What I Saw Before the War

A woman losing her sight turns to small family magics to save the lives of those she loves the most.

Novelette | 7,560 words

It had been a comfortable five years since my husband and I moved to this small town, and a positively bucolic three years since my father’s death. My brother wrote occasionally—about Father’s failing health, then his funeral, then snippy, reproachful missives about his sons’ progress in the military school down south—and I dashed off guilty responses before returning to my preferred state of determined forgetfulness. I was aided in this by my adopted surroundings. In a small town the world is just the world, which is to say the town—what extends beyond its borders might be real in a material sense, but not the metaphysical. I had embraced this worldview with the passion of a convert, but that summer two events occurred in close succession to remind me of the uncomfortable reality outside: I began to lose my sight, and the draft barges took to the river. These ungainly vessels limned in Lucan red and gold, the fuel provided by their fire mages belching black, churned from town to town and returned to Stoneheart City heavy in the water with listless boys and hard-faced men, bound for the war further south.

They had not yet moored at our tiny river dock, but we all knew it was only a matter of time. Mothers sent their oldest boys away. Some men stayed in their fields instead of returning home at the end of a hard day. Zeke and I stayed on our hillside outside of town, and we might have succeeded in pretending the outside world away for a little longer if it hadn’t been for my eyes.

I first noticed the problem while milking Apollonia. I keep her tied to a post of bamboo a few inches taller than me and as wide as my hand. As I sat smelling her sour goaty aroma while she squirmed between my knees, I realized that the pole had a kink in it. Since I had been staring at the same pole every morning for the last five months without noticing any such kink, I traced it with my right hand. No kink. In fact, when I moved my head, the kink moved with it, up and down the pole.

It got worse after that. Words stretched and squashed themselves across the pages of my favorite books. In any but the brightest light, they hid themselves in undistinguishable shadows. Faces twisted like reflections in carnival mirrors at any appreciable distance: cartoonish foreheads, one eye comically large, the other drooping and small, lips smeared out entirely into the brown tones of the surrounding skin. Mine became a world of halos and shadows, of things half-seen, of familiar objects made sickening with unfamiliarity. I lost details and I could not recover them no matter how many mornings I lay abed with my eyes closed, praying that this time, the lines would have turned straight again.

At first, Zeke thought a bad wind had blown over me. I was prone to bad winds—they had followed me from the city. This was one of his people’s small magics, and I trusted him implicitly when he sat me down in one of our wooden chairs out in the shed behind the house. He rubbed an egg cold with herb-infused cane liquor over my face and hair. Its scent rose up my nose like a balm. My spirit was in his hands. Then he lifted the half-gourd of liquor to his lips and blew it out in an explosive spray. I shrieked. The egg rolled out of his hand and splattered on the ground.

“I think that’s a bad omen,” he said, but he picked up the unbroken yolk anyway and slid it into a water-filled glass. The next day, the yolk had clouded over, its yellow turned sickly behind a milky green veil.

“It looks like a cataract,” he said. “Like my grandmother’s eyes before she died.”

“Your grandmother was blind, Zeke.”

He kept his eyes trained on the glass. “Go to the city, Maeve.”

I’d never expected to hear him say this. He hated Stoneheart, hated the Lucan, who had repressed his people even more than they had mine, and for far more years. We’d met in Roaring Junction, a dusty coal town whose only virtue was a university funded by the estate of a guilty fire mage. Eventually we made our way to this tributary town where no one knew us, and the Lucan were merely grainy figures in penny serials enjoyed in the evening after a day in the fields, palely floating through improbable lives of cartoonish wealth.

We’d never left.

“We’ve only done one ritual,” I told him. “There’s no reason to give up so soon.”

He shook his head and took the glass out back. When he returned, it was empty.

“What did you do with it?”

“Threw it over the cliff so the dogs can’t eat it.”

“Oh.”

“Maeve.”

I hated it when his voice took on those heavy, cool tones. I looked up involuntarily.

“Go to the city.”

I knew he meant alone. I hated him a little for that, though my brother would never welcome him, and both of us couldn’t leave the farm at such short notice, right before the harvest.

“The doctors will help,” he said, embracing me.

“But Zeke,” I tried, tears beginning to stretch the world over his shoulder in even more impossible directions. “The draft barges. What if…” I couldn’t choke it out.

“Don’t worry, I’m too old—”

“They’re taking up to thirty-nine! That’s what Leticia at the bakery heard. Her cousin’s older than you and he was just taken last week.”

He hugged me more tightly. “Then I’ll hide in the forest until they go away.”

