ChaoticArmcandy

  The river fog swirled so thick and pale above the rushing current that she almost felt herself to be a ghost. Mi paused at the apex of the stone bridge she was crossing and looked down into the dark, fast water. The familiar, sinking weight of loneliness in her heart drew a sigh. This dark innd realm was so different than the bright, blue-green water of her home harbor, with its bck sand, salt breezes, seabird calls and sweet-tolling bells.

  Mi missed Opali so much it hurt—though never so much that she did not welcome the pain. Her homesickness was her most treasured possession, here. Even when walking barefoot over scorching sand, a girl might hesitate to wish for sandals, if she had as paltry a cim to the beachhead of belonging as Mi had.

  She swallowed and absently rubbed her breastbone. In dreams, she often journeyed back to Opali, to dote on the dozens of cats that visited her balcony, tails flicking confidently back and forth as they crossed the weft of washlines strung high above the narrow, bustling streets.

  Just this morning Mi had woken from a wonderful dream of tangled limbs and loose tongued gossip with Zuri and Simone, all of them swaying together in her colorful hammock, in the purple dusk, as the pealing belltowers bade mingling farewell to the out-breath of the west.

  And then, upon waking in the darkness of her dormitory room, the realization of how far adrift, how really alone she was had rolled onto her chest like a den draft cart. Though her new roommate, Roxa, slept like a rock, Mi had still wedged her hand between her teeth to muffle the soft weeping gasps that wracked her frame.

  So many of her mornings began this way, she’d reminded herself, with a heart that hurt, and today was no different.

  But she knew what to do.

  After a few minutes, she’d gotten herself enough in hand that she could dress and step into the corridor dry-eyed. From there it was only a short, brisk walk across the Allegiance courtyard to the carriage road that led over the river.

  On the bridge, Mi shivered, and pulled her coat tighter.

  The Allegiance courtyard made her nervous, even early in the morning, when there was no one else about. It seemed to be the favored pce for loyalist rallies, and when she had to cross it to get to css on time, she would always duck her head and skirt the periphery, trying to avoid the notice of the older boys who liked to lounge there in little knots. They often seemed to be competing with each other to see which of them had the brashest ughter, the sharpest, most fashionable temple-shaved haircut, the fshiest allegiance insignia, the most flourishing loyalty salute. And of course, the loudest, most aggressive jeers.

  On the days they flocked to the courtyard for packed rallies, Mi had learned to skip her csses and shut herself in her room with a few meals from the refectory wrapped in waxed paper, to wait out the danger. As a foreigner from one of the Common Cities, she was already inherently a target. She got jostled in doorways, had boys mutter racialized slurs as she passed them, worked twice as hard in csses and still bore the brunt of contempt from teachers and students alike.

  She winced as she spotted a yet another allegiance symbol scrawled on the stonework of the bridge. Traveling across the sea, into the Imperiat, to study at Harmine University already felt like an overwhelming burden, and she had years still to go. The people were chilly and distant, the Dragonian nguage felt guttural and unpleasant in her mouth, the sky was often cloudy and wet and cold, and it was so hard to make friends.

  At least she had lucked out with Roxa as a roommate. The tall, pale-skinned girl with the angur, freckle-dusted face had defied Mi’s expectations from their very first meeting. She was noble-born, true, the daughter of a countess from the Duchy of Waterfalls, no less, but she seemed genuinely concerned with Mi’s well-being, and determined to win her as a friend. And to Mi’s relief, Roxa seemed to have an abiding hatred of the loyalists.

  Most of the Imperiat students sneered as soon as they saw the honeycomb gleam of Mi’s skin. Those that didn’t were usually trying to tumble her into their beds, and their lips curled and their eyes turned flinty as soon as she disappointed their expectations for an easy y.

  Of course, the more or less thinly veiled contempt she saw in the eyes of passersby wasn’t exactly new to her. She was well-used to shrugging it off and pretending it didn’t hurt. Opali didn’t use insults like ‘half-breed’ or ‘mutt’ the way Imperiati did, didn’t consider race or breeding something that could be used to insult, and yet that hadn’t stopped the stares and whispers that greeted Mi at the well when she went to draw water or the children who mocked her when she tried to py with them at the market.

  Mi thought of her mother, as strong and unbreakable as sunlight. Pazo Finnochio was Opali to the bone and to the heart, a tall woman with lovely, shining skin and coiled hair, a fine weaver and skilled haggler, known and well-respected up and down Seaward Street and in the harborside market.

  Before Mi was born, her mother had shipped as a sailor on a merchant ship that would often switch fgs and turn pirate when it suited them, as most Opali ships did. Her mother told her many stories of the wonders she had seen while living betwixt the sea and the stars, visiting strange ports, narrowly eluding Imperiat pursuers and navigating treacherous shoals. But Pazo was tight-lipped with Mi about the voyage on which she was conceived.

  All Mi knew was what one of her aunties, an infamous neighborhood gossip, had told her: that Pazo’s ship, the Starbze, had been boarded and seized by an Imperiat Navy frigate, her crew thrown in the brig and all her cargo ‘repossessed’. The marines could identify no captain, so they hung the navigators, the cooks and the ship’s griot, cimed the vessel, and dropped the crew off on a nearby isnd. By the time Pazo and the rest of the crew worked their roundabout way back to Opali, she was visibly pregnant.

  Mi felt her face harden as memory rose inside her.

  ~ ~ ~

  “And it’s such a pity, too.” The auntie sighs, rocking in her chair. “That her child will never—well.” Her mouth twists disdainfully.

  She hasn’t said the word rassa anywhere in the story, but Mi can feel it in the space between them. Mi gets up, thanks the woman politely, and flees the cramped apartment.

  She goes first to her mother.

