The Curiosities Read online

  When the sun lights the sky, I work. I sew aprons and turn milk into butter; [6]I tend the fire and go into the bog with the other girls to collect ore for the bloomeries. More and more I stay in the bog, or wander the forest gathering bilberries and roots. Alone.

  The daylight grows shorter, and most of my time I am in your ship. At first I bring a basket of sewing and spend the night with bone-needles pricking blood from my fingers because I light no fire. I sew until I can do so no longer, and then I sleep. I curl up in your ship, press my cheek to the rough, cold earth, and sleep.

  . . .

  “You must stop, Geira,” Kitta tells me, tugging at my hand. The sun is setting behind her head, making her hair into a fiery aura. “Stay here with us. Drink and eat surrounded by your family, love.”

  I stare at her.

  Her lips press together. “You can remember him next to the fire as well as you remember him in the barrow field. Better, even! He has been here, alive and strong and whole—there, he is only a ghost.”

  I nod and pull away from her. I come out to the ship and wait for you.

  . . .

  One morning I wake and find a bundle of cooked rabbit meat wrapped in a small fold of cloth. The air is cold, and I don’t smell it until I’ve unwrapped it and brought the meat close to my face. My stomach pinches and I eat it. I cannot remember the last time I’ve eaten.

  . . .

  Where are you? Why haven’t you come? Just to tell me you’re well. I light a fire and pray your spirit be released from Hel for one night. Only one. The flames dance over your ship’s stones and on all the stones beyond, echoing out into the field until I am surrounded by dancing light. The silver and gold shadows will call the svartálfar, and I hope they come. I hope they come and hear my sorrow. I will give them anything they ask if they help me see you again. Sheep, horse blood, all the cream I can get, flowers, honey—anything.

  But no one comes.

  . . .

  Two mornings later, a pile of roasted acorns. I thank the empty air and eat them. The soft nuts remind me to drink and to bring a pouch of water with me tonight. Perhaps the svartálfar are indeed watching out for us.

  . . .

  [7]I bring handfuls of rings with me now, the small ones you gave to me, that your father had given you when you were a boy. In the morning when I wake to find three strips of dry deer meat, I eat them and leave a ring, shining dully against the brown grass. When I return at sunset, the ring is gone.

  . . .

  There is not always food, and my own rings weigh heavily on my wrist-bones and slide off my fingers. I cannot wear the thumb ring anymore, but I tie it about my neck with a strip of wool.

  Kitta tries again, bringing her children whom I’ve always loved. They take my hands and drag at my skirts, pulling me into town to share in the harvest feast. Your mother avoids me, as if she expects me to curse her for not joining my vigil. But I know she has other sons, other daughters, other family to care for who are living.

  I stay until they light the bonfire, throwing offerings of mead and horse blood into the hungry flames. I think of you, as I always am, and close my eyes to pretend you are dancing with your sister and will soon come to me and swing me to my feet for a wild, raucous turn around the fire. We will laugh and spin, and when I stumble you will catch me up and tease me for being clumsy. I will promise to show you my grace when we are alone, and we sneak to the beach, kissing and clutching at each other.

  If there are tears on my cheeks, the hot fire eats them away.

  Kitta’s youngest climbs into my lap and tugs at my braid. I take her grubby hands and whisper stories to her, of sea-dragons and trolls hiding under cliffs, and in all of them, yours is the hero’s name. She falls asleep and I cradle her, leaning my cheek against her hair. I watch others leave the fire ground, and Kitta joins us. She touches my hand, and I turn mine over so she might weave together our fingers. It gives her comfort and buys me more nights at your ship.

  . . .

  I have gifted my dawn-time benefactor with three rings before I ever see him. It is a frosted morning; I wake to find my eyelashes frozen together. I must have cried in my sleep. I cover my face with my mittened hands and breathe into the dark pocket until the tears melt. And I see him.

  He crouches against the large boulder that marks the prow of your ship, and the first silver of dawn reflects off the thin clouds and onto his face. It is Orri Never-Smile, who came here when I was a maid and lives in the forest. He is lordless and will never approach your father for explanation or trial. You said, I remember, that we should be kind to him, for we cannot know what tragedy tore him from his lord and his family. The only clue is the great scar slashing down his face. It pulls the side of his mouth down so that he cannot smile.

  Orri leans on the butt of his great ax and holds up one hand, palm inward. He flexes his fingers, and I see the rings lined up on his smallest like armor. I nod once, slowly, and before he goes Orri taps the ground at his feet.

  I find a small square of meat, and I stare after him. It is pig meat, and Orri must have brought down a wild one all on his own.

  . . .

  [8]He lets me see him now. He haunts the ship field as readily as I do, though there is not always food left at your ship. I catch glimpses of him in the darkness, walking between stones. Does he wait for someone from Hel, too? I notice he has no proper mittens, but only thick woolen ones. So I find the sealskin I meant for yours and spend a week of daylight hours stitching them together. I embroider the edges with thread dyed red, for heat and summer and war. It is a pattern of axes, and I think you would approve.

  He leaves me a leg of rabbit and more roasted nuts, and I leave him the mittens.

  . . .

