Yoon Ha Lee's Blog, page 9

In the Hills of the Sun, a cat-eyed witch once received a visitor. She had been gathering herbs for her stew, in which several luckless ptarmigans and a rabbit were already simmering, and was wondering whether to break out the last of her peppercorns, when she heard a knocking at the door.

“Come in,” said the witch absently. “Would you like something to eat?”

“I would be much obliged for some breakfast,” said the visitor, “but I have nothing to offer you.”

The witch looked up at the visitor, a tawny woman with her hair in a crown of braids held in place with hairpins decorated by feather tufts, and a talon-curved knife hanging at her belt. She wore a scratched pair of spectacles and her boots looked as though they were one day’s travel from falling off her feet, but her cloak was very fine, and its hood was lined with soft white down. “Don’t trouble yourself about that,” the witch said. “Have a seat?”

The traveler shook the snow off her boots and wiped them before coming in, then sat, polite as you please. “I had heard that there is a witch in the Hills who likes to eat visitors for breakfast,” she said, quirking an eyebrow.

“People say the unkindest things about people they don’t know,” the witch remarked, ladling the traveler a hearty bowl of stew with rice and a mug of hot citron tea. “What I would like to know is, why would you come to the hut of a witch suspected of consuming her visitors?”

The traveler smiled. “Perhaps it’s occurred to me that such a witch might grow lonely for companionship.”

“Presumptuous,” the witch said, not unsmiling. She set down a platter of sliced bread and a little dish of salted butter, then sat to nibble at one of the slices herself. “What would someone like you know of the ways of witches?”

“I know that in the Hills of the Sun there is no such thing as breakfast,” the traveler said, “because there is no night, and thus no one ever sleeps, either. It must grow tiresome, long days that stretch ever longer, with no one for company but the birds.”

“The birds are perfectly delicious company,” the witch said. “And their bonesong is welcome when I need to do some cleaning.” She looked meaningfully at the drumstick the traveler was gnawing on.

The traveler raised an eyebrow. “Even birds eat birds,” she said, and there was something of the raptor’s hunger in her eye. “Still, it would be remiss for the queen of the birds not to seek to spare some few of her subjects.”

“I’ll make you a bargain, then,” the witch said. “Come visit me once a year, so that I have someone to practice my cooking on, and I will turn my attentions to the rabbits and voles instead. Unless you are also here on their behalf?”

“Hardly,” said the queen of the birds. “The rabbits and voles can fend for themselves. Besides, they, too, make an excellent breakfast.”

For cyphomandra. Prompt: breakfast.

At the yearly cotillion ball, in the palaces of cloud and thunder and seething plasma, astromancers were introduced to the Society of the Sky. One of these astromancers was a young woman who looked out the windows of her room and sighed mournfully every night. She was attentive enough to her studies, in which she studied spiral density waves and the chemical composition of gas giants. In the mornings (as determined by the celestial bells), she embroidered constellations on cloth-of-void, paying particular attention to her favorites in the shape of dipper or dragon, and the pale luminescent thread gleamed in her hands and over the sliver of her needle. In the afternoons she attended serious lectures on the proper forms of address for a magister of red giants, and practiced her handwriting with a dip pen and shining ink, and learned to fold handkerchiefs into the shapes of generation ships. In the evenings, she brewed tea fragrant with starblossoms and flavored it with the honey of distant worlds.

As the day of the ball approached, the astromancer’s teachers noticed that, for all her diligence, she continued to look out the windows and sigh. They asked her if she was nervous about her presentation to the Society of the Sky, and assured her that her work was of more than adequate standard; that she would find suitable partners aplenty at the ball. The young woman smiled inscrutably at them and said that no, she suffered no such loss of nerve, and that all she needed was some quiet time to compose herself.

During the nighttimes—and nighttimes in the cloud palaces were dark indeed—the young woman stayed up and worked on an outfit of her own devising. She knew her teachers would not approve, and yet she was compelled by the vision, or perhaps not-vision, that came to her with the clarity of a mirror in the dark. Her teachers had taught her well: by now she knew her tools so thoroughly that she could work with only the faintest of candle flames to guide her eyes, and her fingers wielded needle and thimble and scissors without drawing blood. And if she was listless during the day from lack of sleep, well, her teachers attributed this to her customary melancholy, and convinced themselves that, as with most young astromancers, her full entry into the Society of the Sky would prove the cure for her moods.

