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

she said, “I will need to sleep tonight. I cannot walk for another three days.”
    “Sleep, then,” said the dwarfs. “We will wake you at sunrise.”
    She went to sleep that night in a hayrick, in a meadow, with the dwarfs around her, wondering if she wouldever wake to see another morning.
    The castle in the Forest of Acaire was a gray, blocky thing, all grown over with climbing roses. They tumbled down into the moat and grew almost as high as the tallest tower. Each year the roses grew out farther: close to the stone of the castle there were only dead, brown stems and creepers, with old thorns sharp as knives. Fifteen feet away the plants weregreen and the blossoming roses grew thickly. The climbing roses, living and dead, were a brown skeleton, splashed with color, that rendered the gray fastness less precise.
    The trees in the Forest of Acaire were pressed thickly together, and the forest floor was dark. A century before, it had been a forest only in name: it had been hunting lands, a royalpark, home to deer and wild boar and birdsbeyond counting. Now the forest was a dense tangle, and the old paths through the forest were overgrown and forgotten.
    The fair-haired girl in the high tower slept.
    All the people in the castle slept. Each of them was fast asleep, excepting only one.
    The old woman’s hair was gray, streaked with white, and was so sparse her scalp showed. She hobbled, angrily, through the castle, leaning on herstick, as if she were driven only by hatred, slamming doors, talking to herself as she walked. “Up the blooming stairs and past the blinking cook and what are you cooking now, eh, great lard-arse, nothing in your pots and pans but dust and more dust, and all you ever ruddy do is snore.”
    Into the kitchen garden, neatly tended. The old woman picked rampion and rocket, and she pulled a large turnipfrom the ground.
    Eighty years before, the palace had held five hundred chickens; the pigeon coop had been home to hundreds of fat white doves; rabbits had run, white-tailed, across the greenery of the grass square inside the castle walls, and fish had swum in the moat and the pond: carp and trout and perch. There remained now only three chickens. All the sleeping fish had been netted and carriedout of the water. There were no more rabbits, no more doves.
    She had killed her first horse sixty years back, and eaten as much of it as she could before the flesh went rainbow-colored and the carcass began to stink and crawl with blueflies and maggots. Now she butchered the larger mammals only in midwinter, when nothing rotted and she could hack and sear frozen chunks of the animal’s corpseuntil the spring thaw.
    The old woman passed a mother, asleep, with a baby dozing at her breast. She dusted them, absently, as she passed and made certain that the baby’s sleepy mouth remained on the nipple.
    She ate her meal of turnips and greens in silence.
    It was the first great grand city they had come to. The city gates were high and impregnably thick, but they were open wide.
    The threedwarfs were all for going around it, for they were uncomfortable in cities, distrusted houses and streets as unnatural things, but they followed their queen.
    Once in the city, the sheer numbers of people made them uncomfortable. There were sleeping riders on sleeping horses, sleeping cabmen up on still carriages that held sleeping passengers, sleeping children clutching their toys and hoops andthe whips for their spinning tops; sleeping flower women at their stalls of brown, rotten, dried flowers; even sleeping fishmongers beside their marble slabs. The slabs were covered with the remains of stinking fish, and they were crawling with maggots. The rustle and movement of the maggots was the only movement and noise the queen and the dwarfs encountered.
    “We should not be here,” grumbledthe dwarf with the angry brown beard.
    “This road is more direct than any other road we could follow,” said the queen. “Also it leads to the