There’s trust between them that few others can claim. But it’s a trust that Jonah feels he failed earlier in the day, through the simple act of not answering her question about Leah and all those other questions hiding behind it: Will this winter ever end? Will my brother’s shadow follow us always? Is my blood tainted? Is our daughter’s?

“All right,” May said and moved aside so that George could herd the bot through the door. The bot swept into the front room, stopping to examine each object in her path. George watched her quick movements and heard her cheerful noises and was pleased.

Him, though, he had no place to go. All the cantrevs of his homeland had been burned; nothing there now but the stubble of new green that would never be sheafed and dried to straw, nothing but foundations.

And now Ilsi had seen her future Headmaster, and he seemed like a fine ordinary middle-aged Headmastery sort of person, and this was apparently the point where she was supposed to feel lucky. Lucky about leaving the temple, about living the rest of her days in his household, about spending the rest of the her days in his service; all of it.

My dough is too sticky, and the smell of the yeast suddenly makes me ill. I want the day off from seeing other people’s gods. I search for the towel I use to carry the hot loaves, my flour-coated hands before me, and try not to think what I’m thinking: does XuShem not exist? Is that why they never appear?

They were expectant, for she was the Storm's daughter and it fell to her to find a suitable replacement. And when she looked down at her own children, when she saw the worry in her son's roving stare and the concern in the way her daughter counted the buttons on her dress over and over, she knew she'd search the entirety of the land for someone, anyone, strong enough.

“I can help you avenge what they did to you,” the Fivefold God said. Their features rippled like a pool embracing a pebble, and then they wore their third face, the warrior face. The God’s words were like a dry wind that blew through Ana, sweeping aside the numbness and ash and trailing fury in its wake.

The experiment had shifted the star’s death a mere week, and she could see worry coiling inside Vittorio. She let it, even as she dug deeper into the records for the previous supernovae that he had mentioned more than ten years before. The dates and accounts showed steady increases in frequency and brightness, and the wall she’d raised against Vittorio trembled. She thought of the volcano, and of how much a small change might matter—and yet how undeniably small this change had been. The remnant burning in the night sky began to worry her, too, though she could not say why.

Coming straight toward us was a young couple, a man with long moon-white hair and a woman whose hair was shadow black, in matching black Stetsons and dusters. They looked all sweetness and light, different than everything else in that town. There was no way they couldn’t be gods, and I hate to admit it now, but seeing them made me ashamed to be an apprentice to the god of remembrance, and I wanted nothing more than to be theirs.

The cards were crisp, almost brittle in Cédric’s hands; he ran his thumbs along the corners as he shuffled, feeling where he’d marked them during the game with the same needle in his ring he’d used to draw the blood to let him keep gambling. It all came down to this hand, this moment. The moment he was going to cheat the dead at their own table.

At that moment I experienced nothing less than a revelation, a moment at which Heaven’s intentions, normally concealed from humankind, are laid bare and perceptible. It was, undoubtedly, the divine that had guided me to that glade of Widow’s-Gown, and from there to Alessa’s house, and would lead me hence to Multzep, where I would fulfill my destiny. My only purpose in life was to wed my cousin Halime. I adored her, and our marriage was Heaven’s design; I had been told as such by a great sage.

So a goblin priest—or exile—definitely wrote this, Gaunt thought. Drudger? The title Goblin’s Confession surely bore two meanings. Goblins saw oral culture as living, written culture as dead. For a goblin priest to record his doctrine was itself a crime—and this very work an admission of guilt—

Azrael knew this was no random robbery. Lazarus and the other ghosts had been looking for the chest they took from the coach. They’d clearly been lying in wait for it. Azrael knew he could keep on riding, just like Lazarus had suggested. There was nothing to keep him from getting back on the dead horse and following the wagon trail to Ezekiel's Remains or wherever else it led. In days past, that was exactly what he would have done. But, like he'd told Winter, he wasn't like that anymore.

