As she finished each one, she kissed the horse between the eyes and touched the point of her knife there, still dark with her own blood.

  When each horse was ready, she went back to the stableyard, sitting down in the dust with her back to the closed doors, and waited.

  She sang, too softly for any ears but her own and the gods’, and waited for the sun to rise. When it was high enough to touch her face, she closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, the stable door opened behind her, and the warriors came out.

  Plausible Deniability

  by Cat & Bari Greenberg

  Speaking of undesirable gift horses, here’s a story about a woman who survived one. Cassandra, as you may know, was cursed by Apollo. She had the gift of prophecy, but his curse made everyone disbelieve her. She told the Trojans not to bring a large hollow wooden horse left by the Greek army inside the city’s walls, but they didn’t listen to her.

  Cat and Bari Greenberg are a married writing team. Bari is an engineer by day and writer by night and this is his publishing debut. Cat was previously published under the name Sandra Morrese (S&S 11, Four Moons of Darkover, and MZB’s Fantasy Magazine) and by day works part-time for a greeting card company. In addition to fiction, they also write filk songs together which are recorded by their band, The Unusual Suspects. They currently have two albums out from their studio, Mountain Cat Media. They live in St. Louis along with four cats and a dog.

  Unfortunately, Bari passed away from a heart attack on August 17, 2014, so he won’t see his story in print, but it’s a part of him that still lives on.

  The queen stalked closer, her face a mask of rage. She gripped an axe still dripping the king’s blood from its ornate blade. The younger woman stood simply watching her. She didn’t run, or cower or scream; there was no point. This was all expected.

  She had warned the king, but of course he hadn’t believed her. No one ever did. But this time, she was pleased he hadn’t listened. For once, the curse had worked in her favor.

  “I am not your enemy, Clytemnestra,” she said quietly, looking the older woman in the eye as the queen raised the axe to strike. “And I am already dead.”

  Queen Clytemnestra paused, held by the younger woman’s steady, direct gaze.

  “I have nothing,” she said. “I am nothing. I have been raped, beaten and held against my will by the same man you just executed. I owe you thanks for that. From where I stand, he got better than he deserved.”

  The Queen’s eyes flickered. This was clearly not the reaction she expected. The axe lowered.

  “Kassandra, Princess of Troia,” she said, “my late husband’s war prize.”

  “Troia is destroyed, my family slain. I no longer have a birthright, or a home.” She kept her eyes locked on the Queen’s as she continued. “I have done you no wrong, nor do I stand here by choice. Am I to blame for Agamemnon’s deeds? I beg of you one mercy: say I am dead and let me go. I wish only to disappear and live out my life in peace and anonymity.”

  Kassandra watched the blind rage leave Clytemnestra’s eyes. The head of the axe lowered slowly to the floor; she then released the handle. The clatter of gilt wood striking marble echoed like judgment through the hall.

  “There has been enough death in this house,” Clytemnestra said. She clapped sharply and a guard appeared. “The king is dead, as is his concubine. This is Eurayle, a servant of the princess. We grant her mercy, but banish her from Mycenae. Escort her out of the city at once.”

  Kassandra bowed deeply, then wrapped her travel cloak tightly about herself, hiding her face and hair, and the fine gown no servant would own, as she followed the guard.

  She was alive. She was free. But free to go where? Do what? Her thoughts skittered like beads spilled on marble. Belatedly, she realized the guard was talking.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “What did you say?”

  “Which way? North gate or south?”

  “I...have no idea. Which direction would you suggest?”

  Did she see pity in his eyes?

  “Go north. There’s been trouble on the south road. A caravan’s heading out. You could buy passage with them.”

  ~o0o~

  Kassandra walked the northern road overwhelmed and dazed by her escape. She’d seen her own death, yet here she was, walking safely away from that grisly fate, although history would say otherwise. That meant the futures she saw could be changed!

