Eight legs, fleeing. Eight babies cling to my back.Over my black exoskeleton, my children scuttle on sticky feet, pitter-patt-pitt, trying to hide from you.Your torches shine violent orange in my eight eyes.You drove us from my cave with your foul smoke and shouts.But I’m fast.I charge through the dark forest, trampling shrubs and shaking pines […]
The Queen’s knitting circle sits in the painted tower, four double-pointed needles and a ball of yarn apiece, as the blackbirds sing in mourning. The sun sets, the stars awake, and points go click, click, click.Magic, formed with each stitch twist and loop, keeps the candles burning bright.Mistress Avalard, of the Sing River crossing, uses […]
“One of these days, you’re going to kill me.”“I know,” she murmured, breath brined with salt and green weed. Her eyes held mine, inhuman and unfeeling, slitted and narrow, yet they drew me in. I never welcomed the chill of midnight on the water until I met her. She froze my bones with her predatory […]
The ice cutter’s daughter dreams that her world is melting. She knows the theory of thawing from common things: how candle wax weeps or sugar hisses in a skillet. But she’s not prepared for the severity of the sun.She can’t hide her glee. After all, what young woman doesn’t secretly delight in the destruction of […]
Neve’s breath billows white. Two miles back, the heater in the borrowed pickup truck rattled and died. She thrums her fingers against the steering wheel. It’s the shortest day of the year, and the sun won’t rise for another three hours. The narrow country road is claustrophobic at five in the morning.The only working headlight […]
In the Dead Month, Brigid goes to the mountain to speak with the hag. She does not know what else to do.Beinn Nibheis towers black and rimeslick over the Narrows, taller than any peak of Nature’s make, but Brigid’s fear of the climb is a small thing next to her fear of this unyielding winter. […]
The persimmon seeds, Grandfather always said, revealed the winter to come. Tear the ripe flesh, dig out the round seeds, split them in half, and you’ll see the icy translucent interior, and in the center of each, one of three white shapes. A spoon, a fork, or a knife. Spoons mean heavy snowfalls. Forks foretell […]
Urtif vaulted the snow-covered log and pressed himself hurriedly but soundlessly into a recess beneath the felled tree. He stifled his breath into the sleeve of his fur-lined tunic hoping desperately no condensation was visible from his laboring. That which chased him no longer had a name, at least not among those still living. His father […]
Long ago, in the city where we live, there was a heartbreaker.(By which we mean, a woman who broke hearts for a living—sliding scale, pay what you can.)None of us knew how she did it, but we had a hundred theories, told a thousand stories: she takes a hair from his head and burns it; […]
The snow crunches beneath the soles of my boots. My footsteps echo, as though I walk upon the skinned hide of a drum, and when I pluck the last persimmon from the tree, I feel the rumbling swell. I run.The avalanche is the thundering of a thousand horses, hooves dispatching the crushing blows of bruises, […]