More clawed paws swam before her, jutting from his shirtsleeves, and when they laid themselves on her face they were cold and wet like the corpses had been, everything cold and wet and smelling of death. She raised her eyes and stared into the swollen black ones bulging from the boy’s face. Daughter, you’ve returned at last, he repeated in a mouth stuffed with chelicerae, his face glowing with moonlight. Sooner or later, we all come back.

I held out my hand with the marble in it, and the drowned girl reached out her long fingers and lifted it gently out of my palm, not even touching me with one of her fingernails. She rolled it in her hand for a moment, looking into the misty shadows in the glass, and then swallowed it, grinning almost like she was still human.

Why an armed man should have been the one worrying, she never explained, but I had seen the tumblers tossing one another in the air and the strongman lifting all six dancing girls on his outstretched arms like they were no heavier than a pair of sleeves. I could guess what would happen to anyone who was caught out.

The warmth, then swift coldness, of piss on my legs brings me back from the rolling horror oozing over the dirt-pack towards me. Still a league distant, it is monstrous. A grotesque boil on the earth; a seething mass of tree spars and rocks that scalds the ice around it into steam. The way it moves! Questing forward, then rushing into the blackened space before it. Each thrust accompanied by boulders grinding, great snappings of century-old trunks as it heaves ahead.

The pronouncements of the captain were drowned by the goading of the crowd, but his actions were clear. It took three men to hold Kaul's father's left arm on the block. One soldier brought out a broad-bladed axe and his father's struggles renewed. The axe-man bent over him, giving instructions, but Kaul's father's eyes rolled and he screamed. The axe-man seemed to shrug; then, raising his weapon, he brought it down, once, with a sickening crunch.

Beneath the shop, Latch had to fight his way through a forest of dangling limbs. Hundreds of wooden arms and legs hung from the ceiling, fingers and toes low enough to brush Latch’s face as he pried his way through like some jungle explorer, all reaching out, grasping for him.

"No," Miriam said. But there had been pain. There had been terrible pain. She had bit down on a twisted sheet as her insides knotted, as the thing in her lurched and fought to live, flexing in the throes of their shared agony. It had gone on far too long, and she remembered thinking that either it must die soon, or she would.

"Antlion's mirror-writing. He was Leonardo da Vinci when he wrote this book, and favoured writing that way because he was left-handed. It made less of a smudge and also serves as a deterrent to others who cannot easily read the words in reverse. They are needed for navigating the many paths through the Codex. The first protean seal is like the entrance to the maze."

I swear that I hear it when the Star deploys her new lanterns. I feel it as a low vibration in all the mineral parts of my body and look out of the starboard window just in time to see the six cold iron cages slide out of her. They ignite one at a time, turning the faceless ether of the ghostmurk into a haze of green light. It's so bright that I have to turn my head. Raise my hand to shield my eyes. Can almost feel my own shadow burning into me.

We dry the tongues on butcher's paper beside the stove. Once desiccated, they barely have a scent. Uncle Sholert has shown me how to arrange them like tiny shingles or scales, overlapping. We fix them in place with a glue made from horses' hooves, and then we seal the boxes with beeswax.

Folu has forgotten how to read them, but something is stirring. The symbols start dancing again, even if only a little. The Lion, the Knight, the Sun. The Knight is finally here. The cards knew he was coming. He came to ruin everything, with his warm blanket and bright fire and hot soup. The Knight has brought the Sun. The Sun burns. The Grey Men’s Sun burnt Mother. Folu will never forget.

Jared studied her, her sopping hair and gaunt face. She was nothing to him, or shouldn't have been. The story she told—he might have ridden past the field where she worked a hundred times and never noticed her, not even her face, because it was bent to the earth.

"At the end, where else?" Streamers of greasy black smoke leaked from her cloak to vanish in the wind, her body like dry grass in my arms. I shook her, but she, the god of the dead, was dead herself and my hands empty but for her cloak of feathers.

She kept her head up until she'd exited the shop. Then she staggered sideways into the wall outside. The pair of marbles glinted in the palm of her good hand. She was a little stunned to be holding her prize at all; she stared at them as if somewhere in their milky depths the secrets of the universe might reside. Perhaps it was merely the dizzying pain, but she felt almost as if they stared back.

It was only months after she'd moved to the cabin, months of teeth cracking on stone, that she thought the witch may have meant her harm. Not a conspiracy between women, one free thanks to age, the other free thanks to cunning and constitution, but a punishment intended to ruin her. And yet Sapo kept at it, kept eating the mountain, stone by stone by stone, because she feared that if she didn't, it would come, and she didn't want it.