He didn’t understand. Behind him, his shadow glimmered and churned, as though some spirits toiled there to tie him to this place. Already, they were releasing me, letting me float away.

In one of his occasional spells of mother weed–wreathed honesty, my father had called the Bannon and the Lucan “milk brothers fed too rich to know how to share two breasts and a pair of arms.” A century ago the Bannon had ruled this peninsula with the Lucan as their deputies, before the Lucan broke with them in their war of independence. Smaller conflicts had proliferated since, fueled on both sides by the big magics—fire and earth. Father had liked mother weed because it accentuated the small magics, of which he had a little: an eye to see and a nose to smell. He had used these talents in the Lucan army as a young man, to rise in their ranks and avoid becoming fodder for the fire mages. After the last war ended, he turned them on other Ananse and poor Lucans to build himself a small, dirty empire, imperfectly scrubbed toward the end of his life.

My brother, Fer, had retained the proper filial spirit and stayed with him.

I, the traitor, had left. Fifteen years ago now. Five since my last visit. If it weren’t for Zeke’s insistence, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to even buy the ticket.

When I left, I’d been young, supple-skinned, leather-shod, half-ignorant and beholden to an idea of the world which my father’s class aspirations left me as an unsteady legacy. Now I was returning well into the decade past which women lie about their ages, hoof-footed, turkey-necked, barren as a cornfield after the burn and—I was terrified—going blind.

Witness the scene: an older woman of mumblety-some years, dressed in the wide trousers of a poor student and the sandals of a rich farmhand, waiting for the ferry to the city. I never gave much thought to my age with Zeke, ten years my junior, but today I felt the years in every joint. I moved from beneath an oak tree into the light and checked my ticket again. The handwriting of the part-time worker smudged across the much-mimeographed paper, with the date and my name—misspelled—at the top. The print type below was somehow harder for me, the letters wobbling and stretching. My stomach lurched and my eyes watered.

I squinted and tried again.

One way to Stoneheart – South Terminal

Ladies Chamber

Sub-basement 2

(To the left of the boiler room)

Ah, yes, now I remembered the other, more practical reasons why I’d avoided the big city these last five years. Two days in a dank, green-carpeted chamber two decks below, packed in with thirty other unfortunates doing everything from weaving socks to smudging incense, with the boiler room clanking and hissing and the stevedores spitting and cursing all day and night long.

Zeke and I embraced when the boat docked.

“Be safe,” he said. My throat closed. I squeezed his hand mutely and hurried up the gangplank. The ferry pulled away again within the minute. I raised my hand, the space between me and that beloved shore filling with green water and white froth.

I felt young again as the town, then even the hill, slipped behind the blue fir and red oak and out of view. It was the worst kind of young: ignorant, vulnerable, at once self-doubting and overconfident. I’d be back in a few weeks. The doctors in the city would fix whatever had gone wrong with the light and shadows. Zeke would be waiting for me. Zeke would—

An hour downriver we passed one of them gleaming red and gold in the noon light, a stream of black smoke trailing it like ribbon. It was heading upriver, not low enough in the water for a full load of conscripts. It could probably take on a dozen more before its return to Stoneheart. A hand took hold of my heart and squeezed.

Who would I return home to? Would I even be able to get back at all?

My brother and I had been raised in a storm, and much as two refugees forced by necessity and not inclination to cling to one another for survival, our post-tempestual relationship was characterized by a teeth-rattling mix of casual intimacy and reflexive revulsion. I could not fathom what he had become, but my understanding of what he had been made any comfortable hatred impossible, and even my disdain felt cumbersome, a knife with a grip too large for my hand.

I sat on his veranda, jelly-legged from the days on the river, whistle-eared from the din of the boiler room, squinting against the unexpected halos obscuring the details of the evening. I explained, again, that no, I only planned to trouble him for a short time.

“But what’s the point of being on that mountain in the middle of the uncivilized hinterlands if you can’t even see it, Mav?”

“There is Zeke,” I said, mildly. His wife, Vianne, hovered over the tea service, offering me tiny cakes, more sugar for my coffee, handmade caramels.

He made a sour face and spoke around a mouthful of orange meringue. “Is he still around?”

Bright things darted in and out of my peripheral vision, like hummingbirds made of light. One seemed to pick at the dust of orange powder around his fingers, but when I blinked, his fingers merely smeared into the light and I could hardly differentiate them at all.

I took a shuddering breath. “He’s my husband, Fer.”

He waved his hand, and his wife held out for him another stuffed meringue. “Aren’t the draft barges due in your town? I heard they sent half a dozen upriver and around the coast.”

