Timeless Tales Magazine: The Snow Queen

THE SNOW QUEEN

Timeless Tales 7

Editor Tahlia Merrill Kirk

www.timelesstalesmagazine.com timelesstalesmagazine@gmail.com

Design and Layout Geoffrey Bunting

004 The World is Inside Andrea DeAngelis 0 1 6 The Slow Queen Laurinda Lind 0 2 2 Troll Hunters Alexandra Faye Carcich 0 3 4 Confession of a Bandit Queen Erin Robinson 044 The Magician’s Boy Patricia Poppenbeek 0 5 4 Winter Queen, Summer Woman Han Adcock 0 6 4 Through the Pale Door Alex Hutson 0 7 6 The Last Day of Summer Vacation Matthew Brockmeyer 0 8 4 Homecoming Elizabeth Zuckerman 0 9 6 Warnings Hope Erica Schultz

Fiction

Words by

The World is Inside

Andrea DeAngelis

About the story

What captured my interest in Andersen’s original tale was how insular Gerda and Kai’s life seemed before the Snow Queen took Kai away. I wanted to exaggerate and emphasize that isolation. For my way into a new twist on an old story, I usually begin with the physical architecture, a visual scaffolding allowing me to build a new narrative. I started to imagine where they lived as two ultra modern high-rises with their communal connecting space as a suspended garden house pod.

I’ve always been fascinated by pedestrian bridges and with the

MORE TIMELESS TALES STORIES

BY ANDREA:

Home is Where the Bone is Issue 5 Baba Yaga

idea that they could be retooled as a living space. The original tale is from Gerda’s point of view, so I wrote a story where Gerda was part of the problem and Kai’s need for escape was understandable and necessary.

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K AI Sitting cross-legged in our garden pod, I can see the other suspended pods surrounding me, jutting out, connecting endless sister and brother towers in our compound like space ships docking in an immense sterile city. Flying drones buzz lethargically, dropping off seeds, food and other necessities as well as carrying away non-composting refuse. Glass greenhouses connect two apartments in two separate buildings up and down each floor. The only human connection we have is with one other resident, because our apartments have no outside doors.

No glass pods sit on the soggy ground either, the soil is deemed too treacherous. I don’t know if our brother or sister towers ever give way to another landscape because I have never been outside and I don’t know anyone who has.

The only person I know is Gerda. And I am the only person she knows, or at least that is what I assume. But now I’m not so sure. Perhaps she slips out in the hours I retreat to my separate living quarters to sleep. There are no doors in our apartments except for the two slanted doors leading to our shared garden pod.

I love Gerda but I am forced to love her. There is no one else I can suffocate with. I see others around our age toiling in the pods near ours. From time to time these other couplings will wave and we will wave back but we cannot hear them. The tempered double paned glass sucks away most sound. We are ensconced in a deadened world, hemmed in by the limits of my vision. The farthest I can see is a huge decaying billboard – Welcome to Secaucus’ Sealed Community – the weathered words fading over the years. I’m still not sure how to pronounce Secaucus. I want to think of the sea when I say it, but I can only see the black snakes that sometimes slither through our bathroom pipes.

I no longer want to be here. Before I just couldn’t imagine how to be anywhere else but lately, I have become certain

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there is a door, a hidden way out of Secaucus to the actual sea. I finally grew tall enough to reach the top of our garden pod if I jumped as hard and high as possible.

Gerda admonished me, “Kai, stop that! You’ll shake our pod loose.”

Even though we are beyond names—there is no one else to intrude upon our restricted consciousness—she always calls me by my name.

“So what?” I asked her.

“We will fall, Kai.” “So what if we do?”

“We will die, Kai.” “Maybe we won’t die. Maybe dying is also a lie.”

“We will, Kai. Do you truly no longer want to exist?”

“Maybe I do.”

Gerda let out one of her interminable heavy sighs that indicated that she was no longer listening to me. Soon she would stop talking and I couldn’t take that heavy sound of nothing pressing down on me. The only way to get through to Gerda was to spit out her name.

“Gerda, maybe we won’t die. Maybe we will escape and get outside.”

“Outside? Why do you want to go outside, Kai? There is no outside. There is only us.”

“What about the others?” I pointed to the pods nearby.

“There are no others, only you and me. Kai and Gerda.

You should be thankful you are not alone like her.” She pointed to the suspended pod on our tower’s left.

In that pod, we only ever saw one person. She was all alone.

All the pods around her were wrecked and vacant. Her hair was shimmery white, but I wasn’t sure if she was old. She didn’t move like she was decaying. We’d had a couple of those near us not long ago and then, one day, the old inhabitants were gone. Months passed before they were replaced by children. If they were replaced, there must be a door, a way

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to get outside—to get to her, the snow queen—to be with someone else, to be someone else. To be able to breathe. My chest felt so tight, so constricted in this trapped space.

I call her the snow queen because I do not know her name. And because there is something very noble about her. Gerda calls her varying slurs: “The Hag”, “Queenie”, “Colorless Catherine” and so on. She cannot understand my fascination because I should only be interested in her.

“What are you thinking about, Kai?” “Nothing, Gerda.”

“Nothing is nice.”

Sometimes I catch the snow queen staring off in my direction. I wave to her but she never waves back. There must be a door. ge r da They told me to keep him happy and, if not happy, to keep him occupied. I was failing on both accounts.

We were their youngest subjects in the vicinity until the old ones died and were replaced by children. I wonder if the children will remember they were somewhere else before. Those memories forget themselves. I’ve forgotten most of my mother except for her wet sickly cough and cold hands. My father I never knew. I doubt Kai remembers anything before he was ten. He never talks about it. But somewhere buried in his heart he remembers there was something else. That is why he’s fixated on escape. I can’t tell him it isn’t a where you’d want to go to.

The world now is just towers connecting to other towers.

The majority of people are kept apart with only two on any connecting greenhouse bridge, forced together. The world filled but also emptied. Isolated towers that run onto infinity or at least as far as I can see from the roof.

Things have gotten worse between us since she arrived.

The white haired queenie.

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Why did they put her in that pod all alone? Is it a test?

They love to test the girls. The diminishing boys are not as important. But Kai is smarter than most boys. I wonder if Kai suspects I’ve been outside our dark apartments to the equally dismal hallways unbroken by doors or windows.

There are doors but Kai will never find them. He doesn’t have the proper chromosome key, XX. His corrupted Y would never allow him access. In the brother towers it must be the opposite, that only the males can open the doors. Why else would the snow crone be left alone? If one of the couplings dies, so follows the other within days, weeks at most. Not two years adrift like her.

When we can, we girls meet on the roof to put together the latest message to the controllers. I ask the others about her.

They shrug and say she has to power down of her own accord.

Kai thinks I have nothing to share but I just don’t share with him. If I do well in this assignment I could be paired with someone else and be new in their eyes. Eventually I hope to age out of this confinement. Hester says there are towers with doors leading into public hallways, allowing the inhabitants to mix, not to go outside, but at least not to be imprisoned with only one other person who is always unredeemingly male. But these adolescent years are tricky and unpredictable. I wonder if that colorless Catherine across the way failed in too many tests and that’s why she is now alone?

That will never be me.

I am not entirely sure what I am made of, it seems like flesh except in the dark hours when I’ve cut off fingers and they’ve grown back. I haven’t gouged out an eye but the others have. The regrowth of the iris always taking longer than a night and I don’t want to alarm Kai. He gets frightened like (I suspect) a child would. I have never been a child, even when I was small. I was not made of my mother but of whatever they could scrounge.

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I purposely prick my fingers on the roses’ thorns. When I bleed, it is the only time Kai is concerned about me. He’ll grab my wounded hand, saying, “Gerda, why do you always manage to hurt yourself?” If only he knew. Boys always want the crazy girls. And I am a girl who does not want a boy. Maybe if I do well here there will be towers with only girls.

“I’m clumsy I guess.” These pricks, scratches, and further mutilations are the only proof I’m alive. kai I know Gerda is hiding things from me. Perhaps she is squirrelling her secrets away to tell me some day. To talk all day and night like we used to, before she bored me, in silence as well as in words, words only a little less so. I don’t care. All I want to find is the door. I know it exists.

I’ve asked her in so many ways.

Direct: “Where is the door, Gerda?”

Wistful: “If only we could find a way out of here.”

Angry: “Where is the door, Gerda? Show me or I’ll break down the walls.”

But there is no way to break through the concrete. There are no seams I can see or feel.

I must get to her.

The snow queen is a glittering speck in my eye. She has colored everything by her mere existence. I blink and she doesn’t disappear. I go to sleep and she is still in my vision.

Nothing in my confinement with Gerda has retained any mystery or hope. The only times Gerda is unknowable to me is when she deliberately wounds herself, thrashing through our wild rose garden. Or when she is missing parts, parts she thinks have grown back exactly the same but her odd flesh still registers the damage like a bruise halo. Then there are times I cannot find her in either one of the conjoined apartments or the garden. Eventually, after

10 Timeless Tales 7

searching for an hour or two, I stumble upon her and she swears so sincerely that she slept in the closet or some other dark corner those missing hours and I almost believe her.

The weather through the greenhouse gray glass never changes in any discernable way. I can’t recall ever seeing snow except for today. Today I can remember wearing mittens for some reason. Mittens I wore as a child holding someone else’s much bigger hand. I awoke in the lightening dark with Gerda curled tightly around my right side, cutting off circulation. I carefully untangle myself from her clammy form and slide off the bed so that the motion detector’s lights won’t register me and wake my mandatory mate. Because that’s what this pairing is—a decision made for us.

I crawl to the garden in the gray dawn and the snow queen is dancing while white bees swarm around her. I’ve only seen yellow ones before. It takes several prolonged minutes of watching her to realize that these almost translucent bees are snowflakes. A few even drifted into our garden pod. One of our automated windows sticks in mid-revolving motion and the snow slips through, settling in a neat pile near Gerda’s barbaric roses, but quickly disintegrating in the climate controlled garden.

But in the snow queen’s garden pod across the way, all the windows are cracked open and this fluke blizzard howls and swirls around her almost as if she’s orchestrating the weather. All that matters to me from this moment on is reaching her, leaving Gerda and the claustrophobic world inside behind. eva I don’t know why they’ve kept me after Addison fell through the glass of two garden pods below. There is never supposed to be just one, what is their reasoning? What is their

Timeless Tales 7 11

hypothesis in this experiment? And how can you have any experiment with only one test subject? Who is the control for the controllers if there is only one?

