It came to Jabey that Sloan’d never looked at these glasses in proper light; what if they were just a cheap shiny? But the sudden sharp panic receded as he pulled them from his pocket and unwrapped the linen. They were indeed a tiny pair of opera glasses, with a simplicity and a heft about them that suggested expense.

I do not want his scrutiny now, with the cool blade of the dagger pressing against my thigh. On the nearest dance path, a woman laughs as a fat prince covers her ears and throat with wet kisses. I feign interest as he spins her across the path, through the starlight that pours into the atrium. Unbidden, I picture our last dance together, on a night so similar and so different.

A church grim like Magrat could taste death, scent it on the air, feel it in the marrow of her bones. Every mortal carried a little bit; death was always a possibility, from accident or disease. But sometimes the possibility grew stronger, closer, when a man stood at a fork in the road, then chose the path that led toward peril.

Mother stepped close enough to plant a fleeting kiss. By habit, Madeline did not cringe from the fog of falsehoods that clothed Mother. Indeed, her very clothing was false. Mother could play the part of a proper lady better than any actress on stage, but she was neither. She was a scientist and a thief, and Madeline was not sure where one ended and the other began.

"Take a look. I have them here with me. Please, godling." The girl's fear seeped into the words—as did her faith that Dreya would make everything right again. Dreya was unworthy of such devotion, but she drank it in nevertheless.

I touched my cheekbones. Was that how I looked after a single offering? How would I endure this for two more times? I washed my face and crossed the village to Mkiwa’s hut. Her face still paled, but her strong body had stifled the pain. Did her heart’s pain fare any better, though? I couldn’t tell.

Singling out the watch would keep suspicion focused outward, Meinrad hoped, to the woods and the wild Prussians who had not yet submitted to the order and the church. With so few knights and half-brothers under him, infighting would leave them defenseless fast. Fear of the outside was manageable.

I wiped red blood from a white arm. Scars knotted its lines. Some pink, some white. Here and there the skin was near to bone, where flesh had long ago been torn away. The legacy of a dozen clients. “I don't fight any more.”

He'd wanted to show her this place—this forest where he'd been a boy and hadn't been back since. He'd expected to find it changed. Not like this. The storms had uprooted whole trees. The brook roared, churning with debris, fighting to drag it all down into the valley. "Tell me," she said, watching him. He loved her. He didn't know where to begin.

An old fox greeted us at the edge, three-tailed and red like fire. I was so small that her snout reached my neck, smelling of the cloying musk of foxes, thick and odd, like dirty metal gripped in my hand. She came to Aimi like one of the village dogs, completely unafraid, and kissed her cheek.

The rest of the birthing was hard work, but painless. Dziko and Terra sprinkled water over the clay to soften it and kneaded the flesh together until there was no way to separate his riverbed brown from her sunset orange. Then they divided the babyflesh into two equal pieces, soon to be their children.

Harald and Solveig were academic heirs apparent, favored disciples of Asbjørnsen and von Linne, the two great authorities on Anthropomorpha. Even before graduation, their joint study of field goblins, based on existing literature and new observations, showed that Homo monstrosus vulgus practice exogamous mating; Professor Strindberg had to retire his popular lectures on goblin promiscuity.

"Come here with you," Boden calls, as he retrieves his son, Tallow, from amongst the crowd's rushing legs. He lifts the boy onto his shoulders, but the weight makes him gasp, makes his lower back twinge, and Tal's mucky brown boots smear the front of his tunic. He can hardly tell the boy off for that, though, can he? Not when he only sees him for the odd day here and there.

Forthcoming TBA 2016 FeastWar — Chasing Shadows, 2016 2015 Last Hunt — Asimov’s, 2015 2014 Ink of My Bones, Blood of My Hands – Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 2014 Updates (co-aut…

There are two kinds of secrets: those we keep from others, and those we keep from ourselves. My mother told me this after one of her too-silent nights with my father. She told me that the worst ones, the ones too terrible to believe, are the second …

The stories begin: there was a lowland man, and he loved a mountain woman. From there they diverge, but the bones of it remain the same. The poet, who had never been to the mountains, gained enough fame that the metaphor worked its way into the lexi…

“—and she said, well, that’s as may be, lad, but if you don’t recall what color it was, then I don’t see how I can help you!” Roars of laughter seemed to shake the hot taproom. via Pocket

Like you, I grew up with the telling of the Tale of the Scout and the Pachydormu. That telling, on the night of first new moon of winter, marked my years between toddler and twelve like tree rings. via Pocket

When the magistrate arrives in Immen, the first thing he does is summon Grandmother Seung, druidess of Yang Village Behind-the-Mountains, to ask for her magic potion. via Pocket

Grandmother kept her cloth of winds in the orange room, a storage chamber painted in fire and lit to a translucent glow by dozens of floating candlebulbs created by the older women’s magic. via Pocket

The pirate captain’s daughter had no name, although her mother’s land-born lovers, male and female, sometimes amused themselves thinking of names for her. Such strong hands, such a lithe frame, one might say, and suggest a name from an island known …

In the town of Svalgearyen, on the thirty-third day of the months-long winter night, Grandma Marit abruptly cast her knitting aside and marched toward the door. Her granddaughter, Adda, set her own knitting down with far more delicacy but also a gre…

The mama mmiri is the mother of the Ofia River, and she loves her food in pairs. Every month the villagers toss goats and fowl into her water so that in return she will allow them to fish and row and wash in it. via Pocket

The folk of the Infinite Forum swore in nine languages and ninety dialects as a cat’s black shape darted up Via Antiqua’s hot white stones. They hissed again as they spied the magic-twisted bloodhound bounding after it like a carnelian thundercloud.…

The leader of House Hawthorn’s Court of Birth lived in a part of the House that Samariel had never been to: a wing of dusty, disused corridors where the wainscoting had rotted away and the wallpaper’s elegant asphodels were obscured by elongated smu…

The rot hound struck in the dark hours of the morning. It took one of our horses and left a geld woman bloodied and wild, telling tales of a two-headed wolf with eyes like the last embers of a fire. I had known this would come. Not the wolf but some…

Yes, I went walking with him near the Deaf King Inn. There are some in Quadril who will call that my first mistake. via Pocket

We went to the lake of our ancestors on the longest night of the year. As the oldest, I had to make sure I and my four sisters and little brother gave greetings to our parents in their first year under the ice. via Pocket

It’s easy to shoot a dog. Susanna watched Papa do it one bitter morning, winter before last, when old Karo couldn’t get up off his blankets, so she knows how it’s done. via Pocket