Introduction

To be honest, the foxes may have started as a joke.

A few years back, I started writing a space opera novel called (at the time) Ninefox and Suicide Hawk. I later changed the submissions title to Ninefox Gambit—as one of my friends remarked, the original title sounded like it came out of a superhero comic—but the fox remained a central image. One of the characters, a tactician, was called the Immolation Fox and was an all-around devious bastard. This was partly in reaction to the foxwives of Legend of the Five Rings (L5R), a game I played and loved when I was younger, and later had the privilege of writing game fiction for. One thing always bothered me about the setting, however, which was that the foxwives of L5R managed to be cuddly. (Also unlucky.) And if there was one thing I remembered from the fox spirit stories of Korea, which have similarities to the Japanese version, it’s that fox spirits aren’t cuddly.

Naturally, I hypocritically started writing cuddly foxes myself. Maybe it comes from staring at cute fox photos on Tumblr. Maybe it’s the foxaganda.

As for the flash fairy tales, they started because I was looking to make quick cash. I wanted to buy a relatively inexpensive font, so I sold flash fiction at $6 a pop. It was a length I hadn’t previously experimented much with because it was such a hassle. At the time I started submitting, there didn’t seem to be many venues that accepted flash fiction, or paid for it either. I stuck to stories of 2,000 words and up. And even when markets did accept flash, I still had to go to the trouble of sending it in and waiting for a response, which might or might not be an acceptance, and then wait beyond that for the payment. With this setup, selling stories directly to people on reading my blogs on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, the deal was that I got paid in advance and the buyer got the story they got. I wasn’t sure if anyone would go for it—but people did. And furthermore, I discovered that I really enjoyed writing at this length, and that I could usually dash off a draft in a half-hour or less.

Flash fiction is interesting in that you can’t waste any words. It’s well-suited for jeweled imagery, and also well-suited for fairy tales or similar because you can evoke a great deal using archetypes. The fact that these were commissioned stories also meant that I deliberately wrote more upbeat stories than the usual. If you’re familiar with my longer work, a lot of which deals with war, you’ll know that “upbeat” isn’t how it’s usually described. But people don’t like downers, so I default to more cheerful (or at least, not outright sad) stories unless specifically requested. And a few of these I wrote for my own amusement, so there’s a little variation in tone.

There are four new stories in this collection for your enjoyment: “The River Soldier,” “The Stone-Hearted Soldier,” “The Witch and Her Lover,” and “The Rose and the Peacock.” No foxes in those stories, but foxes are tricky enough to maneuver around as it is. I hope there are enough of them in the rest of this collection to satisfy any vulpine-lover’s heart.

The Fox’s Tower

The prisoner had lived in the tower at the center of the wood for moons beyond counting. Even so, the walls were notched with pale crescent marks, crisscrossed into a tapestry of patient waiting. Sometimes dew jeweled the rough-hewn stone floor; sometimes ice obscured the walls’ pale marks, and he wondered if the world outside had forgotten his existence.

There was a single window, set high in the wall, too high for him to reach. It was guarded by an iron grille in the shape of tangled bones and branching arteries. He spent many hours contemplating the grille.

One night, the prisoner heard a fox’s sharp bark. “Brother fox,” he called out, “I would offer you my bones, but I am trapped behind these walls.”

To his great surprise, this fox, unlike countless ones before it, answered in a young man’s voice. The fox said, “I have no need of your bones. Why do you insist on sleeping behind stone?”

The story was an old one, but the prisoner did not expect a fox to be familiar with it. “I offended the lady to whom I had sworn fealty,” he said. “As a punishment, she set me here, to wait unaging until the forest should be no more.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous,” the fox said. “How would you know whether the forest still exists or not when you can’t set foot outside the tower?”

The prisoner was nonplussed. It had never occurred to him that the forest might not be eternal. “Nevertheless,” he said, “I am here.”

“You must be lonely,” the fox said, “if you are talking to a fox.”

The prisoner could imagine the fox’s genial grin. “Come and join me, then,” he retorted.

The fox did not respond, but that night, as the prisoner started to drift asleep, he felt the soft touch of forsythia petals on his skin. And in his dream that night, he embraced a man in a red coat and black gloves and boots, whose teeth were very white. He woke expecting to find the man’s fingers still tangled in his hair.

On the next day, the prisoner waited for the fox to return. He heard nothing, not even a bark. But at night, he smelled the sweet, mingled fragrance of quinces and peaches, and once more he dreamed of the man in the red coat.

On the third day, the man knew to be patient. He spent his time counting all the crescent marks, although there were so many that he kept having to start over. That night, maple and gingko leaves fluttered from the window in a dance of red and yellow. “A night is a lifetime, you know,” the man in the red coat said in his dream.

On the fourth day, the sun was especially bright. The crescent marks seemed paler than ever, almost white against the stone. When nighttime came, snowflakes landed in the prisoner’s cupped palms. He fell asleep to the sound of a fox barking four times.

On the morning after, the tower still stood, but nothing was inside it but the illegible crescent marks, and soon, they, too, would fade.

for chomiji

Carousel Foals

The breeding of carousel horses is like and unlike the breeding of more ordinary steeds. Carousel horses have their bloodlines, their registries, their stud books. The breeders, who must demonstrate skill with bonsai and acrylics, Fallabellas and broad-backed destriers, select the dams for their kindly temperaments and strong backs. It is no small thing to bear the hopes of a child, and the breeders take their responsibility to produce suitable carousel horses very seriously.

Carousel mares generally birth their foals at night, surrounded by the herd’s comforting circle. The neighs and whickers of carousel horses sound like calliopes and whimsical chimes, and the spindly-legged foal comes into the world surrounded by music.

The breeders sand and paint the foals’ carved ribbons and saddles, gild their manes and protect them with a final clear coat. Some are painted white as clouds, some are painted bright bay or dapple gray, some are painted black as coal. Some are decorated in festive pink, some in pale yellow, some in ocean blue.

The foals learn to prance to carousel rhythms from their mothers. Finally, the day comes when they must leave the herd to be mounted on a carousel of their own. They cry for their mothers, of course; it is the way of things. But when the children run to greet them, petting their muzzles and clambering into their saddles, giving them secret names, the foals remember what their mothers taught them, and whinny to their new friends.

for dormouse_in_tea

The Third Song

It was midway in the morning of the world, in the great middle desert, and a woman knelt beneath a tree beneath the wide, wondering sky. Her eyes were wet, her throat was dry, her feet as rough as the sand.

Sing to me, the woman said to the sky. It showed her dry, clear, blueness and dry, clear air, and never a song at all, for this was before the sky learned the rain-song, the storm-song, the thunderbird wing-song. And the woman went thirsty.

Sing to me, the woman said to the tree. It showed her pale, deadly spines and pale, threadlike roots, and never a song at all, for this was before the tree learned the leaf-song, the fruit-song, the oasis wind-song. And the woman went hungry.

Then a crow came out of the west wind, the evening wind. He was blacker than burnt wood, blacker than unbroken night.

Sing to me, the woman said to the crow. He showed her the fluid of her eyes and the marrow of her bones, for this was what the crow knew. As he drank and ate, the crow sang her the mystery of her muscles, the wonder of her womb.

Under that beak, those talons, the woman died. In her womb, the crow found an egg-child, pale and wondering. The crow carried the unborn egg-child away and placed it in a nest in the tree, under the sky. Then the sky learned rain and the tree learned fruit and gave them to the egg-child to drink and eat. From the rain, the fruit, the crow’s lullaby, all things came to be born. The crow had no song left for himself, and so in the evening of the world, he finds its echoes in eggshells and carrion, in his own raucous croak.

first appeared in Lenox Avenue Jan./Feb. 2005

Candles

When I hand you a candle, I don’t expect you to burn. I don’t expect your hands to glove black (ashes are my favorite fashion), and I don’t expect the smoke to be your perfume.

A candle isn’t an eye. A candle isn’t a jewel. And a candle isn’t a star. It can’t show you where the wolves scratch poetry in the chambers of your heart. It can’t buy you wine pressed from winter promises. It can’t tell you where your maps are marked with dragons, or dreams, or dust blowing black in the dark.

One chance wind, one chilly word, and a candle gutters out. You can no more rely on it than you can rely on bells to keep the hours after the sun slams shut. A candle is the poorest foundation on which to construct any lasting connection.

Yours has flinched into shadow. But look: I have brought you another, as hot as crushed kisses. If you become its wick, it might last longer.

The Crane Wife

Once a peasant woman found a crane with a wounded wing in the woods.

“It is a hungry winter,” the woman said to the crane, “but it must be just as hungry for you as it is for me.”

“The highborn claim that my flesh is excellent,” the crane said matter-of-factly. “I should not like to deprive you of that delight.”

“You think rather too highly of yourself, friend crane.” But the woman was smiling, and she shared her rice and water with the crane.

On the next day, the crane was still there. “Aren’t you worried about wolves?” the woman asked.

“I am a prey animal,” the crane said. “One might as well meet one’s end with a certain dignity.”

“Dignity nothing,” the woman said. And she shared her meal with the crane again.

On the third day, the crane cocked its head at the woman and said, “You know, my cousins tell stories of a crane wife. Are you doing this because you’re in need of a wife? I would think that there are easier ways to get one than by wandering in the woods.” The crane flexed its wing experimentally.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the woman said tartly. “I helped you because you ought to fly again, not because I wanted to take you home and tie you to a loom.”

“You’re assuming that the two things are mutually exclusive,” said the crane. “They say crane wives make excellent lovers, you know.”

“I see your vanity is intact,” the woman said. But she did have to admit that the crane was likely to be beautiful in any guise it took.

“I shall just have to prove it to you the old-fashioned way, then,” the crane said, undeterred. “Now, which way is home?”

for Nancy Sauer

Raven Tracks

The thing to know about ravens is that they don’t leave tracks the way other birds do. It is not just a matter of raven feet, of tearing raven talons.

