Jon went back tomorrow and the next day, to find that she had no news. On the third day, Iánheh was not at the Bab-ál-Lámeh at all. And so he worried. As did Pendergast, whose private fretting about 'His crowning glory' became more intense, at least in Jon's presence. "Here I am working to possibly no end, and you—you sniff around the place like a street dog!" he snapped when Jon came 'round on the third day and would not leave the office. "Don't you have some child to tutor, some view to photograph, somewhere else to be—something to look for?"

Sardamira courteously relented, secretly resentful. The servants brought a beautiful chess board with pieces made of bone and dark wood. Pinela knew the rules but no strategy. She made basic mistakes against the giant and suddenly excused herself and left halfway through. The giant seemed disappointed. Sardamira gathered up her courage and her desire to out-do Pinela. "If it pleases you, I shall take over her game."

Semira made her way to him, unsteady as if on a rocking deck. He took her outstretched hand, and the point of contact became an anchor, and axis; something steady to work around. The fear didn’t abate, but its quality changed: from dread to dizzy panic to the icy clutch of despair. Semira thought of rushing winds, coming and abating, and of sudden downpours of rain. Of storms.

For a frozen moment, I glanced between the murder-sharp blade of my athame and Bastien's stricken expression, trying to reconcile the two. Part of me wasn't sure why I hadn't slit his throat for everything he'd done and all the people he'd betrayed. Because he didn't do any of that, the rational part of me insisted. Trouble was, I remembered him stabbing Annie in the arm on the Day of Glass, and what Gretchen had become after he got to her in Gabbleford.

The bees' solemn procession across pillow and cheek had been silent, their wings folded and still; when they crept back out over the sash they had disappeared as if not flying but falling into the darkness.  Their feet had pricked, Mel remembered, and their fur had tickled as they worked their way through lips, teeth, and tongue.  They had smelled of barley and clover and a dark musk that made Mel think of Travelers’ wagons on market day.

The next noise I knew quite well; a sword drawn through a belt-ring. And there stood a small man, lost in a vast feathered cloak-and-cowl with a great ash-roc plume curling up from a thick combed headband, pointing a long needle of steel at me, his arm shod in small quills like an ant-hunter. I swear I heard a tinny, whistling call as my eyes took him in.

Zéphine followed Mme. Dumouchel into the living room, Madame’s galanterie for her husband padding contentedly along beside them. It was a docile little thing, with a cute pug nose and large soulful eyes, and Zéphine could not fail to notice with a pang of envy how similar it was to its counterpart, M. Dumouchel’s galanterie for his wife, which dozed placidly at Monsieur's feet.

He’d signed his note “The Fabulous Frederick.”  He hadn’t called himself that in years.  I smiled and stroked the soft leather of the journal's cover. In it he explained his familiar tricks with complicated diagrams that made things that I’d always just felt were right become suddenly understandable. Freddy really had been fabulous once.  I wondered what happened.  Why had I never bothered to ask?

But even so, when we gather for vespers and again for compline, I cannot help but look at my brothers with uncharitable suspicions in my mind.  Did one of them get up in the night? I heard nothing—not even the snoring of Frère Bruno—so any one of them might have done so. But why? And what did the cat have to do with anything? Even if one of the brothers were sneaking into the pantry, I cannot fathom why anyone would want to strip a cat of her flesh.

After the last snap fills the air, the Healers weave a spell to fuse the bones of her fingers back together. To fill her up with something new. When they let her go, she crawls to the corner of her cell, holds her ruined hands to her chest, and sobs into the filthy straw.

I had never before met this man, this gnarled old usurper who lounged on furniture emblazoned with my ancestors' crest.  I had never seen those flint-sharp eyes floating in a sea of overlapping wrinkles.  And yet within that crumpled flesh I read hatred and bitterness and treachery.  This man had murdered my grandfather, and his face bore the guilt of it.

“Miss Em?” Florence called softly from the doorway.  The woman—perhaps it was a woman—in the bed was fragile and hollow as a teacup. Her white hair wisped and curled around her skull, and her eyes looked like stones dropped in deep snow. She opened her mouth and made a weak, kitten-ish sound. Florence nodded and bent to adjust the pillow.

I snapped the flute in half across my knee. Junko’s scream drowned out the faint whistle and much louder crack of the flute coming apart. He dove toward me, nearly incoherent in rage. Kenji managed to trip him as he hurtled past, and Junko went sprawling, though he quickly scrambled back to his feet. “I’ll kill—”

"An Imperial Princess uses her curses sparingly," said Tib, but the narrow-eyed look she gave Safy was more skeptical than remonstrative. Safy knew that Tib doubted her affection for the arrogant Phenole very much--even more so since she had just met him--and could not see how such a curse would help Safy or anyone she did care about. Safy smiled. Let her wonder.

(This story has been removed from the archives at the author’s request.)

Something deep within her stilled and she thought she would fall, because the world was tilting. But there was solid stone beneath her, and she set one foot upon it, then another, and then she was running back to the palace, heedless of everything but reaching her rooms. There were doors in her way; she flung them aside and halted only to snatch up the crown.

By now the rumors had spread; half the population of the Shreds seemed to know that Tolyat the scholar was trying something mad, and most of them had come to watch.  They parted, though, to allow Last through—along with the cart he was dragging behind him. Tolyat paused to stare.  "What in the name of everybody else's god is that?"

Death circles the tent. She sees the shadow of antlers, tangled like the grove beneath her study in the towers she betrayed. You cannot save him, Death whispers; not forever. But perhaps you can save yourself. Is that why you nurse him with the warmth of the souls of crows? So that you may save his life, and offer it to me? Will he be the payment for your debt?

My host studiously ignored the open portfolios of photographs that had been retrieved from my carriage.  Presented therein were proofs from the aforementioned exhibit ("mechano-erotica", it had been dubbed by the artistic community).  Androgynous waifs posed in the controlled symmetry of Machines; the hair on their heads and elsewhere thickly woven with industrial cable; black metallic powders darkening eyes and lips.

Next morning, they'd hardly gone a mile when the boy found something dead. He crouched over it. He called Jacsen over. "It's a raccoon, ain't it?" the boy said. Jacsen stared at the carcass from his saddle. "It looks just like you," the boy said, awestruck. His words rang ill and Jacsen felt suddenly sick. Heat sick maybe and he needed some water.