The Fiddler of Bayou Teche

by Delia Sherman

One night, paddling far from home, I see lights that are not the pale feu follets that dance in the swamp at night. They are yellow lights, lantern lights, and they tell me I have come to a farm. I am a little afraid, for Tante Eulalie used to warn me about letting people see me.

“You know how ducks carry on when a strange bird land in their water?” she says. “The good people of Pierreville, they see that white hair and those pink eyes, and they peck at you till there’s nothing left but two-three white feathers.”

I do not want to be pecked, me, so I start to paddle away.

And then I hear the music.

I turn back with a sweep of my paddle and drift clear. I see a wharf and a cabin and an outhouse and a hog pen, and a big barn built on high ground away from the water. The barn doors are open, and they spill yellow light out over a pack of buggies and horses and even cars–only cars I’ve seen outside the magazines Ulysse sometimes brings. I don’t care about the cars, though, for I am caught by the fiddle music that spills out brighter than the lantern light, brighter than anything in the world since Tante Eulalie left it.

The evolution of trickster stories among the dogs of North Park after the Change

by Kij Johnson

(It’s a universal fantasy, isn’t it?—that the animals learn to speak, and at last we learn what they’re thinking, our cats and dogs and horses: a new era in cross-species understanding. But nothing ever works out quite as we imagine. When the Change happened, it affected all the mammals we have shaped to meet our own needs. They all could talk a little, and they all could frame their thoughts well enough to talk. Cattle, horses, goats, llamas; rats, too. Pigs. Minks. And dogs and cats. And we found that, really, we prefer our slaves mute.

(The cats mostly leave, even ones who love their owners. Their pragmatic sociopathy makes us uncomfortable, and we bore them; and they leave. They slip out between our legs and lope into summer dusks. We hear them at night, fighting as they sort out ranges, mates, boundaries. The savage sounds frighten us, a fear that does not ease when our cat Klio returns home for a single night, asking to be fed and to sleep on the bed. A lot of cats die in fights or under car wheels, but they seem to prefer that to living under our roofs; and as I said, we fear them.

(Some dogs run away. Others are thrown out by the owners who loved them. Some were always free.)

On the Banks of the River of Heaven

by Richard Parks

On the seventh day of the seventh month as it had for the previous two years, it rained.  And it rained.  The cranes still came at Kaiboshi’s bidding to stand by the shore and form the base of the bridge.  Next came the geese and the ducks and other waterfowl, who fared well enough creating the platform and first few degrees of arc for the bridge.  After that, however, came the hawks and crows and sparrows and smaller birds, and the rain beat down on them incessantly, and their wings became sodden and would no longer support them and a bridge, too.  The cranes held on gamely as the river swelled into flood, but their skinny legs began to tremble.  Kaiboshi reluctantly concluded that the enterprise was doomed, and he dismissed the birds with thanks rather than risk seeing them fall in the river after the inevitable collapse.

Three years now the rains had come on the appointed day.  For three years the Bridge of Birds that was his only way to cross the Celestial River had been unable to form.  Kaiboshi began to wonder if he was cursed, but more he wondered if Asago-hime had started to forget him.  He sat down on the banks of the river and let the rising waters chill his feet as he indulged in a bout of melancholy, since he knew of nothing else he could do.

“Three years is a long time to be apart from the one you love,” he said aloud.  “Even for an immortal.”

Nine-Fingered Maria

by Hilary Moon Murphy

…this girl appeared from behind a door and caught my ball.  She was probably my age: several inches taller than I am, with long straight black hair pulled back in a ponytail, plain white t-shirt, denim jacket and jeans with a hole worn in the knee.  She stared at me with intense dark eyes and said, “What are you doing here?”

“I was just getting my ball,” I said, stepping out of the way of two movers carrying a large red bureau with multi-colored wax stains all over it.

“No, you weren’t.”  She cocked her head to the side, and raised her eyebrow.  “You were spying.”

“I wasn’t!”

“That’s okay, I like spies.”  She gave me back my ball and showed me her hands.  “I have nine fingers.  I’m a witch.”

The Nalendar

by Ann Leckie

“Down here!” the voice said, and she looked down at her feet, and then crouched, her dull green dress puddling behind and beside her on the gray stone. On the top of her foot was a tiny, black lizard, hardly as big as her thumb, and that only including its long, bright blue tail.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I didn’t see you at first. I’m sorry, but I’m not looking for protection, or a guide.” (Continue Reading…)

The Cambist and Lord Iron

by Daniel Abraham

Born Edmund Scarasso, Lord Iron had taken his father’s title and lands and ridden them first to war, then to power, and finally to a notorious fame. His family estate outside the city was reputed to rival the king’s, but Lord Iron spent little time there. He had a house in the city with two hundred rooms arranged around a central courtyard garden in which trees bore fruits unfamiliar to the city and flowers bloomed with exotic and troubling scents. His servants were numberless as ants; his personal fortune greater than some smaller nations. And never, it was said, had such wealth, power, and influence been squandered on such a debased soul. (Continue Reading…)

Return of the Warrior

by Laird Long

In the Province of Sull, in the Kingdom of Ronn, all seemed right with the world – the potters potted, the sculptors sculpted, the painters painted, and the scriveners did whatever their name implies. For Sull was home to the kingdom’s artisans, a colorful colony of creative cranks who used well their artistic endowments, for satisfaction of the soul, and sale. And they toiled truly and profitably.

But beneath the placid, pleasant exterior of the province and the people, lay a seething resentment bubbled to near-surface boil by the erratic, practicality-impaired nature of the creative personality, and the indolence of a King who listened not to ill-formed complaints some two hundred leagues removed. A prickly current of unrest sparked and shocked the citizenry, for many held the opinion that the provincial governor, the Wizard Kadil, was in no uncertain terms fudging the books, collecting taxes beyond what the law allowed. And though the people of Sull claimed to be moved primarily by muse, so, too, were they moved by a love of the good, old, gold stuff.