Rather, ravens leave their thoughts scattered sideways in out-of-print books, in footnotes that should not be there and that are written in extinguished languages. Sometimes they discuss the number of coins it would take to imbalance a businessman’s greed. Sometimes they dissect (pitilessly, that goes without saying) the libretti of operas where too many characters wear black. They find it presumptuous.

At other times, ravens leave feather-imprints in corroded steel. Saying that everything decays, but even doomed things can fly for a little while.

Ravens leave snarled adages in traffic jams and scratch oaths old and terrible into 1s and 0s. (Ravens are not atheists. They know their own lineage too well.)

Curiously, ravens are scrupulous about leaving souls unmarked. It turns out that any weavework scars and appoggiaturas of grace you find are what you put there yourself.

for dormouse_in_tea

Magician’s Feast

Once, in a far land, there lived a magician whose great passion was not her studies but her food. In her youth she had applied herself passionately to her studies, but her particular school of magic emphasized asceticism and long hours of meditation. However, once she left her teachers and founded her own tower (she was enough of a traditionalist to prefer a tower, and humane enough to call it out of the earth’s bones in a remote location where it wouldn’t trigger seismic disturbances or ghost-plagues), her discipline began to slip. Away from her teachers and her solemn fellow students, it was not long before she began dreaming up feasts of custard and roast goose, couscous and eggplant, quail eggs and minty lemonades.

Traders soon learned of the new tower from far-wanderers and dream-seekers. The first ones brought the usual goods favored by magicians: whirring jeweled orreries, dried plum petals gathered from cloud-veiled peaks during the new moon, crystals brimming over with their own iridescence. Although the magician was too kind to say so outright, none of these tools of her trade interested her much. She bought some of this and that so that the traders would see some profit for their journey, and bid them come back next time with exotic foods.

The traders went away well-provisioned and laden with the kinds of small gifts that only a magician could provide, such as charms of trebuchet-warding (very useful in certain siege-ridden parts of the world), bat-binding, and may-your-sewing-needles-never-break. And then the magician settled back into her existence of meditations broken by the occasional galloping thunderstorm, and the even more occasional fantasy of chicken stuffed with rice, jujubes, and chestnuts, or tea-of-quinces.

The magician was not entirely idle during this time. Her mechanical servants gathered rarities such as firefowl eggs (the yolks had an unfortunate tendency to overcook) and mistfruit and the milk of dragons. At first these foods pleased her, but after a while her palate grew jaded and even these palled.

A year passed and the traders returned. This time there were three-fruit marmalades and rose liqueurs; a herd of plump, comically nearsighted goats ready for the slaughter; kumquat pickles in jars painted jewel-bright. The magician took in the goats but did not have the heart to roast them.

The traders had yet one more surprise for the magician: a jar of chopped dried pepper, piquantly red and to be handled only with gloves. (The magician had plenty of those.)

“A pepper?” the magician said, a little dubiously. It wasn’t that she disliked spicy food—she liked it very much indeed—but she wasn’t sure how far a single pepper would go.

“Its taste is very subtle,” said the oldest and wisest of the traders. “But chop it fine and sprinkle a little of it over each meal you wish to make special, and someday it will reward you.” More than that they would not say.

Years upon years passed. The magician experimented with the pepper, and found its taste so subtle that she could not detect it at all. Nevertheless, each year when the traders stopped by, she made use of it in preparing the welcome dinner so that they would not think her unappreciative.

At last illness came upon the magician, and she knew that death would overtake her before the traders came again. Moved by whimsy, she made herself a simple meal and seasoned it with the mysterious pepper. But this time, when she ate, all the memories of those previous dinners came back to her: not just the savor of roast boar or rare slices of beef alternating with candied ginger, but the traders’ convivial stories of seas where squid danced paeans to the kelp-gods, and the way they had laughed at the antics of her mechanical servants, and the pleasure of company after long months alone. And so it was at the end of her life that the magician finally understood the true value of what the traders had brought to her in their yearly visits.

for cohomology

The Mermaid’s Teeth

The mermaid sat on the island and sang without words. She had lost her teeth to the last sailor passing by, which made it hard to form words. Words of foam-rush and and storm-sweep, words of coral uprooted, words of clouds spun upended into the sea’s endless churning cauldron. Still, the mermaid was possessed of great determination and creativity. She shaped her words through the tension of her throat, forced them into seduction-verses.

Through all this she combed out her hair. It was beautiful hair and she didn’t see why she should neglect it because of a little bad luck with a sailor. It hung heavy and dark and ripple-sheened. Her lovers had told her that they could see the colors of the sea caught in it, or luminous moon-weave; they had told her about its silk, its salt perfume, the way it tangled them almost as surely as her kisses. The mermaid kept a diary of these compliments, written in the vortices around her island. Only the most ardent and perceptive sailors could navigate those vortices to embrace her.

Ah: here came a sailor. She sang louder, tossing the comb toward him so that the sun flashed against its curve. I wear nothing but the salt spray, she sang. I am cold on my island. Also, as long as it has been for you, I guarantee that it has been longer for me. Come and clasp my cold limbs, come and help me comb out my hair, explore the tide pools of my body.

The sailor heard her, although not his comrades. She only needed one anyway. He was sun-browned and lean, and she liked the quick fire of his movements as he dived to meet her, the way he knifed through the water.

When he reached her, she kissed him all the way from the bottom of her throat, all the way from the empty space where mortals have hearts but mermaids do not, mouth stretching wider and wider, and ripped out the sailor’s teeth to use for her own. They didn’t fit her mouth, but she had a lot of time and the sea was good at grinding down things to fit.

for dormouse_in_tea

The Dragon Festival

Once, on a tidy planet whose clouds wrote combinatorial equations across the sky in the morning and sieved the light into rich colors in the evening, there was a city of robots. The robots had governed themselves for almost 496 of their years, and since they had a fondness for number theory, they planned a festival to celebrate.

The robots gathered in a gloriously orderly convocation, with representatives from every segment of their society. There were robots who recorded the thrumming of the city’s shimmering bridges and the tread of robot or alien pedestrians or the murmuring of the wind, and arranged these sounds into clattering symphonies. There were robots who repaired other robots and painted them with the finest fractal designs. There were robots who sculpted careful habitats for the birds who lived among them, and robots who delved the planet’s shadowed depths for rare minerals and robust metals.

Robots do not sleep the way we sleep, and for twenty-eight nights and days they deliberated. As marvelous as their city was, they felt something was missing. On the twenty-eighth day, they agreed that their world lacked one special thing: a dragon.

Since dragons did not exist in their part of the galaxy, the robots decided to build one. They spent the better part of the year in research and design. They consulted symbologies burned pixel by pixel into old starships and oral histories collected from deep-dreaming visitors in ages past. They tested exoskeletons based on various luminous alloys, for robots are nothing if not empirically minded. And when they had any doubts, they erred in the direction of beauty.

At last came the day of completion, when the dragon was released from its protective shell and powered on. It was silver-bright and keen of visage and sleek, and its wings hummed with the stardrive that the robots had given it in case it wished to travel.

The robot dragon was pleased to make their acquaintance. To the robots’ surprise, a second dragon soared down from the sky to join it. This second dragon flew on wings of storm, although it limited its electric discharges out of consideration for its hosts.

The robots politely inquired as to how the storm dragon had become aware of the city’s endeavor. The storm dragon replied that, above all things, a dragon is a state of mind, and it, like the storm dragon, had been born of their welcome. It was particularly pleased that another of its kind was to be found here.

The two dragons were eager to travel. But they promised to visit once a year, and the annual dragon festival became one of the robots’ favorite holidays.

for an Anonymous Benefactor

The River Soldier

Every year, in the City of Ravens Feasting, people toss rings into the river. In the old days the river demanded rings of metal: steel, or silver, or bright iridium. In return, the soldier who lived in the river would guard them from raiders.

One day, the people of the city battle among themselves, in a bloody war that lasted two generations. The cause was not important, but at the end of it a merchant drowned their wealth in the river and demanded to know why the soldier hadn’t protected their family. The soldier walked out of the river, clad in armor of rings and coins, dark and glorious of face. She said, “I can protect you from the wars that walk out of the world and to your gates, but I cannot protect you from the wars that you nourish in your own hearts.”

Ever since then, the city’s people have thrown in rings of anything but metal. Whether this is a repudiation of the soldier’s words, or a way of honoring them, is a matter of opinion.

The Fox’s Forest

In the darkest reaches of a forest whose trees never whispered its name, there lived a fox. She was not the smallest of her sisters and brothers, but her family reckoned that she was unlikely to continue the family’s tradition of grand seductions and shadowy games. Even so, her mother said philosophically that there was more than one way to steal a chicken, and she would find her way into some foxish story.

The fox found a certain contentment in her days: lapping dew from flowers (there was a family legend that one of her great-aunts had delighted in starting contradictory trends in the language of flowers during her days at court), or fitting her paws into the patterns made by fallen branches, or gnawing on bones until they were as white as death, as white as desire deferred. It was not a bad life for a fox.

One day the fox pricked her ears up at a human’s tread. Although she was not the cleverest fox in the forest, she knew enough to watch from the shelter of a tree, whispering to it that her fine red pelt was the color of the shadows.

The human was a black-haired woman in a coat that had once been beautiful, with maple leaves embroidered in a zigzag across the breast. She carried a sword knotted with a gray cord, and the fox knew enough to know that some great shame had befallen her. The woman was looking directly at the fox.

“I am not a hunter of foxes,” the woman said. “I know your people are cunning and worldly beyond compare. I come to beg a boon.”

“If you know the tales of my people,” the fox said, “then you know that we always ask a price, and that we ask for things that no one wise would ever give.”

The woman’s face was still like water on a windless day. “Perhaps that’s so,” she said. “But I am desperate, and the desperate have few choices.”

“Tell me,” the fox said, noticing how the woman looked too thin for her bones.

“To unknot my honor,” the woman said. “I must bring to my liege red leaves from a forest whose every leaf is red. I thought such a place might be known in the lore of foxes.”

“Is a lord who would ask such a thing worthy of your service?” asked the fox. Her oldest sister, who delighted in impossible tasks, would have despaired of her.

