Three Days and Nights In Lord Darkdrake’s Hall

by Leah Bobet

The sun slanted ever further in, pooling warm and uncomfortable at my feet as I noted the exits and matched walls to arms of the compass, itemized my situation neatly in my head.

They had taken my armor. Instead I wore a long dress of white linen, the kind of dress that would have been too simple in my previous life and was much too impractically frivolous now. They had taken my arms, my secondhand sword and the bow my lord uncle had given me, and the reason for that was obvious. He wanted vulnerability, not strength; he wanted me to look and feel and be vulnerable.

Somewhere beneath the coldness of my regard, I began to get angry. He was setting a stage. He was creating the battlefield. I could not buy into it.

I resolved to ask Captain Stoneburn, when next I saw him, what had transpired between him and Lord Darkdrake to provoke such a desire for vengeance.

When the light-dapples on the floor were long and tinged with sickly orange, a servant came in with bread and cheese and water. Peasant food: perhaps it was meant to be a slight. Mercenary food, Company food: perhaps it was meant to remind. I moved to take it, and remembered that my hands were bound fast.

Tio Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts

by Ben Francisco

Before I can even ring, Uncle Gilberto opens the door and gives me a big hug and a kiss that smells of gin and menthol cigarettes.  His dog, Ganymede, barks and snuggles his head between my legs.  The cat eyes me suspiciously from the next room.  From behind me, someone helps me slip off my jacket.  I look over my shoulder, but nobody’s there.  “Who’s that?” I ask my uncle.

“That’s Daniel,” he says.

“Hey, Daniel,” I say.  “Been a while.”

Gilberto shakes a finger at the air behind me.  “No, you cannot also take his shirt!  I told you to behave.”  Uncle Gil throws both hands into the air.  “Dios mío, what have I done?  Bringing my innocent nephew into a house with twenty-seven horny ghosts. Qué barbaridad. You tell me right away if any of them try anything, me entiendes, James?”

Restless In My Hand

by Tim Pratt

“It is an axe, Mr. Selfry,” the man said. He produced a prybar — from where, Richard wasn’t sure — and, with a great squealing and popping of nails, pried the lid off the crate. Richard left the safety of the doorway and went out onto the porch just as the man set the lid aside. Peering into the crate, Richard saw only darkness, as if the box were full of ink, but then something glinted silver, and — as if his eyes were adjusting to a moonlit night, instead of midafternoon sun — he saw the great silver crescent of an axehead, nestled among styrofoam packing peanuts that were, inexplicably, black instead of white. It was a double-bladed axe, with a long three-sided pyramidal spike emerging from the top.

“Workmanship,” the man said approvingly. “Look at the blood-gutters on that spike. It’s not as if the spike was ever likely to be used for stabbing, but the smith allowed for the possibility. Truly, they were giants on the earth in those days.”

“I don’t understand,” Richard said. “This thing is a family heirloom? From Great Grandma Melody? It doesn’t even look old.”

The Petrified Girl

by Katherine Sparrow

Besides, Tucson was too hot in summer.

It was so hot, way up into the hundred and tens, that the only refuge was in Betty’s pool. We stayed out there the whole hot afternoon, and when the sun went down it didn’t even get all that much cooler. Neither of us had a stitch of clothes on as we lay submerged, lying on twin yellow plastic floatables. It was good to be naked with Betty, I could look over at her and see all the things a body could survive. She had that old desert skin that bore a million wrinkles and just hung off her. It made me feel like maybe I could survive in this world too. Betty kept our cups of Jim Beam and Mountain Dew full all afternoon and into the night, cause as she said it, it was too hot not to drink. On about midnight, the hot air was just starting to feel bareable again, but neither of us were keen on getting out.

Marsh Gods

by Ann Leckie

Irris was a changed man. When he went out fishing, he didn’t spend the day drunk or asleep in the boat and then come home with nothing, the way everyone expected. Instead he made a full day’s catch early, and then picked up an axe and went to cut wood. He sat down to dinner sober, played with the baby, spoke pleasantly to his wife and sister. In the evening, instead of drinking, he sat in front of the fire and knotted nets, or carved fishhooks. It’s because he almost died, the neighbors whispered. Everyone had seen the scar. Everyone wondered how long the change could last.

There were other things, little strangenesses that never made their way out of the house for the villagers to be aware of them. For instance, one afternoon Ytine brought him a dish of vetch, and he said, “My dear, it amuses me to call this gravel. So the next time I ask you for a bowl of gravel, you’ll know what I want.” Water was poison, working was sleeping. The list of changed names seemed to grow every day. Voud wasn’t sure why Ytine went along with it, except that the new Irris was kind and hard-working, and doted on the baby. And maybe, thought Voud, that was reason enough. The crane had said not to waste her grief on Irris, and she hadn’t cried when she’d heard the whispery-voiced god say he was dead.

But one evening Irris came home in an especially good mood. “Good fishing means good trading,” he said. He had needles, and fiber — dyed and spun — for Ytine, and a tiny, wheeled cart for the baby. “And Voud,” he said, “I hear you’re a hunter.” He handed her a bronze knife. It was small and its plain haft was dented, but it was a real metal knife and it was hers.

That was when she knew for certain that her brother was dead. Irris would never have thought to buy her something she wanted so much. Not without her telling him, and likely not even then. She sat there with the knife in her hand and cried.

Nine Sundays in a Row

by Kris Dikeman

If you wanta learn you somethin’, go on down to a place where two roads cross. Get there Saturday ’round midnight, and wait there ’til Sunday morning—do that for nine Sundays, all in a row. The dark man, he’ll send his dog to watch on you while you wait. And on the ninth morning, the dark man will meet you. And he will learn you—anything you wanta learn. But you remember this: that dark man, he don’t work for free.