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I look back down the table at Eris. She is staring thoughtfully at the ceiling with bright eyes, and then her gaze drifts down—over me, whom she seems not even to notice—and settles on the Queen, with an expression simultaneously fired with curiosity and cold with regard. I have seen that expression many times before, when she first holds up the organ of a newly dissected animal with her forceps, or when she discovers that prodding the exposed brain of a mouse can make its leg twitch. That is how she is looking at the Queen.

Featuring a giveaway for BCS author Christopher M. Cevasco's new historical fiction novel Beheld (Lethe Press). Eshat’s Temple by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. Ten Fruits and Other Memories of Rialynas by AnaMaria Curtis. BCS 293: Ten Fruits and Other Memories of Rialynas by AnaMaria Curtis.

When I recovered, I tried to peel a berenton myself. The skin of the fruit seemed to harden wherever my fingers landed, showed sharp scales everywhere I moved my thumb, made a bloody mess of my hand. When at last I wrestled the flesh out, it tasted of nothing at all. The flavor of a berenton is determined entirely by its surroundings. Alas, in Rialynas I came to find that I was the same.

“Just as soon as our House’s wondrous vistas of possibility opened up before me, dear one, I found my spirit inexplicably enervated. Legendary tomes that beckoned to me since my first blush of adolescence have lost their luster, revealing themselves as desiccated, retrograde texts best returned to the dusts of time. Blessed scrolls have proven reactionary and un-illuminating; rarefied incunabula, fusty and yawn-inducing. Most distressingly, even the Translator’s Almanac, that transcendent tool that has helped me steer so many during their moments of need, has provided no solace.”

When I shirk my chores to go venturing, Momma Londie’s always mad as all, and Dad Bray tuts and clucks when he sees me come home all muddy and with burrs in my hair, and he takes up the whomping stick and looks all hardeyed as a father ought to, but then there’s us gone down to the root cellar, him hitting the wall with the stick and me squeaking an Ow every once and somewhen to fool Momma Londie. He don’t whomp me so long as I got a good story for him.