by Yoon Ha Lee
The crane’s voice turned cunning. “You would make a better queen than she would.”
The queen’s sister gazed steadfastly at the crane. “I do not know how you do things in the realm of birds, but she is my sister and I will not betray her, even for this. I will look for another way.”
All around her as she spoke were birds: long-necked geese and merry sparrows, pheasants and swallows and falcons and swans. The eyes of the crane were very bright, and the queen’s sister realized she had been speaking with the queen of the birds all along.
“You cannot buy us as allies,” the crane said, “but we would offer you our friendship if you would have it.”
“I would be honored,” the queen’s sister said.
The crane said, “Lead on, then. I believe we have an army to defeat.”
for Nancy Sauer
The Sunlit Horse
The magician’s son crouched over the wooden horse that his father had made for them. The two of them had sneaked out when the night drew down over tower and shore and sea like a blanket sewn bright with comets and constellations and the ebbing crescent of the moon. They had listened so carefully for the downwards footsteps of the magician, and of his great yawn (he had a very loud yawn), and the quiet that indicated, they hoped, that he had curled up in bed with one of his books.
At first it had been wonderful. They had ridden along the night winds, trading riddles and rhymes and the occasional half-formed limerick, and skimmed the foam-pearled waves. The horse had whickered softly, lowly, and hippocampuses with their wide green eyes and tangle-curled manes and their songs, sweet and barbed like mer-song toward the high tilt of the midnight stars. The magician’s son wasn’t sure he trusted them—their teeth, white like shells scoured pale, looked very sharp—but the horse flicked its ears friendly fashion, and the hippocampuses sang back and didn’t come too close, so that was all right.
They went up into the sky, then, and saw the dark humped shapes of islands that might have been sea serpent coils, it was impossible to tell. They saw bioluminiscent jellyfish in ever-changing kaleidoscope drifts. They saw flowers that rose from the depths of the sea and sank back down, all between one breath and the next, and perfumed the air with a scent like that of lilacs and limes. Sometimes the wind blew warm and sometimes it blew cold, and in every case the magician’s son could all but taste the ice-fruit of stars at the tip of his tongue when he breathed it.
It was on the way home, hurrying to be back in bed before the sun rose and the magician caught them, that the mishap happened. They were on the way back into the tower, through the window they had left open. But the horse was tired after the long night of wonders they had witnessed, and when there was a sudden gust, he careened into the side of the tower. He swerved so that the magician’s son would not be harmed, but in the process his foreleg cracked at the knee, and dangled perilously as he limped into the room and onto the bed.
The magician’s son put blankets around the injured horse, then, and ran for his father in tears. His father had heard the collision, and was already on his way up the stairs. The magician didn’t ask what had happened. You didn’t have to be a magician, or a father, for that matter, to know. Instead, he told his son to pet the horse’s yarn mane and soothe the horse while he went to his workshop to begin the repair.
First the magician took measurements from the other foreleg. Then, with a net of morning glory eyes and seagull cries, the magician captured a solid beam of sunlight. He carved the sunlight into another leg—magicians have their ways—and then used a sander to smooth it so that its light sparkled and glimmered and glowed amber-welcoming.
At last he went upstairs, to where his son was waiting with anxious eyes, and fastened the replacement leg on. “Be more careful next time,” he said, not too reprimanding. The horse nuzzled him with its worn wooden nose. Then he yawned his great yawn and invited them both downstairs to breakfast, and they all went together, whole of limb and whole of heart.
for SR
Tiger Wives
Past the lowlands of hell and their unmentionable rivers, beyond the clangor of hammers on unwhole anvils, lies a city whose name is only written ringed with formulas of fear. Its queen has eyes the color of an extinguished sun, in a smooth, sweet face that has told many lies. At her throat is a rough stone, and her hands are hidden by gloves sewn stiff with the hair of corpses. She has no shortage of such gloves.
The queen has fifteen-and-two generals to do her bidding, and it is her generals that concern us. Under her unsunned banner they have conquered cities that skein themselves across chasms, cities that build their walls from an alloy of inviolate desire and predatory fire, cities that conjure swords from needles and knights from spoons. They have brought her fine horses that travel as easily upon funeral smoke as upon land, and coins that sing the name of your greatest enemy when you spin them on the table, and bronze goblets that pour forth the tears of the latest person to betray you. (The unfortunate side effect is that someone will always betray the owner of such a goblet.)
To the generals’ dismay, the queen’s visage grows more palely poisonous as long as there exists a city that does not acknowledge her as its ruler; and such cities are not in short supply. The generals have noticed, as have others, that the queen’s collection of gloves grows faster and faster.
One general has turned her attention to the land of tigers, which has heretofore escaped notice because tigers, while talented at many things, are baffled by the need for cities. People who live near the land of tigers—rarely a comfortable thing, even for people who are themselves predators—speak of tiger wives. They say that a tiger wife must be subdued by stonelight and starfall, and can only be bound by chains of steel rotted through by the whispers of the wicked. And they say, too, that a tiger wife is a tactician beyond compare, merciless and attentive to carrion details, and most of all a master of the 3,000 red arts.
