Black Bottle

It was because she had been so strong that the one instance of her crying forever echoed in Sena’s head.

The moments had crystallized. It was as if she was still there. She could replay the sequence endlessly: remember Aislinn dragging her toward docks cobbled out of stone and oxidized metal plates found long ago above the salt flats, where some goliath machine had been cannibalized.

Eerie, alien-looking apertures not quite suitable for human frames had been reinvented as arches beneath the wharf. Remnants of odd markings and irregular rivets still rusted across vast sections of tramontane metal. A bolt the size of a rowboat rested on its side above the piers. Scavenged a hundred years ago from something now covered over, it had long been the symbol of Greenwick Harbor.

The boards by the ocean were slippery and dark, anchored to the ancient perversion of metal and crusted with whitening barnacles. Spidery orange thewick crabs scuttled helter-skelter.

Aislinn’s cold hand gripped Sena by the elbow. Sena remembered the feel of her arm flapping over her head like a flag as her mother pulled her toward smells mixed by waves.

Back in the center of the village, the clock tower glowed; its illuminated face displayed the hours the two of them had been charitably allowed. Now Aislinn sought passage to the mainland while the town growled, no longer welcoming with its shops of cinnamon and fish.

Tenwinds’ courtrooms had debarred Sena but they had swallowed her mother. For endless hours—for days it seemed—Sena had been sequestered in hallways where squares of light inched over walls devoid of decoration. She had listened to solemn adult voices seep under doors until the droning had put her to sleep, head on her doll, alone on the hardwood floors.

Now, as her mother marched her down to the docks, her strongest memories were of Shamgar Wichser, the somber-faced admiral-mayor whose shadow emphasized the question mark of her father’s body dangling in Tenwinds’ square.

The coast was wintry. The pebbles crowned in ice. Out of season for a trip to the mainland.

She could feel the fear pouring out of her mother’s palm as cold sweat, a clammy toxin Sena absorbed through the skin. It made her six-year-old heart bang like a caged finch.

Together, they boarded a long dark shape lit with rows of golden lights floating in the harbor. Its iron sails snapped. Smoke retched into thin icy air. Her nose felt like a lump of clay. She looked back at her home as the vessel pulled away. The sodden gray buildings seemed to share her sadness; sparse leafless trees clutched the sinking sun like a bright fruit, a gift if only she would come back.

Sena never went back. Her mother took her to Mirayhr.

What Sena brought with of her father was his curly blond hair and an infectious smile. “The spitting image,” her mother always said. For a while, Sena still sang the nonsense song, “Daddy, Daddy I love you. Like an oyster- oyster I do-do-do.” But days and weeks choked it slowly until the melody disappeared.

Aislinn’s name sounded cold, like one of those olden cities gone beneath the Loor. But even though her voice often matched the temperature of her name, Sena loved her. At least until they reached the mainland.

There, love was something the Sisterhood snipped into usable squares. The Sisterhood patched itself with love conscripted from its members: to bolster the organization, to control its enemies, to bait, seduce and kill.

At Skellum, Sena drew pictures in class of her mother and her, holding hands. She wrote in large inept letters above their circle-smiling heads, Mamma and Me. But when the preceptress discovered the drawings, Sena received seven lashes with a ruler across the wrist.

“You do not love your mother. You love the Sisterhood.”

Seven strokes across the wrist and when Sena cried: one across the lips. It had happened several times.

Sena slowly realized that none of the other girls had mothers. They slept in the nursery under the watchful eye of an Ascendant. But that difference between herself and the other girls ended when the Coven Mother, Megan, ordered Sena from Aislinn’s care. It was necessary, Megan said, for Sena to focus on her studies.

Sena was a good pupil despite—or perhaps because of her anger.

She learned quickly to recognize weakness. She was instructed vigorously in the arts of sex, manipulation and murder. All this, the Coven Mother claimed, was necessary for strengthening the Houses. For preparation of the war.

“What is the war?” Sena asked her mother one day while sharing a rare lunch on Parliament’s lawn. They had taken off their shoes and Sena had just realized that they had identical toes.

“Shh—” Her mother’s eyes had scanned the lawn without any movement of her head. “There is no war. Megan thinks it’s our business to protect the world from myths. She takes it far too seriously.”

“But aren’t you friends with Megan?”

“I try to be, baby-girl. But you know, we’re here because we have no place else to go. And never tell anyone that. That’s just between you and me.”

“I won’t, Mamma.”

In the end there were no bonds strong enough, not even between mother and daughter, to prevent the Sisterhood’s relentless training from tearing them apart. And finally, at long last, Sena realized that she hated her mother for bringing them both to Mirayhr: a dichotomy that ever after haunted her when Aislinn was found guilty of faron—the betrayal—and sent to Juyn Hel to burn.

And so …

Following in her mother’s footsteps, Sena had looked for companionship outside the Circles of Ascension, beyond Houses One through Eight. She had not done it out of desire for love (because love’s stuffing and toy-sized springs had been broken long ago) but out of rebellion. Out of hatred for the Sisterhood, she had warmed Tynan’s bed. And Caliph’s.

*   *   *

SHE looked at the double keel shell lined with tubercles that reminded her so vividly of a shattered childhood by the sea. The shell’s silver-indigo curves of gleaming carbonate had been anchored to the floor. Thick bolts held it upside down, foot in the air, diaphanous pink tentacles flailing like a bed of leeches. It was very much alive. The tentacles looked inexpressibly soft. Yet parlous.

Sena came to it naked with her hair pinned up. The hair on your neck is fine as a gosling, Nathaniel whispered.

She ignored him and straightaway eased into the pudding of tentacles, leaning forward until she lay on her stomach, fully cupped in their gentle tossing motion.

The sensation was pleasant and strange as the watery pink arms oozed over her chest, abdomen and thighs.

Are you proud of yourself for evading me? What did you tell him while you were alone in the tincture?

To help block him out, Sena thought about the Pplarians who knew the road before her. They had come down from the sky, stranded here eons ago. Put here, they said, as a punishment. They knew about the Yillo’tharnah. The Pebella of the Pplar had heard the rumors out of Stonehold, like everybody else. Unlike everybody else, the Pebella put stock in those rumors and had invited Sena to the Pplar for an audience.

When she had seen the markings on Sena’s skin the Pebella had tasked a group of Pplarians already in Isca City with the construction of the temple on Incense Street.

Why?

Not because they worshiped her. The Veydens worshiped her. The Lua’groc worshiped her in their horrible outlandish way. But the Pplarians? The Pplarians felt sorry for her. They had seen this bargain made before. The Yillo’tharnah rising from sleep, seducing Their “chosen one” with the not-quite-promise of freedom, the tantalizing false hope of escape.

The Pplarians had assured her of this: that the way was false, that the Yillo’tharnah had never failed to catch Their prey after the prey had foolishly set Them free.

“You are in a trap,” the Pebella had told her. Yul and the rest had vigorously agreed. “It is better not to free Them. You will fail as every other Sslia has. Under Their power, your ambit will be broken, the Lua’groc will have their sacrament of flesh and the Abominations will entomb your soul.”

“But I have the Gringling’s notes,” Sena had said.

To which the Pebella had answered nothing but told her servants, “Give the Sslia what help she needs.”