  The irony of the name Eurayle did not escape her—it meant “wanders far,” a subtle message from the queen. Which was fine, it matched her fervent desire to leave more than a decade of horror and tragedy far behind. And all because she said no to a god.

  As a priestess of Apollo, Kassandra had learned herb lore and basic healing arts. She was able to barter her skills for a place in the caravan, which had no healer of its own. The days passed in peace and Kassandra felt her previous life fade, marveling at her incredible turn of fortune. She was Eurayle now, who spent her time cataloging the herbs they stocked, determining how much to save and how much could be sold or traded. They stopped in towns for only a few days at a time. She was even learning how to cook.

  A different life, simpler yet more labored, but she embraced it. The Achaeans were not her enemy, only their rulers were. These people had not attacked her city or murdered its citizens. They were good, honest and decent. They didn’t judge her and no one pried into her past.

  ~o0o~

  She’d had no visions since Mycenae and was just beginning to wonder if she might finally be free of Apollo’s so-called gift when she woke with an all too familiar headache.

  Most of her visions began with the same dull ache behind her eyes, then flashed a series of dreamlike images, and ended with slight disorientation. Not this one. It slammed her with a migraine fit to fell a Titan, pitching her into a swirling maelstrom darker than Hades. When the roiling mists dissolved into clouds and parted, she was standing on a pinnacle of rock.

  One side overlooked a wide ridge with a modest acropolis. In the valley on the other side sat a well-kept small town. As she watched the town, it grew until it became a bustling city branching inland from the sea toward the ridge.

  She turned and watched the acropolis grow commensurately magnificent with beautiful polished white stone adorned with colorful frescoes. Throngs of well-dressed pilgrims filled the aisles.

  A blast of wind and dust accompanied an earthquake-like rumble, sweeping through the acropolis. The stones became weathered and grayed, pillars and icons toppled, broken, or smashed, walls and roofs in tumbled down blocks or entirely missing. The place was suddenly dark and deserted.

  She turned to the valley, expecting to see the city equally devastated. It was changed, but to her astonishment, it was not in ruins.

  The city was immense! Buildings of every size filled the landscape. Tall buildings of strange design stretched square fingers, reaching for the distant clouds, glittering with bands of silver between tiles of jeweled stone. Lights gleamed everywhere.

  The dawning sun revealed smooth streets with colorful, enclosed carts darting along without the benefit of oxen or horses. Whooshes and honks unlike any wind or bird susurrated around her. Bewildered, she turned back to the acropolis.

  Throngs of people moved through it again, but not pilgrims. They wore strange clothing of separate pieces, including lower robes that enclosed their legs individually rather than skirting both. There were people of colorations she’d never seen, who must come from lands unheard of.

  She spotted a young Achaean girl clutching a toy, asking questions of her mother. They spoke a tantalizingly familiar mix of dialects with unfamiliar pronunciations. But after a while, she made out enough words to guess more and get the gist of the mother’s answers. Her daughter laughed in bemused delight. It was quite a revelation.

  Mist shrouded everything again, then cleared and she stood surrounded by similar ruins in a lonely bower on a mountain top. The man lying there had a face etched indelibly into her memory, but now it looked gaunt, pale, and anguished. He stretched out an emaciated arm, reaching for something unseen, then collapsed back onto his ancient alabaster chaise. He became translucent, then blurred and transparent, finally dissipating like wisps of steam. Poignant as it was, she couldn’t bring herself to mourn.

  ~o0o~

  Kassandra climbed the steps of a temple to Apollo, a place she never thought she would enter again. It was well past when pilgrims normally arrived and the Pythia, the temple’s High Priestess, tried to block her way.

  “It is late. Come back tomorrow.”

  “No,” she said, brushing past her. She headed for the door of the sanctum, and the Pythia gasped.

  “Impertinent woman! You cannot enter the heart of the temple.”

  The look she turned on the Pythia was implacable.

  “I can, and I will. You have the ear of Apollo? Tell him his prophet awaits his countenance.” She turned as the Pythia sputtered incoherently.

