It nestles close to the heart of the city, where the lord rests. Spun in silks and truths that taste of lies, in the storyteller’s market which is Samudhrapura’s glory. You’ve always found it ironic that a lord who never gave his tale away had fostered the silken market where all stories can be sold.
He wants to fold his body flat, make little cuts with scissors and unfold it into a paper–doll chain like a magician. This silver-streaked fritillary beast that is standing in his room covered in shadowed scars that look like barbed wire.
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The Circle has a gutter cap tight in the middle of it, and beyond that a ladder that descends to the ground. Around the first steps of the ladder the couple have placed a mattress, a steel box filled with odds and ends, and a broken wooden crate that could be considered their cupboard. In the shadowy corner is a small metal box that is Nina’s alone and Kaz stays well away from it.
That is how the Green Man finds you, a sprite like himself with petals in your hair, weeping to the rose bush about an older sister married and sent off to a distant land where there are no trees for miles around.
The gods have always flitted in and out of my dreams, their words never making any sense to me – a lowly human. They never seem to detect me listening in the dark or, if they are aware of my presence, they do not care. Only on that hot, humid night did any of them try to speak to me.
I am far from home. Knee-deep in the salt pond, with a shovel and a barrel, the sun flaming upon my head like fire, raising blisters on my skin. I sense a boil bubbling on my feet as my eyes crawl beyond the treeline at the mound of a hill, waiting for the sun to set. Our time is here. Our only chance. The barber witch of the woods has whispered her secrets into all our enslaved hairs, but I alone stand and wonder what my role is.