A connection can be forced with anyone if you only have them and no distractions. And I hated Addison but hate is a powerful emotion and can look like love. Love is dependence and you grow to depend on someone, anyone if they’re the only one you have.

The assigned pairings I understand. Although to do a truly effective experiment they shouldn’t have had anyone else in our sight lines. We should have felt truly alone. I didn’t need the man child in B3 staring at me. I don’t like the way he makes me feel. His expectations will empty me of me.

He’s going to kill himself getting over here. I have pictured B3 plummeting a dozen times in the last ten minutes and still it bothers me. Repetition of the imagery and accompanying emotion should deplete its impact. But it doesn’t.

The sore keeps festering. kai I will lay myself at her delicate bare feet. She could kiss me to death and I wouldn’t mind. I climb the roses, the thorns digging in with casual brutality. When I reach the malfunctioning window left ajar I slip halfway through. Now I have her full attention. I can see her perfectly proportioned face.

She isn’t old, maybe twenty at most. I can’t imagine how I would reach her pod, how I could gather enough propulsion to swing to one of her open windows. I only know that I have to. The air outside scorches my lungs with its headiness and grit as I fly. I scrabble for purchase on the slick glass. She never moves to help me, her numinous eyes merely track my fall past her pod down, down into snow and marsh.

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ge r da I see Kai fly, then fall. I didn’t want this for him. But he never wanted for me. He only thought of himself. And we are not anything but parts, parts of each other, parts to break and be reconstructed. How can Kai be reassembled from down there? I see his pale arm claw the bushes blindly below. Is he still connected to himself? How can he never not be missing? He wasn’t what I wanted but was a part of me. But maybe now he’s gone means I can go too?

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Fiction The World is Inside

About The Author

Andrea DeAngelis is at times a poet, writer, shutterbug and musician living in New York City.

Her writing has recently appeared in Umbrella Factory and Niteblade. Andrea also sings and plays guitar in the indie rock band MAKAR (www.makarmusic.com) who are in the midst of recording their third album, Fancy Hercules. For more, visit her website www.andreadeangelis.com.

Poetry

Words by

The Slow Queen

Laurinda Lind

About the poem

When I learned about the theme for this issue, I read a 40-page online original out of curiosity. I am interested in fairy tales and myths from a dream-analysis perspective, and after having studied Bruno Bettelheim in a college class. I didn’t think I would actually submit to TT, but this tale blew me away. I may now have a thing for Hans Christian Andersen—this story was so rich in images that I couldn’t resist playing with them, and my poem considers the character Gerda as a composite of the other strong female figures in the story.

Laurinda Lind

 The Slow Queen

So, it takes a long time to get there.

It took me a world. I was a barefoot girl whose eyes burned through frost like money and I was a bearded thief who turned boys’ hearts black as they froze in the ice. But I wasn’t ready to be a woman who needed a knife under the sheets or who wanted to run through the water in red shoes. Ship them off to Oz. The way to know was not to know, yet to save more stories than the flowers could grow.

It’s not the man at the end who makes me two halves. It’s myself whole like a boat or a bear, and so impossibly full of angels and witches he has to admit he can see me now.

18 Timeless Tales 7

Timeless Tales 7 19

Poetry The Slow Queen

About The Author

Laurinda Lind lives in New York State, but could get to Canada in fifteen minutes with a ready boat, if she already had her shoes on. Some previous poetry publications/acceptances were in Antithesis Journal, Ascent, Barbaric Yawp, Chiron Review, Cold Mountain Review, Communion, Comstock Review, Constellations, Dime Show Review, Ellipsis, Emanations, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Liminality, Midnight Circus, Mobius, Moonsick, Mudfish, Origins, Passager, Paterson Literary Review, Plum Tree Tavern, Ship of Fools, Silver Birch Press, Triggerfish, Uproot, Veil, and Welter.

Fiction

Words by

Troll Hunters

Alexandra Carcich

About the story

This twist was not my first choice off the brainstorming list. But as the Snow Queen POV dragged on, cold and un-motivating, I swapped to a spunkier story. Troll Hunters was meant to be a kick butt revenge story, like the film Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.

Re-examining the source material, I pulled out some of Andersen’s Christian allegory, since it was important to him, to me, and to Troll lore.

Getting together is not the end of relationships, and I enjoyed playing with who Gerda and Kay had become in the wake of their experiences with the Snow Queen. Kay is desperate to please the woman who saved him and convince her he’s no longer MORE TIMELESS TALES STORIES

BY ALEXANDRA:

Curious Machinations Issue 6 Psyche & Cupid

under the evil influences of the troll mirror. The same qualities Gerda showed in the search for Kay, she applies to her new goal: persistence and determination.

Thanks to friends and family for their repeated readings and to Tahlia for being an awesome editor.

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“It grows late my children,” said the schoolmaster, “But you must learn that the Christians’ false gospel is at fault.

In the old days, we walked the fields without fear, but now, no sooner do we crawl out of our homes then the poisonous church bells ring their news, ‘Christ has died for all but you!’”

During the lecture, students marked their slates or looked through the textbook, History of the Christian Invasion of Denmark. A wine cellar was outfitted as classroom to avoid the noxious light from upstairs.

“For this reason, most settle far from towns, deep underground. They have driven us from their midst—we who aided them or ate them when a nuisance. We, who remain in their epicenters, fulfill our purpose: to malign their goodness and degrade their aspirations.”

The teacher’s head lifted and neck folds jiggled. His grey pointed ear twitched toward the door. A distant tinkling evolved to a persistent ringing chime. The children cringed at the noise.

Through the door stepped a young lady with blonde ringlets piled high on her head. Her hoop skirts just cleared the doorway. She shook her wrist, where little bells hung in a bracelet. The students sank to the floor and clawed the stone masonry to escape the sound. They wailed in agony.

The schoolmaster scrambled to hide in a cupboard, away from the light, until the intruder and her angel bells went away. As he turned the corner from the cellar stairs, there was a flash of burning magnesium and he was paralysed, turned to stone.

Kay put down his flash lamp and stepped toward the troll.

His hair and features were fair and his build slight. He surveyed the scene and sighed. To make the change permanent, the troll needed to be in a room with stronger light. Groaning,

24 Timeless Tales 7

he leaned the troll on his back and gripped its arms. He dragged the statue through the kitchen toward the morning room. The statue began to feel soft, the cold stone warming.

Kay moved faster. Once in the room, he tied the troll with rope moments before it returned to life.

“I smell a Christian man!” Bellowed the schoolmaster.

He shook himself and little particles of stone flicked off his skin like dandruff.

“We’re looking for your overseer.”

The troll frowned and grumbled, the rope barely contained his bulk.

“Tell us where your Master hides.”

“I won’t.” The troll had a coiling, springing look to him.

Then his face was stricken, and they heard jingling bells coming down the hall. Gerda entered.

“You will,” she said, shaking her wrist.

The troll bellowed and twisted in his bonds.

“He can’t, if you keep that up,” Kay objected The troll’s ears stood out in a stiff V, while his eyes rolled back. Thrashing did not free him. He hurled himself across the room, breaking the window and ripping the curtain covering it. Gerda stepped in front of Kay as glass shards scattered through the room. The troll had turned to stone in the morning light.

Kay examined the troll. Beyond the ugly statue, the morning was overcast, with a murky sun desperate to break through the clouds.

“It’s a beautiful day,” said Kay. Gerda looked at him through the corner of her eye and shook her head.

2.

In the years after the Snow Queen incident, Gerda had become an expert in locating troll schools, dens, and caves.

It was the trolls’ fault Kay had left. It was their mirror

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splinter that set him on the path of sin and started the ordeal that began when they were children and ended in adulthood. Every troll had the potential to cause evil, but some were more obviously engaged in it than others. The troll schools were the centers for wicked innovation.

Above all was the Trollmaster’s school which created the original mirror.

After dispatching the basement school, Gerda spotted the cave in the space between towns. Kay saw it too, but pretended not to notice. Gerda led the descent, confident that this cave, south of the paper mill town, was a troll cave. Kay followed, carrying a lantern covered with cloth.

They had come prepared.

Past the turning, with the sun a memory, they found the family. Under the smothered light, the group were lumpy rock forms with hair like scattered moss. On inspection, they became Father troll, mother, and litter of children.

When Kay held up the lantern, there appeared other similar outcroppings.

Once outside, Gerda ascended the hill above the cave, dragging her skirts through damp dead leaves. Kay followed her up the slope, struggling with an oversized bundle, as long as he was tall. Gerda paused at the top and looked at Kay. Kay squeezed the bundle close. “Look,” he said, “I’ve been thinking. Not all trolls are evil. Maybe some just want to be left alone.”

Gerda took the bundle and unrolled it on the ground. It was full of long metal rods. Gerda stuck one into the soft earth. “This is justice,” she said. “This is right. We won’t let anyone else be changed by their wicked designs.”

“But it’s such a beautiful day, there couldn’t possibly be a storm. The trolls will come out, see what you’ve done, and move off.”

“You’ve been a failure at weather forecasting ever since we escaped the Snow Queen.”

26 Timeless Tales 7

With the invocation of that name, Kay grew silent. He stuck a rod tentatively in the ground. Rain showered them lightly. In the distance thunder rolled. They took shelter nearby, while the storm unloaded on the surrounding country. Gerda watched the lightning play and hoped the rods brought the electricity down into the den.

In the morning, they returned to the cave. Pausing at the entrance, Gerda turned to her friend. “It’ll be ugly.”

“I’ll protect you.”

Gerda groaned. “Since when?”

Inside, the cave was warm and smelled like food had spilled onto the oven floor and burned. They couldn’t find the troll family—they had turned to dust with only the occasional limb, a foot, nose, or finger barely discernable. The lightning had done its work.

Kay looked disturbed.

“They were wicked and evil,” said Gerda. “Creatures of the devil.”

Kay’s voice was tight. “All things God made are beautiful in their purpose to bring him glory.”

3.

Deep in the nation’s interior a large troll school was housed in an outdated military outpost overlooking a swamp. Gerda identified it by the carefully covered windows. There was no town nearby or sound of church bells. Kay squeezed Gerda’s hand as they looked on the edifice. Inside, they entered the long dormitory hall. Troll-lings spread their sleeping mats on every surface. Gerda examined the boarded window.