  Pazo is at her loom, engrossed in her weaving. Hesitant in the doorway, throat tightening, Mi asks whether it is true, as some other children have officiously told her, that rassa children are full of the hate and anger and callousness that made them. That her true ancestors are the Eaters—the ghosts and ghouls and hungry predators of the spirit world, whose siren songs will pull her down to join them, if she strays there.

  Pazo puts down her weaving, beckons her closer, and pulls Mi onto her p. “You, child, are full of my love, and the love of allllll my fore-mothers. And also the blessing of our anger, which follows on its heels.”

  Mi thinks about this. But, she asks, what about my father? And my fore-fathers? Do they fill me up with anything?

  Pazo does not frown, exactly, but her eyes glint with something fierce and unyielding. “No, child, they have no cim on you, none beyond a word. They cannot miss you, cannot cry out for you, cannot love you or ugh with you. In all those ways and more, I tether myself to you, and just so, do you tether yourself to me, and that is how I know you are of me and mine. I promise you this, Mi. You will find, when the time comes for your spirit to soar those waters, that you are not just a word. Listen. Words only have the power you let them have. Now tell me what you heard.”

  Stumbling somewhat, Mi repeats this back to her mother, and her mother seems pleased that she has listened.

  The whispers and jibes and looks continue and Mi tries to take her mother’s advice and she tries not to let the name-callers see her flinch or react.

  But she is not always strong enough.

  ~ ~ ~

  She has passed the mouth of this alley every day, to draw water and carry it back.But on this morning, as she treks past with her eyes cast down, a pailful of fish guts sails right into her face. She freezes in shock, unable to believe it. Her hair, her clothes, her buckets of clear well water, all fouled.

  Then the jeeringbeginsin earnest.

  “Rassa child! Her eyes are like dead fish eyes!”

  “She was made by ghouls, it’s obvious.”

  “Look at her shark eyes! So ft and cold.”

  “Look everyone! Look at the ghoul-eyed rassa!”

  “She smells bad, let’s go!”

  “Let’s go swimming!”

  The hollers and taunts and sp of sandals fade as her bullies sprint away, crowing gleefully, and Mi stands alone at the mouth of the alley, barely holding her fragile face together, her smock dripping in slimy fish guts.

  Her water is dirty now, worthless.

  She is trembling. Her thoughts have become choppy, disjointed, wobbly when she tries to put her weight on them, like the rickety steps in the sway-hipped staircase that climbs by her bedroom window.

  She will need to retrace her way to the common well at the Belltower of Mercy, fill the buckets again, and trek all the way back up Seaward Street.

  This is not the first time, she tells herself, trying to force her lip to stop trembling, and it won’t be the st. The fish guts are a new touch. But, in general, she has done this before. She can handle it.

  But what if they are here, again, waiting for her?

  Will it ever stop?

  Mi’s throat clenches suddenly as her reserves of fortitude are overwhelmed. She cannot anymore. She simply cannot. She drops the buckets and squats, hugging her knees, as her entire face gives out and comes tumbling messily apart. She chokes on a sob, trying to squeeze her eyes shut against the streaming of tears.

  At her backthere is a muttered “Oh, girl,” and a heavy exhale.

  In that voice is an alloy of elements—the cool flexibility of steel, the burning heat of coals, the capacity for memory held by quenching salt water—that recalls to Mi something fierce and magnetic, and familiar as her own heartbeat.

  She peeksover her shoulder, through the ringlet cascade of her hair, and recognizes the older tea girl setting down her own buckets.

  Simone is one of those girls for whom the tea seems to immediately work wonders. In contrast, Mi’s own body is still disappointingly angur after almost a year of tea.

  When Simone decided to announce that she was a girl, it seemed to Mi that the whole city spoke of nothing else for a week.

  The monsoons had just arrived, washing the streets with rhythmic curtains of rain. Mi remembered running through her mother’s apartment to the balcony to listen, her heartsoaring, without quite knowing why.

  As the stormwater crashed deafeningly down on the snted rooftop, Simone’s song carved high, bright, liquid waves through the pounding crescendos of the rain, discarding and emphasizing different harmonies, searching and finding and searching again foran elusive timbre that set Mi’s own pulse racing.

  In some versions of the story, Simone had talked her way past the grown bellkeeper. In others, she had simply snuck up to the belfry while he was distracted.

  What was undisputed was that in pying her gender on the twelve bells of clouded silver hanging in the Belltower of Ire, Simone wove a polyphonic spell of such complexity that for a time, hardly anyone in Opali could cross the spirit waters using the bellsound as their bridge without getting her song stuck in their heads, so that an occasional reverberating chorus of I-must-be-a-girl-I-must-be-a-girl-I-must-be-a-girlechoedbehind their thoughts.

  Suffice it to say that there were some who got mad.

  Now Simonesquats down next to her and meets hergaze with eyesso clear and sharp Mi is startled out of her plummeting overwhelm. “Never let those vultures see you cry, it’ll just make them circle. Come on, get up—let’s wash you off.”

  Baffled at this kindness, Mi buckles to the other tea girl’s insistence and lets herself be pulledback to standing. With a grunt, Simone heaves one of her own buckets of fresh water up to shoulder height and looks at Mi expectantly.

  Mi stares at her uncomprehendingly. They have both lugged heavy buckets most of the way up Seaward Street. For Simone to pour hers out here means that she, too, will need to trek back to the well. All for Mi, a rassa girl? It doesn’t make any sense. Why would she—

  “Don’t just stand there, get under it,” Simone snaps, and Mi obediently steps close and ducks her head.

  The older girl tips a clear and heavy pour of water over her. “Go on, rinse yourself,” she orders impatiently, and Mi scrubs the slime of fish entrails off herself as Simone sluices her down, first with one bucket of fresh water, then the other.