Sugar and bile brushed my epiglottis; I swallowed and coughed. “Not yet. At least I don’t think so…” That draft barge heading upriver, only half-filled. How could I know where it had been planning to stop?

Fer shifted uncomfortably and turned to his wife. “Darling, do you think Oscar might be able to check if, er, Zeke’s been put on the rolls?”

Vianne’s posture went rigid and she set the plate of sweets down on the table with a clatter. “I—I can’t say. You know my cousin is a very busy man—”

“He’s in the secretary pool for the military logistics office,” Fer interrupted, smiling as though that could make up for Vianne’s pickled expression. She didn’t want to waste a favor with her well-placed cousin on her husband’s ill-tempered sister.

Still, I wasn’t above a little social theater. “Vianne,” I said, reaching for her hands. She jerked, startled. “I can’t tell you how grateful I would be.”

Vianne retrieved her delicate, well-moisturized fingers from beneath my calluses and gave me a resigned smile. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Fer raised his eyebrow, so much like Daddy when I was fifteen that he came crisp in my vision, as though by no longer seeing the present, I could peer into the past. “Carlo graduated the military academy last year, you know,” he said abruptly.

My chest clenched. Carlo had been a beautiful boy, considerate, curious. At ten, he had made flower arrangements every day for the table. I hadn’t seen him in a decade. “Yes, you sent the photo. You both must be very proud.”

Vianne’s expression loosened at the mention of her eldest. “With honors! Top of his class in water logistics. He’s already been called into the secretary’s office.”

I felt lightheaded. “The war secretary’s office?”

A shadow crossed Fer’s expression, but Vianne went on, beaming. “General Bramley-Stokes himself. Carlo is one of only five Ananse serving in his direct line of command. He’s a merit to our community.” Vianne grabbed the plate and held it out to me. “Take a meringue, dear. You can’t have eaten well on that ferry!”

The cookie tasted like clay. “The front lines, Fer?”

His eyes, when they met mine, were hollow. “The generals are well-protected. It’s a good position. And I’ll make sure he keeps an eye out for Zeke—if it comes to that.”

I stood up with a clattering of porcelain, knocking my half-eaten sweet to the flagstones. I thought to pick it up, but as I looked down more of the light swarmed nearby, until I could not see the pastel rose confection at all, only the holes made by swimming light.

I shook my head, which made my vision lurch as though I were still on the ship.

“Excuse me,” I said, in their general direction. “I’m going on a walk.”

The doctors were all Lucan, of course, but the kind who deigned to work in a charity hospital were at least respectful, if a little brusque. My brother had offered to pay so I could consult the doctors at the newest hospital up the hill, but I was collecting enough strings just by staying in his perfect house and eating his wife’s food. I didn’t need any more.

Besides, he had two kids in school down south and I knew he couldn’t really afford to pay for my visit to the Lucan hospital; he just liked to project the comfortable consequences of his respectable choices, and so felt burdens where there were only connections. I wouldn’t let him make one of me; I could see the guilt and pride that pushed him to it too clearly.

Most of us sweating through the line just past the magnificent iron-wrought gates of the charity hospital were Ananse like me, or one of this land’s many original peoples, like Zeke. There were a few Lucan dotted through, but they held themselves apart stiffly and flinched if one of us brushed their pale skin, so clear in the harsh light of midday that even the blue of their veins traced a map around their bodies, to the hearts Zeke and I would joke they didn’t have. Everyone was talking about the war that had yet to be officially declared: troops on the border, southern cities evacuated, poor northern towns stripped of their young men for their warm bodies and hot spirits. They would man the front lines and serve the fire mages who would drain them like batteries to fight off the Bannon incursion. Zeke was thirty-five, no fiery young man, but strong enough to serve their purposes.

 After three hours of heat and anxiety my one respectable dress clung wetly to my back and my armpits exhaled a gamy humidity. I tried not to think about my hair. A young Ananse nurse escorted me down a mirrored hallway to an examination booth, but luckily the thoroughfare was so jostling, filled with doctors and assistants walking at a jogging pace between the standing sentinels of old blind people and their caretakers, that I did not have much time to admire or deplore my own reflection. The examination room was high-ceilinged and blessedly quiet, painted in shades of grayish slate, and dim enough that I stopped squinting for the first time in hours. I rubbed at my crows’ feet, smoothed them out like wax paper.

