Free Codespell by Kelly McCullough

the new shape was a harsh caw of pure agony. My second: an Anglo-Saxonism of the four-letter variety. My third was Melchior’s name, called out as I swept forward above the surfboard and caught him in my claws. It was only just in time. Whether the shark with Dairn’s eyes had already decided to stop playing with us, or whether the final attack was triggered by his awareness of my transformation, I don’t know. Whatever the case, when he hit this time, it was no gentle nip, it was a crushing blow of the jaws, shattering the board from below.

    But I was already climbing up and away, with Melchior hanging beneath me. As I headed back toward Raven House, I could see the shark arrowing along below us, and I had a nasty suspicion that reaching land wouldn’t stop him.

    “Mel?” I cawed in my raven’s voice.

    “Yeah.”

    “What do you think the odds are that thing’s going to come out of the water in the near future?”

    “Let’s just say I don’t think we should to stop to wash the dishes when we get back to the house.”

    “That’s what I thought, too. Is there some way we can warn Haemun to find someplace safe to wait things out? I doubt it’ll stay long after we leave.”

    There was a long pause before Melchior finally answered, “Yeah, hang on.”

    He whistled a choppy string of binary, then spat. A short crossbow bolt with a note tied around it emerged from his mouth and went winging ahead of us.

    “How do you know he’ll find it in time?” I asked.

    “I aimed for a window.”

    “That should do it.” Haemun is not a fan of messes in Raven House. “What if it hits him?”

    “No problem, it’s got a blunted tip. It might hurt like Hades’ own kick in the ass, but it shouldn’t do any major tissue damage.”

    “Good enough. Next question: Where to?”

    “How about Castle Discord?” he asked.

    “I thought you didn’t much like Eris,” I cawed.

    “I don’t. She scares me, all the way down to the chipset. Worse, I owe her my soul.”

    That was quite literally true. Without the intervention of Eris and Tyche, or Discord and Fortune if you prefer, webgoblins and their kin would never have developed self-awareness.

    “Shouldn’t that make it better?” I asked.

    “No. She didn’t do it for my sake. She did it to thwart the Fates. Knowing you exist because Fate was trying to come up with a better way to rule the world is bad enough. Knowing that the reason you’re a person and not a thing is because Discord thought it would make for a good joke at Fate’s expense is so much worse. I’m the moral equivalent of that damn golden apple that started the Trojan War. If a different humor had taken her the day she messed around with webgoblin design specs, the multiverse might have a better class of rubber vomit instead of me. Quite frankly, it gives me the wobblies in my subroutines.”

    “So why suggest we go see her?” The question was becoming more urgent, as we would soon reach the House and its built-in faerie ring.

    “Because, for reasons unknown and possibly unknowable, she likes you. If she can think of some way to make helping you irritate the forces of order more than not helping you would, she’ll do it. Since she’s enormously powerful and—as usual—you can use all the help you can get, it seems worth the risk. Besides, it’s not like we’re talking about moving into her basement or anything. Even you’re not that cracked.”

    Then we arrived at Raven House and decision time.

    “Castle Discord it is,” I croaked, dropping down to touch the swirl of black within the green stone of the lanai.

    We entered the faerie ring and found . . . infinite possibility. I hovered in a million different places all at the same time, none of them the one I wanted. The Castle Discord faerie ring I’d used in the past didn’t currently exist. No surprise really; Castle Discord didn’t exactly exist in the normal sense of the word, either. It changed constantly to fit