Free Birthnight by Michelle Sagara

Introduction
     
    Memory is a tricky thing. When I decided I
would reprint all of my short stories as individual ebooks, I also
decided I would take the time—and space—to write introductions for
each of the stories. But
Birthnight
had been reprinted
once, in 2003, for a collection of first stories by various
authors. So I already had an introduction for the short story.
Except, rereading it, there are things I don’t remember, in 2011,
the way I did in 2003.
    Other things have changed. I am not,
obviously, working on the fifth book of The Sun Sword now. I
am, on the other hand, working on the fifth book of
House
War
now, and I thought that would be two books too, and I am
reading a new Tanya Huff novel, one chapter at a time—and Tanya
actually doesn’t write
quickly
when a book is being read
that way—so I guess the more things change, the more they stay the
same. I’ve been nagging her. I did that back in 1990 as well, but
it was easier as she was in the store thirty-six of the same hours
a week as I was.
    “Birthnight” was the first short story I
sold. It’s not the first short story published—that was “Gifted”,
because they moved the anthology which contained it up a month to
coincide with the Disney Aladdin movie that was being released that
month. But I was probably more nervous and more worried about
“Birthnight” than I was about the novel which would see print in
the same month.
    I wrote this story twenty years ago. It has
some of the wildness and some of the sense of elegy that I feel I
absorbed from the books I loved in my childhood—
Lord of the
Rings, Forgotten Beasts of Eld
—and while it is not the story I
would write today, I can honestly say I still see the heart of it
clearly.
     
    Toronto, August 2011
    ------
     
    There are a number of loosely related facts
that underpin the writing of this story. First: I love Christmas
stories. The story of Santa Claus, the jolly, white-bearded
whimsical gift-giver, coupled with the certain knowledge that my
parents had lied to me, deliberately about his existence, is
probably chiefly responsible for the way that love is expressed;
there is both giving and losing, gift and loss, inherent on the
occasion.
    Second: Although I’m not what anyone rational
would call a religious person, there’s a certain element of
Christian myth that I find fascinating, in almost the same way that
I find Tolkien fascinating; it speaks to me in a way that
resonates, that feels true, and that I rationally would never
defend as reality, no matter how much it can inform my own.
    Third: When this story was written, I knew
almost nothing about the short story market, because my first
attempt at a short story was what eventually became the
Hunter’s Oath
and
Hunter’s Death
duology; my
third attempt was what eventually became the four book
Books of
The Sundered
tetralogy. Just for the record, I originally
thought that the
Sun Sword
series, of which I am currently
working on volume five, would be two novels—so I admit up front
that I don’t always understand the concept of “length” when it
comes to number of words. Mike Resnick, who had written more novels
than I, and vastly more short stories than I, and with whom I’m
never likely to catch up – and who has also won almost every award
known to man for the writing of those – informed me of the
anthology for which Birthnight was originally written—one which
Marty Greenberg was editing. He also had a lot of advice to offer,
and if I wasn’t afraid of embarrassing him with what is admittedly
my terrible memory, I’d probably attempt to reconstruct it all.
Suffice it to say that if it weren’t for Mike Resnick, this story
and most of the others over which he has no direct bearing, would
probably not exist.
    Fourth: I was working with Tanya Huff when I
wrote this story. She had written a story for the same anthology a
month or two earlier, and as I pretty much got to read all of her
work before she submitted it