“I wronged her,” the woman said. The fox knew it was improper to inquire further. “But you see, that is why I came in search of foxes.”

The fox’s youngest brother would have known of such a forest, and he would have sent the woman to fetch a peony carved from pink jade, or the heart of a stag with three antlers, or the moon’s name written on spider silk. But the fox had never had any talent for such games. She said, simply, “I would offer you a bargain if I could. But the truth is that I have no answers for you. You will have to seek elsewhere.”

The woman was still again. “I suppose I will,” she said. “Thank you in any case.”

The fox knew it was no use asking her family. They were foxes, after all. She did not offer comfort in velvet words or kisses, but walked with the woman to the edge of the forest. During those nine days, the woman told her of the lands she had seen, of cranes dancing and crows calling and temples of carved stone high in the mountains. By the time they said their farewells, the fox was quite in love, but she would never say so. She would have worried the gray knot loose with her teeth if it would have helped, but she knew that human honor did not admit such easy solutions.

After the woman left, the fox began telling the woman’s stories to the wind and the rain and the trees. It was as if the woman had left a piece of her heart behind, and the fox was enough of a fox to savor hearts. And if sometimes the fox dreamed dreams of the woman’s thin face, the woman’s ungloved hands, she kept them to herself.

Trees in a great forest—and any forest where foxes make their home is great in some way—can see a long way, and trees talk even when foxes are not there to whisper to them. Trees also do not share foxish notions that every gift must end in a bite. They saw the woman coming back on the road she had departed by, and they saw that she came empty-handed.

As the fox slept, as the woman neared the forest, the trees, without any fuss, changed their leaves from green and gold to red.

“I know that this is your doing,” the woman said, “and I know there is a price to be paid. Name it.”

The fox would not speak, but as she looked at the woman, her eyes said what her mouth would not.

The woman could have listened to the fox’s mouth, but instead she listened to the fox’s eyes, the fox’s heart. She had asked the price, after all; and sometimes prices are gladly paid. Perhaps, during her days away, she had thought about the kind of liege she served, and what that was worth to her.

As for the fox’s mother, she said that she had always known her daughter would find herself in a foxish tale one way or another, and no one could argue with her.

for sara

The Melancholy Astromancer

At the yearly cotillion ball, in the palaces of cloud and thunder and seething plasma, astromancers were introduced to the Society of the Sky. One of these astromancers was a young woman who looked out the windows of her room and sighed mournfully every night. She was attentive enough to her studies, in which she studied spiral density waves and the chemical composition of gas giants. In the mornings (as determined by the celestial bells), she embroidered constellations on cloth-of-void, paying particular attention to her favorites in the shape of dipper or dragon, and the pale luminescent thread gleamed in her hands and over the sliver of her needle. In the afternoons she attended serious lectures on the proper forms of address for a magister of red giants, and practiced her handwriting with a dip pen and shining ink, and learned to fold handkerchiefs into the shapes of generation ships. In the evenings, she brewed tea fragrant with starblossoms and flavored it with the honey of distant worlds.

As the day of the ball approached, the astromancer’s teachers noticed that, for all her diligence, she continued to look out the windows and sigh. They asked her if she was nervous about her presentation to the Society of the Sky, and assured her that her work was of more than adequate standard; that she would find suitable partners aplenty at the ball. The young woman smiled inscrutably at them and said that no, she suffered no such loss of nerve, and that all she needed was some quiet time to compose herself.

During the nighttimes—and nighttimes in the cloud palaces were dark indeed—the young woman stayed up and worked on an outfit of her own devising. She knew her teachers would not approve, and yet she was compelled by the vision, or perhaps not-vision, that came to her with the clarity of a mirror in the dark. Her teachers had taught her well: by now she knew her tools so thoroughly that she could work with only the faintest of candle flames to guide her eyes, and her fingers wielded needle and thimble and scissors without drawing blood. And if she was listless during the day from lack of sleep, well, her teachers attributed this to her customary melancholy, and convinced themselves that, as with most young astromancers, her full entry into the Society of the Sky would prove the cure for her moods.

At last the morning of the ball dawned. The dance hall was bright with lanterns from which shone clear silvery light, and one by one the young astromancers entered with the decorum to which they had been trained. They wore dresses in flamboyant crimson, highlighted with beads of spinel and speckled amber; robes of shining blue trimmed with lace like quantum froth; earrings from which beads of lapis and snowflake obsidian spun orrery-fashion, and bracelets that chimed with pleasing dissonances. Each astromancer appeared in the bright colors of the finery they had made for themselves—all but one.

The melancholy astromancer, unlike all her peers, showed up in a suit of black that she had embroidered with black threads, so that she was the only one in the hall entire dressed in that color rather than the radiant colors of living stars. A strand of black pearls and onyx circled her throat, and her black hair was caught up in a net hung with polished chips of obsidian. She raised her chin at the stares and smiled, in her element at last; and if she was not the most popular of the season’s astromancers, still she did not lack for offers to dance, or suitors to bring her petits-fours and glasses of radiant liqueur.

for Andrew S.

Harvesting Shadows

They say the mountains in this land are so numerous that the smallest of them have no names. This is not true; it is just that mountains are circumspect about the people they tell their names to.

On one of these mountains, where snow lies in wing-shaped drifts beneath the sweet pines, there is a temple. Its timbers are painted with the emblems of lantern and candle, sun and moon. Most importantly, it has windows open wide, so that whatever light travels through the pines can find its welcome there.

The priests of this temple are diligent in their worship, which centers around harvesting shadows. Nothing escapes their notice: the shadows of tumbling tiger cubs, the shadows of the great boulders that record the passing seasons on their faces, the shadows of fallen azaleas. The shadows of discarded straw sandals. Lost celadon pendants grown over with moss. Mismatched chopsticks worked into magpies’ nests.

It is a common misconception that the temple serves some god of dark places, as even mountains have their roots in the earth’s hidden halls, or perhaps the queen of dead things. But the truth is simpler than that. The dead have no need of shadows. It is the living who require them to remember the importance of sunlight and moonlight and heartlight.

for chomiji

The Stone-Hearted Soldier

In a war-torn land, the queen had a habit of demanding her soldiers’ hearts removed, and replaced with hearts of stone, that they might serve her better. Only the finest of stone was quarried for her soldiers’ hearts: cuttingly brilliant diamond for her generals, lushly veined marble for other officers, granite for the rank and file. None of her subjects objected to this practice, which had been customary for generations.

For all the queen’s cleverness and the hardiness of her army, however, her realm was defeated by dragon-eyed conquerors. Foreign observers agreed there was not a great deal she could have done differently. The harvests had been poor for several years running, and the queen’s predecessor had allowed the treasury to run dangerously low with their love of lavish banquets.

One of the queen’s soldiers, more pragmatic than most, carried out the last of her orders and then deserted when she heard the palace had been razed, the queen captured and beheaded. This soldier shed her uniform for simple clothes and traveled far beyond her home’s old boundaries, until the people she met no longer recognized her accent. She was not too proud to do whatever chores came her way in exchange for food and hearth-warmth, a virtue her time as a soldier had taught her. As for bandits, she had little to fear from those. Even if not for her sword, a stone-hearted soldier is more difficult to kill than the ordinary kind.

In the course of her travels, the former soldier met people both good and wicked, people of all professions and philosophies. She became preoccupied with her own nature. She knew the reputation her kind had outside their land of origin, that they understood nothing of mercy or rage or the usual human emotions, even in the thick of battle; that they committed the most terrible atrocities without qualm if so commanded. Yet she knew returning to her homeland would do her no good. For one thing, she expected it was still ruled by the dragon-eyed invaders. For another, her heart of flesh had been consumed by the great and pitiless magics that had replaced it with the heart of stone. She had watched the ritual with the rest of her company.

The former soldier knew the sum of her deeds, both glorious and cruel. She had been a good soldier, as these things were reckoned. Yet she knew that a good soldier and a good person are not always judged the same way. Perhaps, she thought, if she could resolve the matter of her stone heart, her course of action would come clear.

Eventually she heard a foreign saying that all wisdom is to be found in the sea. She was skeptical, but she had always wanted to visit the sea—her old homeland was landlocked—so she set out. It took her the better part of a year to reach it, but at last she came to the stern cliffs and salt winds of the sea where, the locals claimed, the Sea Oracle sometimes deigned to receive petitioners.

Mindful of her manners, the former soldier had brought the best offering she owned: her sword, oiled and blessed by a wander-priest. She descended the cliff by a trail cut into it by former petitioners, careful of her step, and to the sand-lined shore with its scatter of kelp and shells and driftwood. The roar of the sea overwhelmed her at first. It reminded her of battle, which she had not tasted in a long time. Then she regained her composure and called out to the Sea Oracle.

The Sea Oracle rose from the waves, taking on the shape of a sleek youth with secretive eyes. Jewels dripped from their hair, their fingers, circled their neck: pearls and sapphires and agate, carven ivory, beads of bleached coral. The former soldier laid her sword before the Sea Oracle and awaited permission to speak.

The Sea Oracle spoke in the everywhere voice of wind and wave and rain. “You have come a long way for a simple thing,” they said, not unkindly. “Look down.”

The former soldier looked down. She saw what she had seen before, sand and kelp, shells and driftwood. The gulls and terns cried out to her, yet she did not understand.

“You have a heart of stone,” the Sea Oracle said, “but did you think that meant your nature was unyielding? If there is something the sea knows, it is that sand is nothing but stone given wisdom by the hand of water over time. And sand can be shaped. How you wish to shape the sand of your heart—that is up to you.”

The former soldier bowed deeply to the Sea Oracle and would have left her offering, but the Oracle shook her head. “Take your sword with you,” they said. “I have no use for it. If you, too, are done with it, I am sure you can find someone to pass it on to.”

The former soldier began to thank the Sea Oracle, but all that remained was a rush of foam, an evanescent fragrance of blossoms and storm-ozone. Easy of heart, she picked up the sword and walked into a new life.

