kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
H
er mother told her that she had constellations trapped in her heart. They would stare up at that so impossible, infinite night sky and she imagined those same nebulas swam in her veins and expanded across her chest—that she was nothing but stardust. She wonders, if she were stardust, where she would go. Across galaxies, across time, across worlds, and across universes. Away, away, away.
In some ways, Elliana has been robbed of her childhood. She has seen death, has heard the way they face it, some bravely, some clawing at their life until they tip over into the abyss. There is not the carefree childish quality of imagining that this world she lives in now stretches on and on for eternity, unchanging. She knows the faces that are here now were once not, and will one day not be again. She is all to aware of time, when she should be free of it in youthful bliss. Instead, it weighs on her, the chills she feels when someone is close, when she knows they are going to leave. Another face, here, gone, and then another face gone, then here. Faces, faces, faces.
The ghost girl, the quiet girl, the almost invisible girl. She has only known snow, only known the endless alabaster blanket that covers the earth. She likes the way it makes everything look the same, uniform. There is comfort in the expectedness of it. Elliana walks in the fields where she has painted before, grabs a piece of snow already slightly rolled and begins pushing it against the ground. Rolling, rolling, rolling.
Elena had agreed to let her daughter attend the playdate by herself, but her mother had warned her that not many in the world were kind – that most wore a facade, that they pretended to be whatever they needed to be to get what they wanted. But Elliana could not help it, despite the ghosts, despite the demons, Elli was being raised in a world far kinder than her mother’s, and because of this, she was not jaded. Her heart saw things, and she wanted to love them. Love, love, love.
Jack, her companion animal thought the snow to be too cold and so he remains hanging on her neck, occasionally running those strange hands of his through her short, blonde mane. He chatters in her ear, telling her how big to roll the snow and what she should do to make the best possible snow pony out here. (He also chatters about how he is somewhat hurt that she was not building a snow lemur.) Build, build, build.
It is then those too blue eyes find an older girl also standing in the snow and Elliana, so free of doubt that this stranger could hurt her, walks up behind her. “Are you Maybird? Do you want to help me build my Snow Pony?” She asks, her lemur clinging onto her neck, watching carefully and settling himself in a position ready to spring. “I’m Elliana.” Elliana, Elliana, Elliana.
come little children / i'll take thee away / into a land of enchantment
Did you used to like the sn—
I muffle a cry when I topple against Rook's shoulder, the knee-deep snow beneath me crumbling away to reveal a gaping gopher-hole beneath. Reluctantly, Rook slows his infernal pace down to steady me, his antlers skating like ice over my neck.
The snow? he repeats, mockingly, tugging at one of my braids. Hmm. Maybe.
I am made so cold by the plunge into the snow pit that I stand frozen until Rook's breath melts the frost on my lashes, and I blink back to life. Maybe? I push him away, scrabbling from the pit. Snow (and snowdrops) rain from my hair. He scoffs.
You look ridiculous, Daisy-bird. Stop flailing, it'll only make it worse.
I am about to snap back that it hadn't been at my insistence that we'd left the cave in the woods, and that I'd only left it because he'd taunted me with the promise of a warm meal in town, when he lowers his head and begins to dig a rough track through the snow with his antlers.
I am so cold that this is enough to chasten me.
...I spent my winters indoors. My father—he was a court advisor.
He looks back towards me, awaiting my confirmation. I nod sullenly.
Then he couldn't have made me do much of anything, when we wintered, except drink the melted chocolate and read a library of books. I crook my brow and he shakes his head. No. Not that library. His own collection.
I nod again, pretending that I understand. My limbs are as dull as wood, solidifying where they ought to bend as I hobble onto the path he's carved away. Hopping inside the hoofmarks he leaves behind, we continue our slow way through the river of snow.
Melted cho-co-late. I pull a thin icicle off a hanging branch and tap it against his antlers. What is that?
His milky eyes narrow, but he answers me anyway. A drink, warm. Sweet if you add sugar. Bitter as your Elder's herbs if you don't.
So we are going to town to get this cho-co-late? Rook nods evasively, snow shaking off his antlers like salt. I am so cold that I pay little mind to the fact that the skeletal oaks leering down on us don't look much like the slumping oaks we'd passed on our way from town, back to the safety of the forest.
The sun is dipping into red dusk when Rook nudges aside a branch heavy with spiny frost, revealing an expanse of untouched white so bright my eyes glisten over with tears. He continues forwards, feigning ignorance, until I recover enough to grab at a tine of his antlers with my mouth and yank him back. He hisses. I snarl.