  Simone looks her up and down, then nods firmly. “Better. Much better.”

  Mi stands there dripping, her face loosening, lightening, filling with warmth. The ache in her throat easing, draining away. “Thank you,” she almost chokes. It’s all she’s able to get out.

  “I’d make you do the same for me,” counters Simone, eyebrows arching as if to say, and you’d better.

  Mi swallows andnods hurriedly. The old, old belts of tension around her lungs are unbinding, unknotting, unraveling. She takes a deeper breath and almost breaks down crying again at how good it feels.

  Simone manages to scoop all four empty buckets and shrug them over one shoulder. “Anyway, come on, then.” She slides her free arm inside of Mi’s and begins to pull her along, back to the well. “And if we see those mealworms again, I’m going to push their faces into the dust while you sit on their heads, got it?”

  ~ ~ ~

  Mi turned, savoring the little smile that slipped onto her face, thinking of her friend, and paced down the other side of the bridge, the milky-white tendrils of the fog parting before her. Where the tight-fitted fgstones of the bridge met the rougher cobblestones of the road, she stepped off both and cut back towards the riverbank on a familiar footpath, wending through wet, sprawling road weeds. That’s when she spotted a new, rger scrawl of graffiti.

  Cleanse The Degenerate Filth

  The little smile was wiped instantly away. Mi’s hand went reflexively to her side, where a small, silver bell hung, tongue stilled in its leather pouch. This is where I have come to live, she thought, shoulders tensing. In this hive of hungry ghosts.

  Being a foreigner was one thing, but if anyone found out how much more aptly she fit into the loyalist imaginary of degenerate filth, her life would be radically more forfeit. Mi knew she was walking the edge of a razor just by attending their vaunted University.

  And yet, Harmine-trained sorcerers and alchemists were supposed to be the best in the world. Mi had learned from her mentor Sada that nowhere else was there anything remotely like the Archives, or the alchemical research bs, or the Medicava, not to mention the Arcane Tower and the Foundry. She set her jaw. She needed to learn things she could only learn here. Things that were desperately needed in Opali, not to mention the other Common Cities.

  ~ ~ ~

  Not long after Simone’s harmonies send her heart aloft, Mi too has begun chewing the sweet, fibrous roots and drinking the special tea blends that are used to shift puberties, to develop skinny hips into round ones, and lean chests into full breasts. Because girls like Mi are drinking this tea almost constantly, they call themselves and each other ‘tea girls’.

  The tea, however, can only do so much, and when, at thirteen, she finds herself waiting in the water line with some much older tea girls, Mi listens eagerly to their stories of the days, now long gone, when Jyllish trading ships still visited Opali harbor, bringing alchemists from that distant continental isthmus who peddled the now legendary elixirs and tonics they called halia.

  Ever since the Imperiat Navy has begun patrolling the Whistling Sea and ciming jurisdiction over all commerce crossing its waters, the halia has become near impossible to find, Mi learns. The st traders came and went years ago with the clipper Damselfly, and shortly after there were a spat of ugly rumors of that ship’s fate at the hands of Imperiat marines.

  But the Imperiat has not existed until quite recently, one of the older tea girls reminds another with a kind of callous, sardonic optimism that Mi instinctively identifies with, and it will not continue forever.

  Within living memory, it was merely a mediocre port city named Drago, ruled by a corrupt Senate, home to a cabal of arrogant sorcerers with some strange obsessions about purity. In the st fifty years, with terrifying speed, it has bloated into a grotesque tumor, consuming everything within reach, but it cannot grow forever, the tea girls tell each other. Visiting merchants whisper of internal upheaval, brutal political purges, insurgencies taking root in the colonies, grain blights and bor shortages. Colpse is an ever-looming possibility.

  The halia might well find its way back.

  Mi ponders this while she plods back up Seaward Street with her heavy buckets of water. She refills the kitchen cistern, leans over Pazo’s shoulder at the loom to absently kiss her mother’s cheek, then seeks out her friend Zuri. They are due to visit Nesh the herbalist-chemist today and help him grind the recent harvest of yuba roots into powder in exchange for another lesson.

  At Zuri’s, Mi waits in the kitchen for her friend to get ready, chatting with her mother. Zuri rolls downstairs like a whirl of chaos, and they wave goodbye and swing out onto the street, bantering easily.

  Together, they climb the street to Nesh’s apothecary, a rge, airy room. Mi bnks her face as Nesh’s older apprentices spot her and lean towards each other, whispering. She can smell their resentment, thick as a cloying perfume. Mi’s studies of herb craft have been growing by leaps and bounds, and her grasp on pharmacological lore has already outpaced theirs.

  Nesh is a slight, birdlike man with a creased face and a smooth shaved head. He is chatting warmly with a tea girl that Mi does not recognize, as he deftly measures out doses. Zuri greets him and he welcomes her with a one-armed hug. His other hand does not stop writing a bel.

  Mi he acknowledges with a sterile nod.

  When they are both seated on the floor mats, working elbow to elbow at the mortars, Zuri gnces uncomfortably at Mi, and mouths an apology, to which Mi shrugs with practiced nonchance.

  The lesson is a good one, on the endocrine moduting capacities of bck cohosh. Afterwards, Mi’s head is a-swirl with wet-to-dry volume and compounding figures and extraction ratios. She raises her hand and a question about the rumored alchemy of halia leaps to her tongue. Does Nesh thinks it could have been synthesized using the elegant biochemical formus of pnts? Could the more brutish, but powerful compositions of human chemistry ever be directed with such nuance, to create medicines that were more effective, with smaller doses?

  Nesh looks at her witheringly.

  “A question only a rassa could ask.” One of the older apprentices loudly whispers to another, and they both rock on their mats with stifled ughter.