  It is the darkest hours of the night, one week before the Midwinter sacrifice. I sit with my knees drawn up, sewing abandoned, and stare up at the stars. There are neither clouds nor moon. Only the stars, mirroring the patterns of the barrow field until I wonder if I sit among silver-white boulders and look at the stars, or if I sit among the stars and stare down at the deathships.

  Orri says from the edge of your ship, “I remember the story of Hildr Sweet-Tongue, who won her husband from the hands of Othinn himself. When he died, Hildr waited at his grave for nine months until he appeared. He rode his great horse around and around, smiling at her. When invited to mount, she did, and spent all the time from dusk to dawn riding within his arms. As the sun rose she was again alone, and pined and waited for nine months more until again her husband appeared. From dusk to dawn she rode in his arms, and as the sun rose she was alone. Every nine months she rode with him, neglecting all else in the meantime, until at last her foot touched the earth and she collapsed into bones.”

  I have never heard this story and suspect him of inventing it. But I understand his meaning. So I say, “Orri Never-Smile, what do you do in these woods alone, with no rings but those given by a widow?”

  His lips twist, and I do not know if it is anger or humor they try to convey, because it is too dark now to read in his eyes.

  I touch the ground beside me. Orri comes and sits. “You are Geira Silver Hair, from the land of the Geats.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why not return to your childhood home?”

  “My home is with my lord.”

  “As is mine.”

  “My husband’s father would accept you, were you to tell him your story.”

  “Whatever it might be?”

  “He is kind.”

  “So I heard, and of his son, too.”

  I remember your gentle smile. “Did you make up the story of Hildr Sweet-Tongue?”

  “I have watched you waste yourself here on this deathship, lady.”

  “No less do you do, a fine warrior without a lord.”

  “They say women are stronger than us, when a lord is lost.”

  You used to tell me I was strong. Practical. Like a thrice-woven rope. But I am unraveled. I say, “It is only six nights to t
he sacrifice. That is when he will come.”

  “Is it?”

  I clench my teeth together and nod. Orri pushes to his feet and leaves me alone.

  . . .

  The day before the sacrifice, I am delivering a basket of ore to the [9]bloomery when I hear a crowd of children run past me, yelling at each other that the wolf has come to see our king.

  I know the wolf they mean, and I drop the iron ore and run after them. I shove through into the great hall, where all the benches and long tables have been pushed against the walls. I join the youngest children and several other women in climbing up onto the tables so that we can see over the heads of the warband. I could take my place beside your mother, who stands behind your father in his thick throne, but I have given that right up these long weeks.

  Lifting a girl—Jofast, her name is—onto my hip, I stretch to see the back of the hall better. A man kneels before your father, and he is speaking. His hair is braided in seven thick ropes and tied together with leather, and his clothes are old but clean. I see your mittens tucked into his belt.

  Orri Never-Smile tells his story, and I hear pieces of it, that he was sworn to Alfarin Stone-Skin and they sailed over the eastern sea to Daneland to ally with a king there and fight against a Frankish clan raiding northward. I missed how they were split, but he fought with all his spirit and arrived back at his lord Stone-Skin to find him far dead. Orri’s scar was won during the vengeance quest, at which he also failed. His lord’s killer died of a sweating sickness, and so Orri had no blood nor rings to bring home to the kith and kin of Alfarin Stone-Skin. His only recourse was to wander as the wolves and pray he might find a ring-giver willing to forgive his failings.

  Your father offers him his ring-sword and welcomes him.

  Jofast wriggles out of my grasp, and I do not move as the mead-cup is passed and the war-band recognizes their new brother. I do not move as the boasting begins, a night early. I imagine you standing beside me, glad of the merriment and feasting, looking forward as you always did to the sacrifice and the drinking. Your warm hand presses my cold skin, and I curl up my fingers wishing for the weight of rings upon them.

  I do not move even when the fire is low, when the poem-singer stands forth and recites for us all. Orri is seated at your father’s feet, and he finds me in the crowded shadows. He finds me and holds out his hand again, palm-inward. He flexes his fingers, and I see the glint of my rings on his smallest. Below it, circling his wrist, is a new, larger arm ring of twisted copper that your father has given.

  . . .

  Outside and alone, I run to the barrow field. I stand at the prow of your ship as the sun dips away. Tonight is the sacrifice. Tonight you will come, if you are to come. I watch the last light tug at the crystals hidden inside some of the boulders. I stare and stare and then, just before the light vanishes, I turn my back to the [10]death-ship, and I [11]walk steadily towards the hall .

  THE LAST DAY OF SPRING

  by Maggie Stiefvater

  This story makes me desperate to know where it came from. I want to [1]pin Maggie down and ask her all the most annoying questions about inspiration and muses, then take the story back to college and write an essay about time and sex and god and death. It’s about all my favorite things, but in a way it would never occur to me to write it. —Tessa

  [2]We’re such products of our surroundings. It’s not just where we grow up or what sort of people we are, but things that are specific to our species: how long we live, how far our eyes are from the ground, the fact that we see color, the fact that we cannot fly. If you change any one of these variables, so much of our culture suddenly fails to satisfy our needs. This story is about me removing one [3]Jenga block from the tower—our life span—and trying to see what shape the collapsed pile is afterward. —Maggie

  [4]The Papillons had ruled the spring for as long as I could remember. We were always told not to touch them, because it would hurt.

