The River Has Roots

by Amal El-Mohtar

So long as you can hear the waters, everything seems possible: that the sun is the moon, that a star is a cloud, that dusk is dawn, and everything is both hallowed and haunted at the same time.

She couldn’t put words to the look on Rin’s face. She only knew, very sharply and deeply, that she wanted to go on being the cause of it.

You shall have poems written to you with a quill on fire. You shall have songs sung to you by enchanted harps. Whole branches of grammar will be invented only to praise you.”

very charming song, beloved in the west country, which is either about the planting, reaping, and milling of barley or about the ritual consumption of a man brutally murdered several times over.