Strange Creatures Read online

  Dedication

  I couldn’t decide whose book this was

  And then I realized I wrote it for

  The girl I never was,

  The boy I almost wasn’t,

  And the person who survived them both.

  I dedicate this book to myself.

  (Does that seem bold to you? Vain?

  Do you wish I’d given it to you instead?

  Fine. Here. Take it.

  I wrote it for you, too.

  To show you that if you live through this,

  Then someday you can tell the story

  You’d hoped your whole life to find

  Every time you turned a page.

  Bring it to me then. So I might tuck myself in

  With your book. Yours.

  My story’s been told. I’m done with it—

  But the world can always use

  More books that are honest, strange

  And true.)

  Epigraph

  I knew he was in danger

  because he was both the egg

  and the one who cracked it —

  —Jessica Fisher

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Epilogue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part II

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Part III

  Part IV

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Part V

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Part VI

  Across the Vast Salt Sea

  Dramatis Personae

  About the Author

  Books by Phoebe North

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Epilogue

  EVERY MORNING ANNIT woke at dawn, while the two moons were still low against the horizon. Alone, she built her fire from the wood she’d gathered the evening before. Alone, she ate her meager breakfast, scraped her plates clean, dressed. There had been a time when she’d worn steel, a time when twin swords had dangled from her leather belt. If her men had doubted she had the strength to don her surcoat and arms, they never mentioned it. Speak ill of the Emperata, they whispered to one another, and she’ll cut off your tongue.

  She had never cut off a man’s tongue. That had been petty gossip. But she’d cut off other things.

  Now, no more armor. No more swords. The only weapon she carried was a small stone she’d found the evening before in the creek bed out back, tucked now into her pocket. The only armor she wore? An old tunic, secondhand and patched. A pair of men’s trousers she’d found in someone’s trash bin and her old familiar dragonscale boots. They were her only finery, and they’d been a gift from her brother, a long, long time ago.

  She walked through the village, as she did every day. Today she was alone again, as usual—until she wasn’t. A small boy walked quietly beside her.

  The boy’s hair was a disaster of black snarls. He kept his eyes down as he walked, although on occasion his gaze would dart up to ascertain that the old woman hadn’t gone far. But in fact, the old woman kept pace with the child, matching stride to barefoot stride.

  “I shouldn’t take you past the village edge,” the old woman said at last, as they neared the squalid row of mud-and-thatch houses at the end. “Your mother wouldn’t like it.”

  Annit had been here for fifteen years, at least. She knew every face, had lived here long enough to see some of the babies grow up to have babies of their own. She’d even made a friend or two, like Ijah, the silversmith’s only son, who occasionally traded her a spell for a cookpot or a spoon or some other useful trinket. But she didn’t recognize the wide set of this boy’s eyes or the growl that graced his lips when he replied, “Y’ain’t taking me anywhere. I take myself.”

  The corner of the old woman’s mouth quirked upward in a smile. “You do,” she agreed. “Can’t argue that.”

  And so, Annit began to climb a zigzag path up the side of the mountain, and as she went, she let the boy follow behind.

  Had she ever been so young, so determined? Must have been, once. Her body bore the scars of it. But now she had only shadows of feelings, and none of them mattered. Now she lived a quiet life—a life without hurt or insult. There was no crying. But there was no hot passion, either.

  And once, she had lived a life full of passions. Those vicious arguments with her brother. The spilled blood of a battle, and the celebration that came after. The music of a beautiful girl on a summer’s day. The taste of wild mead on their lips as they joined their bodies together, their lives together, in the days before Annit had made an exile of herself. It had been inevitable. One cannot remove so many body parts without consequences. She knew that, and so she had accepted her fate willingly, and without hesitation.

  And yet she found it pleasant now, after all these years, to have company. The boy’s breath was a steady pulse, joining hers as the air grew thin and they drew close to the top of the mountain. It was on the far side that the old woman found it, her cairn, swaying against the cliff’s edge.

  The pile of stones was enormous—standing nearly twice her height, stacked narrowly at first, and then growing wider, like an enormous egg. And like an egg, it had one smooth side. No instrument in this world could cut a rock or carve a piece of lime with such intention. Now Annit walked to the object’s far edge, feeling over the cliff face for the hole she knew would be there. This close to the structure, she could hear a faint hum on the air—could taste the metallic twang of electricity. It was magic. Hers. But not only hers. Reaching out, she slipped the small stone into the gap. It fit as if it had been carved precisely for this purpose, though she knew it had been shaped by the river. By the water. By the inevitability of time. She stepped away, joining the boy on the path’s edge, crouching low beside him in the grass there, looking at the cairn. Her head was cocked to one side as she considered.

