Summer in Orcus

by T. Kingfisher

But she sometimes thought that it would be nice to have a brother or a sister, not because she particularly liked other children but because it would have been nice to have somebody to share the burden of her mother’s love.

“Are you frightened?” asked the old woman. “You should be, you know. I am as old as sinning and twice as dangerous. I drink my beer from the skulls of heroes.”

“You’re dangerously ignorant, girl,” she said. “It is not your fault at the moment, though if you grow much older, it will be.”

(This may seem an unusual ambition, but Summer had read a great many books about magic and animals and changing your shape. Summer’s mother believed that books were safe things that kept you inside, which only shows how little she knew about it, because books are one of the least safe things in the world.)

“I don’t think it’s a chicken coop,” said Summer. “There’s a lot of stained glass.” “Perhaps they’re very religious chickens.”

In movies, when someone has just made a very dramatic statement, everyone gasps or recoils in horror, so you might think that when Summer heard the bear woman say, "There is a cancer at the heart of the world," she would have done something similar. In real life, though, a very dramatic statement is usually met with awkward silence, and then somebody makes a joke to try to break the silence, and somebody else decides they need a cup of tea.

Occasionally grown-ups told her how sad it must be, to grow up without a father, and Summer always nodded politely, because you had to be polite, even to grown-ups who had no idea what they were talking about.

She liked puns well enough in their place, but this struck her as the sort of pun that a grown-up would make, expecting a child to find it hysterically funny.

It is difficult to walk across an enchanted desert and then be thrust into someone else’s sense of humor.

Grown-ups are strange creatures, and many of them are useless, but even the worst of them has authority.

Poets and even ordinary people make much of dew. They point to it on grass and sing its praises on spiderwebs. Words like “silver” and “gossamer” and “a thousand glittering diamonds” are thrown about whenever dew comes up, often by people who should know better. Occasionally, they will even go so far as to speak of “nymph tears sparkling on the grass” or some such. When it has gotten to this stage, they generally need to be sat down and given a stern talking-to, and perhaps a settling cup of tea. What these people forget, or never knew, is that dew is real and solid and if you are sleeping out of doors, you can go to bed warm and dry and wake up cold and soaking wet and not at all inclined to admire the sparkling of a thousand dewy diamonds.

The wolf stepped up to the bars and looked at her thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said. “I promise by tooth and marrow and bone. Show mercy to me and I will show it to you in return. There’s too little courage in the world to go eating it up.”

“Prophets and poets, the lot of them. Not bad-hearted, but you ask one the time of day and he tells you time is an illusion, and how is that getting anything done?”

“The thoughts of others are dangerous,” said Glorious. “But it is not a danger that we can protect ourselves from.” He shook himself, but cautiously, so that she did not fall off. “Be at ease. A friend will not think unkindly of you, and an unfriend will not tell you the truth of their thoughts, so what purpose is there to worry?”

“Magic is like rain,” said Glorious. “Dragons are like mountains. Or wolves. Magic may happen to a dragon, but mountains are not made of rain.”

She wished she’d paid more attention to the number of people at the OK Corral, or that her school hadn’t wasted so much time on vocabulary words when teaching history and had spent a little more time on important things, like how many people you needed to keep a land terrorized for a hundred years.

“It would be a good day for the world if I could not find a child who knew terrible adult things. But I will be a great deal older before that day comes, I think.”

The best thing about my patrons was that they wanted everyone to read it. They didn’t want a story just for them, they wanted to donate money to give a book to the world. And since the year that I am writing to you from was—well, let’s say it was a very bad year for the world—because it was a serial, I could put out extra chapters on the worst days so that my readers could get a few minutes away from the news. It’s not often that you get a chance to help people with fiction in real-time. Even if it’s just five minutes of respite, even if it’s just a weird little story about hoopoes and wolves. So many of us right then felt like we were bailing the tide, like the world was breaking beyond any of our ability to fix. (I hope that when some of you read this, we are in a far happier future.) That my patrons had helped me be at a place, right at that moment, where I could do even this little tiny thing…that was a gift that can’t be measured in dollar figures. For them, and for you, I’m grateful.