The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year Two by Scott H. Andrews

Author:Scott H. Andrews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: scifi, anthology, fantasy, fantasy adventure, adventure fantasy, literary fantasy, scifi and fantasy, short fiction anthology, best of science fiction and fantasy horror, swords and scorcery
Publisher: Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Miss Stanton had not loved her, had not needed her, had known she was not human. Had still died for her.

Violet dropped to her knees in the grass. She had thought she understood humans. When they talked of love and altruism, they meant protecting mine. When they talked of bravery and moral choices, they meant destroying yours.

Despite what humans thought, faeries did know sacrifice; every day of the war they laid down their lives for their Queen and their kin. But not for their enemies. Not for strangers. They would never die for someone who had betrayed them, simply because she needed help.

For the first time in her life, Violet wanted to know why.

And for that the faeries had no answer.

There was no point to dying for someone who had tried to hurt you, and no point at all to dying for someone who had never been in danger. Violet knew it as surely as she felt her own heartbeat, and she could feel the butterflies laughing at the blood dribbling out between Miss Stanton’s wrinkled lips. But she knew, also, that something in that death had been needful and right.

Maybe it didn’t matter who was us and who was them, whether she was human or faery, and maybe it didn’t matter whether she loved anyone or not. Maybe there was something still she had to do.

She took a train to London, walked into the War Office, and said, “I am a changeling. I want to defect.”

~ ~ ~

“Nasty little fight, but we killed the buggers.” Major Harris’s voice echoed slightly in the tunnel. Then he saw Violet. He stiffened, mouth working uncomfortably, but didn’t apologize for his language.

The soldiers were all like that: they could not treat her as a man, did not want to treat her as a woman. Violet only smiled and unfurled her wings, laughing inside as he turned away uncomfortably.

“Right this way, miss,” said Colonel Weston. He was afraid of her, like the rest of them; Violet could taste his nightmares sometimes. But he still pretended she was a lady, and so Violet had tracked down his wife and laid protections on her. She appreciated anyone who, like her, pretended to be kind.

Violet followed the Colonel down the tunnel, trying not to gag. They had gassed the mound with sulphur to weaken its enchantments, then thrown jam-tin grenades full of iron filings to destroy them, and enough iron and sulphur still hung in the air to make her vision swim.

“We’ll have to hurry. We think they might have called for reinforcements.” He gave her a sidelong glance.

“I can’t tell if there are any nearby,” said Violet. “The fumes are still too strong. They’d likely come through Faery, anyway.”

Through a doorway she glimpsed the great white anchor stone. It was split clean across, and her wings ached in sympathetic pain: there would be no more easy passage to Faery through this mound. But come twilight, the faeries would be able to use any stream or forked branch to cross into the mortal world.

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