The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, MarApr 2022 by Sheree Renée Thomas Editor

Author:Sheree Renée Thomas, Editor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction, Fantasy fiction, Short fiction, Magazine
Publisher: Spilogale, Inc.
Published: 2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

• • •

There were ninety-three knots you had to climb to get out of the well.

The uneven number had always boggled Varvara. She wondered if it had been the Morasser’s intention, or if he, too, had taken the rope from somewhere else. Plenty of rope on abandoned ships, and there were plenty of those around the island. Not that she could see him ever going near the sea. It would probably melt him.

You needed two thousand, two hundred and fifty-seven stones, ninety-three knots, and one rotten brain for one well, one rope, and one Varvara.

So many of this gave so many of that.

In all the time she’d been there, seven people had managed to get out alive. You needed one of three things to do so: quick feet, a delightfully atrocious personality, or sheer, mind-bogglingly blind luck.

Varvara wasn’t sure which one applied the most now.

She was distantly preoccupied with the way lichens had started growing amidst the mushrooms on the dead lad’s corpse. She would peel it all off, in a bit. There was time.

It was edging on morning. At last. Already.

Dimitar snored like an old crone, which, well, Varvara supposed she was. Truthfully, Varvara was more than slightly impressed she’d managed to fall asleep at all, given the corpse-strewn well and corpse-eating madwoman within in. She had to respect that.

Still. Varvara sighed. She missed snoring. She missed sleeping, too, if only as a break from the boredom of everyday bog-life. There were only so many times she could listen to the same stony gossips about this and that patch of moss without wanting to claw her eyes out—she had, once, but it didn’t last.

Varvara never slept. And yet, she still jerked up and fell sideways at Dimitar’s abrupt shift from sleep to awareness. It was as if she sprang from sleep directly to her feet, which made Varvara wonder what curses her articulations were waging on her right about now. She forced her breathing into a more even cadence.

“It’s morning,” Dimitar said, as if she was the first to discover it.

“Aye.”

For several moments, they just stared at each other. It reminded Varvara of being seventeen and waking up in the stinking attic of a tavern, wearing someone else’s breeches and not much else. This idiocy lasted until Dimitar cleared her throat.

“Up I go, now, shall I?”

She already had her hands on the rope. Yet, her eyes watched Varvara defiantly, as if she had done anything to deserve it. Varvara shook her head incredulously and waved her off.

“What are you waiting for?”

“I don’t want to start climbing up, only to have you jump at me.”

“Hah! That doesn’t work, I tried.” Varvara laughed. She waved her hand again. “Go, go, I have our mutual friend here to keep me sated.”

Their mutual friend had grown even more mushroomy during the night, but some things couldn’t be helped. Dimitar eyed him distrustfully, then leveled the same gaze back at Varvara.

“I’m not one for favors,” she said.

Then she climbed up, without hesitation and without another word.

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