The Passage of Pearl Read online

  Introduction

  Back in 2013, I had plans to release ‘The Passage of Pearl’ on its own. Those plans never materialised courtesy of some twists and turns that showed up as I continued working on polishing the story up into a publishable state. I collected the story in Feather by Feather and Other Stories, but the idea of releasing it on its own never left me alone. Sometimes my ideas are like that, though it seems a little silly to say ‘never’ about an idea I’ve only had for about a year or so.

  I published the novelette in a collection, though, so how could I justify releasing it as a stand-alone piece? Slowly 2014 came around and crept along. I had quite a few plans that already got scuppered early on in the year. Some were writing plans, such as the serialisation I’d planned on starting next year and shifted to this year, but some dealt and continue to deal with the demands of the world around me. I figured that publishing the novelette with additional material was as good an addition to my schedule as any and that additional material would be enough to justify the step to myself. At least it’d be a lot more fun than some of the things that got added to my 2014 bucket list!

  Deciding on what kind of extras to add is hard, though. The first was a no-brainer. When I published Feather by Feather and Other Stories, I added in brief author’s commentary on each story and what I discussed for ‘The Passage of Pearl’ was the draft I’d originally shared with people. The original version of this story is about a third of the length and in far rougher state. In the introduction to Feather by Feather and Other Stories I wrote that the sampler version collects all the stories that I’d written and shared on my journals up to 2013, but that isn’t entirely true. I left out the original version of ‘The Passage of Pearl’. You’ll see why when you read it. It wasn’t anywhere near finished.

  Then it became a question of figuring out what kind of extra material people could want without turning the book into a massive project, or adding in far more additional material than the final length of the story. I hope that people will enjoy the extras.

  Happy reading!

  Lynn E. O’Connacht

  May 1st, 2014

  The Passage of Pearl

  SURPRISINGLY, THE LIBRARY was almost as noisy inside as the festivities outside. Pearl had expected things to be quieter. Usually the world beyond the building’s dark-bricked walls and shelves crammed (respectfully) full of books faded once she was inside, but today she could hear the parade just as clearly as if she’d been standing in the throng of spectators. She’d hoped to finish a fair bit of work in the afternoon as well the morning, but she couldn’t concentrate. Forget coming up with her own arguments, she could barely focus on the text she was reading; the trumpeters heralding floats in the parade kept distracting her from the words.

  Pearl sighed. The parade should only be passing for an hour, and it was actually a good excuse to take a break. She’d already spent most of her morning at the desk, sifting through books in search of useful articles. Even if she decided she wasn’t interested in lunch after all, she’d at least be able to stretch her limbs. The ones her human body had anyway.

  Slumping over the desk with her hands in her hair, Pearl pondered whether she should take the book she was trying to read with her so no one else could borrow it while she was gone. She decided against it. Her assignment wasn’t due for a while yet; she already had a fair amount of useful articles; and the book didn’t seem to contain the information she’d been looking for anyway. If someone did check it out, as unlikely as that was, she’d certainly survive the loss.

  So she shut Sivellus’ Flowers: Metamorphosis in His Later Years as she got up. She packed her stuff into her bag, returned the book to the shelf it belonged on and left. Out in the grand hall, the parade was even more audible and Pearl stopped at the balustrade. At least navigating the stairs down wouldn’t require too much concentration. On the ground floor below a white-haired security guard-slash-library attendant sat at the entrance desk, his back turned to her. Apart from him, the hall was empty, its supposed-to-be-white-and-blue floor tiles basking in the sunshine and the music.

  On impulse, Pearl took a deep breath to catch the scent of building in her mouth and let it tickle across her tongue — no unexpected result there, really, but it was nice to try — then walked down the helix staircase and made her way to the cafeteria in the right wing. When she was halfway across the hall, the guard swivelled on his chair and nodded briefly at her. Pearl did the same and watched the man turn back to face the entrance before walking on. As she hurried down the corridor that led to the cafeteria, she could hear someone ask for directions to the main library.

