Sword ess 32, p.33
Sword and Sorceress 32,
p.33
“Matthew!”
He pulled me into his arms. “Jane! What happened? Where have you been?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said, smiling up into his face with tears obscuring my vision. “Right now, I need to search the shelves. 1964.” Secretly, in a guilty part deep inside me, I hoped we didn’t have the right date. If I found the right box or can, I knew I’d have to take it back. But if the shop didn’t have Evelyn’s birth date...I would disappear, and none of my co-workers would ever know what happened to me. I could stay here, where I belonged.
Matthew followed me to the back. I saw that there were now twenty storerooms. He must have been busy. I grabbed an apron, slid the strap over my head, and tied the ties. Already I was taking goods from the shelves, looking at dates, replacing them.
“Where have you been?” Matthew asked again.
Between cans I told him of my life for the past few years.
“You should have worked for a nursing home,” he said.
“I would have needed ID, a birth certificate, to get a real job.” I lifted another can. 9 JUL 1961.
When I ran out of things to say, Matthew grabbed my arm, stopping me from picking up a dusty box. “Jane, please listen to me.”
I turned and looked, saw how he hadn’t changed at all. His face like an absent-minded professor’s, his overlong hair, even the clothing he wore. Exactly the same as the day he walked into my shop.
“Jane, you don’t know how worried I’ve been,” he said, staring earnestly into my eyes. “I talked you into going, and then you just disappeared. I was frantic.”
“I worried, too. What if the goods no longer saved people, with me gone?” I paused. That wasn’t what I’d worried about the most. “What if you were trapped here forever, unable to leave?”
I turned back to the shelf so he wouldn’t see the tears springing to my eyes, and picked up the next can. USE BY SEP 2 1964. I blinked the tears away. That was the date.
Slowly, holding the can out, I turned to Matthew. The look in his eyes told me he had read it in my face.
“You found the right one.” A statement, not a question.
“Yes. I must get it to Evelyn. She was hit by a car. I-I’ve still got her blood on my hand.”
“Jane, please don’t go.”
“I must. I can’t thwart the magic. Everything would go wrong. I just know it.”
Matthew reached out and pulled me to him, the can awkward between us. “Please,” he said into my hair. His heart pounded against my cheek, and we stood like that for long moments.
Then he straightened up, though he still had an arm around my shoulders. “I’ll go. I’ll take it to her.”
“No, this is my responsibility,” I said to his chest.
“Isn’t this shop your responsibility?” he asked. “You told me I was the only person who ever came back without trying to save someone. Why can’t I do that again?”
“But what if you can’t? What if I never see you again?” I very much wanted to see him again. It felt good, leaning into his arms. For the first time in over half a century, I felt warm and comfortable with another human being.
“If you go now, what assurance do we have that you’ll be able to come back?” I heard tears in his voice now.
“None. We have none. But why would the magic bring us together only to part us?” That was a good question. Had the magic brought him to the shop only because it needed another worker? But then why had I not been able to find it for years?
The bell over the door jingled, startling me with how loud it sounded in the storage room.
“I’ll go to Evelyn,” Matthew said, pulling the can from my grasp. “You help whoever just came in.”
I put my hands around his where they held the can. “Will you try to come back?” I asked. “Or do you just want to leave?”
“How can you think that, Jane? You’re the only person—”
A voice from the front of the store. “Is anyone there?”
I looked into his face, put up a hand to touch his cheek. “Come back to me, then.”
He nodded, lips trembling, then turned and walked down the hallway.
~o0o~
That was two years ago, or so I think. As I’ve noted before, time doesn’t work the same here in my shop. I wonder what they thought, at the shelter, when I disappeared. Did Matthew get the can to Evelyn in time? He would know what to do. He’d done it for his sister.
More people come to my shop than ever before. Sometimes I have two or three searching the storerooms at once. Staying busy helps, so that I don’t fret about Matthew.
I was helping a couple whose teenaged son had been stabbed in a fight when the bell over the door jingled. I sent the couple back to the storerooms, and looked up with a weary smile. “Welcome to Jane’s Pantry. How can I help you?”
A very young couple, late teens or early twenties, hesitated at the door of my shop. “Our baby,” said the boy. “Birth defects.”
“When was the child born?” I asked.
The couple stepped into the shop, and before the door closed behind them, someone followed them in. Tall and lean, looking more like a professor than ever in hospital scrubs. I realized I had no idea what Matthew had done before he came to my shop. Was he a doctor, or had he found work at a hospital?
“Jane will help you,” Matthew said, and looked up to smile at me. “You’ll want the 2018 room.”
