Scale-Bright (13 page)

"I wasn't really thinking at the time."

Olivia gapes at her.

"It's just not very practical, is it? I mean, part of Bak Seijuen's story. A plague striking a town because she was with a human."

"That never happened! If that happens every time a demon loves a human there'd be no city left standing on this earth! Heaven frowns on it some if there are children, but it's not like I can give you babies! Or get them on you." Olivia pauses to breathe. "You don't want babies, do you? There are ways, but please tell me you don't."

"Let's see," Julienne muses. "I'm an only child. My grandparents—they paid for my university tuition—are still hoping I'll have somebody to look after me when I'm old, and to carry on the Lau line."

Then, abruptly, she bursts into laughter. Olivia throws up her hands. "You were making fun of me. This isn't funny. This is important."

"It's just—your expression." Julienne stifles her giggling. "But it's more than just about me. I haven't even talked about it with my aunts, and for a serious thing I'd have to. You'd have to call them aunties, too."

Olivia blanches. "You're a girl of this era. Defy your elders. Be a rebel."

"Other girls can do that; I won't. I'm going to shop for grocery. Would you like to come?"

"You're going to turn me into an embarrassment to demonkind. Grocery."

"Home cooking," Julienne says. "If you're into that."

"You'd cook for me?" Olivia's eyes widen. "Will you do that every day? It'd be as though you are my wife."

Julienne's ears warm as they wave Octopus cards at the turnstile. "That's getting ahead of yourself. I've got a job. I'd cook twice a week at most. I'm
not
your stay-at-home… partner."

Their arms clasp close as they board the ferry. Olivia's skin is warm and complicated, because attached to it are the lingering copper of killing and the brilliant green of serpent. But Julienne thinks it could happen, if they work through the tangles together. If they persist and persevere, and as long as they can reconcile her aunts to it.

After all, this is what she asked for when the white serpent of legend wanted to grant her a wish: and just as Bak Seijuen said, desires must be seized and held onto, just like everything else, for them to become real and endure.

Appendix

Before there was
Scale-Bright
, there were short stories. While they aren't necessary to enjoy the novella itself, they have been included for completeness, in chronological order. All stories take place before
Scale-Bright
.

"The Crows Her Dragon's Gate" (first published in
Beneath Ceaseless Skies,
 2013. Ed. Scott H. Andrews). The story of Xihe, the mother of suns, when she was young and the world was new: how she met her husband, lost herself, and found it again.

"Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon" (first published in
GigaNotoSaurus,
2012. Ed. Ann Leckie). Houyi rose in heaven, bow and arrow in hand: the hunt was her joy, the slaying of demons her delight. But most delightful was a serving girl called Chang'e.

"Chang'e Dashes from the Moon" (first published in
Expanded Horizons,
2012. Ed. Dash). Chang'e has been a prisoner on the moon while the world turns and cities rise. For centuries Houyi has looked for a way to free her wife, and now she has found it in a distant grand-niece: a young mortal woman named Julienne.

The Crows Her Dragon's Gate

Before the end there would be love-songs to a passion so fierce that the offspring of my body turned into suns; tales of our courtship a wildfire that scorched the world.

The annals of heavens may not always be trusted. They were texts carefully edited, passed to chosen scholars; it did well to remind the warlords—and once empire dreams had come true, the monarchs calling themselves heaven's sons—that above them reigned paradise, and above paradise an everlasting emperor.

Much was elided and confused. But in the beginning, it was mostly that I was young.

The Huang He was new, freshly disgorged from a dragon's gullet, brimming with stomach-lizards and fish with scales thick as lamellar. The heat drew me, as it too must have drawn him. And so I found Dijun by the banks with knees drawn up like a boy, gazing into the waters. In his palms flame detonated into monsters that cavorted to the edge of his nails and spilled onto the grass, turning green to black-brown.

I measured and watched him through the frame of my hands. What did I know of him then? That he was an oddity, not unlike me; that he was without a place at court, without sworn brothers earned through blood and fire. A lack that left him wifeless, for all that women gazed upon him as they would on rare silverwork. They would glance at him, and sigh a little, and look away. Untitled and unpositioned, what husband could he make?