  Mi flushes hot with shame. She hasn’t spared a thought for how such a question would seem to confirm her taint, baked so deep into her that it would never come out. Obviously, her spirit is cramped by the cold instinct to fragment the world in order to better manipute it, the mind habit of use-thinking, a tool taken to its logical extreme by the contemptible Imperiati, whose spirits are little more than stale ghoul-fodder. She dares a sideways gnce at Zuri, terrified that she will find her friend looking at her in horror and disgust. But no, dizzying relief sweeps through her—Zuri is gring daggers at the other apprentices.

  “There is only one alchemist I know of in this city,” Nesh stares out the window, though he seems to be speaking to Mi. “A Imperiat refugee, a recluse, and rassa like yourself. That troublemaker Lindsey, bellkeeper of Terns, seems to put up with him—how I cannot imagine, given his deformity. They say his spirit was crippled by the dread necromancy those Dragonian sorcerers traffic in. I would not send my own students to him, but perhaps your taint will help you tolerate him.” Nesh sighs. “His anesthetics are superior, it’s true. Though his consistency in supplying them leaves much to be desired.”

  Stung, Mi shoves her precious notes jerkily into her satchel and straightens. “Thank you for the lesson,” she manages in a tight voice.

  Nesh waves dismissively.

  Mi turns on her heel, and walks out.

  Zuri catches up with her on the street. “Mi! Wait for me. That was such nonsense!”

  Mi keeps going, head down, afraid that if she turns or looks at her friend, she will burst into tears.

  “Mi, slow down.” Zuri catches her hand. “Look, Nesh can be rancid, but there are other witches and chemists you can learn from. You don’t have to go study with a stranger, an exile.”

  “Don’t I?” retorts Mi bitterly, yanking her hand away. “They all talk to each other. Nesh is just the test one to turn up his nose at me. Maybe I belong with the exile more than any of you.”

  “Mi, it’s just a stupid prejudice,” Zuri said soothingly. “You’re nothing like some Imperiati merchant, scamming and specuting at the market. Your spirit is good.”

  “You didn’t say anything,” Mi mutters. “Back there.” She isn’t sure where she is going. Her vision is blurring.

  “Mi, I’m sorry. I—I don’t want to have to start over with someone else,” Zuri admits, shamefaced. “And Nesh knows so much about the tea blends, really. Listen, let’s go over to Simone’s, okay? I know she has some wine over there, we can watch the sunset and listen to the bells and—”

  “I can’t!” Mi chokes. “I can’t listen to the bells, not the way you can! Any of you!” She sags against the nearest wall, the st scraps of her composure crumbling. “I’m on the outside, looking in. I always have been.”

  “Oh, Mi.” The way Zuri is looking at her, the pity in her eyes, makes her want to die on the spot. “They would hold you, if you let them,” she says gently. “I know they would.”

  “You don’t,” Mi sobs. She is losing it in the street, in broad daylight. She is getting stares and she doesn’t care. “You can’t know that.”

  Zuri pulls her carefully into an embrace, and holds her while Mi is wracked by bone-shaking grief. Somehow—Mi can’t quite remember how—Zuri gets her to Simone’s porch, which is closest.

  She sits numbly and lets her friends fuss over her, as the afternoon simmers into a long, fragrant evening, but in her mind she is resolute, already setting out on the path that lies ahead.

  ~ ~ ~

  The Belltower of Terns is perched on the limestone cliffs north of the city, among the scrub pines and the seabird nests. The day Mi hikes up there, the sun on the white rocks is blinding bright, and the buffeting rush of the wind is pierced by gull calls.

  The small door at the base of the tower is thrown open. At her call, a towering red beard stumps out of the gloom, fnked by shelf-like shoulders. As the man stops before her, one hand resting protectively on the door-frame, she cranes her neck to try and peer out his face. The dazzling sun reaches his bearded mouth; above that there is only shadow.

  “Good morning,” he says, and no more.

  Trying to hide her nervousness, Mi introduces herself and expins that she has come to meet the reclusive alchemist and study with him

  He frowns and crosses brawny arms. “Others have come, and asked to learn, and could not stand their own revulsion. They left as abruptly as they announced themselves. Did you know that the harder they try, and the longer they st before they eventually find him unbearable, the more it hurts him? I am not altogether sure if his mind can take the strain of another rupture like that.” His voice is beautiful, melodic, and lined with a fierce anger. “Why should you be any different?”

  Mi takes a deep breath, watching his en-shadowed face. She had come prepared to recite and compare kinship networks, as is the Opali way, in order to find the common threads, the mutual retionships, the bridges upriver and down that might serve as a vouchsafe of trust with an apparent stranger. Now she feels a thrum of foreboding and abruptly she knows it will not work. She swallows, throat dry.

  His mouth makes a thin line.

  “Wait,” she blurts, her mind racing desperately. She braces herself. “I am rassa, too.”

  A frown of interest.

  “My father shamed himself in the act of conceiving me, and because of that I am accounted to be a ghoul-made thing by my own people.” She did not try to hide her bitterness. “I know a little of what it means to be an exile here.”

  He shifts, a tiny movement of huge bulk, and uncrosses his arms. After a pause he says, gently, “My name is Lindsey. The one you seek is named Sada. He lives with me here now, but once he lived among the Imperiati and did their bidding. He fled their power but...at a high cost. One he pays daily.”

  Mi swallows and nods. “I see.”

