The Seventh Bride

I’m suggesting that if you’re going to bring hell down upon someone’s head, you should dress for the occasion.

She was still going somewhere terrible, but she had a hedgehog, damnit.

Marriage was like death. You knew it'd happen eventually, but it wasn't something you dwelt on.

The problem with crying in the woods, by the side of a white road that leads somewhere terrible, is that the reason for crying isn't inside your head. You have a perfectly legitimate and pressing reason for crying, and it will still be there in five minutes, except that your throat will be raw and your eyes will itch and absolutely nothing else will have changed.

You just didn’t bring a pitchfork to a swan fight.

It is somehow easier to face things when one is not alone. Courage still does most of the heavy lifting, but Pride gets its shoulder in there, too, just to keep you from embarrassing yourself in front of the other person...or hedgehog, as the case may be.

It wasn’t that she particularly wanted to be fattened up and eaten, or turned into a donkey, or forced to wear hair shirts and ashes like the children of wicked parents in fairy tales. But if your parents were wicked, you needn’t worry about pleasing them. When they were doing the best they could, you had no traction at all.

I will unmake him,” said the clock wife simply. “I will pull the marrow from his bones and pour lead into the spaces left behind. I will make his dying into a place and visit it every day until the end of eternity.

Rhea had learned everything she knew about hate from her encounters with this swan.

It is sometimes easier to be punished for something than it is to be a victim of random cruelty. As long as Ingeth can tell herself that her voice was taken from her because she committed some sin, then she has some control of it, you understand? Otherwise it was simply a terrible thing that happened. And if terrible things are allowed to happen to people that don’t deserve them, then the world is terrible and random and cruel. Which it is,” she added, pointing the spoon in Rhea’s direction, “but there’s not much comfort in that.” There

But he's mad, completely mad, and he turns his wives into golems. He needs killing, not negotiation.

The nice thing about immortality is that you have plenty of time to figure out how to get rid of it.

So much for prayer, then. What was the point of saints that wouldn’t kick someone off a horse when you asked them to?

It was starting to get impatient. A hedgehog hopping irritably on its hind legs is a tragic sight.

Unlike the mice, gremlins really were a problem. If you ground one into flour on accident, the bread had a tendency to explode in the oven, or bleed when you cut into it, or turn into a flock of starlings and tear around the cottage shrieking, and then people came around and had words with the miller, many of which had only four letters and involved hand gestures.

I don’t know why I’m second-guessing Crevan’s sanity—I’m sitting here talking to a hedgehog mime.

(Potatoes were, for some reason, more prone to fits of random magic than most vegetables. It would take a remarkable magic to affect turnips or kale. No one bothered planting eggplants—they would run into the woods or fly away on leafy kites the instant your back was turned.)

If you’re looking for a way to break the contract, I do not know. You’d need a demon or a barrister to answer that.

What’s going to happen?” asked Rhea.  “I was a witch, not a fortune teller,” said Maria testily. “No one knows what’s going to happen.

Rhea followed, because when your future husband is a mad sorcerer, following a hedgehog sometimes seems like a good option.

It was still white, and it still glowed under the moon, and the cobbles were still as rounded as old skulls, and the leaves still looked like splashes of blood across the stones, but Rhea felt better. She was still going somewhere terrible, but she had a hedgehog, dammit.

It was not a terribly good stab. Millers' daughters do not traditionally spend a great deal of time engaged in single combat.

He smiled. “Suppose you had something that you did not need, Miss Rhea.” Like a husband? she thought grimly.

The road itself was as clear as heartbreak.

She could see, in an odd way, what they were doing. It was as if the words they spoke were weaving a kind of net, a net of normalcy and propriety and sanity, around a situation that was anything but.

Something nagged at the back of her brain, a niggling little itch, as if she had a mosquito bite on the inside of her skull. It was like a whisper, just below what she could quite hear, and what it was whispering was “Something isn’t quite right here. Something is going on . . .

The man in white cleared his throat. “You’re not a swan,” she said. He raised both eyebrows. “I’ve been accused of many things, but never that.

Rhea wondered if she should be annoyed, and decided the potatoes were much more important. “Oh,

What options did an angry butterfly have, anyway? Stamping eyelash-sized feet? Flapping its wings in a sarcastic manner? In