At last the morning of the ball dawned. The dance hall was bright with lanterns from which shone clear silvery light, and one by one the young astromancers entered with the decorum to which they had been trained. They wore dresses in flamboyant crimson, highlighted with beads of spinel and speckled amber; robes of shining blue trimmed with lace like quantum froth; earrings from which beads of lapis and snowflake obsidian spun orrery-fashion, and bracelets that chimed with pleasing dissonances. Each astromancer appeared in the bright colors of the finery they had made for themselves—all but one.

The melancholy astromancer, unlike all her peers, showed up in a suit of black that she had embroidered with black threads, so that she was the only one in the hall entire dressed in that color rather than the radiant colors of living stars. A strand of black pearls and onyx circled her throat, and her black hair was caught up in a net hung with polished chips of obsidian. She raised her chin at the stares and smiled, in her element at last; and if she was not the most popular of the season’s astromancers, still she did not lack for offers to dance, or suitors to bring her petits-fours and glasses of radiant liqueur.

For Andrew S. Prompt: cotillion, stars.

Once in a land of dragons there lived a great dragon queen who collected eggs. Not the living eggs of her kin, but rather the preserved eggshards of youngling dragons. There were gold-rimmed shards from the firedrakes that built their nests near volcanoes, and transparent, glass-like shards from the moondrakes who danced their wonder-dances during the new moon so that the land might not be entirely dark, barnacle-encrusted shards from the seadrakes who kept their eggs in the wrecks of galleons where eyeless human kings stared from devalued coins. All these the dragon queen arranged upon the shelves she had carved into her lair.

Each day the dragon queen polished the eggshards with cloths she had gathered from diverse sources: ballgowns with their froth of lace, pennants-of-war dyed gaily bright, an immense quilt patched together from the jackets of beheaded knights. In the mornings she admired the way that the bloom of dawnlight glistened over the shards, and in the evenings she listened to the captive crystalline thrumming of dragon lullabies. And for all the beauty of her collection, she was reminded that all her egglings had flown away long aeons ago to distant worlds, there to found their own lineages and raise egglings of their own.

For all that, the dragon queen was not one to give herself over to regrets, and the collection was, in its way, a comfort. She did not dwell on her essential loneliness until one day, after a delegation from the queen of birds departed, she found an unexpected addition to her collection: a misty stone of lavender and smoke-silver carved into the shape of a dragon’s unbroken egg.

It was no true egg, of course; she heard no eggling within, dreaming dreams of flight and deep-diving and hoarding bright pebbles, jay feathers, and shed snakeskins. (Hoarding behavior begins with small things and progresses to the grander treasures for which dragons are better known.) Nevertheless, the stone’s misty swirls danced and shimmered in the light, and whispers in the language of dragons emanated from its mazy heart.

The dragon queen attended to the gift just as diligently as though it were a true egg, although her egg-laying years were far behind her. She curled around it to warm it with the heat of her regard, and recited meditations of fire and frost to it in the mornings, and crooned to it at night. All the while the stone egg’s swirls did not stop dancing and shimmering and whispering.

One night in the dead of winter, while the winds drove needles of ice against the mountains and the world outside turned silver-black, the dragon queen woke to the sound of a terrible crack. She roused immediately and hurried to her beloved collection. She let out a great cry when she saw that the stone egg had cracked and lay in pieces at the center of the collection.

Moments later, however, she heard the unmistakable lilting song of dragons, a voice from each of the scattered pieces: her far-scattered children were greeting her across unmappable distances. The stone egg’s enchantment had been hatched by the persistence of the dragon queen’s affection. She called back to her children and they answered, telling her of the egglings they had raised, the museums they had founded, the constellations they had studied as they flew from world to world.

The dragon queen did not abandon her collection, but from then on she never spent a day without speaking to one of her family.

For Telophase. Prompt: egg.

