I haul my basket over to the stand of flowers that look like ladies’ lacy handkerchiefs. While I’m digging in the soil with my trowel, sure enough, Picket hops over in the funny way Rabbits do and stares at me through the fence. His ears have perked up again, and I can see him smiling out of the corner of my eye. Insults and scoldings never keep them down for long.

"No," Ela said. "Wait. Stop!" She’d not been idle in deception. She fumbled in the ragged pockets of her robe. Thread. Golden thread. To sew up a shirt. The pretty one he was never around to wear. How long have I hated you? she thought as he struck her. Is it because you aren’t here or because you are?

When you are young you think that you will live forever and that no harm will ever come to you. Your friends will stay friends and your lovers lovers, and the most dangerous thing is spotting a wrinkle in your looking glass. Ah, this is not true, my boy! There are worse things than a safe old age.

If I did not stop her, she would be lying with strangers in the smoke-room tonight, heedless of those who might be watching. So I made a show of stepping forward to take her satchel, as though she were now too delicate to bear it herself. She let me carry it, and I followed her through the halls and to her room.

They turned their backs to Mabella. Her stomach twisted as it did when she pilfered too many sweets from the kitchens. She wanted to say something and nothing. She wanted to run, but her feet throbbed. Instead she turned and walked from the winged women's cackling silence.

“You’re a liar,” said the girl with golden hair. “You lie to keep us in check. You lie about the fish people to keep us here, so we won’t try to escape down the river. And you lie about the mountains, so we won’t go there, either. You lie about the blood tax being integral to the wealth of the city. What could you possibly use the blood for?”

I wanted to go, but I did not know where I was going. I wanted to stay and rub my hands all over her belly, but I did not like the thought of all that sand in the creases of my palms. I wanted to ask her more questions, about the way the world was made, about death and dreams, but did not want to know the answers, should they distract me from my destined future.

We pass the last of those who have preceded us, those who crossed into the warped, rippling landscape without the benefit of protective magic. Father stops to examine a grotesquely deformed skeleton. The bleached bones are twisted and swollen; the skull cave-like. Of necessity, I halt too, but I already know this poor warped cadaver is neither Mother nor my sister.

If Lady Percivalia loved the cinematographist in her chaste way—and she thought despite all propriety that the rising, fluttering, tremulous sensation she felt when she looked at him might be a kind of love—then she loved him because he had brought her the shapes and shadows of creatures that dwelled outside the confines of her life.

As Alana approached, a single beastman detached himself from the crowd. He was larger than the others and wore only a long, red tabard that left his huge arms bare. His lower jaw protruded far beyond his upper, giving him a pugnacious look, yet his black hair was meticulously combed, shot through with braids ending in red beads. A three-fingered hand rested on the hilt of an oversized longsword.

The Prodigy scampered forward at once and sat before the pipe organ’s keyboards. Kreisler was with him. Together they began to play, calling the automata back to their city. Just as we had planned. And I, I ran after the Clockwork King, driven, as ever, by the thought of Olympia. For I had more that I would know.

From this window, we watched the man’s whip rise again and the back hoof of the mare collide with his thin throat in the same instant. The man crumpled down into the festering street as gouts of blood spouted from his neck. No one came to claim his body. Below us in the alley, rats and dogs or rat-sized dogs emerged slowly. They began to sip at the red puddles around him.

The garrote was made of fine silk laced with steel wire, designed to choke bloodlessly. Its ends were looped to small grips of cherry wood. Otranto had crafted it himself over a period of three weeks, designing for speed and efficacy. Still, the target was thrashing hard enough that the smooth handles were biting his palms. He drew harder.

Otranto didn't hesitate. On some level, he realized, he had been anticipating this moment, or one like it, for a very long time. "The punishment for failure should be death by my own hand."

Dr. Benjamin, he was running, running through the rain from one tent to another, trying to save his Story Eater and those pasty wax circles he’s spent so long collecting and, once, he looked up. Mala was sitting there on the top of the sea wall. She wasn’t wearing a rain slicker or even shoes and she was just looking at him like he was a rat, like he was a bug. Like he was something with too many eyes and too many legs and all she wanted to know was what ridiculous thing he was going to do next.

“Miss Em?” Florence called softly from the doorway. The woman—perhaps it was a woman—in the bed was fragile and hollow as a teacup. Her white hair wisped and curled around her skull, and her eyes looked like stones dropped in deep snow. She opened her mouth and made a weak, kitten-ish sound. Florence nodded and bent to adjust the pillow.

