The sapling cage, p.1
The Sapling Cage, page 1
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE SAPLING CAGE
“[Killjoy]’s complex characterizations and in-depth worldbuilding are distinguishing.”
—FOREWORD REVIEWS (starred review)
“A cracking, first-rate, epic coming-of-age fantasy novel. The crisis of gender identity only heightens the stakes (and suspense) of this propulsive, page-turning tale.”
—CORY DOCTOROW, author of Little Brother
“To read The Sapling Cage is to witness the birth of a new classic. This is a book that will utterly transport you.”
—SARAH GAILEY, author of Magic for Liars: A Novel
“Simple, strange, and elegantly effective, The Sapling Cage begins Margaret Killjoy’s anarchist fantasy series with an engrossing story of the struggles between tax-collecting knights, barfly thieves, and apprentice witches still too raw to use the magic they can barely see out of the corners of their eyes. There are goodies and baddies of all genders; there’s bullying and monsters and healing rainbows and rotten, scheming nobles. This book was so gripping that, though I tried my best to slow down as the end came rushing nearer and nearer, I just couldn’t do it. Now that I’ve reached the last page, the only thing keeping me from crying is the knowledge that there’s more of Killjoy’s glorious epic to come.”
—NISI SHAWL, author of Everfair: A Novel
“ The Sapling Cage is a compelling coming-of-age fantasy with impeccable vibes; witches, knights errant, and monsters populate a rich story about a trans girl finding power and community. It’s also a reminder that fantasy can be a vehicle for so much: interrogations of power, knowledge, ethics, an exploration of how to live in the world.”
—NINO CIPRI, author of Finna
“The Sapling Cage is a stirring, thought-provoking fantasy story that grabbed me in the first paragraph and didn’t let me go until I’d finished. If I’d been able to read this as a teenager, I think I’d have figured out some important things much earlier than I did.”
—ROBERT EVANS, author of After The Revolution: A Novel
“An anarcha-fairy tale with the most ironically powerful moral of all—power itself is so dangerous that nobody should be allowed to have any, except over themselves!”
—NICK MAMATAS, author of Sensation
TITLES IN THE
DAUGHTERS OF THE EMPTY THRONE
TRILOGY
The Sapling Cage
Published in 2024 by the Feminist Press
at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
feministpress.org
First Feminist Press edition 2024
Copyright © 2024 by Margaret Killjoy
All rights reserved.
This book is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First printing September 2024
Cover design by Erica Williams
Text design by Drew Stevens
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Killjoy, Margaret, 1982- author.
Title: The sapling cage / Margaret Killjoy.
Description: First Feminist Press edition. | New York City : The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2024. | Series: Daughters of the empty throne ; 1
Identifiers: LCCN 2024012289 (print) | LCCN 2024012290 (ebook) | ISBN 9781558613317 (paperback) | ISBN 9781558613331 (e-book)
Subjects: LCGFT: Fantasy fiction. | Queer fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3611.I4517 S37 2024 (print) | LCC PS3611.I4517 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20240325
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024012289
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024012290
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
Cover
Advance Praise for The Sapling Cage
Titles in the Daughters of the Empty Throne Trilogy
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also Available from Feminist Press
About Feminist Press
For my mother
ONE
The alder tree was ancient, and its leaves and branches left sunlight dappled on the forest floor. It was also dead, and it shouldn’t have been. Everywhere around us, the forest was waking from winter. Everything was bluebells and white trilliums and new buds on branches and bright green leaves. Everything was spring. Except the alder. Its bark was sharp with cold, like ice or like stone. Its leaves were gray.
“I don’t think trees are supposed to be like that,” Lane said.
We’d finished our morning work on the communal fields. Not a hundred yards away through the trees, horses ran in the pasture, excited to be outside after so many months of snow. I could smell rain in the air. It should have been a perfect day. But the alder was dead, and it shouldn’t have been.
“Witchcraft,” Lane said. That was her explanation for everything strange.
“It couldn’t be the witches,” I said. That was my defense of everything blamed on witchcraft.
She paced around the tree. It took her several paces for every lap. She was half a year younger than me—she’d just turned sixteen—but she was the one always trying to burn off extra energy. I peered at the frost gathered on the alder’s bark.
“I see another one,” Lane said. She took off running further into the forest and I caught up with her a ways away. A young pine was dead and cold, its needles gone gray. One shattered at the touch of my finger.
“Who else but witches?” Lane asked. “Trees don’t turn cold.”
“Only a witch could save it,” I said. “You’ll be able to save it.”
“Oh, hurray,” Lane said sarcastically.
“It’s not that bad.”
