Beneath Ceaseless Skies #137 Read online

  Issue #137 • Dec. 26, 2013

  “Stitched Wings,” by Beth Cato

  “Whistler’s Grove,” by A.E. Decker

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  STITCHED WINGS

  by Beth Cato

  Madeline fled from her new governess and into the shadowy strangeness of the garden. Strange, this garden, because she and Mother had scarcely been in that house for a week, and more so because Mother had expressly forbidden her from that part of the property. That made the garden the ideal hiding spot.

  After their months in the desert hinterlands of Drell, the greenery of the stone-walled paradise delighted Madeline. Panting, she paused on the coarsely-laid brick path and breathed in the muskiness of lichen-laden branches. Something about such places always made her feel indescribably alive; Mother seemed to react similarly within her laboratory, surrounded by oil cans and metal detritus.

  “Gertrude! Where are you, child?”

  The voice carried over a great distance, but Madeline bolted forward. She needed to hide from Miss Shelly, and fast.

  She crawled between grasping shrubberies, wiggling on her knees without care for skirts or lace. There, within a tiny cathedral of boxwood branches and desiccated leaves, she spied the fairy in the cage.

  The fairy sat, twiggy legs akimbo. His tunic shirt and trousers seemed woven of moss, the intense green almost camouflaging him against the grass flattened by the cage. With one hand he wielded what appeared to be a whisker or quill, and with the other he held together a tidy stack of overlapped leaves.

  “Hello!” A real fairy, in her garden! Madeline’s filthy skirts rustled as she sat. “What are you doing?”

  “Makin’ me wings for fall.” He didn’t look up. “Us lot, we make wings with what we ‘ave.”

  “Who set the trap? Is it meant for fairies?”

  “Haven’t a clue who put the blimey thing here, but here it is, eh?” He lied. He knew. The awareness tasted like pickled onions—oh, how she hated pickled onions.

  “I can let you out.” She needed to let him out. Cages reminded her of Father, in his box.

  The fairy met her eye then, gaze baleful. “I’m just idling for a while, minding me own business.” More lies, with a hint of garlic.

  He tested the hold of his spider-silk thread. The newly-sewn wing featured an array of small leaves in a dozen shades of orange and vermillion. His sort of sewing looked interesting—not at all like the drudgery Miss Shelly expected of Madeline, forcing her to sit with feet rooted to the rug as she stitched the hours away as a proper girl should.

  Madeline had no intention of being proper. Mother had taught her that much, even as Mother expected domestication from her.

  Madeline sat back, frowning. “What’s your name?”

  “Snuggleweed Rothchild the Third.” He stitched another leaf into place.

  “You’re lying.” The stench of his words made her stomach roil, though his untruths were nowhere near Mother’s grand scale.

  “That’s the smartest thing you’ve said yet, it is. And what’s your name, then, eh?” He met her eyes then, so briefly, and they pierced her in a way that made her shudder.

  Names had power, Mother had said, which was why Madeline was not allowed to use her true name wherever they lived. With a name, they could be discovered by reeves, or soldiers, or worst of all, bank investigators.

  “Gertrude,” said Madeline, and tasted the foulness of her own lie on her tongue. Gertrude, her new name in this new place.

  “Gertrude.” The fairy chortled. “You lie like a fairy, you do. Mightily impressive for a human child of your age.”

  She pondered him for a moment. “Fairies lie a lot?”

  “‘Course not.” He tied off the thread.

  The sourness of his words lingered. She lifted the gate of the trap. “I don’t want you to lie to me anymore.”

  He scowled at her most fiercely. “Well, now you dunnit. You done me a kindness and now I’m in your debt. If you’d left me alone to do me spot o’ sewing, life woulda been much simpler.”

  “I couldn’t just leave you like that. You could’ve starved to death.” Madeline shuffled back to give him space.

  He shuddered. “Even worse, a life debt. Damned and double damned.” He ambled to freedom, and a peculiar smell grew stronger—that of fresh-cut grass, mouth-watering cheese, and dusty cat.