The Gate of Bells

At the northern border of a land where badgers play board games with comma-shaped stones and poems are inscribed on the very sycamores, a traveler paused at the Gate of Bells. She wore a bow at her back, and her hair was the color of sentinel nightfall.

“Open the gate,” the traveler called. When she looked up at the pavilions, painted in the five holy colors, she saw the silhouettes of ropes unswaying, ropes knotted, ropes without bells.

A man stood watch at the highest pavilion, eyes dark and keen beneath his helm. “The gate will open only when the bells ring,” he said. “As you can see, there are no bells to be had for miles around.”

“Do your people have no desire to welcome me?” she asked. “I bring gifts from the north, stories that once belonged to you. We have remembered them for you all these years.”

“I am sure they have grown finer in your keeping,” he said regretfully. “But the rule is the rule and I have no authority to change it.”

“In that case, take off your helm and set it aside,” the traveler said, “so that I may look upon your face before I go.”

The man saw no harm in this, so he set his helm aside as she had asked. He was not handsome, but his face was honest.

In no hurry at all, the traveler strung her bow and nocked an arrow fletched with gray goosefeathers. The arrow flew straight and sweet to strike the helm; and the helm sang with the voice of a hundred bells.

The gate cracked open from top to bottom. The traveler lowered her bow. “Am I still welcome?” she asked.

“More than ever,” the man said, glancing at the gate, and he came down the stairs to greet her properly.

for YKL

The Workshop

She is not an angel, but angels visit her workshop. Some are crowned in light from the universe’s first exhalation. Others come with swords forged from final kisses, and still others bring wine pressed from ripe stars. (Angels have indifferent palates, but she is kind enough not to tell them so.)

Angels visit her when their wings want mending. She has tools fine and terrible: needles hammered from indiscreet mirrors and nails that bite like first love abandoned, bandages woven from the susurration of seafoam and bonesaws that recite anatomical treatises in the language of entropy. No one questions her skill with these things.

But it is not her skill the angels think of when they come to her. Rather, it is that old story of an angel who unwinged herself that her comrades might fly again. When they mention it to her, however, she only laughs and says she could build herself wings any time she liked; it is their company she wants.

for YKL

The School of the Empty Book

At the School of the Empty Book, children are not taught to read until they are ten years old. Ten is one of the ten holy numbers. There are ten great sages, each associated with a flower of rare medicinal properties. There are ten sword-saints, such as Shiema of the Storm and Kir Red-Hand. And there are ten chronicles of battles past and future in the book everlasting.

It is not that the children grow up impoverished of stories. Every morning and every evening, they are read some poem, perhaps about the heavenly horses that bring the rain-chariot when it is time to plant the spring crops, or perhaps the curious history of Liaskion, the girl-queen who sacrificed her face in exchange for the wisdom to rule well, and who reigned from behind masks of butterfly and bird, so that even her consort never learned what she looked like.

In the meantime, the children at the School of the Empty Book learn other things: how to rake straight lines and flawlessly undulating curves in the rock gardens, how to prepare acorns for flour, how to spar with weapons of wood and bamboo. They learn to use the abacus, to meditate on the names of the ten angels without fidgeting, and to arrange flowers, including flowers of folded paper in the winter when nothing else blooms.

On his or her tenth birthday, each child is given two books. One is a primer with the sorts of things you might expect: tales of talking animals and humble trees, conjugations and stroke orders, exhortations about the proper frame of mind in which to attempt calligraphy. Here the child is finally given a systematic introduction to the beauties of the written language.

The child sees the other book as empty except for the title sheet, upon which the child’s name has been written in an elegant, smooth hand and embellished with gold leaf. Yet no child can read his or her own book. The pages seem to be creamy, smooth, and utterly blank. Others will assure the child that there is something there, several pages densely scribed. They even agree on what is written. Often these are stories about mysteries heretofore unknown, such as the current haunt of the nightbird who eats the sun-fruit each evening, or what happened to the child’s beloved older sibling who rode off to war and never returned. As the years pass, more stories appear in the book, and the pages remain as empty to the child’s eyes as ever.

Inevitably there are some children who spatter ink on their books or hold them up to fire in hopes of uncovering the secret writing. In the first case, the ink quickly fades away. In the second, new stories stop appearing. Even among those who are more careful with their books, the bittersweetness of this gift, which they must rely on others to read for them, never goes away.

for Nancy Sauer

How the Andan Court

Actually, I cannot offer you roses. Roses that taste like crystallized desire when you try to smell them. Roses whose buds are softer than the hands of the morning mist. Roses pierced through by the needles of nightfall.

Roses that count the season’s clock with their petals, disrobing red by red until all’s gone except the sun’s winter angles. Roses growing in walls around the wells of your heart. Roses crowding the boundaries of your cards until every shuffle is a procession of brambles.

Roses laid upon the swelling waters to be swallowed by black tides. Roses that candy themselves as they pass your lips. Roses so shy you can only glimpse their shadows as you fall asleep.

I would rather give you roses than a bouquet of words, but I do not speak the petal language adequately and it does not admit translation; this will have to suffice.

for Nancy Sauer

The Last Angel

In the streets of a city at the edge of hell, the last angel traces out every dead end in soft, measured footsteps. In her hand is a shard of star, with which she marks boarded-up windows and decaying walls. She writes fragments of poetry in gutter cant and half-formed creoles, draws crude stick figures of lovers coupling and cats curled by leaking radiators.

The last angel has only one wing, and it is the color of smog and the crisp, charred end of a candle wick. She plucks her flight feathers and gives them to nursing mothers and beggars huddled in coats two sizes too large. The last battle has been fought, and hell’s gates are open wide, but some people cling to the city’s cinders nonetheless. Although she cannot guide them out of the city—that is something only they can do for themselves—she can give them her assurance that, as long as they linger here, so will she.

for YKL

The Virtues of Magpies

Once in a border keep where the winters were tempest-winged and the sun never appeared without robes of violet clouds, there lived a youth who liked to feed the birds. In particular they were fond of magpies with their sleek black-and-white plumage and their cheery cries. Other people who lived in the keep viewed the magpies with scorn, for they were said to bring chancy luck at best, and they made a racket in the mornings. Or during any time of day.

Nevertheless, the youth insisted on continuing to save morsels for the magpies. As time passed and the youth grew closer to adulthood, they came to be blamed for the magpies’ antics, and the keep elders greeted them with cuffs and curses. The youth only said that even tricksters deserved to eat, and continued to wheedle crusts of bread or handfuls of seed from the kitchens.

Once the magpies stole all the keep’s light, from the flames dancing in the lanterns to the gleam of starlight upon spearpoint and armor-joint, and scattered the flicker-tapestry in the nearby wood, with the result that no one could see a thing for the next two nights, until the enchantment dissolved. Squirrels gnawed at the tapestry and undid the spell-strands. But by then the magpies, had lost interest anyway.

Another time the magpies switched the voice of the keep’s great warning bell with the voice of the keep’s chantmaster, which everyone found out on the morning of devotions. The chantmaster had to be restrained from hunting down the youth and deafening them with the clangor. (Deafening everyone, really.) The youth, who had acquired a certain storm-sense for magpie tricks, had elected to spend the day holed up in a well-insulated section of the library with some hastily-made sandwiches.

Most notorious of all was the time when the magpies switched left and right, which played havoc with everything from a dinner of state—the keep was hosting a delegation from a country where it was taboo to use the left hand to eat with—to the warmasters’ drills, to say nothing of everyone getting lost and books having to be read in mirrors. Even then the youth persisted in their affection for the magpies, and passed the birds baubles of bead or bright thread for their nests. (In secret. They weren’t so indiscreet.)

Yet when invaders came riding from the high hills, the magpies proved surprisingly useful. No one but the youth would have guessed it of them. The magpies filched the edges from the invaders’ swords and placed them on the rocks underfoot: instant caltrops. They snagged scraps of cloud from the sky-heights and clogged the invaders’ helmets with them, making it impossible to see or speak clearly. And they rearranged the countryside so that east was west and north was south, a swirl of misdirection with the keep at its inaccessible center.

Afterward, when the invasion force retired in disarray, the lady of the keep came to tender the magpies and their youth an apology. The magpies’ response was to braid a cage of crickets into her hair. The lady gritted her teeth, smiled, and accepted that the magpies’ nature could not be changed, so the least she could do was accept it gracefully. As for the youth, they were conspicuously absent during the exchange, but they were later seen napping in a corner, with several watchful magpies perched on their shoulders to make sure the chantmaster didn’t remember old grudges.

for Storme

Two Bakeries

In a city where tame peacocks wandered the promenades and trees mingled their branches in graceful arches, there lived two bakers. It was not a small city, of course; there were other bakers as well. But these two bakers were notable because their bakeries were side by side on the same street. One had a sign painted with a sheaf of wheat and a blue rose. The other had no sign at all.

The first bakery had shelves filled with loaves of all kinds: bread speckled with golden raisins and currants like secret treasures, bread that tasted of mountain honey or molasses, bread fragrant with thyme or rosemary; bread with thick, dark crusts that rewarded thoughtful chewing and delicate crusts dotted with seeds.

The other bakery sold wheat bread in plain, dense loaves. That was all.

The first baker noticed that, even so, all sorts of people visited the signless bakery next door. There were servants of the great houses in livery embroidered with amphisbaenas and eagles, and musicians who carried their coins in violin cases, and constables with callused hands and muddy boots. In short, they were the same kinds of people who came to her own bakery.

Finally, curiosity overcame her, and she went next door where the second baker, a tidy woman with square, strong hands, was sweeping the floor.

“Forgive me for my impudence,” the first baker said, “but may I ask you a question?”

The second baker smiled. “I don’t sell words, only bread. What troubles you?”

“My bakery sells all the different kinds of bread I can think of,” she said, “and yours sells only one. Yet people come to you day after day.” She stopped, not knowing how to ask her question without being rude.

The second baker understood her anyway. “When people go to your bakery,” she said kindly, “they are looking forward to the world’s riches. When people come to my bakery, they are remembering hunger.”

