Excerpts
Rose Daughter
...She had picked up Beauty’s last remaining wreath and was looking at it as she spoke. She hesitated and glanced at Beauty again. "D’you know why everyone wants a rose wreath, dear? Forgive me for insulting you by asking, but you look as if maybe you don’t know."
"No-o," said Beauty. "Not because they’re beautiful?"
The woman laughed with genuine amusement. "Bless you. Maybe it’s no wonder they grow for you after all. You know—pansy for thougthfulness, yew for sorrow, bay for glory, dock for tomorrow? Roses are for love. Not forget-me-not, honeysuckle, silly sweethearts’ love but the love that makes you and keeps you whole, love that gets you through the worst your life’ll give you and that pours out of you when you’re given the best instead.
"There are a lot of the old wreaths from Rose Cottage around, not just over my door. There’s an old folk-tale—maybe you never heard it in your city—that there aren’t many roses around any more because they need more love than people have to give ’em, to make ’em flower, and the only thing that’ll stand in for love is magic, though it ain’t as good, and you have to have a lot of magic, like a sorcerer, and I ain’t never heard of a kind sorcerer, have you? And the bushes only started covering themselves with thorns when it got so it was only magic that ever made ’em grow. They were sad, like, and it came out in thorns. Maybe it was different when the world was younger, when people and roses were younger."
The woman stood up, and briskly took out her purse, and paid Beauty for her wreath, picked up her shopping basket, and turned to go; but she paused, frowning, as if she could not make up her mind either to say something or to leave it unsaid.
"I’d much rather know," said Beauty softly, and the woman looked at her again with her friendly smile.
"You may not, dear, but I’m thinking maybe you’d better. I’ve told you there’s no magic hereabouts. There are tales about why, of course. I’d make one up meself if nobody’d taken care of the job before me. There was some kind of sorcerers’ battle here, they say, long, long ago, no one knows rightly how long, and it ain’t the kind of thing the squire puts down in his record book, is it? ‘One sorcerers’ battle. Very bad. Has taken all magic away from Longchance forever’—if we had a squire in those days, though Oak Hall is as old as anything around here, and sorcerers don’t live in wilderness. But there’s a curse tacked on to the end of it, like the sting on a manticore’s tail...."
Deerskin
The standing herald came forward, and bowed to her, and handed her a piece of stiff paper, folded and sealed. She looked at the herald on the floor, and realised that what was on his lap was the rear parts of a dog; the head and forequarters were wedged under his arm. She took the paper and broke the seal.
"To the princess Lissla Lissar, from the prince Ossin, I give you greeting. I have heard of your great grief and I am very unhappy for it. I do not know how I could bear it if my mother died. My favorite bitch had her puppies a few weeks ago and I am sending you the best one. Her name is Ash, for her coat is the color of the bark of that tree. There are many ash trees here. She will love you and I hope you will be glad of her. My highest regards and duty to you and your father. Ossin."
She looked up. She did not quite know what to do. The herald with the dog, who had children (and dogs) of his own, stood up, tucking the puppy firmly under the arm she was trying to disappear beneath. Her legs began a frantic paddling. He supported them with his other arm and slowly drew her out from hiding, turning her round to face the princess. The puppy bobbed in his grasp for a moment, but the princess had, as if involuntarily, taken a step forward, and reached out a hand.
The puppy caught the gesture, and large brown silvery-lashed eyes caught the glance of large dark-fringed amber-hazel eyes, and then the puppy began bobbing in good earnest, her ears flattening, her tail going like a whirlwind. The princess held out her arms, and the herald, smiling, lay the puppy in them, and the puppy thumped and paddled and kicked, and banged her nose against the princess’s breastbone, licked her chin, and made tiny urgent noises deep in her throat.
The princess looked up: hazel eyes met blue, and the princess saw kindness, and the herald saw that the puppy would have a good home, and he was pleased, both because he loved dogs and because he loved his prince; and because he felt sorry for this young girl who had lost her mother. The herald bowed, deeply, and the princess smiled down at her armful. (Which made a dive at her face again, and this time succeeded in grazing the princess’s nose with a puppy fang.) The court noticed the smile, and found themselves interested again, despite the clumsy curtsey. "She’s a pretty little thing," they murmured to each other. "I had never noticed. She might even grow up to be a beauty; don’t forget who her mother was. How old is she now?"
