“That,” said Quillam Mye to his daughter, “was seven years ago. Today the Realm still awaits the Committee’s Decision. Shall I tell you what has happened since then? I will show you our nation. It is . . .” He reached for his supper plate. “It is this cookie.”

The Housefly stared at the cookie obediently, perhaps trying to imagine that the ground beneath her was crunchy and full of almonds.

“Our ‘kingdom’ is like this.” Mye brought his fist down sharply on the cookie, fracturing it. “See? It still looks like a whole cookie, but it is cracked beyond repair. Every fragment flies a flag to a different king or queen. You see this?” He picked out a butter-browned fragment. “This chunk is the Capital and its lands. And this piece”—a piece crested with a large nut—“is Galdspar. This is Mandelion, and these bits are the counties of Amblevetch. But there is no cookie anymore. The cookie where we once lived is dying . . .”

Familiar pains were throbbing behind his eyes, and he paused to let them pass. Little pale points came and went before his sight, as if a giant cat were kneading the tapestry of the world and letting its claw tips show through the cloth. He sighed, swept away the crumbs and dipped his quill to continue with his writing, then looked up at the baby one last time, as if she had said something to interrupt him.

“Well, if you are to help me with my work, you had better get used to stories without endings. True stories seldom have endings.”

Quillam Mye’s great treatise on “The Fractured Realm” was never given an ending. Eight years later the historian Quillam Mye was dead, and his books had been burned. Twelve years after the night she was named, his daughter could be found hiding inside a dovecote, with a goose tucked under one arm.

A Is for Arson

A
IS FOR ARSON

It was often said that only divine flame could persuade anything to burn in Chough. Many joked that the villagers cooked their dinners over marsh lights.

Chough could be found by straying as far as possible from anywhere comfortable or significant, and following the smell of damp. The village had long since surrendered to a seeping, creeping rot. The buildings rotted from the bottom upward. The trees rotted from the inside out. The carrots and turnips rotted from the outside in, and were pale and pulpy when they were dug out.

Around and through the village, water seethed down the breakneck hillside in a thousand winding streamlets. They hissed and gleamed through dark miles of pine forest above the village, chafing the white rocks and learning a strange milkiness. Chough itself was more a tumble than a town, the houses scattered down the incline as if stranded there after a violent flood.