Free Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear

cheek.
    “Don’t mourn.” The voice is uninflected, but his palp reaches out softly and strokes her leg. “You will remember us.”
    We made it to nine. I yanked my hands back, Hadiyah pressed hers down. The first push didn’t do it. She realigned, lips moving on what must have been a prayer now, and thrust forward sharply, the weight of her shoulders behind it.
    Something glistening shot from Tara’s lips and sailed over Hadiyah’s shoulder, and Tara took a deep harsh breath and started to cough, her eyes squinched shut, tears running down her cheeks.
    “He’s gone,” she said, when she got her breath.
    She rolled over and grabbed my hands, and wailed against my shoulder like a much younger child, and would not be consoled.
    There’s enough room in Tara’s implant for three or four Libraries of Congress. And it seems to be full. It also seems like she’s the only one who can make sense of the information, and not all of it, and not all the time.
    She’s different now. Quieter. Not withdrawn, but . . . sad. And she looks at me sometimes with these calm, strange eyes, and I almost feel as if she’s the mother.
    I should have stopped her sooner. I didn’t think.
    At least she hasn’t tried to strangle herself again.
    Hadiyah suggested we not tell anybody what had happened just yet, and I agreed. I won’t let my daughter wind up in some government facility, being pumped for clues to alien technology and science.
    I won’t.
    She’s ten years old. She’s got school to get through. We’ll figure the rest of it out in our own time. And maybe she’ll be more like herself again as time goes by.
    But the first thing she did when she recovered was paint a watercolor. She said it was a poem.
    She said it was her name.

The Cold Blacksmith
    “Old man, old man, do you tinker?”
    Weyland Smith raised up his head from his anvil, the heat rolling beads of sweat across his face and his sparsely forested scalp, but he never stopped swinging his hammer. The ropy muscles of his chest knotted and released with every blow, and the clamor of steel on steel echoed from the trees. The hammer looked to weigh as much as the Smith, but he handled it like a bit of cork on a twig. He worked in a glade, out of doors, by a deep cold well, just right for quenching and full of magic fish. Whoever had spoken was still under the shade of the trees, only a shadow to one who squinted through the glare of the sun.
    “Happen I’m a blacksmith, Miss,” he said.
    As if he could be anything else, in his leather apron, sweating over forge and anvil in the noonday sun, limping on a lamed leg.
    “Do you take mending, old man?” she asked, stepping forth into the light.
    He thought the girl might be pretty enough in a country manner, her features a plump-cheeked outline under the black silk veil pinned to the corners of her hat. Not a patch on his own long-lost swan-maiden Olrun, though Olrun had left him after seven years to go with her two sisters, and his two brothers had gone with them as well, leaving Weyland alone.
    But Weyland kept her ring and with it her promise. And for seven times seven years to the seventh times, he’d kept it, seduced it back when it was stolen away, held it to his heart in fair weather and foul. Olrun’s promisering. Olrun’s promise to return.
    Olrun who had been fair as ice, with shoulders like a blacksmith, shoulders like a giantess.
    This girl could not be less like her. Her hair was black and it wasn’t pinned, all those gleaming curls a-tumble across the shoulders of a dress that matched her hair and veil and hat. A little linen sack in her left hand was just the natural color, and something in it chimed when she shifted. Something not too big. He heard it despite the tolling of the hammer that never stopped.
    “I’ll do what I’m paid to.” He let his hammer rest, and shifted his grip on the tongs. His wife’s ring slid on its chain around his neck, catching on chest hair. He couldn’t wear it on