Also by Catherynne M. Valente YUMENOHON THELABYRINTH THEGRASS-CUTTINGSWORD Poetry APOCRYPHA ORACLES ABOUT THE AUTHOR Catherynne M. Valente was born in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Crete with her husband and two dogs. This is her fourth novel. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A few brief thanks: To Sean Wallace, Nick Mamatas, and Jeff VanderMeer for their early faith in me and generous advice. To Deborah Schwartz and Sonya Taaffe for their inspiration and patient ears. To Juliet Ulman for her unerring instinct and guidance, and Michele Rubin for her kind shepherding. Finally, to Sam Barris and Dmitri and Melissa Zagidulin, without whose unflagging support, love, and thoughtful criticism this book would have been impossible. PRELUDE ONCE THERE WAS A CHILD WHOSE FACE WAS LIKE THE NEW MOON SHININGon cypress trees and the feathers of waterbirds. She was a strange child, full of secrets. She would sit alone in the great Palace Garden on winter nights, pressing her hands into the snow and watching it melt under her heat. She wore a crown of garlic greens and wisteria; she drank from the silver fountains studded with lapis; she ate cold pears under a canopy of pines on rainy afternoons. Now this child had a strange and wonderful birthmark, in that her eyelids and the flesh around her eyes were stained a deep indigo-black, like ink pooled in china pots. It gave her the mysterious, taciturn look of an owl on ivory rafters, or a raccoon drinking from the swift-flowing river. It colored her eyes such that when she was grown she would never have to smoke her eyelashes with kohl. For this mark she was feared, and from her earliest days, the girl was abandoned to wander the Garden around the many-towered Palace. Her parents regarded her with trepidation and terror, wondering if her deformity reflected poorly on their virtue. The other nobles firmly believed she was a demon, sent to destroy the glittering court. Their children, who often roamed the Garden like a flock of wild geese, kept away from her, lest she curse them with her terrible powers. The Sultan could not decide—after all, if she were a demon, it would not do to offend her infernal kin by doing away with her like so much cut grass. In the end, all preferred that she simply remain silent and far away, so that none would have to confront the dilemma. And so it went like this for many years, while thirteen summers like fat orange roses sprang and withered. But one day another child came near to her, though not too near, hesitant as a deer about to bolt into the shadows. His face was like a winter sun, his form like a river reed. He stood before the girl in her tattered silk dress and shabby cloak which had once been white, and touched her eyelids with his sweet-scented forefinger. She found, to her surprise, that she endured his touch, for she was lonely and ever full of sorrow. “Are you really a spirit? A very wicked spirit? Why are your eyes dark like that, like the lake before the dawn?” The pretty boy-child cocked his head to one side, an ibis in midstream. The girl said nothing. “I am not afraid of you!” The boy stood his ground but his voice broke hoarsely. The girl continued to stare at him while the willow trees wavered in the east wind. When she spoke her voice was the low hum of cicadas in the far-misted hills. “Why not?” “I am very brave. One day I will be a great General and wear a scarlet cloak.” At this there was almost a smile on the girl’s pale lips. “And you have come to slay the great girl-demon who haunts the Garden?” she whispered. “Oh, no, I…” The boy spread his hands, feeling suddenly that he had shown very bad form somewhere along the way. “No one has spoken so many words to me since I saw the winter snows through a warm window draped in furs.” The girl stared again, impossibly still. All at once, a tiny light stole through her dusky eyes and she seemed to make a decision within herself. “Shall I tell you the truth, then? Tell you my secret? You of all the children who wear ruby rings and smell of olive soap?” Her voice had gone so quiet it was almost without breath. “I asked, didn’t I? I can keep secrets. My sister says I am very good at it, like the King of the Thieves in the nursery story.” There was another long silence, as clouds covered the sun. And the girl began to speak very softly, almost afraid to hear her own voice. “On an evening, when I was a very small child, an old woman came to the great silver gate, and twisting her hands among the rose roots told me this: I was not born with this mark. A spirit came into my cradle on the seventh day of the seventh month of my life, and while my mother slept in her snow white bed, the spirit touched my face, and left there many tales and spells, like the tattoos of sailors. The verses and songs were so great in number and so closely written that they appeared as one long, unbroken streak of jet on my eyelids. But they are the words of the river and the marsh, the lake and the wind. Together they make a great magic, and when the tales are all read out, and heard end to shining end, to the last syllable, the spirit