“What is this, Crow?” My voice echoes shrilly across the empty, sparkling field. He had promised me—warmth! Melted cho-co-late. I brush back a braid fallen into my eyes and bare my teeth. “Unless you mean for me to start rooting around in the snow like a wild boar, then you've tricked me!” It wouldn't be the first time. I think of the wasp's nest, the barely-hidden spite, the laughter like a hawk's in the night. But that had been weeks ago.
I'd thought he'd gotten over it.
Rook paws at the snow like a dog and I gnash my tongue against my teeth to keep from screaming. A pitstop. I don't have time to snarl in anger at his foreign word before a child's voice rings across the white field and tenses me up like a deer in a trap.
“Are you Maybird? Do you want to help me build my Snow Pony?”
I whip towards the voice, braids flying, my shoulder pressing (angrily) to Rook's. My mask wobbles like a severed head on my neck. Through the skeletal tangle of his antlers, I trace out the silhouette of a girl walking towards me, her knees raised high over the snow, a spill of pale hair cascading over her thin neck. I hear Rook's laugh like a sparrow's song in my head. She's the color of chocolate.
I look from the girl to the laughing black stag besides me.
But the cold numbs me first. Carefully, I raise my mask over my head and pluck a wilted snowdrop from my braids in disgust. I look at her sideways, frown at the strange animal curled up on her back, and say, disbelieving, “You're making a new body from the snow?” I sniff. “Your dark magic doesn't interest me. And anyway, where will you get the blood to raise the snow body when you're finished?”
I stare at the furry thing resting on her back. I don't quite say it, but I think it darkly. That doesn't look like it'll give you enough.
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
O
ne night, sometime soon, Elliana will wake up and she will walk beside a skeleton man. His bones jitter and yawn and rattle. Her own body is quiet, quiet. She walks beside him and they say no words. She would awaken the next morning, terrified, tasting death on her tongue, and letting it run up her spine colder than a chill. This will not be the first man she sees like this (though, she will think him so much better than that bent necked lady). She will see nightmares, and she will walk beside them. Kiss their cheeks and tell them of their beauty. The girl, it would seem, is not so different from her mother. She befriends even those in the shadows, even those who terrify her.
Especially those who terrify her.
A dreamy smile kisses the corners of her mouth as she stands there before the girl, Maybird. Jack buries his hands into her mane, waiting to see what will happen. He eyes the girl’s own bonded, wondering how he could possibly take down a creature with swords for ears. What he does not expect though is to see the mask of a bird on the girl’s face. He squeaks out his concern and ducks behind Elliana’s head, while the girl, for her part, stares with wide, blue eyes, everything about her still inviting as ever. Demon. Jack whispers to Elliana, but she quiets him with a gentle roll of her shoulders.
The mask tips upwards, revealing her face, and Elliana cannot decide if she prefers the mask up or down. It was lovely to pretend for a moment she had found a bird on a snowy afternoon. A splendid day out of the ordinary before it tumbles into typical as she sees the girl is entirely equine.
“Dark magic?” Elliana questions the girl, the words fly from her mouth with the lightness of a bird. She looks down at the snow imagines it covered in blood, a crimson masterpiece (she thinks in the same breath that she would love to paint such a thing, in secret, away from her mother’s eyes—she can only imagine how sad they would become if she saw such a painting). She has not seen so much blood before, has only seen it in skid knees and small cuts, but she takes the red and splashes it across alabaster. In her mind, it is beautiful.
And suddenly she wants to see it.
“From each other,” she suggests. “Some from you, some from me,” she thinks, and takes a piece of ice from the ground. She remembers the way the unicorn’s horn had delved into her skin until drops of red emerged. “I can cut you, and you can cut me, and then when our snow creature comes to life it can be entirely our own.” She turns back to the creation she had began before meeting the girl. “What do you say?” She asks and holds out the icicle to her. “We could be like sisters in a way—blood sisters.”
come little children / i'll take thee away / into a land of enchantment
I don't think that's what she meant, Daisy-bird, Rook laughs, his antlers chuckling with him, snow raining down in drifts around me.
I look from the furry creature to the chocolate-colored girl once more before I pivot silently away, taking the first steps out of the clearing, abandoning Rook to his charade—before his shoulder cuts into mine and warm breath, smelling of pine needles and holly berries, blows against my cheek.
