Once There Was: Chapters 12–18

“There are,” she said in a voice soft with reverence and awe, “other witches.”

One fateful day, a band of marauders rode out of the desert and attacked the town.

Here the men had adorned themselves with the jewelry of the villagers.

She brought me to a meeting room with a window overlooking the sprawling Menagerie campus.

At the barrack, a friendly, matronly woman led me to a simple, clean bedroom on the second floor.

They wheeled the manticore into the operating theater on a gurney the size of a formal dining table.

She was sedated, and her legs were pinioned to the gurney with leather straps, all her toes exposed and shaved clean of fur.

A bramble of surgical lamps on jointed armatures hung down from the lighting apparatus, a giant spider made of steel and light.

He wore green scrubs and a surgical mask and cap, and he stood at the head of the table as several other masked and scrubbed men and women bustled around him, moving machinery into place, fussing over surgical tools, responding to the doctor’s succinct orders in hushed voices.

Dr. Batiste was almost comically short compared to his assistants, but their constant movement combined with his assured stillness made them seem almost invisible, while he seemed nearly as powerful and imposing as the thing on the table.

At one end of the operating theater, Horatio Prendergast was donning a surgical mask.

Today we’ll be performing amputations of the first through the fifth distal phalanges on each of the patient’s paws.

After the initial incision, we will cauterize the wound, remove the bone, and then close the wound with stitches.

I brought it over and showed it to Horatio, pointing wordlessly to the place where the claw had grown back, twisted and gnarled, into the bone.

The sound of splitting bones echoed inside my skull. I tasted raw blood and wet marrow in my mouth. I felt flesh pop and cartilage crumple between my teeth.

Reeling away, sick, I staggered to a corner of the room, out of her immediate line of sight.

Her teeth vanished beneath the smooth veneer of her mask.

Then, as the sedative spread, it all became gummy, soft and vanishing like tallow being poured down a drain, until all I felt was a swimming gray nothingness.

I’ve always abhorred chaos, ever since I was young. A messy bedroom, a class full of unruly students. At best, these things made me uncomfortable. At worst, they terrified me.

I was young and idealistic. I thought everyone wanted the same things I did. I thought I was building a tool that would help scientists make the world a better place.

He paused, a bitter, rueful smile on his face.

When I got home, Malloryn was positioning a number of small, smooth stones on the floor to match a diagram in one of her witchy books.
“Scrying spell. I’m just practicing. You have to—”

“Perigee,” she said, motioning to the moon rising behind the hills.

She looked back at the picture, muttered something under her breath, then drew a cross with one finger over Armand Gelsin’s dour face.

He was young and proud and brash and full of mysteries and closer to his death than he realized.

He had a straight D average, and would probably, through the magic of nepotism and money, still end up at an Ivy.

Grace made a point to glower at anyone who stared at us, which greatly reduced the number of people staring at us.

But now she was watching me, and she was breathing, inhaling and exhaling, her body expanding and contracting like a rib cage, the f-shaped slits on both sides of the strings working the air like gills.

After a moment, she craned her neck up, revealing dark, lean sinews and veins behind the fingerboard, descending into a sort of clavicle where it met the body.

If I palpated, it gave. She didn’t seem bothered by my touch.

His arm, the one holding the bow, became languid, graceful.

It almost sounded like birdsong, like the joyful afternoon chirps of a canary.
I thought for a moment of Horatio’s menagerie, of the faeries and their songs, and for some reason a chill ran up my spine.

As my fingers touched her whorled, wood-grain skin, I could feel something like blood racing just beneath the surface, a tiny stomach sated, a strange little heart flush with excitement.

I began looking more closely at the other shoppers as they passed me, trying to see if one of them would meet my gaze, give me a signal. None did, and soon I found myself joining their sullen death march from shop to shop.

They give you a charter, and that’s your work. Me, they gave me this place.

King Yazdegerd the Unjust, Shahanshah of the old Persian empire of Eranshahr, once received a royal visit from an emissary of the regent emperor of China.

Accompanying the emissary were two majestic and ferocious lion-dogs—beasts with massive heads and powerful bodies, and whiskers that curled like waves, and manes like flames.

They were unlike anything the shah had ever seen before, and he was captivated.

The shah, ever a good host, commanded his court do whatever was necessary to bring it back to health. One of his viziers had heard rumors of a certain falconer from the forests of Hyrcania, which lie between the Alborz Mountains and the Caspian Sea.

The falconer was swiftly executed. The king sent for the falconer’s daughter as well, because one can never be too careful where summary execution is concerned.