by Yoon Ha Lee
The beagle bared his teeth, although it was clear that it wasn’t the corgi bitch he was irritated with. “Summoning it is, then,” he said. He bayed again, and the chorus of the court of the dogs resounded through the void with its empty expanses, its glimmer of constellations.
Faraway, the moon heard the summons, and was chastened. She rode back upon feet of wind and winter and smoke-ghost longings, of hunters’ oaths and lovers’ cries, of the crisp last curls of nighttide. She came before them a hind of white and gray, of mist-colored eyes.
“You’ve neglected your duties,” the beagle said to her. “Do you have any defense to offer?”
The moon moved restlessly upon her hooves, leaving a scent-trail of violet shores, the violence of colliding stars, the dead devouring knots deep in the hearts of galaxies where everything went to be stretched dead. “Nothing,” she said, “except that I wanted to see—” The longing in her voice was unmistakable. “—I wanted to run the way prey runs, and see the way prey sees, in this universe where everything from entropy to the everywhere hand of gravity is a predator.”
“You’re right,” the beagle said, and his voice might have been a little gentler. “It’s not a defense. But it is a reason. And perhaps we’ve leashed you too tightly. It’s not much of a hunt, after all, if only the hunter can run.”
From then on, they kept the moon leashed, but gave her a span of darkness to run in, so that she could weave in and out of the month, chased—but not only caught—by the dogs at their hunt.
for CO
The Palace of the Dragons
In the dark seas, in the deep and stirring waters, the dragons are building a palace.
Dragons do not build in human time, although they sometimes permit seers and unwed peasant daughters and abalone divers to swim among them. They do not build in coral time, although they sometimes plant coral gardens. They do not even build in fossil time.
The palace of the dragons is composed of curves and kelp-shrouded columns, vast theatres that thrum with stormsong and whaletide yearnings. They do not decorate it with the treasures of humankind. Neither do they remove the stray chains of iron, the coinfall treasures, the swords of soldiers cold and true.
Dragons build with death. When they read their deaths in the sea’s unrests, they travel—how they travel—from sand and stone and sunken ship to add their bones to the palace. The dragon has not been born who will rule from those bleached halls. No dragon ever will. The only crown a dragon acknowledges is its own steadfast heart.
for YKL
Hibernation
Dormice know nothing of Charlemagne or Orlando Furioso, but they, too, have their paladins. Every winter, when the sun ebbs in the smoke-colored sky and the frost scribes farewells to flowers and butterflies on the fallen leaves, the quiet, plump dormice huddle next to each other, lulled by the keening song of the woodland winds. They dream of springtime buds and summer blossoms, spindrift seeds and the slow-blinking eyes of hungry birds.
Even in slumber, dormice know that predators seek them. So the dormouse paladins keep vigil, bright-eyed and stern. They do not wield sword or mace, but they wake their kindred if danger approaches. And, knowing that not all threats come from without, they patrol the shared winter dream, making sure that shadows remain shadows until it is time to wake in the spring.
for coraa
The Red Braid
The woman had not chosen to be in the tower. They had taken her sword away from her, and her bow, and even her boots. They hadn’t been very good boots, that was a given when you were a soldier, but they had been better than nothing at all. (She could have insisted on better boots, given who she was, but that would have been cheating.)
Her captors didn’t know what to do with a female soldier, that much was clear. She had seen her comrades taken away, the axes; she knew the reek of slaughter. After all, sometimes she had done the slaughtering. On the other hand, her captors were also people of poetry and strange prejudices, and they prided themselves on a chivalry bound up with roses and filigree chains. The tower had been their compromise. Her cell was so spacious that it wasn’t quite a cell, although you couldn’t call it the height of luxury either. She slept upon sheets of worn silk and a soft mat rather than one of rice straw, and while the window was narrow, it let in stripes of sunlight and moonlight and the occasional bird-shaped shadow.
In the early days she had hoped that her brother might ransom her, but the cost of her ransom would be dear, she knew; and war was expensive. He had always been the calculating sort, and she didn’t expect him to value one horse-archer, even a good one, even his sister, over a company of keen-eyed mercenaries. It was just the way he was, and besides, as her mother had always said dryly, a woman had to make her own luck in a world of men.
The woman had only two changes of clothing, but it was not, she reflected, as if she needed to fear battlefield mud and gore in here. Along with the weapons and boots, her captors had taken away all possessions that they deemed metaphysically dangerous, such as the whalebone charm to the dragon-of-the-sea, or the beads of alternating carnelian and alabaster she had worn about her neck for protection from gangrene spirits. But they had left her a single braided cord, which had been a gift from her great-aunt.
“It’s a ladder to escape,” her great-aunt had said one firelit evening, her fingers turning the worn red, white, and black cord around and around. The woman, then a girl, had only halfway paid attention, despite her interest in the cheerful orange-tinted red of the component cords. Her great-aunt, for all her lean beauty, her amber-brown eyes, was something of an eccentric. Even to her death she always went around in black gloves. But she was still talking: “Eight threads in the braid, do you see? One missing. It’s a one-way ladder. Still, best to have some way out than none.”