  When she got to the cafeteria, it was downright cacophonous and Pearl fled back the way she’d come before she’d even gone through the doors. It sounded like half the university’s students had gathered there for a shouting championship. She’d take the parade and trumpeters over that any day.

  Her stomach rumbled at her, though, and she’d forgotten her food and her rucksack was cutting into her hand. She shifted her grip and wondered whether she’d ever develop calluses. Lesley, one her friends, was always trying to get her to wear the thing over her back, the way it was supposed to be worn, but Pearl hated the sense of entrapment that went with it. It felt wrong. When Pearl got to the entrance hall again, she stopped and scuffed her feet across the mosaic as she thought. Where was she going to find affordable, accessible food with the parade and festivities clogging up the nearby streets? The stall owners would be charging a small fortune and she’d struggle to get to the stores in a decent time frame. She’d never make it back before the evening.

  At least with the parade starting to fade off into the distance, it was getting easier to keep herself focused. That was something. Before she could decide whether to brave the streets and give up on her library research or to go back upstairs, her stomach rumbled again. The guard-slash-attendant turned to face her, almost like he’d heard the noise. For all she knew he had; if the library had magical security, they wouldn’t be advertising it. “You just going to stand there?” he asked, not unkindly.

  “Yeah. Maybe.” Pearl paused, then continued, “I’m waiting for it to be safe to go out onto the streets again.” With it being Liberation Day, if she trusted her self-control in the press of people after all, she might still be able to find something wonderfully nice and affordable if she was lucky. Or over-priced and tasteless fresh fruit and bread. A fish sandwich might be the best find; her stomach approved of this idea. It might actually be worth trying her patience and self-control for. Pearl shook her head, certain something the man had said had caught her attention. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I just asked if you’re hungry.”

  “A bit…” She shifted her weight and her rucksack banged against her knees. “I forgot to pack food when I left, and the cafeteria’s crammed. I didn’t realise the date until I got here.”

  The man shook his head. “Kids these days don’t hold with tradition,” he muttered, but he didn’t look annoyed. “I’ll be off-duty in a few minutes. I can get you something if you’d like.”

  Pearl started, but smiled when she interpreted the words. “That’d be very kind of you. I’m not picky.” That wasn’t true, but she didn’t want to be seen as demanding. It was the nicest thing a stranger had done for her in ages.

  The man laughed, making the wrinkles on his face even more pronounced. “You’ll have to pay for it yourself, you know.”

  Balling the fist she wasn’t using to carry her rucksack, Pearl wished she were right-shaped and none of these pleasantries were even necessary. “I wouldn’t want it any other way,” she said, struggling not to bare her teeth. She put her rucksack down on the tiles and tried to relax, but she couldn�
��t move the way she wanted to. After a moment or two, the man gestured at a small bench. It was hidden in the shadows just beside the archway that separated the locker room from the grand hall. Now that she knew what to look for, she could see a couple more empty benches along the walls. Pearl frowned; she should have noticed them before and she never had.

  “Have a seat.” If he’d noticed her initial hostility, he wasn’t showing it. “I’ll be a few minutes.”

  Pearl nodded as she retrieved her rucksack and looked at the benches to see which one allowed her to oversee most of the activity in the hall and settled onto it. She perched on the edge of the seat, careful to keep her back away from the wall and give some space to the wings she could only feel. The better to keep it with her, she pressed her rucksack between her legs. The guard was watching the entrance again and didn’t try to make small talk with her. Pearl was glad; it gave her a chance to continue Daughter of Light, Sister of Night, which she’d started reading that morning.

  While she was digging the book out of her rucksack, she caught a glimpse of another person dressed as a guard appearing from a staff corridor. Her heels clicked loudly on the tiles as she walked towards the desk. Pearl repacked her bag carefully, simultaneously trying to flip her book open to where she’d left off. She’d only managed a couple of chapters so far and it was fascinating. The book was so clearly based on one of Sivellus’ lesser-known (and Pearl’s favourite) poems that she was considering using the book for her dissertation topic in the next semester. She’d already given up on simply enjoying the experience and had started pencilling notes in periodically.

