"Nettle & Bone"

Luckily the scary 'blistered land' only appeared in the first chapter, and the rest of T. Kingfisher's updated fairytale was a comfort read for me. I love the solidly female perspective throughout.

• They were protected by powerful magic, but magic could not fix blood, so the kings looked to marry outside their borders.
• Their horses, too, were black. They had black bridles and black saddles and black barding. <> It struck Marra, watching, as an extravagance of grief. Someone wanted the world to know how sad he could afford to be.
• She had apparently decided that Marra could be withdrawn from the game of merchants and princes and safely set aside. Marra both resented her mother for being so clear-eyed and was grateful to be free of the game, and she added this to the store of complicated things piled up beneath her heart.
• No one knew what she wanted, only that she was generally kindly disposed toward humans. “We’re a mystery religion,” said the abbess, when she’d had a bit more wine than usual, “for people who have too much work to do to bother with mysteries. So we simply get along as best we can. Occasionally someone has a vision, but she doesn’t seem to want anything much, and so we try to return the favor.”
• There was no call to nurture intellectual curiosity among princesses. She did not even quite know what to call it. It felt like a light shining in her chest and she could see just a little way ahead, and that was enough to keep her going forward.
• It would be very satisfying to be a sad-eyed, beautiful ghost who drifted through the halls, gazing up at the moon and weeping silently, as a warning to other young women. On the other hand, she was still short and round-faced and sturdy, and there were very few ghost stories about short, sturdy women.
• “Mostly corsets,” said the queen, amused, watching Marra’s gaze. “There’s a trick to it, at my age. You must have a good figure for having born two children, but not so girlish that people suspect artifice and not so ripe that people think you are trying to be seductive.”
• The labor went very much the same way that Kania’s had, which seemed strange to Marra. Then again, peasants and princesses all shit the same and have their courses the same, so I suppose it’s no surprise that babies all come out the same way, too. Having thus accidentally anticipated a few centuries’ worth of revolutionary political thought, Marra got down to the business of boiling water and making tea.
• The next three days were nauseating in the dullness of their horror. Marra did not dare speak to anyone about what she had learned.
• Another stab of the needle into the cloth. The stitch would be too tight and would pucker the fabric. “Or,” said her mother, “if we defy Vorling before he has an heir that might conceivably inherit our throne, he well might decide to march on us himself and raze this entire city to the ground in a single bloody day.”
• The knowledge bloomed inside her like blood soaking through a bandage. Prince Vorling had picked a tiny, vulnerable kingdom who could not fight back.
• “Lots of people deserve to die,” said the dust-wife finally. “Not everybody deserves to be a killer.” She sighed heavily. “I can’t change your mind, can I?”
• “There,” said the dust-wife. “You have given me moonlight in a jar of clay. Well done. That’s the third task.”... “I didn’t want to do this,” said the dust-wife. “That’s why I gave you the impossible tasks, so you’d fail and go away and not ask any more. I don’t like travel and I don’t like going places and I’m going to have to find someone to watch the chickens. And also this is a fool’s errand and we’ll probably all die.”
• Even a princess learned patience in a convent, and what the nuns had not taught her, she had learned from knitting and weaving. Haste led to dropped threads and mangled socks. They could not afford haste with Kania’s life.
• “Not much about goblins,” said Marra. “I could tell you a great deal about knitting bandages and drying herbs and the feast days of lesser saints.” <> “Well,” muttered the dust-wife, in the tone of one determined to be fair. “That’s not completely useless, anyway. Whose feast is it today, then?”
• But I could easily imagine someone making a saint out of her, a hundred years hence. Maybe some of the saints were like that, too—cranky, old women with strange gifts. She remembered the one icon she had seen of Saint Ebbe, a gray-haired woman with her foot on a boar’s snout, holding it pinned. Both she and the boar had been grinning.
• The dust-wife nodded. “Do you wish ending?” she asked as brusquely as if she were negotiating with a farmer for a loaf of bread.