The general has sent her dead-eyed hunters and her lady assassins to capture a tiger to take to wife, but she has had no success, and it is unlikely she ever will. It is not that the general carries a corroded pale lump where her heart should be; it is not that ledgers of spilled lives are recorded in blurred inexactitude upon her bones. Tigers are indifferent to such niceties. But there has never been a tiger born who respects someone who failed to fight her own battles, and tigers are in a position to be choosy about their mates.
for YKL
Dew-Weighted Roses
In a convent high in the mountains, where the stars hang barely out of reach and the wind sings stories of frozen songbirds and silvered firs, a sister-of-the-snow tends her garden. It is not truly her garden, of course. It belongs, insofar as it belongs to anyone on the wheel of the world, to all the sisters. And it belongs most of all to that presence whose face is different in each season but whose name never changes, and who set the sun and moon in their courses. But for all that, the sister spends more time in the garden than anyone else, so she thinks of it as hers.
The only flowers that grow so close to the stars are white or blue, like the colors of cloud or sky, or the unseen sea. The convent’s garden contains none of these. Instead, it is a stone courtyard bounded by high walls. Every morning and evening, the sister sweeps the courtyard clear of snow.
The garden of stone is not lifeless, however. No matter what the season, from the brief, shining summers to the mirror-colored winters, it breathes the fragrances of absent flowers. If you start at one corner and walk a path of tangled triangles, you may inhale the scent of jasmine, or gardenias, or orange blossoms. The absent flowers move from year to year. The sister takes great pleasure in chronicling their movements.
Most elusive is the sister’s favorite, roses with their petals heavy with dew. In her mind’s eye, the roses are the lush red of heart’s blood. She has not managed to find them in the garden this year.
But she stirs in her sleep at night, breathing, without being aware of it, the scent of dew-weighted roses, for the soil they find
most fertile resides in the devotion of her dreams.
for Nancy Sauer
The Firziak Mountains
The Firziak Mountains have many charms, from the spectacular springtime displays of cherry blossoms to the shrines with their gilded statues of the Blind Falconer, who is considered an apostate elsewhere in the region. Then, too, there are the hawks, whose cries echo in the gorges and whose silhouettes punctuate the storm-lashed skies.
The mountains are famous for none of these things, although all of them are mentioned to some degree in tourists’ guides and travelers’ journals. Rather, the mountains are famous because of the tea.
It is not that the Firziaks produce excellent tea. The quality of their tea is variable, and the world’s connoisseurs agree that Nhogeh has better oolongs and blacks, while the Footfall Islands are unmatched for ginseng.
But year after year, the tea-tourists come, some wearing the outlandish padded silks of the Celadon Kingdom, others huddled in wool cloaks striped brown and beige. For the most part, they bring their own tea, although it truly does not matter.
For the peculiarity of the Firziak Mountains, duplicated nowhere else in the world, is that each crag, each peak and ridgeline, has its own flavor, which it imparts to whatever tea you drink there, whatever its type or quality. Aficionados have been mapping the topography of tastes for the past centuries, from the hint of roseate honey common in one vale to the steady, startlingly mellow oaken note to be tasted near the mouths of certain caverns.
As for those native to the Firziaks, they smilingly accept the tourists’ money, hoarding it to buy their own coveted drink, entirely unaffected by the tea phenomenon, from the traders: coffee.
for cofax7
The Rose and the Peacock
The border between the summerlands and the winterlands is marked by a fortress commanding the Mountain of the Moon. The mountain’s rocks cast shadows that reflect the phase of the moon, whatever it may be. To give one as a gift on the full moon is a great honor; to bury someone in a casket of such rock during the dark of the moon is a sure way to keep the dead from singing at inopportune moments.
For years had the fortress with its banners of gold and silver been jointly manned by the Queen of Roses and the King of Birds. But a malaise had befallen the fortress. Its walls grew dimmer and dimmer, and the very shadow that it cast upon the rocks, the small flowers, the stunted grasses, was devouring the mountain. The fish in the clear cold brooks dreamt of dragons leaping wingless into unutterable heights, there to perish. The tiger sages left off their discussions of the ethics of shapeshifting and retreated to meditate upon the bones of deer. And moths winged between summer and winter, dragging the clouds from one realm into the wother, so that the very wind whispered of unmapped senescence to the weary sojourners, the wary sentries.
The rose court with its windows of heart-stained glass received messengers three from the king of birds. The first was a raven, one-eyed and taciturn. The second was a kestrel, fierce of mien. The third wore the shape of a man, and the man had dressed in fine satins and a cloak lined with iridescent blue feathers.
The Queen of Roses received the messengers in her throne room, sweetly perfumed with the mingled blooms that crowded the walls. The rubies and spinels in her bronze crown shone in the light from the windows: red for the blood of thorns, as the saying went in her nation. She offered the messengers cups of rose liqueur from her own hands, and bade them welcome.
“We are grateful for your hospitality,” the kestrel said after a nod from the raven, “but we are here on the urgent matter of the fortress.”
“Yes,” the Queen said, and turned her eye upon the man. “Do you think I don’t recognize you, King of Birds? Your vanity gives you away.” She referred to the peacock feathers on his cloak, but she was smiling.