I did not think of positions or titles.

He noticed my approach, and his smile intrigued me, for aesthetically it was most pleasing. Being young I mistook this for something else; being young I thought beauty was all there was.

"Would you like to try?" He held out his hand, where many-eyed beasts spun through their deaths and rebirths, purer each time, finer with each cycle.

"How did you know?"

"Your shadow moves on its own even when heaven's light stands still. Like calls to like." Dijun hesitated. "And I find I cannot look away from your radiance."

I inclined my head. Men offered flattery; women accepted with poise. That was the way of things. We examined one another; he in fascination, I for lack of conversation. Portrait-still, portrait-flattened. To escape that tableau I thought of heat. It flared out of me, gusting into two wings that multiplied, quartet then decaplet.

I'd thought he would take to it, my natural kindred. He recoiled. "That is wild. Have you never taught yourself control?"

Until that moment it'd never struck me that this required discipline, anymore than did breathing or laughing, or searching for the true face of the sky. "No, why would I?"

He frowned at me. "Unreined it'll bring disaster. This will burn even immortals." Leaning close he gripped my wrists, his breath on my cheeks. "Let me teach you."

I wanted to tell him: no, I had never burned anything, anyone. That I did not want guidance, for this was part of me, like my tongue and my feet, and why did he want to teach me how to use those? I was no infant; I was no child.

But for a reason I wouldn't be able to name until years after—years stretching between us like clouds unrolling beneath chariot wheels—I was silent; I was silenced and could not demur. I let him, could not quite pull away, show me how to coax the flame and bring order that it did not need. I let him teach me what I already understood.

Pulse hot in my throat I went away from him rubbing the places where he'd touched, the fingerprints on my arms.

This, too, was easy to mistake for an entirely different emotion.

* * *

Winter was air sizzling against my skin, snow hissing to steam on my hair, a susurrus in my ears:
Xihe, Xihe
. Had I a mother she'd have warned me,
Your vanity is how men will ensnare you, little daughter
—but I gestated in the dreams of birds and left them fully grown: a woman's silhouette, no childhood behind and no old age before to give it substance.

I would have liked to be someone's daughter, to call someone my aunt. But all I had was my older self, teeth bared in angry laughter.

Winter was shelter too, for Dijun hated that season. He courted status more desperately than he courted me, and he thought the cold would diminish him. It would not; only why tell him that? This was my place, this was my peace.

In my contemplation I could have missed the girl. Only look another way, sidestep rather than forward, take a different turn—any of this and the storm would have sifted over, burying her fortune. How small that chance; how breakable her life. Humans were so prone to death it was a marvel that they survived to fulfill their allotted span, a fraction's fraction of my own.

Furs in the snow like slain carcasses: she was wrapped in layers of them, had curled in upon herself to retain heat. I brushed away the flakes on her cheeks and lifted her up. So light, so small, as though mortals were made of a substance less dense and less real than mine.

A wolf's den. The beast, litter-mother, towered over me even as it slept. It woke and made room.

At my behest it extended a paw, gathering the girl to its belly like a pup. I left and returned with lychees from my garden, fed from seed to fruit with fire. Stripping it of skin and seed I fed to the mortal flesh like meat, flesh like liquor; blood-red and just as hot.

The girl woke like that in my lap around a mouthful of sweetness, of warmth leaping in the jugular and bounding in the stomach. Flush with this heat she'd changed colors. She spluttered laughter through chapped lips. "They told us death would look like a field in summer, not a giant wolf and a woman."

"There's no field," I said sharply, and did not tell her that the afterlife was far harsher than the wolf. "Nor am I of the world below. What insult. What were you doing in the storm?"

Her name was Lin, and she did not believe I was real, my throat and head bare, my robes summer-thin. With her thumbs she brushed my braids; with her fists she crumpled my sleeves; with her mouth she insisted I was a fever dream.

