Jay Lake - Green

A long, narrow shard of cobalt blue glass lay near me. I picked it up, moving with the deliberate pace of ritual while I tried to think past the next few seconds.

Such power as made Choybalsan a god now had first been stolen, or taken, from the Dancing Mistress’ people. That was a power of woodlands and meadows and the turning of the world’s life.

The Duke had held the power next. To hear the Factor speak, the Duke had thought himself a force for preservation, even renewal. He had never called lightnings or made war the way Choybalsan seemed all too ready to do.

Then I had snatched the power away and set it free. It was a cruel strength-the pardines hunted and had once made war; the Duke in turn had been ruthless in his rule-but that was the cruelty of the natural world. Not the deliberate goading and betrayals of Choybalsan. Even the Duke had been more like a farmer extinguishing weeds and scavengers among his crop.

Patience. The world was patient.

I slit my left forearm again with the glass, careful not to cut the vein. As the blood began to flow, I cast the glistening shard aside and took up my little wooden bell. I held it from the top this time and let the clappers swing as the blood fell on the stones. The bell echoed with its wooden clop as it had underground.

Goddess, I prayed, send the least of Your servants to me. I offer up my own blood, and through me a part of the blood of the child within me, to carry the last measure of this grace which was never mine, out of my body and into Your servant.

The gods in this place were silent, or were barely roused, but I knew that the Lily Goddess was fully clothed in Her power across the sea. However great or small She might be measured against Choybalsan, She attended me.

I rang the bell awhile, but nothing happened. No flash of light, no creaking of the Wheel, no manifestation in the street. Just me, a foolish girl with a little wooden bell, which I finally dropped.

“Thank you for your offering,” Choybalsan said. Even gods could be sarcastic. He bent down to stroke his burned fingers in the blood.

That was when I realized the bell still echoed.

The god heard it, too. He glanced at my own bell, cast aside. He looked past me. Something changed in the set of his body.

Clutching closed the wound on my arm, I stood and turned.

Endurance walked slowly down Lyme Street. Though I knew him to be dead and gone, he approached with the steady pace I remembered from the first days of my life. His bell, his real bell, clopped in time with the fall of his feet.

My grandmother sat astride his back. She was wrapped in her cloak of bells. Except my grandmother was never so tall.

I looked carefully and saw a tail sweeping away from the hem of the cloak.

The Dancing Mistress.

I opened my mouth to cry gladly, then shut it again. A stream of pardines came out of alleys and side streets, so that in moments a crowd of her people followed behind-far more than I had ever seen. Dozens. Scores.

The three who had fought with me-the Rectifier, the Tavernkeep, and the tan woman-rose from their hiding places and stepped quickly to stand beside the ox. Chowdry followed them, drawn perhaps by the familiar costume my teacher wore.

What had she done?

What had I done?

The lightning died. Choybalsan stood tall, beside me now as the two of us stood together to meet the coming challenge.

The Dancing Mistress slipped off her cloak of bells. I saw this was not my grandmother’s belled silk, that I had mistaken it so only because she was astride the ox. Endurance’s eyes gleamed as he pitched his head toward me, ringing his bell again, but he did not seek to call me back.

She handed the silk to Chowdry. Though it seemed he could move only one arm, he took the cloth and gathered it close as best he could, before giving me a long look of mute appeal.

“Federo,” the Dancing Mistress said.

“Choybalsan,” the god corrected her.

She slid from the back of the ox and walked toward us. “You have something that does not belong to you. Something that was never meant for men.”

“Whoever this power might once have belonged to, it is mine now.” He flexed his ruined fingers, then pointed to a building down the street. A single bolt of lightning struck the roof, breaking off shattered bricks and smoldering splinters.

“That trick grows old,” I found myself saying.

He looked at me with a set of his eyes that chilled my blood once again. “You are both here. Together you are the keys.”

“No.” The Dancing Mistress was at arm’s length now. Her people had followed close behind, the ox Endurance with them.

I did not hear the wheezing bellows of his breath as I had always known them. That was when I understood that I had succeeded in reaching out to the divine. My measure of grace had spoken, my piece of the Duke’s power. Endurance was not a sending so much as he was a calling.

A quiet, voiceless god of patience, if he survived long enough to grow as I understood that gods could do.

The Dancing Mistress went on: “There are no keys. You are a flawed vessel. Like a water crock into which someone has poured the red iron of the forge. You were never meant to hold this power.”

The Factor stepped close. His shade flickered. I could see the pardines disturbed him. “Release the power, Federo,” he said. “This has mastered you rather than you mastering it.”

“No.” Choybalsan began to quiver. I could taste metal in my mouth once more. “No, I will not let go!”

The Dancing Mistress’ claws came out. “You cannot be touched by weapons, but I have a hundred of my kindred behind me. I assure you that we can lay claws on you until you are nothing but a ribbon of blood in the street.”

Patience. Every time this dispute came to blows, somehow affairs grew worse. I had the habit of killing people, but this was both more and less than that.

We did not need to kill this god. We needed to persuade him to lay himself down.

“Please,” I told the Dancing Mistress. “Please let me try.”

I took Federo’s hand as the god within him raised his other arm to call down more wrath. He tried to snatch it away, but somehow could not. Instead he turned to look at me.

“You came to claim me, thirteen years ago.” I gripped his fingers close, as if he were Papa and holding tight could have saved me back then.

“That was the man Federo,” he rumbled in the voice that made my ribs ache.

Ignoring him, I went on. “I hated you for it. You were kind enough, and spared me good words, and fed me better than I had ever eaten in my life. Sometimes, for a child, that can be enough.”

His eyes held a distant, almost lopsided look. “You were a wise girl.” I heard the man inside the god.

“Now I have come to claim you back. Whatever love you hold for her ,” and with that word I cast my eyes toward the Dancing Mistress, “whatever love you hold for me, let that be enough for you to follow me as I once followed you.”

“I do not know how to let go,” Federo whispered. Sparks crackled within the god’s eyes. He shoved me away. I owe my life now to the fact that it was the man who pushed me and not the god, for I merely fell to the stones of the street instead of skittering half a block to the sound of shattering bones.

A stampede erupted. I curled tight as dozens of clawed feet pelted past me in a sudden burst of movement. For a panicked moment, I closed my eyes. I was too cowardly to face my death.

What came was not the shredding of my body, but the tearing noise of lightning slashing the air. I tasted metal yet again. All the hairs on my skin stood like spikes. Thunder clawed at my ears until only a heavy, smothering silence remained, though the stones beneath me carried the sound to my bones, echoing much as the god’s voice had.