A Knot in the Grain
There was an old farmer who married a young wife. He had been married once before, in his own youth, but his wife had died of a fever after they had been together only a year. In his grief the farmer forgot about all other human creatures and set himself only to his farm; and because there was both strength and fire in him, his farm bloomed and blossomed, and he himself did not know that his heart held its winter about it.
But all winters end, and the farmer’s heart was secretly warm within its winter, and one day it melted: at the sight of a young girl at the town well. The girl was nothing like his first wife; it was not memories she aroused, but something new. Some green spring woke in him in a moment, and yet he had had no warning of it. He thought that he felt no different than he had for twenty years; that the coldness under his breastbone was an old scar, with nothing living and stirring beneath it; that some things only came once in a man’s life.
Imaginary Lands
Contents:
- Paper Dragons, by James P. Blaylock
- The Old Woman and the Storm, by Patricia A. McKillip
- The Big Rock Candy Mountain, by Robert Westall
- Flight, by Peter Dickinson, from Imaginary Lands, edited by Robin McKinley
- Evian Steel, by Jane Yolen
- Stranger Blood, by PC Hodgell
- The Curse of Igamor, by Michael de Larrabeiti
- Tam Lin, by Joan D. Vinge
- The Stone Fey, by Robin McKinley
Excerpt from
The Stone Fey
She knew what it was that she had seen; she remembered her grandmother's tales . . . she remembered those tales far more vividly than a shepherd need, of the wild things that lived in their Hills; there was even supposed to be a wizard who had lived for thousands of years somewhere to the south of them. But she had spent too much time alone with her dog, wandering the low wild foothills, not to know that there were creatures that lived there that she could not call by name; things besides the yerig and the folstza, the small shy orobog, the sweet-swinging britti; things that were not birds or beasts, or lizards or fish or spiders.
Things like what had brought her back her lamb. She recognised him from one of her grandmother's stories: he was a stone fey. They were shorter and burlier than the other feys, with broad shoulders and heavy bones; in her childhood she had imagined them as shambling and clumsy, but she knew now it was not so. It was his skin that had told her for sure, for his skin was grey, the grey of rocks, and yet it was obvious — as her grandmother's story had told her it was obvious — that it was not the color of ill-health, and there was a rose-quartz flush across his cheekbones.
Excerpt from
Flight
by Peter Dickinson
Inevitably certain tribes proved obstinate. The most tragic of these were the bean-eating people of an island in Kala Lake called Tenu-Tenu. They had the misfortune not to believe in any God at all, maintaining that life was purposeless, that there was no after-life, and the only sensible course was to pass the time agreeably. For the Tenui this chiefly meant perfecting the techniques of the nose-flute, on which they performed with a skill never since approached. One might think there was no problem in such a people adopting some undemonstrative form of Ob-worship. The Ob himself appreciated music and maintained a band of nose-flautists. But the Tenui were convinced that the smallest departure from their faith in the pointlessness of life would impair the purity of their music. In view of their intransigence and the general indigence of bean-eaters, the Ob confirmed the dictates of his Decree and the Tenui ceased to exist. The order was carried out, even to the court musicians.
The Outlaws of Sherwood
A small vagrant breeze came from nowhere and barely flicked the feather tips as the arrow sped on its way. It shivered in its flight, and fell, a little off course—just enough that the arrow missed the slender tree it was aimed at, and struck tiredly and low into the bole of another tree, twenty paces beyond the mark.
Robin sighed and dropped his bow. There were some people, he thought, who not only could shoot accurately—if the breeze hadn’t disturbed it, that last arrow would have flown true—but seemed to know when and where to expect small vagrant breezes, and to allow for them. He was not a bad archer, but his father had been a splendid one, and he was his father’s only child.
