Thornhedge

by T. Kingfisher

Because she had eaten no human food, because she was barely born, Toadling’s flesh was malleable to magic.

Surrounded by child-eating swamp spirits, Toadling felt intensely loved.

She left the greenteeth knowing everything worth knowing about her world and came to the fairy court to find that she knew nothing at all.

She learned that her ideas of beauty were wrong and of no use to anyone. In her world, the Eldest was the most beautiful, swollen with power and secrets and the deaths of her enemies.

stand as godmother to the child left in your place.”

She did not know how to fight a story. She had learned so many from the greenteeth and later from Master Gourami, but no one had taught her how to stop one.

“It’s not a curse. It’s a gift. I’ve come to stop her doing harm

This is your gift, that you will do no harm to those around you.

They were as green as poison and they looked into Toadling’s, and the spirit behind them was old and cold and cruel.

door to Faerie slam closed behind her.

thorns die from the inside out, like priests—

But it was that kind of twisting, careless mind that Toadling was up against.

She had never asked. The greenteeth had not told her. They had not cared.

She was theirs; they were hers. The love of monsters was uncomplicated.

that all the neighboring wells were running dry.

“I came to stop her from doing harm. The words of my gift or the terms of my sentence—take your pick.”

“You were always stopping me,” said Fayette. “I could have brought them in. I could have called them.”

Her fingers had too many joints and her neck was too long and the bloody teeth in her mouth were too many and too sharp.

“She might have,” she rasped. “If she’d been older. But she could not yet command the air, and it is … was … not in her nature to ask.”

She remembered Fayette talking about calling them in and shuddered. There were worse worlds than Faerie.

It was paralyzing. How does anyone manage? There are too many streams and they all flow and all of them could be good and there’s no way to know. How does anyone ever choose to do anything?

“Call if you need me,” he said, curling his lips back from his teeth. “Maybe I’ll come. Maybe I’ll drown you.”

but Toadling was very polite. Her backstory unfolded pretty much as I typed it.