When that was past, Lin told her tale. Her mother was a physician, away in the neighboring village. "I was fetching Mother. When I started off," she said defensively, "there wasn't yet a blizzard. My friend's sister got so ill. That's the only family Jia has got left."

What did I think? Only: gods were beginning to teach mortalkind the arts of hunting and making, the sciences of crafting and writing, while I stood aside, giving them nothing. Only: through her girlish glibness there was need, afraid of being heard but no less true for that.

"I will take you there," I said, and impelled by pride added, "for I haven't saved you only to see you rush to die in this weather. It would have been a waste of my time and investment."

"This is what near-death sounds like: my mother." Lin sniffed. "But thank you. I think."

We did not wait out the storm. In the aegis of my warmth she needed fear nothing of winter, and we raced along the snow. I tucked up my robes to keep pace, the winds like razors on my cheeks. They filled my ears with the beating of wings.

This was better than peace.

* * *

Dijun asked me to marry him, in my garden where I grew tiger lilies with stamens in gold, mandarins that crackled in the mouth, and starlings that thrived on graphite. My self, made old and sagacious by rage, would say: a crime committed against yourself to have so much, to love so much; had you made nothing, had you loved nothing, you would have had nothing to lose.

I was, then, turning my speculations to the sky. Not the one seen by mortals, whose every chi was charted and layered by celestial topography. Their sky had limits; mine, far above even the heavenly court, was endless and true.

Skies had nothing to do with what he talked about, which was what he always talked about. Finding a gap in human knowledge that other immortals hadn't yet filled—law-making, matrimony, poetry—and through that making a name for himself, earning worship and shrines, then a place in palace hierarchy. Between this he also recited poetry wonderfully and played music sweetly. So he interrupted both his own rhetoric and my thoughts when he pressed his mouth—hot as the bubbling lakes around us—to the inside of my wrist.

I looked at him, at my seized hand. "What?"

"I would," he said against my skin in a voice low and thick, "see you a bride."

His breath jolted my pulse as his words and gestures had not. It was so sharp, so singular; an arrow's pierce. Later I would think: was this meant, did he know? Of fire quickening fire, as oil in a lamp. A reaction without mind or thought and I was caught up in it, in the insistence of his mouth. "I—" I began, and stopped. My stomach roiled.

"I do not require your answer now, though I've long postponed this. Each day—" His choked hesitation, mirroring my own; for different reasons. "You overwhelm me."

Custom demanded that I respond. An appropriate answer to his question; surely one must exist in the cup of my skull, floating like tea leaves or hiding among the bottom dregs. Not until his leave-taking, graceful and correct, did it strike me there had been no question. Only a series of statements. The imprint of his lips stayed, my skin ridged red around it.

I wanted more than anything to seek another goddess' wisdom. How would I put forward to Xiwangmu, wedded empress, that I had been made uneasy; how to say that without losing some essential piece of myself, becoming an alien unwoman? I did not object to Dijun's lack of rank, so what misgivings did I have? Why would I not want a man this well-made, this adept in his bearing; a voice this rich, a hand this firm?

In search of clarity I descended.

Through piety and deed humans could join heaven, scoured clean of mortality; there were almost as many ways to achieve that as there were to fail. For beasts, the methods were different. For fish of jeweled scales there was the dragon's gate, an arch above the apex of great waterfalls over which they must leap. I had always liked watching these quests to transmute from fish to divine beast, from small bodies to sinuous muscle and horned head. Most did not clear the height, and fewer still arced over the roof.

The handful that did, one in a hundred-thousand thousand, emerged so incandescent that they filled me with certainty that a transformation awaited me; that someday I too would pass through my dragon's gate and become more than a goddess who did not know her way and purpose.

This certainty eased me into an answer for Dijun's non-questions: to see me in bridal dress he should be made to leap. Perhaps I would set him a wall so great, a cataract so fierce, that he would never leap high enough.

Enlisting a child spirit I sent him the message: I want a light in the night that sheds without heat, winged and strong, tame to me and fierce to all else, and when you have brought me this thing I will consent to be your wife.