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If this was a fairy tale, it was the kind where everyone gets eaten as a cautionary tale about straying into the woods, not the sentimental kind that ends with a wedding and the words, “And if they have not since died, they are living there still.”
share of small waterfalls breaking quaintly over mossy boulders, if you try to step back to admire one from a distance, you’re likely to fall off a different cliff and break your neck. Also there are bears.
Paris, when we left, had been in full glory. Much is made of springtime there, but for my money, a warm autumn is just as spectacular and you don’t trip over nearly as many poets.
(The greatest city in Gallacia is fine, I suppose, but I didn’t feel the need to linger. Imagine if an architect wanted to re-create Budapest, but on a shoestring budget and without any of the convenient flat bits. While fighting wolves.)
(You really don’t want to drink our wine. We export it because we don’t want to drink it either.)
Angus leaned down and pulled a small amber bottle out of his pack. He didn’t even need to open it before I recognized the smell of livrit, our beloved national paint thinner, made from lichen, cloudberries, and spite. No Gallacian soldier would be without a bottle, in case we ever need to remember what we’re fighting for. (Mostly the opportunity to be somewhere that has better liquor.)
If you have ever dealt with the possessions of the dead, you probably know what I mean. You take things away and leave behind emptiness, and everything you remove—every sheet and pillowcase, every lost sock and old razor—erases a little bit of the dead person’s footprint in the world.
Bors was willing to make a fourth for whist, provided that there was no actual gambling, and while he took a long time to make his plays, he was absolutely cutthroat once he did. It was like being bludgeoned to death by a cheerful turtle.
“May we always have the choice to err on the side of mercy,” I said, lifting my wine.
“Something bad happened to both of us, too. We don’t deserve to fall apart either.”
the two groups who will always spot the details are the gun people and the textile people, and while I fear the textile people somewhat more, I like to stay on the right side of both of them.