will return and judge me. “After the old woman vanished into the blue-faced night, I spent each day hidden in a thicket of jasmine and oleander, trying to read what I could in a cast-off bronze mirror, or in the reflections of the Garden pools. But it is difficult; I must read them backwards, and I can only read one eye at a time.” She stopped, and the last was no louder than a spider weaving its opaline threads. “And there is no one to listen.” The boy stared. He looked closely and could see wavering lines in the solid black of her eyelid, hints of alphabets and letters he could not imagine. The closer he looked, the more the shapes seemed to leap at him, clutch at him, until he was quite dizzy. He licked his lips. They were all whispers now, the two of them, conspirators and thieves. The other children had all gone, and they stood alone under the braided whips of a gnarled willow. “Tell me? Tell me one of the tales from your eyelids. Please. Just one.” He was terrified that she would rebuke him and run, like the hound which is often beaten. But she only continued to look at him with those strange, dark eyes. “You are kind to me when no one else will come near. And my tales are all I have to give as thanks. But you must come away from the open Garden, into my hiding place, for I would have no one else know. You would surely be punished, and they would take my mirror and my knife, which are all I own, and lock me away to keep the demon spirit from hollowing their fine house.” And so they crept away from the yellow-tinged willow, across the endless rows of roses. They ducked under an arch of chestnut blossoms and were suddenly enveloped in a bower of white petals, the perfume touching them like hands. Red branches had thatched themselves into a kind of low roof, and there was ample room on the soft, compact earth thatched with leaves for them both to sit. “I will tell you the first tale I was able to read, from the crease of my left eyelid.” The boy sat very still, listening like a silk-eared hare deep in the forest. “Once in a far away there was a restless Prince, who was not satisfied by his father’s riches, or the beauty of the Palace women, or the diversions of the banquet hall. This Prince was called Leander, after the tawny lion that bounds across the steppes like a fearful wind. One night he crept out of the vine-covered walls of the great Castle like a hawk on the hunt, to find a quest and silence the gnaw of discontent in his breast…” NOW THEPRINCE STOLE INTO THE NIGHT,THEshadows wrapping around him like slippery river eels, and his footfalls were black and soundless on the pine needles. He journeyed through the Forest, stars flooding overhead as though they had burst through some gilded dam, having no particular plan except to get as far from the Palace as possible before the sun rose up and his father’s hounds were set on his scent. The trees made a roof of many tiles over his head, a scented mosaic studded with blue clouds. For the first time in his young life, the Prince felt a fierce kind of happiness, rimmed with light. As dawn swept up behind him like a clever thief, he rested against the trunk of a great baobab, leaning his head against the knotted wood. He breakfasted on cheese and dried meat he had stolen from the kitchens. The salt of the meat was more delicious than anything he had ever tasted, and he slept for a few hours under the sky which bloomed in the colors of wisteria and lilies. Traveling on, it was not long before he came to a little hut in a pleasant meadow with a thatched roof and a well-made wooden door, round with solid brass studs. The chimney smoked cheerily, smelling of sage and cedar. Milling around the house was a flock of gray-feathered geese, circling like cirrus clouds, ethereal and wild. They were very fine animals and beautiful, squawking and ruffling their feathers under the curling eaves of camphor and fresh straw. Now the Prince was young and resourceful, but not very wise, and he had taken only a little food from the kitchens and a few apples from the orchards. He had assumed that he could forage easily, for the whole world must be as fertile as his father’s lands, and all trees must be as full of jeweled fruit, all animals as docile and savory, all peasants as agreeable and generous. It was beginning to be clear that this might not be the case, and his stomach growled noisily. He resolved to replenish his pack before he went further. There were, after all, so many geese, and certainly whatever warm and festive creatures dwelt in that fine hut, they would not even notice if one of the long-necked animals disappeared. The Prince had been trained to hunt and sneak from his earliest childhood, and he crept silently on well-muscled thighs from his hiding place. He stole behind a great plow and waited among the high summer grasses, searching for the right moment, controlling his breathing and slowing his hammering heart. The midmorning sun was hot on his neck. His hair crawled with sweat, trickling down into his collar, but he did not move at all until, finally, one of the lovely geese wandered away from the pack, peering around the