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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF NANCY SPRINGER

  “Wonderful.” —Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “The finest fantasy writer of this or any decade.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Ms. Springer’s work is outstanding in the field.” —Andre Norton

  “Nancy Springer writes like a dream.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Nancy Springer’s kind of writing is the kind that makes you want to run out, grab people on the street, and tell them to go find her books immediately and read them, all of them.” —Arkansas News

  “[Nancy Springer is] someone special in the fantasy field.” —Anne McCaffrey

  Larque on the Wing

  Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award

  “Satisfying and illuminating … uproariously funny … an off-the-wall contemporary fantasy that refuses to fit any of the normal boxes.” —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “Irresistible … charming, eccentric … a winning, precisely rendered foray into magic realism.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Best known for her traditional fantasy novels, Springer here offers an offbeat contemporary tale that owes much to magical realism.… An engrossing novel about gender and self-formation that should appeal to readers both in and outside the SF/fantasy audience.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Springer’s best book yet … A beautiful/rough/raunchy dose of magic.” —Locus

  Fair Peril

  “Rollicking, outrageous … eccentric, charming … Springer has created a hilarious blend of feminism and fantasy in this heartfelt story of the power of a mother’s love.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Witty, whimsical, and enormously appealing.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “A delightful romp of a book … an exuberant and funny feminist fairy tale.” —Lambda Book Report

  “Moving, eloquent … often hilarious, but … beneath the laughter, Springer has utterly serious insights into life, and her own art … Fair Peril is modern/timeless storytelling at its best, both enchanting and very down-to-earth. Once again, brava!” —Locus

  Chains of Gold

  “Fantasy as its finest.” —Romantic Times

  “[Springer’s] fantastic images are telling, sharp and impressive; her poetic imagination unparalleled.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Nancy Springer is a writer possessed of a uniquely individual vision. The story in Chains of Gold is borrowed from no one. It has a small, neat scope rare in a book of this genre, and it is a little jewel.” —Mansfield News Journal

  “Springer writes with depth and subtlety; her characters have failings as well as strengths, and the topography is as vivid as the lands of dreams and nightmares. Cerilla is a worthy heroine, her story richly mythic.” —Publishers Weekly

  The Hex Witch of Seldom

  “Springer has turned her considerable talents to contemporary fantasy with a large degree of success.” —Booklist

  “Nimble and quite charming … with lots of appeal.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “I’m not usually a witchcraft and fantasy fan, but I met the author at a convention and started her book to see how she writes. Next thing I knew, it was morning.” —Jerry Pournelle, coauthor of Footfall

  Apocalypse

  “This offbeat fantasy’s mixture of liberating eccentricity and small-town prejudice makes for some lively passages.” —Publishers Weekly

  Plumage

  “With a touch of Alice Hoffmanesque magic, a colorfully painted avian world and a winning heroine, this is pure fun.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A writer’s writer, an extraordinarily gifted craftsman.” —Jennifer Roberson

  Godbond

  “A cast of well-drawn characters, a solidly realized imaginary world, and graceful writing.” —Booklist

  Plumage

  Nancy Springer

  ONE

  Sassy Hummel knew she should get over it, but how? Twenty-seven years of her life she’d given to that man. Twenty-eight years if you counted the courtship. Twenty-eight years and seven months if you added up the odds and ends. Or maybe eight months. Twenty-eight years and seven or maybe eight months of dependably smiling, mediating between him and his clients or the kids or his parents, listening to him brag/bluster/bleat, calming him down, building him up, fetching the hammer and holding the light, cleaning up after him, making him go to the dentist/doctor/in-laws, trying to figure out what he wanted for supper, getting lost because he wouldn’t ask for directions, faking orgasm because he couldn’t find her clitoris either—twenty-too-many years of coupons rebates Monday Night Football phone messages grocery lists Mount Saint Laundry

  and off he went.

  With another woman.

  Younger. Had not yet started to look like her own mother.

  Skinnier.

  Bitty little ass. Chickie-yellow wispie-poo hair.