Once in a border keep where the winters were tempest-winged and the sun never appeared without robes of violet clouds, there lived a youth who liked to feed the birds. In particular they were fond of magpies with their sleek black-and-white plumage and their cheery cries. Other people who lived in the keep viewed the magpies with scorn, for they were said to bring chancy luck at best, and they made a racket in the mornings. Or during any time of day.

Nevertheless, the youth insisted on continuing to save morsels for the magpies. As time passed and the youth grew closer to adulthood, they came to be blamed for the magpies’ antics, and the keep elders greeted them with cuffs and curses. The youth only said that even tricksters deserved to eat, and continued to wheedle crusts of bread or handfuls of seed from the kitchens.

Once the magpies stole all the keep’s light, from the flames dancing in the lanterns to the gleam of starlight upon spearpoint and armor-joint, and scattered the flicker-tapestry in the nearby wood, with the result that no one could see a thing for the next two nights, until the enchantment dissolved. Squirrels gnawed at the tapestry and undid the spell-strands. But by then the magpies, had lost interest anyway.

Another time the magpies switched the voice of the keep’s great warning bell with the voice of the keep’s chantmaster, which everyone found out on the morning of devotions. The chantmaster had to be restrained from hunting down the youth and deafening them with the clangor. (Deafening everyone, really.) The youth, who had acquired a certain storm-sense for magpie tricks, had elected to spend the day holed up in a well-insulated section of the library with some hastily-made sandwiches.

Most notorious of all was the time when the magpies switched left and right, which played havoc with everything from a dinner of state—the keep was hosting a delegation from a country where it was taboo to use the left hand to eat with—to the warmasters’ drills, to say nothing of everyone getting lost and books having to be read in mirrors. Even then the youth persisted in their affection for the magpies, and passed the birds baubles of bead or bright thread for their nests. (In secret. They weren’t so indiscreet.)

Yet when invaders came riding from the high hills, the magpies proved surprisingly useful. No one but the youth would have guessed it of them. The magpies filched the edges from the invaders’ swords and placed them on the rocks underfoot: instant caltrops. They snagged scraps of cloud from the sky-heights and clogged the invaders’ helmets with them, making it impossible to see or speak clearly. And they rearranged the countryside so that east was west and north was south, a swirl of misdirection with the keep at its inaccessible center.

Afterward, when the invasion force retired in disarray, the lady of the keep came to tender the magpies and their youth an apology. The magpies’ response was to braid a cage of crickets into her hair. The lady gritted her teeth, smiled, and accepted that the magpies’ nature could not be changed, so the least she could do was accept it gracefully. As for the youth, they were conspicuously absent during the exchange, but they were later seen napping in a corner, with several watchful magpies perched on their shoulders to make sure the chantmaster didn’t remember old grudges.

For Storme. Prompt: tricksters, loyalty.

Once, in a far land, there lived a magician whose great passion was not her studies but her food. In her youth she had applied herself passionately to her studies, but her particular school of magic emphasized asceticism and long hours of meditation. However, once she left her teachers and founded her own tower (she was enough of a traditionalist to prefer a tower, and humane enough to call it out of the earth’s bones in a remote location where it wouldn’t trigger seismic disturbances or ghost-plagues), her discipline began to slip. Away from her teachers and her solemn fellow students, it was not long before she began dreaming up feasts of custard and roast goose, couscous and eggplant, quail eggs and minty lemonades.

Traders soon learned of the new tower from far-wanderers and dream-seekers. The first ones brought the usual goods favored by magicians: whirring jeweled orreries, dried plum petals gathered from cloud-veiled peaks during the new moon, crystals brimming over with their own iridescence. Although the magician was too kind to say so outright, none of these tools of her trade interested her much. She bought some of this and that so that the traders would see some profit for their journey, and bid them come back next time with exotic foods.

The traders went away well-provisioned and laden with the kinds of small gifts that only a magician could provide, such as charms of trebuchet-warding (very useful in certain siege-ridden parts of the world), bat-binding, and may-your-sewing-needles-never-break. And then the magician settled back into her existence of meditations broken by the occasional galloping thunderstorm, and the even more occasional fantasy of chicken stuffed with rice, jujubes, and chestnuts, or tea-of-quinces.

