“You know my gifts, and so you know though there is plenty I can take, little can I give. No way to know what that would be.” Fortune’s face slipped between cruelty and sympathy as her coin slipped through quick fingers, flashing day and night, red and white.ĭeath, on the other hand, did not stir. You have come far, through the dark and through the frost, to ask our favor.” “In truth, you were seeking me,” Death said in her dark-velvet voice, and the woman’s features crumpled with shame. “You told your other children you’d take her into the woods to seek her fortune.” The Low God herself plucked a coin from her wreath and let it dance about her fingers, flashing copper and silver, gold and black. That makes her the thirteenth daughter of a thirteenth daughter.
Weak firelight caught on Fortune’s coin wreath, on the wispy hems of Death’s hood. “She’s the thirteenth,” the woman insisted, shoving her lantern higher as if to drive her point home. The proper age to be spilling grain and breaking things.” “Four,” Death said in her soft, dark voice, for Death always knew.įortune wrinkled her nose. “Three? Ten? Forgive me, I never know with you humans.” ” Fortune tilted her head, and the wreath of coins about her brow shimmered and flipped, changing from copper to coal to silver to gold.
Wherever she goes, the milk spoils, the wool tangles, the grain spills. “We’re stretched thin to feed the twelve other mouths already, and this one-she’s ill luck. “Please,” the woman said, shivering in snow up to her shins. Her other hand was locked around the ragged mitt of a little girl beside her.
One hand clutched a dimming iron lantern, which smoldered just bright enough to catch the snowflakes flitting by like fireflies before they melted back into the shadows. Her dull carrot-colored curls twisted from under a woolen cap, her wind-burnt red face as worn as the threadbare cloak over her shoulders. On this night, a woman had come to do just that: meet them. More than that cannot be said, for no two souls see Death and Fortune the same way yet we all know when we meet them. They stood tall and unfathomable in the glass-smooth snow, Death in her shroud of pyre-smoke and shadows, and Fortune in her gown of gold and bones. Once upon a time, on the coldest night of midwinter, in the darkest heart of the forest, Death and Fortune came to a crossroads.
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