  Damn him. Damn everything.

  Thinking about it, Sassy pushed the carpet sweeper as if she were pumping iron and tried not to contemplate what it was going to be like to spend the rest of her life alone and poor. Alone, because she knew what she was: a dowdy middle-aged housewife; who could possibly want her or love her? And poor, because take him for all he’s worth her friends kept saying but it turned out he wasn’t worth that much and now there were lawyers to pay.

  Twenty-eight years. Twenty-nine, if you added the year of hard angry grieving she’d put in since Frederick had left, worse than if he had died. Now the divorce was final, congratulations! friends said. Time for fun.

  Yeah, right.

  Sassy slammed the carpet sweeper against the baseboard hard enough to jar her molars, trying not to think about Frederick anymore. It was bad enough to think about herself. Bad enough to think about what she was doing, which was immaculatizing the Sylvan Tower Hotel’s already immaculate green-and-burgundy mezzanine carpet.

  Bad enough to think about what she was, wearing a truly loathsome green poplin shirtwaist uniform dress and a frilled white apron.

  A maid.

  Twenty-eight years in a development house fulfilling every apple-pie requirement of the wife mythos, and the only job she could get was currying carpets and scrubbing potties at the Tower.

  A hotel maid.

  Not for the first time in her life, Sassy grew aware of the irony inherent in her own name. Calling her Sassy was like calling a midget Hercules. Damn, what a doormat she had been.

  Still was.

  “Damn” did not provide sufficient vent for her feelings, but it was the strongest expletive she permitted herself. Having been raised by a mother who scrubbed out her mouth with Lava Soap for taking the name of the Lord in vain, she could not help being a bit inhibited. She was not a shouter, for instance. When Frederick had gone away, she had not thrown any crockery into his earnest face, she had not screamed at him, and because it would have been childish, she had not said any of the things she now thought night and day. Puerile things, most of them. Juvenile. Being dumped puts a person in a childish mood. Tired of damning everything, “Poop,” Sassy whispered the way she used to when she was ten, scowling at the carpet, giving the sweeper a truly vehement shove—and she felt something lightweight but ominous land on the top of her head.

  She stopped sweeping and began to lift a hand to her head but stopped herself. She looked around.

  From where she stood, on the third wedding-cake layer of the lobby, Sassy gazed up at the plumy tops of subtropical trees, their seventy-foot height no more impressive than petunias in the context of the Tower atrium soaring eighty-five glassy-sparkle fairy-tale stories above. The Sylvan Tower Hotel claimed,
with some justification, to be the world’s most spectacular luxury hotel, with a six-story lacework lobby blooming with kiosks and specialty shops, boutiques, bodegas, discotheques, ethnic eateries, bistros, cafés, promenades and terraces and fountains and gardens full of braided quince and gazebos and fishpools—koi-starred waterholes out of which arose, like technogods arising from the primordial brine, the twelve neon-limned glass elevators which rocketed up the central supporting tower, the arbor vitae of the place, to eighty-five catwalks leading to eighty-five vine-edged balconies and several thousand guest rooms—too many of which Sassy was tired of cleaning. She understood that the maids up top, where the locked floors and the suites surrounded a rotating haute-cuisine restaurant, wore different uniforms and were responsible for only a few luxurious rooms.

  Maybe that should be her ambition in life now. To be a maid up top.

  “Poop,” Sassy muttered again.

  Exertion and emotion had humidified her face, fogging her glasses. Sassy took them off, wiped them on her apron and put them on again. Squinting against the glare of too much decorator lighting as she flexed her tired shoulders, all she could see above her was darkly silhouetted tree fronds—she didn’t know what the hothouse trees were called, but they looked like ficus on steroids. Something that felt faintly wet had disturbed her meek cap of mouse-colored hair; what was it? Once again she lifted a hand, but stopped the gesture in midair, because in the crown of one of the trees she saw a flitter of movement, like a leaf stirring—but there was no breeze in the atrium, or at least there shouldn’t be, and some gloomy gut instinct told her what had happened.

