Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 86

He liked this one, her furry red smell and her voice with the hitch in it. He pressed his face into her palm and waited.

And she looked at him, sad and strange, and pulled her hand back and pressed it to her neck as if to keep her heart from rising up her throat. And then she looped the reins over the fence, turned away, scooped up her book bag by the strap, hauled back, c.o.c.ked her arm, and pitched it spinning over the bright aluminum rail.

It fell with a splash and bobbed only once before it sank, recollected by ripples and then bubbles. "Right," she said. "I guess that's that, then, innit?"

She hadn't done much more with the reins than a gesture. Perhaps she half-hoped that when she turned back, he'd be gone. A wisp of dream, burned off with the morning mist rising from the river.

Stately, careful, the stallion stepped out of the shadow of the bridge. The sun was high enough to catch in her tawny hair and warm the crest of his neck now, and he paused in the light so that when she looked up, she would see him. But she stood at the rail, staring, and so he came to her, and breathed across her neck. She shuddered and turned back.

"So," she said, "where to now?"

He whickered again, tickling her ear with his whiskers. She leaned her cheek against his neck.

And then she turned, suddenly, tossed the reins over his head. She came under his neck and stepped crisply along his near side. He felt her hand on his shoulder, his mane. She grasped the pommel of the saddle and lifted one leg with complete immodesty, revealing a dab of crimson on her panties, her foot a testing weight in the stirrup. The scent of blood and iron dizzied him; he shook froth from his lips. And then she was on his back, knee socks and clunky black shoes, and he could hear her thighs sticking to the leather of the saddle as she settled herself. Living flesh on dead, adhering. She s.h.i.+fted her weight in the saddle, and he waited until she was seated, both feet in the stirrups.

"I know who you are," she said. "You don't fool me, pony." And then she patted him on the neck and said, "And I don't care."

He craned his neck, pulling against the off rein, and she moved her hand to give him that freedom. She leaned down to push his forelock out of his eye as it came within reach, making him shake his head and send it tumbling down again. She laughed and drummed her heels against his side. "Well then, run off with me, Kelpie."

He wondered when she'd known him. The eyes, perhaps: the eyes often gave him away. And those he could not change. Every Fae who transforms has some mark that stays with him in every shape, and the stallion's was china-blue irises.

He winked at her, and she crowed. "I knew it!"

"You're not frightened," he said, his voice unm.u.f.fled by the bit.

She straightened his mane again. He dropped his head and ambled forward. His unshod hooves thumped on stone rather than clattering.

She stretched her legs into the stirrups. She understood the basics, he thought, but her balance wasn't fluid. Knowledge without practice. "What have I to fear?"

"Death by drowning," he answered, and she didn't laugh. He hadn't thought she would; the sort of girl who laughed at literary jokes didn't tumble her books into the Clyde without a hesitation.

The walk became a trot, which she posted over awkwardly, wincing, and out of pity he began to canter. The river walk wasn't long, but he planned to take Bell's Bridge near the science center and bring her across the river, among the scrubby trees in the dawn-cold park.

Where they could find a little privacy.

The rising sun was at their backs, stretching their shadow long across the cobbles, and the river walk was all but deserted. One man, in a long coat and a hat, waved as they pa.s.sed, and the girl waved back.

"You shouldn't canter that beast on cobbles," he called, but they were already past by the time the girl answered, "He's cantering me!"

Whatever her bravado, and though she clung gamely to the saddle, the stallion could smell her fear. A gallop, he thought, might lose her.

If he had never thrown a rider he didn't want thrown.

She'd abandoned the reins. They bounced against his neck, and her hands were fisted one in his mane and one on the pommel. She leaned forward, precariously, so he had to hitch his stride to throw her back into balance, and called into his ear, "Aren't you supposed to look like a wild horse off the moors? And yet here you are under saddle, careering along a tame riverside."

"Where the river goes harnessed," he said, "so go the river-spirits."

Through all the Isles, in these times.

Besides, she'd never stay on him if his back were bare, though he missed the grip of legs around his barrel, the drum of bare heels against his sides.

There had been another. He'd worn her soul for a time, chain and change, and lived in hunger while he'd done so. She had owned him-altered him-but he had won free at the last.

And though he had changed...a predator needs meat.

They cantered past brick condominiums, startling a red-clad woman who had been fis.h.i.+ng in her bag, and came to the place where the riverwalk curved back to rejoin the road. Here there was construction on the north side of the street and-between the road and the river-trees and gra.s.s and ratty flowers amidst the litter on the south. They moved with the spa.r.s.e early traffic but faster, threading around cars he didn't dare jump for fear of losing the girl.

