The Swan Riders by Erin Bow Page A

away.
    Skinning.
    It meant: to be skinned.
    â€œIt’s a lot to take,” said Talis. The electrical conductivity of his fingers was changing. “Patriotism. Royalty.”
    â€œThe who of me. The why of me.” It was almost nonsense but it made sense in my head. Too much. Everything. The muscles in my cheeks were firing, a series of small twitches.
    I couldn’t even stay on my feet without Francis but I threw up my hands, batting at Talis’s chest. Ultrasound bounced around my sinuses. He was building a map. “Don’t—”
    â€œAn event this big—”
    â€œI know—”
    â€œCategory two, maybe even three. An event this big will kill you.”
    My teeth were rattling. Beads on stone. Xie’s headdress, coming apart. The click of gears as the apple press dropped.
    â€œHold her steady, FX,” said Talis.
    Francis Xavier’s voice, in my hair: “She said no.”
    The world was breaking into strobes of itself. And I was on fire. Talis’s fingers were points of light in my skin.
    â€œHelp,” I said. Or maybe “Stop.”
    But nothing stopped.
    Talis’s fingers pushed into me.
    There was a great rush of everything.
    And then nothing at all.

    I came up from—I did not know what. Nothing at all.
    They’d laid me out on the bed and wrapped the quilts around me. I sat up, dragging blankets. I blinked three times. The Swan Riders’ refuge, Refuge 792. Warm. Lit golden. They had a pellet stove going, a little box of heat. There were tears evaporating from my face in its heat, leaving trails of tightness, numbness. I could not quite remember why I had been crying.
    I blinked again, and took inventory. Talis was nowhere in sight. Sri was sitting on the floor in the empty alcove, working on her carving. She had her boots off, and little curls of wood were falling onto her long brown bare toes.
    At the table, Francis Xavier was taking apart a bridle, oiling and cleaning the pieces: intricate, delicate work. I could smell the neat’s-foot oil and hear the click of the tack against the soft-worn metal of the tabletop. His hands moved together, not with frenetic energy, like Talis’s dancing fingers, but with perfectly matched grace. Matched, despite their mismatch, like a pair of lovers, a team of horses. His left was such a dark umber that the black wing tattoo that cuffed it hardly showed. His right was translucent, pearly under the light fixture, metal bones inside it moving like trees in the fog.
    â€œHow did you lose it?” I asked.
    I’d lost something.
    â€œI was born without it,” he said.
    â€œYou didn’t get ren-gen?”
    He didn’t answer. At length Sri filled in the blank. “We’re not all born in royal courts, Greta.”
    â€œBut . . .” But surely Talis could afford whatever was needed for his people.
    â€œThe Swan Riders don’t get corrective therapies of any kind.” Sri turned her carving over, shaving her way closer to the horse’s heart. “It changes our mind/body map too much. Makes it harder for the AIs to use us.”
    There was a beat of silence.
    Then Francis Xavier said: “Rachel wears glasses.”
    Something in the way he said the name of the woman Talis was inhabiting made me wonder . . . Sri had said this wasn’t her station. Was it then Francis Xavier’s? And Rachel’s?
    I got up, trailing the blanket like a cape. It was poppy orange. There was a tiny red silk heart stitched to the hem of the backing. I fixated on it—poppy and saffron, and the little red heart, every thread. I was fixating on it as I had on the apple. I was falling into fugue, shutting down. What had happened? I hugged the quilt close. I was shivering, not from cold but from . . . exhaustion? As if I’d run miles and miles. I found one hand squeezing the base of the other thumb, like a vise, making pain shoot up my