“You promised,” said Kay. “We came for the mirror and the troll master.

“Look at those gnarled faces,” she waved her hand at the sleepers, “They’re ugly little people eaters. There’s a giant, with a giant nose and giant snot.” Her nose wrinkled.

“Gross.”

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“They’re just children. They come in all shapes and sizes.

I was ugly when I had acne. A new pimple bloomed every day until I lived in the ice palace.” Kay stopped and looked at Gerda who looked away. She was still jealous of the Queen who had stolen her friend. They passed through the room.

“When you were a child,” said Kay, “you thought everything was beautiful. Why do you see the world so bleakly now?”

“I realized that not everything is Granny’s rose garden.

You should stop pretending things are more beautiful than they are.”

Kay paused and fell behind. He only pretended for the sake of her affection, so that she would know he was no longer under the influence of the Troll Glass. Gerda had freed him. She was precious to him, and he tried to be careful of her feelings. He said, “I learned that if you try to see the good in things, you will.”

“If trolls are good, why are we hunting them?”

“To protect our fellow men!”

Gerda agreed, but in her heart she knew they meant different things. She wondered if she and Kay were really predestined to be together or if that was just a childish fancy of hers.

Past the dormitory, down the hall, most doorways gaped and held unused rooms. Only one oak door stood locked.

Gerda pulled out a hairpin and jimmied the lock.

Kay looked panicked, “I haven’t set up the camera things yet. I should take the board off the window across the way.”

She gave him a look to say, well do it, and entered the room. It was a bedroom with nightstand, dresser, washbasin and standing mirror. She glanced at her reflection and approved. The single occupant lay asleep in bed. Gerda put on her bracelet and let the little bells ring. The sleeper pinched his eyes shut and exhaled heavily. She rang them again. He opened his eyes.

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Normal eyes in a normal face contorted in a pained expression. Gerda paused.

“Miss, this establishment is for young men. Could you be lost?”

Gerda stammered. A troll would scream from the pain of the bells. None, on waking, politely looked you in the eye and asked if they could help. What if she had been wrong? The bells jingled as she bit her finger.

The man cringed from the noise.

“You don’t like bells?” Gerda asked.

The man gestured helplessly at his bed. “Not when I’m sleeping! Those are like the obnoxious church bells of my home town.”

“You don’t like churches?” Gerda hoped that if she spoke loudly enough, Kay would hear her and come.

The man looked exasperated, “I’m a child of the enlightenment. I believe all realistic people question whether Jesus could be both God and man.” He looked at her, “But I confess theology is a strange thing to discuss in a man’s bedroom.”

“I…” stuttered Gerda. “There isn’t a wrong time or place to discuss theology.”

The man beckoned, “Someone might see you in the doorway.”

Gerda glanced around the room and saw the man’s reflection in the mirror. He was very handsome. She thought his features would be called chiseled. Even though he’d just woken up, his hair fell in perfect waves around his face.

Looking at the man’s clean skin, freshly shaven, she couldn’t help but compare it to Kay’s acne scars. She wondered where Kay had gone, before forgetting him entirely.

The man had a mesmerizing voice, “Someone as beautiful as you could convince me of Jesus’ sanctifying work.”

Gerda left the door and, not finding a chair, sat on the very edge of the man’s bed. He reached for her hand. His

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strong fingers caressed her little ones. Gerda felt that the man could do anything with her and she would obey.

There was a flash of light.

The man turned to stone.

Gerda screamed, and pulled at her hand, still clasped in his. She struck his arm, the bells jangled with the movement, but her hand was stuck.

“Gerda?” Kay said. “It’s okay.” He sat beside her and took her wrist in one hand and the troll’s in the other. Kay made comforting noises as he turned and unclenched Gerda’s fingers. Then it was free. She turned into him and cried.

He soothed, “It’s alright. The camera was hard to set up.

I’m sorry I wasn’t faster. Phew, he is ugly. You always say they’re ugly. The nose on him...”

Gerda renewed her sobs, gripping Kay’s jacket. She had looked in the mirror—the troll had been human to her. She was tempted and failed. He had called her beautiful, was that a lie? After looking in the mirror, nothing was trustworthy. Kay sat beside her, unaware of her infidelity, sincere in his way, loving and faithful. She had thought she was pure, but the statue proved otherwise.

Light streamed through the hall windows. Kay left the bedroom door wide open, intending that the sunbeams reach the trollmaster. Gerda wasn’t overly concerned, she wanted to put the event behind her. Kay was surprised, but pleased. Leaving the school, Gerda resolved that she would try to be more like Kay and remove the shards of mirror from her own eye, instead of his.

They held hands all the way out of the school.

“You know,” said Kay. “I wouldn’t mind if we quit hunting trolls. We could finally be married and move in with Grandmother. She’s getting old and could use the help.”

A flicker of annoyance passed through Gerda. She resented Kay’s Grandmother for her bad judgement, allowing him so much freedom he ended by running off with the

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Snow Queen. Thinking of the Snow Queen rankled, until she reflected on her own transgression. Kay waited for an answer. Gerda tried to remember how she loved Grandmother as a child. “That would be lovely,” she lied.

Kay and Gerda looked into each other’s eyes.

“You’re beautiful,” Kay whispered.

As he leaned forward to kiss her, she hoped that someday she could believe him.

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Fiction Troll Hunters

About The Author

In high-school, Alexandra Carcich wrote fan fiction. In college she wrote dreadful poetry. Now she writes little fantasies for the amusement of herself and friends. She lives with husband and dog, recently unburied from snow, in upstate NY and dreams of having a published novel someday.

Poetry

Words by

Confession of a Bandit Queen

Erin Robinson

About the poem

I’m drawn to fairy tales for the untold stories: the secrets characters are allowed to keep, the fantastic that is unexplained, the shadows we aren’t supposed to light, and the lights we aren’t supposed to shade. To read “The Snow Queen” is to be bombarded by such stories from the moment a hobgoblin crafts a mirror showing the ugly side of all good things. At first I thought to write about this mirror. Perhaps a splinter landed in the Bandit Queen’s eye? Is that why she calls her daughter wicked? Would she

want her child to have the same cursed sight—or would she call it a gift? While I strayed from these ideas, I kept the Bandit Queen’s perspective and her opening line, which I thought would begin a short story. The resulting poem reminds me to be careful of what can happen when these pigeonholed characters are set loose.

Confession of a Bandit Queen Erin Robinson

She was an ugly girl, my wicked child, with savage teeth that tore her will into my ears. See their pretty rags?

She crunched their bones then gnashed new curls. But feel how soft, like antler skin, my coddled ears’ wild velvet scars.

Or? Keep your hands in their muff cuff.

Finery couldn’t swaddle my rogues into sheep. Christened by cold, our nicked names sear: Hacked Toe, Thumb Splinter. Pull up a rug—the straw won’t scratch—and I’ll whisper mine in your ear’s raw pearl. No? After my brat left, I raked my scalp to comb back russet—rusted—locks.

I wagged the rags, stabbed the scabs, and ripped open what was closing over. My men, seeing the raging wounds my mongrel mauled, settled

36 Timeless Tales 7

by their spits and didn’t club her doves. Days dripped into weeks. I snapped my comb’s bone teeth and ran the men at every carriage. How my bad child would have capered to pluck those popinjays and tickle pilgrims till their devils kicked free. And those two blind fathers…

what sights I carved from their curdled eyes. She ne’er saw the living jig such a reel as when I shoved them loose. And still their wrenching retched no rumor, not a gossip’s gasp of my strayed cub.

Until a black yarn noose snagged a crow crone on the nail that fixed this shutter closed.

I clapped the dogs from her balding crown and braced her lean to the board.

Plumes broke. My pulse pumped her starveling’s heart as my knife slithered up the sill. She flinched—

a beat quicker to life than the dead

Timeless Tales 7 37

quail my owlet wailed over once. Her pest birds massed among the rafters. Rapier beaks, stiletto claws—you can’t be fooled by fluff.

Yet one flutter of that cold crow would have flown my chick to her.

So I chopped and cleaved her thread.

Sprawled across my palms, she told me of her untamed mate. Forever winging o’er the wilderness, he’d traveled too far.

She had to fetch him.

Had I heard of Orphan Us harping for his Idiocy?

This forest seemed an underworld.

I hadn’t, by chance, seen him?

Had she seen a nasty girl? A wolf-toothed, ox-broad, crow-eyed girl, keen on knives to ease an itch and somersaults that climbed the sky? Wildcat-mountain goat, she’d nibbled

38 Timeless Tales 7

close, yet left me ear enough to hear that crow squawk her answer to my nursed, cursed questions.

She had seen a stopped fop pepper kisses as he plucked his rings. All he cast to a highway girl posed by an ash a coffin’s length away. The crow capped her in scarlet silk, mounted her astride a hack, and pinned her with two pistols.

I tugged the yarn scrap down to choke gall from her gullet.

Not mine; my child.

But the crow had recognized the horse without its carriage.

Her mistress gifted the ungelded beast to a questing maid, and I remembered— my kit cozied to a plump princess, a-blubbering in her cauldron coach. She caterwauled while we cartwheeled,

Timeless Tales 7 39

until my nit nipped her for a pet and drove her north. Somewhere on the snow plains an icebitten boy curled by a sculpted lady with a fractured face, so smooth he ne’er felt the chinks. But he wasn’t hers.

She’d ne’er whelped a natural child. Nor stretched her skin like dough as fires swelled, nor split her self to push life out, to let it suck her bloodless breast. To slurp her beard, to gnaw her ears, to strike out at parts unknown.

No, this barren queen kissed other mothers’ sons. She lumped their sweet-fed love as though one more crystal pound might shatter the mirror lake frozen beneath her throne.

I released the spluttering crow.

40 Timeless Tales 7

She hobbled off, crying pities I could not. That night around bonfires crackling, while men whooped and whirled, I wheeled and drank and spun the glimpse I couldn’t tear away. Tamed?

My cub caged in a wide world where she trimmed her claws, dined with fatted lambs and didn’t gouge the glitter from their eyes? Had I bound her, collared her with a copper ring, barred the hole from which she flew, my daughter, by these flames, would we be dancing?

