"Not all women were monsters, of course," the man who works at the tourist trap says. His chair is tilted against the wall, legs resting leisurely on the counter.

He strokes the pelt on his lap. His stubby fingers tousle the golden-red fur, grease it with sweat from his clammy hands.

The girl winces. Her ginger hair, feather-light, falls in ringlets on her shoulders.

After the quake, the air smelled like dust and blood and the ozone of lightning spells. The students were all on a mountain retreat with the chancellor, so there was no one to do the heavy work of cleaning up the university but the faculty and staff.

The quad had been hit hard. Most of the statues of glorious wizards of yore had sustained damage, including Head Wizard Barra's, which had plummeted from its pedestal, separating head from body. I didn't even understand where all the stones and debris had come from, but a lot of it would have to be removed through pure backbreaking labor.

Abraham was rushing through his miracles. He drew out the rune-etched broadsword of young Haddad's great-grandfather and laid it in the boy's hands, along with the elegant sheath that lunar moths had woven from their own silk. Then came the maps that would send Haddad on the next leg of his journey: those that told how to navigate mountains by constellations of the sky, and those of the eight oceans that could only be read amid sea breeze.

Underneath that pile of iron and parchment and enchantment, the little Haddad wriggled. He was barely visible under the pile of destiny he held.

"Wait! What do I do with this one? Does it re-dead zombies?"

Amber has been dead three days when she wakes up in her boyfriend's bathtub. It isn't the scritch-scratch of the tattoo needle that brings her back—although that sting is strange and unexpected. No, it's the cold that shocks her back into the world. She's buried up to her neck under bags of melting ice.

"Holy shit," Cash, her supposed-to-be-ex-boyfriend, shouts at the sound of her involuntary gasp. "I did it!" He's crouched beside the tub, tattoo pen in one hand, her wrist in the other.

Of course. Amber can barely hold back her sigh. Of course.

Never underestimate the power of an entitled man with a fragile ego and too much paid time off.

It is of vital importance to brush one's teeth, says Maralka, even though there are the horrors. Brush twice a day, waking and going to sleep again. And one mustn't eat an hour beforehand, which is easy the first time because Joni can't eat while sleeping, and come to think of it also easy the second time, because there's not so much food in the high cupboards of their little room that she could spend all day eating it.

You can't eat before because your saliva still has digestion modes, says Maralka, and the combination of salivary acidity plus the abrasion of the toothbrush can compromise your enamel. Enamel is what's on the outside of your teeth, but there's also something called calculus, which is not math but bacteria poop "It's like how inflammable means that something might catch fire or it might be unable to catch fire," Maralka explains one day, in the middle of brushing.

Cathilde pulled her foot back, shuddering at the sight. The rabbit was just outside the tent, laid out like an offering. Beady brown eyes stared up at a sky the colour and texture of meringue; its soft white fur rippled in the crisp wind, and a spray of red berries grew out of its mouth, covered in a thin lace of frost.

The first time it happened, Aglahé had sliced open the rabbit's—seemingly innocuous—belly to reveal a furl of pale flowers growing between its organs. The second time, a tangle of roots had grown overnight next to their tent, a white pheasant encased in its coils. The third, they had opened a handful of chestnut shells, only to find quail chicks nestled inside.

There is a language that I know, but my tongue cannot form the words. Even if it could, the sentences are too long for you to listen to. They stretch across hours, or days. You are like the small fast ones of the forest—the birds, the lightning sparks of minnows in the creeks—words pour off your tongue, your hands flutter in the air. I can move quickly, too, but language is meant to be slow.

You were trying to save me, I know. But it is very lonely here.

The first time, I'm watching cat videos on my laptop when my chest starts to ache, and a long line of pain from my forehead down past my navel splits me into two.

And then, the sensation of fingernails, scratching under my skin.

When it's over, she stands naked in the moonlight, her body a mirror of my own. Same slightly upturned nose, same mouse-brown hair, same curves. But her eyes are filled with different histories, and her mouth is twisted in a smile that I have never been able to accomplish. In her right hand is a knife the color of old bone.

1.

You were cruel when we first met.

It would have been easy to claim I was sleepwalking, under your compulsion. But the truth was, I sought you out that midwinter night, in my spiderweb-flimsy nightgown and bruised, bare feet, chasing after a woodland vista I was taught through catechisms and beatings always to avoid. I left my bed in the smallest of hours despite parents and priests cautioning I stay away from the Erl-Queen's territory.

You were cruel, but you were honest too, unlike the honey-concealed callousness of my family and villagefolk. Wrapped in obsidian armor, you inspected me through the tenebrous gaps of your visor and said in a crushed-velvet voice, "My horse will cross this part of the woods once, and only once. It matters not to me if you join me or not."

He thought drowning would feel blissful. Scary at first, the panic of breathlessness, but then pleasant and mostly serene. He had already decided that, when the time came, he would be eclipsed from this life with a mangled Manfred quote: "It is not so difficult to die, after all."

It was not peaceful.

The salt stung the inside of his torso, his ribs turned to knives that sliced him open. His very blood felt like an attack: an enemy of his own making. He swallowed mouthful after mouthful of seawater. His throat burned, his stomach distended to bursting. The sound of the ocean filled his ears: a beast, roaring with aquatic laughter. Manfred? Who's Manfred?