  “No,” she said softly. “It’s still not right.”

  “
What izzit, anyway?” he asked. She laughed a little, a dry, rattly laugh, and shook her head.

  “You might call it a beacon,” she said. She stood. She was looking at it from every angle now, her eyes tracing the smooth edges. There were no holes left in the cairn. Every stone had found its place. “It calls out to other beacons across the world. There are two others. They’re meant to work together. My first love built one, on the shore of the Crystal Sea.”

  “And the third?” asked the boy, wrinkling his nose. She turned to look at him, at the serious face beneath so much dirt.

  “My brother,” she said.

  The two of them were quiet for a moment. Perhaps the boy was thinking about his own brother, if he had one—which he probably did; these village girls whelped children like they were puppies. But if that was the case, the boy said nothing about it. His face was merely a mud-stained, determined mask.

  “D’theirs look the same as yours?” he asked. Annit let out a scoff.

  “No,” she said, a little too sharply. She wasn’t used to speaking to children. She wasn’t used to talking to people, really—but especially children. “Magic isn’t like a knife or a spoon, where one design works best. Their beacons would be of their own making. I have no idea what theirs look like.” She fell silent, realizing, perhaps, that she’d been too harsh with him. When he answered, it was in a hard voice, too.

  “And wot d’they do?” he demanded, standing now, as she had. “These beacons?” He came closer to the cairn, closer to the cliff’s edge. That wild hair had begun to stand on end in the presence of so much magic. He lifted a hand. Almost, but not quite, touching the beacon’s smooth wall.

  “Oh,” Annit said, and she let out a sigh. “It’s supposed to crack open the eternal truth, and then rip a hole in the universe.”

  The boy turned, his hand still raised, and looked at her—eyes like the dots on the bottom of a pair of wide, wild exclamation points.

  “Don’t worry,” she said grimly. Now she reached out, too, and put her hand against the cairn. She closed her eyes so she could better feel the hum of their music. Her own music. Her lover’s. Her brother’s. The three songs were almost, but not quite, a chorus. The notes were off-kilter, off-key, and worse—something was still hidden there. Some truth was still occluded. She said, “I built it wrong. It was meant to be magic, but there’s no magic here.”

  That was a lie. There was magic everywhere, in every cell. In the stones, the cliff, the grass, the path. In this boy and his illiterate brain. In the girl who had taught her how to build beacons, stack stones, make art—so long ago that she’d been practically an illiterate child herself. In her brother, in some distant prison of his own making, a continent or two away from here.

  There was especially magic there. It had been there from the beginning—undeniable. It was still there, through the miles that stretched between them. The magic that bound them. The magic that had set them, years and years ago, out on this adventure. And yet it wasn’t the magic she had wanted. She had wanted to capture something, to destroy something, to make something new. And she hadn’t, not yet. When she put her hand against the cairn, she felt how feeble it was. She could sense, though she could not see, small gaps between the stones. Imperfections. The truth was invisible to her. The door was closed. The door would never open, unless she made a choice.

  She opened her eyes.

  “Tell me, child, what do you want with me? Some spell to bring your mother back from the dead?”

  “Mother ain’t dead, either. Not yet, anyway.” He finally dropped his hand to his side. And then he looked back down at his bare toes, and how they wormed through the sun-warmed dirt.

  “I could teach you how to heal her,” the old woman said. The boy’s eyes didn’t brighten. And why should they? Who should blame him for not wanting to carry the burden of his mother’s life—or death? But something still sparked inside that stormy gaze. Hunger. “Or I could show you something else.”

  “Wot?” the boy demanded, looking up then. Looking hard. He was so starved for it. She was, too.

  Annit considered what it might cost. She would have to squander this meager, peaceful existence. Still, there had been time enough for peace already. Magic seared through her, and had from the very beginning—no matter how long she’d tried to deny it. She only had to build something better this time. Something right. Something true.

  Her hand was still against the beacon. The metallic taste of magic was in her mouth. And then, just like that, she swallowed it down. She pushed her weight against the cairn’s wall. It sounded almost like the start of rain at first—one small stone dropping, then the next. Plop plop plop. But then suddenly there was a crash and rumble of rock down the mountain. That zap of magic went silent, like a candle going out.

  The look on the child’s face made it all worth it: wide-eyed horror.

  “What’dya do?!” he cried out.

  Annit just laughed. “Child,” she said, “it’s only stone. We’ll build another beacon. One that works properly this time.”

