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Blighted Heart

For years my city gave the hearts of maidens to the corn-man to awaken him, but on the day I came to him I was no longer untouched by man. The priests were careless; they had checked the previous morning, but did not check again. Their mistake, and mine, for I had made love to a warrior on the evening before, out of pique, out of a desire to defy them for the last time before they took my innocence away. I was not thinking of the consequences at…

The Dragon’s Tears

Huan Ho passed through the gates, which lay open for fear the riders would tear them down to enter the city, and took the long, winding road that led past the rice fields into the hills above Fei Weng. The air was crisp and cold, and stung his exposed skin. He walked on. The door through which the riders came stood a little way from a fork in the road. Its wood was old and weathered, and the lacquer had cracked in many places. Faded pictures of p…

Dragon Feasts

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By Bargain and By Blood

…daughter, little beyond her certainty that everything would turn out right in the end. Her death in childbirth had left my questions forever unanswered. Nevertheless, when Aname told me about her child to come, she spoke of a bargain struck. And thus I should have known someone would come to honour it–that someone would walk through the rice paddies and the forests until he reached our jati, our small community isolated from the affairs of the wor…

A Game of Three Generals

…A Xuya story about chess and lava planets, out in Nick Gevers Extrasolar. Every day is the same: Song Ha gets down to the refectory and spoons rice porridge into her mouth, feeling the salty taste of fish sauce against her palate–there used to be something subtly wrong with it, wasn’t there? But now it’s a familiar beat like a syllable in a poem–a daily counting out–she’s not sure exactly what, but it’s important that she doesn’t lose count….