I wiped red blood from a white arm. Scars knotted its lines. Some pink, some white. Here and there the skin was near to bone, where flesh had long ago been torn away. The legacy of a dozen clients. “I don't fight any more.”

Singling out the watch would keep suspicion focused outward, Meinrad hoped, to the woods and the wild Prussians who had not yet submitted to the order and the church. With so few knights and half-brothers under him, infighting would leave them defenseless fast. Fear of the outside was manageable.

He'd wanted to show her this place—this forest where he'd been a boy and hadn't been back since. He'd expected to find it changed. Not like this. The storms had uprooted whole trees. The brook roared, churning with debris, fighting to drag it all down into the valley. "Tell me," she said, watching him. He loved her. He didn't know where to begin.

An old fox greeted us at the edge, three-tailed and red like fire. I was so small that her snout reached my neck, smelling of the cloying musk of foxes, thick and odd, like dirty metal gripped in my hand. She came to Aimi like one of the village dogs, completely unafraid, and kissed her cheek.

Harald and Solveig were academic heirs apparent, favored disciples of Asbjørnsen and von Linne, the two great authorities on Anthropomorpha. Even before graduation, their joint study of field goblins, based on existing literature and new observations, showed that Homo monstrosus vulgus practice exogamous mating; Professor Strindberg had to retire his popular lectures on goblin promiscuity.

"Come here with you," Boden calls, as he retrieves his son, Tallow, from amongst the crowd's rushing legs. He lifts the boy onto his shoulders, but the weight makes him gasp, makes his lower back twinge, and Tal's mucky brown boots smear the front of his tunic. He can hardly tell the boy off for that, though, can he? Not when he only sees him for the odd day here and there.

He hadn't put out place settings, this time. Instead he'd gone inside, by the cabinet near the hearth and the concertina that lay in a little heap on top of it like a discarded shawl. From the looks of him, he'd been there a while. Katrin dumped rabbit and greens on the table. "Leave it," she said, and he turned, his eyebrows peaked together in concern. She sighed. "Leave the concertina alone," she repeated, this time in a sweeter voice. It was the tone that mattered, not the words. "Don't you ever touch that," she cooed, and he smiled at her.

She retreated with my gifts back into the Hollow Tree. With another shiver and groan, the trunk snapped shut, swallowing her up. When it opened again, there was something there. I went to retrieve the item and recognized it immediately. It was my father's favorite mug. Exactly his, down to the chip on the handle from when he fell asleep with it on his knee and dropped it; down to the worrying on the lip from where he always rubbed it with his thumb; down to the bottom, where etched were the words: "Love, Lunan." Lunan was my mother's name.

When she plays, it’s the old songs—not her heavy concertos but brisk two-fingered melodies, folk tunes and old hymns, the first songs her youngest students would master. Every month when the soldiers bring her supply of flour and milk, they also bring waterproofed parcels of manuscript paper and cool bricks of ink. She always refuses them.

I had long since tired of my mother’s lessons: these polite assaults, this bastard corsetry. But what was I supposed to do? Tell her no? I was her only daughter. My mother would have fought her little war for my appearance, her weapons silk and silver and the voices of our family's dead, even if we’d known that our world was already over, that the armies of the underworld were slipping through our walls through broaches and hatpins, necklaces and bangles, boxes and bags, using the city's favorite things against it.

The Poet Laureate was fetched from his retirement in a lighthouse on the far shore of the Founder Mer to compose a song of eighty-six interlocked stanzas like steps on a stairway spiraling down into a cool dim quiet. But on the forty-seventh stanza of its recitation, the Governor squinted into the space over the Poet's shoulder and said, "listen, any deeper and we shall hear the words those beasts sing as they pass" and demanded that the previous stanzas be read in reverse; "back to the surface," he said.

On one of her rests, Ser Wynn checked the banyo tree; the Lady Loreen had taken an ax to its mouth, destroying its ability to tattle on her evening disappearances. It was then that Wynn knew that Loreen held inside her a rage like that she herself had experienced in her fight with the king father’s bear. The kind of rage that she knew would burn her up if she let it.

The magistrate thinks he will go mad. What does it matter what exact angle his wrist must be turned at? But Grandmother Seung scowls at him; opens her mouth to start repeating herself about the need to be present, for the awareness of his intentions in the potion, and if he cannot be aware of his own body’s workings in this last crucial stage of the magic potion, then how will he rein and discipline his mind for the task?

With that she swept her cloak around her and walked smoothly to the door. All eyes watched her. She opened it, sending a skirl of sleet across the threshold, and stepped out into the blizzard. The assembled crowd waited, more than one of them expecting her to pause in the doorway to make some last dramatic pronouncement, but she only drew her hood over her face against the wind and disappeared into the dark. But the story spread...

Out the cat door I found two hellsnouts remaining below the tower, hopeful of a good rending. I puzzled again as to who—or what—had made the beasts, and why they increasingly threatened our city. Archaeopolis was older than recorded history, and the underground coughed up ancient horrors the way other soil might reveal arrowheads or potshards. But of late, creatures stalked the open air that had no counterpart in story or scroll. Even a black cat might be mildly concerned.

Samariel took in a deep, trembling breath. Asmodeus was watching him, with that distant, amused curiosity, the sketch lightly resting in the palm of his hand. That smell came again, orange blossom, with something else, something tangier and more acidic. Lemon; lime?

“Let me go, Poppa,” I said. "I'll watch out for our interests." I wouldn’t say more. Brac said nothing, but he smiled for the first time. He had dimples, like you do, child. And that was my second mistake, noticing them. For Father's eyes narrowed further.

I looked at them each. Hard, well-blooded men and women: those wearing Talgrun’s iron yoke, eager to break it, and those with faces tattooed as mine was with the seventeenth knot, the sign of our holding. The fiercest of the holdings, the strongest. We who had lifted our beam half a league from the narrow place, unknowing; who had been harried by the gray more than any other holding and never broken.

Jasna was silent as we completed the Ancestor Night rituals and songs and laid the wreaths over our parents. On the way back to the house, we walked unspeaking, joined by the dark figures of others who had finished their rituals. Jasna walked apart from us, as she had since last spring, and the rest of us linked hands.

For months she prayed for a puppy, but God did not relent, and one chill October morning she wandered off into the forest to find a pup herself. She was seven years old, hemmed in on all sides by chores and rules and commandments, her brother scampering in her wake. As always, she was supposed to watch him, the louse, same as every day since he’d been born.

The cold burn of electricks stung Hester, like the touch of wires bearing a live current—exactly where the cancerous ink had invaded her flesh. But Verity screamed outright, again and again, each fleck of raw iron sparking with electrick discharge as it touched her skin. No, not Verity, Hester realized. The screams came from the patterns of black ink on Verity’s skin. The shapes tore free, each springing into a surreal semblance of life.

He drove their bov wagon, standing up behind the storage box and nudging the beastmind along through the sett’s covered passages, delivering La Chanda’s sporecake dishes all over the sett, his new arm itching where his flesh met the dull sculptwood, its spirit, its immanence, not woken from bloom and fully mated to his yet. That morning, everywhere he drove he heard about the murder that wasn’t murder but business done by different name. “A dead incast in Pingree. Shot, tche.”