Queen of the Crossroads Read online

  Queen of the Crossroads

  A Worldsbridge Road’s Beloved Story

  Erica Anoe

  Copyright © 2022 by Erica Anoe

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  For Elizabeth, who read it first and believed in it.

  I learn by going where I have to go.

  Theodore Roethke

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Erica Anoe

  1

  Entering a city resembled emerging from underwater. Passing through a city gate into streets that local residents saw as teeming with life was to set foot in an emptier, lonelier place. Sometimes Piper found it a relief – the thick and constant contact of magic along the Road took its toll – but it amused her that these cosmopolitans knew so little of what a full world really looked and felt like.

  She unwound protective layers of cloth, slowly revealing her face, throat and arms. She watched the city guards around her react to the tangle of birthmarks on her uncovered skin, a personal map that recorded the gifts of every Road she’d ever walked and would ever walk. “You act like you’ve never seen a Road’s Beloved.” She laughed. “Surely, the city of Worldsbridge has sent and received messengers on more than one occasion.”

  Still, they shrank away, until one woman braved a reply. “We’ve never seen one so… covered.”

  “Ah, well if you saw me uncovered, you’d know exactly how covered I am.” She winked, enjoyed the answering blush.

  A male guard, whose spear had dipped momentarily in the general consternation at Piper’s appearance, cleared his throat and restored the rectitude of his posture. “You have a message?”

  “No, I’m here to collect one.”

  It was a bit unusual for those of her kind to arrive in a city empty handed – the Road’s magic normally displayed a love of efficiency. Piper, however, possessed knowledge of a hundred times the roads of the average Road’s Beloved on a conservative estimate. The Road seemed to enjoy sending her on long, strange trips to places almost no one else knew how to reach, and that fundamentally whimsical quality manifested also in the message-carrying that most people associated with a Road’s Beloved.

  She removed her shoes and hung them carefully on the city gate. The dust of Road and dust of City could never mix except on the surface of her skin. Her kind had been coming here for years – other sets of shoes swung beside hers, some so ancient that it seemed they would fall to dust if she brushed them with a fingertip.

  She offered a pleasant smile. “Where will I bathe? I’ll need an attendant and clothing appropriate for court that I can put on afterward. I’ll also need fresh shoes. The ruler of this place has a message for me.”

  “The King?” The city guards all glanced at each other nervously.

  “He may not know it yet. That happens sometimes.”

  “The King hasn’t spoken to anyone in years.”

  Piper widened her smile. “Well, he’ll be speaking to me shortly. Let’s prepare for it properly, shall we?” She pointed to the city guard with the cute blush. “You’ll do for an attendant unless someone objects. No? Let’s go.”

  2

  The best part of a city was the satiation it could provide. A chance to truly rest with no feeling of danger, to eat a meal in peace, to become entirely clean, to dirty oneself joyfully by making love to an attractive stranger, and then to bathe again. Piper took her time preparing for this visit to the apparently reclusive King, but at a certain point the lovely city guard was more than spent, and Piper’s particular genius lay in never having overstayed her welcome, not even once in her life.

  She stood and stretched luxuriously, accepting the guard’s help winding her into corsetry and other silly city clothes, smiling indulgently at the way the guard’s hands still trembled. When Piper was dressed, she pulled the guard into one last passionate kiss. “Darling–”

  “Etta.”

  “I won’t remember that, but it’s nothing personal. You are beautiful, and you’ve given me a heavenly welcome to Worldsbridge, and that I will remember. You’ll remember it, too. We won’t see each other again.”

  “Not even…” A shy hand traced Piper’s upper arm. “Not even on your way out?”

  She shook her head. “You’ve seen another Road’s Beloved, I assume?”

  Etta nodded.

  “Then you know that for most of them, their Road is contained, usually a polygonal design – a route, if you will.”

  “There are some who go back and forth between here and Sharksbay.”

  “Yes, exactly.” Piper held out her hand, traced the complex, tangled line that meandered between her fingers and onto her palm. “I, on the other hand, have never found a spot where my road crossed over itself or doubled back. Every patch of ground I set foot on is new to me.”

  Etta’s face fell, but Piper shook her head.

  “It’s better that way, I promise. I’m very grouchy in the mornings.” She took Etta by the shoulders and turned her toward the way they’d come. “I do have one last gift for you, my lovely. For a little while after I’ve touched you, you become like me. If you find a mark on yourself afterward, it may even be for longer. This means that, if you like, you can go outside the city. For a little while. See what’s out there.”

  “You mean that?” Etta breathed.

  Piper smiled to herself. She always chose well. “Yes, but go quickly. You’ll feel it when you need to return, and you must obey the feeling or it won’t go well for you.”

  “Thank you,” Etta said, “for everything.” But Piper made sure to slip out of the room in the moments between the words so no further embrace was possible.