“Thank you,” the first baker said, and she bought two loaves on her way out.

for Nancy Sauer

The Witch and Her Lover

On the other side of the horizon, where the waters of the sea fall off into a great cauldron, a witch lived with her lover, a woman who armored her heart with bramble-story and sword-honor and prayers of charred words. Every night the two would meet breath to breath and hand to hand, as is the way of lovers, and every night the sun would ride beyond them to plunge into the cauldron on the other side of the horizon, lighting the witch’s home. The witch worked every sorcery she knew to please her lover, for she knew the small charms of lovers are the most difficult of all. Yet no matter what she did, her lover never smiled.

During the days, when the other side of the horizon lay in shadow and the vapors of the old sun scorched dragon-visions into the air, the witch meditated upon her failures. First she brought offerings of pickled apples or labradorite strung onto chains of fickle silver as gifts, or birds to sing dissonant symphonies. Her lover expressed her appreciation, but did not smile.

Then the witch invited poets and dancers and glassblowers to entertain her lover. Her lover watched the performances attentively, and seemed the most impressed with the glassblowers’ artistry. Their creations gleamed beautifully in the sun’s light. Yet she did not smile.

At last the witch, in desperation, descended into the heart of the cauldron. She wore talismans of cat-bone and chrysoberyl to protect herself, and waited in ambush for the sun. When the sun made its nightly plunge, she trapped it in a net woven from merfolk hair and gallows ropes and tongueless bells. The sun turned a face sightless with despair to her, but the witch was firm in her purpose and dragged it to her home to present to her lover. “Here,” the witch said, “we will always have light in our home.”

Then the witch’s lover said, still unsmiling, “Beloved, did you not realize? It is not a captive sun that lights my heart. And it is not that I never smile; it is that I only do so in the dark, where you must take it on faith.”

Then the witch apologized to her lover and to the sun, and set the latter free.

Moonwander

The court of the dogs met in a pack, in a circle in woods at the edge of the world where the night falls off into distances of infinite wild smells: pine, and water ever-running, and that sharp unshadowy tang of borders unbraided. There were huskies pale-eyed, and tall stern poodles, and German shepherds, and other dogs besides, including a beagle with his tricolor coat. Although the velvet blackness was pierced through with stars and stirred with luminous nebular drifts, there was no moon.

The beagle bayed at the absent moon, once and twice and thrice, and the other dogs took up the chorus. The first time no moon rode to silver the woods, nor the second, nor the third. Crickets quieted; frogs went silent. They knew.

“There’s no question,” said one of the German shepherds. “She’s slipped her leash one time too many.”

“She has to face the consequences, then,” the beagle returned. He had a quiet voice, but they heeded it well, in the court of the dogs. “She can’t claim ignorance, and it’s no excuse anyway.”

The dogs didn’t fear the dark, which wasn’t absolute in any case. They knew what it was to hunt for mice and voles and sleek fast rabbits in the woods; they knew what it was to follow scent-trails like smoke-knit puzzles. But the moon was the crown of the hunt, in her way. It was not proper for her to miss her allotted days in the sky.

“Summon her for the sentencing, then,” said a small fierce corgi, head craned back as far as it would go to peer up into the sky’s forever depths.

The beagle bared his teeth, although it was clear that it wasn’t the corgi bitch he was irritated with. “Summoning it is, then,” he said. He bayed again, and the chorus of the court of the dogs resounded through the void with its empty expanses, its glimmer of constellations.

Faraway, the moon heard the summons, and was chastened. She rode back upon feet of wind and winter and smoke-ghost longings, of hunters’ oaths and lovers’ cries, of the crisp last curls of nighttide. She came before them a hind of white and gray, of mist-colored eyes.

“You’ve neglected your duties,” the beagle said to her. “Do you have any defense to offer?”

The moon moved restlessly upon her hooves, leaving a scent-trail of violet shores, the violence of colliding stars, the dead devouring knots deep in the hearts of galaxies where everything went to be stretched dead. “Nothing,” she said, “except that I wanted to see—” The longing in her voice was unmistakable. “—I wanted to run the way prey runs, and see the way prey sees, in this universe where everything from entropy to the everywhere hand of gravity is a predator.”

“You’re right,” the beagle said, and his voice might have been a little gentler. “It’s not a defense. But it is a reason. And perhaps we’ve leashed you too tightly. It’s not much of a hunt, after all, if only the hunter can run.”

From then on, they kept the moon leashed, but gave her a span of darkness to run in, so that she could weave in and out of the month, chased—but not only caught—by the dogs at their hunt.

for CO

The Palace of the Dragons

In the dark seas, in the deep and stirring waters, the dragons are building a palace.

Dragons do not build in human time, although they sometimes permit seers and unwed peasant daughters and abalone divers to swim among them. They do not build in coral time, although they sometimes plant coral gardens. They do not even build in fossil time.

The palace of the dragons is composed of curves and kelp-shrouded columns, vast theatres that thrum with stormsong and whaletide yearnings. They do not decorate it with the treasures of humankind. Neither do they remove the stray chains of iron, the coinfall treasures, the swords of soldiers cold and true.

Dragons build with death. When they read their deaths in the sea’s unrests, they travel—how they travel—from sand and stone and sunken ship to add their bones to the palace. The dragon has not been born who will rule from those bleached halls. No dragon ever will. The only crown a dragon acknowledges is its own steadfast heart.

for YKL

Hibernation

Dormice know nothing of Charlemagne or Orlando Furioso, but they, too, have their paladins. Every winter, when the sun ebbs in the smoke-colored sky and the frost scribes farewells to flowers and butterflies on the fallen leaves, the quiet, plump dormice huddle next to each other, lulled by the keening song of the woodland winds. They dream of springtime buds and summer blossoms, spindrift seeds and the slow-blinking eyes of hungry birds.

Even in slumber, dormice know that predators seek them. So the dormouse paladins keep vigil, bright-eyed and stern. They do not wield sword or mace, but they wake their kindred if danger approaches. And, knowing that not all threats come from without, they patrol the shared winter dream, making sure that shadows remain shadows until it is time to wake in the spring.

for coraa

The Red Braid

The woman had not chosen to be in the tower. They had taken her sword away from her, and her bow, and even her boots. They hadn’t been very good boots, that was a given when you were a soldier, but they had been better than nothing at all. (She could have insisted on better boots, given who she was, but that would have been cheating.)

Her captors didn’t know what to do with a female soldier, that much was clear. She had seen her comrades taken away, the axes; she knew the reek of slaughter. After all, sometimes she had done the slaughtering. On the other hand, her captors were also people of poetry and strange prejudices, and they prided themselves on a chivalry bound up with roses and filigree chains. The tower had been their compromise. Her cell was so spacious that it wasn’t quite a cell, although you couldn’t call it the height of luxury either. She slept upon sheets of worn silk and a soft mat rather than one of rice straw, and while the window was narrow, it let in stripes of sunlight and moonlight and the occasional bird-shaped shadow.

In the early days she had hoped that her brother might ransom her, but the cost of her ransom would be dear, she knew; and war was expensive. He had always been the calculating sort, and she didn’t expect him to value one horse-archer, even a good one, even his sister, over a company of keen-eyed mercenaries. It was just the way he was, and besides, as her mother had always said dryly, a woman had to make her own luck in a world of men.

The woman had only two changes of clothing, but it was not, she reflected, as if she needed to fear battlefield mud and gore in here. Along with the weapons and boots, her captors had taken away all possessions that they deemed metaphysically dangerous, such as the whalebone charm to the dragon-of-the-sea, or the beads of alternating carnelian and alabaster she had worn about her neck for protection from gangrene spirits. But they had left her a single braided cord, which had been a gift from her great-aunt.

“It’s a ladder to escape,” her great-aunt had said one firelit evening, her fingers turning the worn red, white, and black cord around and around. The woman, then a girl, had only halfway paid attention, despite her interest in the cheerful orange-tinted red of the component cords. Her great-aunt, for all her lean beauty, her amber-brown eyes, was something of an eccentric. Even to her death she always went around in black gloves. But she was still talking: “Eight threads in the braid, do you see? One missing. It’s a one-way ladder. Still, best to have some way out than none.”

“Yes, Auntie,” the girl said, and reached for the cord to wrap around her wrist.

Now, the woman walked over to the window—too narrow to see much, too wide for any self-respecting architect to claim it as a loophole—and glanced at the distant mountains, the low-hanging clouds. And she heard in her head, It’s because you have to divide by four, something she’d overheard her great-aunt saying to her mother, whatever it meant.

No: she didn’t want to stay here any longer. Patience had gotten her this far; it would get her no further. She listened for the guards, but they were accustomed to her docility. So she took out the braid and began doing the only thing she could think of, unweaving its strands, red and white and black. As she did so, she felt a pleasant dizziness. She set her teeth and kept unweaving. She began to see why the braid’s construction required multiples of four.

When she was done, she lifted one paw, then another, then another, then another, looking at them in turn. Interesting. And she had a plume of handsome white-tipped tails, but there should have been nine and one was missing. Eight threads in the braid. Not that she knew anything about braiding, but even being an unwhole fox spirit was better than being a whole captive.

She slid through the window ghostlike—as if walls could hold a fox spirit—then ran down the side of the tower on black-stockinged fox feet, silken, fearless. When she reached the base of the tower, she looked up—the tower appeared much taller from a fox’s vantage point—and cocked her head. Then she shrugged a fox shrug and slipped from the tower’s shadow into the distance, contemplating foxish mathematics all the while.

for Telophase

Sand and Sea

Once there lived twin witches, one of sand and one of sea. The witch of sand built towers studded with conch shells and polished fragments of glass, and hung them around with rusted chains and lockets grown over with old coral. The witch of sea danced in the foam with the octopuses and porpoises, and braided kelp-strands into her hair, and the frayed old rope of anchors. In the evenings the towers crumbled away as the waves lapped over them, and the two sisters met to roast fish over driftwood fires.