  “Them?” I asked my mother. “Or us?”

  I was tiny back then, a paper-thin facsimile of a boy, no hint of my almost epic height to come. My mother was in the long, thin cotton sweater that she wore every day—or at least in my memory she did—and she tugged my slender hand to guide me around a flock of them. “What a silly question, Mark.”

  It was the first warm day of spring, and the Papillons had come out in flocks. Beautiful and shining and resplendent, no sign of the unformed creatures they’d been in their cocoons. They were clustered in Persephone’s two parks and around the trees that lined the streets, caught in the flowers that grew in the highway median and in each other’s hair.

  Annoyed that she hadn’t really answered my question, I said hello to one of them.

  “Hello,” the Papillon said back, brightly, his hair on fire with the sun and his smile alight with the sight of me. The Papillon loved children, the same way we loved them. I wondered if they’d been told not to touch us as well.

  “Mark,” said my mother disapprovingly, not bothering to whisper.

  “Mom,” I said back. I was always brave when it was just words.

  “What did I just tell you?”

  “Talking is not touching,” I replied.

  Mom jerked my arm, leading me away from the red-haired Papillon. “It’s close enough. I’m going to tell your father you’ve been trouble today, and then what do you think will happen?”

  I looked over my shoulder at the Papillon. He was singing to a group of girl Papillons, the simple delight of his face transformed to something more urgent.

  My mother hadn’t answered my question, so I didn’t answer hers either.

  . . .

  I didn’t see much of the Papillons next spring because my parents enrolled me in a Catholic school. Not only was I in school every day—and the Papillons, of course, didn’t go to school—but I was also in Mass twice a week, and if there was one place Papillons definitely didn’t go, it was into churches.

  “Is it because they’re demons?” I asked my mother once.

  “No,” she said. “Ask the nuns.”

  So I asked Sister Therese, and she told me they were animals or angels or something in between, and I didn’t need to worry about much other than their general lack of soul. There would be no Papillons in heaven.

  “Will there be butterflies in heaven?” I asked her.

  “Possibly,” she allowed. She liked me and knew I liked insects, so I’m sure she thought she was being kind.

  [5]The Papillons, as their name suggested, were very like insects. What else hatched from cocoons and lived for only three days? I persisted, “Then why not the Papillons?”

  Her lips parted and then pressed together again, twice, and finally, she said, “Because they are made in the image of God, Mark, and they choose to deny it.”

  Later that day, I tried to persuade one of the Papillons, a girl still shimmery and damp from emerging, to go into the empty church with me. She let me take her hand, and I stood there for a moment, thrilling to the illicitness of it—touching a Papillon, four feet from a church. Her hand was like a bird in mine; I could feel the bones through her smooth, damp skin, and it didn’t weigh anything at all. It was very, very warm, and her pulse tapped against me at the base of her palm.

  “Your hand is so cold,” she told me.

  “Actually, yours is hot,” I said. She had brilliantly rich hazel eyes, very large and round, like those small dogs that you’re afraid of breaking. I was filled with the need to get this particular Papillon into heaven after she died.

  “Well, it’s still a hand,” she said. “Both of them, I mean.”

  It was true. There was nothing really to distinguish her as a Papillon aside from her pale skin, not old enough to have a tan, and her long, long hair, laying against her back like new butterfly wings.

  “You should come into the church,” I said. “God’s in there, and I want Him to see you.”

  “I’m not supposed to,” she said. “They said it would hurt.”

&nbs
p; “It’s not that bad. Only if the homily is really long.”

  She grinned at me. “I’m not that good at sitting still.”

  It was such an ordinary, human exchange. I had expected her to sound more like an insect. More like a child. My eight-year-old self suddenly realized that he was holding the hand of an adult, an adult halfway between birth and death, and I lost my nerve. I released her hand and ran. I was a coward.

  . . .

  [6]Three years later, it was cold for the Papillons, and most of them died before they ever lived; frozen, dried corpses inside papery cocoon coffins. The ones that did emerge were hungrier than they had been in previous years, and though they were fewer, it seemed they were everywhere.

  [6]That year, I learned a new word for Papillons: whore.

  . . .

  By the time I was in college, both the Papillons and I were well-managed. Some city dignitary had come up with the idea of shelters with glass roofs, and now there were fewer gruesome mornings after late frosts. My parents had realized that the only way I would stay in college was if they took away my car and gave me an apartment. Now there were fewer gruesome mornings after final exams.

  So we all had a roof over our heads.

  It was spring semester; classes were just beginning to grow odious, and the weather broke. So, like every year, it was simply this: one morning they weren’t there, and then they were.

  As a college student the Papillons offered me a different sort of entertainment than they had when I was a boy. The further I was from childhood, the easier it was to tell which day they were on. Day one: birth, discovery, innocence. Day two: the frantic search for other Papillons, the mad desire to pursue and be pursued. Day three: the weaving of new cocoons and then the countdown to death.