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.

I didn’t have to ask whom he meant, but it seemed that Daiki, in this one regard, was not going to get his wish. The bushi produced two flea-bitten, scruffy men. Both were bruised and bloody but alive. Two more were not. Daiki kicked the body so that it rolled face up and studied the dead man’s features. “It would seem the bandit has escaped me after all.”

My smile broadened. It was lucky for the old man I don't practice my trade for free, or he'd have spent the rest of the day rolling on the floor clutching his guts. “If one of them was a wizard capable of performing that level of enchantment, he'd be a rich man,” I said. “Stands to reason.”

"Let me try something," I suggested, and slid into my goatskin and became a mouse. I winked at her—although I doubt she could see it—and skittered out into the front of the wagon, down into the ropes that held the ox to the cart. Akiiki and his man were discussing their impending fortunes. Whether they meant to sell the Lady Uduru off, or rent out her magic, I did not know and did not care. I wanted only to put a stop to it.

I saw my men, who had been the cream of the III Corps, gladly charge well-fed, well-shod Cossacks with nothing but the bayonet and stock of the musket frozen in their hands, barefoot and starving. I admired them for their courage. I envied it. Because I had lost what I most cared for: the calculus of risk, and in its disregard, of bravery. That month of frimaire, I learned that nothing could end my life. I was no longer human.

Lession's first catch was an old drunk, a silver-haired sailor who was staggering through one of the back streets. When he bit a chunk from the drunk's shoulder, the man went limp. The initial thrill of tasting meat soon evaporated. The flesh was old, sour, steeped with alcohol. He couldn’t take this back for Hurkerna. No. Goat would taste far better.

When I woke again, I was looking up into a face which, belonging as it now did to a girl, was much prettier than it had been when it belonged to a boy. It was more than that, however. The face was more willing to smile now, and to be as soft as in truth it was. And when the face spoke, it relinquished all pretense of a voice other than its own--a relief to my ears and certainly to Bonifacio’s as well.

It is the nature of empire to calve new words, and Mattar has walked ruined roads and suffocating marketplaces to find them. She knows the word for how a Kilin-kasa woman turns a wax-melon in her hands three times before she asks a price—tsa-tsa-tsa. She knows the name the now-dead Enokoans had for her, diabi-sai, witch-mother. She knows, too, the syllables of the arrows of the Hasha as they fall, tulbuku, on Korondi shields and Korondi flesh.

She didn't see what happened in the girl, what changed, but something did. Tsani relaxed, losing a tension that Sagraille hadn't noticed was there until it wasn't. She glided forward to kneel at the table, though calling the waterfall of silk and almost-exposed skin she displayed kneeling was probably insulting. It was more beautiful than that. A painting from the medium of motion. The girl even cast a shadow with elegance.

Mandate knew the count of those who had died exactly; knew it the way stone-crafts could tell granite and marble apart without their eyes and the way a blaze-dancer knew a candle from a torch from miles off, in a way he'd never known anything in his life.

I was sagging, listing in pain, by the time I could see Rattle and the crew. They were waiting on the Eight-B platform, near the engine console. The Eight-B line had a rust-and-people smell that mingled into a peculiar musk. I imagined the stench of Hail's blood and body beneath the usual platform scents. From Rattle's face, I knew she didn't have to.

Oh, poor Enanatuma! We had been estranged long before my banishment. I had seen her only once since the day ten years ago when I had given up dancing and devoted all my energies to magic. I had done her a favor in return for the thousand kindnesses she and her father had shown me and had intended never to see her again. But she was still my sister.

The rugmaker's lips twitched of their own accord, itched to speak her mind, to ask the wise woman what right she had to come and make the rugmaker doubt herself now, while when it had mattered, no one had been surer that the rugmaker had done well to send the warrior away.

The neighborhood was dark and insalubrious; if it had not been for the sake of Professor Haversham's scientific endeavors I would never have ventured into its foul-smelling streets in the daytime, far less at night. He, however, appeared to have no such misgivings but looked about him with interest. "Now to find a public house of suitable character," he said. "Not too difficult in this area, I should think."