The witch of sand slept in a cottage above the undulating line of tide-marks, and combed out her hair every morning to the cries of gulls. During the days she sometimes wove tapestries from mer-hair and sail-strands and gold thread picked out from rotting banners. At other times she amused herself with sand-paintings, which were never twice the same, sometimes of whimsical winged snails, sometimes of mournful otters.

The witch of sand slept on the sea itself, amid the cushioning glow of jellyfish, and clothed herself in transitory jewels of brine. During the nights she painted moonlight portraits of ghost ships–some of which were mistaken for the genuine article–and arranged the spume into maps of distant nations. Sometimes she spun temporary mirrors of ice so that she could admire the sea’s shifting faces in it, only to send it shattering across the waves.

The twins’ birthday approached, and they quarreled–albeit in a friendly fashion–over how to celebrate. Should they create a splendid castle of sand for the occasion, or dive down among the anemones? (They could have settled the matter by age–technically, the sea-sister was older–but that would have been too easy.) Gather pebbles from the beach or dive deep for lost jewels? Dance barefoot on the sand or swim among the seals? Since they were both witches, they turned to divination to determine the answer.

The twins shared a cauldron, a gift from their departed mother. Together they cast in powdered baleen and gold coins stamped with the visages of pirate queens, ink of deep-diving squid and tiny exquisite abalone-inlaid boxes, honey that bees had made from the flowers that bloomed along the beach and splinters from the great warships of dead empires. They chanted poems in the language of the sky as it kisses the far horizon, and the moon as it silvers the sands at night.

At last the ritual came to its conclusion, and the brew within the cauldron quieted to an unmoving sheen. The twins peered over the cauldron’s rim, hoping for a vision to resolve their dilemma. (Even small dilemmas require rituals in the world of witches.)

They were not disappointed: within the glimmering depths, each witch saw her sister’s face. They looked up from the cauldron at each other, then burst into laughter. They agreed to spend the next year in each other’s domain. Then, that settled, they prepared their customary dinner of roast fish, well-content with the answer that had already been theirs.

The Birdsong Flute

Some speak of the forest’s great trees, fire-scarred and crowned with the nests of birds extinct elsewhere, and others speak of the tigers, who delight in giving terrible advice to travelers when they are hungry, but can always be trusted to be honest about go stratagems. The forest has known exiled poets and princesses, pious warriors and worried monks, and it writes their names in its loam just as it writes the secret lives of the squirrels and hedgehogs.

One pilgrim came to the forest to visit what she believed to be its finest treasure, a flute that sang in the voices of all the world’s birds. She found that the way to the shrine of the flute was not barred to her. The very pebbles of the path were kind to her feet.

The shrine was tended only by an old woman whose hair might have been black when the moon was young. The pilgrim explained her heart’s desire, and the old woman nodded and set aside her broom.

“There it is,” she said, leading the pilgrim to the altar, lit only by cloudlight. The flute was plain and dark, worn smooth and carved with a single curling feather, like a riddle of smoke. “You will find no finer chorale in the halls of the world: swan’s lament and lark’s song and crane’s cry, the voice of every bird that has lived beneath the roof of the sky.”

“If this is so,” said the pilgrim, greatly wondering, “why is this treasure not played where people can hear it?”

As the pilgrim looked at the old woman, she saw that the birds of the forest had gathered around them: sleepy owls and small wrens, falcons with their fierce eyes and magpies in their handsome black-and-white.

“If the flute contains the voices of the very birds,” the old woman said, “what do you think is left for the birds themselves when it is played?”

The pilgrim thanked her and headed home, on a path no less friendly, singing an old travel-song in her own rough voice.

for YKL

Two Payments

The horses that plunge through the waterways between the cities of heaven and the citadels of hell are wild of eye and white of mane. No one rides them. In times past they have trampled armies and thundered down brave fortresses, and every hoofmark fills with dead water. They leave behind them a trail of sodden smoke and equations tearing themselves into constituent constants and shadows that chatter in the language of untimely gifts.

A single angel accompanies them. She wears armor woven haphazardly from ligaments of dreary bark, gears scrapped from clanking engines, and leather strips from the backs of broken traitors. The angel wears no veil or helm, but there is a terrible mark on her brow where the greatest of the horses struck her with her hoof.

On the high day of summer, when the sun strikes chords from the cities of heaven and even the citadels of hell are luminous with the anticipation of sinfire and soul’s pyre, the angel leads the horses to heaven and hell in turn. She collects a coin of silver from heaven and a coin of steel from hell so that the horses will not pillage the great cities, the greedy citadels. Even the wardens of heaven and the warriors of hell know to fear the horses.

And on the low day of winter, when the stars gather closely around the cities of heaven and the citadels of hell are bright with the knowledge of famine, the angels lead the horses to heaven and hell again. This time, when they pay her in silver and steel, it is to ensure the horses will never leave them. For the wardens of heaven and the warriors of hell recognize that, terrible as the horses are, they too are essential to the order of the world.

for YKL

A Single Pebble

The ruined palace of the ancient sea queen was bright and hard with treasures: ropes of shark’s teeth and flawed tourmalines woven in webs that spiders would have wept over; the keels of ancient ships with the fates of nations written upon them in the language of barnacles; crowns set with mirrors instead of gems so that the wise would see their own wisdom reflected back to them. But although each treasure had been wrought under the sun’s eye and the moon’s smile, none held any warmth.

Nevertheless, a daughter of the island dragons journeyed to the palace, which had stood uninhabited for many generations. We do not know what trouble took her there, but she thought she might find some balm for it in the ruins. All she brought with her was a single pebble from the black beaches of her home, a blessing-piece from her mother.

She met other travelers in the ruins, which is to say that she met their bones. But bones tell stories, especially to predators, and for all their benevolence, dragons are predators. From the bones she learned that each traveler had found some answer to his or her desire, yet none of them had departed with it.

Still, she had come a long way, so she lingered a little while among the swan-curved knives of obsidian and chalices that had once tasted the tears of kings and dictionaries stitched in corroded wire upon funeral shrouds. She looked and looked, but found nothing to ease her heart.

At last, not wishing to join the bones, she journeyed back home. There she confessed that she had not taken any of the cold and glittering treasures for herself. Her mother said she was sorry to hear of her failure.

Not at all, the dragon said. For in the cold currents of the ruins, she had found herself meditating on the pebble, a reminder of black sands and night winds sweet with the yearning of flowers, dragon-games of raindrop poetry and pearl riddles, stormcloud praises encrypted in foam. She had not found the heartsease she sought amid those great and grim treasures, but she had found the one she had brought with her from the very beginning.

for Jonquil, a gift courtesy of Anonymous

The Pale Queen’s Sister

The mountain court of the pale queen was bright with treasures: dew harvested from young roses and trapped inside crystal lockets; shirts of silk sewn so densely with hematite beads that they shimmered like hauberks; vases imprinted with the feather-patterns of ascending firebirds. But for all the splendors in her court, the queen was not pleased. For ten-and-three years she had warred with an empire of scythes and fissures, and for ten-and-three years she had been losing.

To the north and east was the realm of the birds, and twice a year the pale queen sent emissaries laden with rare treasures to beseech the birds’ aid. She sent coins stamped with the faces of incomparable warriors, whose eyes were tiny diamonds; she sent books of poetry scribed on the hides of extinct wolves, and clever puzzle boxes that sang the hymns of the snow sisters when they were opened. But the envoys returned each time with their gifts rejected and their pleas unheard.

At last the queen’s sister asked to travel to the realm of the birds. The pale queen forbade it at first, fearing to lose her heir, but she gave in at last. Although she offered her sister the rarest of her treasures, her sister refused everything but supplies for the trip.

The pale queen’s sister set off the next day. Halfway to the realm of the birds, she came across a starving crane, too weak to move. Although her mission was urgent, she fed the crane her own food and tended it until it recovered.

“I know your purpose,” the crane said when it was stronger. “You are the pale queen’s sister. What tribute do you bring to the queen of the birds?”

“Nothing,” the queen’s sister said. “For all the gifts we sent, we never troubled to ask what the birds wanted of us. I mean to do that when I arrive.”

“What if the birds want something you can’t give?”

“Then I must return empty-handed,” the queen’s sister said. “The queen grows ill at heart watching the trees shatter, the rocks break, the soldiers cut down. When she falters, it will be my turn to take up the fight, however hopeless.”

The crane’s voice turned cunning. “You would make a better queen than she would.”

The queen’s sister gazed steadfastly at the crane. “I do not know how you do things in the realm of birds, but she is my sister and I will not betray her, even for this. I will look for another way.”

All around her as she spoke were birds: long-necked geese and merry sparrows, pheasants and swallows and falcons and swans. The eyes of the crane were very bright, and the queen’s sister realized she had been speaking with the queen of the birds all along.

“You cannot buy us as allies,” the crane said, “but we would offer you our friendship if you would have it.”

“I would be honored,” the queen’s sister said.

The crane said, “Lead on, then. I believe we have an army to defeat.”

for Nancy Sauer

The Sunlit Horse

The magician’s son crouched over the wooden horse that his father had made for them. The two of them had sneaked out when the night drew down over tower and shore and sea like a blanket sewn bright with comets and constellations and the ebbing crescent of the moon. They had listened so carefully for the downwards footsteps of the magician, and of his great yawn (he had a very loud yawn), and the quiet that indicated, they hoped, that he had curled up in bed with one of his books.

At first it had been wonderful. They had ridden along the night winds, trading riddles and rhymes and the occasional half-formed limerick, and skimmed the foam-pearled waves. The horse had whickered softly, lowly, and hippocampuses with their wide green eyes and tangle-curled manes and their songs, sweet and barbed like mer-song toward the high tilt of the midnight stars. The magician’s son wasn’t sure he trusted them—their teeth, white like shells scoured pale, looked very sharp—but the horse flicked its ears friendly fashion, and the hippocampuses sang back and didn’t come too close, so that was all right.