• “Bleah,” said the dust-wife. “The ones who die by water go bad as often as not. Something about the water turns them dark. Give me bones in the ground any day.”
• For she did not glow—not precisely—but she moved through a cloud of light as if it were dust. Her footsteps kicked up motes of brilliance. The light roiled around her feet and trailed behind her, refusing to settle. She carried a severed hand in her right hand. Her left wrist ended in a stump, not bloody, simply there. The motes of light seemed to gather near it, briefly forming fingers, then falling back to the ground again... The strangeness of the market seemed less somehow after the saint’s passage, or perhaps strangeness did not quite measure up to glory.
• “The moth says we need him,” said the dust-wife. “And one of your teeth has been bothering you, hasn’t it?”
  “Well, yes, but—”
  “I thought so. You wince a little when you chew.”
  “Eh! Toothdancer! Stir your stumps!”
  “But you’re going to have someone pull my tooth? Right now? Because a bug landed on him?”
• stopped wondering because her teeth had begun to dance. <> They twitched in her jaw like living things. She shrieked, not in pain but in horror, her mouth suddenly full of wiggling bone, as if she were in one of those nightmares where all her teeth fell out at once. It was like chewing and squirming and wiggling a loose tooth, wrapped all together, in time to the pennywhistle’s tune.
• “Sound’s expensive,” agreed the glamour seller. “People expect to see or feel certain things. Their minds do half the work. Play with sound and you have to convince the world, too, or else the echoes don’t come out right. And don’t ask me for something that will fool other dogs.
• “Fenris,” said the dust-wife. She snorted, looking over at Marra. “So you built yourself a dog and found yourself a wolf. If a fox shows up looking for you, we’ll have a proper fairy tale and I’ll start to worry.”
  “Why?” asked Marra. “If I’m in a fairy tale, I might actually have a chance.”
  “Fairy tales,” said the dust-wife heavily, “are very hard on bystanders. Particularly old women. I’d rather not dance myself to death in iron shoes, if it’s all the same to you.”
• “Everybody makes up a story about their sins. Sometimes to make them less, sometimes to make them the worst thing a mortal’s ever done. Really depends on the person. I’d wager this one’s more martyr than apologist, but you never can tell.”
• “Not all of them,” said the dust-wife, “not even most of them, come to that. And the ones who do tend to be in much larger kingdoms, not little nations poised between dangerous neighbors. Power calls to power.”
• “I don’t claim it,” said the dust-wife calmly. “I do it. Although most days it’s less speaking and more listening. People who won’t shut up in life rarely shut up in death.”
• I can’t remember Damia’s face, she thought, gazing dry-eyed into the dark, but I remember the lavender.
• “Well, he’s a dog. They don’t have an idea how the world’s supposed to be, so it doesn’t bother them when it isn’t.” Agnes frowned. “Except herding dogs, I think. They have a pretty clear idea in their heads, so they’re always nipping and worrying and trying to get it to fit. Of course, there’s people like that, too.”
• “Five of us,” said Fenris, looking over at the others approvingly. Marra leaned down and scratched Bonedog’s spine until his jaws clattered with pleasure. “Five is a fist. Five is a hand on the enemy’s throat.”
• “Interesting,” said the dust-wife slowly. “So you are rather more versatile than you claim, but health is the only gift that you’re willing to give.” <> “Health can’t go wrong,” said Agnes. “Most of the rest can. If you bless a mouse that they’ll always be happy, they run right out in front of a cat and get happily eaten. But health always works. No one regrets being healthy.”
• “I know how I’d start,” said the dust-wife finally. “Some things I expect you don’t know until you’re doing them. But it’s been done before.” She leveled a glare at Marra. “But don’t get any ideas. We’re here for a straightforward regicide, not to level the city.”
• Fenris shrugged. Marra remembered him handling the drunk at the well and felt a stab of envy for anyone who could go through life so unconcerned about possible physical violence.