  3

  The area around the palace had fallen too quiet. Piper’s new sandals smacked like hungry lips against the sandstone approach. She noted the arrows nocked in windows above, their deadly tips all trained on her.

  She paid them no mind, for her Road unmistakably drew her to the ornately carved and intricately locked palace door. Piper knocked boldly.

  “You were not summoned, Road’s Beloved,” a forbidding voice hissed through a slit in the door.

  Piper laughed. “My kind is neither summoned nor sent away. My Road has carried me here, where there is a message for me. You will not like what happens should you become an obstacle in my path.”

  The door remained unmoved, so she put a hand on it. It recoiled from her, as if the very wood knew it had offended. Piper permitted herself a smile at the grunt of pain from the guard who had tried to refuse her entry. “You’ll want to cool that before it bruises – and take a lesson from it.”

  She stepped into the palace. The hallways dripped with chilly silence and seemed to shudder at her every footstep. Dust motes were so thick in the air that she sneezed three times in quick succession. Lazy ceiling fans covered in layers of dust swirled so slowly that they disturbed nothing.

  Piper walked past row upon row of portraits, noting the descent of their subjects from the conquering poses of warriors to the complacent smiles of those who fed on the labor of others. She saw barely a soul – the occasional whisper of a servant, more a retreating garment than an actual person, or the clank of a guard shifting position.

  She came at last to a throne room, pushed the great doors open with a shoulder. Because of who she was, the hinges didn’t p
rotest when she forced them to move.

  The room she revealed would have been grander were it not so gray and faded. The carpet there may once have been red. Suits of armor stood in oddly relaxed attitudes, their previously martial positions eased by time like guards grown lax from lack of supervision.

  A man sat on the throne, so enveloped in pillows that his form was hard to make out in the dim light. Blankets and clothing covered all but the backs of his hands and his face, and what skin did show was ashy from lack of sun. Piper wondered how it was that no one had claimed the throne from this weak-looking creature. In her days, she had met – and sometimes bedded – monarchs far more vigorous.

  She cleared her throat. “King Willburn? There is something you need to say to me.”

  The creature in the throne moved ever so slowly, as if trying to hide the movement even from himself. “Where are you going, Road’s Beloved?”

  Piper shrugged. “I go where my feet carry me. They seem about to carry me somewhere useful to you.”

  “Come closer and let me look at you.”

  Piper obeyed. A gnarled old finger reached for her arm, and she permitted it. He traced a past journey that she remembered well, a stretch of road that wound around a cliffside slippery with ocean spray. Her footing on that road had been uncertain, and it had carried her into a cave empty only at low tide. There, an ancient merman had whispered secrets in her ear, gifts for a long-lost daughter born to a vivacious ship’s captain whose home lay hundreds of miles away along the coast. As a dry fingernail scraped her flesh, Piper recalled watching lightning scratch the surface of the sky as the ocean waves eddied around her ankles. She’d walked half in a dream for days, wrestling with new images of what the sun did during the night and what became of bodies once they drifted to the ocean floor and where the largest pearls in the ocean lay and what guarded them.

  “You have been on many journeys in your time,” the King said in a reedy voice.

  “I think of it as one very long journey.”

  “I recognize some of your marks. A road far, far south of Sharksbay.” He touched her other arm. “A path that seems to lead up to heaven itself.”

  Piper stepped back, shaken for the first time in a while. “How would you know such things?”

  “I’ve made a study of what it is to be a Road’s Beloved. Cut the skin off more than a few. Stretched and dried it, bound it in books. It gave me time to identify the roads they’d walked and learn their stories, to understand what gave Worldsbridge its name.” The childish singsong of his voice horrified Piper absolutely.

  “The Road would never stand for–”

  “The Road is no kind master. You must know at least that, girl.”

  “The Road has granted me strong magic.”

  King Willburn laughed, his mirth pulling his lips away from long, strong white teeth. “If I wished to flay you as well, you could not stop me.”

  Piper marked exits – the way she’d come, of course, and a window that might open to the other side of the palace. “You have a message?”

  “Oh yes, I do. It’s for the Road itself.”

  “For the Road?” Piper echoed. She hated herself for having been carefree just moments before. She had entered the city so casually, made love to the guard so arrogantly, walked into the palace like a person sure to survive.

  “It’s unseemly to behave as if you haven’t heard me when you have.”

  “I can’t give a message to the Road. There’s no one to talk to, nowhere to go.”

  “You poor darling. Covered with maps, a living embodiment of the Road’s whim, and you haven’t figured out that the Road is something – someone – real. Someone you can touch and talk to. Someone who can make mistakes and perhaps be killed. Someone who supposedly loves you. Someone who can lie.”

  The King’s lips writhed like worms as he spoke, seeming to twist around themselves. Piper tore her gaze away. The sight of them felt too vulgar, too intimate. She glanced around the room, noted that the windows were perfectly aligned with the cardinal directions. The sun was setting in the west, its orange-red light making the flesh of the man in the throne appear fevered.