They went up into the sky, then, and saw the dark humped shapes of islands that might have been sea serpent coils, it was impossible to tell. They saw bioluminiscent jellyfish in ever-changing kaleidoscope drifts. They saw flowers that rose from the depths of the sea and sank back down, all between one breath and the next, and perfumed the air with a scent like that of lilacs and limes. Sometimes the wind blew warm and sometimes it blew cold, and in every case the magician’s son could all but taste the ice-fruit of stars at the tip of his tongue when he breathed it.

It was on the way home, hurrying to be back in bed before the sun rose and the magician caught them, that the mishap happened. They were on the way back into the tower, through the window they had left open. But the horse was tired after the long night of wonders they had witnessed, and when there was a sudden gust, he careened into the side of the tower. He swerved so that the magician’s son would not be harmed, but in the process his foreleg cracked at the knee, and dangled perilously as he limped into the room and onto the bed.

The magician’s son put blankets around the injured horse, then, and ran for his father in tears. His father had heard the collision, and was already on his way up the stairs. The magician didn’t ask what had happened. You didn’t have to be a magician, or a father, for that matter, to know. Instead, he told his son to pet the horse’s yarn mane and soothe the horse while he went to his workshop to begin the repair.

First the magician took measurements from the other foreleg. Then, with a net of morning glory eyes and seagull cries, the magician captured a solid beam of sunlight. He carved the sunlight into another leg—magicians have their ways—and then used a sander to smooth it so that its light sparkled and glimmered and glowed amber-welcoming.

At last he went upstairs, to where his son was waiting with anxious eyes, and fastened the replacement leg on. “Be more careful next time,” he said, not too reprimanding. The horse nuzzled him with its worn wooden nose. Then he yawned his great yawn and invited them both downstairs to breakfast, and they all went together, whole of limb and whole of heart.

for SR

Tiger Wives

Past the lowlands of hell and their unmentionable rivers, beyond the clangor of hammers on unwhole anvils, lies a city whose name is only written ringed with formulas of fear. Its queen has eyes the color of an extinguished sun, in a smooth, sweet face that has told many lies. At her throat is a rough stone, and her hands are hidden by gloves sewn stiff with the hair of corpses. She has no shortage of such gloves.

The queen has fifteen-and-two generals to do her bidding, and it is her generals that concern us. Under her unsunned banner they have conquered cities that skein themselves across chasms, cities that build their walls from an alloy of inviolate desire and predatory fire, cities that conjure swords from needles and knights from spoons. They have brought her fine horses that travel as easily upon funeral smoke as upon land, and coins that sing the name of your greatest enemy when you spin them on the table, and bronze goblets that pour forth the tears of the latest person to betray you. (The unfortunate side effect is that someone will always betray the owner of such a goblet.)

To the generals’ dismay, the queen’s visage grows more palely poisonous as long as there exists a city that does not acknowledge her as its ruler; and such cities are not in short supply. The generals have noticed, as have others, that the queen’s collection of gloves grows faster and faster.

One general has turned her attention to the land of tigers, which has heretofore escaped notice because tigers, while talented at many things, are baffled by the need for cities. People who live near the land of tigers—rarely a comfortable thing, even for people who are themselves predators—speak of tiger wives. They say that a tiger wife must be subdued by stonelight and starfall, and can only be bound by chains of steel rotted through by the whispers of the wicked. And they say, too, that a tiger wife is a tactician beyond compare, merciless and attentive to carrion details, and most of all a master of the 3,000 red arts.

The general has sent her dead-eyed hunters and her lady assassins to capture a tiger to take to wife, but she has had no success, and it is unlikely she ever will. It is not that the general carries a corroded pale lump where her heart should be; it is not that ledgers of spilled lives are recorded in blurred inexactitude upon her bones. Tigers are indifferent to such niceties. But there has never been a tiger born who respects someone who failed to fight her own battles, and tigers are in a position to be choosy about their mates.

for YKL

Dew-Weighted Roses

In a convent high in the mountains, where the stars hang barely out of reach and the wind sings stories of frozen songbirds and silvered firs, a sister-of-the-snow tends her garden. It is not truly her garden, of course. It belongs, insofar as it belongs to anyone on the wheel of the world, to all the sisters. And it belongs most of all to that presence whose face is different in each season but whose name never changes, and who set the sun and moon in their courses. But for all that, the sister spends more time in the garden than anyone else, so she thinks of it as hers.

The only flowers that grow so close to the stars are white or blue, like the colors of cloud or sky, or the unseen sea. The convent’s garden contains none of these. Instead, it is a stone courtyard bounded by high walls. Every morning and evening, the sister sweeps the courtyard clear of snow.

The garden of stone is not lifeless, however. No matter what the season, from the brief, shining summers to the mirror-colored winters, it breathes the fragrances of absent flowers. If you start at one corner and walk a path of tangled triangles, you may inhale the scent of jasmine, or gardenias, or orange blossoms. The absent flowers move from year to year. The sister takes great pleasure in chronicling their movements.

Most elusive is the sister’s favorite, roses with their petals heavy with dew. In her mind’s eye, the roses are the lush red of heart’s blood. She has not managed to find them in the garden this year.

But she stirs in her sleep at night, breathing, without being aware of it, the scent of dew-weighted roses, for the soil they find most fertile resides in the devotion of her dreams.

for Nancy Sauer

The Firziak Mountains

The Firziak Mountains have many charms, from the spectacular springtime displays of cherry blossoms to the shrines with their gilded statues of the Blind Falconer, who is considered an apostate elsewhere in the region. Then, too, there are the hawks, whose cries echo in the gorges and whose silhouettes punctuate the storm-lashed skies.

The mountains are famous for none of these things, although all of them are mentioned to some degree in tourists’ guides and travelers’ journals. Rather, the mountains are famous because of the tea.

It is not that the Firziaks produce excellent tea. The quality of their tea is variable, and the world’s connoisseurs agree that Nhogeh has better oolongs and blacks, while the Footfall Islands are unmatched for ginseng.

But year after year, the tea-tourists come, some wearing the outlandish padded silks of the Celadon Kingdom, others huddled in wool cloaks striped brown and beige. For the most part, they bring their own tea, although it truly does not matter.

For the peculiarity of the Firziak Mountains, duplicated nowhere else in the world, is that each crag, each peak and ridgeline, has its own flavor, which it imparts to whatever tea you drink there, whatever its type or quality. Aficionados have been mapping the topography of tastes for the past centuries, from the hint of roseate honey common in one vale to the steady, startlingly mellow oaken note to be tasted near the mouths of certain caverns.

As for those native to the Firziaks, they smilingly accept the tourists’ money, hoarding it to buy their own coveted drink, entirely unaffected by the tea phenomenon, from the traders: coffee.

for cofax7

The Rose and the Peacock

The border between the summerlands and the winterlands is marked by a fortress commanding the Mountain of the Moon. The mountain’s rocks cast shadows that reflect the phase of the moon, whatever it may be. To give one as a gift on the full moon is a great honor; to bury someone in a casket of such rock during the dark of the moon is a sure way to keep the dead from singing at inopportune moments.

For years had the fortress with its banners of gold and silver been jointly manned by the Queen of Roses and the King of Birds. But a malaise had befallen the fortress. Its walls grew dimmer and dimmer, and the very shadow that it cast upon the rocks, the small flowers, the stunted grasses, was devouring the mountain. The fish in the clear cold brooks dreamt of dragons leaping wingless into unutterable heights, there to perish. The tiger sages left off their discussions of the ethics of shapeshifting and retreated to meditate upon the bones of deer. And moths winged between summer and winter, dragging the clouds from one realm into the wother, so that the very wind whispered of unmapped senescence to the weary sojourners, the wary sentries.

The rose court with its windows of heart-stained glass received messengers three from the king of birds. The first was a raven, one-eyed and taciturn. The second was a kestrel, fierce of mien. The third wore the shape of a man, and the man had dressed in fine satins and a cloak lined with iridescent blue feathers.

The Queen of Roses received the messengers in her throne room, sweetly perfumed with the mingled blooms that crowded the walls. The rubies and spinels in her bronze crown shone in the light from the windows: red for the blood of thorns, as the saying went in her nation. She offered the messengers cups of rose liqueur from her own hands, and bade them welcome.

“We are grateful for your hospitality,” the kestrel said after a nod from the raven, “but we are here on the urgent matter of the fortress.”

“Yes,” the Queen said, and turned her eye upon the man. “Do you think I don’t recognize you, King of Birds? Your vanity gives you away.” She referred to the peacock feathers on his cloak, but she was smiling.

“I wasn’t trying very hard anyway,” he said. “Nevertheless, the fortress—”

“The fortress has outlived its usefulness,” she said. “The seasons will weave in and out of the year as they always have, but surely you see the use of an alliance between our realms. We are most of the way there already.”

“That is why I came in person,” the King of Birds said. “It is as well that we are of like mind—?”

The Queen of Roses descended from her throne, then, and offered him her hand. “Come with me, and we shall celebrate this alliance the way we do in my realm.”

“I can only imagine,” the King of Birds said as the Queen pressed a kiss to his hand. He followed her out of the throne room, past the gates of bronze grown over with nodding roses, and to her bed.

What passed between them is their business and not ours, but what is known is that seven days afterward, the fortress dissolved entirely, and was never seen again.

The Youngest Fox

Once in a wood by a great city there lived a family of foxes. The head of the family, who wore the guise of lady or gentleman or other as the whim took them, had a splendid collection of jewels given to them by any number of human lovers. The younger foxes of the family studied this art of seduction diligently, not because foxes have any use for human baubles, but because the baubles they received from their lovers were an essential component in the game known as “human-fishing.” Any number of humans could be lured into the wood for further pranks by the strategic placement of necklaces, rings, crowns; and from that point on they could be entangled in fox spells and fox riddles for endless hours of entertainment.

The very youngest fox, however, had no interest in any of this, to the despair of her family. Rather, her interest was in science. This in itself wasn’t entirely dishonorable (from a fox viewpoint, anyway). After all, her sire said, with a certain determination to make the best of the situation, one of their ancestors had been the lover of a court alchemist, which was almost like science. And if it made her happy, it made her happy.