Together we escorted the young couple to the storerooms, where they found a box of cereal with the correct date. As they hurried away, we followed them as far as the front of the shop.
“I’m back,” Matthew said simply.
“I’m glad.”
“This time, I’ll stay.”
I turned to him and put both hands on his chest. “Are you sure? We’ll never have a normal life. Busy all hours of the day. Hardly any time alone together.”
Matthew put his hands on my shoulders. “But we will be together, and that’s all I want.”
That feeling, hot and bright and wilder than ever before, burst in my head. I could tell Matthew felt it by the way his hands tightened on my shoulders.
I laughed through the tears running down my cheeks. “I think it’s what the magic wants, too.”
As Matthew kissed me, the bell above the shop door jingled.
Finding Truth
Lorie Calkins
Even in our materialistic culture, where we are constantly encouraged to want more, some people are happy with their lives. Not every woman is looking for a handsome prince, and that can be a problem when one shows up on her doorstep.
Lorie and her husband live on Whidbey Island in Washington State with their Miniature Schnauzers, Magic and Chaos. She has stories in Sword and Sorceress anthologies 19, 28, and 31, as well as an SF book for children, The Terrarium Dragons. She has numerous hobbies in wood, fabric, glass, yarn, and dirt, but the best one is spending time with her grandchildren.
Mina had to hide a lot of truths on the first day of March. First of all, she had to act as if her dress wasn’t covered with soup when she answered the door. She had just lifted a full ladle from the pot on the hearth when the young man’s peremptory pounding on her cottage door startled her so much that the soup splashed down her front, instead of pouring into her bowl. When she opened the door, she had to pretend she accepted the man’s disguise at face value, although she knew at a glance that he was Hamus, the prince of Iredom.
With a heavy sigh, she lied to herself about what his visit really meant. And if that wasn’t enough, she had to lie to the prince, because she was sure there was no way this side of Hades that he would believe the truth if she told him now. Not that she was ready to believe it herself.
“Come in, sir, and sit,” she said politely. She thought it a shame that his handsome face was coated in dust, and his shining black hair hidden beneath a player’s wig, under his peddler’s cap. The breeches and tunic and vest to match his supposed livelihood hung loose and a little short on him, but Mina pretended not to notice.
His dark eyes swept the room for dangers, or perhaps eavesdroppers, but he focused on Mina as he sat. She seated herself in the only other chair at her small wooden table. “Are you in need of a tonic, sir? Or perhaps a charm against goblins?” she asked, avoiding another truth she knew full well.
He frowned at her as though uncertain. “Nothing like that,” he said. “I have heard,” he ventured slowly, “that you are able to find things for people.”
Mina permitted herself a tiny sigh. “I—yes—sometimes I have been able to help people find things they have lost.”
“Or things they need?” he probed, more confident.
Unable to hide a truth he already knew, Mina pursed her lips and gave a small nod.
“Ah. Then I shall need you to perform a finding for me. I wish you to find—to find out—to tell me, that is—who will be my future wife,” he spat out at last, easing his rigid posture somewhat, having said the hard thing he’d come for.
Mina’s heart sank. She gazed around at her comfortable little cottage and sighed as if she’d just been branded a witch and sentenced to the dungeons. “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” she said.
“But you must! That is, it’s very important. The fate of the kingdom—uh—that is…the uh, my life. I think of my home as my—kingdom….”
“I would if I could,” Mina lied. “But it doesn’t work that way.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“The finding doesn’t work the way you’re suggesting. It’s not a spell I can cast, or a reading, like cards or chicken bones. It’s more like the way a lodestone attracts other lodestones.”
He frowned and stared. “But they say in the village…”
“Yes, yes,” Mina said, fluttering her hands and privately cringing in horror that she had cut off the prince’s sentence. “It’s something like the way a tree in the field will attract lightning. Do you know what I mean? The finding is rather like that. I don’t set out to find things. They find me.”
The man who was still pretending not to be the prince tilted his head and looked at her as if she’d uttered bird sounds instead of words.
“Lost things just seem to show up in my vicinity,” Mina explained. “I don’t do anything to discover where they are while they’re lost. It’s figuring out where they belong after they’re found that’s the real gift.”
“You won’t help me?” He looked desperate.
Mina brushed ineffectually at the soup on her bodice. “I can send you a message if such a woman shows up,” she said, but she felt the weight of the truth crushing her.
“That won’t do!” he cried. “I need to find the right woman now. The king is dying, and by the laws of our land, I am too young to take the throne unless I am married. That means Queen Isidra will become Regent, and you can imagine what will happen to the kingdom with my stepmother on the throne. I must get married!”