The nurse indicated a wooden chair on one side of a giant microscope. At least, that’s what it looked like: sleek in chrome and slate, with mirrors and levers and two hanging vacuum tubes like great worms off the side. The nurse strapped me into the machine with practiced hands, pulling the bands tight against the bush of my hair that had half-escaped the combs and pins of my optimistic morning, and affixed the vacuum tubes to my eyes. I couldn’t see anything but the dimmest of reflections of my bottom eyelid.

“The patient is ready, Doctor.”

I could smell the man, a light perfume of some woody resin overtop starched wool (in this weather!) and, inevitably, a musky sweat. I liked his smell, which disconcerted me, because I wasn’t in the habit of smelling men I could not see.

“And how are we today?” he asked. A reedy voice, straining to be avuncular.

“Not good,” I said, gritting my teeth.

“What seems to be the problem, Miss…?”

The nurse spoke before I could. “Maeve delle Sampson, Doctor.”

“Ah, my mother’s family is Sampson! I don’t suppose we might be related way back when?”

He laughed too loudly at this joke, and if I had not already known he was Lucan, this would have erased all doubt. I felt the nurse stock-still behind me.

“Or her ancestors owned mine,” I said, dry as switch grass in fire season.

The doctor kept chuckling, “As you say, as you say. It was all so long ago, thank goodness we’re well past that now—” and turned on a light. I squinted against the flood of it, straight into my pupils like two boring needles. I could see nothing but the negative print of a vertical bar.

“Try not to blink.”

“I’m trying.”

“Are you normally so sensitive to light?”

“Only recently.”

“And what else have you been experiencing recently, Miss delle Sampson?”

I described my other symptoms: the flattening of my vision in bright and low light, the smearing shadows, the evening halos, washes of colors without details, straight edges bending and twisting as though some god were oil painting with the world and only I could see.

He murmured vague doctorly phrases, “I see,” “We’ll get this sorted out,” and other nonsense that reassured me not at all while he shined a vertical bar of blue into my left eye, then the right. He grunted. The lights flicked off. I blinked into a hazy darkness, lit by flitting afterimages, different in each eye. They pulsed and moved, shadows with halos, or halos within shadows. The doctor drew the nurse aside. No one thought to unstrap me from the machine, and my neck began to hum with discomfort. Now the door opened, letting in the sounds of the frantic river of necessity out in the hallway. More footsteps, more voices, all male. They were speaking the rarefied dialect of the southern universities and churches, which they must have assumed I didn’t understand.

“Possible degeneration of the pigmentary epithelial layer…”

“Isn’t she a bit young for that?”

“It could be a congenital malformation…”

“Isn’t she a bit old for that?”

My neck was singing; my upper back was turning operatic. I thought of asking the nurse to unstrap me from the machine, but the moving lights before my eyes were doing the oddest things. They seemed to be forming shapes, for all the world like a group of four doctors—two in each eye—in their robes and square caps. The nurse hovered behind them with a clipboard. I couldn’t see much detail—no surprise to me these days—but the odd part was being able to see them at all.

One of the other doctors settled into the chair before me. “Let’s see what’s going on here, ma’am.”

He sounded older than the first, his tone matter-of-fact, not straining to be liked. Some of the tension in my vertebrae relaxed. He turned different levers and maneuvered a lens until it was right on top of my eye, a cold gel preventing it from scratching the surface.

Then the lights pierced it clear through, an awl so sharp it made me forget even my neck. The odd images fled, and perhaps I did too, because I remember little of what remained in that exam. I had spent my childhood staring into lights and watching shadows, dreaming of that other world where they lived, its silence and its brilliance, and how I would take my brother with me—away, away, away.

A military parade passed through the center of town after I left the charity hospital, leaving me stranded on the wrong side of the central boulevard. The cavalry came first, horses high-bridled, caparisoned in red and white, with gold-plated chanfrons heavy over their long faces. I watched, impressed despite myself, as the horses and their gold-buttoned riders danced in perfect synchronization to the heavy drums and flutes playing just behind them. The riders were all Lucan men, and from this distance I couldn’t hope to tell one from the other; in my defense, it seemed as though they’d been selected not for military prowess but for aesthetics: they all had the classic Lucan frost-white hair, blue-veined skin, rounded ears, amber eyes. Not a trace of Bannon red or Ananse brown in any of them. The band was a more mixed crew, and behind them marched the infantry. Their steps reverberated against the flagstones, so loudly my head seemed to buzz with a military fervor I was sure I did not feel. To my right, an Ananse woman a little younger than me wiped her eyes.

“There goes my boy,” she said.

“I’m so sorry.”