blade of the plow and fixing him with wide black eyes. Her gaze was very strange, endless and deep as the autumn moon, pupilless and knowing. But swift as a sleek wolf, the Prince escaped her gaze. He caught her slender neck in his hand and snapped it, the sound no louder than a twig caught underfoot. He rose from the dry grass and moved back towards the tree line, but the geese had noticed that one of their number was missing, and sent up a great alarm, terrible and piercing. The door of the hut flew open and out stomped a fearful woman, a flurry of streaming gray hair and glinting axe blade. Her face was wide and flat, covered with horrible and arcane markings, great black tattoos and scars cutting across her features so that it was impossible to tell if she had once been beautiful. She wore a wide leather belt studded with silver, two long knives glittering at her hips. She screamed horribly and the sound of it shook the cypresses and the oaks, vibrating in the air like a shattered flute. “What have you done? What have you done? Awful, awful boy!—Villain, demon!” She screeched again, higher and shriller than any owl, and the geese joined her, keening and wailing. Their howls gouged at the air, at the rich red earth, a sound both monstrous and alien, full of inhuman, bottomless grief. It dug at his ears like claws. Finally, the woman quieted and simply shook her great head, weeping. The Prince stood, stunned, more chagrined over his lack of stealth than her rage. She was, after all, only a woman, and it was only a bird. She was dwarfish and no longer young, and he knew he had nothing to fear from her. He clutched the bird’s corpse behind his back, hoping his broad chest and arms would hide it. “I have only just stumbled upon your house, Lady. I meant no offense.” The wretched woman loosed her awful scream again, and her eyes grew hideously large. He had not noticed their yellowish cast before, but it was certainly there now, feral and sickly. “You lie, you lie! You have killed my goose, my beautiful bird, my child! She was mine and you broke her neck! My darling, my child!” She broke into bitter weeping. The Prince could not understand. He drew the goose’s body from behind his back to hold it out to the crone. But in his fist he held not a bird, but a radiant young woman, small and delicate as a crane poised in the water, long black hair like a coiled serpent winding around his hand, for he clutched her at the root of the braided mane. She was clothed in diaphanous rags which barely covered her shimmering limbs. And her long, smooth neck was neatly broken. The tattooed woman ran at him, swinging her axe like a scythe through wheat, and he dropped the girl’s body with a horrible thump onto the grass. When she reached him, she stopped short and breathed hard into his face, stinking of rotted plums and dark, secret mosses. She lifted her axe and cut off two fingers on the Prince’s left hand, licking the spray of blood from her cracked lips. He could not run, the blow was so sudden and complete, but only cry out and clutch his maimed hand. He knew if he bolted from her he would lose much more than a finger. He promised the crone a thousand thousand kingdoms, the treasures of a hundred dragons, babbling oaths like a child. But she would have none of it, and slowly moved her free hand to one of the long knives. “You have killed my child, my only daughter.” She laid her ponderous axe on the damp earth and drew, with one long, sinuous sigh, the bright-bladed knife from its sheath— The girl paused, and looked into her companion’s eyes, which were like deep marshes at sunset. “Don’t stop!” he choked. “Tell me! Did she kill him then and there?” “It is night, boy. You must go in to dinner and I must make my bed among the cedar boughs. Each to our own.” The boy gaped, grasping frantically for a reason to stay and hear the fate of the wounded Prince. Hurriedly, he murmured, “Wait, wait. I will go to dinner, and steal food for us like the brave Prince Leander, and creep out under cover of night like a hawk on the hunt, and stay the night with you, here under the stars, which are bright as crane feathers in the sun. Then you can finish the story.” He looked at her with a hope whose fierceness was brighter than any torch now lit at court. She was quiet for a moment, head bowed like a temple postulant. Finally, she nodded, without looking up. “Very well.” In the Garden AS THE LAST HARP STRINGS OF CRIMSON SIGHED INTO THE SILENTwestward darkness, the boy returned, clutching a handkerchief filled to bursting. He clambered into the little thicket and proudly laid out their feast. The girl sat as she had when he left her, still as one of the calm profiles of the Garden statues. Her strange quiet unnerved him, frightened him. He could not hold her dark gaze, her wide, almond-shaped eyes ringed about with their strange markings. Instead, he glanced awkwardly at the steaming food. On the little square of silk lay a glistening roasted dove, fat peaches and cold pears, a half loaf of buttery bread covered in jam, broiled turnips and potatoes, a lump of hard cheese, and several sugared violets whisked