  About twelve pages later someone tapped Pearl on the shoulder. She almost tried to snap the slightly hairy hand off before remembering that such behaviour wasn’t considered polite. And, anyway, she didn’t have the right teeth for it and the owner of the hand had promised to bring her food. Pearl laid her index finger a little below the line she’d just finished reading and looked up. Smiling, the elderly man straightened. “What d’you want?” he asked.

  It still took Pearl a moment or two to realise what he was talking about. “Oh. Uh. Just…” She considered, then made her herself smile back as she met the guard’s eyes. “Just a sandwich with ham or something meaty. Please.”

  “All right. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  “Thanks.”

  The guard gave her an exaggerated salute that teased a laugh out of her as he turned and sauntered towards the cafeteria. His replacement turned out to be a young, blonde woman who looked vaguely familiar and smelled, very strongly, of cherries and roses. She ignored Pearl, though, and Pearl elected to ignore her in return.

  Pearl settled back into her novel and dug out her notebook and pencil to mark a quote that she wanted to double-check when she got home. She tapped the pencil against her cheek, rereading the page to check if she’d missed anything. Caught up in annotation instead of the story, Pearl was actually aware of the heavy footfalls approaching her even before she smelled steak and ham.

  She looked up. The male guard-slash-attendant was carrying three plates as expertly as if he’d once been a waiter at a restaurant. He stopped at the reception desk. What he murmured to his colleague was too low even for Pearl to make out from so close. Whatever the exchange was about, it gave her enough time to use an old receipt as bookmark and to pull her wallet from her rucksack so that by the time the guard set her plate beside her she didn’t have to fumble around for it.

  Pearl thanked him, paid him what he asked, put her wallet back in its proper place, and tried not to be annoyed when the man plunked down at the other end of the bench with a whole, albeit small, three-course meal that included a mostly-rare steak while all she had was a big cheese-and-ham sandwich. It wasn’t nearly enough and Pearl normally disdained cheese, but she was too hungry to care.

  “So,” the man said once Pearl had finished licking the crumbs off her fingers, “what are you studying?”

  Though her stomach demanded that she eat his steak (and possibly him too; she was that hungry), she pointedly ignored it and focused on the question. He’d already been exceptionally nice; she knew what cafeteria prices were like.

  “Literature. I’m in my fourth year.”

  The guard ate a forkful of salad before responding. “Are you enjoying it?”

  “Very.” And then, because he seemed willing to listen and had been kind, Pearl launched into describing the research she’d come to the library to do. She was studying the alterations in Sivellus’ poetry as he grew older, she explained. It wasn’t just, or so much, that his mastery of language improved or that his themes changed (sometimes seemingly radically, such as in The Lay of Saltroad Rock) but the way those themes actually, subtly, stayed very much the same underneath the surface. Though the political climate of the time had changed drastically, Sivellus kept on referencing his earlier works as well as that of his contemporaries, weaving commentaries on contemporary literature and events throughout his work. Sivellus, she posited, had only been pretending to change his feelings on most matters. At least, proving that theory was what she was considering for her dissertation topic next semester. It would require a lot of historical research she hadn’t yet started, so, for now, she planned to write only a short essay tracing the lines of her argument in a trio of poems for one of her classes and to see whether her professors deemed it worth exploring in greater depth.

  When she ran out of things to say and breath to say them with, the man said, “Sounds impressive.”

  The woman at the reception desk laughed, startling Pearl slightly as she hadn’t thought the other guard had been paying attention. “You don’t sound very impressed, Greg.” He truly didn’t. Pearl’d watched his eyes grow larger and larger as she spoke on, but she didn’t mind that he didn’t sound impressed or interested. Having someone else listen without trying to interrupt or change the topic was a pleasant novelty enough. Pearl’s fingers ran circles along the rim of her plate, unsure of what to do. She’d gotten good at ignoring her stomach over the years, but she was still hungry and she still had work to do.