She looked at me sharply. “Why would you be? I’m not. We Ananse are never going to be considered full citizens in this country if we don’t do our part to protect it. And my boy is one of the finest—he’s in the First Southwest.”

The display clicked for me then—the unusual route through this heavily Ananse part of the city, the riders up front, and the charioteers behind, streaming red and black banners embossed with golden tongues of flame. These foot soldiers were in the all-Ananse battalion that had, legendarily, helped to win the war of independence against the Bannon. In exchange for our freedom, we’d fought, was the story Daddy liked to tell us. Plenty of Ananse thought like this woman, and though I disagreed with her, I could hardly argue. It was her son marching to the south, soon to be a living battery for a fire mage, and maybe fire a bullet or two while he was at it.

Behind chariots with seated fire mages and armored drivers, came the second half of the First Southwest: their Widows of Charity. An explosion above our heads distracted me as soon as I had registered their presence. I paused with the rest to squint at the spectacle of a giant bird made of fire, blue-tailed like a peacock, flying above us before bursting into a million sparks.

The cheers from the crowd replaced the din from the explosions. But I had moved my eyes low as soon as the firebird began to swarm with shadows instead of light, and so I saw two Widows break ranks to catch an infantry boy who had stumbled in the march. The others in his line kept rhythm—they’d been trained for this. What cover they had would come from the cavalry and the artillery up ahead, and what succor from the Widows behind. Fer and Vianne would consider this battalion and others like it a credit to the race, but to me it seemed like the same old exploitation.

The marchers paused, the horses stilled, and in the sudden hush of the flutes and drums the fire mages stood with uncanny synchronicity. When they raised their hands the crowd gasped, but I couldn’t see why—in my sight their bodies seemed to have erupted in shadows like fire, and just looking at that writhing dark, limned with darting light, drove a spike of pain deep between my eyes.

“Aunty, are you all right?” said the woman by my side.

I stuttered out something I couldn’t follow even as I was saying it and stumbled away. The shadows were side-effects of my central vision loss, they had told me. Nothing real. Fire roared above me and I followed the shadows and the light until I reached a little patch of grass where I could crouch and wait out the storm.

What a strange way to go blind. Seeing things that aren’t there, not seeing what’s actually in front of me. Was it like this for everyone? But who could know? One day, the dry-voiced doctor had told me, most likely in the next ten or fifteen years, my vision would narrow to a pinprick and then all I would see would be light and shadow, and perhaps what few colors remained to my degenerate maculae.

But in the meantime, the shadows had halos, and they could move.

They congregated around the table at dinner that evening, flickering beneath the dingy yellow light of the gas lamps that Fer preferred. A crowd of them sniffed at the cut of roast venison on Vianne’s plate before swarming up her arms to hide in the capacious volume of a bouffant hairdo that was—I surmised—the latest fashion in well-heeled Ananse society here in Stoneheart.

“You really should try the venison, Mav,” Fer said, cutting into his own. “Even the Lucan families on Hedge Hill send their domestics to our butcher’s for cuts. Her supply chain is a national secret. I bet you don’t get meat like this in the backwoods.”

I looked at him incredulously. “If I wanted meat, I could certainly get it, brother. But we try not to hunt the last of the deer on the mountain.”

Vianne looked up from her plate. “But we get these from the south, don’t we Fer? Bodaia wouldn’t sell the hill stock.”

Fer shrugged. “However it gets to our plate, I like it and I don’t plan to pry into Bodaia’s business methods either. Since when did you stop eating flesh, Mav?”

I thought about explaining to him that I had done nothing of the sort, only restricted my carnivorous impulses to what I could raise or hunt locally, but I suspected the effort would be wasted on him. Society had trained him to fit the mold of a prosperous burgher and he had embraced the artifice.

“A few years ago,” I said mildly.

Fer made a few other expostulations that fit with his caricature of a prosperous Ananse of the class to which we most certainly had not been born. I finished my peas and reminded myself not to rest my cheek on my hand.

“Fer, Dad sometimes talked to you didn’t he? About his life before?”

His fork froze halfway to his mouth. He glanced at his wife and then back to me. “He liked the sound of his own voice.” He laughed, trying to make a joke of it.

“I know,” I said thinly, “but he only ever used it to lecture me.” What on earth had he told her about our family? Nothing honest, it would seem. It helped to explain why he’d been so insistent on the matter of the old bastard’s funeral.

“The roast is exceptional this time, dear,” he said to his wife. “You must give Dora our compliments.”