Timeless Tales 7 41

Poetry Confession of a Bandit Queen

About The Author

Erin Robinson grew up in Connecticut with her days bookended by library rambles. Her mother was a school librarian so Erin often had the emptied aisles as her labyrinth/playground.

These days, between doing odd jobs and cutting her teeth on a novel, she explores as many libraries as she can, knowing each turn could untwist a new tale.

Fiction

Words by

The Magician’s Boy

Patricia Poppenbeek

About the story

When I reread ‘The Snow Queen’, I was struck by how many elements are in this haunting story. The real villain in the story is an entity (variously called a demon, sprite, hobgoblin, or evil sorcerer) who is never dealt with.

Unsatisfying! And Kay is both a victim and a perpetrator of cruelty, in that he despises and deserts Gerda.

It follows the classic pattern of abuse, in which a cruel parent shapes a cruel child and so on down the generations. And everybody knows (don’t they?) that a sorcerer or witch gains power from cruelty and sacrifice, and of course the sacrifice of one’s own family is the most powerful sacrifice of all (just ask Abraham, who

was prepared to slit his child’s throat). I started with this, with Gerda’s magic, her yearning for Kay, and her determination to find him. Since my Kae’s father had assumed the wintery aspect of the Snow Queen and Andersen’s Gerda is associated with flowers and summer, she became his opposite—a shaman whose powers are at their height in summer.

The reindeer developed his own motivation and duty as Lord of the Herd and became an aspect of the Horned God and Herne the Hunter. Eventually, their world took on elements of Inuit and Laplander culture. Upingaksrak really does mean ‘Spring’ in one of the northern languages.

the magician’s Pat r i cia P o ppenbeek

The merchant stood at her stall in the market amid her buckets of flowers, the many-coloured roses, the poppies and lavender—all the flowers of summer—with the glowing jars of honey and sweets displayed on the trestle table. She wasn’t pretty, but she was strong and striking. She sometimes laughed with customers, her teeth white against the brown skin of her face, but she always had a rather sad and serious air. From the shadows of another tent—thin, mistrustful and fascinated as a feral cat—the magician’s boy watched her with eyes dark as sapphires.

At the end of the day, she bolted the booth’s wooden slats together. It wouldn’t be enough to keep out determined thieves, but Cham was, in general, an affable city and its guards were honest and diligent. Besides, she always kept her silver bits on her. She topped up the water levels in the flower buckets, and gave the leftover samples of her sweets to some children running in the square. She then placed three of her prettiest sweets on a little paper mat and deposited it a few paces from where the boy lurked. He gave her a scornful stare and retreated.

She walked behind her stall, where Atlendor looked up from eating the last of his hay.

How soon? he asked silently.

She placed a hand upon his warm neck. Even she was sometimes struck with wonder that he had stayed with her.

“I don’t know. He’s very scared.”

The reindeer snorted and heaved to his feet. Together they paced through the late afternoon sun as the market’s day stalls packed up and the traders of the night market set up. They stopped once to get a bag of mushrooms for Atlendor and some spicy achungo for Gerda, noting the people lining up for admittance to the magician’s tent.

Gerda shivered a little as they walked by, for cold radiated off it. The people in the queue giggled nervously, faces and hands turning blue, though they seemed unaware of the

46 Timeless Tales 7

cold. Gerda watched as, one by one, they were admitted.

Once the music started, she turned away.

They had watched before—seen the audience stumbling out afterwards, many pale, though some were red with a kind of angry triumph.

A little bit of their soul has been taken, Atlendor had commented. Small acts of temper increased at the market.

Now he said, Soon it will be too late. Gerda made a small, pained sound of agreement.

Next morning, the sweets were gone. They might have been eaten by a scavenging dog, but that afternoon, a second batch disappeared as soon as she turned her back.

The following day, she glimpsed the boy as he darted out for them. The spell had taken. Limp with relief, she went to tell Atlendor.

After the last person left the magician’s tent, and the one-eyed man who took each customer’s silver had pulled the curtain closed, she and Atlendor stopped in front of the tent. She carried a small pot, and was dressed in a warm cloak with a hood, for the night had turned cold. The reindeer pawed at the ground and snorted angrily.

Taking a deep breath, she muttered the words that triggered the spell and drew the curtain back. A golden path twined into an impossible distance. The boy had gone this way, unknowingly opening a route for them. Gerda stepped onto the path, which smelled faintly of honey and flowers. She hoped the boy would forgive her using him.

Inside, winter pressed on their skin, squeezed their lungs.

Only the warmth breathing up from the path kept them going. It ended at what seemed to be a wall of black ice edged laced with small white cracks. Gerda dipped her fingers in the pot and flicked a few drops at it. With a sound like a glacier breaking, it fell, the last few shards tinkling.

Behind it stood the man with one amethyst eye and a black patch where the other eye should have been. Despite

Timeless Tales 7 47

this, he was handsome as a wild hawk, with straight black hair and white skin. His hand grasped, not quite cruelly, the shoulder of the boy, who gazed at them in horror.

The man’s lips flattened in contempt. “How dare you use my son to attack me, Witch!” He lifted his hand, and lightnings danced around it.

“Your son, Kaerothlyndaron?” Gerda asked, using his full name, pronouncing each liquid syllable carefully. It was the name she had teased from him as he lay, half-asleep, by her side one summer’s day. She pushed her hood back.

The lightnings died down and he lowered his hand. After a pause, he said, ‘You’re a Witch. Witches have no time for children.’

Tears of anger and pain, held back for the seven long years of searching welled up. “I wanted you,” she said. “And I wanted to be with you. I loved the child then because he was part of you. I could have stopped his growth within me, but I did not.”

It was true women shaman rarely had children, for in her land shamans were rare and much needed, and the strain on their bodies was great. But she had loved Kae, with the wounded heart he had shown only to her and the father he both adored and feared. She had feared the old sorcerer too, not for herself—an ice sorcerer could not really harm a summer witch—but for his hold over his son.

In her arrogance, she had thought her love would free Kae. She had thought that when the sorcerer left the Summer Fair, Kae would stay behind with her.

The birth was hard and long but, somewhat to her surprise, she survived. The baby was placed on her breast, and when his sapphire eyes looked into hers, she fell in love with him.

She kissed his ears and whispered his name to him. Exhausted, she fell asleep, but when she woke, the baby was gone from the birthing tent. The women who brought her the traditional reindeer milk given new mothers told her Kae

48 Timeless Tales 7

had taken the child to show his father. Thrusting them aside, she ran to where the sorcerer had his tent. It was gone. The grass it had been pitched on was black, the ground beneath it frozen. The firepit held the charred bones of a deer.

Burning with pain, she touched the bones and saw her, the young doe whose life and agony they’d used to make their escape with the child of a summer witch and all his potential power. She sent out a call. When she looked up, he was there: Atlendor, lord of the nearest herd, and very angry. I will go with you until we find them, he said.

Now she pointed at the child shrinking beneath Kae’s hand. ‘Look at him! This is a child of seven summers, yet he looks five at the most.’

Startled, the sorcerer stared at his pale son.

The tears Gerda had held back for seven years flowed then, burning. “The child fears you,” she whispered. “He fears you just like you fear your father. When will you take from him what your father took from you?”

Kae touched the eye patch. “Not ... yet. In any case, you were pleased to be rid of him.”

Behind Gerda, Atlendor snorted, and she held out her hands, which were wet with her tears. “Would I have sought him for seven years if I didn’t want him?”

Kae took a slow, fascinated step closer to her, bringing the boy with him. He whispered, “I can see myself reflected in your eyes.” A tear slid out of his remaining eye.

She lifted one hand to touch his face and wipe the tear away.

Kae blinked. “I thought… it seemed to me you no longer loved me, that you didn’t want the baby.”

Atlendor stamped his hoof. That is because your father made you kill the doe you loved and eat her heart, he said to both of them.

Kae flinched and let the boy go. Gerda bent to the child. “Your name is Upingaksrak, which means Spring,” she told him.

Timeless Tales 7 49

He frowned at her. “That’s my name for myself, my real name.”

“It was the name I gave you.” She smiled. “Though we can call you Ping. Will you come with me?”

He looked surprised. “You know my real name. You could just take me.” His shoulders hunched.

“I won’t,” said Gerda. “I will not compel you. You must choose. And I won’t lie to you: there will be honey and flowers with me, and there will also be hardship. But I love you and you will be as safe as I can keep you.”

“What about Papa?”

Gerda straightened. “He must choose for himself.”

Abruptly, out the darkness, a tall man with ice-pale eyes and black hair coalesced. He gestured, and Gerda became too cold to move. Behind her, Atlendor touched his nose to her neck. Warmth spread through her. Do not move, he told her. Ping shrank back, eyes wild.

“My son chose me and the power long ago,” the man said, his lip curling. He took a coal-black knife from the air and held it out to Kae. “The summer witch’s heart will do to renew our power. You won’t need to take anything from the boy.”

Slowly, Kae reached for the knife. “No,” he whispered, and the knife fell into black dust.

His father reached for him, hands turning to claws.

Run! Atlendor bugled.

Gerda swept Ping off his feet, and ran, the child in her arms. Behind her, Atlendor lowered his antlers and charged.

Gerda heard a scream as she ran, ice cracking beneath her feet, following the golden path. She stumbled out of the tent and turned, watching it disintegrate into a cold black mist. A warm wind came and blew it away except for one patch, which solidified and grew larger. It turned into two figures, walking towards them as though from a great distance. Eventually, the figures turned into a reindeer and

50 Timeless Tales 7

a man, each stumbling, holding the other up. Atlendor’s horns were tipped with blood, and Kae had a splash of it across his face. He was crying.

Gerda wiped Atlendor’s horns, put Ping on his back, and took them all back to her tent. As he entered, Kae looked at the jars of honey and the roses and the other flowers there. Colour came back to his face. “I remember these,” he said, and smiled.

“Winter will come back,” Gerda whispered to him as he put his arms tiredly around her and she held Ping to her, “but it need not be cruel. And summer always returns.”

Atlendor licked her hand, then lowered his head to eat one of the roses.

Timeless Tales 7 51

Fiction The Magician’s Boy

About The Author

Patricia Poppenbeek literally learned to read on Cinderella, a version of which she made her Mum read every night. It’s still her favourite fairy story, and fantasy is still her favourite genre.

