In the Night Garden

She stood above her daughter’s crib. It was a beautiful room, with a fire in the marble hearth and a bottle of hot wine on a little glass table. The crib was cedar, and the blankets were pure and white as a dove’s belly. The little girl had a shock of dark hair and her red fingers were curled into fists, her tiny brow furrowed as she dreamed. Zmeya opened the window, so that the light of the Stars could stream in, the light of the Moon, the dark of the Sky. Dappled silver light fell onto the child’s face.

“Sorrow,” she whispered. “My Sorrow, my love.”

Tears welled up in her eyes, tears of light, of Snake-light and Star-light. Zmeya lit the room like a brazier, her silver self spilling into the corners. She had not known such light in her skin since before the Boar-King had taken her. It filled up her throat so she could not breathe. She had forgotten what it felt like to be so bright. She knelt by the crib, her jagged, shorn hair dripping light like blood, and smiled at her daughter. She wanted to stay, after all. She wanted to put a veil over her hair and take this child downstairs into the spinning world of the court, and watch her grow up. She wanted to make sure that the Moon and the Stars were always on her. She wanted to hold her child to her as she had done on the lonely island, and feel her living mouth tug at her breast.

Slowly, Zmeya reached out a glowing finger, and with infinite care, caressed her daughter’s eyelids, the first and last touch of the Star and her daughter in the lakeless world.

The skin beneath her finger curled black and steaming, and shadows leapt from the smoking flesh. Sorrow began to cry. A nurse came bustling in, and Zmeya stepped into the shadows and the starlight, chagrined.

Once, there was a ferry on a lonely gray lake on a lonely gray shore. It creaked in the storms and the wind, and its tether stretched. A man with a hunch on his back poled it back and forth, clothed all in rags. He saw a woman walking along the shore toward him, her hair short and unkempt, her eyes red with weeping. She came to the ferry and looked up at him stonily.

“I only wanted to touch her, with living hands, my living child. Just once.”

“Was it enough?” the ferryman asked.

Zmeya was a long time answering.

“Yes,” she said finally, and stepped onto the ferry once more.

Out of the Garden

“WHAT SHE LEFT ON YOUR EYELIDS, SORROW, MY DOVE, MY DARLING, my little goose,” said the old woman, “was your history, winding and tangling back and back and back. It was your story, the story of your birth, your life, swinging forward and backward like a holy censer, the tendrils of its smoke reaching out and around and into each other like the coils of a snake, pursuing all those strange and varied folk with a Star’s tenacity. They are the tales of everyone who reached into silver shadows and pulled you into the world: your mother, who was a murdered Star; your father, a lonely creature who loved a raft that became a tree and a tree that became a red ship; a tea leaf that found its way out of the world and quickened a dead woman’s womb, and the girl who carried it there; the boy who paid your fare across the water, the women who pushed your mother back from death, the Basilisk three women mutilated to speak once more before they di

ed, the bear who was turned back, and the flame-hearted Djinn who was born from your eyelids burning beneath your mother’s hand, who drifted into the world before you.” The crone smiled, her face breaking into wrinkles, her eyes spilling with tears. “And perhaps not least the woman who carried you on the ferry, who was once a goose, who took a child away from her cradle and far away, who left you instead, a magpie’s trick, who watched over you, and gave you a knife to keep you from hunger and safe, her own knife, the one she used to kill a Wizard when she was very, very young. Your name is Sorrow, my little bird, my dear-as-diamonds, and you have been loved all your days.”

The girl could not breathe. She coughed, and wept, and crumbled into the snow. Aerie opened the Gate and took the girl into her arms. She stroked her hair. She whispered to her and dried her tears. The boy watched, his mouth open, trying to remember every tale and losing them as quickly as they rose up in his heart, golden fish that would not stay.

Out of the wood a young girl came. She was very beautiful, and she wore a wispy red dress that seemed made for dancing. All along her right side ran stark tattoos: a dancing black flame. Beside her were a great Firebird, a black, smoking Djinn, and a small brown spider with glittering legs. The young girl walked slowly to Sorrow, who untangled herself from Aerie and stood to face her. Solace touched the girl’s eyelids softly, and looked into the white-hushed Garden.

“So this is where I would have lived, if I had not become a Firebird’s daughter,” she said. “Did you like it?”

Sorrow blushed. “No,” she whispered. “It was cold at night. I think… I think I have paid for your fire with my sadness since we were born.”

Solace grew very serious. “I am sorry.” She folded the other girl into her dancer’s arms, and kissed her cheek. They looked so much alike, the boy thought, standing like that, with their faces buried in one another’s shoulders, all that long black hair mingling.

“But now we will be sisters,” Solace said brightly, brushing Sorrow’s hair from her face. “And you will learn to dance with me, I promise.”

The Djinn floated forward, and Sorrow could see, in her eyes, how old she was now, the ancient, guttering fire. She was still as youthful-looking as any flame, her stomach taut and black, her palms gleaming, but she was so tired.

“I think,” she said, one red eyebrow arched, “that you are, somehow, my mother. At least as much as you are her sister. Aerie has tried to explain it, but I was never good at history. But it would seem I am the only Djinn of seared flesh, and that is something to know before one is blown out.”

“Why did you leave me for so long?” Sorrow cried, unable to contain herself. “I was so alone! I was so frightened! You could have come for me anytime! Why did you wait?”

Aerie regarded her solemnly. “The world is wide, and the rearing of children is a delicate thing. But, heart of my heart, I knew”—and from her skirts she drew a long, golden feather—“that all tales end. And I, and all, would be here when it was time for yours to begin.”

“Come with us,” said Solace.

“I… I am afraid!” Sorrow said. “I have never been outside the Gate, ever! I have wished for it, so many times, but I am so afraid!”

Aerie bent and took the girl’s dark face in her hands. Her laughing eyes were black as a bird’s. “Sorrow, come. Come into the world, into the land beyond wishing, where, I swear to you, there are miracles: a multitude of Griffins, and a Papess at prayer, and lost girls found, and a Satyr laughing in a cottage by the sea.”

Solace turned to Lantern and the two shared a glittering and conspiratorial expression. The spider said nothing, but clicked her silver legs together. He turned and let a long, glistening cloak fall from his back, and Solace caught it. She wrapped her sister’s shivering shoulders in a cloak of golden feathers, and arranged her hair over its collar.

“Come,” she said, “I will show you so many strange and wonderful things.”

The boy squeaked. He had meant to make a much more grown-up sound, but it came out a squeak. He did not know what he wanted, he did not know what to say, but his face was stricken, his mouth trembling—he tried valiantly not to cry.

“You were not always alone,” he managed to say. “Not always.”