I made an involuntary face, then raised my wine glass to hide it. Could this be the same boy who had spent hours with me counting the thousands of coins our father hauled back as his take from the army of beggars and urchins who had the misfortune of seeking alms on the streets controlled by his gang?

Vianne’s curiosity had been roused, though. “The old dear would talk to me sometimes,” she said, smiling helpfully as Fer closed his eyes in bleak resignation. “He did love his war stories.”

I waved my hand, and then frowned as the shadows backed away from her plate. “The war he was invalided out of in the first month?” I said, blinking. “You know, I’ve always thought he shot himself in the foot just to get a desk job.”

Vianne put her hand to her mouth.

“Mav,” Fer said warningly. “Don’t say things you know aren’t true.”

Did I know? I put down my wine. Relaxed inhibitions were clearly doing me no good here.

“That can’t be right, Mav,” Vianne said, with a firmness I had not heard from her before. As though the job she took most seriously was spreading a gauzy glow over any gathering, not so much banishing the shadows as smothering them. “Carlo wore his grandfather’s Spear of Flame to his officer induction ceremony. Marcan was so jealous, he can’t wait to wear it when it’s his turn to graduate next year.”

I took another drink of wine; the glass raised itself to my lips, I swear it. “Then I’m glad they’re getting some use out of it.” Daddy had gotten that Spear of Flame for being wounded in the line of duty; he must have saved up to pay the bribe to the army medic.

I realized that Marcan—in my memory, still a child showing me his collection of crystals— would be an officer in a little over a year. Would he be with the generals like Carlo, right behind the fire mages?

“I saw the parade today,” I said, in defiance of my wiser—and sober—self’s decision not to mention it.

Vianne put both hands on the table. “Of the First Southwest? Oh, Maeve, what a treat that must have been! I so wanted to step out to see the show, but our committee meeting went over and I missed everything but the Widows’ wagons!”

“Well then you must have seen them carrying a cartload of drained Ananse boys.”

Fer frowned. “It’s the cost of our self-defense, Maeve. No need to be crass.”

“The Widows are so good to those boys, and you know the fire mages don’t drain any more than they have to—”

“So then why are infantry field casualties so high?”

 “Mav!”

Fer’s bark was enough to let my good manners catch up with my mouth. Far too late. The lace tablecloth bunched beneath Vianne’s fingers. A pair of shadows slid from her shoulders to her face and hung there like a mask.

She stood abruptly. “I must check on Dora.”

Dora and Vianne reappeared with dessert just in time to stop Fer’s lecture. Instead, we exclaimed dutifully over a trembling blancmange running with disturbingly bloody blackberry coulis. At the sight of it, I fought back a squall of some inappropriate emotion. I wanted to laugh or curse or weep inconsolably. Vianne served us with a plaster smile and panicked eyes. My sister-in-law seemed good-hearted and well-meaning in a doggedly respectable way, but I could not reconcile the life that Fer led now with what we had first known together. I was a little angry with him, I suppose, because in embracing this life he had so clearly suppressed the other.

As we ate, shadows lined up end to end on the tablecloth, fighting each other with tanks and bristling weapons. A storm rained fire on the left flank and the shadows burned. On the right, shadows fell, drained of their life-force, half-dead until the crows carried them away on their carts.

“Delicious, Vianne,” said Fer, with a brassy jollity. My head snapped up. Was I drunk? Was he? “Brilliant idea to use the last of the blackberries for the sauce, dear. Don’t you agree, sister?”

I contemplated the twisted and shadow-flattened visages of my brother and sister-in-law.

“Oh yes,” I said, wiping my mouth on my napkin and observing the dark smear left behind. “It tasted much better than it looked.”

After Vianne had icily suggested I remove myself from the dining room, I lay crying in the guest room for several hours, so enthusiastically self-pitying that even Fer had knocked on the door to ask roughly if I needed medical assistance.

I shouted, “I have already seen the doctor, and he said I’m going blind!”

At least that shut him up. I like to think that my appreciation for life’s absurdity is a natural counterweight to self-pity, but if it weren’t for Fer’s interruption I might have gone on like that for a few hours more. Instead, I hiccupped my tears dry and rubbed ruefully at the snot-covered sheet. The silence of the house felt resentful and bruised. I could not sleep to it. And then a revelation touched me, soft as Zeke’s fingers along my spine, and I sat bolt upright. Father had small magic—what if these strange shadows meant that I did, too? What if I’d just never been able to see them before I lost my sight?