away from the table garnish. He drew from his pocket a flask of pale watered wine, the great prize of his kitchen adventures. The girl made no move, did not reach for the dove or the pears. Her crow-feather hair wafted into her face, borne by the warm breeze, and all at once she began to shudder and weep. The boy did not know where to look, did not wish to shame her by witnessing her tears. He fixed his eyes on the shivering boughs of a distant cypress tree, and waited. By and by, the sniffling ceased, and he turned back to her. Of course, he understood that she had never eaten so well in her life, as she had never been welcome at the Palace dinners—he imagined that she had lived on the fruits and nuts of the Garden, foraging like a beggar. But he could not understand why plenty would make someone weep. His hands were soft and scented with rose oil, and his hair gleamed. He had known nothing but the court and the peculiar adoration it bestowed on beautiful youths. But he was a child of nobility, and would not embarrass her with displays of compassion. Wordlessly, she tore a wing off the coppery dove and delicately mouthed the meat. With a small, ornate silver knife hidden in the folds of her plain shift she sliced a pear in two. As she extended one pale green half to the boy, he wondered vaguely how she had come upon such a handsome knife. Certainly he had nothing so fine, and yet her dress, such as it was, was threadbare and her fingernails dirty. A thread of fragrant juice ran down her chin, and for the first time, the girl smiled, and it was like the moonrise over a mountain stream, the light caught in a stag’s pale antlers, clear water running under the night sky. When she spoke again, the boy leaned forward eagerly, shoved his thick, dark hair back from his face, bit into a ripe peach and stuffed a bit of cheese into his mouth, mechanically, without noticing the taste. Her large eyes slid shut as she spoke, so that her eyelids and their mosaic covering seemed to float like black lilies in the paleness of her face. “The wild woman drew her long knife from her belt and held it for a moment, almost playfully, at the Prince’s smooth neck, a sliver of breath before the fatal cut…” “LET ME LIVE,LADY,”HE WHISPERED ,“IBEG YOU . Ishall stay here and be your servant; I will take the place of the bird-maiden and remain loyal to you for all of my days. I will be yours. I am young and strong. Please.” He did not know what moved him to make such an offer, or if he meant to keep his promise, true as law. But the words ripped from him as though the woman had put her fist into his throat and seized them for her own. Her eyes blazed like clouds filled with a thousand tiny seeds of lightning. But they held now a calculating gleam, and indeed, in another instant the knife had vanished from the Prince’s throat. “Even if I agree it will not save you,” she hissed, her voice like a great toad singing at dawn. “But I will tell you the tale of my daughter and how she became winged. Then, perhaps, you will see what it is you offer, and we shall discover whether or not you prefer death.” But she did not speak. Instead, she tore a long strip of mottled fur from the collar of her tunic and bandaged his hand. Her touch was practiced and much softer than he expected, almost, though not quite, tender. From a pouch at her waist she drew some withered leaves, among which he thought he could recognize bay and juniper. She pressed them into his ruined stumps. Tightening the poultice, she examined her work and judged it fair. “First, I am not blind. I can see that you are young and strong, and there is no doubt I can use up your youth and vigor like well water. This is not the question. Can you listen? Can you learn? Can you keep silent? I wonder. I believe you are a spoiled brat with no ears at all.” The Prince bent his head, penitent. Already his hand had stopped its thick throbbing, and he said nothing, judging that nothing was the best shield he could fashion against her. The crone sat against a large stone and rolled a few musky leaves between her gnarled fingers… ICAME FROM THE NORTHERN TRIBES ,THE STEPPE-WOMENwith their shaggy horses and snow-clotted braids. I’m sure you’ve heard stories—we were monsters, we were unnatural, we deserved what we got. Among the unnatural monsters, I was more monstrous and more unnatural than the rest. They called me Knife. When I was young and my strength was taut as a bow string, I was the best rider of all the young girls. I had many necklaces of jasper and wolf-tooth, three fine hunting knives, a strong bow that I could draw into the shape of the full moon, a quiver full of arrows fletched in hawk feathers, and a wildcat hide from my first kill. All around me were the wild, honey-colored steppes, the fat deer we hunted, and the sleek, brown, fragrant horses I loved. They ran like ripples in a mountain lake. I ran alongside them, and rode astride them, and I slept against their flanks. I was happy, the sun was high. I had enough. My sisters were all older than I, my brothers away fighting on the borders of our country, and so I was free, and feral, and my smile was