  No.

  Yes.

  Maybe.

  Oh, for gosh sake—

  “Racquel,” she called to a tall woman loitering in the doorway of a nearby boutique, “could you come here a minute, please?”

  “Sure thing, honey.” Racquel roused, erected, and ambled toward Sassy, as lithe as a black rawhide whip even on four-inch heels.

  Sassy knew Racquel only slightly, not having worked at the hotel for long. She knew that Racquel was the proprietor of PLUMAGE, the boutique in the doorway of which she had been loafing. Other than that, Sassy knew of Racquel only what she saw: a handsome ebony woman of statuesque, even monumental height, lavishly dressed, and crowned unto an even greater altitude with a new metallic-luster hair sculpture each week.

  “Could you see,” Sassy appealed, gesturing with her hovering hand, “is there something on my head?”

  Racquel could easily see. In heels, Racquel stood a good foot-and-a-half taller than Sassy.

  “Good Lord,” said Racquel in her rich contralto voice, studying the top of Sassy’s flat straggle of hair, “it looks like bird poop.”

  “But—” Sassy’s sense of the proper order of things in life had been much disturbed of late, and she didn’t like it. She struggled with this latest violation. “But are there supposed to be birds in here?”

  “Not that I know of.” Despite perfectly correct diction, Racquel’s low-pitched drawl still spoke of someplace south of Florida, making Sassy think of sugar and deep-throated velvety blossoms. “But I’m telling you, honey, it’s bird poop.”

  Sassy contemplated this appraisal of her situation for a moment. Sassy felt her well-trained self-control tightening like steel bands around a narrow barrel. Her shoulders closed a warning grip on her neck, her butt clenched as if she might be spanked—but inexorably the emotion in her flat chest arose and rose, swelling like a tsunami, until she had no choice but to let it burst forth in a wail of existential angst. “Good grief,” Sassy cried, “my mother gets Alzheimer’s, my husband runs off with a chippie, I lose my house, they sell my miserable jewelry at auction, I have to take this scutty job, and now you’re telling me a bird pooped on me?”

  “Really? Sweeeet!” Gracefully Racquel bent at the knees to look into Sassy’s face, studying her with newly piqued interest.

  Sassy stamped her foot, clunky in its orthopedically correct white nursie shoe. “Would you get it off me?”

  “Sure, honey. Just a minute, just let me get a Kleenex or something.” Long-legged, potent, sleek in iridescent silk, with a length of chiffon floating from her neck, Racquel strode off toward her shop.

  Waiting for her to come back, glowering at the smooth taffy-colored trunks of ficus-on-steroids trees, at sunlit glass casting rainbows on too much carpet, at designer-clad couples eating tiramisu at fountainside, Sassy pondered imponderables: Why? Why this, why now? Why me?

  What damn bird?

  Through her unhappy thoughts she heard something whirring, a dry, airy sound. Before she could quite focus, something, a blur of barbaric lime-green and lemon-yellow, shot down from above her, out of tree plumes and glassy skylight. Sassy heard a squawk of demonic glee as her already-violated hair stirred in its own personal whirlwind and the incubus thumped down upon the left rim of her glasses, throwing her world even more off-balance than it already was. In front of her left eye, smack against the forcibly tilted lens, separated from her tender cornea only by glass and a scant half inch of air, there appeared a yellow manifestation that she could not begin to interpret. She could only gawk, cross-eyed, at—what? She saw bilateral symmetry out of which her mind tried to organize a face, but the thing had too many eyes, six of them, a big pair of black ones and a little pair of kudzu-berry blue ones and those other ones off to the sides—and what was the hard brownish steeple where a nose should have been?

  Then the steeple moved, knocking against her lens as if the yellow demon wanted in.

  Sassy’s overstressed self-control snapped entirely. She screamed.

  She had not previously known that she was capable of such a scream, an exquisite supra-soprano paean of terror, a soaring, feral, thrilling bright yellow scream. Glass should have broken. Several hotel guests turned their bored, orthodontically correct heads to stare at her.