Not so quick, there. His voice is acid in a champagne glass. Being a bit rude, aren't you? If he means to guilt me this way, then the black stag does not know me enough. I sniff and watch in reprobation as his lips curl up, up, up; as he steps towards the girl, leers down at her companion. Lowers his head to paw, innocently, at the snow.
Leave, then. I'll have my own fun with them. The threat is thinly veiled and blackly taunting. Rook's white antlers gleam like swords, a tangled thicket of bone no weaker than forged metal. I would know. He'd nearly killed me with them, before.
I'll simply stop you.
Can you? When I'm expecting it, now?
A flock of blackbirds startle out of the underbrush. The sun, a red disc, rests its descent to watch us. Rook's eyes, pools of spilled milk, narrow in a mirthful victory when I turn back, the fury limning my answering smile enough to sicken me like poisoned berries.
“Dark magic?” I study her; the girl's voice is too soft, her demeanor too fine, to die by the boredom of a half-mad stag.
Picking my way back towards her, I reply acridly, “White magic surely wouldn't work if—”
“From each other. Some from you, some from me. I can cut you, and you can cut me, and then when our snow creature comes to life it can be entirely our own.” My gaze cuts upwards and laughter bubbles delightedly out from my throat.
Maybe I underestimated her. “What do you say?” Maybe she's as mad as Ma. “We could be like sisters in a way—blood sisters.”
It is my turn to level a gleeful smile at Rook, to watch with a cat's slow-blinking pleasure as grim shock works its way across his face. Have your fun with her, I taunt, snowdrops fluttering like wings from my hair. She'll exsanguinate you.
My mask falls back over my head and the world is a calming ocean of dark. In it, the girl's hair shines like filtered starlight. “... We can pack snow into the cuts to stop the bleeding, after.” I think of Ma, and how loudly she had shrieked when I had slipped home one day with a shallow gash in my knee.
Her anger had been worse than the cut, a hundred times over.
“I don't have anything sharp, though.” I touch my nose curiously, a little jealously, to the yellow moon on her shoulder. “Are you truly that powerful?”
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
J
ack clings tighter to her back, as if sensing the way the other girls looks at her, as if she means to drain all the blood from him. Elli, in her own innocence simply stares with that longing gaze of glaciers towards the older girl. She smiles and only frowns when the girl starts to walk away. Elli tip toes after her for a moment before stopping and waiting. She would not chase someone who did not want to be chased, and this is an important distinction between Elli and her mother. Elena chases people, Elli chases the world.
The deer comes close to her back, Stares down at Jack and Elli swings her body away, better to watch the girl slowly walking away from her. She looks away when the birds suddenly erupt from the underbrush and Elliana takes a jump towards the girl in surprise. Started by birds to reach towards another. She thinks maybe it worked, whatever it is, Elli is not sure, but the girl with the mask comes back towards her. White magic, she doesn't know what it is. Her mother never talks about magic, not unless in terms of her family’s old magic. (Wind talkers, air movers, the names have changed through the course of their family’s history.) But Elli never thought the wind to be white magic, if she painted the wind it would be purple.
And the girl smiles.
Elli has no choice here but to smile back at her.
And they look one in the same—though they should be—they were blood sisters after all.
Her mask falls firmly in place and Elliana is beginning to think she quite likes it. She wants to ask where she got such a thing and if she would make one for her. “It will be cold,” Elliana warns. She is young, but she has grown enough to know that snow is cold and that mad girls are not always what you expect, sometimes they are full of innocent blue eyes, batting lashes, and shy smiles.
“Not quite,” she tells her before beginning to search the ground. Where she had rolled a snowball had revealed some of the ground below, and nestled in the wet grass there lays a sharp stone, sharp enough to cut through flesh. Elli holds it before her. “Okay, you first,” she says, takes a deep breath and waits for Bird to hold out an appendage towards her. Jack looks away, as if he could not stand to watch. It feels strange, cutting through flesh, different that cutting the stems of flowers, or through a slice of bread. Crimson bubbles to the surface of the fresh cut on Bird, and Elli wonders if it hurts, she will soon find out. She stares as it bleeds, entirely caught up in what is happening. She has never seen a cut so intentional, so direct. This was no skinned knee or rose thorn prick. She blinks and reaches for some snow to place over it, she shivers. (From the snow, she tells herself.) ”There,” she says, admiring the stone, now darkened. She hands it to Bird and holds out her own golden and shadowed leg. “Me next,” she says, looks down at first her leg, to the stone, and to the mask. And she thinks, dark magic cannot be so bad if it gives her sister. A blood sister, but a sister all the same.