“Yes, Auntie,” the girl said, and reached for the cord to wrap around her wrist.
Now, the woman walked over to the window—too narrow to see much, too wide for any self-respecting architect to claim it as a loophole—and glanced at the distant mountains, the low-hanging clouds. And she heard in her head, It’s because you have to divide by four, something she’d overheard her great-aunt saying to her mother, whatever it meant.
No: she didn’t want to stay here any longer. Patience had gotten her this far; it would get her no further. She listened for the guards, but they were accustomed to her docility. So she took out the braid and began doing the only thing she could think of, unweaving its strands, red and white and black. As she did so, she felt a pleasant dizziness. She set her teeth and kept unweaving. She began to see why the braid’s construction required multiples of four.
When she was done, she lifted one paw, then another, then another, then another, looking at them in turn. Interesting. And she had a plume of handsome white-tipped tails, but there should have been nine and one was missing. Eight threads in the braid. Not that she knew anything about braiding, but even being an unwhole fox spirit was better than being a whole captive.
She slid through the window ghostlike—as if walls could hold a fox spirit—then ran down the side of the tower on black-stockinged fox feet, silken, fearless. When she reached the base of the tower, she looked up—the tower appeared much taller from a fox’s vantage point—and cocked her head. Then she shrugged a fox shrug and slipped from the tower’s shadow into the distance, contemplating foxish mathematics all the while.
for Telophase
Sand and Sea
Once there lived twin witches, one of sand and one of sea. The witch of sand built towers studded with conch shells and polished fragments of glass, and hung them around with rusted chains and lockets grown over with old coral. The witch of sea danced in the foam with the octopuses and porpoises, and braided kelp-strands into her hair, and the frayed old rope of anchors. In the evenings the towers crumbled away as the waves lapped over them, and the two sisters met to roast fish over driftwood fires.
The witch of sand slept in a cottage above the undulating line of
tide-marks, and combed out her hair every morning to the cries of gulls. During the days she sometimes wove tapestries from mer-hair and sail-strands and gold thread picked out from rotting banners. At other times she amused herself with sand-paintings, which were never twice the same, sometimes of whimsical winged snails, sometimes of mournful otters.
The witch of sand slept on the sea itself, amid the cushioning glow of jellyfish, and clothed herself in transitory jewels of brine. During the nights she painted moonlight portraits of ghost ships–some of which were mistaken for the genuine article–and arranged the spume into maps of distant nations. Sometimes she spun temporary mirrors of ice so that she could admire the sea’s shifting faces in it, only to send it shattering across the waves.
The twins’ birthday approached, and they quarreled–albeit in a friendly fashion–over how to celebrate. Should they create a splendid castle of sand for the occasion, or dive down among the anemones? (They could have settled the matter by age–technically, the sea-sister was older–but that would have been too easy.) Gather pebbles from the beach or dive deep for lost jewels? Dance barefoot on the sand or swim among the seals? Since they were both witches, they turned to divination to determine the answer.
The twins shared a cauldron, a gift from their departed mother. Together they cast in powdered baleen and gold coins stamped with the visages of pirate queens, ink of deep-diving squid and tiny exquisite abalone-inlaid boxes, honey that bees had made from the flowers that bloomed along the beach and splinters from the great warships of dead empires. They chanted poems in the language of the sky as it kisses the far horizon, and the moon as it silvers the sands at night.
At last the ritual came to its conclusion, and the brew within the cauldron quieted to an unmoving sheen. The twins peered over the cauldron’s rim, hoping for a vision to resolve their dilemma. (Even small dilemmas require rituals in the world of witches.)
They were not disappointed: within the glimmering depths, each witch saw her sister’s face. They looked up from the cauldron at each other, then burst into laughter. They agreed to spend the next year in each other’s domain. Then, that settled, they prepared their customary dinner of roast fish, well-content with the answer that had already been theirs.
The Birdsong Flute
Some speak of the forest’s great trees, fire-scarred and crowned with the nests of birds extinct elsewhere, and others speak of the tigers, who delight in giving terrible advice to travelers when they are hungry, but can always be trusted to be honest about go stratagems. The forest has known exiled poets and princesses, pious warriors and worried monks, and it writes their names in its loam just as it writes the secret lives of the squirrels and hedgehogs.
One pilgrim came to the forest to visit what she believed to be its finest treasure, a flute that sang in the voices of all the world’s birds. She found that the way to the shrine of the flute was not barred to her. The very pebbles of the path were kind to her feet.
The shrine was tended only by an old woman whose hair might have been black when the moon was young. The pilgrim explained her heart’s desire, and the old woman nodded and set aside her broom.
“There it is,” she said, leading the pilgrim to the altar, lit only by cloudlight. The flute was plain and dark, worn smooth and carved with a single curling feather, like a riddle of smoke. “You will find no finer chorale in the halls of the world: swan’s lament and lark’s song and crane’s cry, the voice of every bird that has lived beneath the roof of the sky.”
“If this is so,” said the pilgrim, greatly wondering, “why is this treasure not played where people can hear it?”
As the pilgrim looked at the old woman, she saw that the birds of the forest had gathered around them: sleepy owls and small wrens, falcons with their fierce eyes and magpies in their handsome black-and-white.
