What Moves the Dead (Sworn Soldier, #1)

by T. Kingfisher

Perhaps it would not have been so unsettling if the mushrooms had not looked so much like flesh. The caps were clammy, swollen beige, puffed up against the dark-red gills. They grew out of the gaps in the stones of the tarn like tumors growing from diseased skin. I had a strong urge to step back from them, and an even stronger urge to poke them with a stick.

(Look, if you don’t make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren’t to be trusted. That was one of my father’s maxims, and it’s never failed me yet.)

Very few ancient crypts have plump shepherdesses and gamboling sheep on the walls. I consider this an oversight.

(I am never sure what to think of Americans. Their brashness can be charming, but just when I decide that I rather like them, I meet one that I wish would go back to America, and then perhaps keep going off the far edge, into the sea.)

I offered Denton my hand, because Americans will shake hands with the table if you don’t stop them.

I did not know how to deal with this sort of death, the one that comes slow and inevitable and does not let go. I am a soldier, I deal in cannonballs and rifle shots. I understand how a wound can fester and kill a soldier, but there is still the initial wound, something that can be avoided with a little skill and a great deal of luck. Death that simply comes and settles is not a thing I had any experience with.

Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American.

I’d been tired of it a decade ago. Now I’d moved to some other state entirely. Transcendent exhaustion, perhaps.

“We were younger then,” I said. “And immortal.”

“They say mushrooms spring up where the Devil walks,” said Angus sourly. “And where fairies dance.”

It was fun. People get hung up on happiness and joy, but fun will take you at least as far and it’s generally cheaper to obtain.

(A Frenchwoman once told me that I had no poetry in my soul. I recited a dirty limerick to her, and she threw a lemon at my head. Paris is a marvelous city.)

“I begin to think that this place has killed all of us, in its time. Perhaps it’s too late for me as well.”

His voice had that light veneer of humor that we all get, because if we don’t pretend we’re laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are.

Headache is always preferable to heartache, and if you’re focusing on not throwing up, you aren’t thinking about how the friends of your youth are dying around you.

An idea was forming in the back of my mind. I didn’t like it one bit. “What do they look like, these hyphae?” “They can take a number of different forms,” said Miss Potter. “But the most common one is white filaments.” “Filaments.” I thought of Angus’s description of the fish. “Like slimy felt?” “Felt, certainly, if it’s a thick enough mat.” She smiled tranquilly up at me. “But in small amounts, it would look like fine white hairs.”

(I was, perhaps, rather less reverent than the situation warranted, but it is a flaw of mine that I become sarcastic when I am frustrated.)

“You know what men are like when women try to tell them anything.”

“You look like I feel,” I told him. “What a coincidence,” he said. “I feel about how you look.”