often too like a snarl. One day Grandmother Bent-Bow, whom everyone called Grandmother but who was truly mine, and had the ugliest face I knew, like beaten bark, called me to her under the new moon. She told me that she had found a man for me to marry. I loved my grandmother very much, but I did not care to be married. I was a muscle-knotted mare; I needed no mount to slow me down. But Grandmother’s word was the closest thing to law we had. Monsters, you know, cannot appreciate the niceties of commandments carved in stone. And so, even though I was very young, I stood in her beautiful deerskin breeches, with my proud wildcat hide on my shoulders, and wed the man she had chosen. He was dark, with very bright eyes, and we hunted together—at first only cutting meat side by side, but slowly we became one hunter, leaping onto heavy-boned deer with twin knives flashing. We smiled and snarled and smiled again under a sky blazing with stars, like milk spilled across a black hide. When I was not hunting with him, my sisters Sheath and Quiver—for daughters come always in threes among us—and I raced each other, practiced the songs of our tribe and the twanging songs of our bows, and from Grandmother we learned magic. I braided her silver hair while she taught us secret things—monstrous things, unnatural things. Under the Snake-Star and the Bridle-Star and the Knife-Star, my own namesake, Grandmother prickled my face with delicate tattoos and called me her best girl, called me initiate, and horsewoman true. We grew, we hunted, we laughed. I was happy. But though I did not know it, the sun was getting lower in the sky. One day your father’s army— Stop gaping, boy. Did you think I did not know who you were the second you crossed onto my land? One day your father’s army came screeching up from the south like a prairie fire. He wanted our fat herds and strong horses. He wanted the heads of monsters on his wall. He wanted to clean his kingdom of unnatural things, things which squalled and crept and darkened the corners of the light. I had never seen anything like his soldiers. They wore armor like fish scales, with towering smoky plumes, and they shone like a thousand silver clouds on horses black as demons. I shot all my arrows into those clouds, and all of Sheath’s arrows, which were fletched with crow feathers, after a man cut her sword arm off. From a ruin of her blood and dark, wet insides, I pulled her blade and tried to swing it into the gut of one of the clouds, but I was never much use with blades, no matter my name, and he was on top of me before my blow had even begun its arc. He was a filthy man—and when a scrabbling creature who spends her nights squeezed between horses under no kind of roof calls a body filthy, you can be sure it is no ordinary dirt-stench. Leather-lashed beard bristling with lice and blood, he picked me up by the waist, hauling me up onto his warhorse. To shut my cursing mouth, he smashed my face with an armored fist. The glove floated before me, silvery and oddly beautiful, and then my forehead split and glutted red. What sort of monster was I? I could not even hold my own against one knight; I could not even get a sword into one hollering pig. I looked up through a sheet of tears and blood and clay-slick dirt to see my new husband racing after us, screaming like a wounded wolf, and your father with his raven plume riding behind him. The black-feathered rider rammed a colossal blade through his poor chest with as little thought or effort as squeezing a fly from the air with two fingers. I saw the bits of bone and gore fly forward; I watched my husband spit blood onto the grass and kneel as if in prayer before he went face-first into the blood-whipped mud. I tried to stop crying and pressed my face into the comfort of the strange horse’s flank—at least it was a horse, at least its sweat and hide were not so different from my own long-legged friends’—smelling for the goodness of my family in those thick, powerful haunches. We rode south. The sun had disappeared. That first fist of many marked my face, knotted my forehead into scar like a sailor’s rope. The rest, though, is my doing. We rode for a long time. I lost track of the days. The sour smell of the filthy man and his starving horse enclosed me. There was hardly enough to feed the knights and the women, let alone those poor beasts, who should have been oiled and loved and held while they slurped clear water. After a few days Quiver managed to kill herself by leaping into a river; the current like a breath of night carried her far from me, who should have caught her and held her face to mine. She was the oldest, yet I live and she is dead. I knew before we arrived at the Palace what would happen to me. Even monsters are not stupid. I would be a slave, meant for the pleasure of your father and his grime-bathed soldiers. I would be dressed prettily, and oiled like a whore. Slavery did not disturb me; escape would be simple enough. But I would do nothing for their pleasure, and I would not be beautiful for them. They found my grandmother’s tattoos, those beautiful dark lines snaking over my face, to be exotic .