![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Free Short Story!
Jun. 3rd, 2011 11:47 amJust put up "Poisoned Dreams" on my blog (go here or click "Read A Story"). It's from Sword & Sorceress XI, 1994, and is one of my darker, more twisted tales, with an embittered, crippled fay and a princess willing to do anything, pay any price, to earn her father's love. I hope you enjoy it!
At the first stirring of the single uneaten cock, the fay lifted her head and turned eyes like milky opals toward the east. The delicately pointed ears that protruded through her matted amethyst hair quivered. Ember-light reflected dully from the loop of iron around her neck, no thicker than a wire and joined by only a twist of rawhide that even a child could have pulled loose. Purplish discoloration spread across the moony skin from under the wire, leaving cracked, oozing scars. As the fay bent over the ashes once more, the movement shifted her tattered cloak to reveal the wings which hung, crippled, down her back.
With one finger, she traced over the runes, coaxing them from luck to dread and from dread to cowardice and from cowardice to mortal terror. The King had commanded her to work a charm of victory for the morning's battle and so she would, but he had not said whose victory.
At the first stirring of the single uneaten cock, the fay lifted her head and turned eyes like milky opals toward the east. The delicately pointed ears that protruded through her matted amethyst hair quivered. Ember-light reflected dully from the loop of iron around her neck, no thicker than a wire and joined by only a twist of rawhide that even a child could have pulled loose. Purplish discoloration spread across the moony skin from under the wire, leaving cracked, oozing scars. As the fay bent over the ashes once more, the movement shifted her tattered cloak to reveal the wings which hung, crippled, down her back.
With one finger, she traced over the runes, coaxing them from luck to dread and from dread to cowardice and from cowardice to mortal terror. The King had commanded her to work a charm of victory for the morning's battle and so she would, but he had not said whose victory.
