came. That’s why an ordinary day in late June came and left again, and in those hours, by invasive and ephemeral means, every aspect of human existence was conquered.

The new rulers were few, less than a hundred, but they were an experienced, well-practiced partnership. Avoiding sloppiness and haste, they followed their occupation with months of careful study. This was a new colony, one realm among ten thousand thousand scattered about the galaxy, and their first job was to understand the world’s nature. Out of that collection of meat and history, failure and divine promise, they had to select one good leader – a human face and mind to be entrusted with the administration of what was theirs.

AT FIFTY-EIGHT, ADRIANNE Hammer ruled an empire of cubicles and computers as well as an impressive stockpile of Folgers Classic Roast. She was sharpminded and quietly demanding of her seven-person staff. Weighing data from multiple sources, she was paid to make honest, unsentimental guesses about the future. Economic growth and downturns were predicted. The odds of storms and plagues and various medical breakthroughs had to be rendered as numbers. Hers was one minuscule department inside a major insurance conglomerate, but while other departments often duplicated their work, Adrianne and her team were unusually competent. Which is to say that the eight of them were correct a little more often than their competitors.