His father had taught him to shoot; he had also taught him to make and fletch his own arrows. Robin stopped to pull the treacherous arrow out of the ash it had chosen to fly at, and ran his fingers gently over the shaft. It was undamaged, he was relieved to see; he had a living to earn, and little time to spend making his own arrows. Mostly he sold the ones he found time to make; he had some slight local fame as a fletcher. He would rather have had any local fame, however slight, as an archer. But the money was useful; as one of the youngest sub-apprentice foresters in the King’s Forest of Nottingham, he barely earned coin enough to feed himself—in fact he didn’t earn even that, and he was struggling as well to keep title to his father’s small holding. Every quarter saw him in rising panic as the time for the rents grew near.
The Hero and the Crown
The book was faded with age, and the style of lettering was strange to her, so she had to puzzle out some of the words; and some of the words were archaic and unfamiliar, so she had to puzzle out the meanings. But it was worth it, for this book told her stories more exciting than the ones she made up for herself before she fell asleep at night. And so, as she read, she first learned of the old dragons.
Damar had dragons still; little ones, dog-sized, nasty, mean-tempered creatures who would fry a baby for supper and swallow it in two gulps if they could; but they had been beaten back into the heavy forest and the wilder Hills by Aerin’s day. They still killed an occasional unwary hunter, for they had no fear, and they had teeth and claws as well as fire to subdue their prey, but they were no longer a serious threat. Arlbeth heard occasionally of one—or of a family, for they most often hunted in families—that was harassing a village or an outlying farm, and when that happened a party of men with spears and arrows—swords were of little use, for if one were close enough to use a sword, one was close enough to be badly burned—went out from the City to deal with them. Always they came back with a few more unpleasant stories of the cunning treachery of dragons; always they came back nursing a few scorched limbs; occasionally they came back a horse or a hound the less.
But there was no glamour in dragon-hunting. It was hard, tricky, grim work, and dragons were vermin. The folk of the hunt, the thotar, who ran the king’s dogs and provided meat for the royal household, would have nothing to do with dragons, and dogs once used for dragons were considered worthless for anything else.
There were still the old myths of the great dragons, huge scaled beasts many times larger than horses; and it was sometimes even said that the great dragons flew, flew in the air, with wingspreads so vast as to blacken the sun. The little dragons had vestigial wings, but no one had ever seen or heard of a dragon that could lift its thick squat body off the ground with them. They beat their wings in anger and in courtship, as they raised their crests; but that was all. The old dragons were no more nor less of a tale than that of flying dragons.
But this book took the old dragons seriously. It said that while the only dragons humankind had seen in many years were little ones, there were still one or two of the great ones hiding in the Hills; and that one day the one or two would fly out of their secret places and wreak havoc on man, for man would have forgotten how to deal with them. The great dragons lived long; they could afford to wait for that forgetfulness....
The Blue Sword
...The man in white was tall, though no taller than Richard or Sir Charles. But there was a quivering in the air around him, like the heat haze over the desert, shed from his white sleeves, cast off by the shadows of his scarlet sash. Those who stood near him looked small and pale and vague, while this man was so bright he hurt the eyes. More men came quietly out behind the Homelanders and stood a little to one side, but they kept their eyes on their king. He could be no one else. This must be Corlath.
Harry took a deep breath. He didn’t look insane or inhuman. He did look uncooperative. He shook his head and frowned at something someone said, and Sir Charles looked very unhappy. Corlath shrugged, and made a sweeping movement with his arms, like a man coming out of a forest gratefully into the sunlight. He took a long step forward to the edge of the verandah. Then Dedham took two quick steps toward him and spoke to him, a few words only, urgently; and Corlath turned again, as it seemed unwillingly, and looked back. Dedham held out his hand, palm down and fingers spread; and so they stood for a long minute. Corlath dropped his eyes to the hand stretched toward him, then looked into the face of its owner. Harry, watching, held her breath without knowing why. With a nasty feeling in the pit of her stomach she saw a look of terrible strain cross Dedham’s face as the Hill-king held his gaze; and the outstretched hand trembled very slightly. Corlath slowly reached out his own hand and touched the back of Dedham’s wrist with two fingers; the hand dropped to Dedham’s side once more, but as if it were heavy as stone, and the man slumped in relief like a murderer reprieved at the scaffold. The look of strain slid off his face to be replaced by one of great weariness.