  The fairy stood only two of her hands-spans tall, his body emaciated in the way of a deep winter twig. “I mighta lived. The queen coulda saved me. She could bust through that iron, maybe. Iron’s tough on fairy magic, even hers, and she’s the most powerful thing in this whole forest, she is.”

  Magic! Mother had recently muttered about magic as she studied her blueprints. Madeline clasped her hands. “Do you use magic to make your wings?”

  “To attach’em, sure. We gotta stitch wings each season, as magic fades after a time.”

  He held up his new wing. Bending his gangly arm in an impossible way, he angled the wing to rest at the top of his shoulder blade. That bizarre smell of him increased, as strong as the aether and butane in Mother’s laboratory. A few twitches and the fairy stood straight. The wing had attached, even through his mossy shirt.

  “Amazing!” she breathed. He did look a little smug at that. “And your queen can do much more?”

  “Most assuredly. Glow like the sun, she can, though not much call for that sorta ting.”

  “Does she lie, too?”

  “Best liar o’ anyone.” His truth was sweet as nectar.

  “Ger-trude!” The two syllables belted out, off-key and far too close. Madeline and the fairy cringed.

  “It’s Miss Shelly!” Madeline looked around, keenly aware of the brightness of her red dress and the patchwork cover of the autumn foliage. “I’ll have to talk to you more later.”

  “As you will,” he said, though didn’t seem entirely displeased. “Crawl straight on, huggin’ the wall like them vines, ‘n she won’t see you. I best go deeper in the woods, avoid more temp-pa-ta-tion from these cages.”

  “Why? What’s the bait?” she asked, angling her head around.

  “Sugar cakes.” He sighed his delight. “Bait like that, ‘m bound to be caught ‘gain.”

  Madeline could well understand that. “G’bye, Sir Fairy!” She choked back a yelp as the nearby garden gate creaked and footsteps crunched on dry leaves.

  “Sir!” The fairy’s voice was faint, but delighted. “You honor a nobody like me, little liar-who’s-not-lying.”

  She wormed her way through the jasmine as she faintly heard him say, “And jess so you know, the name’s Rowan.”

  Truth.

  #

  Rowan hadn’t been lying when he said his queen was the best liar of all, but Madeline knew that was only because he hadn’t met her mother.

  Madeline sat at the big long dining table. Glass windows poured ruddy sunlight into the room, like pomegranate juice from a pitcher. An old servant shuffled to bring out food from the kitchen. Beside Madeline, Miss Shelly sat rigid as stone, napkin tucked over her lap just so.

  Across from Madeline, Mother’s place was set, food steaming in wait, as always.

  At the head of the table sat the biggest lie of all: Father’s seat. Food awaited him, as it had every night as long as Madeline could remember, even though he had eaten nothing in over five years.

  When she was younger, she had believed the lie and thought Father would whirl through the door at any moment, smelling of horse and dusty roads, and his saber rattling at his side. She still recalled his fervent love when he looked her in the eye—she could taste it, swe
et as sugar cakes—and the potent foulness when he walked towards the door so often and said to Mother, “I’ll see you soon, my love.”

  Lie, and lie. The former was the realism that came with being a soldier, as he was most always away; the latter, because Madeline knew the love that made him return home from each campaign was for her and her alone.

  But Mother’s love for him was true and absolute. She was absolute in everything she did.

  “Ah, dinner!” Mother entered the room, demure in a clean frock. Gloves covered the permanent stains of oil within the creases of her hands, and the two stubby fingers from an explosion last year. “Good evening, everyone.”

  Mother’s chipper mood was a shock, nearly as much a shock as the elbow that jabbed into Madeline’s ribs. She lurched to her feet at Miss Shelly’s prompt. “Mother,” she said, curtsying, and Miss Shelly stood and did likewise.

  “Gertrude, my darling.” Mother stepped close enough to plant a fleeting kiss on her cheek. By habit, Madeline did not cringe from the fog of falsehoods that clothed Mother. Indeed, her very clothing was false. Mother could play the part of a proper lady better than any actress on stage, but she was neither. She was a scientist and a thief, and Madeline was not sure where one ended and the other began.