“I didn’t make that deal. I don’t think my dead mom’s promise should mean anything.” Lane and I started back toward the village.
“Witches get to wear those black skirts, though,” I said. “And curse people. And heal people.”
“I’d rather be a knight. You know I’d rather be a knight. Why are you arguing with me about this?”
That was a fair question. I thought it over as we walked.
“If I was a girl, I’d pretend to be you and go in your place.” I’d always wanted to be a witch.
“It’s a shame you aren’t a girl,” Lane said.
I agreed. Not just because of the witch thing. One of my earliest memories was being glad that my name, Lorel, was as common for girls as it was for boys. Five years back, my mother had given up trying to keep me out of her face powder and paint. Lane had always been game to trade clothes with me.
Those were the only two people in town who I talked to about how I should have been a girl. I had enough social problems already. When I was little, maybe seven, I’d told my friend River to call me a girl instead of a boy, and he’d just punched me, right then and there, without thinking about it. My mom thought my nose was broke, and a traveling witch had to set it for me. River apologized, and maybe he even meant it that he was sorry, but he’d made it seem like the whole thing was my fault—like I’d scared him or something.
So, yeah, only my mom and Lane knew about the dresses and the paint.
If I were a witch, though, I could turn the next person like River into a goat. Or figure out things like why those trees were cold.
“I’ll do it anyway,” I said as we walked through the fields of flax and barley.
“What?”
I started talking faster so I wouldn’t lose my nerve. “When the coven comes through to take you, I’ll tell them I’m you, and I’ll go off and learn to be a witch.”
“You’re a boy,” Lane said.
“Girls are allowed to be knights now, why can’t boys be witches? And besides, it’s not my fault I’m a boy.”
“It’s still true.”
“I can pretend.”
Lane walked up next to me and threw her arms around my shoulders. “What if you get caught?”
“I won’t get caught,” I said. “Strangers always think I’m a girl anyway.”
My mother and I ran the stables. There were more popular roads than South Ede, and there were more prosperous towns than Ledston on South Ede, but we still saw our share of wayfarers. Most were on their way to Port Cek to our east or Deadman Castle to our west, and most of them had horses, and most of them stabled with us overnight. We served knights and mercenaries and merchants and brigands, and I was just reaching an age where grown men took not a small amount of interest in trying to figure out my gender. I didn’t have even a hint of a beard, my shoulders were narrow, and I had my mother’s sharp features.
“These are witches, though,” Lane reminded me. “They can see more than other people can.”
“Are you trying to talk me out of it?” I asked.
“No.” She squeezed me tighter against her side as we walked. “I’m just worried. What will you tell your dads? Or your mother?”
“I won’t tell Grell or Jorge anything.” My dads had a home all the way in Port Cek. I lived with them every autumn for a month or so when the storms kept them on land. Most of the year I didn’t hear from them, and their only contribution to my upbringing was the silver they sent my mother when they could. “Mom, though, she’ll understand.”
“I love it like I love the Baron,” my mother said when I told her. That was about as close as she came to cursing—she sure didn’t love Baron Ede. No one did.
She sat in her rocking chair, a clay mug of wine in her hand. I’d waited until after supper to tell her, because she never took news well on an empty stomach. I didn’t either, come to think of it.
She took a long draw off the mug. “You’re old enough to make your own mistakes.”
After that, she didn’t say anything at all. Which was kind of worse than her yelling at me, really. It left me with nothing to do but stand around—there was only one good chair on the porch of the stable house—and come to my own conclusions about why it was a bad idea.
I didn’t want to do that. I’d made up my mind, so I tried not to linger on what the witches might do to me if they found out. Or what knights sometimes did to witches.
“I’ll get to learn magic,” I said. “Real magic. Cauldrons and curses, and maybe I’ll even learn how to fly.”
“What is it that you think witches do?”
“They travel around doing good things,” I said. “They help some people and hurt some people, depending on what they deserve.”
“That’s what you want to do? Help some people, hurt other people? Since when have you liked hurting people?”
“I don’t know, Mom. Since never, I guess.”
It was my turn to grow quiet. I’d probably learned that trick from her. The cicadas were out, and early too, filling the air with their rising and falling song. The town drunk said it was going to be an irrational year, one of those years where the seasons don’t do what they’re supposed to and crops fail. No one paid him overmuch heed, but the cicadas really shouldn’t have been out just yet.
“There’s no way to disguise yourself,” my mom said, breaking the silence. “Not forever. You don’t look it now, but you’re going to grow into a man.”
“By then, I bet I’ll have magic enough to hide it,” I said.
“I won’t hear the end of it, never, not from Grell.”