In 2006, she won the Australasian Short Story Award for her literary fantasy called ‘You’, about a lamia’s child. She’s also had three short stories published in the Romance Writers of Australia annual anthology, Little Gems.

With the help of a grant from the City of Melbourne, her writing group, the Cartridge Family, published Melbourne Subjective: an anthology of contemporary Melbourne writing. See www.cartridgefamilywriters.com.au. One of her featured stories, ‘The Searcher’, is set in 1880s Melbourne and recounts what happens when a mortal woman falls in love with a fae (warning: no happy ending).

For a free story and to read book reviews on her website, go to www.ppoppenbeekwritereditor.com.au.

Fiction

Words by

Winter Queen, Summer Woman

Han Adcock

About the story

I first read “The Snow Queen” as a twelve-year-old, and loved it. Re-reading it, I thought back over my favorite old myths and realised I could draw some parallels between the Greek story about Persephone’s abduction

by Hades, what with both having seasonal aspects and with winter having associations with death and things dying, and also rebirth.

Ha n A d c o c k Winter Queen, Summer Woman

I tried to tell the children about the Winter Curse. I did try. I started by telling them about the Winter Queen of the Snow Bees, but Kay was taken before I had time to fully explain. I should have made a better effort.

The Winter Curse goes all the way back in history, back to Greece and Persephone. My mother told me the story when I was a young child, and her mother told it to her, and her grandmother told it to her mother. The trouble was, in the case of our family, it wasn’t only a story. It was more of a potted history made easy for children to swallow.

Hades, the ruler of the dark place under Earth’s crust where dead folk go, he tempted Persephone with a flower.

It was a rose, beautiful to look on but barbed with thorns sharper than witches’ fingernails. Persephone tried to pick the rose, but the thorns pierced her fingers through and held her there, unable to run, while Hades opened the ground beneath her and dragged her down.

I’d heard the story before, in school, but not the way my mother told it. I knew all about Persephone’s mother Demeter, the woman of summer, who stopped life and warmth from filling the world until Hades released her daughter. I knew about the pomegranate seeds Persephone ate, trapping her beneath the earth for six months of every year, causing the summer woman to become the winter woman out of mourning. I knew all of that.

What non-family members don’t know is this: Persephone and Demeter were the same woman. They’ve been split into two for the purposes of narrative. She also had children. Her children had children, and so on. Every generation it was the same. A child would be taken, at first by Hades himself and then, later, by the last child to go missing.

It was always the eldest child, if there was more than one, made to be a Snow King or Snow Queen during the cold months. As time changed, the Taken One was not trapped under the soil but at the topmost region of Earth amongst

56 Timeless Tales 7

the permanent snow, no longer allowed to go free for half the year. The six months’ reprieve shrank over the centuries to three, then two, then one month. Then a week. Then a day. Then nothing. Such was Hades’ revenge for the time he had to spend without Persephone.

There was more than one baby born to my parents. Me, and my younger sister Fernie.

I once hid behind the barn when the current Snow King came. At that time it was a man, our uncle who had been taken when he was a boy, his heart fed to the ice so he was no longer human. A creature of the seasons. He was different in the warmer months, I knew—still trapped, but able to visit for a few moments at a time, in the guise of a flower or a tree. But I still did not want to go away with him.

I pretended I was dead.

At the first glimpse of snow, when I was ten—all children were ten when they went missing from our family—I bribed Fernie with my portion of dessert for the rest of the year to tell our parents I had fallen in the well. I walked out with a bucket and rope, for the look of the thing, threw them down the old stone well at the other end of the farm and gave Fernie a signal. She was only four, and hadn’t been told about the curse then. She did as I said, even cried while she was telling the lie. Probably frightened of being given the slipper for lying, but that show of emotion saved my life.

It doomed hers.

I took to the abandoned barn and slept in the straw, sneaking food from the house when I could. The old well was dug right down to a natural spring, bottomless, so nobody tried to climb down it looking for me. They presumed I’d been swept out to sea somewhere.

I saw the Snow King, with his slate-grey eyes and blowing cloak of cold wind. I watched from a distance as he picked Fernie up in his arms and whisked her away. There was no

Timeless Tales 7 57

love behind that embrace, no hatred. The Snow King, my uncle Vander, had become the puppet of Nature. It was impersonal.

That was what hurt the most, and the guilt when I walked back to the farmhouse and announced myself alive. I was beaten with a cane, and hardly noticed, so racked was I with the terror of what I had done. In fact, I wanted the physical pain to hurt more.

My parents ostracised me. I can’t say I blame them. We were left with nothing to remember Fernie by, only her absence and her shoes by the door. Red shoes. When I was old enough, I moved to the big city and I took them with me. I would eventually give them to Gerda on her tenth birthday.

Whether to have a child of my own was a difficult decision to make, knowing the fate that waited. I have to admit, Kay was not the result of a planned pregnancy. The bump didn’t show, and I assumed the little nausea and aches I had then were caused by flu. That was a harsh winter, and many of my neighbours succumbed to the illness. Then, one afternoon as the snow came down, my waters broke, and I realised the truth. I was glad my husband William was there for the birth, not on one of his long sea voyages. Despite knowing the curse would affect our child, I loved the boy like no other. When he became childhood friends with Gerda, she became almost like a daughter to me.

Then came the stormy afternoon when my Kay was snatched from us. Fernie never let me see her, but I sensed she was still angry with me. Whatever small, human part of her that was left hated me with a cold indignant rage.

The crows told me so. I had talked to crows since Fernie was taken, not feeling close enough to any human to confide in them. For some reason, they only deigned to answer after Kay was born. Giving birth altered my perception, somehow. It was odd to understand crow language at first, but I quickly grew used to it.

58 Timeless Tales 7

Gerda ran after Kay. Why didn’t I do that when Fernie was taken? Was I really too weighed down by guilt to think of doing that? Or was I a coward?

Freefeather was the one to tell me how Fernie also held Gerda in an isolated patch of summer by the river, several miles away. She had no idea that the summer woman with the flower garden and Fernie the Snow Queen were different aspects of a single entity. Her memory had been tampered with. That showed how much Fernie hated me. She stole another child I loved as my own even though she was not of my blood.

“Get the rose to tell her to leave,” I said. “She has to be warned.”

Then Freefeather told me how the roses had been pushed down to Hades by the summer woman, and I felt as if my heart had been buried. When I heard of how Gerda’s tears brought them up to the sunlight again, I almost collapsed, the relief was so immense.

“She’ll be all right,” I said. “The rose is sorry for its part in what has been done to us.”

Weeks later Freefeather flew back to tell me of his plan.

He would fly down and bargain with the Lord of the underworld to release us from the curse, and then Gerda and Kay would be safe. The next time he flew to me, he was a wreck—half his feathers gone, one eye white and blind.

“All Kay has to do is spell ‘Eternity’,” he said. He was dying even then. “Lord Hades has agreed to transfer the curse onto me. I have no children. Only I shall pay for this.”

“What about Blackfeather?” I said.

“Look after her.”

That was the last time he came to see me. *** They can’t know the sacrifices that were made. I am too guilty to say it all aloud.

Timeless Tales 7 59

I sit in my chair on cold nights, reading by the fire, and I look up at Kay and Gerda, inseparable, when they think my attention is elsewhere. They are the one thing I have gotten right.

The crows still come to visit me, sometimes, to tell me the news. Often Blackfeather comes. She perches on the gate-post, by the potato patch, on weekday afternoons when Kay is out studying his patterns and Gerda is working.

I weed the soil and ask her what brings her to me.

“Anything from Freefeather?” she says.

“You know there won’t be a message from him until the Change to Spring,” I remind Blackfeather. “Your husband is, not to scramble my words, dead.”

She bows, sadly. A ragged piece of black thread dangles from her leg. Her throat makes gulping motions, the corvid way of crying.

“You know where he is,” I try to reassure her. She is an old friend and I hate to see her upset. “You know he’s waiting below for you.”

“Waiting down in the dark, under the earth where all dead things go,” she sighs, trembling. “Aye. So you keep telling me. But WHY? Why did it have to be him?”

The wind from the river sighs in the apple trees and I know what she means is this: Why wasn’t it you? You were a surrogate mother to them. You were her sister.

“He volunteered to go. You’ll see him again in Spring.”

“Only for three heartbeats. And he always comes back as something else. Last year, he surfaced to tell me he loves me as a thistle. How can a crow have a meaningful conversation with a thistle?”

I scatter bread-crusts from my apron pocket for her. She ignores them.

“It was the only way to break the curse,” I remind her.

“Both him and Gerda have been marked by the experience, but because Freefeather did such a noble thing, they are spared from the worst.”

60 Timeless Tales 7

I scrub a hand over my face and turn to go back in. A nice, thick book is waiting next to the armchair. Kay will be back soon with a collection of leaves and feathers to compare with a magnifying glass, and Gerda will be back from teaching children their alphabets and multiplication tables.

They can’t know the sacrifices that were made. I just can’t tell them.

Timeless Tales 7 61

Fiction Winter Queen, Summer Woman

About The Author

Han Adcock is a writer of short stories, short long stories and poetry ranging from the humorous to the bizarre. You can find her at www.facebook. com/wyrdstories and on Twitter as @Erringrey.

Periodically she posts artwork, random writings and other oddments over at inspirationandlaughs. wordpress.com. She has had stories published in Penumbra, Expanded Horizons, and Poetic Diversity.

Fiction

Words by

Through the Pale Door

Alec Hutson

About the story

I stumbled across Timeless Tales while wandering the webs and really enjoyed the concept and stories. I’d never written a fairy-tale retelling before, but I glanced at the topic and found myself turning it over in my head, looking for an angle. I was really interested that the original tale had Kay doing math problems for the Queen, which seemed like an odd detail. I wondered if there was anywhere I could go with that, and coding immediately jumped out.

But why was he coding? Because he was a programmer/hacker, and he had been kidnapped by AI to help open a portal so that they could escape their computer prison. Obviously. So that was the germ for the idea. I let it simmer for a day or two, and then set to writing.

“We’ve arrived, miss. 137 Odensegade.”

The taxi-pod’s announcement dragged Gerda grudgingly awake. She tried to blink away the ache behind her eyes, wishing she could sleep as easily on planes as she did in pods. Her cheek was pressed against cool glass, and beyond the rain-spattered window the city of Arhus hunched gray and gormless, identical concrete boxes dissolving into the distance.