  “Do you, though?” Lindsey sighs. “The people of this city look at Sada and see a broken husk, a monstrosity. The stigma is an understandable one, given what our ancestors fought their way free of. He has had his spirit vioted, but that is all they see, and they bme him for it, as if it was his doing. And perhaps it was his doing—but what he did, he did in order to save my life and the lives of my shipmates when we were in need. I know his sacrifice. I am living proof of his redemption, every day that I step into the Tides and walk those waters, and chase off the specters that haunt and circle him like baying bloodhounds. He belongs here just as much as any Opali—and more than some—not for what he is, but for how he acts.”

  Lindsey goes silent and studies her for a long moment. “Just because you, too, are accounted rassa, does not mean you are exempt from our people’s prejudice. I wonder if you have yet to glimpse your own freedom from its narrowness. You must, if I am to trust you with him. Are you willing to show me that the revulsion you reserve for yourself is not the truth about you?”

  Mi blinks. “H-how?” she stammers.

  Lindsey beckons. “Follow me into the Tides. There, we will both be able to see.” He retreats into the abrupt darkness of the hallway.

  Dazzled, Mi follows. Colored lights explode in her vision as she crosses the threshold of shadow. She climbs the winding stairs to the belfry, her heart trying to lunge frantically up and out of her throat, her hands shaking uncontrolbly.

  When she emerges onto the creaking wooden pnks of the ptform, it’s like she can see the whole world spreading out around her, all the way to the horizon. Lindsey stands facing her, his hand resting lightly on a single, great bell, its surface of swirling, streaky silver etched and pitted with scars.

  She opens her mouth, and her voice cracks in her dry throat. “I-I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “Please feel free not to,” he assures her. “The door is back that way.”

  “I’ll fall—I’ll draw the Eaters and ghouls right to us,” Mi protests, her blind panic crawling up into her throat.

  “They will not trouble us, having learned to fear me greatly. And I will not let you fall. Follow me if you wish to.”

  He reaches for the knotted rope and Mi closes her eyes.

  The deep, rolling chime erupts behind her eyelids, vivid argent ripples that caress the seams of reality, coaxing them to unstitch and flutter open like sheaves of paper. From the other side throbs a staccato thunder—the rhythmic crashing bass of the Tides.

  It is as if the tangible world has been lifted like a rug, and beneath it yawns a chasm, full of rushing movement, bone-shaking roar, and bottomless depths. The bellsound cascades around her, making a slide, leading the way. There is a darkness and a chill that has nothing to do with her sight or her temperature and suddenly Mi knows she can simply reach out, if she wants to, slip into the spirit current, and let it pull her in.

  Her knees are quaking so hard she almost cannot stand. Lindsey is just ahead, banced patiently at the threshold. His spirit form resembles his tangible shape—except that sometimes it does not, and he is a pulsing, flitting shadow of brightest teal.

  She wavers, hesitating. Those darkest depths whisper her name. There are things down there in the chasm, she knows. Lurking, prowling, hungry things, with rows of tangled needles for teeth. Things that she fears have a preordained, inordinate taste for her spirit, because of how she was made.

  A moment of dizzying vertigo makes her sway, filing. She looks wildly around for the spirit guides that are supposed to be there—would be there for any other Opali, but there are none.

  What slides up out of the darkness instead are slithering whispers, hiding inside the fullness of the pounding noise.

  —You will fall, alone, into endless depths

  —you will fall and no one will catch you,

  —they will turn away from you,

  —because they will know,

  —how could they not,

  —they will know that you were never theirs.

  She sees Lindsay frown and slice his hand in an arc, gathering the bell ripples and curving them into a whirling orb of liquid, textured silver that holds and encloses the two of them.

  The whispers are cut off, and Mi spares him a grateful look.

  The reverberations of the bell are still streaming through her, lifting her spirit like wind filling a taut sail. She bites the inside of her cheek, and forces herself to unclench her death grip on the tangible realm. It feels like prying loose one cramped finger at a time. It feels like throwing herself off a cliff.

  It takes forever.

  Finally, she uncurls her own rigid grasp, and lets the bellsound whip her down and in. The acceleration takes her breath. One moment she is in her body, the next she has left her stomach behind, she is in the Tides, she is falling, plummeting—

  Lindsey catches her, steadies her, slows her rate of descent—and they slip together below the surface of the unseen.

  It is lightless, and cold, except for the orb of silver ripples that swirls around them, still ringing. Below them there is only a gaping abyss. Mi stares helplessly into its maw, the old, stark terror beginning to cw its way into her brain. She huddles closer to Lindsey.

  “Well done,” says Lindsey gently. “Now, watch closely.”

  Mi feels his spirit begin to wave and flicker along with the pulsing of the spinning silver orb, and then the shivering reverberations of the bellsound begin to modute, as Lindsay begins to sculpt. Like a potter at the twirling wheel, he rolls and carves out the raw sound, flicking away slivers and re-yering them into complex interlocking harmonies. His bell-wrought melodies skip and dance lightly over the bone-shaking bass thunder of the Tides, warp pying with weft, surrounding them with a woven spell of musical density.

  Mi feels like a bee cupped in a gigantic, throbbing flower of sound. She stares at the flowing silver grain of the bellmagic, and feels the textured fractal ce shimmer and caress her spirit, and her panic begins to ebb.

  Lindsay scoops out an armful of gleaming ripples and sends them arcing out like a bridge, into the gloomy darkness ahead. A glowing cat, floofy with colorless fire, emerges beside Mi’s shin, and rubs her ankle. She startles, then freezes, eyes wide as saucers. The cat twines between her shins, then disappears again.

  Other spirits waft in and out of her view. A bze of starlight with six feathered wings rotating around a great eye appears ahead of them, shredding the gloom. A swirling vortex of butterflies storms past like chain lightning, and is gone, leaving only burning afterimages. Mi stares around, awed.

