CW: violence.
It’s a little difficult for me to think about the initial process of this piece because I’ve continued to think about it quite a lot since initially writing it, to the point where it’s now the kernel of a someday novel project about occupation by a victorious fairyland. Certainly the most proximate inspiration was reading Jeanette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun, but I’ve been steeped in faerie stories, with a preference for the darker, older kind since I was small, and this is just one of many iterations on the broader theme I’ve worked on. I’d like to say that the terrible Victoria of Failbetter’s Sunless Skies was also a thematic seed, but since I wrote this long before playing that, it’s just a case of parallel evolution.
Since the late war and the revolution of memory that ended it, the Green Hills have been opened. You are one of the lucky few to win the lottery this year. Welcome to your travel guide.
The trip is not difficult, but there are things you should not miss, and there are customs you may not understand as a new arrival in the Kingdom. Let us begin.
• • • •
You must arrange your berth at the consulate, as no ship chartered elsewhere can sail to the Green Hills.
Be on deck to see the ship pass between the Barrow Cliffs and onto the Sea-Under-Stone. Save your money and avoid buying the various guides to finding constellations in the false sky overhead; the lights are different for each journey and each traveler. If you remain on deck for the entire passage, consider sunglasses for the moment of emergence into Summer Bay.
Once you pass under the Gate of Horn and into the harbor, you may see other ships running below the water. Don’t look too long at them. You would not wish to arrive in Summerport’s reflection.
Below the reflections are the wrecks of what was once a navy fit to shake the world, but do not look at that either. There is only pain and loss to see in it.
Keep your eyes up, on the rising terraces of the true city, its windows like bright eyes and its thousand thousand banners floating in the wind.
• • • •
Any house in Summerport will open if you ask three times for hospitality, but there are some that specialize in foreign visitors, and it is worth finding them. The long, low warehouses on the dockside are often crowded, and the wrecks in the harbor groan after moonset.
Up seven levels from the harbor, on the street of crying owls, is the blue house, large enough for many parties, and empty but for visitors and blue-feathered servants. Extensive gardens full of streams and fountains ring the house and can provide hours of pleasant respite from the dust of travel and noises of the city.
The House of Velvet Curtains, three levels up at the northern edge of the city, is perfect for the adventurous or lonely traveler. The hosts will greet you with wide smiles and red lips and soft, inviting hands. The beds are soft, too, and light at every hour of the evening sifts gently through the curtains. One can view the harbor from the windows or arrange for the more immediate distraction of pleasant company. I have not forgotten my own visit yet.
• • • •
The streets of Summerport come alive each night with markets, filling the dark-cobbled squares, hiding in narrow alleys hung with strings of little candles, floating on ice in the many streams and pools of the terraced city, and dangling high above the streets atop half-finished towers.
It is best to go your first night in the city, it becomes impossible to keep away.
There is a thing you must buy at one stall. You will know it when you find it. Just as I knew the quill of glass and amber and thorn-wood that found my hand when I first looked for it. The stallholder will tell you what your lodestar costs.
It is worth wandering once you have it. There are bargains among the many colorful displays, and some things that cannot be found elsewhere for any price. Don’t worry about prices or exchange rates. There is always something the vendors of Summerport want, and you can almost certainly afford it.
Make sure to thank each stallholder you buy from, not only the one you are compelled to find.
• • • •
Of all the sights in Summerport, the mills that ring the highest southern terraces are most remarkable. Set among small dormitory buildings where most of Summerport’s long-term foreign residents reside, the mills are marvels of cross-cultural cooperation that barely pre-date the late war, but still draw on heritage art forms older than recorded history.
The double-looms used here are found nowhere but the Kingdom.
Foreign workers weave the finest silk and linen on vast machines, while natives of the Green Hills work beside them on the shadow looms, twisting dream fiber around the ordinary thread.
Watch how the shadow-shuttles pass through the weavers’ hands like smoke. Watch how the other shuttles do not. Blood is black-crimson here, and that silk is the most prized by the kingdom’s noble houses.
• • • •
Outside of Summerport, of course, there is only one part of the Green Hills open to you. The Abbey of St. Thomas is the only foreign religious building in the kingdom, and you must visit it before you go where you are wanted next.
Around the abbey are the grave hedges, where all the dead of the late war rest at last, our kindred under roses, and those of the Green Hills under the holly. If you should find a bare grave, pick a flower and let it fall. It will grow to one more curl of the labyrinth. Drink in the fragrance of the flowers, and see if you can spy a single holly bush.
There is only one path to the center. Walk until you reach the abbey, no matter how long it seems to take.
Inside, approach the empty casket of the Queen Undying, carved out of crystal clear as breath, draped all in dream-silk green as grass and red as blood.
There are no pews, but you may kneel.
The Queen is absent, but when you look into her emptiness, you will remember why she now reigns over us. You will remember how the bodies stank until the queen accepted them under the banks of roses, and how our fleet burned before the quays of Summerport. And you will know, as memory fades into pain, what tribute you are called to give, your blood to silk, your words to ink, or to some stranger service even I have never seen.
Good luck, my chosen, as much as can be left to you.