• “They usually are. Somebody gives a lonely child a toy and they pour all their hopes and fears and problems into it. Do it long enough and intensely enough, and then it just needs a stray bit of bad luck and the toy wakes up. Of course, it knows that the only reason it’s alive is because of the child. A tiny personal god with one worshipper. It latches on and … well.” She clucked her tongue. “Normally you get them pried off and burned long before adolescence. Impressive that it lasted this long.”
• “Horrible puppet,” she said, “demon chicken, fairy godmother.” <> “And it’s a fool’s errand and we’re all going to die,” said Fenris. He patted her shoulder. “Still, I have to admit I didn’t see the chicken or the puppet coming.”
• No, it seemed not. The pain had softened over the years, the edges worn down by time. She gazed dry-eyed at their hands. Her left hand had never quite recovered from spinning the nettle thread. One of the knuckles was more swollen than the others, and there was a numb band along the side of her little finger.
• “So you are giving up your power in order to be liked,” said the dust-wife heavily. <> “No.” That was loud enough that Marra winced. “I am giving up my power in order to be decent. If warriors are allowed to stop killing people and bang their swords into plowshares, I ought to be allowed to keep chickens and give children good health and not curse them.”
• Neither was terribly unusual, but weavers usually picked a style and stuck to it. This followed no discernable pattern. Six splits would be close together, followed by a run of weft locks and then straight runs of a single color. The effect was disorientating. At the bottom right corner, for no apparent reason, the weaver had used golden embroidery thread to make a kind of knot, as if tying off the tapestry, except that was certainly not how you did it
• She knew why, of course. Vorling feared the godmother and Marra feared Vorling, links in a chain from predator to prey. I am a worm and Vorling is a starling. The worm has nothing to fear from the hawk, but I cannot quite convince myself of that …
• She stopped. Her eyes went round. She looked at Marra and Marra felt the same idea strike her all at once, a shared moment of realization. The king is dead. <> Slowly, holding the thought in her head as delicately as an egg, Marra turned to the dust-wife. “The dead kings live in a palace of dust below the living palace,” she said. She remembered the billow of tapestries, and the maid telling her about the maze beneath the palace.
• “It’s theater,” said Agnes. <> Fenris looked puzzled, but Marra nodded. “Yes, exactly. A royal funeral is like a wedding. And the christening is the same way. You need set dressing and staging and schedules. Horses don’t just show up spontaneously in the right outfits and march.”
• Actually setting up the feasts and the clothes and the priests was someone else’s problem.” <> Marra thought privately that it was probably mostly a woman’s problem, but at least Fenris was acknowledging it was work.
• She wondered if all the old stories of heroes slaying monsters and maidens locked in towers had involved long, tedious stretches of trying to find the monsters or build the towers in the first place... Who wants to hear the dull practical bits? <> Me. I do. It would make me feel less like I am failing.
• “We’ll find out soon enough. There’s nothing we can do either way.”
  “I can fret,” snapped Marra. “And I intend to!”
  “And I won’t stop you.” Agnes patted her arm. “A good fret is balm for the soul. Just don’t overdo it.”
• Nothing is fair, except that we try to make it so. That’s the point of humans, maybe, to fix things the gods haven’t managed.
• Bonedog solved the problem by straining at his leash in toward one of the branchings, although it turned out that he only wanted to pee against a wall, which he did, meditatively, while everyone else pretended to be interested in the bas-reliefs on the walls. <> The branching, newly anointed, led to another room like the last one
• The voice was made of echoes, of small green tiles falling from the badly mortared sarcophagus, of golden ornaments rattling together like metal cobwebs.
• “I might be able to still enchant the babe,” said Agnes a bit doubtfully. “Even if we miss the christening. But it doesn’t take as well, not with humans. You lay a name on them and suddenly their whole future is rolled out like dough in front of you, but it doesn’t last. Life starts to bake it pretty quick.”
• She unrolled the frayed bit of tapestry in her pack, running her fingers along the weave. Three lines of thread. The middle one a single continuous line, the two flanking a combination of split weaves and weft locks. Six split weaves in a row. At the time she’d thought it was absurd, ugly, fiddly stuff, but it wasn’t. It was marking the openings on the walls of the tombs.