Aspley turned slowly. He had been washed ashore on the island, and in a daze, a delirium, had stumbled from the beach and into this building. He had no idea where he was or how he had come to be there. No explanations to soothe the rushing of his frantic mind. But then his intellect cut in. Reason, lovely, lovely reason, told him, in all its wisdom, that wherever he was it was preferable to where he had been, preferable, dear god, yes, to the horror of sucking seawater into his lungs.

They couldn't be serious, Morrow thought, could not possibly be...but then the Major allowed the squid to slip from his fingers and into his mouth. Miss Twickenham stifled a horrified gasp. Morrow’s heart quickened its beating. Surely, there had been some sleight of hand in the Major’s actions. What he had witnessed was impossible, and he wondered just how strongly the professor’s tobacco had been tinctured with laudanum.

I hear the swish of snow falling off branches outside our thick-needled shelter and think, for a strange moment, that the illness is over, that animals will come near us—but no, it’s Oruguaq standing at the narrow opening, with a dead fox slung over her shoulder almost blending into her furs, winter-hidden. She looks like she’s trying not to laugh.

The South-East Wind had not blown through those hills since becoming the guardian of the temple for this period, but the South Wind blew there / where the bones drift into gullies like the snow that falls in other lands and I can call through them in a hundred voices, like lizards, like foxes, like men /

As Knowe hikes fast over the plain and down the heather-thick slope to the farms spread out along the low lands, she almost laughs thinking: of course a ghost is the first person to want her singing.

Out of respect for the fox, she ground its bones there. First the tail-bones, murmuring the words her grandmother had taught her early in the pregnancy: For a strong heart. For strong lungs. For strong arms and legs. For strength. For strength. Then the other bones, separating them as use dictated, and picked up the hide and meat and set off home with steps full of fear: that the tail bones would not strengthen her son; or that they would, and her mother would hate her for it.

Father may have been a scholar of the Tao, but he was not above invoking the teachings of Kong Fuzi when it suited him, usually where I was concerned. It was my place to be the innocent, obedient daughter, except in our role of devil hunters when I had to use my martial training to kill something. I took a moment to loosen my jian in its scabbard across my back. This accomplished little except to make me feel a bit better.

But she is special. That first night, when you land together on the roof of the north tower, she hops off the wyvern as easy as dismounting a horse. Her skin is burned from the high sun and chapped from the hard wind, but she spins on her heel and hugs the wyvern around its huge neck. It turns to look at you, with a slightly tilted head, a confusion in its eyes.

Almas wants to say that it’s barbaric, but then so is the whole of it; it would be like observing that a cupful dipped from the sea is salt. And this man has been the author of barbarisms as well, so how should it matter to him? So all she says is, “I’m sorry.” That much is true.

Sere wouldn’t be able to send letters. Diligent, loyal Tashet would never fathom that anyone was reading her mail and would take no precautions. Sere couldn’t explain what would happen to them both if she didn’t leave.

Never before had she run with such speed or such fear, caroming off trees, tearing through brush, ripping loose the roots that hooked her feet, until she caught up to Hundeil. Both were wheezing with exhaustion when they reached the gnarled behemoth of a tree that proved to be Olderra's dwelling. Its bark parted like curtains to admit them.

The first dozen or so corpses Yinghua paused to examine yielded nothing. By then her nostrils were so full of the death-stench that proximity to any particular corpse hardly mattered, and her nausea began to settle, as if her body were reluctantly coming to terms with the situation. She saw the carnage in the abstract—this was not a severed limb or a split skull, it was simply part of a butterfly habitat.

Eefa looks back. Talaan is bed-tousled and half-dressed astride a yellow mare, her hair a tangled mane behind her (how many times has Eefa combed that hair, gently, in the glow of the fire?), her robe fallen open to the chest (the laundry Eefa washed the previous day, folded with lavender and cloves). Her feet are bare. She does not seem to feel the white-toothed wind nipping at her flesh.

She spends the afternoon with the clay-boy, watching for signs of wakefulness, sprinkling a few more seeds onto his chest. She feels as though she’s woken up into a world that’s slightly off-kilter, as though everything has taken one step to the left in her absence. Everyone’s acting a bit odd. Besides that, there’s this creature, this half-human, half-monster, this not-quite-Sleeper who nevertheless is Sleeping just as Magda does.