"They will want you always," said Madame. "If you do not find a way to guard against them, they will pursue you. They love to destroy, and you make it possible for them to destroy again and again. If you are in their power, they can cut that page's throat again and again. You understand? They need not find something new to smash until they have wrung all the joy out of one toy, if you are with them. You must not let them take you."

For the first few years, Violet only passed information, while the reports of faery incursions began to grow. Then—when they went to London for her introduction into society—three things happened. The faeries turned the Prime Minister’s fingers into twigs and his eyes into acorns. Papa died. And Thomas discovered what she was.

Look: she is here, asleep in a row of plush seats in the Grande Salle. Above her soars the painted ceiling and the many chandeliers of the Opéra le Peletier, which is, in the brief time of this story, the national opera of France. Around her stand the members of the production company—the angular Costume Mistress, the rotund Directeur de Théâtre, the seamstresses and the members of the orchestra and the many brawny stagehands—all peering at her intently and holding their breath, as if she is a princess in a tale.

I killed my sister with my own two hands. I am not sorry for it; she lied and cheated and stole, and if it had not been her it would have been me. Blood does not mean only one thing, the same across all boundaries. For my sister it meant nothing until I spilled hers, warm and wet and surprisingly copious, up to my elbows in it. Though I loved her, I killed her; though I loved her, she did not love me.

We used our mating knives to wound them, then married them for the year and nursed them back to health. They told us that people in their homeland mated forever. They had no use for wounds, no fear of healing. When they were strong enough to walk back home, a few of our own left with them, lured by that promise of wound-free love, that strange idea of permanence.

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.

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.

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