“Before God subjects Nahilia’s people to bitumen and brimstone,” says Luther, ignoring the question, “I must apprise them of the reasons for His wrath. Tell me, does any Sodomite myth turn on a primal act of disobedience? Is there a story involving forbidden fruit or a lost paradise?”

The sea is a remarkable thing. Nobody owns it. It'll kill you if you give it half a chance, but it'll take you anywhere you want to go. It can turn a nobody like my father into a person of consequence. You can rob other ships, murder people and throw them over the side, swoop down on cities and steal and slaughter to your heart's content, and nobody will come after you, because of jurisdictional issues. The sea isn't a place, it's a state of mind. The sea is freedom.

“Oh please, now you’re being sappy. Where’s the dignity of the God of Ash?” Armind gestured to the earlier panels, moonlight etching the lines of lean muscle on his arms. “The forms you took in those battles, can you still adopt them?” Shun forced himself look at his guises in the paintings. The golden gryphon he’d assumed when facing Rorinn. The six-armed titan he’d been at Mount Tizen.

When I awoke in the morning, the temple was in turmoil. The oxen lowed and stamped their feet, and the peacocks shrieked and plucked the inlaid silver and lapis lazuli from the walls. I found the priests Lamentation and Butter Tub under the date palm, slaughtering a sheep. “Calamity!” Lamentation cried, poking at the sheep’s entrails. “Calamity and devastation!”

I take a deep breath and heave the cabbage as hard as I can at the sky. It rises, hangs for just an instant against the tree line, and falls. I run to catch it but can’t make it in time. it hits the dirt at the garden’s edge with a crack. The trees shiver in a disapproving wind. Annell had a better arm than I do. Her throws always rose high enough that the skies accepted her sacrifice. Why isn’t she here? Why did she have to leave instead of me?

I have thought of a thousand different names for our future children. Ever since our eyes first met. But right now, right at this moment when I should be the most happy, I am terrified. Terrified of the moment when Osarah and I will hunt down the animal that bears our child and kill it. Will my aim be good enough to wound it without hurting our child? Will my hands shake as I cut its belly open and pry the baby out of its innards, slick with blood?

Reminding me of another little girl centuries before, one who had grown up to claim her youth-name, her adult-name, and finally her elder-name, yet who had never been quite content with any of those names, nor what they represented. Not until her hands turned to stone-care.

On any other day, Varthin and I would not have met. His was a world of fire and iron and light everlasting; mine of the cool depths and a dark that was no dark at all, mapped by the subtle changes in taste and temperature and pressure of the saltwater that was my element. But it chanced I passed the tideline on midsummer’s day when Varthin stepped beyond his door into much light and little darkness, and so we met within the marram. His life was twined from its golden light; its black iron gave him his strength. These gifts he offered with his ring, and freely.

In conjunction with the release of BCS author R.B. Lemberg's new novel The Unbalancing, Jaymee Goh of Tachyon Publications, the publisher of R.B.'s novella The Four Profound Weaves (2021) and The Unbalancing (2022), interviews R.B. about queer norms and sexualities in their Birdverse fantasy world, which is also the setting for R.B.'s five stories, novelettes, and novella that appeared in BCS.

But what plagues me now, the questions I ask myself as I stare down at her little violets, as I sense out the elements in the earth beneath their roots until I can feel the cold charred edges of her bones and assure myself that that is all that remains of her—those questions are these: is it different, to withhold life than to end it? What moral obligations does my power come with? And, more selfishly: if I don’t bring her back, how long until her followers turn on me?

Some years ago I bedded an old man, a wizard and mathematician, who told me that any statement you make contains the entirety of the universe in what is left unsaid by it. If you were to declare “I exist,” then by extension you are also declaring that you are not a tree, that you are not sorrowful, that you have not eaten, that you are not your brother’s keeper... Every positive affirmation contains an infinity of negation. There is nothing you can speak that the universe is not held in the shadow of your flame.