Mother, Maiden, Crone Read online

  Maiden, Mother, Crone

  Fantastical Trans Femmes

  Edited by Gwen Benaway

  Copyright 2019 Bedside Press

  Cover art A by Annie Mok

  Cover design A by Scott A. Ford

  Cover art B by Alex Morris

  Interior and cover design B by Relish New Brand Experience

  Edited by Gwen Benaway

  with additional edits by Emily Stewart & Tia Vasiliou

  All stories, memoirs, and poems are copyright of their respective creators as indicated herein, and are reproduced here with permission.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in any sort of retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in the case of photocopying or other reproduction, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Maiden, mother, crone : fantastical trans femmes / Gwen Benaway.

  Other titles: Fantastical trans femmes

  Names: Benaway, Gwen, 1987- editor.

  Description: Short stories.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190078669 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190078774 | ISBN 9781988715216 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988715285 (PDF)

  Subjects: CSH: Fantasy fiction, Canadian (English) | CSH: Short stories, Canadian (English) | LCSH: Fantasy fiction, American. | LCSH: Short stories, American. | CSH: Canadian fiction—21st—century | LCSH: Transgender women—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PN6071.F25 M35 2019 | DDC 813.087660806—dc23

  ISBN 978-1-988715-30-8 (MOBI) | ISBN: 978-1-988715-31-5 (EPUB)

  Bedside Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada and the Government of Manitoba through financial support received from Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for this project.

  Bedside Press

  bedsidepress.com

  Table of Contents

  Editor’s Introduction

  Gwen Benaway

  Mountain God

  Gwen Benaway

  Forest’s Edge

  Audrey Vest

  The Vixen, With Death Pursuing

  Izzy Wasserstein

  Potions and Practices

  gwynception

  Freeing the Bitch

  Ellen Mellor

  The Knighting

  Alexa Fae McDaniel

  Undoing Vampirism

  Lilah Sturges

  i shall remain

  Kai Cheng Thom

  Dreamborn

  Kylie Ariel Bemis

  Failure

  Casey Plett

  Perisher

  Crystal Frasier

  Bios

  Editor’s Introduction

  Gwen Benaway

  Fantasy was always my first literary love. I spent all of my childhood reading paperbacks by Mercedes Lackey, Tanya Huff, Melanie Rawn, and Robin Hobb. Stories of magic and romance were the one safe place in my life, an imaginary home that I carried with me wherever I went. My earliest heroines were the beautiful and powerful women that I found in between the pages of fantasy books. I used to imagine that I could step through a shimmering portal and appear in a fantasy land in a different body and gender where adventure, spells, and love waited for me.

  I never found that magical other world, but I did transition to become the woman I always knew I was. Revisiting my favourite fantasy books after my transition made me realize the many parallels between the lives of trans femmes and fantasy heroines. While we don’t always slay dragons, there is a magic and wonder about our lives. We often face enormous challenges and terrible villains, but we continue to battle onwards. Yet despite these obvious connections, our lives as trans folks are almost never reflected in the fantasy books and stories.

  I wanted Maiden Mother Crone to be a space for other trans women and trans feminine folk to write fantastical short stories where trans folks were the main characters. Between the pages of this anthology, there is a wide range of fantasy genres and characters represented. All of the classic fantasy tropes are here, but they are often reimagined in new and compelling ways. Many stories are about love, community, and kinship. Some stories look into a bleak future world while others imagine entirely new worlds. Every story offers a different window into the possibilities of trans femmes, imagining us as fearless warriors, revolutionary fighters, and mercenary mages.

  While reading the stories in this anthology, I was reminded of why I fell in love with fantasy. Fantasy gives us the freedom to imagine different stories for ourselves. The reality of our lives as trans women is never far from the surface of our fantastical stories, but within their magical bounds, we have the agency and capacity to change worlds. I hope that our readers find the same wonder and joy within this anthology that I found in editing it.

  Miikwec,

  Gwen

  Mountain God

  Gwen Benaway

  The air was cool around her. She and Rais were in the foothills of the mountains, a transitory landscape where the scrub brush of the plains gave way to tall evergreen trees and dense under foliage. As they rode closer, the temperature had steadily dropped from a blistering dry heat into a cool and moist fog. Aoyas breathed in and felt her chest muscles constrict underneath her leather armour. The air was getting thinner.

  Rais rode beside her in silence. They had camped at the edge of the foothills last night, sleeping underneath one heavy woolen blanket beside a small creek. She knew Rais hadn’t slept well, haunted by his dreams and kicking her in his sleep. The last few moons had been rough on both of them. They had taken a small contract with a local Lord in Hakien out of financial desperation. Mercenary jobs were plenty in the Occupied lands as the local Lords and Ladies frequently warred with each other for regional domination, but some jobs were better than others. The Hakien contract was messy, as the Lord was fighting off a small farmer rebellion led by his half-sister, and it ended in a brutal midnight raid that made Aoyas’s stomach turn to think of.

