Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories by Naomi Kritzer

Author:Naomi Kritzer [Kritzer, Naomi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Collections & Anthologies, fantasy, Fiction, science fiction, short stories
Amazon: B004WPPA7C
Published: 2011-04-13T23:00:00+00:00

KIN

THIS IS ALSO short fiction set in the same world as Fires of the Faithful. It is somewhat noteworthy that with this story, I finally cracked the first market I ever submitted to—Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress.

***

WHEN I WAS five years old, my father took me into town, to an inn, where a man in black robes waited for us. The man was old, and stern, and he frightened me, but my father gave me my doll, Emilia, and said that I needed to be calm and obedient to set a good example for my baby.

“Can you make a witchlight for me, Julia?” the man in black robes said.

Clutching Emilia with my left arm, I held out my right hand and easily willed a small glow into my palm. Witchlight was nothing. Everyone could make witchlight; I couldn’t remember not being able to do it.

The man set a small log onto the hearth. “Can you make that burn?” he asked. I knelt down beside the log and touched it lightly to make it burst into bright flame.

“Oh, very good,” the man said. “Very good indeed.” I straightened up with an impatient frown. Most people could light fires. His praise was empty, and I knew it.

“Now,” he said, and my ears caught a new note in his voice. “I have something else for you.” Out of his pocket came a small gray pebble, which he tucked into my hand, where the witchlight had bloomed a moment before. “Can you make this burn?”

Still holding Emilia tightly with my arm, I turned the pebble over and over. Here, at last, was a new task—a new challenge. I set the pebble down on the hearth, so that it wouldn’t burn me, and laid my whole hand over it flat, the way I had when I first began to start hearthfires. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, and reached for the energy under my feet. The rock was different from wood—very different. But when I pulled my hand back, it glowed a deep orange-red.

“Very good,” said the man in black robes, and from the look in his eyes when he glanced at my father, I knew his praise was not perfunctory. Nervous, I wrapped both arms around Emilia and retreated to my father. I heard the jingle of coins, and my father exclaimed his thanks as he pocketed what the man in robes handed him. Then the stranger crouched down to my level.

“In a few weeks,” he said, “a young woman is going to come live with your family. She’s going to bring gifts for you and your parents, and she’s going to tutor you in magery. You’re unusually good at it, for a five-year-old, but you’re going to get even better. She’ll teach you to work with others to create really big fires, to set fires from a long way away, even to make fires in the sky. When you’re a grown-up, you’ll get to come live in Cuore with

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