you taught her that is her most important lesson.”
Jess blushed. “Swordplay is nothing, lord wizard.”
“Swordplay was not the lesson. Thanks to you, she knows how to defend herself in every way that matters. She will be a wise and confident ruler, and she will also hold her own with her mate. You taught her that. You once thought you were too humble to take your place as her companion, but what you shared has, er, will make all the difference.”
Jess shot him a puzzled look. He tipped her a wink. Perhaps the old fellow wasn’t as far gone as he seemed.
The Girls from the Hood
by Jim C. Hines
“Once upon a time,” Stepmama began, “a hunter named Roland made a very poor choice.”
The hunter in question rubbed bloodshot eyes and squinted. Empty bottles littered the floor around the cot in his small cabin. One balanced precariously on the belly of a stuffed possum, whose patchy fur suggested it had died of a particularly unpleasant disease. “Who—what are you?”
Stepmama’s short riding cape was thrown back, exposing the fringed black leather that covered her bosom and left her midriff bare. Matching leather trousers protected her legs, and a skirt of leather and steel provided additional armor for her hips and thighs. A short-bladed sword hung from one hip. Steel studs covered her shoulders and the bracers on her forearms. A blood-red leather helm topped the ensemble.
His attention went next to her tattoos. An image of her first mare, Water Spirit, was inked onto her left bicep. Three horseshoes decorated her right forearm. A blue snake circled her wrist, seeming to cool itself with the small fan gripped in its tail.
“The princess,” said Stepmama. “What did you do with her body?”
Roland reached beneath a sweat-stained pillow. Stepmama’s hand moved toward her sword, but he pulled out only a mostly empty bottle, yanked the cork, and took a drink. “That’d be a nice costume on someone half your age.”
Stepmama let the insult slide past. From the gray sprinkled in his greasy hair to the wrinkles spreading like cracks in the mud through the skin by his eyes, he couldn’t have been more than five years her junior.
Roland’s cabin was as much a wreck as the man himself. Dead animals crowded the space, preserved in poses ranging from awkward to bizarre. A cross-eyed bear’s head with an irregularly shaped bald spot stared from the wall. A fox stood in the corner with one leg cocked. A snake at the foot of the bed coiled in what was presumably supposed to be a threatening pose, but the effect was ruined by the long, stiff tongue lolling from the side of its mouth.
According to her sources, Roland was an excellent hunter. Maybe so, but he was a lousy taxidermist.
Roland frowned. “I know that costume. Didn’t the Red Hood Riders used to wear that helm and cape?”
“We still do.”
He belched. “We?”
A lumbering figure stepped out of the shadows in the corner, holding a dead raccoon with a lopsided snarl and no tail.
Roland jumped to his feet. “What in the name of Rumplestiltskin’s wrinkled balls is that?”
“That’s Goldie,” Stepmama said.
Goldie grunted, which was about as talkative as she got most days. She was a bear of a woman. Stepmama had once seen her smash a full keg over the head of a handsy barman. Her garb was similar to Stepmama’s, but her weapons of choice were the iron chains she wore around her hips and shoulders. The gold-colored padlocks made excellent bludgeons.
Roland reached for Stepmama. Goldie rammed the raccoon’s twisted jaws into Roland’s face. He brought his hands up to block the dead animal, and Goldie kicked him in the chest. He slammed into the wall and slid down onto a pile of old furs.
“The princess,” Stepmama repeated.
“You’re really Red Hoods?”
Stepmama simply waited. She had found that silence often worked better than threats.
“I didn’t—it was the queen. She ordered me to—”
“Yes, we know.” She flicked open her fan and waved it lazily in front of her face, trying to hide her turmoil. If she had gotten word just a few days earlier, they might have saved the girl. As it was, they could at least bring her back for a proper burial . . . where everyone could see what the queen had done. She would deny it, of course, but Roland’s testimony should—
“I didn’t kill her.”
She snapped the fan shut. “You brought her heart back as proof.”
“It wasn’t hers.” He closed his eyes. “I was told to kill her,