“Why put up with ugly and cruel? Why not try to make things better? With our own work, our own suffering, to pay our own way in the universe?” It was the argument Crocus had had with her mother since she turned thirteen. Now that argument was over. She’d never have it with her mother again. And now she could cry, small angry tears.

My substance is much declined, yet on occasion I draw humans who can hear echoes of what I once was. They climb the winding steps up my pagodas, descend deep into the bowels beneath my palaces, venture between the serpentine stacks of my high-spired libraries. The human soul yearns for cities, even if they do not realize it, and their hearts revolve toward our kind as flowers turn toward the sun. This is true even for cities whose names—like mine—have been swallowed up by catastrophe and oblivion.

My jug is still dry. My magic has always been difficult, complicated, messy. In my mother's parlor, all my will can barely manage a droplet. Even by the banks of the sacred Cantara, I gave up and drew my water with a bucket. But in the garden, when I'm with you, magic is so simple that it seems to happen on its own.

My city trembled and screamed as the waves battered the granite. The wall still held when the storm waned, but the sea-quake had frightened us all. That night, as soon as my hands stopped shaking, I wrote a letter to my father, asking him to send a magician. I sealed it with the imprint of my thumb in the warm wax; he always said that a caress, even at a remove, was better than a cold signet.

The jail cell’s not the least comfortable place Al’s slept. There’s a cot and a blanket and a chamber pot. Could be worse. The sheriff must be a decent enough sort, if a tad suspicious for a snake oil salesman’s liking. Al’s not concerned, though. The sheriff may not have sampled the elixir, but near enough everyone else in town did. Come morning, the townsfolk will all be better than ever. If the sheriff refuses to let Al go, they’ll push him to do the right thing.

Two days ago, Gastel had walked through the floor plan of the Last Pudding with his sous chef, who was working architect and chief mason. There was a terrible friction, Gastel knew, any time you dragged something out of a dream and into mortal life. Things ruptured. Things were scraped away. One felt terribly small, living for so long with a vision and finally settling for an earthbound knockoff. He had carried this vision longer than any other. With three slow breaths, he wished it farewell. He turned the corner into the great hall.

“Enough!” Llewyn shut his eyes. When he opened them the veil returned, bathing the world again in mortal normalcy. He stared at the space above the altar, where he knew the raven fiend still crouched, hidden from him now. Still watching him. Old and powerful enough, he hoped, to consider him little threat.

While we waited for the hourglass, the blacksmith dug a line in the snow with the heel of his boot. This would be the starting point. Until the final grain of sand fell to the bottom, the prince could not cross it. Some of the older boys had once told me that the sand inside was the long dead ashes of Dracula himself, but I don’t know if I truly believe them.

That I want her to come back. That I'm not sure her contacts will trust me. That I'm not able to balance being me and being an informant for Maksim and not telling Elzbet anything and sewing violet stars and leading a silent revolution. That I'm not sure I can see it through to the end alone. That all of this may be the price that the dragon demands, even if it isn't here yet and may never come. That maybe the only way forward is to let the pressure chew you up until there's nothing left, and that's how you win.

I had to remonstrate with the Artisans over the coffin. They wanted to apply only four layers of lacquer, arguing with great impudence that it would suffice. I informed them with no uncertain terms that, though the Barbarians were at the gate, this was no license to degenerate to the level of savages ourselves. Seven coats of lacquer should be considered a bare minimum, and for the quality of wood I have supplied and the cost of the preparations, some might consider seven coats sparing. I have started to regret engaging them.

Gaunt folded her arms and studied Bone in partial jest, but only partial. “I will tell you a thing, Imago. The more fully you live, the more ridicule you get... and the more admirers too. There are those who long to become big by knocking others down. But there are those who long to grow. By growing yourself, you help them. What if you are not a 'thief' but a quick-thinking man who steals at times—but at other times also saves? What if the second quality defined you and not the first?”

Gorel could smell the sea. It was always there, the water like a black mirror, upon which glided the enormous black ships with the seven-pointed star on their hulls. From time to time spells crackled in the air above the port. Wind-mages and speakers-to-whales and astrologer-navigators and sun-talkers and battle-sorcerers with the power to level whole cities. Goliris’s fleets sailed across the World and brought the civilising influence of the empire to its furthest reaches. They came back laden with the World’s goods; with all the riches the World had to offer.

There's no higher incidence of witchcraft in the gentry, and so the oppressed-and-victimised theory doesn't convince me. Myself, I figure that anyone, man or woman, who has the talent but isn't identified and whisked off to the Studium at age ten to be taught polite behaviour would naturally use such powers to bully and torment others because that's human nature for you. Let any man pick up a stick and he'll use it to hit someone else, unless the other man's got a stick too.

I couldn’t blame Kenji for that. The weight of my current position could only be avoided temporarily, not put aside at will. I was now the head of my own clan and responsible for a vast estate. My life was no longer solely my own, and in truth I would not have changed that fact for the world, but sometimes it was pleasant, for a little while, to pretend otherwise.

You eat and you eat, too hungered to fuss over the blood scent in your nose. Though what’s a little blood between you and the prairie? Blood is the binding between hunting and womanhood, and yet, and yet, the dress the virgin bride wears is white, no matter how much she hunts or menstruates. White dresses are impossible to keep clean on the prairie. White dresses lie.

They died, or they didn’t, and Helena burned them or handed their things back before they headed down the road to fight for a place among the farmsteads and ranches that didn’t want the cities’ survivors. Her oldest brother and sister-in-law, they’d been good at celebrating the small victories, but she didn’t have the knack.

A pause only Winnifletch herself notices, a twinge in her guts as she unsacks the gull that Gert Mews has lugged to her sea-spindle shack. Dazed but not dead, the bird crawks down onto her workbench. Think of shearwater honey, Winni tells herself, with predictions truer than gold. She grabs its fat fluttersome breast. Jams it wings-and-all between her vise’s steel jaws. Holds firm. Don’t think of shattered sailors.

Outside, the cries of the blood locusts swelled, as they would until month's end. These creatures writhed below ground for seven years before breaching the surface to feast on fruits and flesh alike. It was during the prior plague that she'd set foot in this shanty for the first time, foolish and desperate, in search of her own bloody accord. By the daemons' whispers, it would be during another such plague—this one, with any luck—that she'd regain her freedom. But if the daemons lied, or if her replacement failed to arrive—

It was a very strange feeling to be past forty and creeping about my old college quad under cover of darkness with my old college advisor who was bald, had a bad knee, and usually went to bed at half eight. Were it not for the flooded Potions Vault and its hauntings, I think Jermiah would have retired five years since, but he had to see it through, and now the only way he could see to do that was to bring me in. My stomach twisted, that I was his last hope.

Somewhere within me must be memories I could call my own. But how am I to extricate them from the cacophony of other voices, other visions? Layered over the person I once was are a hundred thousand half-remembered dreams, stories, glories, losses. All the pieces that will be passed on again when I am dead; the secret history of my life stowed away in my blood's enormous cargo.