Каарон Уоррен: The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

“Pippa?” Elsa’s eyes are yellow in this light. “No, she knew that it was you that wasn’t hers. She had to watch you like a hawk around Pip.”

I vomit again. Clumps of semi digested food gets caught in my hair. Elsa dabs at my mouth with a tea towel. Her colors are the jay’s—brown, pink, and blue. Was it her, stood at Mum’s back and pecking at her eye?

Pippa stands in the doorway looking from my face to Elsa’s and back again. I’ve never seen Pip’s gaze so direct.

Now I know why my heart’s loveless. Pip’s not the aberration, I am. I’m the daughter of crows, smuggled into the nest. Pippa is how she is because of my failed murder attempt. I affected her development when I tried to foist her from the womb.

It’s all my fault.

Pippa edges around the room, giving the woman who raised her a wide berth. She tucks herself under my arm and puts a hand low down on my abdomen. She peers into my face, concerned, and says, “Birdies.”

After she was taken, Sarai lived two years with a cloth bound over her eyes, learning scent and touch and taste, never once seeing the island that was her prison. When the day came for the blindfold to be removed, she thought at first her eyes must have failed. Home was a world of blue waters and red-bark trees, of jewel fruits and opal-bellied songbirds. Even the sand shone honey-gold and glittered where it clung to creases in the rock, tucked there by a warm south wind. Here on Felas, isle of the essence-eaters, there was only gray. Gray stone and gray water, gray robes and gray faces.

Jarad laughed when she asked what was wrong with her and turned her by her shoulders toward the sea. He stretched out one finger, the tattoo that marked his Mastery stark against his skin. “See that? The crimson at the peak of the ocean’s curve. That is the isle of Verakis, seat of our beloved queen and her court of misers. They hoard gold and joy in equal measure, and do nothing of value with either. That’s where all the color’s gone, little seabird. There’s nothing wrong with you, only with this place.”

She squinted, but her eyes were weak. She couldn’t see and couldn’t ’sense that far. Still she stared. That far and farther, on and on past Verakis, over a gray sea and then a blue one, far beyond where the eye could reach, there waited red-bark trees and opal-bellied songbirds; there waited her sisters and her brothers, her mother and her father. “I want to go home,” she said. “I will go home.” Defiant. A fool, but what child wasn’t?

A croaked laugh from Jarad brought her chin up. She looked to the structure behind her, the once-fortress, now-prison that dominated the island. Even blind, she had known it was the largest building she had ever encountered. With her sight returned, she could scarcely bear to look at it: half carved from the island’s rook-black rock, the rest a lighter stone stacked high enough that not even the narrowest spit of shore on the island escaped its shadow.

“Don’t tell me this is my home now. It isn’t. I won’t stay here.”

This only made Jarad shake his head. “This rock is no one’s home, girl. But only the best of the poison-tamers can leave it, and only to go to Verakis and live in a prettier cage. The rest of us—scent-makers, stone-tellers, all—we must get used to the gray, for we’ll never go home.”

“Then I will be a poison-tamer,” she said. She would go south, and then farther south, however she could. Over the gray sea to the blue.

“Verakis is no home either,” he said. “And you are no poison-tamer. It is not your talent. Take this.” He pressed a sachet into her hand, tapped it. “What do you ’sense?”

“Vanilla,” she said instantly, scent and ‘sense telling her true. She could feel the faint tug of it below her ribs, almost imperceptible—a gentle essence, not a powerful one. “A Nariguan strain.”

“And what do you smell?”

She lifted the sachet to her nose, inhaled. “Vanilla,” she said again, not understanding the lesson.

“For me it is home. It is the cook-fires in the field at harvest, it is the lines in my father’s face. Take this.” He took the sachet from her, gave her another.

“Red bark,” she said, and lifted it to her nose without prompting. Closed her eyes. She saw her mother’s hands, stained from working the bark. Heard her auntie’s laughter and the rumble of her father’s voice. Felt the slanting sun on her skin as she ran, ran, over the dry earth of the forest toward the beach, toward the shore. “Home,” she whispered.

“The scent has power to you because of your memories,” Jarad said. “Poison strikes us all the same, but scent is individual. A scent-maker must know the moments of their client’s life, must know what scents define them. And then they can summon any emotion, evoke any memory. That is where our power lies.”

“Scents are for a rich man’s fancy,” she said, echoing the scorn she’d heard from the other essence-eaters on the island. “There’s no power in them at all.”

She held out the sachet. He shook his head.

“Keep it,” he said. “Your true training begins tomorrow.” He left her on the southern cliff above the colorless, crashing waves, the red-bark sachet clutched in her palm as she tried to pick out a spot of crimson against empty sky. If she could get that far, she could find a way to go farther. To get that far, she would need to be a poison-tamer; she would need to be the best. And so she would.

The wind snatched at the blindfold in her hand. She let it go. The wind flung it back toward the island and crushed it against the rocks.

The day Sarai was taken, she had left her chores and her scolding father behind and gone to wander the shores. She was careful to go to the south, where the leathery tortoise her mother’s mother’s mother had ridden on as a child spent his days staring out to sea; the north shore hosted the black-stained bows of the queen’s ships, here to collect what was owed the thrice-slain undying queen, and Sarai had been warned away.

She had little notion of what being a queen meant. No one from Sarai’s island had stepped foot on the queen’s, nor had the thrice-slain queen ever laid eyes on the shadow-green treetops of Sarai’s home. Sarai knew only that her kinfolk gathered abalone and resin and red bark once a year and were given a stamped iron disk in return, which they added to the pile at the center of the village. Twenty-seven iron disks, twenty-seven years under the queen’s rule. They did not tell the sailors or the gray-cloaked official that they kept, too, the thirty-four copper ingots stamped with the hatch-mark lettering of the Principalities. The island lay at the lip of the kingdom. No navies defended them, no soldiers rattled lances on their shores. The queen and the Twelve Princes had bloodied blades before just to shift a thin black line a centimeter across a page; they would do it again. Then her kinfolk would bury the iron, they would dig up the copper; all would continue as it had before.

Sarai understood none of this. She understood that the sky was vast and the sea was blue, and her feet were made for wandering. She sang to the old tortoise and turned cartwheels in the sand. She skipped among the shallows and picked up ruby starfish, prodded the translucent tops of jellyfish with her fat finger. And then she turned toward the tug.

A little thing, it was. Like a fishhook just under her left rib, minnow-nibbled. Tug-tug-tug, and something else with it, a deep sense, a dark sense. When she focused on it, the world seemed impossibly large, and so did she.

She found it nestled in the sand. A rock, black and yellow, the size of her father’s fists closed and pressed together. Ambergris. She’d seen it before; her mother wore a piece of it, the size of a child’s finger, on a cord around her neck. Proof that her mother was lucky, for she had found it the day Sarai’s father asked for her to be his wife. She’d walked away from him to think, and found it, and smiling walked back. She told him yes and broke the ambergris in half, one piece for her and one for him.