Summer in Orcus

by T. Kingfisher

she sometimes thought that it would be nice to have a brother or a sister, not because she particularly liked other children but because it would have been nice to have somebody to share the burden of her mother’s love. If there had been two of them, maybe they could have taken turns. Surely her mother wouldn’t have the energy to keep barging in on both of them in the bathtub.

“You’re dangerously ignorant, girl,” she said. “It is not your fault at the moment, though if you grow much older, it will be.”

No one knows where I am, she thought, except the weasel. No one is expecting me to be somewhere. No one is going to come looking for me if I don’t arrive. She took another sip of water. She knew that she should be afraid—and she was, a little—but also she felt…free.

She told herself this sternly several times and then wanted to cry, because it doesn’t help to yell at people who are cold and wet, even when the person yelling at you is you.

For one horrible moment, Summer felt as if she had gone down to the secret chamber of her heart and found her mother writing on its walls.

It is a great relief, when one has thrown away normal life in search of their heart’s desire, to know that one is doing it right and isn’t going to get yelled at for going the wrong way.

“Oh, well, albatrosses.” Reginald flipped his wing. “Prophets and poets, the lot of them. Not bad-hearted, but you ask one the time of day and he tells you time is an illusion, and how is that getting anything done?”

“It was only a tree,” whispered Summer, feeling as if she were stabbing herself in the stomach with the words. Only a tree. “And you are only a girl,” said the Forester, “and Reginald is only a bird and I am only…what I am. We are all still worth saving.”

“Saving a single wondrous thing is better than saving the world. For one thing, it’s more achievable. The world is never content to stay saved.”

There were too many sorrows in the world. She thought that if she felt any one too deeply, she might drown in it.

“Let them look,” said Glorious. “My hide is not so raw that another’s eyes can scar it.”

It was too fast. Huge irrevocable things should not be allowed to happen so fast! It didn’t make any sense that people were allowed to betray you and tie you up and throw you over a horse-monster before you had time to think.

She wished she’d paid more attention to the number of people at the OK Corral, or that her school hadn’t wasted so much time on vocabulary words when teaching history and had spent a little more time on important things, like how many people you needed to keep a land terrorized for a hundred years.

“He thinks he’s a great deal smarter than he is. Assumes that just because he’s angry at the world, he could understand my anger.” She tossed her head and her horns hissed through the air like swords. “He wants the world to burn and I want to dance on the ashes, so he thinks that we are alike. But hate and chaos aren’t the same thing. Occasionally, I see fit to remind him of that.”

Come from a race of angels and about the only thing you can be is a devil.”

Lying in bed that night, Summer put her face in the pillow and cried for the horror that was over and the fact that she was safe again, but also for the antelope woman and chances lost, a chance that might have been different, or better, or wonderful.

Perhaps you should not have that skill at your age, but the world is unfair, and sometimes we must use that unfairness to our advantage.” She rocked back and forth. “It would be a good day for the world if I could not find a child who knew terrible adult things. But I will be a great deal older before that day comes, I think.”