They were sitting in a rented room at the time, and Minsu had scared up a tea that even Iseul liked.
“I only wrote the account,” Iseul said, very clearly, “because none of the charms work anymore.” With the Genial Ones’ language extinguished, the magic it empowered was gone for good. She had attempted to create working charms, just to be sure, but all of them remained inert. “Imagine if Yeged’s Emperor had figured out how to use this on Chindallan or the language of any other nation he desired to conquer.”
“The way we could have?” Minsu said sardonically. “It’s done now. Finish your report, and we can get out of this town.”
There were still refugees on the road north. They might have deprived the Yegedin of magical assaults, but then, they had also deprived the Chindallans of magical defenses. Given that both sides had spent the uneasy peace preparing to go to war, it was anyone’s guess as to who would prevail.
At one point they ended up at a wretched camp for those who were too sick to continue fleeing, and the few people who were staying with them, mostly their families and a few monks who were acting as caretakers. Iseul remained prone to headaches and was running low on medicine. Minsu had insisted that they seek out a physician, even though Iseul tried to point out that the people at the camp probably needed the medicine more than she did.
As it turned out, they forgot all about the question of who deserved the medicine when Iseul saw a familiar little girl. She was picking flowers, weeds really, but in her hands they became jewels.
Iseul approached the girl and asked her if she knew where the physician was. The girl seemed confused by the question, but after a little while her older sister appeared from one of the tents and recognized Iseul. “I’ll take you to him,” the girl said, “but he’s very sick.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Iseul said. Despite the monks’ best efforts to enforce basic sanitary practices, the camp reeked of filth and sickness and curdled hopes, and she couldn’t help but imagine that the physician had taken sick while helping others.
She and Minsu followed the older girl to a tent at the edge of the camp. Flowers had been weighted down with a rock at the tent’s opening: the younger girl’s handiwork, surely. They could smell the bitter incense that was used to bring easeful dreams to the dying.
The tent was small, and there were more flowers next to the brazier. Their petals had fallen off and were scattered next to the pallet. The incense was almost all burned away. The physician slept on the pallet. Even at rest his lined face suggested a certain weary kindness. Someone had drawn a heavy quilted blanket over him, stained red-brown on one corner.
“What happened?” Minsu said. “Will he recover? I’m sure he could be a great help here.”
“He fell sick,” the girl said. “One of the monks said he had a stroke. He doesn’t talk anymore and he doesn’t seem to understand when people talk to him. They said he might like us to visit him, though, and our mother works with the monks to help the sick people, so we come by and bring flowers.”
He doesn’t talk anymore. Iseul went cold. He had spoken Chindallan; shouldn’t that have saved him? But she didn’t know how language worked in the brain.
Without asking, she lifted the corner of the blanket. The physician had longer arms than she remembered, like the Genial One she had killed at his house a lifetime ago. Who was to say they couldn’t change their shapes? Especially if they were living among humans? Tears pricking her eyes, she replaced the blanket.
“I’m very sorry,” Iseul said to the girl. “It’s probably not long before he dies.”
She couldn’t help but wonder how many Genial Ones had lingered into this age, taking no part in the conspiracy for vengeance, leading quiet lives as healers of small hurts to atone for their kindred who summoned storm-horses and faces of fire. There was no way to tell.
The Yegedin had tried to destroy Chindalla’s literature and names, but Iseul had destroyed the Genial Ones themselves. It hadn’t seemed real until now.
“Thank you,” she said to the dying Genial One, even though his mind was gone. She and Minsu sat by his side for a time, listening to him breathe. There was a war coming, and a storm entirely human, but in this small space they could mourn what they had done.
For a long time afterwards, Iseul tried to come up with a poem about the Genial Ones, encapsulating what they had meant to the world and why they had had to die and why she regretted the physician’s passing, but no words ever came to her.
—. A noun, probably, pertaining to regret or cinders or something of that nature, but this word can no longer be found in any lexicon, human or otherwise.
Yoon Ha Lee’s Crawford Memorial Award-nominated short fiction collection Conservation of Shadows was published in 2013 by Prime Books. She lives in Louisiana with her family, used to design constructed languages as a hobby, and has not yet been eaten by gators.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“Postcards from Abroad” © 2013 Peter Atkins. First publication: Rolling Darkness Revue 2013 (Earthling Publications).
“The Creature Recants” © 2013 Dale Bailey. First publication: Clarkesworld, Issue 85, October 2013.
“The Good Husband” © 2013 Nathan Ballingrud. First publication: North American Lake Monsters (Small Beer Press).