  Her footsteps echoed on the marble floor as she walked the distance to Apollo’s statue. He stood carved in stone, naked, a robe draped across his out-stretched arm. She folded her arms and stood as if she, too, were stone.

  “I’m waiting,” she sent to him, a prayer and a demand.

  The light of the setting sun faded, leaving only the flickering torchlight in their sconces. She half sat, leaning casually against the altar. She kept herself awake, knowing his tactics and what he might try if she dozed off. Finally the statue began to glow, soften, and change until Apollo stood before her in human form. Still naked.

  “Kassandra, how good of you to visit me. I have not heard your lovely prayers in so very long.”

  “I decided to pray only to someone I could trust, and you don’t qualify.”

  “I’m wounded,” he said, placing a hand on his heart, his musical voice soothing and warm. “So why entreat me now?”

  “I bring you a prophecy. It came to me this morning, and I am compelled by your gift to tell you.”

  “A prophecy? About me?” He was positively elated.

  “Oh yes. It was very clear.”

  “Well by all means, do tell.”

  She let her face go completely blank. “Belief fades, and with it so do the gods. Your temples will crumble and your followers abandon their faith. You become a memory, then a legend, and finally, no more than a myth, a story to entertain children. It is then you will fade into oblivion forever.”

  Apollo stared at her a long while before bursting out laughing. “Kassandra,” he chided, “you have become a raving madwoman.”

  She managed the stricken look she’d practiced on the way here.

  “I should be angry at your insolence, dear Kassandra, but I have always been fond of you. So, I forgive you and send you on your way.” He stopped chuckling then and scowled. “But do not push your luck with me, mortal. Leave my presence and never return.”

  She bowed deeply. “As you wish,” she said in her most humble voice. When she rose, Apollo’s statue was again merely stone; the god had departed. She smiled.

  “I had a feeling you wouldn’t believe me.”

  Then Eurayle strode out of the temple and into the first shafts of dawn.

  The Stormwitch's Daughter

  by Dave Smeds

  Azure and her partner Coil have successfully fulfilled their mission to rescue Zephyr, the witch’s daughter. But there are just a few leftover complications....

  Dave Smeds is the author of novels such as The Sorcery Within and The Schemes of Dragons. His short fiction has appeared in myriad anthologies, including fourteen previous volumes of Sword & Sorceress, and in such magazines as Asimov's SF, Realms of Fantasy, and F&SF. His next major upcoming release is The Wizard's Nemesis, the conclusion of his “War of the Dragons” trilogy. “The Stormwitch’s Daughter” features his characters Azure and Coil, picking up where we left them at the end of “The Salt Mines” in Sword & Sorceress 27.

  As she so often did, Azure dreamed of the journey between the worlds, unable to quell the vividness, unable to improve the outcome as she could with other repeated dreams.

  The dream began where it always did. Coil freed the camel from its hobbles. He rolled out the magic carpet. Azure and Zephyr settled upon it. Coil joined them and spoke the words he never should have spoken.

  The carpet rose, carrying them beyond the reach of the Witch of Sandstorms. At first it flew just as it had while liberating them from Salt Town. Ordinary air buffetted their collars and sleeves. Moonglow painted them in shades of ash and silver, and the craters and dark seas of that moon were fixed in the same configurations Azure had always known. The godsmoon hung to the right, pocked and oblong—another profoundly familiar sight given how many times she had been forced to sleep under the open sky during the past thirteen years.

  Then they entered some other kind of place. It did not seem at first that they had crossed a threshold, because the stars over their heads seemed the same as ever. But when Azure looked down, where she expected to see dark landscape, she only saw more night sky. More stars. The world of their birth was no longer beneath them.

  Coil placed an arm over her shoulder. Azure crowded close against him, but she suspected he was drawing as much reassurance from her and he was giving back. He was the one who had made the mistake, and therefore had regret to pile atop his disorientation. The disorientation alone was bad enough. The wrongness of their surroundings tugged at Azure’s insides, made her tongue into a slab of lint, kept her even from knowing which way was up and which was down.