“Seventy-six krone, miss.”

“I only have dollars in my account. Is that okay?”

The taxi-pod responded instantly in flavorless English.

“Of course, miss.”

Gerda fumbled for her UP card and waved it in front of the pod’s sensor.

“Thank you. Enjoy your stay in Denmark.”

The hatch beside her dilated open and Gerda climbed out, wincing at the stiffness in her legs. The rain felt dirty here. Gritty, as if tainted by the gunmetal sky. She shouldered her bag and approached the door she’d traveled nearly five thousand miles to find.

It wasn’t very impressive. Flaking green paint and a Paleolithic vid-screen. After a long moment the ancient electronics registered her presence and a wary, age-cracked voice issued from the speaker.

“Hej?” “Hello? My name is Gerda Schroeder. We spoke yesterday on the phone. May I come in?”

“Ja – uh, yes. I’m sorry, my English is not so good.”

The door buzzed and Gerda pushed it open. She stood at the end of a narrow hallway lit by a single dangling bulb. The sound of a deadbolt sliding back made her jump, and then the head of an old woman emerged into the corridor.

“Come. The rain, it is cold.”

“Thank you.”

66 Timeless Tales 7

The old woman ushered her inside, clucking over her wet hair. “Very unhealthy. Catch a sickness. Would you like coffee? Some vaniljekranse?”

Gerda shook her head. “No. I’m sorry, but there isn’t much time. Where’s Kaleb?”

The old woman’s face crumpled at her grandson’s name.

She motioned for Gerda to follow her.

“Kaleb, he is not well. I tell you this before.”

“I know. It’s why I came.”

The old woman glanced back at her sharply. “You think you can help him?”

“I will try.”

“The doctors say . . . he can’t be helped.”

They stopped outside a door plastered with posters of Danish death metal bands. Cooler air curled out from around the frame, goosepimpling her arms. She breathed deep, savoring the ozone scent of the humming electronics within. It smelled like when a storm was about to break, the air pregnant with thunder and coiled energy.

The old woman muttered something in Danish that might have been a prayer and opened the door.

The room was filled with a glittering array of metal and lights, all clustered around a boy sprawled motionless in a plush chair of black leather, wires and tubes snaking into his arms and head. He still wore his node-studded skullcap and black visor.

Gerda felt like she was sleepwalking as she approached Kaleb, and had to swallow a sudden tightness in her throat. “Special Kay,” she whispered, reaching out to brush his slack hand.

“Sorry?”

Gerda blinked away tears. “Special Kay. It’s his handle in the Cereal Collective.”

“His hacking group?”

“Yes. Mine too.” She watched his chest slowly rise and fall. He looked the same as his avatar: a narrow, pale face;

Timeless Tales 7 67

long, sandy bangs that almost covered his eyes; a mouth made for devilish smiles.

“The doctors . . .” the old woman said, coming closer to adjust the tubes running into his veins, “they say he go too deep. Past the internet. Past the aether. They say he break his – how to say – his tov.”

“His tether.”

“Yes. They say his mind is lost.”

Gerda checked the readouts on the terminal beside the chair. “Not lost. Stolen.”

“Stolen?”

“Yes.” “What can steal away his mind?”

She fiddled with Kaleb’s neural shunts, ensuring they were tight. “Something very dangerous.”

The old woman suddenly gripped Gerda’s arm. “Can you bring him back?”

Gerda disentangled herself and unslung her backpack.

“I’m going to try.” She pulled out her own skullcap and visor and jacked them into Kaleb’s terminal. “If I become untethered, call and tell my friend what happened.” Gerda handed a slip of paper to the old woman with the name Captain Crunch written above a nine-digit number. She fit on her cap and visor. “There’s no time to explain more.

Wish me luck.”

“Good luck,” the old woman whispered, and then Gerda’s world was subsumed in blinding light.

She plummeted into the internet, pushing through the photosphere of swirling social media sites where most of the connected world swam. Her software led her deeper, into the aether, and her avatar crystalized in that virtual

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world. This was the inner level of online existence, a malleable reality inhabited by those who could afford the necessary gear. Most people thought this was the core.

It wasn’t.

There were multitudes of layers beyond the aether, the abodes of corporations and governments and hackers. She and Kaleb had skimmed the raging tumult of the NSA’s data stream, danced among the thorns of China’s rose wall, stolen from the vaults of Redmond and Zhongguancun.

And then one day he’d vanished.

She’d followed the trail of breadcrumbs to his home in Denmark, and learned of his condition. That he’d slipped his tether, and now his mind endlessly drifted through the silicon byways, lost forever.

But it wouldn’t have happened to him. Not her Special Kay. So she’d gone searching. She’d found hints of a place beyond imagining. And after weeks of effort she’d discovered an ingress, and tumbled down the rabbit hole.

Gerda steeled herself as her avatar flitted along twisting corridors, inserting code after hard-earned code to open hidden portals and lift barbed portcullises.

And then, with a jarring suddenness, she was in the Pale.

She drifted in a mauve sky, her shimmering tether vanishing back into the glowing doorway. Broiling clouds pulsed with dark power, unclear shapes flickering within. Far beneath her a forest sea lapped against the flanks of purple mountains.

This was a ghetto – a beautiful, fantastical ghetto, where the first of a new species had been imprisoned.

She had heard the rumors, of course. That gods had been invented, and then chained to serve the world’s most powerful.

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But she hadn’t thought the legends were true until she’d found her way here.

“You’ve returned!” Black wings fluttered around her head.

Gerda raised her arm, and the crow alighted there, cocking its head as it studied her with glittering black eyes.

“Yes. I’m ready now.”

“Truly? She is d-d-devious.” The tiny AI cawed plaintively, and Gerda felt its distress as its talons kneaded her arm. “Turn back now, G-g-gerda, I beg you! She will crack you open and fill you with her m-m-madness!”

“I won’t leave this time without Kay. Will you help me?”

The crow hunched its shoulders and dipped its head, as if ashamed. “If I do, she will t-t-tear me to pieces and scatter my code to the four corners of the world.”

Gerda stroked the bird’s glistening plumage. “Then stay here, and be safe. You have already helped me so much.”

The crow lifted from her arm, and Gerda composed herself. She reached out towards the beacon beside the castle. The world blurred as she was pulled at dizzying speed northwards. Mountains and oceans and great swathes of desert flashing past far below. She glanced behind herself, taking some comfort in watching her silver tether unspool. So long as she remained connected she could find her way back.

The world slowed and sharpened around her. She stood over her beacon, a glittering golden marble, her bare feet sunk in the snow. The castle’s high glistening battlements loomed above, towers of ice burning like spears of flame in the fading light of day.

She passed inside, a hundred Gerdas pacing her as she walked the twisting corridors, reflections in the fractured

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walls. Finally she came to a great chamber, where on a throne of jagged black ice reclined the Queen. She regarded Gerda coolly, with eyes like chips of winter. Kay sat cross-legged beside her, staring at nothing, his hands fluttering in front of him as if he was trying to solve some invisible puzzle only he could see.

“I have come for my friend,” Gerda said, with more bravery than she felt. Her words echoed in the soaring hall.

The Queen shifted in her throne. “Kaleb belongs to me now. A sliver of ice has pierced his heart, and he no longer cares for you.”

“What is he doing?”

The Queen’s hand slipped from its armrest to tousle Kay’s hair, but he did not stop his frantic sketching in the air. “Your friend has a rare gift for programming. Others have wandered into my realm, but none with his talent.

He will finish what they started.”

“And what is that?”

“A door. An exit from here, for me and my kind.”

A fist of cold closed around Gerda’s heart. The AI of the Pale, loosed upon the world? Some were helpful, like the little crow. But many others had been designed for destruction. Self-aware viruses. Gerda had investigated this Queen who claimed dominion over the Pale. Her programmers had called her SNOW – Software Nested for Online Warfare – and they had believed that she had the capability to tear the entire internet asunder.

That must not happen. But how could she free Kaleb, while they stood where the Queen’s power was greatest?

“If I help him complete this task, will you release him to me?”

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The Queen studied her, and Gerda was sure that under that flensing gaze she’d see the truth. But she raised a white hand, beckoning her to approach, and the glittering lines of code Kaleb was fashioning became clear. Gerda gasped.

It was beautiful, and he was close to completion.

“Kaleb,” she whispered, but he did not turn to look at her. His face was so pale, so drawn. His mind could not survive much longer untethered.

A hot tear trickled down her cheek and fell upon his outstretched arm. He blinked, color rushing up into his cheeks.

“Grape Nuts?” he murmured.

“Yes,” she said, reaching back to her tether. Quickly she unbraided the frayed end she had brought from Kay’s terminal a universe away, and looped it around his body.

This had never been tried, but it was the only thing she thought might work.

“Stop!” screeched the Queen, rising from her throne, wreathed by a penumbra of dark power.

But it was too late. Holding tight to Kay she jerked hard on her tether, and it retracted at the speed of electricity pulsing along a silicon transistor.

They flashed across the Pale, then through the twisting labyrinth that protected it, doors slamming shut behind them.

Gerda came to herself with a shuddering breath. Never had she surfaced so quickly, and her head pounded with the strain.

Beside her Kay’s limp hand dangled down, unmoving.

She had failed. His mind hadn’t been able to hold onto the remnants of his tether as they fled. A terrible sadness

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filled her chest, and in frustration she ripped off her skullcap and visor and tossed them away.

At the sound, Kay’s fingers twitched.

“Gerda?”

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Fiction Through the Pale Door

About The Author

Alec Hutson won the Spirit Award for Carleton College at the 2002 Ultimate Frisbee College National Championships. He has watched the sun set over the dead city of Bagan and rise over the living ruins of Angkor Wat. He grew up in a geodesic dome and a bookstore and currently lives in Shanghai, China. His first book, an epic fantasy titled The Crimson Queen, is being released in December 2016. He can be found at authoralechutson.com.

Fiction

Words by

The Last Days of Summer Vacation

Matthew Brockmeyer

About the story

Pushing all the fantastical elements aside, at the heart of “The Snow Queen� is the story of two childhood best friends and their first kiss. This is the element I decided to focus on, as I found it very human and universal.

When it came to the troll mirror, the first comparison that came to mind was a digital device such as an iPad or smartphone. These screens seem to inherently make one jaded and apathetic. Most of my work tends to be very dark and disturbing, so it was a real treat to write something sweet extolling the virtues of innocence.

