Unnatural Magic

by C.M. Waggoner

Sy had been her bosom companion since she was seven years old, and he a very mature and sophisticated nine.

You couldn’t argue with a blizzard or with Tsira’s mother, but at least the blizzard wouldn’t criticize your logic if you tried.

But then she wet her handkerchief in earnest because it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair that she could be clever and polite and work hard and mind her elders and smile prettily and mend her dresses and clean her nails and chew every bite twenty times and do everything that every adult had ever told her she ought to do and still not get what some silly troll-blooded boy with a pony and a tutor and a house in the country got just because he wanted it.

She saw him and said, “Hey, Pink.” “Hey,” he said back, trying out Tsira’s preferred mode of address. He liked being inside of the things that she used: borrowing her bowl, crawling under her blankets.

She was, however, irreproachably polite, and she thought that one of the essential abilities of a polite and genteel young lady was to create pleasant fictions in order to preserve her companions from unpleasant truths.

we are not shrinking, sighing women. We are bold, and the bold always take a good breakfast.”

She was in the habit of apologizing for making faces that men thought weren’t very pretty. It occurred to her, very briefly, that she resented being made to think about her face when she was trying to focus on the contents of her mind.

Loga was different around him: more relaxed, less artificial. Sometimes when Mr. Finnbair smiled at him he looked startled, as if being smiled at with such warmth was a very peculiar thing, indeed.

The idea of levitating the plinth struck Onna as similar to levitating the first headman’s wife in terms of its violation of stately dignity—though of course, considering the greater mass of the gigantic granite plinth, much more difficult.

“If believing in the rights of ladies to publicly engage in serious scholarship and of gentlemen to publicly wear a delicious magenta taffeta in the summer makes me a radical, then I can only embrace the label.”

He thought that a little flat and a warm hearth and a bed with Tsira in it might be what home might feel like, but he would settle for nothing but Tsira, Tsira as she used to be, the stout walls and sturdy roof of her.

He now forced her to take a proper breakfast in the morning, rather than letting her, in her impatience, set off for the day after gulping down a cup of coffee and a bit of bread. He liked watching her eat, in any case; he liked the flashes of unguarded pleasure that crossed her face when she bit into something she liked. She otherwise was only ever so expressive in bed, or when she was breaking some poor devil’s bones.

🔥🔥🔥

Five hundred years of what the good people of Monsatelle had thrown into the river so that they wouldn’t have to look at it had collected and risen up out of the black water, and now people went to Six-Bend Island when they, too, had been thrown away by the rest of the city.

Ready for a fight, Pink?” “Never,” he said. She snorted. “Least you’re fucking honest.”

Loga himself was wearing an extremely frivolous-looking concoction in pale pink. She supposed that, in his case, it wasn’t that the right costume made him look like a wizard, but that whatever he wore had no choice but to surrender to the inevitable and look like a wizard’s costume.