With the first snip, the count spoke again. "Filip's hand shook the last time I was in his shop. A man can't have his hair cut by someone he does not trust. Your hand will be true. Will it not, barber?"

The Baron stared long at the tank, and Crane and Gilchrist saw for the first time an unfocused quality to his eyes, a faint gray fog. “I want her to be real,” he muttered, folding his scarred hands together. “She does look real.”

But for a reason I wouldn’t be able to name until years after—years stretching between us like clouds unrolling beneath chariot wheels—I was silent; I was silenced and could not demur. I let him, could not quite pull away, show me how to coax the flame and bring order that it did not need. I let him teach me what I already understood.

Startled, Tau lost her grip on her paddle. Before she had the chance to reform her thoughts, she had to quickly strip off and dive in to retrieve it. A smile a shade more cynical than expected greeted her as she heaved herself back over the edge of the oka, spluttering and cursing. Nhia quit her rearward rescue-paddling and held her own dripping paddle firmly in her lap.

Things got worse when they started to have their flush of post-war babies and wanted us back out again, back where we belonged, and we had to tell them there was no "back"—they had conjured us from the blue sky, from nowhere, from their own minds, to win their great war.

"Wrong on both counts," I told Cardinal Galloway, swirling the brandy to disperse my blood through it. "First, I was the one who showed people visions." I offered him the chalice.  "And second, they weren't illusions. Have a drink, and see for yourself."

Meat for a blanket was no proper trade. Netta turned away from the fire, waiting for her eyes to adjust. She could make out a few of the other groups of refugees—and yes, they were watching her. Waiting for just such a sign of weakness as this. 

I’m not even sure what "her moonblood" means, only that it means the moment when the girl's wolf-colored hair cascades into velvet pelt. I can't stop thinking about the way she moves, so quick and lithe. She could cross the room in one leap.

I thrust my scimitar into its sheath and picked up one of the books. After the mystics' warning, it was almost too much not to open it. I set the book down again but too close to the edge, and would you look at that, it accidentally opened up. My eyes scanned the pages and came away thirsty. The text was dry. It had something to do with the intricacies of paper-making. I kicked the book into the corner and started digging. The books could wait, but my shriveled insides couldn’t.

When the boy opened his eyes, his finger was gone, the flesh sealed over it as if it had never been.  Then the temple wall bucked and groaned, and a hairline crack appeared in its surface.  Light came pouring out through it—a strange sort of light he could not describe. “Yes,” said his father.  “It is opening.  You must give more.”

As Alana approached, a single beastman detached himself from the crowd. He was larger than the others and wore only a long, red tabard that left his huge arms bare. His lower jaw protruded far beyond his upper, giving him a pugnacious look, yet his black hair was meticulously combed, shot through with braids ending in red beads. A three-fingered hand rested on the hilt of an oversized longsword.

Her mountain of skirts fell away, and their pocket and petticoat undersides revealed her arsenal: grappling hooks, spider climbing-legs, a buckler that doubled as a bit of mid-line accent on her corset. Fashions this year had left Ivette room to arm a platoon if the need arose, and she and her mentor had refined her skirts into the perfect carrying system. She could not sit, but really, who but old dowagers and incurable bores ever sat at an imperial fête?

Just as we got set to cast off, I spied something in the water, and the boat sensed it too: flick of a palm-leaf tail. And we were off, so fast that the pots of tea leapt from the table and were on me like freezing rain and I was on the floor. The merchant yelled louder, shouting at me to stop it, but what could I do? I tried, pounding on the floor like a fool and saying no, no, not now! But I knew we'd go till the boat lost the fish—or caught it.

Elerit felt a rush of arid wind as the daemon brushed past him. Released from his invisible bonds, he dashed after it, leaped onto the handcar, and began pumping. When he shot into the open air it was already far ahead. It was like a tall, black lemur, a living shadow crowned with two bifurcating branches. It turned and looked at him with eyes that were small and round and yellow. Then it was gone.

Mandate knew the count of those who had died exactly; knew it the way stone-crafts could tell granite and marble apart without their eyes and the way a blaze-dancer knew a candle from a torch from miles off, in a way he'd never known anything in his life.

"Touch the tree here. Listen." There was nothing at first, just the early breezes rustling a few tattered leaves. Then the blood rushing in my ears, my breath in and out. These sounds faded with concentration. Beyond them there was a very faint groaning, as of wood straining in a wind, but nothing more. "They still sleep," Sister Mauro whispered.