  “For the restful dead, silence is the answer and silence is the truth,” says Lindsey mildly. “The harmonies we weave with the bellmagic allow us to reach for them, and they may hear our songs, and may even choose to come to our aid, but they do not break the silence. But if we, the living, can let our edges soften enough to merge with the music, and remember everything we know about our ancestors, we can still receive their messages.”

  Having said this, Lindsey looks at Mi with curiosity, as if she might yet do something that surprised him.

  Mi nods, and tentatively dips her mind into the rippling silver harmonies, as one puts a toe into a bath. She feels the cool lick of the waves, the unduting peaks and valleys of the noise, and sighs, untensing.

  ~ ~ ~

  Mi remembers the day Pazo brings her to the rolling grassnds outside of Opali, where the burial mounds covered in sweet meadowgrass and wildflowers stretch as far as the eye can see. Tiny birds flit and sing throaty melodies from swaying stems.

  Her mother spreads a bnket and sits across from her. Mi watches the dark, expressive gleam of Pazo’s eyes and hands as she tells her daughter the familiar story again, the tale of an ancient empire that once enclosed the entire Whistling Sea in its rigid grip, and the vast colonial bor camp that stood on these very shores, and the dreaded necromancers and warlocks who sought to summon and unleash ancient horrors, ensving whole isnds and feeding on countless souls for their power.

  Pazo speaks of the insurrection that ended their reign, spreading her arms to indicate the burial mounds, teeming with life and birdsong. From that time to this, she tells her daughter, our city has always been an alliance between the living, the dead and those still unborn, welcoming all those across time and space who set themselves against the svers, overseers and turnkeys of the world.

  Mi feels a pang, as she always does when the griots at the festivals come to this part of the story and it seems all the other children are flustered with excitement and pride, unhindered by doubt. She looks nervously at her mother, wondering the old, poisonous fear. But—what would those ancestors think of me?

  Pazo encourages her to rex her belly, to breath deeper and slower. Distant bell chimes mingle on the breeze as the rhythms of their breath began to overp and synchronize, and her mother carefully begins to show her how to open the way with the bellsound, how to slip into the shallowest yer of the Tides, how to reach for the aid of the spirits, how to wrap their presence around her like a cloak on a chilly night.

  Mi finds she cannot do it—cannot quite let go. Something in her freezes and her breathing grows shallow and rapid. She tenses and bites her lip, staring at her mother in a silent plea.

  Pazo sees the fright and the distress in Mi’s eyes and reaches for her, touches her shoulder. “Oh my sweet daughter,” she whispers, her eyes full of tender pain. She hesitates, and Mi feels the weight of all that is unsaid, or unwitnessed, between them.

  “I know you feel so, so alone,” she says softly. “But I promise you are not. I promise.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Mi gasps as the argent rippling of the bellsound leaps, spreading and constelting in every direction in the blink of an eye, snapping out pathways that diverge and reconnect and diverge again, weaving a web of shining leylines, a vast, blossoming net of glowing silver.

  A torrent of pure, unnguaged meaning thunders through her mind like a waterfall into a pool.

  ~little sister~

  Mi jerks back, breaking the connection, and the gleaming net gutters and fades away. She stares skittishly around her, unnerved, shaking.

  Lindsey is watching her carefully. She raises her eyes pleadingly to the surface, and he nods. They begin rising, faster and faster.

  She breaks the surface, and then she is kneeling on the belfry ptform in bright, windy daylight, her face streaming with tears.

  “What,” she croaks.

  “Questions ter, I think.” Lindsey clucks over her like a concerned hen. “First, something cool to drink.”

  He gets her to stand on wobbly legs, then leads her carefully down the winding stairs. She totters after him,through a doorway into a blue-tiled kitchen, where a slender, gray-haired man looks up at her from a jar of dried fruit he is munching his way through.

  “Do you py chess?” He asks her casually, without preamble, in accented Opali. His voice seems younger than his face, though perhaps that is an effect of the scarring. He is covered head to toe in gleaming, feathery burns that swirl in fractal patterns, fern-like.

  Mi swallows. “What is chess?”

  Sada shrugs. “I guess not. Hi, love,” he breathes, hugging Lindsey. To Mi, it looks like a stick hugging a mountain. An aside, apparently to her: “I could teach you.”

  Lindsey takes Sada’s head in both hands and kissed him gently on the forehead. “Hello. Are you looking for lunch?”

  “I tried to get out ingredients, but I was pushing it and my right hand started seizing again.”

  Lindsey frowns.

  “I know, I know,” sighs Sada, pulling away. He looks curiously at Mi. “So. You don’t mind the way I look? What it means about me?”

  Mi gnces at Lindsey, but he simply watches her. “What does it mean about you?”

  “That I was Eaten.” Sada cocks his head at her. “That Mictn the Fleshless, a Greater Revenant of the Ninth Abyss, tore through my spirit like wet paper, and very nearly damned me to join it down there, except that this one and a bzing albatross as big as the hill of Drago city fought their way through a whole naval blockade and barely arrived in time to pull me out of its maw.”

  Mi can only nod weakly. “Okay.” She goes over to the table and pulls herself onto a stool.

  Lindsey opens a cupboard and begins rummaging. “Mi might need a moment to recover from her journey into the Tides, Sada.”

  Sada looks nonplussed. “You took her in there? Why?”

  Lindsay looks at him.

  “Ooh,” says Sada, slowly.

  “I got scared,” mumbles Mi. “I could feel them, reaching for me, but I couldn’t let myself trust them.” Numbly, she raises her eyesto Lindsey. “I failed. Again. All I have proven is that there is something wrong with me, after all, and it’s my fault.”

  Lindsey and Sada exchange a gnce den with meaning, and then Sada slowly scrapes out a stool and sits in it. “Kid,” he says, gently. “That you found them in the first pce means that you did absolutely brilliant.”

