This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

Author:Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press

Blue is braiding grasses between her fingers.

It looks like purest idleness: a long-haired woman at day’s end, painted in sunset, cross-legged near the river, weaving for pleasure. She is not making baskets or nets, not even crowns or garlands for the children running barefoot nearby.

What she does is study. What she does is play, in six dimensions, a game of chess in which every piece is a game of Go, whole boards of black and white stones dancing around each other, pushed, knights turned rooks, iterations of atari carefully constructing checkmate. She lays grass over grass over grass and studies, not only the geometries of green, but the calculus of scent and heat, the thermodynamics of understory, the velocity of birdsong.

While so enmeshed—knotting grass to grackle scold, the smell of leaf mold to sun’s azimuth—a tree swallow swoops near, scissors her peripheral vision, severs her from trancing reverie with its dissonance. It flashes blue at her eyes’ edge, stuns her with its unaccountable presence. There are tree swallows aplenty, but this one is wrong: This one approaches an empty nest in autumn, a nest that she was near to harvesting to show her nephew and teach him about how much weaving can be learned from birds.

She stands, and the grasses fall from her hand like seeds. She follows the swallow, watches as it deposits a damselfly in the nest and flies away.

She climbs, plucks the insect from the muddy twigs, hops back down. In the damsel’s needle-body, checkered in black and blue, she reads a letter.

She looks from the dead damsel to the scattering it’s made of her thoughts, fistfuls of green and gold heaped uselessly together, and feels nothing but a knifing, knotting happiness as she opens her mouth to devour it, wings and all.

Years later, a seeker shadows the grass where Blue lay. She scoops up a handful, then melts away.

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