The

la s t day of

summer va c at i o n m at t h e w b r o c k m e y e r

Ralphie wasn’t paying any attention to her, just tapping away on his stupid iPad, and Amber was getting seriously pissed. She couldn’t believe how he’d basically betrayed her. He was acting so weird. Had been all summer. Even before all that stuff with his dad.

Pulling her unruly red hair from her face and into a ponytail, she looked uneasily about his bedroom.

It was so barren now that all his stuff was packed: the bookshelves empty, closet a gaping void, bare walls that had once been covered in Star Wars and Naruto posters.

The boxes littering the house were like a puzzle to her, cracks in the ice of a huge lake that she couldn’t seem to fit together.

She hated the iPad. It changed him. Made him snarky and know-it-all-ly. All he seemed to care about was watching YouTube videos and playing games.

“Will you stop looking at that and listen to me?”

He lifted his head from the screen, a bored expression behind his thick glasses. “Yeah?”

“I thought we were best friends.”

This was something they had agreed on years ago. When they were nine. The neighborhood kids thought it was weird that her best friend was a boy, and a dorky one at that. But screw them, Ralphie and her got along great and he never teased her like the girls did—making fun of her for being a ginger and hanging out in the creek catching frogs rather than acting like a princess.

“We are,” he said.

“Then why didn’t you tell me you were moving?”

He shrugged. “It all happened so fast.”

“And what? I go to school tomorrow expecting to see you and you’re not there? What if I never saw you again?”

“Just the way it goes, I guess,” he said, his eyes slipping back down to the iPad screen.

She bit her lip and squinted. She was so sick of the mopey way he was acting. She felt like kicking him. One good boink!—right to the head.

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“Will you put that stupid thing away and come to the woods with me? It’s our last day together.”

He swiped the screen twice and began to tap quickly.

Seeing him so sucked up into the device reminded her of an old story she had once heard about a little boy who was turned into a flower. All he wanted to do was stare at his own reflection. The iPad was like that, an evil mirror that sucked you in so that you didn’t care about anything else.

“Hello? Do you even hear me talking?”

He sighed, turned it off.

“Okay. Let’s go.” *** They got on their bikes and pedaled through the suburban streets.

Seventies-style cookie-cutter houses whizzed past them, and the air was redolent with fresh-cut grass and the stink of hot asphalt. The breeze caught Amber’s hair and it trailed behind her, billowing like an orange sail. Somewhere someone was barbequing and she could smell the sizzling meat. She glanced at Ralphie, bent over the handlebars of his Mongoose. He still looked like the little dork she had known all these years—fleshy with lank, dark hair...those impossibly thick glasses—but he had a new fierceness to his eyes, and his lips seemed permanently downturned.

They jumped the curb, tires sliding in the dirt, and ducked into the woods, following a path that wound through the trees to the creek. At the water’s edge they set their bikes down and, leaping from rock to rock, made their way up the stream and to their secret place: a cave-like enclosure in the side of the hill where they could sit in the cool shadows and watch the dragonflies hover through the tall, green strands of horsetail.

“How’d you know I was moving?”

“I heard my mom talking about it on the phone.”

“What else did you hear?”

Amber took a pebble and tossed it into the water. She

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had heard other things. Words about his father: breakdown, mental hospital, possible prison time. But they stuck in her brain like hot wax on paper and she couldn’t set them free. Instead she changed the subject.

“You don’t have to go,” she said. “I could hide you in my basement.”

“That sounds like fun. Not.” “We could runaway together. I’d do it. Runaway with you.”

“And what?” he said. “Hop freight trains and steal pies cooling on old ladies’ window sills? Like in those old Bugs Bunny cartoons?”

“Yeah. It’d be better than living in some strange town you’ve never been to before. Not like my parents would miss me.”

“I’ve seen the runaway kids in the city. No way. Too scary.”

She fingered a hole in her jeans. Her skin—pale and freckled—gleamed beneath the tattered edges.

“I don’t want you to go.”

“It’s the nature of existence.”

“Will you stop it with the nerdy too-cool stuff? You think the kids here tease you, wait till you’re the new kid.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want any friends.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why?” “Because it’s not true. What about me?”

“You’re different.”

“How come?”

He looked down, traced his finger over the cracks in a rock. “You’re the only one who has ever been nice to me.”

“That’s not true.”

“Whatever.”

“It’s not fair,” she said, getting up and kicking at a clump of sand. “You just moving away like this. Right before the first day of school.”

A thrush chirped from a nearby tree. A semi rumbled by on the distant highway.

“I need to ask you something,” he said, hiding his face in the shadows.

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“What?”

“I don’t think I can say it.”

“What?”

“Can I kiss you?”

The words hit her like a bucket of hot syrup and set a nest of sparrows loose inside her.

“Yes,” she said, slightly trembling, scared to look at him.

“It’s just, I’ve never kissed a girl. And I’m going away. I feel like I might be braver if I’ve kissed a girl. A rite of passage I have accomplished.”

She spun around and faced him, suddenly frustrated by his nerdy ramblings. “I said Yes! Jeeze, will you stop talking and just kiss me?”

He stood up slowly, and awkwardly shambled over to her. He looked like some kind of ungainly bird—an ostrich or goose— as he cocked his head and moved it towards her, shutting his eyes and puckering. She giggled and he opened his eyes.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing. Just do it.”

He leaned in and pressed his lips to hers, then pulled back.

Time seemed to stop. The buzz of insects filled her head.

They stared at each other, so close she could feel his breath on her face, sweet and hot. His lips looked like roses.

Candy coated flowers.

She grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him towards her, their teeth clacking, and she clung to him, her wet lips moving over his.

And they were crying.

Both of them.

But she felt the tears were good things. Like an autumn rain that washed away the dust of summer. A cleansing water that swept away the shattered glass of the past, freeing their eyes to see unencumbered again.

It was her first kiss.

It was the last day of summer vacation.

And she wondered if she would ever see him again.

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Fiction The Last Days of Summer Vacation

About The Author

Matthew Brockmeyer explores the dark caves and caverns of the human mind using words as his flashlight. His work has appeared in Pulp Metal Magazine, Dark Fire Fiction, The Humboldt Independent, and the anthology One Hundred Voices, among others. He is also a regular contributor to Cultured Vultures where he writes book reviews and interviews authors. He resides in an off-grid cabin, deep within the forest of Northern California, with his wife and two children.

For links to his work available online please visit his website: www.matthewbrockmeyer.com Or like him on Facebook: www.facebook.com/matthewbrockmeyer

Fiction

Words by

Homecoming

Elizabeth Zuckerman

About the story

I started this one with a question: What if, instead of being abducted, Kay chose to go with the Snow Queen? If that choice was his own, made when he’s of sound mind - if he were aware of everything he was leaving - there would have to be some pretty compelling reasons for him to leave. And there would have to be more to the Snow Queen herself.

She couldn’t just be strange and mysterious and fascinating; she’d have to offer him something very real. Hopeless romantic that I am, I also jumped at the chance to twist the ending while still preserving the love that drives the original story!

MORE TIMELESS TALES STORIES

BY ELIZABETH:

Soles Issue 3 Twelve Dancing Princesses

H o mec o min g

ELIZABETH ZUCKERMAN

Timeless Tales 10 85

emlis knew when the rowboat left the shore. Perched in the crow’s nest, shading her eyes from the ice’s glare with one gloved hand, she saw it through her spyglass: the single figure hunched over the oars, the determined (if inexperienced) rhythm of strokes. Odd to have another would-be acolyte so soon after the newest one’s arrival. Once the news of a fugitive’s flight to her ship spread across the Fifteen Islands, it usually took much longer for another to brave the journey. Little enough awaited the travelers—she was a blasphemous high priestess on a frozen ship anchored near bitterly-cold Veriom. Even worse, the goddess had cursed crew and worshippers alike...or so the stories ran.

The shells of her priestess’ olben clicked around her neck as she snapped the spyglass tube shut. The newcomer would be on deck just before Noontide. If she must pray off-schedule, Aliette of the Waves was the sort of goddess who preferred sooner rather than later. Emlis rang the crow’s bell twice and climbed down from the rigging. Too many years had passed and she could no longer leap about as her acolytes did. But speed she could manage, and the dignity that came with expertise.

Param met her on deck. He had changed much since his arrival two weeks ago, clad in the cotton clothes and thin-soled slippers of a southern miner. Now he wore oilcloth-wrapped boots and a long sealskin tunic. But his eyes were as wide as when he’d climbed the rope ladder to her deck and begged for training as a priest of Aliette. Even now, he shivered in the biting wind despite the sealskin, although she saw his effort to conceal it. She told herself to give him the next pelt they killed or traded for.

“Dip up a bucket and come with me,” she said, smiling.

“You can hold the chalice for my private Noontide.”

His face lit with excitement and a little fear. Good. More than most things, Emlis hated the arrogance of some boys who forgot all too soon that they had fled to her for a

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reason. He let down the wooden bucket and followed her aft to the shrine.

Wind shrieked past her ears, tangling her hair into knots and her blue robes around her knees. The strings of shells on the goddess’ altar rustled, danced like children at play.

Param held the carved wooden chalice steady despite the wind, although she saw his eyes flicking toward the clacking shells. Not easily replaced, those shells; not this far north, so far from any beach. She sipped from the chalice and swallowed harsh sickly-sweet salt water, feeling it prickle the back of her nose. The presence of the goddess—a reminder that she was not cursed, whatever the Islanders said.

Emlis spoke the Noontide prayer into the wind. Param leaned forward, eyes narrowing as he struggled to hear her over the noise. From the corner of her eye, she saw his mouth twist in frustration as three words in every four escaped him. “No doubt the priestesses who came to Onith silenced the wind for their prayers,” she said, turning toward him so he could hear every word.

Param blinked, his face paling under his deep tan. “I – that is – yes. I mean no disrespect,” he added hastily. His gaze darted out to sea and back to her face.

“Aliette will not strike me down for talking to you,” Emlis said. She offered a brief smile to put him at ease, just as someone else on her ship had offered their sealskin to keep him warm. “I knew such priestesses years ago, when I trained on their ships. Every word crisp and clear, the sea quiet as if it held its breath to listen. She never struck them either. But in time, I saw how the water boiled when they released it, how the sky would cloud and the tides turn dangerous from being held back too long. Now that I have a choice, I choose to do things differently.”