When she invoked my birth father’s name, I knew that was basically the end of it. She’d given up. I was my mother’s child, through and through, and she knew I didn’t care what Grell thought. I hadn’t inherited anything from Grell but skin half a shade darker than my mother’s olive.
“This is it then,” she said. She poured the dregs of her wine off into the grass to honor the dead, as she did with every cup. “The coven is going to be by soon enough, and you’re going to lie to them, and you’ll learn to be a witch. Not a sailor, not a knight, not—Nethers forbid—a stablemaster, but a witch. My son, the witch.”
I nodded, grinning. She hadn’t stopped me. I knew deep in my heart that if it was truly a terrible idea, my mother would have tried harder to stop me.
“What’s Lane going to do, while you’re off being her? She want to learn to run a stable?”
“She’s going to be a knight.”
“Of course she is.” My mom sighed. I knew she wasn’t happy about me leaving. I knew she wanted someone to care about the stables, about Ledston, the way she did. But that wasn’t me. It wouldn’t have done anyone any good for me to pretend otherwise.
Witches don’t really keep proper schedules, but most years they made their way down South Ede around Mother’s May, the spring holiday. I figured I had about a week to prepare myself.
The witches didn’t know Lane by name; they were just coming for the daughter of Leona of the Lead now that she’d seen sixteen years. I started sleeping over at the Lead manor in case they came at night. The house was a decrepit shell, really, the rock walls overgrown with vines and half the lumber taken to rot. Lane did what she could to maintain it, but she’d lived there alone for three years. She spent most of her days working the communal fields and hadn’t the skills or resources for serious repairs.
The manor was a shadow of its former glory. “Lead Manor, Dead Manor,” Lane called it, rhyming the name. A few hundred years ago, Lane’s ancestors had founded the town to mine lead, then sworn fealty to some baroness or baron. Serfs moved in, and those who weren’t mining took to farming on the communal fields. A hundred years back, collectivization had swept through the lowlands, and the baron had allowed it rather than lose power completely. Lane’s family stayed richer than most of the rest of us, but only through trade and inheritance. They no longer ruled and they no longer took tax, only the baron did either of those things. By Lane’s mother’s time, the family barely had enough to maintain the ancient manor.
The first night I spent there, waiting for the witches, Lane led me up treacherous stairs to her parents’ old living quarters. We had to pick our way carefully across the sagging floor in the lamplight.
“I’m going to bring this place back to glory,” Lane said, tugging her shirtsleeve free from a protruding nail. “I’ll be the first knight protector Ledston’s had in fifty years.”
“You really think you’ll come back?” I asked.
“You won’t?”
“I mean, I’ll visit my mom,” I said. “Sometimes.”
“We could use a village witch,” Lane said. “Just think of this place with a knight protector and a village witch!”
“Too much world to see,” I said. Since I’d made up my mind to join the witches, I’d spent half my time, waking and asleep, imagining all the things I was off to see and do.
We stopped before a heavy cherrywood wardrobe set in the corner of the master bedroom. Its hinges were faded brass, but gold filigree still gleamed eternally bright along the door panels. Before Lane’s mother died, she had always kept us out of this room. After Lane’s mother died, Lane herself had solemnly told me that this wardrobe was off limits.
Lane selected an iron key hung on a chain from her belt and held it aloft so we might appreciate the seriousness of the moment.
“You ready?” she asked.
I nodded. I could scarcely wait.
She opened the wardrobe. Black skirts and dresses hung from hooks. Stockings woven in intricate patterns lay in a pile. Jewelry, finely crafted from plain materials, glittered beneath the glass lid of an ebony box. I’d studied at the loom enough to know the long days it took to weave a few yards of flax or wool. This was the accumulated wealth of a life.
“My mother left pretty clear instructions for when I left to join the witches,” Lane said. “I was to bring a short dress, a long dress, a warm cloak, a winter skirt, and three pairs of stockings. So pick out whatever you’d like.”
My own dress. I would have my own dress. Two of them, even.
I spent most of an hour making my decision, modeling each garment in front of the mirror on the inside door of the wardrobe. Not even Leona of the Lead had ever owned a smooth glass mirror, so my image was distorted. That suited me fine. It let me imagine how I ought to look.
I let my hair down out of its topknot. Long and straight and black, it framed my face well. I’d have worn it down all the time if I could.
Though I was much taller than Lane, I was nearly the same size as Leona had been. Most of the dresses sat funny across my chest since I had nothing to fill them out, and even fewer of them were loose enough across the hips to hide the bulge between my legs, but in the end I found two that fit me just right. Both were high-waisted, which made my legs look longer and my torso shorter. One linen, one wool.
