Witchcraft is a gift. Imelda would wave her steel spoon at Mercer and insist on this as he measured ingredients for her, whether she was boiling potions or a pot of farfalle pasta. Watch the salt, a teaspoon only, never pour too much. Don’t overheat the sauce. Bottle the hawks’ gizzards separate from the basilisks’. Never half-ass a gift, Mercy. Her perpetual imperative. Mercer is alone now. His hands are unsteady---they’ve shaken like a drunkard’s since they held Imelda as she passed---and he is no witch.

Don’t sell her. The thought rises like a tide in the back of Jeri’s mind, where she’s spent three Nikutan launch cycles struggling to contain it. It leaves her breathless, drowning in guilt, and trying to hide it from the krosuta-whitened stare of the Henza abbess. This is Cleo, not a load of ore. This will break her. And how could it not break her? She’s a lumbering old Juno-class cargo beast, poor Cleo, one of the earliest models.

It is three days before she dreams a strange prophecy. The Daganites believe prophecy is shrouded in mystery. In truth, it is logical---bound by choice and statistics and a million small things they don’t pay attention to, but that gods do. Mortals love secret and ritual and when they come to her temple with their hundred small choices they don’t look at her. Eyes cast down, watering from the smoke, foreheads pressed to the ground.

Two hundred ships moved through the stars, leaving an iridescent trail of transmission beacons in their wake. Five billion kilometers long, the beacons stretched all the way to Earth, a desiccated and shaken planet that the passengers once called home. Sometimes simple messages from the ships arrived in the data. After a long time, images came and---after an even longer time---clips of the passengers going about their lives. But the vast distances meant these clips were rare. Normally an image arriving on Earth was cause for celebration, because it meant the crew was still alive, or at leas...

There was something more civilized about a town that could bury its dead, if they stayed dead, and so Folkvarder Gray put out the notice for a gravedigger.

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io Lieutenant James Marlowe watched a room full of grown, distinguished men act like young ladies at their first ball. via Pocket Marlowe and Harry and the Disinclined Laboratory - Lightspeed Magazine via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2VprmAL

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man. via Pocket Healing Benjamin - Lightspeed Magazine via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2tJ2oR4

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io Elaine broke her curse like a mirror, heedless of the shards that scattered across the floor. The guests at the party laughed, applauded, whooped with delight at her reckless abandon. via Pocket

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io This is a love story, the last of a series of moments when we meet. Saki Jones leaned into the viewport window until her nose nearly touched the glass, staring at the colony planet below. New Mars. From this distance, she could pretend that things w… The Archronology of Love - Lightspeed Magazine via Instapaper http://bit.ly/2Kf1zKW The Archronology of Love - Lightspeed Magazine via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2uI2lWh