What Moves the Dead (Sworn Soldier, #1)

by T. Kingfisher

Hob sighed in the manner of horses who find the world not to their liking and gazed off into the distance.

“I shouldn’t touch it if I were you, officer,” she said again, pointing to the mushroom. I looked down at the stick in my hand, as if it belonged to someone else.

I am delighted by obscure passions, no matter how unusual.

In the course of all that wandering around losing fights, we developed our own language, Gallacian. I am told it is worse than Finnish, which is impressive. Every time we lost a fight, we made off with a few more loan words from our enemies.

I mentioned that we were a fierce warrior people, right? Even though we were bad at it? But we were proud of our warriors. Someone had to be, I guess,

“A doctor, are you?” “Of medicine, not mycology, I fear,” I said. Denton had the grace to look abashed. Miss Potter generously forgave him both this failing and his poor luck to hail from America, with its spurious claims of underwater mushrooms.

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.

The resulting drink starts syrupy, ends bitter, and burns all the way down. No one actually likes it, but it is traditionally made by widows as a means of supporting themselves, so everyone drinks it because you can’t let little old ladies starve to death when they could be climbing mountains and scraping lichen off rocks instead.

I am not a particularly fanciful person. (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.)