The real problem was that her family had no idea how to accommodate the youngest fox’s hunger for knowledge. It would have been one thing if she had a foxish interest in ethology or ecology, which could at least be related to the practical business of hunting. Even foxes who spend their spare time discussing trends in hair ornaments and the proper length of hems need to eat. No: the youngest fox showed distressingly little concern for the ways of the woods, and instead spent her time on boulders peering at the sky, or muttering to herself as she sketched diagrams, or keeping notes in a ledger book that her puzzled but kindly oldest sibling had stolen from an accountant lover. “Accountants are the hardest to steal from,” they had remarked, hoping to slip in some proper education. “They always keep everything organized.” The youngest fox had merely nodded distractedly, but at least she showed up for lessons long enough to practice shapeshifting so that she could use her human form to record her mysterious experiments.

One evening, while the youngest fox was investigating an ornamented spyglass that she had cajoled the head of the family to giving to her, the rest of the family met to discuss her future. “We can’t send her to the city to make her fortune,” said the head of the family, and there was general agreement. “She’s a disaster at seduction and she’ll undoubtedly use her teeth to get herself out of any trouble. But it’s clear that the woods are not the right place for her either.” Indeed, they had often caught the youngest fox pining over mysterious human implements like calipers, pendulums, and prisms.

“Well,” said one of the siblings, “even if we can’t teach her what she wants to learn, surely we can find her someone who can.”

The youngest fox was bemused, then outraged, when over the course of the next month she found any number of measuring instruments and lenses scattered in the woods, instead of the more usual baubles. She spent her time gathering up the instruments and hoarding them, then, without telling anyone, slipped into the city in search of the objects’ owner. (Another disadvantage, to her family’s additional despair: she was that rarity, an honest fox.)

The youngest fox had not been neglecting her lessons quite so much as her family supposed, even if she rarely made use of the skills that they strove to impart to her. In this case, she tracked the instruments’ owner, following their scent in the city’s dreams. This person thought in great wheeling orbits and precessions and cycles, in measurements and the limitations of precision, and the youngest fox trembled with excitement at the wisdom in their mind.

So it was that a very surprised scholar, who had without success hired investigators to locate her stolen instruments, opened the door that night and saw a modestly beautiful youth with a bundle wrapped up in silk. “I must apologize for my relatives,” the youth said, “but I believe these belong to you?” And, as the scholar unwrapped the bundle, the youth said, rather breathlessly, “You may have them back, but perhaps you have need of someone who can protect your belongings from importunate foxes?”

The scholar, who was not only wise in the ways of astronomy and geometry but had also noted the youth’s amber eyes and the telltale russet sheen of their hair, only smiled. “Come in,” she said, “and I will teach you what I know.”

Naturally, the youngest fox’s family had been watching. “That was the fastest seduction I ever saw,” the oldest of the siblings said, “and it didn’t even involve taking off her clothes. I would never have thought it of her.”

“Maybe science is good for something after all?” said the second-oldest.

The head of the family merely licked a paw in satisfaction. Perhaps it wasn’t how they had intended things to go, but a happy ending was a happy ending.

for ahasvers

The Witch and the Traveler

In the Hills of the Sun, a cat-eyed witch once received a visitor. She had been gathering herbs for her stew, in which several luckless ptarmigans and a rabbit were already simmering, and was wondering whether to break out the last of her peppercorns, when she heard a knocking at the door.

“Come in,” said the witch absently. “Would you like something to eat?”

“I would be much obliged for some breakfast,” said the visitor, “but I have nothing to offer you.”

The witch looked up at the visitor, a tawny woman with her hair in a crown of braids held in place with hairpins decorated by feather tufts, and a talon-curved knife hanging at her belt. She wore a scratched pair of spectacles and her boots looked as though they were one day’s travel from falling off her feet, but her cloak was very fine, and its hood was lined with soft white down. “Don’t trouble yourself about that,” the witch said. “Have a seat?”

The traveler shook the snow off her boots and wiped them before coming in, then sat, polite as you please. “I had heard that there is a witch in the Hills who likes to eat visitors for breakfast,” she said, quirking an eyebrow.

“People say the unkindest things about people they don’t know,” the witch remarked, ladling the traveler a hearty bowl of stew with rice and a mug of hot citron tea. “What I would like to know is, why would you come to the hut of a witch suspected of consuming her visitors?”

The traveler smiled. “Perhaps it’s occurred to me that such a witch might grow lonely for companionship.”

“Presumptuous,” the witch said, not unsmiling. She set down a platter of sliced bread and a little dish of salted butter, then sat to nibble at one of the slices herself. “What would someone like you know of the ways of witches?”

“I know that in the Hills of the Sun there is no such thing as breakfast,” the traveler said, “because there is no night, and thus no one ever sleeps, either. It must grow tiresome, long days that stretch ever longer, with no one for company but the birds.”

“The birds are perfectly delicious company,” the witch said. “And their bonesong is welcome when I need to do some cleaning.” She looked meaningfully at the drumstick the traveler was gnawing on.

The traveler raised an eyebrow. “Even birds eat birds,” she said, and there was something of the raptor’s hunger in her eye. “Still, it would be remiss for the queen of the birds not to seek to spare some few of her subjects.”

“I’ll make you a bargain, then,” the witch said. “Come visit me once a year, so that I have someone to practice my cooking on, and I will turn my attentions to the rabbits and voles instead. Unless you are also here on their behalf?”

“Hardly,” said the queen of the birds. “The rabbits and voles can fend for themselves. Besides, they, too, make an excellent breakfast.”

for cyphomandra

Thunder

Sometimes it’s about thunder, and sometimes it’s about the pale horses who thrash the sea into storm, and sometimes it’s about gunfire opening your heart. Fruits smashed down to their glistening pits. Petals that stain your wrists; wine that scours your throat.

I cannot give you soft hands, a sweet mouth, supple words. But let me call out your name in the language of conflagration. Let me bring you flensed fairytales and fossilized endearments. Let me answer the percussion of your heart with the weapons that I know; let me answer the march.

The Godsforge

The godsforge lies at the center of the earth, and there are as many paths to it as there are ways for steel to break. Some paths pass through caverns where crystals unfed by unsunlight glow in unchanging gardens, and fungus feasts on the bones of forgotten heroes. Others have driven people mad with the sourceless sound of water ever dripping in a monotonous beat, or so mazed them with darkness that their useless eyes were sewn shut.

Down, down through the halls of stone came two women and a man. The color of the darkness was the color of their skin. The path they took is not important.

The godsforge was in a cavern densely hung with stalactites. Gaps had been broken into the stalagmites so they could enter. Past supplicants had carved the symbols of their sects and nations into the limestone: two-headed tigers and bird maidens, fish-tailed lions and phoenixes.

The three stepped past the stalagmites and stood before the godsforge. It was hot almost beyond bearing, but they had been selected because they were the bravest and wisest of their people, and they endured.

The first woman held out her offering, a sword with its blade damascened in gold with poetry in her people’s abjad. “This sword is our faith,” she said. “Let it strengthen our god.”

The man held out his offering, a six-flanged mace of watered steel. “This mace is our honor,” he said. “Let it strengthen our god.”

The second woman held out her offering, a curved dagger whose blade was polished mirror-bright. “This dagger is our truth,” she said. “Let it strengthen our god.”

A voice came out of the forge like the hammering of iron on iron. “What god would you have me forge for your people of these objects? There is no more suitable weapon than what is in your hearts. Go back to your people and nourish the strength that is already in them.”

Leaving the weapons behind, the three returned to their people, empty of hand but better-armed.

for Sam Kabo Ashwell

About the Author

Yoon Ha Lee's short story collection Conservation of Shadows came out in 2013 from Prime Books. His fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Clarkesworld Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other venues. He has also authored the StoryNexus game Winterstrike from Failbetter Games. He lives in Louisiana with his family and has not yet been eaten by gators.

<yoonhalee.com>

Copyright © 2015 Yoon Ha Lee <www.yoonhalee.com>

Cover art © Mariya Olshevska <www.mariyaolshevska.com>

ISBN 978-0-692-45850-1

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Flash Fiction

1. The Fox’s Tower

2. Carousel Foals

3. The Third Song

4. Candles

5. The Crane Wife

6. Raven Tracks

7. Magician’s Feast

8. The Mermaid’s Teeth

9. The Dragon Festival

10. The River Soldier

11. The Fox’s Forest

12. The Melancholy Astronomer

13. Harvesting Shadows

14. The Stone-Hearted Soldier

15. The Gate of Bells

16. The Workshop

17. The School of the Empty Book

18. How the Andan Court

19. The Last Angel

20. The Virtues of Magpies

21. Two Bakeries

22. The Witch and Her Lover

23. Moonwander

24. The Palace of the Dragons

25. Hibernation

26. The Red Braid

27. Sand and Sea

28. The Birdsong Flute

29. Two Payments

30. A Single Pebble

31. The Pale Queen’s Sister

32. The Sunlit Horse

33. Tiger Wives

34. Dew-Weighted Roses

35. The Firziak Mountains

36. The Rose and the Peacock

37. The Youngest Fox

38. The Witch and the Traveler

39. Thunder

40. The Godsforge

3. About the Author

Table of Contents

Introduction

Flash Fiction

The Fox’s Tower

Carousel Foals

The Third Song

Candles

The Crane Wife

Raven Tracks

Magician’s Feast

The Mermaid’s Teeth

The Dragon Festival

The River Soldier

The Fox’s Forest

The Melancholy Astronomer

Harvesting Shadows

The Stone-Hearted Soldier

The Gate of Bells

The Workshop

The School of the Empty Book

How the Andan Court

The Last Angel

The Virtues of Magpies

Two Bakeries

The Witch and Her Lover

Moonwander

The Palace of the Dragons

Hibernation

The Red Braid

Sand and Sea

The Birdsong Flute

Two Payments

A Single Pebble

The Pale Queen’s Sister

The Sunlit Horse

Tiger Wives

Dew-Weighted Roses

The Firziak Mountains

The Rose and the Peacock

The Youngest Fox

The Witch and the Traveler

Thunder

The Godsforge

About the Author