  She had, from a tender age, understood there were certain things not done by proper ladies.

  Proper ladies did not give false names to everyone they met, and different names in different places. They did not enter strangers’ houses and leave with new jewels, which were then exchanged for jingling bags of coins. Ladies did not choose which households to rent by the ability to adapt chambers into laboratories—in the case of their current abode, a ballroom—nor did they often set such households afire or create other disturbances that required fleeing in the night. And foremost, ladies did not keep their dead husbands hard-packed in salt like barreled cod, and continue to haul their pickled life-mate by dirigible from city to city for five years.

  Madeline remembered the day the soldiers came with their giant metal box. She had spied on them through a cracked door; watched Mother nod, stoic as always. After the soldiers left, Mother rested one hand on the casket, so briefly, and went straight to her drafting table to begin the first of her many efforts to resurrect Father.

  Even tasting the truth as she did, part of Madeline needed that lie, that sliver of hope, that Father would return. Love for him was the one thing she and Mother shared.

  Mother’s gloved hand caressed the back of Father’s chair and she moved to sit opposite of Madeline. “Have you had a good day, my dear?”

  “Yes, Mother.” She tasted fermenting crabapples in the lie of Mother’s love, and her own feigned obedience.

  “She is doing well in her lessons?”

  “Oh yes,” gushed Miss Shelly. “She’s such a bright child.”

  Madeline and the governess smiled at each other with the pleasantness of roving tomcats making an acquaintance.

  “Good. My husband will be displeased if she’s behind in her lessons.” Mother began eating.

  Everything Madeline did—her lessons, her etiquette training—all of it was a show for Father. She had realized this a few years before, around age seven, after an incident at a past residence. The staff abandoned them, and Madeline survived alone for a week and ate the pantry bare. Mother finally emerged from her locked laboratory and berated Madeline for not being clean—”What would your father say, if he saw you like this!”

  Madeline stared at Father’s chair as she chewed and wondered what he would say, about that and so many other things.

  “I believe the master of the house will not be with us tonight, so you may go ahead and remove his plate,” said Mother, motioning to the old man. “Perhaps tomorrow he’ll return.” Promise brought a rosy haze to her cheeks.

  Something had happened in the laboratory today.

  Madeline could not remember Mother being so happy since right before they had left the hinterlands—and then they had fled the city in the dark of night. Absolute dark, as the steam systems died, casting the streets into blackness that had rivaled Mother’s ferocious mood. As their little airship rose, it was hard to discern the horizon between two spans of darkness.

  “Madam?” The cook stood in the doorway, fidgeting. “I gots more made for you. Sweetened them up, I did.”

  “Very well. Bring them out,” said Mother.

  Madeline smelled the sugar cakes before she saw them. So sweet and citrusy, they brightened the very air. The tops of the little discs sparkled in the evening light.

  Mother keenly inspected them, then took a precise, dainty nibble. “The sweetness could be tweaked,” she said, one hand up to cover her mouth as she chewed. “Just a slight adjustment.”

  “Yes, Madam.”

  Why would a scientist like Mother want to capture fairies? She spoke of magic sometimes, true, but her talent was in machines.

  “That reminds me.” Mother pushed away her still-mounded plate and stood. “I do believe I’ll walk in the garden.” She practically skipped as she left.

  #

  A harsh doorbell resounded again and again from downstairs. Madeline placidly continued her stitchery, her posture perfect in the leather library chair. Finally Miss Shelly could take the obnoxious sound no more.

  “Gertrude!” she snapped. “Continue your work. Where are those servants?”

  Miss Shelly bustled off and closed the door behind her. Madeline lurched to her feet at the distinct click of the lock. The governess had locked her in! The nerve!

  Through the floor, Madeline detected shudders and whirs. Mother was at work in her laboratory directly below, and had been all morning. Madeline could only hope to be so enterprising.