Corlath swung around again, and set his foot on the top stair, and no one moved to stop him. Five men in the loose robes of the Hillfolk separated themselves from the verandah shadows and made to follow. Harry found she could not take her eyes off the king, but from the corners of her eyes she noticed that the other men too wore vivid sashes: gold and orange and green and blue and purple. There was nothing to indicate the king but the glitter of his presence.
Harry stood only a few feet from the bottom step, holding her pony’s bridle. Cassie and Beth were somewhere behind her, and the stable boy stood frozen a few steps from her elbow. Corlath still had not noticed them, and Harry stared, fascinated, as he came nearer. There seemed a roaring in the air that beat on her ear-drums and pressed against her eyeballs till she blinked. Then he looked up abruptly, as if from some unfathomable depth of thought, and saw her: their eyes met.
The man’s eyes were yellow as gold, the hot liquid gold in a smelter’s furnace. Harry found it suddenly difficult to breathe, and understood the expression on Dedham’s face; she almost staggered. Her hand tightened on the bridle, and the pony dropped its head and mouthed the bit uncomfortably. The heat was incredible. It was as though a thousand desert suns beat down on her. Magic? she thought from inside the thunder. Is this what magic is? I come from a cold country, where the witches live in cool green forests. What am I doing here?
The Door in the Hedge
Perhaps they did not think of what that open door in the hedge would bring about, or perhaps they put it deliberately out of their minds, or perhaps they recognised that the time of choice had passed with the end of that first meeting in the strange forest, where briefly they had stood on ground that existed as two places at once; and so they resigned themselves to the inevitable. If any of the mortals had any consciousness of what was happening, beyond anyone’s power now to halt, it was Gilvan; for Alora was too caught up in the tumultuous delight of having not only a daughter, but an excellent husband for that daughter, and a sister besides.
It was Gilvan who woke up one night and found himself thinking before he was awake enough to realise where his thoughts were taking him and deflect them in time. And his thoughts said to him: "When was the time of choice? When did you stand at the crossroads and say this way—not that? Could any of us, in that uncanny wood, have said, ‘No, I condemn my child to eternal wandering—I know for certain what will come of it else, and know for certain that it would be evil’?" He lay staring at the starlight, turning his life, and his wife’s, and his daughter’s, over in his mind as best he could; and then, because he was a king, he considered the lives of his country and his people; and at the end he could still only reply, "I don’t know."
Beauty:
A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast
Grace had set the rose, now standing in a tall pottery cup of water, on the mantelpiece above the parlour fire. Father looked up at it, and all our eyes were drawn after his. "Do you like it, Beauty, child?" he said. "Yes, indeed, Father," I said, wondering; "I have never seen its like."
He said, as if in a trance, staring at the flower: "Little you know what so simple a thing has cost me"; and as he finished speaking, a petal fell from the rose, although it was unharmed and blooming. The petal turned in the air as it fell, as if it were so feather-light that the warm eddies of air from the fire could lift it; and the firelight seemed to gild it. But it struck the floor with an audible clink, like a dropped coin. Ger bent down and picked it up: It was a bright yellow colour. He took it between his fingers, and with a little effort bent it slightly. "It’s gold," he said quietly.
Father stood up as if his back hurt him. "Not now," he said in response to our awed faces. "Tomorrow I will tell you all my story. Will you help me upstairs?" he said to Grace; and the rest of us looked after them when they had gone. Hope banked the fire, and we went our ways to bed. The saddle-bags lay untouched where Ger and I had set them; he gave them hardly a glance as he barred the door.
I dreamed that the stream from the enchanted wood turned to liquid gold, and its voice as it ran over the rocks was as soft as silk; and a great red griffin wheeled over our meadow, shadowing the house with its wings.
Robin McKinley's Blog
An Excerpt from Dragonhaven
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