I stumbled downstairs, feeling my way to Fer’s study. I was relieved to find the box still on the mantelpiece. It rested beside the heavy decanter of cut glass a quarter filled with—I was quite sure—Dad’s favored brand of medicinal bitters, a palinka from the disputed southern border regions and illegal to import. I appreciated this sign that, as I always suspected, Fer had not cleansed himself completely of our sordid family history. But I did not want more alcohol this night. What interested me was in the box.

My fingers, not as supple as they had once been but just as deft, traced the tight seams. How many times had I snuck into my father’s study as a teenager to press the wood in precisely the right places so as to release the false bottom, and reveal the fragrant herb and pipe he kept beneath? In hindsight, Dad must have known I was doing it. Though the small magics were frowned upon by upper-class Ananse, he’d never stopped seeing and smelling more than he ought. But, uncharacteristic of him, he had never said a word to me.

Now, reluctantly in Stoneheart City three years after his death, I felt a curious pressure on my heart—nostalgia and melancholy, anger and regret. He’d wanted to show me the small magics when I was fifteen, but I’d refused. I’m not a criminal like you, I’d yelled at him, happy to see him flinch. Still, I’d smoked the mother weed that released the small spirits. Had I been trying to catch a glimpse of my father’s world, despite myself? And Fer must still partake, too. The herb inside was fragrant and still-fleshy.

By the time Fer discovered me, I had gotten through a full bowl and was packing my second.

“Dad always did say you had a fire tongue, Mav, but Vianne didn’t deserve that,” he said, before he had quite closed the door.

“Dad didn’t know how right he was,” I said, exhaling. He froze, then squinted at the smoke swirling playfully before the lead-paneled Gothic window. I had just made it soar like the fire mages’ bird in the sky this afternoon, but a breeze from the hallway sent it in all directions again.

Fer shut the door.

“It hasn’t smelled like this in here since Dad died. What are you doing?”

I smiled, entirely delighted to see him, my own little brother, so grown up. We had thought he might die at least four times; he’d been both sickly and accident-prone. Daddy had always spent too much time trying to “toughen him up.” The old man must have loved us, but he seemed to believe that you showed care best by a schedule of impossibly high standards and then punishments for not achieving them.

“Just partaking a little mother weed. Getting to know my friendly shadows. Why didn’t we want the small magics again?”

Fer looked pained. “Because we weren’t going to be criminals.”

“Right,” I said, chuckling. “Our wise masters send Ananse boys to be kindling for Lucan fire mages but we’re the criminals. Here, sit beside me,” I said, patting the cushion. “I discovered a little trick, you’ll love it.”

I had forgotten how similar we looked, despite his burgher’s paunch and air of insufferable condescension: thick tight waves of dark hair with a natural part in the middle, walnut skin, our lost mother’s long nose, Dad’s wide mouth. Our eyes were different: his such a light brown you could mistake them for a dog’s, though he had hit me as a child when I told him so. They were striking and almost wise when it occurred to him to reach for wisdom. Mine were large and dark as pools, framed by brushy lashes.

Fer sprawled beside me on the divan beneath the window and rested his back against the sill. He took the pipe when I passed it to him and lit it with a resinous taper that I had taken from beside the fire.

“You are insufferable sometimes, you know that? Vianne really tried at dinner.”

“Shouldn’t she know the truth about the war your boys will fight?”

He blew out, and the scent of mother weed—honey-flowers, cut grass, wet earth—filled my nostrils with heady understanding.

“She does know. She just doesn’t like to think about it.”

“You coddle her,” I said, taking the pipe when he passed it back.

“She’s not like us, Mav, don’t you understand that? She’s the cream of Ananse high society. She went to Lucan schools. She did a continental tour at sixteen. She doesn’t know a thing about how they live down in Beryl Hill or the South Docks. And if she did, she’d just want to minister to them—”

“Good God,” I said.

Fer made a fleeting gagging expression, familiar from our youth, and then laughed ruefully. “Look, you’re corrupting me already.”

“And how did the son of a jumped-up rum runner snag such a paragon?”

 I took a deep lungful of smoke, regarded the curious shadows with my full, intoxicated, will and slowly exhaled.

Fer ran a hand through his thick hair, graying at the temples. My hair was going the same way, just a little less far along. “Damned if I know. I met her at a party and she…she liked me, if you can credit it.”

The smoke from my mouth shaped itself into the silhouette of a young woman of Vianne’s proportions in a debutante’s dress, dancing upon the air.

He made a sound between a gasp and a snort. “That’s your small magic?”

I thought of telling him about the fire mages turning into towers of shadow. “Isn’t it lovely? Small consolation for losing my sight but…”

“Is there really nothing they can do?”