  She tucked her needle into the canvas and looked to the rainbow-hued shelves around her. She could easily read away the hours, but she had no desire to read in captivity—she would be like Rowan, stitching his new wing within his cage. At the thought of the fairy, she dashed to the window.

  The second story view showed several trees and the garden gate. She swung the pane outward. The peculiar magical smell of him tickled her nose, and she smiled.

  “Rowan!” she hissed.

  “What you goin’ on about?”

  It took her a moment to spy him, small and green-garbed as he was, perched atop a bush just below.

  “Can you help me get out?”

  “Mischief is a specialty of mine, ‘tis true. Just jump down and I’ll catch you, and bring that spot o’ sewing in your hand so we can take a gander.”

  “You’ll catch me?” The words confused Madeline, as they rang true. “How can you catch me? You’re not even as tall as my arm!”

  Rowan sighed. “You’ll not come by harm, not from me. I’ll keep you good ‘n safe. This I vow, ‘n folks like me don’t take vows lightly, y’should know.”

  That truth shivered in its might.

  Still, her heart twittered against her breastbone as she climbed onto the sill. She took two deep breaths, squinted her eyes shut, and jumped, barely swallowing a shriek as she fell.

  Sticks cupped beneath her legs and grabbed her, sure and strong. Madeline opened her eyes and gasped. Rowan was as tall as any grown man, his arms wrapped around her.

  “How?!” she asked as he set her down on the grass. As soon as the warmth of his contact withdrew, he shrank down to normal size and scampered toward the bushes where they had met.

  “Sizes ‘n shapes can be lies same as anything, and like most lies, can’t hold up for long. Come along now, girly-girl.”

  She brushed aside bared twigs as she crawled. “If you could get big, why didn’t you break out of your cage that way?”

  “Tut! That’s iron. Binds magic within. Speaking of which, wadn’t being exactly phil-ann-thropic when I brought you down.” He pointed ahead to where the trap had again been laid, complete with a sugar cake. “See that? Stick me big-human-sized hand in there, and it’d box me magic right up. ‘Fraid to know what’d happ
en ta the rest of me. There’s a few more cages ‘bout the garden now, ‘n all. And a few missing fairy kin, dare say.”

  “Oh.” She sucked in a breath. “I know where they are. Mother’s setting the traps.”

  “Well, she can keep me cousin Dandelion. He’s a twitter-twit, through and through. Here. Lemme see that stitchery you gots going while you fetch ‘ere that cake.”

  She had almost forgotten about the sampler in her hand. She gave it to him, then disabled the trap and reached inside. The tiny cake was still soft, the dome crusted with turbinado sugar and candied bits of orange. Her mouth watered, but she offered it to Rowan.

  “Split it as y’ will.” He unfurled the sampler on the grass between them. Madeline tore the cake in half, and Rowan nodded as he accepted his share.

  The sampler was a twelve by twelve canvas, intended to be proof of her proper training as a young lady. Miss Shelly might be aggravating, but she did know how to sew, and her shrewd eye had honed Madeline’s skill—well, prevented laziness, in any case. The sampler had been started only a few days before, but Madeline had accomplished an important bit: her name.

  “My oh my, yes, I sensed the potency of this un from down here.” Rowan traced a knobby finger along the “G” of Gertrude. “Lies are magnificent, knotty things, and this is a beaut. You must be havin’ some fairy in yer blood, way back.”

  Madeline’s tongue worked at a bit of candied fruit stuck between her teeth. “That doesn’t make sense! People lie all the time, and they can’t all carry fairy blood. My mother....”

  “Oh, there’s lies ‘n then there’s lies. It’s how it’s done, bein’ aware of the words and still saying ‘em. Some folks, they say a thing often enough ‘n it become true to them, but not us fairies. Lies are Things.”

  “Do lies have a flavor to you?”

  Rowan grinned, all gap-toothed. “Sweet as that cake.”

  “Oh. Lies taste bad to me, hearing or saying them.”

  “Sounds like some fickle human corruption of somethin’ pleasant, it does. Fae blood’s way back, but there, I’d bet me wings on it.” Sure enough, he did have two full wings now, radiant in autumn glory.