The Seventh Bride

by T. Kingfisher

It was as if the words they spoke were weaving a kind of net, a net of normalcy and propriety and sanity, around a situation that was anything but.

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

He’s just a little . . . off somehow. It could be anything. Well, it seemed that she would find out.

“No point being careful. Careful won’t help.”

They tried to weave that net, but they can’t quite hide the fact that this is wrong, this is strange, this isn’t normal . .

It’s all very well to cry for any number of reasons, including the fact that sometimes you simply need a good cry. And since a lot of the reasons for crying occur largely in your head—which is not to say that they’re not real—it usually helps. Perhaps the world won’t have changed for the better after five or ten minutes spent sobbing into a pillow, but at least you won’t feel quite so much like crying. The red hollow under your breastbone is emptied out, and things can be faced with more resolution. (And a swollen nose and itchy eyes, of course, but you can’t have everything.)

Magic, thought Rhea. Was this what sorcery let you do—hide an enormous house in the middle of nowhere?

“Be bold . . . be bold . . . But not too bold . . . ,”

this . . . is a murderer’s . . . house . . . ,”

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

The hedgehog shrugged and put its paws in the air to be picked up.

I love this magic little hedgehog. Kinda want my own now

Rhea followed, because when your future husband is a mad sorcerer, following a hedgehog sometimes seems like a good option.

Well, as Maria would say, if I sit down and cry, nothing will change and I still won’t have clean laundry.