Beatrice smiled; it was brittle and wavering. It reminded Mona of the first tentative rays of sunlight emerging on the end of winter. How they came through the windowpanes all watery and uncertain. It had been just the two of them for so long, Mona realized.

I chuckled, cracked open my pistol’s cylinder, and loaded it with the wooden ammunition. “Don’t worry, my dear,” I said, and tucked the gun in my waistband. “There’s plenty of time before sunrise.”

“Is that all you have?” Henry yelled at the locomotive. He kicked its hot firebox, and its whistle screamed at him, steam shrieking from the full boiler. “That’s right!” he shouted back. “Shake me. Come on, you ugly bastard. Shake me!” The train, spitting a thick spume of greasy smoke, hurled itself down the far side of the mountain.

Abe experienced the odd sensation of Madame Oljon inside his head aligning her face with his, pushing eyes and lips forward past his own as they both stared at the small figure near the center of the room sitting cross-legged on a high cushion, naked save for a loincloth, smiling idiotically (not unlike, Abe thought, the wizard Philoneus’s own idiotic smile).

“You?” I stood, furious, and as I did the red brazier-light glinted on something behind the throne that I could not see. “Did you not have enough of father’s blessings while he lived? He gave you gifts, and horses, and talked of the great kingdom you would inherit. Meanwhile I sat in your shadow and the heap of your scorn. No, brother. For this once I will have something that you have not had first.”

She looked dead, as well she would be if she were anything else. Only a powerful magus could live without a soul. But even Khatereh needed the touch of her soul once in awhile; on midsummer day, as was her personal tradition, she would let it rest within her and be renewed. With her soul inside her body, she would be as vibrant and beautiful as a twenty-two year-old sister ought to be, and when it was removed she would look healthy again, for a while.  

Once home, I cannot stop thinking about two things: the bird and the poster. I am not sure which one disturbs me more. I don't tell anyone, not even Gordon. He doesn't speak to me of what we saw either, but there is still a conversation there, every time we look at each other. In his eyes I see the same thing that must linger in mine. Questions and hurts. Have we been made only to be sold?

The turntable is three feet around, enough to hold us and whatever Jackson means to display us with. Once he assembled a collection of taxidermied two-faced cats at our feet, mounded so high they constantly spilled over the edge; once it was a school of Fiji mermaids dangling on silver wires. They moved as we moved, nauseating in effect. Usually, as now, it is the frame of a cheval glass, within which we stand.

My love reveled in winter's sunbroken days, when the light spills to the fresh-fallen snow to stab a person in the eyes. Gugán flit from path to stone, a trickster comfortable with his Raven heritage. I, as Eagle, startled at every shift of snow, caught always unawares in the bright sun as he pelted me with clumps of melting cold.

Wherever he traveled, Vasily saw vast networks of lines—across the ground, stretching into the sky. It was the sky-bound lines that pulled at him most, that beckoned him to try his feet upon them. He had always strung ropes and wires to climb, between poles, trees, and buildings, but the lines that he had not strung—lines that existed of their own accord—were a challenge he never expected.

'Twas Abigail who answered, standing some way across the deck. It sounded like the entire crew took a collective breath at the sight of her. Water streamed from her now ill-fitting gown. It seemed as though she was coming apart, becoming water as she crossed to us. Through corset and skirt, it drenched her.

This task had not been set to us but to him. How long might one live if they denied a god? Susanoo could not drown me in these waters, nor could a blade pierce my heart, but he commanded all of Yomi, and what tortures he might devise there I did not wish to know.

She opens the jar to find herself on a Himalayan plain, in a time before humanity has discovered this place. The air here is cold, pinks her cheeks. She picks her way toward the pomegranate trees which line the foothills and opens a wide-mouth jar. Two pomegranates will fit inside, little else. She twists the lid into place then sinks into the dark soil at the base of the trees. If she keeps still, the sunlight sinks through her and she hears only the wind.

Only as the song nears its end do I risk a glance at my audience. I see a movement behind Dr. Mesmer’s head. For a moment I think it is a trick of the doubled mirrors, that I’ve caught a glimpse of myself reflected from the other room. But reflections do not wear strange clothes. The man stands in the back of the room. His eyes are closed, and his jacket is torn. His head is bleeding.