“Termination Dust” © 2013 Laird Barron. First publication: Tales of Jack the Ripper, ed. Ross Lockhart (Word Horde).
“The Ghost Makers” © 2013 Elizabeth Bear. First publication: Fearsome Journeys, ed. Jonathan Strahan (Solaris).
“The Marginals” © 2013 Steve Duffy. First publication: The Moment of Panic, (PS Publishing).
“A Collapse of Horses” © 2013 Brian Evenson. First publication: The American Reader, February/March 2013.
“A Lunar Labyrinth” © 2013 Neil Gaiman. First publication: Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe, eds. J. E. Mooney & Bill Fawcett (Tor).
“Pride” © 2013 Glen Hirshberg. First publication: Rolling Darkness Revue 2013, (Earthling Publications).
“Let My Smile Be Your Umbrella” © 2013 Brian Hodge. First publication: Psycho-Mania!, ed. Stephen Jones (Robinson).
“The Soul in the Bell Jar” © 2013 KJ Kabza. First publication: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2013.
“The Prayer of Ninety Cats” © 2013 Caitlín R. Kiernan. First publication: Subterranean Online, Spring 2013.
“Dark Gardens” © 2013 Greg Kurzawa. First publication: Interzone # 248.
“A Little of the Night” © 2013 Tanith Lee. First publication: Clockwork Phoenix 4, ed. Mike Allen (Mythic Delirium).
“The Gruesome Affair of the Electric Blue Lightning” © 2013 Joe R. Lansdale. First publication: Beyond Rue Morgue: Further Tales of Edgar Allan Poe’s First Detective, ed. Paul Kane & Charles Prepole (Titan).
“Iseul’s Lexicon” © 2013 Yoon Ha Lee. First publication: Conservation of Shadows (Prime Books).
“The Plague” © 2013 Ken Liu. First publication: Nature, 16 May 2013.
“The Slipway Gray” © 2013 Helen Marshall. First publication: (As “The Slipway Grey”) Chilling Tales 2, ed. Michael Kelly (Edge Publications).
“To Die for Moonlight” © 2013 Sarah Monette. First publication: Apex Magazine, Issue #50.
“Event Horizon” © 2013 Sunny Moraine. First publication: Strange Horizons, 21 October 2013.
“The Legend of Troop 13” © 2013 Kit Reed. First publication: Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2013 / The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (Wesleyan University Press).
“Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell” © 2013 Brandon Sanderson. First publication: Dangerous Women, eds. George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois (Tor).
“Phosphorous” © 2013 Veronica Schanoes. First publication: Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, eds. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling (Tor).
“Blue Amber” © 2013 David J. Schow. First publication: Impossible Monsters, ed. Kasey Lansdale (Subterranean
Press).
“Rag & Bone” © 2013 Priya Sharma. First publication: Tor.com, 10 April 2013.
“Our Lady of Ruins” © 2013 Sarah Singleton. First publication: The Dark 2, December 2013.
“Cuckoo,” © 2013 Angela Slatter. First publication: A Killer Among Demons, ed. Craig Bezant (Dark Prints Press).
“Wheatfield with Crows” © 2013 Steve Rasnic Tem. First publication: Dark World: Ghost Stories, ed. Timothy Parker Russell (Tartarus Press).
“Moonstruck” © 2013 Karin Tidbeck. First publication: Shadows and Tall Trees, Vol. 5, ed. Mike Kelly (Undertow Press).
“The Dream Detective” © 2013 Lisa Tuttle. First publication: Lightspeed, March 2013.
“The Fishwife” © 2013 Carrie Vaughn, LLC. First publication: Nightmare, June 2013.
“Air, Water, and the Grove” © 2013 Kaaron Warren. First publication: The Lowest Heaven, eds Anne C. Perry & Jared Shurin (Jurassic London).
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Paula Guran serves as senior editor for Prime Books. She edited the Juno fantasy imprint from its small press inception through its incarnation as an imprint of Pocket Books. In addition to the annual Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series, she edits a growing number of other anthologies as well as novels and single-author collections. In an earlier life she produced weekly email newsletter DarkEcho (winning two Stokers, an IHG Award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination); edited Horror Garage (earning another IHG and a second World Fantasy nomination) and other periodicals; and has contributed reviews, interviews, and articles to numerous professional publications. The mother of four, mother-in-law of two, and grandmother of one, she lives in Akron, Ohio with two cats and—depending on the day or week—a variable number of adult children and/or two of their dogs. Her website is paulaguran.com. Find her on facebook (www.facebook.com/paulaguran) or on Twitter: @paulaguran.
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