Free Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt

previously. “Now it covers a mile, perhaps two miles, each day.”
    “It willbe here tomorrow,” said the sot, and he drained his flagon, then gestured to the innkeeper to fill it once more. “There is nowhere for us to go to escape it. Tomorrow, everything here will be asleep. Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us.”
    “What is there to be afraid of in sleep?” asked the smallest dwarf. “It’s just sleep. We all do it.”
    “Go and look,”said the sot. He threw back his head, and drank as much as he could from his flagon. Then he looked back at them, with eyes unfocused, as if he were surprised to still see them there. “Well, go on. Go and look for yourselves.” He swallowed the remaining drink, then he laid his head upon the table.
    They went and looked.
    “Asleep?” asked the queen. “Explain yourselves. How so, asleep?”
    The dwarfstood upon the table so he could look her in theeye. “Asleep,” he repeated. “Sometimes crumpled upon the ground. Sometimes standing. They sleep in their smithies, at their awls, on milking stools. The animals sleep in the fields. Birds, too, slept, and we saw them in trees or dead and broken in fields where they had fallen from the sky.”
    The queen wore a wedding gown, blindingly white, whiterthan the snow, as white as her skin. Around her, attendants, maids of honor, dressmakers, and milliners clustered and fussed.
    “And why did you three also not fall asleep?”
    The dwarf shrugged. He had a russet-brown beard that had always made the queen think of an angry hedgehog attached to the lower portion of his face. “Dwarfs are magical things. This sleep is a magical thing also. I felt sleepy,mind.”
    “And then?”
    She was the queen, and she was questioning him as if they were alone. Her attendants began removing her gown, taking it away, folding and wrapping it, so the final laces and ribbons could be attached to it, so it would be perfect.
    Tomorrow was the queen’s wedding day. Everything needed to be perfect.
    “By the time we returned to Foxen’s inn they were all asleep, every manjack-and-jill of them. It is expanding, the zone of the spell, a few miles every day. We think it is expanding faster with each day that passes.”
    The mountains that separated the two lands were impossibly high, but not wide. The queen could count the miles. She pushed one pale hand through her raven-black hair, and she looked most serious.
    “What do you think, then?” she asked the dwarf. “IfI went there. Would I sleep, as they did?”
    He scratched his arse, unself-consciously. “You slept for ayear,” he said. “And then you woke again, none the worse for it. If any of the bigguns can stay awake there, it’s you.”
    Outside, the townsfolk were hanging bunting in the streets and decorating their doors and windows with white flowers. Silverware had been polished and protesting childrenhad been forced into tubs of lukewarm water (the oldest child always got the first dunk and the hottest, cleanest water) and then scrubbed with rough flannels until their faces were raw and red; they were then ducked under the water, and the backs of their ears were washed as well.
    “I am afraid,” said the queen, “that there will be no wedding tomorrow.”
    She called for a map of the kingdom, identifiedthe villages closest to the mountains, and sent messengers to tell the inhabitants to evacuate to the coast or risk royal displeasure.
    She called for her first minister and informed him that he would be responsible for the kingdom in her absence, and that he should do his best neither to lose it nor to break it.
    She called for her fiancé and told him not to take on so, and that they would stillsoon be married, even if he was but a prince and she already a queen, and she chucked him beneath his pretty chin and kissed him until he smiled.
    She called for her mail shirt.
    She called for her sword.
    She called for provisions, and for her horse,