Elizabeth Bear - Book of Iron

“Are you in love with her?” he asked.

The idea had never occurred to her. Her hand was trembling, so she did not touch the wires, even though she knew the iron was growing cold.

“No,” she said finally, having examined her emotions. “Not in the way you mean.”

“Then what? I’ve never seen you…” He sighed. “So engaged with anything that was not your work, or a combat, or a contest.”

Bijou shrugged. She set the iron to heat once more. She took the loupe out of her eye.

“We have a lot in common,” she said.

“Like Kaulas?” His face was calm, placid. She did not know if he’d intended it as a gut-punch, or just a point of information.

“I’m not surprised if he’s wooing her,” she said at last. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

The prince stroked his beard, a frown pulling long lines into existence around his eyes. “I care about you,” he said. “And Kaulas. And I need you both.”

“No one is alone,” Bijou affirmed, pleased that he understood. “Don’t worry, my prince. I am ever your right hand.”

When the snake was complete, at last she slept. And then she rose and bathed and dressed, aware that her clothes hung on her loosely. Her hair still swinging damp, she went to where the jeweled serpent hung in its padded rests on the work table.

She laid a hand atop its head, fitted her mouth over the nostrils, and blew a breath of life into its hollow interior.

That was all it took: no incantations and no spells. The intention had been fixed by the work she performed.

The snake-artifice pulled back, suddenly liquidly alive, and slithered to the worktop. There it coiled, slowly orienting itself—to judge by the swing of its head and the flicker of a jeweled tongue.

Bijou coaxed it up her arm and took it to visit her friend.

Salamander sat by herself in the shade of the garden, idly picking seeds from a half-pomegranate and tossing them to the birds. A few overlooked bits scattered the tile table before her like a fistful of rubies.

She looked up when Bijou came forward, and smiled. “I had heard you were closeted on some project. I missed you.”

“I was,” Bijou said. She’d left Ambrosias behind for once. “Doing better?”

“There are good days,” Salamander said. The pinch of her lips suggested this might be one of the other sort. “Will you sit?”

“I have a gift for you,” Bijou said. She perched on the edge of the stool opposite Salamander and rested the tips of her left fingers on the table top. Warmed by her heat, the artifice’s stone and metal skin felt neutral, like her own flesh touching her. It slid down her arm inside the sleeve.

Salamander watched, rapt, as the serpent slipped its head from Bijou’s cuff, tasting the air with a sparkling tongue. “Oh, my—”

She looked up at Bijou, eyes wide. “You made that?”

Bijou smiled an answer.

“It’s like jewelry,” Salamander said. “I can’t take that.”

“You can and will,” Bijou said. “I made it for no one else. You will have to name it—”

If Salamander had been about to argue, Bijou’s tone brought her up short. She raised both hands as in surrender.

“All right. I hope it doesn’t eat much.”

Bijou laughed. The serpent coiled across the table, bridging the distance between them. Its jeweled scales rasped and rattled on the tile, casting a scintilla of reflections from the light dripping through the leaves of the tree they sat beneath.

“Just a clockwork nightingale now and again.”

Salamander held her hand out tentatively. The serpent scraped a tonguetip across it, hesitated, then slithered toward her as if its mind had been abruptly made up. As it climbed Salamander’s arm to drape around her neck, she said, “It’s so heavy!”

“It’s stone and metal,” Bijou said. “As heavy as the living snake. And a bit cleverer, perhaps. What will you name it?”

“I need to think about it,” Salamander said. “It doesn’t seem like a decision to be made lightly. Bijou—”

“Ask,” Bijou said. “I’m not good at answering, but for you I will try.”

“Why?”

That was an easy one. What she wanted to say stuck in her throat, though, as if it were some huge admission of vulnerability. The vulnerability that Bijou had never allowed herself—not since she left her childhood behind.

She swallowed. “You are never alone,” Bijou said finally, hoping Salamander would understand.

Maybe she did. Because she just stared for a moment, and then she reached out with the hand not burdened by artifice, and squeezed Bijou’s fingers lightly once.

Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Wishnevsky.

All rights reserved.

Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2013 by Maurizio Manzieri. All rights reserved.

Print version interior design Copyright © 2013 by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.

Electronic Edition

ISBN 978-1-59606-624-3

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

www.subterraneanpress.com