“If the flute contains the voices of the very birds,” the old woman said, “what do you think is left for the birds themselves when it is played?”
The pilgrim thanked her and headed home, on a path no less friendly, singing an old travel-song in her own rough voice.
for YKL
Two Payments
The horses that plunge through the waterways between the cities of heaven and the citadels of hell are wild of eye and white of mane. No one rides them. In times past they have trampled armies and thundered down brave fortresses, and every hoofmark fills with dead water. They leave behind them a trail of sodden smoke and equations tearing themselves into constituent constants and shadows that chatter in the language of untimely gifts.
A single angel accompanies them. She wears armor woven haphazardly from ligaments of dreary bark, gears scrapped from clanking engines, and leather strips from the backs of broken traitors. The angel wears no veil or helm, but there is a terrible mark on her brow where the greatest of the horses struck her with her hoof.
On the high day of summer, when the sun strikes chords from the cities of heaven and even the citadels of hell are luminous with the anticipation of sinfire and soul’s pyre, the angel leads the horses to heaven and hell in turn. She collects a coin of silver from heaven and a coin of steel from hell so that the horses will not pillage the great cities, the greedy citadels. Even the wardens of heaven and the warriors of hell know to fear the horses.
And on the low day of winter, when the stars gather closely around the cities of heaven and the citadels of hell are bright with the knowledge of famine, the angels lead the horses to heaven and hell again. This time, when they pay her in silver and steel, it is to ensure the horses will never leave them. For the wardens of heaven and the warriors of hell recognize that, terrible as the horses are, they too are essential to the order of the world.
for YKL
A Single Pebble
The ruined palace of the ancient sea queen was bright and hard with treasures: ropes of shark’s teeth and flawed tourmalines woven in webs that spiders would have wept over; the keels of ancient ships with the fates of nations written upon them in the language of barnacles; crowns set with mirrors instead of gems so that the wise would see their own wisdom reflected back to them. But although each treasure had been wrought under the sun’s eye and the moon’s smile, none held any warmth.
Nevertheless, a daughter of the island dragons journeyed to the palace, which had stood uninhabited for many generations. We do not know what trouble took her there, but she thought she might find some balm for it in the ruins. All she brought with her was a single pebble from the black beaches of her home, a blessing-piece from her mother.
She met other travelers in the ruins, which is to say that she met their bones. But bones tell stories, especially to predators, and for all their benevolence, dragons are predators. From the bones she learned that each traveler had found some answer to his or her desire, yet none of them had departed with it.
Still, she had come a long way, so she lingered a little while among the swan-curved knives of obsidian and chalices that had once tasted the tears of kings and dictionaries stitched in corroded wire upon funeral shrouds. She looked and looked, but found nothing to ease her heart.
At last, not wishing to join the bones, she journeyed back home. There she confessed that she had not taken any of the cold and glittering treasures for herself. Her mother said she was sorry to hear of her failure.
Not at all, the dragon said. For in the cold currents of the ruins, she had found herself meditating on the pebble, a reminder of black sands and night winds sweet with the yearning of flowers, dragon-games of raindrop poetry and pearl riddles, stormcloud praises encrypted in foam. She had not found the heartsease she sought amid those great and grim treasures, but she had found the one she had brought with her from the very beginning.
for Jonquil, a gift courtesy of Anonymous
The Pale Queen’s Sister
The mountain court of the pale queen was bright with treasures: dew harvested from young roses and trapped inside crystal lockets; shirts of silk sewn so densely with hematite beads
that they shimmered like hauberks; vases imprinted with the feather-patterns of ascending firebirds. But for all the splendors in her court, the queen was not pleased. For ten-and-three years she had warred with an empire of scythes and fissures, and for ten-and-three years she had been losing.
To the north and east was the realm of the birds, and twice a year the pale queen sent emissaries laden with rare treasures to beseech the birds’ aid. She sent coins stamped with the faces of incomparable warriors, whose eyes were tiny diamonds; she sent books of poetry scribed on the hides of extinct wolves, and clever puzzle boxes that sang the hymns of the snow sisters when they were opened. But the envoys returned each time with their gifts rejected and their pleas unheard.
At last the queen’s sister asked to travel to the realm of the birds. The pale queen forbade it at first, fearing to lose her heir, but she gave in at last. Although she offered her sister the rarest of her treasures, her sister refused everything but supplies for the trip.
The pale queen’s sister set off the next day. Halfway to the realm of the birds, she came across a starving crane, too weak to move. Although her mission was urgent, she fed the crane her own food and tended it until it recovered.
“I know your purpose,” the crane said when it was stronger. “You are the pale queen’s sister. What tribute do you bring to the queen of the birds?”
“Nothing,” the queen’s sister said. “For all the gifts we sent, we never troubled to ask what the birds wanted of us. I mean to do that when I arrive.”
“What if the birds want something you can’t give?”
“Then I must return empty-handed,” the queen’s sister said. “The queen grows ill at heart watching the trees shatter, the rocks break, the soldiers cut down. When she falters, it will be my turn to take up the fight, however hopeless.”