I shrugged lightly. “Nothing to signify. There are some experimental treatments in the south. Too bad about the war.”

Fer pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes. “I’m so sorry, Mav. And…I heard from Oscar. Vianne’s cousin.”

His voice wasn’t heavy enough for the worst news, but it was grim. The shadows hung from my clotted plume of smoke, attentive. “Tell me.”

“The draft boats stopped at your town right after you left. They didn’t take Zeke,” he said, cutting off my panicked question. “But he was on their list of eligible men. In the next few weeks, they’re planning to send boats upriver with earth mages to hunt for stragglers. Straight to the front lines when they find them, according to Oscar.”

Earth magics were more of a Bannon specialty, but the Lucan had a few mages in their service, and mostly for jobs like these: hunting and hurting. Even Zeke wouldn’t be able to hide from them.

The shadows, agitated, wound themselves around my smoke and pulled it into the shape of a hill. Inside the hill two figures embraced while others marched on top of them. Fer and I both stared.

“What…does that mean, Mav?”

I opened my mouth to say that I had no idea, and realized that I did. “I can hide him,” I whispered. “Whatever this small magic is, it will let me hide him.”

My eyes watered and I wiped them with angry impatience. I reached for Fer’s hands. “Brother! If I can hide him, I can hide others! Not too many, but at least Carlo and Marcan! They don’t have to die in this.”

Fer looked stricken. “Vianne would never…and Carlo is so proud of being in the General’s office…but Marcan…Marcan might.” He shook his head and laughed. “The old man always said Marcan had no business in uniform. And he told me to find you.”

I stared at him. “He did not.”

“He liked Vianne, but he thought she was too weak. ‘War is coming, Ferran,’ he would tell me. ‘It’s been coming for the last ten years, but there’s no stopping it now. If you won’t do anything about that wife of yours, at least get Maeve back here from wherever she’s gone hiding. I’d bet on her against a Bannon soldier any day.’”

His imitation of Dad’s voice was so perfect that I jerked back despite myself. “Stop that! I almost hit you.”

Fer laughed softly. “He loved us both, but I never had his respect like you did.”

That funny pressure against my heart again. The shadows paused. I could hardly make out Fer’s face in the low lamplight. A lot of good I would do against an invading soldier, half-blind, with just the shadows and their halos for my friends.

“Then why—” My voice rasped but I couldn’t seem to smooth it. “—did he treat me the way he did, if he admired me so much? If I heard a word of praise from that man’s mouth, it was only to tell me how I could do it better next time.” I gripped his shoulders. “I’ve never been happier, Fer, than when I finally got away.”

For a moment I closed my eyes and imagined the river and the encroaching trees and the distant dock and Zeke smiling to see me there as the boat pulled in—everything as clear and sharp as cut crystal.

My brother, crying, rested his forehead on my arm. “How I envied you, Mav. But you left me here.”

“Then why did you forgive him?”

He reached his arms around my waist and hugged me like a little boy. “For the same reason I forgave you. There was no malice in him. He only wanted us to live.”

Zeke met me by the dock, so brazen I didn’t know if I wanted to laugh or hit him. I had seen another draft barge unloading its sullen, wide-eyed cargo at the Stoneheart dock just before I left. Their shadows had jumped and sung of war. But I and my light-smeared eyes had beat them here.

“The mayor isn’t turning anyone in who hid from the barges,” he said, before I could remonstrate. “But I have to leave before they get back.”

I hugged him for a long enough time that I could feel his arms getting tired, but even then I only raised my head high enough to whisper. “Turns out I got my dad’s small magic. Best gift that old bastard ever gave me. I can keep you hidden from the mages. We can stay on the farm.”

Zeke’s arms tightened around me again. Then he sat me on the cart bench and searched my eyes.

“You’re serious.”

“We’re going to survive this.”

Zeke frowned. “Is it fair for me to get out if the others can’t?”

“Of course not,” I said. “But I am my father’s daughter.”

He took up the reins and the old mare plodded dutifully to the road that led home. He kept his silence in that way of his, thinking but not judging, until we turned into our drive.

“And your eyes?” he asked.

“There’s nothing they can do.”

He hesitated. “Would you like to try another cleansing?”

But hadn’t it already worked? I smiled down at the smear of his hand and brought his fingers to my lips.

We pulled up before the house. The dogs greeted me, and then the goats, and then the shadows in the lights that I had always seen but never known before the war.

“What I Saw Before the War” copyright © 2025 by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Art copyright © 2025 by Ocean Salazar

Buy the Book