He stopped speaking; and for a little it seemed to the woman in the girl, staring into the finality of his face as though into a dark wood, that he might never again utter a word. Then he sighed deeply. "I told you I wasn't kind."

She reached up to touch his cheek, her eyes shining. "No one could possibly be kinder. You've not only granted my wish, you're telling me I'll get to see them again. That I'll meet Alan again, and fall in love again, and hold my little Mouse in my arms, exactly as before. That is what you are saying, isn't it?"

He held both his hands wide, elegant fingers cupped to catch the sun. "You are that child in Central Park, off to see the lions. And I am an old man, half-asleep on a bench… from this point on the world proceeds just as it ever was, and only one thing, quite a bit ahead of today and really not worth talking about, will be any different. Please look in your pocket, child."

She reached into the front of her denim coverall, then, and smiled when she felt her four-year-old hand close around the silver horse. She took it out, and held it up to him as if she were offering a piece of candy.

"I don't know who you are, but I know what you are. You're something good."

"Nonsense, " he said, but she could see he looked pleased. "And now… " The magician placed his vast, lined hands around hers, squeezed once, gently, and said "Forget." When he took his hands away the silver horse was gone.

The little girl stood on the green grass, looking up at the old man with the closed eyes. He spoke to her. "Where are you off to, if I may ask?"

"I'm going to see the lions," she told him. "And the draffs. Draffs are excellent animals."

"So they are," the old man agreed, tilting his head down to look at her. His eyes, when he opened them, were the bluest she had ever seen.

The Pretenders' Tourney by Daniel Abraham

The serfs and peasants of Castrwick said a star had fallen from Heaven. Or an angel. The night had gone bright as an instant of noon. The thunder of it left the church bells chiming as if they'd been struck. A plague-blinded baby regained her sight by being bathed in that divine light, so they said.

Now, only a light rain fell, dotting the heather with silver. A dozen local men, their caps in their hands, stood around the three nobles who had come from Westford Keep: Dafyd's mother, the newly widowed Dowager Duchess; his childhood friend Rosmund Colp, fourth son of Lord Andigent and now family priest of Westford; and Dafyd himself, once the youngest son of Westford, and now by grace of God its Duke.

"It might be miraculous," Rosmund said.

The wound in the land gaped wider than a man's height and three times as long. The stone itself rested on a rough pallet of cut saplings.

"Of course it is," Dafyd's mother said. "It fell from Heaven as a sign from God."

Rosmund looked at his knees, his wide brow taking on the furrows they always did when the Duchess started declaiming upon the Divine.

Dafyd dropped to the ground and walked closer. The village men, once his father's property and now his own, stepped aside to let him pass. Their gazes never rose above his knee and none of them spoke, but something in the way they held themselves crackled with excitement. Dafyd had seen boys no more than ten stand the same way just before a children's melee, but these were men. Gray-haired, some of them. It struck him again that he was the youngest person present.

Black as soot, the stone was shapeless as a blighted apple. The word of God made stone: twisted, diseased, ambiguous.

"It's good iron, that," one of the men behind him said.

Dafyd turned to him. A broad-shouldered man, missing his lower teeth, his hands were knobbed with muscle and his arms were both wider than the young man's thigh. He could have broken Dafyd over his knee like a twig, but instead he blushed under his gaze and looked ashamed for having spoken. Dafyd tried to recall the man's name. Herdlick, he thought. Or that might have been the smith at the next village on. His father would have known.

"If you please, sir," he said toward Dafyd's feet.

"We shall have a new blade forged," the Duchess said. Her eyes were bright as candles. "A new blade for a new age."

The subtle sound came, barely audible over the tapping of raindrops, of a dozen men taking in a breath at once. Nothing, Dafyd thought, suited his mother as well as theater, and the weight of her drama settled across his shoulders like a yoke. Anger crawled up his throat, and he spoke more sharply than he intended to.

"There isn't time. We leave for court in a fortnight."

"It will be done, my lord," the smith who might have been Herdlick said. His face was round as the moon and as bright. "I ain't a swordsmith by trade. That was Ableson, and him plague-took. But I know as much as anyone in the Duchy and, by my honor, my lord, if I have to kill myself and both my 'prentices doing it, it'll be in your hand when that day comes."

That day. The words nipped Dafyd's belly like bad meat.

"It is the will of God," his mother said. Dafyd stepped back to his horse, heaved himself up into the saddle, and pulled her head back toward the path more roughly than she deserved. He felt an instant stab of regret.

Rosmund and his slow nag caught up with Dafyd before the first turning. They rode for half a mile in silence. The rain grew harder, the low gray sky more nearly the color of steel.

"I'm not sure running off helps," Rosmund said.

"I'm not running," Dafyd said. "And a fat lot of good you were."

"What did you want me to say? That stones fall from the sky all the time?"

"You could have said that being odd doesn't make something holy. Or that it was an omen that I shouldn't be king," Dafyd said. "The best you could offer was it might be miraculous?"

"Well, it might."

"Or?"

Rosmund shrugged. The rain had plastered his hair to his skull. He looked like a drowned cat.

"Or it might not," he said. "But that's not the question. Is it?"

The plague had come in late summer, seven weeks before the harvest. It began as a cough, and then a fever. Those who fell before it took to their beds. Two days after the first cough, the fever began to rise and fall, and the ill lost their minds. Many were tormented by dreams of demons lurking in the shadows. Some were possessed by lust.

At five days, their joints swelled and ached. At six, some respite came; lucidity returned, joints moved more freely, fever cooled. On the seventh day, just as the power of the illness seemed broken, they died. A glimmer of hope before the grave, a small added cruelty that made mere tragedy into something worse. Dafyd's infant sister had even taken milk once-the first in days-before her tiny lips stilled.

Some villages lost only one or two people. Others were killed to the last man. Plague-death struck where it struck and passed over the houses it passed with a will of its own.

It took the Duke of Westford, silencing his cool wit and ending forever his warm embraces and drunken midwinter songs. It took Dafyd's sister, Ydel, before she could walk or speak; her toothless grin gone still. It took his eldest brother, fair-eyed Racian, who Dafyd had grown up believing to be invincible. It took his older brother, Caersin, from his library at seminary. It took the family tutor, the dancing master, and twenty servants.

It spared the Duchess, though the grief released a religious fervor that had survived through twenty-five years of marriage to the Duke. Dafyd suffered no cough, no fever, no delirium or swollen hands.

How much of him had survived was an open question.

Riding back now, Rosmund at his side, the lethal season they had left behind showed in small ways. Here a field lay fallow, all the hands that worked it the year before now lying beneath it. There, a dyer's yard with windows stopped up with wooden planks and jute to keep out snow long since melted. The smiles and bows offered by the men and women they passed showed ghosts behind the eyes. No one was untouched.