  Greg’s colleague went back to seemingly ignoring them at some point; Pearl didn’t much care when. No one tried to fill the silence until Greg had finished half his salad and most of his steak and Pearl asked him whether he’d studied anything.

  “Neh. I’m not made for a bookish life.” He said it in such a way that Pearl couldn’t help but laugh. “Not the job I envisioned for myself,” he continued and grinned at her. “But I like it. It’s good to see the younger generation get ready to face the world and improve it.” He paused and stretched. “And it doesn’t involve a lot of hassle.”

  “Greg’s a bit lazy, you see.” Before either Pearl or Greg could respond to that, the woman snapped, “You’re not allowed to take your bags upstairs!” at someone. Pearl turned to find two sheepish-looking students standing in the hall and then gazed down at the rucksack tucked between her legs. Guess I’m lucky. She’d never had problems taking her bag upstairs with her. Maybe it’s because I carry it in my hand? It didn’t really matter, but it was odd.

  “— stealing the books, Julia,” Greg said, pulling Pearl out of her thoughts. “The wards’ll keep the valuable ones more than safe.” In a low voice he confided to Pearl that it was Julia’s first week on her own and he was close to retirement. After that there didn’t seem to be anything more for either of them to say, so Pearl picked up her book and let the man finish his meal in peace. She continued reading about star-crossed lovers and ill-fated spells and the guards let her be, though Julia collected their plates somewhere during one of the hero’s monologues and Greg left them during a magical duel to win a sword. Pearl might have grunted a goodbye at him; she wasn’t sure.

  Finally, she managed to force herself to put the book down at the end of a chapter. A look at the big clock opposite the entrance and then again at her watch for good measure told her that she’d lost a couple of hours. Pearl snarled quietly before catching herself and
turning the sound into a cough as well as she could. She stuffed her things back into her rucksack and returned to the literature faculty’s section of the library. If Julia protested her taking her rucksack along, Pearl didn’t hear it and wouldn’t have cared if she had. She had sources to hunt down.

  WHEN PEARL EMERGED from the library to go home, it was twilight and drizzling, and she was only leaving because she’d been too severely tempted to bite another student’s hand off. He’d been reaching for a book too close to her head while she was putting back The Golden Age of Poetry for being entirely useless. Now she wanted privacy, to let herself experience her feelings instead of suppressing them constantly. The library wouldn’t provide that privacy and the city even less so, but she couldn’t go home just yet. She still had to buy groceries. Snarling softly under her breath, Pearl made her way through the city streets to the nearest tram station. The people were loud, the streetlights garish, and the rain was starting to get heavier.

  Safely on the tram, Pearl dug out her book and wished she could have afforded a decent set of ear plugs this year. At least the weather made the revels outside a little easier to ignore. Pearl hunched over her book while the tram jolted on its way to the city centre, where she’d have to change stations, and let herself get lost in a dramatic failure of a rescue that had definitely not been part of Sivellus’ poem and yet fit snugly into Garrett Newport’s adaptation.

  Looking up, she found her stop blurring into view. The high street was lit up by lanterns, bespelled to burn even through the rain and swinging above them in the breeze. The regular street lights were out like on every Liberation Day celebration she’d attended. Pearl tucked Daughter of Light back into her rucksack and got off while a handful of people got on. Pearl had to wait at the crossing until the tram rode off. When the last compartment disappeared from her sight and she turned to face the high street opposite the stop, she discovered that it was just as empty. The people who’d remained outside had fled under awnings or were carrying umbrellas and even the newly-invented watershields. Shivering in the cold and the wet, Pearl pulled the hood of her jacket over her head and hugged her rucksack closer to her chest. She’d be soaked by the time she got home, but at least the rain meant she could cross the high street without bumping into anyone.