They pa.s.sed between a white hotel and a round restaurant, under the shadow of an enormous crane and past the auditorium called the Armadillo for architecture like a sectioned sh.e.l.l. And then they were on the bank of the river again, and running now, the girl laughing in his ear as the bridge came into sight, with its center suspension spire and its walkways covered with arches like a seagull's wings.

The bridge was named for a whisky sponsors.h.i.+p, and the stallion thought it a fine irony. "Duck," he said, and lowered his own head so the girl could lean forward along his neck.

And so they pa.s.sed across the bridge, and she stayed with him, while supports stippled her face with moving light and the arch blurred by above. His hooves a hollow thunder on the span. The river gave back a moving echo.

They burst out under the streaky sky again. The clouds were torn and moving; there would by rain by dusk.

She laughed, and kept on laughing. She'd found the rhythm-a gallop is not so hard to ride-and their wind and his mane stung tears from her eyes.

On the off side lay the s.h.i.+ning silver arcs of the science center, like half-moons reflecting the rising sun. The stallion veered away, across sand and then gra.s.s and soft earth where his hooves pressed crescents as if in answer.

And then the road, the hard jar up his forelegs, the girl s.h.i.+vering and urging him on. A trail they did not follow: instead, he took them among the winding band of trees.

There, he threw her, head down and rump high, and turned his body and turned his form at once and caught her as she was falling. His intervention knocked the scream right out of her, and she clung, breathless, against his chest. The scent of blood wreathed her, the scent of blood and the scent of woman.

His stomach rumbled.

She pressed closer into his arms, her eyelashes fluttering against the hollow over his collarbone. With blunt-nailed hands, he tipped her chin up and inspected her face, her mouth, the watery green of her eyes under hair tangled by their wild ride.

She winced. And when he touched the top b.u.t.ton on her cardigan, she flinched.

"Run from me," he said. "Go on; I don't mind. I'll catch you."

Her lashes were dusted with gold. "There's no point in running. You never get away, and where's there to run to?" She laid her pale hands over his, the bitten nails and the torn, inflamed cuticles. She helped him unb.u.t.ton her collar.

When the cardigan fell open, he saw the bruises on her throat. She swallowed under tender blue-veined skin, and he touched her softly. The hands that had made the bruises were smaller than his own, but most hands were.

"Did you want that?" he asked her.

She didn't answer, as such. She lowered her eyes, and shook her head.

"My dad called me a wh.o.r.e," she said. "He said I needn't come home again."

"Your father choked you?"

He was new. He was changed, like the changeless sea. It wasn't pity he felt, for he was pitiless.

But he recollected pity. He had carried it for a time, and though he'd laid it down since, the memory lingered.

The sea is also capricious.

"You were raped," he said.

"So? My dad told me he loved me. That makes what he did better? And you. You're going to drown me. What makes you so f.u.c.king superior, water-horse?"

He had no answer, so he sang- I'll go down by Clyde and I'll mourn and weep For satisfied I never can be.

I'll write him a letter, just a few short lines And suffer death ten thousand times.

-and watched her eyebrows rise. And when he had finished, he cleared his throat and said, "You knew the cost when you came with me."

"I did," she said, fists on her hips. "And if I hadn't, you would have taken me anyway."

He dipped his head. It was true.

She sighed. "I don't have anywhere to go. It doesn't matter. Do you know what a sin-eater is?"

"I have been called one," he answered. "But I am not. I cannot absolve you."

"I don't need absolution," she said. "Will you put your sin on me?"

"I can't sin," he answered. He toed the earth nervously. "I haven't a soul."

She rolled her eyes, arms crossed, shaking her hair across her shoulders. "If you f.u.c.k me, will you say it's my fault?"

The stallion was as old as the sea; he'd loved and killed and diced with the kings of Faerie, and-for a while-he had carried a mortal woman's soul. He could not recollect a conversation that had befuddled him as much as this one.

"Of course it's not your fault," he said. "I'm a monster."

"Oh G.o.d!" She shook her head so hard it turned her body from the waist. Her hair was a tempest all around her, and he wanted to reach out and smooth it. "A monster who admits it. I can die happy now."

How he loved these bold young women, their flounces and their storms. He had to touch her hair, and so he did, stroking it smooth as best he could with callused hands. He held her face between his palms, and she let him.

"Did you think I'd be impressed by your stoicism? Did you think you would be different, that you could change me?"

"No," she said. "I know I'm not that special. I just wanted to ride."

"Run," he said. He let his hands fall. "Fight me. You might live."