The magician was not entirely idle during this time. Her mechanical servants gathered rarities such as firefowl eggs (the yolks had an unfortunate tendency to overcook) and mistfruit and the milk of dragons. At first these foods pleased her, but after a while her palate grew jaded and even these palled.

A year passed and the traders returned. This time there were three-fruit marmalades and rose liqueurs; a herd of plump, comically nearsighted goats ready for the slaughter; kumquat pickles in jars painted jewel-bright. The magician took in the goats but did not have the heart to roast them.

The traders had yet one more surprise for the magician: a jar of chopped dried pepper, piquantly red and to be handled only with gloves. (The magician had plenty of those.)

“A pepper?” the magician said, a little dubiously. It wasn’t that she disliked spicy food—she liked it very much indeed—but she wasn’t sure how far a single pepper would go.

“Its taste is very subtle,” said the oldest and wisest of the traders. “But chop it fine and sprinkle a little of it over each meal you wish to make special, and someday it will reward you.” More than that they would not say.

Years upon years passed. The magician experimented with the pepper, and found its taste so subtle that she could not detect it at all. Nevertheless, each year when the traders stopped by, she made use of it in preparing the welcome dinner so that they would not think her unappreciative.

At last illness came upon the magician, and she knew that death would overtake her before the traders came again. Moved by whimsy, she made herself a simple meal and seasoned it with the mysterious pepper. But this time, when she ate, all the memories of those previous dinners came back to her: not just the savor of roast boar or rare slices of beef alternating with candied ginger, but the traders’ convivial stories of seas where squid danced paeans to the kelp-gods, and the way they had laughed at the antics of her mechanical servants, and the pleasure of company after long months alone. And so it was at the end of her life that the magician finally understood the true value of what the traders had brought to her in their yearly visits.

For cohomology. Prompt: recursive pepper.

Once in a wood by a great city there lived a family of foxes. The head of the family, who wore the guise of lady or gentleman or other as the whim took them, had a splendid collection of jewels given to them by any number of human lovers. The younger foxes of the family studied this art of seduction diligently, not because foxes have any use for human baubles, but because the baubles they received from their lovers were an essential component in the game known as “human-fishing.” Any number of humans could be lured into the wood for further pranks by the strategic placement of necklaces, rings, crowns; and from that point on they could be entangled in fox spells and fox riddles for endless hours of entertainment.

The very youngest fox, however, had no interest in any of this, to the despair of her family. Rather, her interest was in science. This in itself wasn’t entirely dishonorable (from a fox viewpoint, anyway). After all, her sire said, with a certain determination to make the best of the situation, one of their ancestors had been the lover of a court alchemist, which was almost like science. And if it made her happy, it made her happy.

The real problem was that her family had no idea how to accommodate the youngest fox’s hunger for knowledge. It would have been one thing if she had a foxish interest in ethology or ecology, which could at least be related to the practical business of hunting. Even foxes who spend their spare time discussing trends in hair ornaments and the proper length of hems need to eat. No: the youngest fox showed distressingly little concern for the ways of the woods, and instead spent her time on boulders peering at the sky, or muttering to herself as she sketched diagrams, or keeping notes in a ledger book that her puzzled but kindly oldest sibling had stolen from an accountant lover. “Accountants are the hardest to steal from,” they had remarked, hoping to slip in some proper education. “They always keep everything organized.” The youngest fox had merely nodded distractedly, but at least she showed up for lessons long enough to practice shapeshifting so that she could use her human form to record her mysterious experiments.

One evening, while the youngest fox was investigating an ornamented spyglass that she had cajoled the head of the family to giving to her, the rest of the family met to discuss her future. “We can’t send her to the city to make her fortune,” said the head of the family, and there was general agreement. “She’s a disaster at seduction and she’ll undoubtedly use her teeth to get herself out of any trouble. But it’s clear that the woods are not the right place for her either.” Indeed, they had often caught the youngest fox pining over mysterious human implements like calipers, pendulums, and prisms.

“Well,” said one of the siblings, “even if we can’t teach her what she wants to learn, surely we can find her someone who can.”