  She cleared her throat, straightened her body. “What is your message for the Road?” She would figure out how to deliver a message to the Road itself once she got away from this mad king and shook the dust of this place off her feet.

  His fingers dipped into his robes and emerged with a long, thin tube. “It’s just some questions I’ve been wondering about. I ask the Road: Do you care at all for those you mark Beloved? How do we know?” He lifted the tube to his lips and exhaled sharply.

  Piper didn’t move in time to avoid the dart. It bit her throat sharper than a horsefly. An ominous, cool stillness chased the pain and began to spread into her lungs.

  The King laughed dryly. “I ask you, Beloved One, what drives you to the next step, the next Road? Do you tire? Do you ever wish to stop?”

  She struggled to catch her breath, but felt oddly compelled to answer him. “There is a restlessness–”

  “And the Road makes wonderful use of that, no? I wonder what it would take to make the Road come for you? What would have to happen to you? How much would you have to hurt?”

  Piper tried to whirl toward the west-facing window opposite the King, but her feet tripped each other and she fell to the floor instead. Two more darts struck her, one in the ankle and one in the upper arm. She feared the numbness that rippled from their points of contact. “Stop. Please.”

  “Perhaps I’ll simply keep you here. If you never take another step on the Road planned for you, what does it matter?”

  Another voice, both familiar and strange, sounded from the grand doors to the throne room. “Enough.”

  Piper squinted toward the source of the voice. She saw two bodies, superimposed on each other. She knew one rather well – the lush and powerful form of the city guard Etta. The other was tall as a late evening shadow, skin sun-baked, carrying the scents of spices of distant marketplaces and the wet, fertile earth from the thickest jungle and much more besides. Piper shook her head, trying to clear it of whatever the King had used to drug her.

  “It’s you, isn’t it? You do care about this one?” The King’s voice contained a whine.

  The two forms split apart. One – Etta – ran to Piper and caught her in powerful arms. Piper felt fingers stroking back hair that had somehow become sweat-soaked, then plucking out the needles in her throat, arm and ankle.

  The other stepped toward the King. “You thought to gain my attention through betrayal.”

  “You came to me once,” the King said. “I remember the night it happened.” He slammed a fist against the arm of his throne.

  “You were very special to me then,” the figure said. “I gave you much more than most.”

  “No one could be satisfied with your gifts,” spat the King.

  “The way of the Road has little to do with satisfaction.”

  Piper accepted Etta’s help struggling to her feet. Etta’s warm breath touched her ear. “Maybe you don’t know as much as you thought, eh?” Despite the chastisement, the voice was gentle and full of humor.

  “I was an ass,” Piper murmured. “I’m very glad to see you.”

  “Look at this,” Etta whispered, turning over her wrist. At the spot where the veins approached the surface most closely was a thick black X, and tendrils of Road curled away from it toward the red-brown expanses of the rest of her body.

  Piper touched the center of the X, a thought tugging at her mind.

  “Are you satisfied with me now?” the King asked, spreading his arms grandly. His voice gained strength and echoed, commanding the attention of all in the room. The blankets fell away from his hands and forearms as he moved, and Piper saw that highways and byways etched his skin, a map so thick with Roads past and present that it put even hers to shame. “I am my own man.”

  “I gave you pathways almost infinite in their variety…” the tall stranger
said.

  “And I have chosen not to walk them. I came to Worldsbridge, the place where all roads meet, and I sat at this crossroads and have not moved since. They extended the palace to shelter me because I am their King.”

  “Crossroads…” Piper murmured. She traced the X on Etta’s arm. The sun slipped further, and the red-orange light began to fade to purple. The tall stranger grew brighter in the shadows. Piper, staring at his back, felt suddenly as if she knew him, recognized the compulsion that sometimes came over her to rush after a person in a crowd and tug at his shoulder. The impulse was nearly always wrong, but it spoke to the power of a familiar gesture in a foreign place, the trick of the light that made a stranger seem to be a friend. Quickly and softly in Etta’s ear, Piper whispered, “I think this is a place of power. What did you see when you went outside the city?”

  “I’d not gone three steps beyond the walls before that stranger came to me. He said it was not yet time for me to walk away from you, and I already knew that. It made sense when he took my hand and we followed you.”

  “The Road is not made for sitting still,” the stranger said, his voice angry as thunder.

  “You said that to me the night you came,” the King said. He dropped his well-traveled arms back to his lap and became small again. “It was raining that night and I’d sought shelter under a tree. You goaded me into racing you through the mud.”

  “It was a lesson and a warning. Stillness has ever been your enemy, Will. Remember how the rain lost its chill when we ran and found the joy in it?”

  “I twisted my ankle in the mud.”

  “Did I not soothe it?”

  “You never let me rest.”

  “Rest comes in fits and starts along a journey, and if you feel you’ve had enough of it, more likely, you’ve had too much.”