  With the same powerful whir, the demon vanished from in front of Sassy’s left eye. Undone by the sudden change of vectors, her glasses fell off, and she let out another wail, because she couldn’t see and she was afraid to move to try to find them.

  “A parakeet!” said Racquel’s voice close behind her.

  Sassy jumped, her hands grabbing at air. “What?” she bleated.

  “A parakeet! How bogus can you get? A freakin’ parakeet, hanging on your glasses with its tail up in the air.” Racquel’s voice moved in front of Sassy, and Sassy felt Racquel slipping her glasses back onto her head, but she still couldn’t see anything but a blur; her eyes had filled with annoying, childish tears.

  “I guess we know now what pooped on your head,” Racquel said.

  “It scared me.” Sassy heard her voice starting to come apart, and hated herself. Saying a thing like that. Sounding like a three-year-old.

  She felt Racquel dabbing gently at the top of her head. “It was just a dinky little parakeet,” Racquel said, her contralto voice a bit too soothing, like that of a Victorian nanny crooning, There, there.

  Sassy yelled, “I didn’t know what it was! You try looking at a parakeet upside down all of a sudden and see if you can figure out what it is!”

  “Shhhh!” But Racquel began to shake with silent laughter; her gentle hands shook atop Sassy’s head. She gave up on the bird poop. “There. It’s mostly gone.” Her voice quivered with suppressed laughter. “What’s left doesn’t show much. Blends right in with the gray.”

  “Oh, wonderful. Thank you so much.”

  Racquel pressed several Kleenex into Sassy’s hands—the supreme humiliation, from Sassy’s point of view; she had hoped that Racquel wouldn’t notice that she needed them. “Have a nice day,” said Racquel with a chuckle as she strode away.

  Abandoning her carpet sweeper, Sassy bolted for the nearest rest room.

  She nearly fled into the men’s by mistake, but caught herself in time and blundered into the ladies’, which, mercifully, was unoccupied. After she washed her face with cold water and dried it with a paper tow
el and blew her nose and got herself together somewhat, she dared to face a mirror to see how she looked. Specifically, her hair; how bad was it? Bird poop blending right in with the gray, indeed.

  The problem of poop on Sassy’s mind, however, was quickly superseded by another. In the mirror, her reflection was not there.

  Not. There.

  Instead—

  In the mirror, seemingly perched on air in the vicinity of what should have been Sassy’s heart, a little blue parakeet looked back at her.

  Sassy blinked.

  Closed her eyes a moment.

  Took a deep breath, opened her eyes again and looked.

  Stared.

  She was still not there.

  And the parakeet still was.

  There. In the mirror. Its head up. Staring back at her with eyes like tiny tourmalines set in silver.

  Sassy glanced down at herself. She was still there. That was her potbellied body under green shirtwaist and stupid ruffled apron. Those were her hands, shaking. She lifted them to her head, felt her own solid skull, her own face, her own eyes, reassuringly gelatinous under rubbery eyelids; all the essential parts still seemed to be in place. Through her fingers she looked at the mirror again.

  Parakeet.

  It should have been a pretty little parakeet. Cobalt-blue, with a cute creamy white face. But Sassy did not find it pretty. She flinched and clenched her fingers together, hiding behind them.

  “Give me a break,” she whispered. Sassy was not a religious person, especially not lately, but her posture was undeniably that of prayer. “Give me a break,” she whispered again, “please.” Slowly she lowered her hands from her eyes.

  It was still there. Little blue parakeet. Looking straight back at her.

  Sassy didn’t reason anything out—that the cant of the parakeet’s head was the mirror image of hers, the stare of the beady eyes, the same as hers—she couldn’t think; her mind was farting way too hard for thought. But ineluctably she knew: that bird was her reflection now. Her self.

  Perched in sweetleaf, hidden in greenfree that matched his own green coverts, Kleet shivered in awe. He trembled, all his feathers prickling. Even his feet quivered on the twig they clutched, even his beak quivered—for he had just encountered Deity face-to-face.