Tide of Shadows and Other Stories (5 page)

I’d recently finished Guy Gavriel Kay’s
Under Heaven
, which provided inspiration for both the gravedigging aspect of the story and the approach to its prose, and Joe Abercrombie’s
Best Served Cold
, which served up the story’s ensemble cast and its dark tone. Without a doubt, “A Night for Spirits and Snowflakes” wears its inspirations on its sleeve. In intervening years, I’ve tried to be more subtle in the ways that I allow other books and stories to inspire and mould my own, but I’d be remiss not to tip my hat to those two authors and the impact they had on this story.

I didn’t know it then, but I was also writing my first “grimdark” story, a label and a set of themes that I have a conflicted relationship with
¹
!

Since 2011, I’ve gained a better understanding of fantasy’s (and all fiction’s) need for diverse voices, characters, cultures, and genders. When I look back at “A Night for Spirits and Snowflakes”, I see some first attempts at playing with a world that’s larger than just boundaries of the popularized perception of faux-medieval England. There are characters of colour, several different cultures and religions represented, but it’s also a story packed to the brim with straight males. Kameron Hurley taught us in her Hugo Award–winning essay, “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle, and Slaves’ Narrative”
²
, that war is no excuse to forget women in wartime narratives. I wonder what this “A Night for Spirits and Snowflakes” would look like if I were to revisit it—to find a truer telling in which the women were not written out by the historians?

“A Night for Spirits and Snowflakes” was originally published in the
Sword & Laser Anthology
(2014), edited by Tom Merritt and Veronica Belmont.

The Girl with Wings

of Iron and Down

I woke in a white room. The gentle hum of electricity enveloped me, and a blinding white light shone down from a single point in the ceiling. I felt like I had just crawled out from the pits of death. Hell. A shadow moved into the light, then resolved into a head, then a face, and then a man. He reminded me of my father.

"Don't worry, girl," said the man. “I’m fixing you."

The light faded, the man drifted into shadows. I fell back into sleep.

Or death. It was difficult to tell which.

The next time I woke, I was still in the white room, but the light was now a dim orange. I was free to move my head, but leather straps held me tight against the table. I looked around my prison as best I could. Two walls were bare, one had outline of what looked like a door, and the third was dominated by a lifeless screen built into the wall above a small desk. On the desk sat a simple table lamp, much like the one in my bedroom. This was my bedroom now.

 
I didn’t know where I was. The easy answer was that I was dead—but was Heaven really just a white room with an orange lamp? My grandmama had always said it would be wonderful, and this room was anything but. It was boring. Small.

The ceiling held several lights settled into shallow depressions. They looked like the watchful eyes of angels. I thought again of my grandmama and her silly stories. Father hadn’t liked it when she told me those stories.

They were just stories, though. So where's the harm, Father?

The hiss of a door broke the room's silence; the light shifted from orange to white and back to orange as new light invaded from whatever lay beyond the door, then was shut away again. Slippered footsteps whispered across the floor.

A large hand touched my shoulder, tender and delicate. It belonged to a stern-faced man in horn-rimmed glasses. The same man as before. The datapad in his hand glowed; its colours danced across the pale skin of his palm as he used the device one-handed, manipulating the screen with his thumb.

"You're not supposed to be awake," he said. His voice was also like my father's but sadder.

He turned and walked to the desk. He put down his datapad and fiddled with the wallscreen. It jumped to life, adding its own erratic light to the room. A soft hiss, then a light kiss against the nape of my neck.

Blackness.

My eyelids strained to open, but remained closed as if stuck by glue. Voices filled the void.

"Would you come to bed, John?" said a woman.

"In a moment. Just another moment," said the familiar voice of the man with the glasses.

The woman sighed. "Yes, yes. Another moment."

"Sarah," the man whispered. It wasn’t my name, but somehow I knew he was talking about me.

"John." Ice entered the woman's voice. She sounded weary and lonely. "Think of who she is, of what you're doing."

"Sarah."

"Please, John! Don't call her that. She’s broken beyond repair.
You've
broken her! She should be dead."

Something crashed against the wall. The man huffed. My grandmama once read me a story about old warriors who fought bulls—pricking them with their metal weapons, taunting and enraging them, then killing the poor beasts for sport. The man's next word had all the power and anger of one of those bulls. "Out."

"John…" said the woman. "Come here. Please." I couldn’t see her, but I pictured her holding her arms out before her, inviting the man into her embrace, into a place where whatever sins he carried could be momentarily forgotten.

He didn’t move—didn't even speak.

"John," she said more firmly. "She’s awake. Look at her eyes flutter. Can she hear us?"

The man stomped through the room; he slapped his hand on the screen above the desk. I fell back into dreamless sleep.

They tried to fix me.

"The drugs are too much. You'll kill her."

When next I awoke, I lay on my stomach. I was free to move, but now metal wings sprouted from my back. My first thought was not that they were absurd but that metal seemed a poor choice for tools meant for flight. My second was a wave of revulsion.

"Do you like them?"

I hadn’t noticed the man with the horn-rimmed glasses sitting in the chair. Startled, the disgust and panic washed away from me in a wave of curiosity.

"I…" I did not know what to say.

"You are special, Sarah. You are my little angel."

That name again.

He smiled, the first I'd seen from him. I was caught off guard by the kindness in his dark eyes. The smile just barely touched his lips, a small turn at one corner, but his eyes danced.

Try as I might, I could not flap the wings and they would not fold; I could not stretch them to their full length nor draw them tight against my bare back. They were dead to me.

"They don't work” was all I could think to say.

"Not yet," he said. Some of the happiness left his eyes. "But soon. I will fix them. You will be the little angel of Tao Hua Yuan."

Being an angel would be nice. And if these wings ever worked, I could leave this small room with its metal bed and leather straps. I’d fly the world over, and find my real father. But they were broken and needed fixing. I needed fixing.

“I’d like to go back to sleep," I said.

"Yes, my dear. Sleep well," the man said. The last thing I saw before sleep swept over me were his sad eyes and smiling lips.