"I don't like kissing," she said, and b.u.t.toned her cardigan down.

This time, no saddle. Her skin cool on his warm hide, naked as G.o.diva, but her hair hiding nothing. He ran, hard, exultant. If she wanted a ride, he would give one.

She rode better without the saddle. She left her blood upon white hide.

They galloped between parking lots and along the waterfront, people turning to stare. A man in a green hat; a woman in a flowered dress not warm enough for the morning. Someone snapped a photo; the stallion tossed his mane. They came up to the fence in a headlong plunge, and she called into his ear.

"It's not a new story, is it?"

"No," he called back. "It's as old as the sea."

He gathered himself and leaped the sunlit silver rail.

They splashed hard, his legs flailing, hers slipping along his sides though she clung with clenched fingers to his black-white, seaweedy mane.

She gasped in cold, clinging. "Your name. What's your name, Kelpie?"

"Uisgebaugh."

There is no point in keeping secrets from the dead. But her name, he asked not. And she did not offer.

Her fingers spasmed on his mane and stayed locked there, entangled, when he rolled and took her down.

Confessor Rebecca Sanchez is climbing Mt. Rainier.

Not to the top. Not to the glacier-what sc.r.a.ps of glacier are left- but down at the foot of the rainy side, picking her way between fernbrakes and over the ma.s.sive, derelict hulks of nurse logs thicketed in saplings and miniature fungal forests until she finds a footworn path ascending.

Somebody has been maintaining this. It switchbacks from left to right, a single-file streak of earth terraced by root-b.u.t.tresses worn satiny-smooth, the bark polished off by endless boots ascending and descending.

Sanchez settles her pack on her shoulders as she tilts her head back and considers. She slips her thumbs inside the waistband and hitches it up, tightening the strap.

With a sigh, she sets her foot upon the path and begins climbing. Set foot, test foot, kick off the rear toe and rise. Small steps, conserving energy. Pacing herself as if climbing stairs. It's a long way up, and she had no way of knowing if this is even the right path.

Several before it have not been.

The pain starts in her knees. Starts, but does not stay there. First that grinding pressure, and then the ache across the quadriceps. The calves follow, and the arches of her feet.

To distract herself, she contemplates the scenery. It's beyond spectacular. One side of the path ends in the rising mountainside. The other drops off steeply. Dripping evergreen branches like wet green feathers surround her, framing furrowed trunks of Brobdingnagian proportion. The moss lies thick over everything.

Everything except the path her steps laboriously ascend.

The moss is her friend. With a trained, experienced eye, she scans it for scuffs, marks, any sign of damage. Signs of a struggle, in other words. When she finds something that looks right, she uses a sampler device to hunt for traces of DNA, or the signature bacteria colonies that inhabit everyone's skin-and which differ nearly as much as fingerprints.

Once upon a time there were roads here. Once, people came for the day, in cars. They drove from Seattle, Tacoma, Portland. They hiked for a few hours, enjoyed the natural beauty, and then drove home with countless others on smooth-surfaced highways.

That would be prohibitive, now. The roads have crumbled, and the oil that powered the cars doesn't exist. For Sanchez to get from San Francisco to this gig was a week-long journey, starting on the train and concluding on a chargeable bike. But a bike wouldn't bring her up the mountain.

So she climbs.

Around her, birds and small animals rustle and chirp. A Douglas squirrel scolds; something heavier and invisible in the dappled light slides along a tree branch to her right. She turns sharply and catches movement, a hint of camouflage color-greens and browns that would make her suspect a lizard, if there were lizards that big up here. Given the invasives, maybe there are, now. Below, a garter snake whips out of sight, leaving only the puddle of warmth where it sunned itself. For the first time since she almost died in Oakland, Sanchez smiles.

Sweat rolls down her back between the shoulder blades, soaks her hatband, dews her upper lip. She rubs it off her palms onto her shorts. When she pauses, she checks her legs for ticks. She slides one of several water bottles from the net pockets on her pack and drinks, counting swallows. She allows herself five.

The simple mechanics of all of it-leverage, evaporation, the movement of muscle under skin-don't fill up the empty ache inside her. It's strange, she thinks, how strictly emotional damage can feel so much like a physical hole. Like somebody opened her up under anesthesia and took out all the internal organs and replaced them with cotton batting.

She still looks like a real girl. But she's empty inside. And there's no one in the world she can tell why.

The a.s.signment could not have come at a better time. She needs this now, needs to get back on her feet. Maybe it's already been too long. Two months is a long time. If you fall off the horse- When she looks up from stowing the bottle, there is a man in front of her. He wears camouflage and appears unfriendly.