  Mi stares at him.

  “I don’t know you, but I have been to the darkest pits of hell, and almost lost myself there. Trust me, you’re doing just fine. They’ll be there, when you’re ready.” Sada raises his eyebrows at her. “You’re still coming home to yourself, that’s all. It just takes a little bit of time.”

  She takes a deep breath and sighs it out. “Sada?”

  “That’s my name, yes. And you seem to be Mi.”

  “Will you teach me alchemy?”

  Sada shrugs. “I could try.” Then he perks up. “I wonder if the peaches are ripe today.”

  “You can check the tree after lunch,” Lindsey says firmly, putting a ptter of food down between them, and Mi’s mouth immediately begins watering. There is a loaf of dense bck bread, a crock of pale goat cheese, ajar of olives, another of rosehip jam, sweet red beans, salted mackerel.

  Lindsey pours her a cup of chilled fennel and skullcap tea, and catches her gaze. “Proud of you,” he murmurs.

  Mi blinks.

  “That’s what I overheard them say to you. Before we turned back.”

  It is hard for Mi to respond, around the lump in her throat.

  ~ ~ ~

  Mi begins to learn what alchemy she can from Sada, though most days his focus is so fragmentary and his attention so attenuated that he can only show her the foundations. When he cannot continue with the lessons, they go for long walks along the cliffs with the goats, and he tells her stories of Harmine University.

  He loves to sit in the cool cave of the kitchen and py chess, too, but he loses to Mi every time. “I used to be a ranked pyer in my school days, you know,” he remarks one day, lounging loosely in his chair. They are speaking in Dragonian, which both Sada and Lindsey have been teaching her.

  “How come you’re so sloppy and terrible at it, then?” she asks, jaunty with victory.

  He shrugs. “When I was Eaten I lost that part of my mind that could imagine a board and move the pieces on it. It’s all scarred over now. That’s why I’m so absolutely useless at factoring alchemical formus, you know. And why I can’t do sorcery any more. Anything that requires the use of symbols, really. And that’s why I’d be helpless in the River, without Lindsey there to protect me, even if they weren’t still hunting for me.”

  The River, Mi has learned, is what Imperiati sorcerers call the Tides. She is still far from confident there, still doesn’t dare make forays into the spirit current without Lindsay by her side.

  Until the day she does.

  ~ ~ ~

  A gust of wind cools the sweat on Mi’s skin and makes sweeping shapes in the sunny meadow, through which she wades, up to her waist in a sea ofvivid yellow koha seedheads, swaying heavy and ripe on cy umbels. With a practiced movement, she gathers a sheaf of stems with a curved stick, bends them over the rim of the wide basket on her hip, and deftly knocks in another shower of seeds. Under her breath, she hums softly to theharvesting melody that two nearby tea girls are singing as they too sweep, bend and knock, sweep, bend and knock.

  Ahead of her, the koha fades into a lush belt of willows and hazel, and just beyond she can hear the liquid chuckle of the broad, green Homaya river, slipping zily towards the silty marsh that forms her delta, just south of Opali. At Mi’s back, the meadow slopes up towards high desert pteaus, throbbing with majestic silence against the bright, azure sky.

  Zuri’s snorting ughter makes Mi smile. Judging her own basket full, she wades back to the far edge of the meadow, where a line of pack goats are picketed, and emptiesa cascade of seeds into one of their saddlebags. Tomorrow, this little crew of tea girls will gather at Zuri’s to grind the koha seeds into powder for tea.

  One of the goats, Bad Pirate, bleats at her urgently, and she pauses to scratch between their horns as they nibble with barely concealed delight at the hem of her dress.

  “Oh Bad Pirate,” she remarks fondly to them. “You’re just so good.”

  “Hey Reshi! Farra!” Zuri’s yell drifts across the still, warm air. “We’re going swimming! Mi! Come swimming!”

  Mi waves back at her in acknowledgment and takes a long drink from her waterskin. Then she follows the other tea girls towards the lilting song of the green water, and wades in to join their sleek pyful tangle. The feeling of something ancient, and holy, slips into her heart.

  ~ ~ ~

  That evening, Mi and Simone walk therooftopsunder the cliffside edge of the city, far above the harbor. The soft light of dusk seeps from the air around them. Clothing fps on washlines and the sounds of gulls and children squabbling drifts up from the streets below.

  “So, you’re serious about this terrible idea of yours?” Simone stops walking and stares at her friend, visibly upset. “Why, Mi? Anything else, but this?”

  Mi looks at her ruefully.

  “And don’t say alchemy,” Simone snaps.

  Mi takes a deep breath and sighs it out. “The things we could do with it—you have no idea, Simone.”

  Simone rolls her eyes loudly, a skill she excels at. “Neither do you, from what I understand.”

  “No, listen to me,” her friend insists. “It’s so limited, what Sada can show me, but even that is shouting to me that there’s more, so much more. It’s like I’m climbing a mountain, and I can’t quite see the summit, but I know it’s up there, because the ground is rising. What I’m searching for is close, I know it is. Listen, Simone, the elixirs that used to flow through here, when the Jyllish alchemy ships still sailed—they can come back!”

  Simone holds up her hands as if to say, woah girl, slow down. “Okay. Right. I see. But.” She taps her chin and then pantomimes a mock realization. “What about the part where they kill us, there, remember?”

  Mi begins to speak but Simone interrupts her, suddenly deadly serious. “I’ve listened to your reasons, Mi, but they just don’t make sense to me—that’s why I’m being such a cunt about this. Whatever you can find there, whatever wonders you can bring back, is it really worth your life? Think about what you are proposing to do, that’s all I’m asking.”

  Mi frowns and is silent, in a thoughtful way. They begin slowly walking again.