  As a mage, she had been behind the main battle lines, casting light spells to guide the Lord’s forces and occasionally casting fire on the rebellion’s camps. Rais was mostly an axe fighter, but he was good on horseback and knew his way around a heavy spear, so the Lord had insisted he participate in the main charge. The rebellion had been on the verge of starving. The Lord’s half-sister had been making gestures toward surrender in the days before the raid. There’d been no reason for a slaughter, much less a dishonourable attack on a sleeping camp.

  Even from where she had been, Aoyas had heard the screams and seen the Lord’s men chase down fleeing rebellion soldiers. It had been a vulgar display of masculine pride and violence. The Lord had gleefully watched the destruction of his half-sister’s forces but elected to stay safely back while his army had murdered their way to a resolution. Aoyas hated him and every noble like him with a fierce passion. When Rais had returned from the raid, his armour soaked in blood and a hard, tight line etched in his mouth, Aoyas had hated the Lord even more.

  Rais didn’t talk about it and Aoyas didn’t ask. She just wrapped Rais in soft arms every night, holding him through bad dreams and strange moods. The trip into the mountains was a makeshift pilgrimage away from the bloodshed of the past moons, a chance for them to reconnect and figure out next steps. The Lord had been pleased with their service, giving a small bonus which Aoyas had accepted with a barely hidden gr
imace. Killing with her magic bothered her.

  Magic was the most beautiful part of her life, a sweetness behind every bad moment, and she hated despoiling it for petty noble cruelty. There was no choice but to use her magic against others. If she’d stayed in the Imperial Academy, she could have used her magic to cast high wards to guard cities, light their streets, and purify their air. It had always been her dream to work the highest magic in the Capital city. She loved the rituals and structures of high magic, the obscure incarnations and the elaborate weaving of elements together to produce perfect spells that lingered for decades. Her battle magic, it’s small and violent applications of elemental force, always felt rushed and flawed in comparison.

  She was the first one in her family to attend the Academy. Growing up in Lerani, the smallest Occupied land under the Empire’s control, meant accepting a second-class life. Lerani was the last conquered region in the Empire. The land had been seized in her great-grandmother’s generation, but the last rebellion was only fifty years ago. In theory, Lerani citizens had the same rights as any other member of the Empire, but in practice, her homeland was barely administrated by the Empire. They sent the worst governors to Lerani, underfunded all of its services, and drained its resources to fuel the Empire’s more important regions.

  Lerani hated the Empire with a passion that put the other Occupied lands to shame. Her grandmother, a short woman with magic of her own, had famously spat at Lerani’s governor and was publicly flogged for it. Aoyas remembered how her grandmother wore her scars with pride, dramatically wearing loose dresses that showed the raised marks along her back at every public gathering. Lerani was not a land meant for Imperial overlords nor were its people interested in the supposed benefits of being Imperial citizens.

  Even as a child, Aoyas had understood that her people had been conquered and were living with invaders inside their own territories. She still dreamt of Imperial high magic and living in the Capital city. Magic was different in Lerani. It had no rituals nor any structure that Aoyas could feel. Her grandmother had felt Aoyas’s magic blossom inside her when she was barely six moons old and had tried to teach her traditional Lerani magecraft. Aoyas didn’t understand it. She knew some Lerani spells, but she could barely make them work even though she was considered a mage of some skill in Imperial magics.

  The Academy was supposed to solve all of Aoyas’s problems. It was extremely rare for the Academy to accept Lerani students. There was a quota set on how many mages from the Occupied lands could become Imperial mages and once you left the Occupied lands, you were not allowed back. The Empire may have been lazy, but it wasn’t stupid. Training its conquered peoples in the magic that had conquered them was only permissible if those trained never returned home. Aoyas had accepted that reality, pushing through her interviews and scoring the highest in all of Lerani’s students.

  On the day that Aoyas left her family and homeland for the Academy, her grandmother had turned away from her and called her a traitor to her people. Perhaps she was right in the end, Aoyas thought as the sound of Rais sneezing brought her back into the present moment. The Academy was as bigoted as the Empire that it served. A Lerani mage might be accepted to the Academy and excel, but they would be regulated to the secondary magics and held back from true knowledge, never more than a servant to the “true” Imperial citizens. The dream she had chased was an impossible one, so she had left the Academy and sold her magic to survive.

  Rais was an unexpected gift. They’d stumbled into each other at a tavern. Both of them had been brand new to the mercenary life, trying to stay alive for the first year of their contracts. The first year of any mercenary’s life was the most lethal. If you lived through it, you were lucky. She and Rais had been competing for the attention of another mercenary, a blond-haired Imperial boy who smouldered with a quiet intensity. Somewhere between flirting with him and downing cheap ale, Aoyas had realized that Rais was a much more captivating match.

  As a Marked woman, Aoyas knew her chances of attracting Rais’s interest were low. The Empire allowed for citizens to change their born genders and, if they could pay for it, buy the magics necessary to make their genders visible in their bodies. Thankfully, Aoyas’s own magic was strong enough to allow her to do it herself. She had started using the feminizing magics just after hitting puberty, walking up to the Lerani Consulate and requesting a gender change without her parent’s permission. Sheer force of will had got her what she’d wanted and she had never looked back, writing her new name in blue ink on the citizen registry in front of a bored Imperial clerk.

