I found my dying boy curled up in a pile of straw wet with his blood. Seamus rolled over as I entered the barn, and I saw then that he’d chewed his fingers down to the first knuckle. I gasped. “I can taste my King in my wet,” he said, rocking forward, naming his lost […]
The lakeside painter is lying, but no one seems to care. It’s a beautiful lie, even Elodie will admit that. There are two lovers on the pier with the painter, sitting for their portrait, and she’s honest about the way the light of the setting sun catches their hair, the way the breeze ripples their […]
His condition was quickly deteriorating and thus it was deemed best that he journey to Saltwater House. The ocean air, the murmur of the waves, they would soothe him. Balthazar had a fortune and a name. Judith had neither. Her father had been a friend to Balthazar’s father. She was now an orphan, though she […]
The Masters file into the high-vaulted chamber with its ceiling of clear, faceted crystal. The rainbow light cast by the sun finds its echo in their robes, fine silks in all the shades of their titles: sky-blue, steel-grey, rose-red, blood-red. The thrones upon which they seat themselves are carved from impossibly large blocks of the […]
You are two on the day you see your first personal bird. It is the sort of thing you barely remember later, at six, seven, twenty. And yet you cling to it as your first memory: a sleek black penguin waddling through your nursery, it in black, you in white lace, mended and re-mended because […]
Currently listening: “Everything” by Ben Howard When Florence and her husband Asher had first moved into their house, Asher hung a hummingbird feeder from the roof overhang. Now Florence listened to the buzz of hummingbird wings as they sucked red from plastic white petals as false as the picture of calm in Florence’s backyard: Florence […]
Here’s a story Lan was told, when she was a child—when she lay in the snugness of her sleep-cradle, listening to the distant noises of station life—the thrum of the recycling filters, the soft gurgle of water reconstituted from its base components, the distant noises of the station’s Mind in the Inner Rings, a vast […]
The funeral is nearly over when the dead captain explodes. Roses turn to shrapnel. The cathedral is lost in fire. I am drenched in blood. Bone buries itself in the wall next to my head, my arm, my howling, open mouth. I am standing at the back of the room where a sin-eater’s child belongs, […]
Val had lost hope. Routine carried her where hope had stopped: up the stairs to tend the lamp. Into the forest for wood, apples, berries, more rarely a deer or a grouse. Her stores of magic and wild rice came from the same place, though not from the same method: the smaller, murky inland lake, […]
“What’s your name, girl?” “Dust.” “Dust! What kinda people named they child Dust!” She sat in thought a moment, recalling what her wayfaring aunt she rarely saw told her to say whenever someone questioned her name, if she could remember it all. “It’s short for Dustdaughter…” “That’s a heavy name for a child.” “My daddy […]