We found my dog by the eastern overlook, sniffing the floor beneath a table with her pink nose. As Deng and I approached, I greeted the spirit of Dog echoing within my mind with a reverent thought. Your visit surprises yet honors me, Lord Dog.

"No, I will not. I cannot. I do not have a baby and even if I did, I would not give it to such a dreadful little monster as you!" Sylvie thrust the carrot back into the dirt and ran into the house. She slammed the door and secured each of Mother Dar's seven locks.

She sang those lines with a fierce, forlorn glee. The ballads took her that way, wherever they would, be they sad or glad. It was that blinding, unearthly intensity in her singing, her ability to sway thoughts and glances, that was the reason the townfolk looked sideways and crossed themselves or made the old warding signs. Part of the reason.

The fire inside Shams was turning, filling him with a bursting hot hunger, and he would have gulped down every leaf and every tree, the stones and earth, the home and the hill and world for his want of her. “Stay,” he said, and the low branches blackened and curled by his breath. “Stay. Stay. Stay.” She sat with him, sweating but unmoved, and she let him hold her and she let him kiss her, and no more. His hunger remained inside.

Experimentally, I played a few notes on the bone flute from High-Flying Jack. Gently, the sky gathered me up into its cool arms. And in no time at all, I was flying south over fields and forest, as true as an assassin's arrow.

The river fought like a snake that could smell the sweetness in his blood. It wrapped thick coils hawser-tight around him and tried to throw him down the current. He twisted, slipped through and beat up into light bright as the sun over his head. He had it. Three fingertips above the silt, the hand still whole and safe below.

Zilpit-nai-Rinah hit steel against tinder, harder than she’d intended. Her lantern, unreliable and imperfect though it was, would provide enough light for her purpose. She pulled out a pen, her own clever mechanical design that allowed ink to be stored in a small cartridge equipped with a pumping mechanism. She’d used her jeweler’s tools to construct it—more useful than jewelry perhaps, though she had no intention of selling it at market.

Too late, of course. They pried my mouth open. The old lady spooned a morsel of something—barley, I think—into my mouth. When I spat it back at them, they caught the pieces on a piece of bamboo cut into a jigsaw puzzle piece. This they gave to a spellscribe, who wrote my full name at the top in grass-green ink.

They found him dangling from what was left of a tough old willow. Grinn’s nose couldn’t have missed him, the clean den-smell of hidden wolf beneath the bitter futility billowing from him like wet-leaf smoke. She eased along the dry creek bed from behind. Her choices displeased the palomino, but she could take this other wolf if it came to claws. He was a long fellow, sure, broad-shouldered with shaggy brown hair, but Grinn’s height and heft near matched him.

And then she was running after the retreating ocean waves as they sheeted from the beach, as it curled under like an enormous sunlit tongue. Louise jumped into the color, into the wet, certain she had never seen anything so beautiful, until the skin, emboldened by the water, swallowed her whole.

A wind picked up, and a half-torn poster of the Scrimshander flapped on a lamppost. The caricaturist walked over to it, reached out to rip it up into pieces. One word was partially legible above the face, and the way the poster flapped in the wind made the word there, gone, there, gone, as if flashing. Strike—

My aunt the roasted chicken to the table and laid it out in front of Lord Ning. It was an excellent supper, and I had helped her with the roasting. I knew that it was good, and at first, from the way Lord Ning started to wolf it down, tearing the chicken with both hands, I thought we would soon be rid of him.

Goodwitch Vidya looked up at her, just once, and in that moment Arati felt the great weight of generations press onto her back, the duty of witches long gone. A duty she did not want. A duty she was expected to uphold. She made tea with numb hands, let the woman cry onto her shoulder, and all the while the bees hummed from the cracks in the walls.

On one of her rests, Ser Wynn checked the banyo tree; the Lady Loreen had taken an ax to its mouth, destroying its ability to tattle on her evening disappearances. It was then that Wynn knew that Loreen held inside her a rage like that she herself had experienced in her fight with the king father’s bear. The kind of rage that she knew would burn her up if she let it.

When she plays, it’s the old songs—not her heavy concertos but brisk two-fingered melodies, folk tunes and old hymns, the first songs her youngest students would master. Every month when the soldiers bring her supply of flour and milk, they also bring waterproofed parcels of manuscript paper and cool bricks of ink. She always refuses them.