The youngest fox was bemused, then outraged, when over the course of the next month she found any number of measuring instruments and lenses scattered in the woods, instead of the more usual baubles. She spent her time gathering up the instruments and hoarding them, then, without telling anyone, slipped into the city in search of the objects’ owner. (Another disadvantage, to her family’s additional despair: she was that rarity, an honest fox.)

The youngest fox had not been neglecting her lessons quite so much as her family supposed, even if she rarely made use of the skills that they strove to impart to her. In this case, she tracked the instruments’ owner, following their scent in the city’s dreams. This person thought in great wheeling orbits and precessions and cycles, in measurements and the limitations of precision, and the youngest fox trembled with excitement at the wisdom in their mind.

So it was that a very surprised scholar, who had without success hired investigators to locate her stolen instruments, opened the door that night and saw a modestly beautiful youth with a bundle wrapped up in silk. “I must apologize for my relatives,” the youth said, “but I believe these belong to you?” And, as the scholar unwrapped the bundle, the youth said, rather breathlessly, “You may have them back, but perhaps you have need of someone who can protect your belongings from importunate foxes?”

The scholar, who was not only wise in the ways of astronomy and geometry but had also noted the youth’s amber eyes and the telltale russet sheen of their hair, only smiled. “Come in,” she said, “and I will teach you what I know.”

Naturally, the youngest fox’s family had been watching. “That was the fastest seduction I ever saw,” the oldest of the siblings said, “and it didn’t even involve taking off her clothes. I would never have thought it of her.”

“Maybe science is good for something after all?” said the second-oldest.

The head of the family merely licked a paw in satisfaction. Perhaps it wasn’t how they had intended things to go, but a happy ending was as happy ending.

For ahasvers. Prompt: SCIENCE!

Military fantasy forthcoming in Operation Arcana, ed. John Joseph Adams. Thanks to E. Lily Yu, Sonya Taaffe, and Yune Kyung Lee for the beta.

A music student on a space station befriends a lost foxwife. I may have spilled a lot of hazy memories of Korea all over this one. Thanks to Yune Kyung Lee and Helen Keeble for the beta. Forthcoming in Clarkesworld Magazine.

Star-crossed cyborg lovers, as it were. Thanks to Yune Kyung Lee and Sonya Taaffe for the beta. Forthcoming in Neil Clarke’s anthology Upgraded.

I cop to being influenced by some of the deliciously macabre imagery in the computer RPG Planescape: Torment.

Con or Bust is an annual online auction that

helps people of color/non-white people attend SFF conventions (how to request assistance; upcoming cons). It is administered by Kate Nepveu under the umbrella of the Carl Brandon Society, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization whose mission is to increase racial and ethnic diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction. Con or Bust isn’t a scholarship and isn’t limited by geography, type of con-goer, or con; its goal is simply to help fans of color go to SFF cons and be their own awesome selves.

This year I am offering:

A bit (or more than a bit) of sf/f, just for you!:

I will write sf/f to a brief, mutually-agreed-upon prompt for you. I will do my best to accommodate any reasonable prompt, but there are some things that I can’t learn how to do fast enough; for example, strongly historical sf/f is probably out, ditto non-parodic romance. I have to warn you that I write the worst sex scenes ever, in case you were going to go there. But origami spaceships? Metaphysical guns? Anime in-jokes? No problem.

If you like, I can elaborate upon the setting or characters of one of my existing pieces of original fiction (see [Fiction on this] website for a list), including the StoryNexus game Winterstrike (but note that I am offering static fiction, NOT a game add-on).

Your fiction will be at least 500 words long.

If bidding goes over $50, it will be at least 1,000 words long.

If bidding goes over $100, it will be at least 2,000 words long.

I will endeavor to be done by the end of March.

In the event that bidding goes over $250, it will be at least 4,000 words long. In this case, I will endeavor to be done by the end of August.

A fiction critique of up to 10,000 words: This can be either the first chunk of a novel or a single shorter work.

A signed copy of Conservation of Shadows, my short story collection. I will ship anywhere reasonable (most nations okay, Mars not so much).

In all cases, see the link for more details; and of course, there are many great items on offer right now. The auction closes Sunday, February 23, 2014 at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time.