Dust

Fluttering, into a spiral toward the treetops, ice-sheathed fingers reaching, brittle splintering as she fell among them. Pinion folded around her, cushioned her fall, so the impacts of shattering branches that would have also shattered her bones only knocked the wind out of her.

At the bottom of the tree, she sprawled in the snow, gasping. Pinion folded about her, as if to protect her from the cold, and she shrieked and shoved at the shadowy wings. 'Get of me. Get off!'

They gave under her clawing and pushing. They folded open. She'd seen a photograph of a falcon's wingprint in snow, elegant and perfect, each feather showing clean and sharp as a razor cut, blood at the center from a kill.

When she arose, this would not look like that.

She rocked forward, rolled onto her knees. Her breath flowed around her face on the still air. The parasite wings weighed almost nothing, but she felt them stir—in the wind, or with their own will. Meltwater soaked through her knees. Her hands ached in their bones from the cold. She heard shouts and crashing, but distant still.

And then Pinion caressed her face on the right side, and someone said, like an echo ...

—Perceval.—

She shot to her feet, snow creaking under her boots, and stood in the silence of the forest, arms spread, breathing hard.

—My love.—

'Who are you?' Whispered, at first, ragged on a gasping breath. And then, when there was no answer, louder, a soldier's demand. 'Who are you?'

—One who will protect you. One who will keep you always safe.—

'Get off me,' she said. She grabbed at the wings and hauled on them, but here, on the ground, they were not constrained to an aerodynamic shape. Pinion melted away under her fingers, slipping like water through the gaps, and she was left back-arched, scrabbling after smoke. 'Who are you, damn you?'

—Pinion.—

The name a breath across her cheek. Wings and chains, she thought. 'Rien named you that. Who are you?'

—It is my only name.—

She would get a lawyering parasite. 'Mutant. What are you?'

—Nothing named me. 1 am a messenger. 1 come from dust.—

The footsteps crunching closer. Cries, lights, sounds of floundering. She heard Tristen cursing the snow. Rien called her name. 'Here!' she called back, and Pinion fanned and flared around her, like a cloak caught by the wind, like a falcon mantling its kill.

'Dust?' It sounded religious to her. We come from dust. We are Stardust. We are dust in the wind.

Were these not words from ancient hymns?

—Dust sends his love for you, Sir Perceval. And his antici' pation of the wedding. I am your guard and warden. 1, Pinion. His wedding gift.—

She gagged. 'Get off me.'

—I shall not.—

But then Tristen burst through the trees, running toward her, his skin and hair lost against the snow. Behind him, running in his footsteps, Rien, with her basilisk companion swimming heavily through the air alongside. And ranged behind them, Benedick and his militia, a staggered search line to find her among the trees. Perceval turned to Tristen, held her hands out, pleading. She had not plead with Ariane, but Tristen ... she did not believe that Tristen meant her harm.

'Get them off,' she said. 'The wings, you have an un-blade. Tristen, get them off me now.'

He stopped, a controlled sliding some five meters away. There came a ratcheting sound from her back; the shadows all stretched away. Tristen flinched in the sudden light.

Pinion opened like a flower—four wings, six, nine—all of them alight in stark blue radiance and folded forward, bent on Tristen as if he were the focus of a parabolic dish. The light shone brightest from their razor edges.

They gleamed with the will to do murder.

Tristen spread his hands. He held that silly boot knife in the left one. He said, 'It's shattered, Perceval.'

'You carry it. The stump still has an edge. Get them off me.'

'I could have cut free of the corridor were that so.'

Rien drew up behind, stepped to his right side, away from the knife. Gavin fluttered down to a branch beside her. And Benedick arrived on Tristen's left, leaving him plenty of room to swing that blade. 'You're asking him to cripple you. Again.'

'It's better to be crippled and free.'

But Pinion hissed, if you could name it so—the rasp of feather on feather, the scraping of blade on blade.

'Perceval,' Rien said. 'I don't think that thing is going to let us get close enough.'

Perceval could not be crying, because Perceval did not cry. But something shining froze on her face as she strode at the center of the group, her parasite wings flared about her like a nest of barbs. She looked severe and resolute— no one could look pale, standing next to Tristen—and Rien admired her desperately.

Such a strange being. Such a strange thing, having a sister. Being a sister. And even stranger, to be a sister to such a sister as this.

And to have a father, Rien forced herself to think, watching Benedick's glossy black hair swing as he broke trail through the snow. That, she was entirely unready for. As unready as she was to be Exalt, or lugging Hero Ng around between her ears.

All Benedick's men and women arrayed about them, some following and some cast out on the sides, many bear' ing lanterns so they made a jeweled procession. For now, Rien could distract herself with the texture of an alien night and the cold trees, ice and snow and the stars smeared behind a frosty sky.

'What is the cold for?...' she asked. The lights that must illuminate Benedick's house shone between bare trees, casting confusing shadows.

He turned to her, and the word Sir died on her lips, though he seemed to feel no lack. 'Apples and cherries,' he said. 'You've tasted some?'

'Yes, sir.'

She managed that small coin of respect this time, and even managed not to squeak. But all she purchased with it was a frown—concern, or disapproval?

'Well,' he said, with a half-smile to Tristen that Rien thought she was not meant to notice, after the fashion of adults before children and Exalt before Mean, 'a lot of sweet things grow in the cold. Temperature differentials promote air exchange. And what good is the world to anyone if, when it brings us safe to another Earth, we have forgotten how to live on the ground?'

'Another Earth.' Funny how Tristen's voice—nasal, a bit rough still though regaining its strength—had the power to comfort her.

'You're not a Go-back, brother?'

Tristen shook his head, his white hair shedding snowflakes as if it were made of snow itself. 'The only way out is through.'

Gavin, who had been cruising in circles about the group, passed over Rien's head, his wings dusting snow from evergreen boughs. Rien stepped to the side, dodging a face-full of frozen water, wondering how it was manufactured. If she were to be Exalt, one of these arrogant cryptic beings, it seemed unfair that she did not have wings.

And then with deep shame she thought of Perceval. But Benedick and Tristen weren't all that different from their siblings, were they? They decided for others with perfect high-handedness. They were only more polite to Perceval than they would have been to some random Mean.

As if Rien's thoughts could command her as easily as Tristen did, Perceval cleared her throat. 'And all that, to remind us how to live on a planet? So we don't get soft, and too bred to the indoors?'

'All that,' Rien answered, with Hero Ng's authority, 'because it was a trivial exercise for them to do so.'

Benedick grunted. Rien could not tell if it was in respect or dismissal, and she was surprised by the ambiguity