  Aoyas meant “winter star” in Lerani. There was some legend about the winter star that her grandmother told the kids in her village, a long-winded Lerani tale about the darkest night and the single silver star that graced the highest point in the sky, but Aoyas just liked the sound of the word. As a Marked woman, the Imperial term for those who changed their gender identification and bodies through magic, Aoyas’s place in society was lower than an Unmarked woman, but living as herself meant more to her than the relative comfort of being Unmarked.

  Rais didn’t care that Aoyas was a Marked woman. He was a child of the Capital city, but Rais’s father was not an Imperial citizen. He came from beyond the borders in a wooden sailing ship and disappeared back to his homeland after Rais was born. Growing up with an Outworlder father, Rais had learned to fight dirty to survive the casual hatred of the Empire. He was fearless at heart, wearing his hair shorn to the scalp and refusing to conform to the rules of Imperial life.

  They fucked the night they met in an alleyway beside the tavern and hadn’t stopped waking up together since. Their love was a soft whirl that kept them alive. They had other lovers when the mood suited them, but always ended tangled back up together. Aoyas didn’t trust anyone like she trusted Rais. Their jobs constantly put them in danger and Rais’s dagger had saved Aoyas’s life more times than she could count. In return, Aoyas spelled Rais’s clothes to keep him warm and wove intricate protection magics around her lover’s body.

  A high pierced whistling ruptured through the silence of the foothills. Rai’s horse started beside Aoyas and almost bolted from the sound. Aoyas felt a sudden searing pain against her cheek and then saw drops of blood fall onto her saddle. It happened so quickly that she missed the bandit’s arrow as it swept past her and into the distance behind her. Rais was already in motion, leaping off horseback into a low tumble with his twin axes in hand.

  Aoyas felt her magic flare around her, a tightening of pressure and air as three men burst through the brush ahead of them. Their loose cloth tunics and steel blades marked them as bandits as surely as the murderous glow in their eyes. She couldn’t see the archer but Rais was already rushing toward the men, fearless as always. Aoyas pulled her magic into a tight arc in her hand, one luminous thread of Air and one smaller spark of Fire. “Immolate,” she whispered under her breath, sending her magic coursing toward the bandits. The sudden rush of yellow flames along their clothes told her that her spell had reached them as Rais’s axes cut the first one down.

  More people to kill, she thought, and another beautiful morning ruined.

  They reached the mountain village entrance by noon. The sun was burning in a high arc overhead, but the shadow of the mountain peaks fell over the land, trapping the wooden houses in morning mist and fog. Every house in the village was painted in bright blues and greens. The village was the terminus point on the trail from the Capital to the mountain range, a meeting point of traders, travellers, and mountain folk. Just beyond the village, there was a pass over the mountains that bridged two worlds, the Occupied lands and the unconquered lands beyond.

  The Empire wasn’t interested in the lands beyond the mountain village. It had expanded westward as far as it wanted, signing treaties with the mountain peoples under the threat of Imperial armies and then ignoring them onwards. There was an Imperial Consulate in the village, but it was just a simple thatched hou
se with a single lowly Imperial clerk. There wasn’t even an army outpost here. As far as the Empire was concerned, as long as the village paid its taxes, it was on its own.

  “Is your face okay?” Rais made brief eye contact with her when he spoke, gesturing by pointing his lips toward her cheeks. The arrow had barely broken skin, but the thin cut had bled for a while before drying shut.

  “It’s fine. Not like I was winning any beauty contests before.” She shrugged at him as their horses ambled through the village gates. “Do you think it will scar?”

  “Maybe? Keep it clean and let it air. You could get lucky.” Rais was always like this—casual, unbothered, matter of fact. “When we get to the inn, I can take a closer look at it. If you want.”

  “If you don’t mind, I guess? I washed it quickly, but I hate to think where that arrow had been before it found me. It’s not like those bandits were worried about hygiene.” The bandits had been well equipped and more organized than the usual highwaymen who preyed on the Imperial highway, but infection from metal blades was always a risk.

  “Okay. I’ll look at it, but after we eat? I’m sick of eating dry rations. Reminds me of being in the army.”

  “And we should probably report it to the Imperial clerk, just in case they ever send a patrol out here and want to follow up.” She didn’t think anyone cared about bandits in the mountains, but if enough travellers went missing, maybe the Empire would send out a patrol. They cared about money and keeping trade routes flowing even if they didn’t care about people.

  Rais rolled his eyes at her. “If you like, m’lady.” His brief army service had left him with a bitter distain for the Empire and all of its agents.

  Aoyas had disliked his cynical practicality when they first got together, wanting a partner who spent more time comforting her, but eventually she’d come to appreciate it. His philosophy came from his life in the poor districts of the Capital city, a world where no respecting Imperial citizen went. It wasn’t that the poor districts lacked in beauty or softness, but everything was measured against the reality of not having enough to spare. He didn’t waste time with falseness or the Empire’s institutions.