  “An’ your brother? An’ your first love?”

  Annit shrugged her thin, elderly shoulders.

  “If there’s any magic in them—and I think there is—then they’ve got work ahead of them, too.”

  “But how will they know?” he whimpered, his chin shaking. “They’re so far away! And ’snot like you told them you was gonna do that!”

  Her brow lowered. Well, the child had a point there. Still, they’d never needed words before. She particularly had never had to tell her brother a thing. When they’d been children, they’d spoken without speaking, traded secrets with a glance. Surely now, after all these years, their magic would be sufficient. Annit shrugged her age-worn shoulders, ignoring the doubts that the child had made creep in.

  “They’ll manage,” she said simply. But the boy wasn’t comforted by this at all.

  “Wot’s the point?” he whispered, and she could see that he was on the verge of tears. So soft, so easily defeated. “All those years, all those stones, only to have to build it over?”

  Annit sighed. She held out her hand to him. He wiped his nose against his sleeve, snuffled. Took her hand in his.

  “Child,” she said. “I’ve learned so much since I’ve come here. Now, maybe I can tell the whole story, from beginning to end, or near to it. Now, maybe . . .” She trailed off, unable to finish the thought. Because it wasn’t only up to her, was it? It would take all three of them—three different perspectives, three different stories, three different cairns. No, no. Her math was wrong. They would need six altogether, if they managed to build them again. But if they did it right, then the three of them, together, would be able to reveal something new. Something magical.

  The truth.

  “And then?” the boy demanded. She turned away from the heap of rock, from the dust that swirled in the air, no magic in it at all.

  “And then we’ll open up the gate and get ourselves out of this muddy shithole,” she said in a singsong. He looked at her, his eyes back to two pools of surprise again, but there was something new there this time. The hint of a wicked grin.

  “Come, child,” she said, leading him down the path. “You have much to learn. And I have work to do.”

  Together, his small hand in her age-spotted hand, the old woman and the boy began to walk down the mountain.

  I

  People often ask me how I got my start. They lick their lips, lean forward in their chairs, adjust the microphones that are pinned to their lapels. I’m old enough now to understand the score: what they really want to know is how magic works, and if there is a tiny bit of it that they can steal.

  What they don’t realize is that they’re asking the wrong question. They shouldn’t be asking about me at all. If they really want to understand beginnings—if they really want to understand magic—then they need to be asking about Jamie. James Michael [Redacted]. My brother.

  He’s the one who started it all.


  1

  EMPERATA ANNIT WASN’T BORN, AND she was never truly an infant. At least not that she could recall. To Annit, the first memory was this: coming to life in the mudluscious bottom of the River Endless, as all Feral Children do, gasping and getting a mouthful of sludge and water, green.

  The mermaids had wanted her for themselves, but Annit never belonged to anybody except herself. Still, she felt desperate hands grasping at her shoulders and toes and ears. Annit thrashed against them, fighting to reach the pale light of the surface. When she landed on the sodden shore, there were still the marks of nails over her bare belly, like a dozen long, hungry mouths.

  The children came to greet her. They’d been waiting, aimless and empty without her. The days, the endless, listless summer days, had piled up like a cairn on the shore. But here she was, perfect: a girl, her hair a tangled mane of algae and mud.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked, scowling.

  Torn apart. That’s what my brother called it. He believed in our magic right from the start. According to Jamie, we weren’t two identical souls, but one soul housed in two bodies. We could only be our true selves when we were together; and because we were inherently together on the inside, in the places that mattered, we could never really be alone.

  September 26 was Jamie’s first birthday. It was also the day that I was born. Jamie always claimed he remembered it with crystal clarity. In the moment before, Aunt Jennifer turned out the light in the dining room, and Jamie, in his high chair, in the momentary darkness, was filled with a yawning sense of dread. He said he always felt that way back then—but this was sharper. Even as Gram and Poppy began to sing and the candle on his cupcake flickered, he felt the blackness encroach on him. A squeezing nothing. He worried, as someone blew the candle out for him, that the doom might swallow him whole.

  But then the light came on, and in the second that it took for our dining room to return to its ordinary sallow color, something inside my brother shifted. Snapped into place. Exploded, too. In that moment, he was abruptly made right.

  Because in that moment, he knew, I was born. A sister. Annie—the name he’d helped Mom and Dad pick from their baby name book by waving his chubby hands at exactly the right moment that Mom’s hand alighted on exactly the right name. It meant gracious, he later told me. Merciful. Most important, in Hebrew, it meant prayer.