The Seventh Bride

by T. Kingfisher

swans were beautiful, but if you saw one while you were sitting on the stream bank, enjoying a bit of lunch, you had better run. They hissed like serpents, and those beautiful white wings could hit like a sledgehammer.

She did not know many beautiful animals that had sweet tempers, except perhaps butterflies. Then again, there wasn’t enough to a butterfly to properly be called a temper.

As if, by pretending everything was perfectly normal, it would make things perfectly normal.

“Roses have thorns,” she said. “That’s the price of roses. When you start to forget that, that’s when things go wrong.”