So much for that bit of untruth, Mina thought. “Yes, Your Highness, I can see that your situation is troubling.”
“‘Troubling!’ The thought of my frivolous stepmother running the kingdom is far more than troubling! Is there nothing you can do to help me?”
Mina shrugged. “I can give you a bowl of soup and fresh biscuits, and if you’ll have a cup of tea, I can read the leaves when you’re done.”
So they ate a simple meal, she spun a typical future from his tea leaves, and the prince went on his way. But Mina knew it wasn’t over.
In a couple of days, Hamus returned. “Have you found her, yet? That is, I mean, has she found you?”
Mina replied carefully. “I haven’t seen anyone new, Your Highness. But perhaps you’d like a berry cake and tea.”
“Do you play Eights?” he asked hopefully.
Every other day the prince returned, hoping for news of his elusive wife-to-be. Mina could do little other than be polite and entertain him. No unattached princesses would be appearing at her doorstep, and she couldn’t tell the prince how she knew. But at least she didn’t have to pretend there wasn’t soup all over her dress.
As the days passed, Mina came up with every diversion she could to ease the prince’s mind about the missing bride. Always, she made it clear that the activities were merely to pass the time, and not a real finding. But they passed the time pleasantly enough in flying a kite and investigating whether the tail pointed to a suitable woman, making a bonfire and following the smoke, and walking through the town on market day. They sailed out in the bay on a small boat and set it adrift for an hour, to see if it came to any women the prince liked. They climbed a small mountain and looked far and wide at the kingdom. But they didn’t find the mystery woman.
One fine day, Hamus said, “Mina, what about you?”
“What?!” Tea splashed from her cup.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a poor proposal, isn’t it? But you and I are the same age, and we get along very well. You have the wits and manners to get on splendidly at court. And it’s not at all romantic, but I’m absolutely desperate. Papa isn’t likely to live out the month. You’ve said so many times how happy you are in your own little cottage, but will you marry me to keep Isidra off the throne?”
Mina sighed. She looked around her comfortable home. She looked at the prince, and her face softened. Gently she asked him, “And what if your papa makes a miraculous recovery and lives for another twenty years?”
Smiling, he replied, “I would not regret my choice of brides.”
~o0o~
King Hamus and Queen Mina sat in the garden on a rare quiet afternoon, watching the children play hide and seek among the shrubbery. “Mina,” said the king, taking his wife’s hand, “It was you all along, wasn’t it?”
“Hm?” she asked, absently picking up a button her lady-in-waiting had dropped six weeks ago.
“The finding I wanted you to do. It was you, wasn’t it? And—and you knew it. You knew it all along, didn’t you?”
Mina smiled at him. “A man has to find his own wife,” she told him. And, she thought to herself, a woman can’t accept a husband just because a prince appears at her door like magic.
About Sword and Sorceress
The Sword and Sorceress anthology series started in 1983, when Marion Zimmer Bradley, complaining that she was sick and tired of sword & sorcery stories where the female character was “a bad-conduct prize” for the male protagonist, persuaded Donald A. Wollheim of DAW Books to buy an anthology of sword & sorcery stories with strong female characters. The book was published in 1984.
The original title, Swords and Sorceresses, was changed during the production process when it was discovered that nobody could pronounce it in a sentence. So the first book was titled simply Sword and Sorceress. It was a success, so the following year we got Sword and Sorceress II.
It is my personal belief that if either Marion or Don had realized how successful this series was going to be, they would not have used Roman numerals, but they did, and DAW published the series through Sword and Sorceress XXI. (That’s 21, for the non-Romans among us.)
Norilana Books picked up the series with volume 22, and because Marion was no longer alive to edit it, Vera Nazarian entitled the book Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress XXII. This led to five titles that were listed on the royalty reports as “Marion Zimmer Bradley’s” with the only thing different being the ISBN.
We finally reissued volumes 22 through 27 as Sword and Sorceress 22 through Sword and Sorceress 27, and we have been using Arabic numbers every since. We hope that our readers find this less confusing. We know that we do.
Volumes available as eBooks are:
Sword and Sorceress 22
Sword and Sorceress 23
Sword and Sorceress 24
Sword and Sorceress 25
Sword and Sorceress 26
Sword and Sorceress 27
Sword and Sorceress 28
Sword and Sorceress 29
Sword and Sorceress 30
Sword and Sorceress 31
Sword and Sorceress 32
Copyright
copyright © 2017 by Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust
cover design copyright © 2017 by Dave Smeds
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Elisabeth Waters (ed.), Sword and Sorceress 32