“I wasn’t trying very hard anyway,” he said. “Nevertheless, the fortress—”
“The fortress has outlived its usefulness,” she said. “The seasons will weave in and out of the year as they always have, but surely you see the use of an alliance between our realms. We are most of the way there already.”
“That is why I came in person,” the King of Birds said. “It is as well that we are of like mind—?”
The Queen of Roses descended from her throne, then, and offered him her hand. “Come with me, and we shall celebrate this alliance the way we do in my realm.”
“I can only imagine,” the King of Birds said as the Queen pressed a kiss to his hand. He followed her out of the throne room, past the gates of bronze grown over with nodding roses, and to her bed.
What passed between them is their business and not ours, but what is known is that seven days afterward, the fortress dissolved entirely, and was never seen again.
The Youngest Fox
Once in a wood by a great city there lived a family of foxes. The head of the family, who wore the guise of lady or gentleman or other as the whim took them, had a splendid collection of jewels given to them by any number of human lovers. The younger foxes of the family studied this art of seduction diligently, not because foxes have any use for human baubles, but because the baubles they received from their lovers were an essential component in the game known as “human-fishing.” Any number of humans could be lured into the wood for further pranks by the strategic placement of necklaces, rings, crowns; and from that point on they could be entangled in fox spells and fox riddles for endless hours of entertainment.
The very youngest fox, however, had no interest in any of this, to the despair of her family. Rather, her interest was in science. This in itself wasn’t entirely dishonorable (from a fox viewpoint, anyway). After all, her sire said, with a certain determination to make the best of the situation, one of their ancestors had been the lover of a court alchemist, which was almost like science. And if it made her happy, it made her happy.
The real problem was that her family had no idea how to accommodate the youngest fox’s hunger for knowledge. It would have been one thing if she had a foxish interest in ethology or ecology, which could at least be related to the practical business of hunting. Even foxes who spend their spare time discussing trends in hair ornaments and the proper length of hems need to eat. No: the youngest fox showed distressingly little concern for the ways of the woods, and instead spent her time on boulders peering at the sky, or muttering to herself as she sketched diagrams, or keeping notes in a ledger book that her puzzled but kindly oldest sibling had stolen from an accountant lover. “Accountants are the hardest to steal from,” they had remarked, hoping to slip in some proper education. “They always keep everything organized.” The youngest fox had merely nodded distractedly, but at least she showed up for lessons long enough to practice shapeshifting so that she could use her human form to record her mysterious experiments.
One evening, while the youngest fox was investigating an ornamented spyglass that she had cajoled the head of the family to giving to her, the rest of the family met to discuss her future. “We can’t send her to the city to make her fortune,” said the head of the family, and there was general agreement. “She’s a disaster at seduction and she’ll undoubtedly use her teeth to get herself out of any trouble. But it’s clear that the woods are not the right place for her either.” Indeed, they had often caught the youngest fox pining over mysterious human implements like calipers, pendulums, and prisms.
“Well,” said one of the siblings, “even if we can’t teach her what she wants to learn, surely we can find her someone who can.”
The youngest fox was bemused, then outraged, when over the course of the next month she found any number of measuring instruments and lenses scattered in the woods, instead of the more usual baubles. She spent her time gathering up the instruments and hoarding them, then, without telling anyone, slipped into the city in search of the objects’ owner. (Another disadvantage, to her family’s additional despair: she was that rarity, an honest fox.)
The youngest fox had not been neglecting her lessons quite so
much as her family supposed, even if she rarely made use of the skills that they strove to impart to her. In this case, she tracked the instruments’ owner, following their scent in the city’s dreams. This person thought in great wheeling orbits and precessions and cycles, in measurements and the limitations of precision, and the youngest fox trembled with excitement at the wisdom in their mind.
So it was that a very surprised scholar, who had without success hired investigators to locate her stolen instruments, opened the door that night and saw a modestly beautiful youth with a bundle wrapped up in silk. “I must apologize for my relatives,” the youth said, “but I believe these belong to you?” And, as the scholar unwrapped the bundle, the youth said, rather breathlessly, “You may have them back, but perhaps you have need of someone who can protect your belongings from importunate foxes?”
The scholar, who was not only wise in the ways of astronomy and geometry but had also noted the youth’s amber eyes and the telltale russet sheen of their hair, only smiled. “Come in,” she said, “and I will teach you what I know.”
Naturally, the youngest fox’s family had been watching. “That was the fastest seduction I ever saw,” the oldest of the siblings said, “and it didn’t even involve taking off her clothes. I would never have thought it of her.”
“Maybe science is good for something after all?” said the second-oldest.
The head of the family merely licked a paw in satisfaction. Perhaps it wasn’t how they had intended things to go, but a happy ending was a happy ending.
for ahasvers
The Witch and the Traveler
In the Hills of the Sun, a cat-eyed witch once received a visitor. She had been gathering herbs for her stew, in which several luckless ptarmigans and a rabbit were already simmering, and was wondering whether to break out the last of her peppercorns, when she heard a knocking at the door.