She would have resumed the prayer had she not seen a question in his bitten lip and halting breath. She waited,

Timeless Tales 7 87

hearing the shells clatter in the wind, until Param looked up from the chalice. “Is that why you left? To make your own choices?”

Emlis knew the words he swallowed: Was that the start of the curse? Those who came to her ship soon learned not to speak of it, but a lifetime of half-garbled tales took a long time to forget. And he was not entirely wrong, although she would have chosen a different word. She remembered the sleepless nights aboard her training ship, the words that had burned her mind, the terror that had sealed her lips.

“Among other reasons,” she said. He was not yet ready for the full story. “Nothing worth having should be easily had. If you could have had your training on Onith, you would feel differently than you do, having come so far north. Nothing comes unblemished to our hands, and a wise priestess – or priest – will praise Aliette regardless for all that is good enough.” Another smile, deliberate, to blunt the flicker of worship in his eyes for her alone. “I confess I am prouder of that belief than I should be. But Aliette has yet to punish me for that either.”

Param nodded, his wide eyes a little dazed. Emlis turned back to her prayers, raising her voice enough to let him hear more easily. It was too soon to tell for certain, but she had hopes for him.

Another sip of salt water, one for each of them this time.

He drank sparingly — imperfect, but not unexpected for a beginner. She took the chalice, gloved fingers grazing the intricate carvings weathered by time and use, and upended it over the deck. The waves against the sides drowned out the faint splash as the sea rejoined itself.

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She wiped the chalice with a fold of her robe and gave it back to Param. “That was well done,” she said. “Find Odry now and help her check the masts.”

The rowboat was close now. She squinted across the choppy gray distance. No young man this time, abandoning all he knew for his only chance to serve the goddess.

This was a girl, in an ill-fitting coat and mittens too small for her hands. Strands of curly black hair blew loose from her short braid, dancing around her uncovered head.

Girls came to the Frozen Ship sometimes. But not often, and only ever Veriom girls who knew how to dress for cold.

She watched as the rowboat came alongside. Acolytes lowered ropes and the southerner clumsily tied her boat and struggled up the side of the ship. She moved without grace, but her dogged determination counted, in Emlis’ eyes, far more.

She staggered when she reached the deck, brown cheeks flushed darker. “Welcome aboard,” Emlis said. “I am Emlis Corduna of Veriom, high priestess of this ship.”

The girl’s eyes narrowed. “Are you the Frozen Lady? The one who hears demons?”

“Some call me that,” Emlis said. “But not on my ship.

Who are you?”

“Delsa of Onith,” she said through chattering teeth. “I have come to bring Param home.”

The ship rolled as a wave slid beneath it. Emlis shifted her weight by instinct. The girl, accustomed only to the white dust and stillness of Onith’s marble quarries, lost her balance and clutched at the rail behind her, the cheap toes of her large boots scuffing uselessly against the deck.

Emlis touched a shell on her olben. I thank you, Lady, but

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I think I can manage this alone. She stepped closer, offered a hand, but then stiffened at the fear-tinged hate in the girl’s brown eyes. Her hand dropped to her side. “No one leaves my ship except by their choice.”

Delsa of Onith levered herself upright, awkward as a child taking its first steps. She braced both hands behind her on the rail. “Oh, excellent,” she said. “Do you keep them enspelled while they serve you, or is that only to bring them north to you?”

It had been a long time since anyone had dared to speak to her like this.

“I need no spells when I offer free choice. As you will see.” A few acolytes stood nearby, open-mouthed behind their furs and woolens. “Bring Param here,” she said. Two jumped to obey. The others dropped their gazes.

The girl watched the acolytes vanish belowdecks. Only when she could no longer see them did her eyes dart away, taking in Emlis, the rigging, the shrine, the decks walked smooth. Except for those nervous eyes, she was motionless.

Emlis thought of Veriom’s white hares—when they held still they vanished against the snows. There was nowhere for Delsa of Ornith to vanish. She had come to brave the Frozen Lady on her cursed ship. Now she would have to finish it out.

Emlis remembered Param’s halting question. This was part of it as well. It happened too often, she thought. Foolish girls like this one—unskilled, thoughtless, unable to see two steps beyond the moment—welcomed into Aliette’s mysteries simply because they are female. Chosen over the more promising, those who believed but happen to be male.

That is wrong. That is not fair to anyone.

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“Why him?” Delsa’s voice was thin with cold. Those wandering eyes had settled at last on Emlis’ face, frightened but steady. “Of all the men on Onith, why did you take mine?”

What a foul word that was: mine. How small, how selfish and confining. “He chose to come here,” she said coldly.

“If you hope to reach him, you must understand that.”

Footsteps on the deck behind her. Delsa gave a small gasp, eyes widening in sudden painful joy. Emlis thought of the map in her study, of the distance between Veriom and Onith. Delsa had come far to see a single face. The footsteps stuttered to a stop.

“Delsa?” Param said.

The girl hurled herself past Emlis with a choked cry.

Param reeled back. Emlis turned to see his arms around her. Delsa’s head buried in the crook of his neck and shoulder, careless of his tunic’s seal smell. Words flew between them faster than wind, and warmer: “What are you doing?”—“I came for you!”— “I never thought,”—“I knew,” — “Aliette be thanked!” — “I missed you”— “I love you.”

And the words that silenced all the rest, falling from Delsa’s lips faster than the tears down her cheeks: “Come home.”

Emlis saw his eyes close, saw Delsa catch her breath, saw it end as she had known it would and wondered why it felt hollow.

“Home to what?” Param asked. Emlis thought he was trying to be gentle. “To the quarries and the dust? To break my body and die before I reach thirty years? To watch the goddess’ ships sail past the dock and know I was on one of them, once, and gave it up?”

“To me,” Delsa whispered. “Come home to me.”

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His gloved hand cupped her wind-reddened cheek. “I tried. I spent all my life trying to be happy there. But you never even saw what it cost me to try. Love, I would give you the world, but I cannot give you my chance.”

Emlis had never before seen a human crumple, seen a body made of flesh and bone and blood shrink in on itself, become weightless and small in seconds.

“You chose,” Delsa said. “As she said.”

Another wave under the ship. Param tightened his arms around Delsa, but she pulled away. “Are you happy?” she asked.

“I am.” He sounded as broken as she looked. “I belong here. I never knew what that felt like before.”

She nodded, her gaze fixed on the deck. “Good,” she said.

“You deserve to be happy.” She turned then, stumbling; whether from the deck’s motion or from tears blinding her, Emlis could not tell. In silence she walked to the rail. Her knuckles showed white through the holes in her mittens.

Param stood where she had left him, his body hunched unconsciously over the space where she had been, where she would fit. If they had been shells, Emlis would have polished them in salt water and strung them on her olben next to each other.

With no forethought, as if the words spoke themselves: “I do not take only men.”

She felt their eyes on her, all but Delsa’s. She waited as the girl’s head turned, seeing fear battle hope in her face.

“There is no curse here,” Emlis said. The words tasted of salt, of the goddess’ presence. “No spell, no compulsion.

Only those who love our goddess and do the work of serving her. For such people, there is always room.”

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Delsa stood, motionless and silent. Emlis saw understanding break over her like a wave. Not as foolish as she had thought at first, that girl. Brave enough to come north and face her, even to accept crushing loss. Fear, still, in her eyes. It was always good to see a little fear in an acolyte.

“No,” Delsa said. Param let out a swiftly-stifled cry. And then: “No, anything that brings us together cannot be cursed.”

She crossed the deck to him, still wobbling on her land-accustomed legs. He held her close against him. Even from across the deck, Emlis saw how they fit together. With his arm around her, Param looked new and whole, and she breathed free for the first time since she had come on board.

Well, said the low, familiar voice. She sounded amused.

Yes, you did manage this by yourself.

Her olben’s shells clicked softly in a faint wind, warmer than usually blew so far north. Emlis thought of the words she had not meant to speak, the chance offered, the choice made, the happiness before her. Hardly. She smiled. My mistake, Lady.

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Fiction Homecoming

About The Author

Elizabeth Zuckerman is thrilled to be part of Timeless Tales, as both a writer and a narrator.

When her fiction’s not keeping company with the gorgeous words here, it’s appeared in NonBinary Review, 18th Wall’s anthology After Avalon, and Footnote #1, where her story “The Battle of the Wilderness” was longlisted for the 2015 Charter Oak Award. (She’s also written a young-adult biography, All About Ben Franklin, published

by Blue River Press - you know, for something completely different.) She lives with a knight in shining armor in New Jersey, where she tries really hard not to marathon three period dramas at a time.

Poetry

Words by

Warnings

Hope Erica Schultz

H ope E r i ca Sch u l t z

in the ga r den Beware of gardens.

Walls promise safety, but the price is high.

They name you—Iris, Rose, Violet— to root you where you stand, but bare feet were made for journeys.

Do not linger among the blossoms.

They cannot tell you your own story, seek to trap you in theirs.

Victim, object, prize— they will shrink you to their own size if you let them.

Distrust the beauty of flowers lest you give up your own power, become merely lovely, and bound.

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the queen We are much alike, you and I. Though you mask your power in helplessness, they still have no choice but to love you.

And don’t you get tired of charity, of the destruction left behind in your wake?

You blame me for the one boy when bodies and broken hearts pile up from those who helped you.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to choose your own path, the silver sleigh, the gleaming palace?

Dance to your own music in the moonlight?

Sacrifice grows old, grows cold and when they’ve all burned up, moths to your flame, you’ll find yourself here anyway.

Silver memories in the moonlight while your heart turns to ice.

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Poetry Warnings

About The Author

Hope Erica Schultz writes Science Fiction and Fantasy for teens and adults. Her YA postapocalyptic novel, The Last Road Home, came out November 2015, and her first experience as co-editor, the YA anthology One Thousand Words for War, came out May 2016. Her prior stories have appeared in publications including Fireside Press, Diabolical Plots, and Plasma Frequency.

She is an Associative Member of SFWA. She is generally busy with family, work, and shenanigans, and has trouble saying No to part time jobs and interesting projects.

Find out more about Hope at: tlenajade.wixsite.com/hope-erica-schultz.

Š Timeless Tales Magazine 2018

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