  From a balcony across the street, a voice bawls out. “Can it be true? I heard a rumor at the market that the rassa girl is going home to her rassa world! Good riddance, I say!”

  Instantly, Simone’s voice shes out like a whip. “Go slither back down to the beach you washed up on, Jerra! You’re like a lifeless sea slug—any fool wandering by will have a poke at you and then forget about it two minutes ter!”

  Mi stifles her giggle asJerra slinks back inside, cowed. Simone’s razor tonguecan outmatch anyone.

  “Is that what this is about?” presses Simone. “Are you trying to prove something?”

  “No!” denies Mi, too quickly. And then, slower, “I-I just know that—this is my task, okay? Like I was born for it, or something. I know that might sound foolish, but I know I can do it, and I may be the only one.” Simone opens her mouth but Mi cuts her off. “No, it’s true, Simone, and you know it. Who else could even stand a chance of pulling this off?”

  Simone sets her hands on her hips and twists her mouth, staring across the sea, at the far horizon blurring into darkness. “I don’t like this, Mi. Not one bit. You’re going to give me nightmares, girl. Ceaseless nightmares. Until I die.” She whirls on her friend and stares at her with sudden ferocity. “You might be able to do this, but that doesn’t mean you have to, okay? You belong here. You’re needed here.”

  “I know,” says Mi automatically, though she doesn’t.

  Simone csps her into a bone-crushing squeeze.

  “You have to come back. Promise me. That you’ll come back.” Her voice breaks on the st word.

  Mi swallows, a lump swelling in her throat. She slides her arms around her friend and clings to her tightly, like a limpet to a rock. “I promise,” she whispers hoarsely.

  They stay that way for a long time, swaying gently in the dusk breeze. The edge of the full moon ripples and merges with the blue-dark horizon as it climbs out of the sea.

  Simone pulls back, sniffles. “Come help me set up,” she commands. “It’s almost time.”

  Mi ughs. “Of course.”

  ~ ~ ~

  For years now, Simone has been gathering fragments and left-over pieces of the rare, clouded silver alloy that is used for bellmetal. She bends them into strange new shapes, or else melts them down and recasts them.

  She has built a sprawling instrument on the rooftop above her apartment, an orchestral contraption that she pys for hours and hours, under the swollen, bright-bellied curve of the moon. Heaving, swaying crowds flock to listen and dance in both realms, diving the Tides together to her musical spellbeats.

  It is here, surrounded by the storm of her friend’s beautiful noise, pressed breast to shoulder with a knot of other tea girls, that Mi first finds the courage to trust herself to the vast, fming argent net of spirit sisters gone and still to come.

  ~ ~ ~

  Mi left the bridge behind and followed the riverbank along a path made springy with wet, fallen leaves. She walked under alders and maples and willows, the river unduting sleek and muscur beside her. Gradually, the pre-dawn gloom lightened. The river fog grew paler and paler and then, as the sun rose, golden light began to pour through it like a trumpet bst.

  Mi stopped under a great-limbed maple with leaves the color of bright, brassy honey and watched the mist burn away. She breathed in deep through her nose, savoring the autumnal river smell of the world awakening.

  Uncsping the bell at her side, she took it carefully into both hands, and looked around to make sure she was alone.

  ~ ~ ~

  Pazo often visits the burial mounds outside the city, usually alone. In the days before Mi boards her ship to Harmine, mother and daughter walk there again.

  “Here,” Pazo’s eyes fsh with pride and concern. “You’ll need this.”

  Mi takes the cloth wrapped bundle. It is a bell, no rger than the size of her fist, with a smooth handle of polished ebony. She traces with her finger the swirls that blossom cloudy in the silver-white metal.

  “How did you…?” She gnce up at her mother.

  With dark-eyed pleasure, Pazo takes in the sight of her daughter’s surprise. “Your auntie Venzata took it off a wealthy merchant’s galleon. She said he didn’t know what it was, couldn’t enjoy it anymore anyway, and agreed that your need befits its purpose. It’s good bellmetal, and well-wrought.”

  Mi’s heart swells. In Opali, thereis no greater cim of belonging, nor of trust, than the gift of a bell. She swings it in a glittering arc, and they both listen to the fine shiver of the song wave breaking and reforming perfectly, like bzing sand, until it trails away. The wind makes ceaseless, moving shapes in the tall grass that cover the burial mounds around them. All the wildflowers have gone to seed.

  “This way, you’ll take some of our harmonies with you,” Pazo observes. “And you’ll be able to make your own. That could save your life, there. Don’t hesitate to use it.”

  Mi nods, blinking away tears. “I won’t.”

  Pazo smiles. “I know.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Mi swung the bell, and as the rippling cloud of silver resonance fluttered apart the yers of reality, she reflected that she had never felt more Opali than she did here, in the hostile depths of the Imperiat. Why should that be so?

  She nudged the bellsound into harmony, and dropped into the rushing dark waters of the Tides. Fiery leylines blossomed and constelted all around her.

  All distance was erased, all time.

  A calm silence washed through her, carrying a timeless embrace. Countless hands brushing her back, reaching out to buoy her up, lifting her heart, bolstering her against despair.

  Mi felt Simone’s presence in these waters, the telltale traces of her. Perhaps she was, at this very instant, tuning her instrument on a rooftop in Opali, while her spirit swirled alongside Mi in the spirit current. If Mi listened closely, she might hear the faint mingling of the great tower bells drifting through from the other side. All of them—mother Pazo, Lindsay, Zuri, her sisters and aunties, were so close.

  Mi’s bones tasted home and in the visible world she smiled through the leaking tears and sighed, her shoulders dropping as they untensed, as the knowing rolled down the inside of her breastbone like warm honey—she was not alone.

  ChaoticArmcandy