  The carpet knows, she told herself. It was made to carry passengers. It will always be beneath. Time and again throughout the journey she depended on that fact to fend off panic.

  The stars faded, replaced by filmy strands not unlike algae waving in a stagnant pond, but of every hue, not just those of nature. Hunks of mountain floated past, disconnected from the ranges to which they belonged. Waterfalls cascaded in the near distance, originating from unseen sources, disappearing into unseen chasms.

  Snow speckled their faces, but even as Azure reached to pluck the traces from her eyelashes, a blast of heat as fierce as any she had felt in the Desert of Fumes evaporated the flakes away so thoroughly they did not have time to form into droplets. They were enveloped by scents of startling randomness: Jasmine. Baking bread. Rotting fish. Rainwater.

  Eventually even their own bodies became ductile, shrinking and expanding, turned airy then stonelike, growing extra parts. Awareness was the only steady aspect here. Surrender that, and they would surely become just another shred of the chaos, their former selves made unrecoverable.

  Time was difficult to measure. They grew hungry, ate food from their packs, and grew hungry again.

  The second half was worse. Coil admitted where he meant for them to go, and so Azure understood no matter how tolerable the rest of the actual transit might turn out to be, they were going to the wrong place.

  The words. How could he have said those words? Without consulting her? They’d only had the carpet a matter of hours. They should have made a plan together. Should have weighed the options. But no. He had said it: “Take us to where the Eleven Gods went.”

  The scribes all said that when the gods departed, they went to the world of the gentle sun. And that was where the carpet took them. Their surroundings ceased transforming in unnatural ways and they found themselves floating through a sky not too different from their own. Below was a landscape of rolling hills and prairie, woods and rivers, not unlike the terrain of any number of kingdoms Azure and Coil had traversed during their wanderings, all of it lit by, yes, the glow of a sun that she could only describe as gentle, its radiance settling upon the skin rather than searing down, and yet for all that, the air was blessed with a sweet and welcoming warmth.

  Yet when the carpet deposited them on a field conveniently trampled by the recent passage of some sort of large grazing beasts, she saw no gods. The carpet had done its job, but the words Coil had chosen had produced a complication. It had been thousands of years since the gods had come to this world. They’d had enough time to tire of it and move on to another.

  Azure opened her eyes. She had been awake for some time, though just when the memory had stopped being a dream and become simple recollection, she wasn’t sure.

  Crepuscular hues swathed the eastern sky, but in the west, the blackness lingered, framing constellations that reminded Azure how impossibly far away she still was from home. The waning gibbous moon displayed no seas upon its face, only craters, and it was alone in the sky, unaccompanied by the dim and irregularly-shaped companion the Twelve Gods had seen fit to move into the heavens above her own world.

  Coil and Zephyr lay beneath their blanket on the other side of the campfire. Nestled close. Azure still found it disconcerting to see them together so unequivocally. Coil had always been like her. Never one to form a steady attachment. They were creatures of the road. To form an attachment led to the pain of having to leave someone behind.

  Part of the difference, of course, was that they had not left Zephyr behind. She was now their companion. Even so, Azure found it odd that her milk brother had been won over so quickly and so...influentially. Zephyr was too young for him. Not that she was a girl. She’d been a woman when they’d rescued her from the Salt Prince’s tower, no matter that Lady Sirocco had characterized her daughter as a girl. She had certainly gone after Coil with a mature confidence. But Coil had never before been drawn to any woman unless she was at least as old as he.

  Apparently Azure hadn’t known him that well after all. He was a man, and what man would not find Zephyr appealing?

  As if he sensed her gaze upon him, Coil opened his eyes.

  Azure rolled over and faced the other way.

  She heard him rise, stir the embers, add a few small pieces of deadfall atop them. Then he marched past her in the direction of the stream, carrying the cookpot.