This is the way to the Dead God’s Heart.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Spring’s Arcana, the first book in a brand new contemporary fantasy duology by Lilith Saintcrow, publishing with Tor Books on May 2nd.
Nat Drozdova is desperate to save a life. Doctors can do little for her cancer-ridden mother, who insists there is only one cure—and that Nat must visit a skyscraper in Manhattan to get it.
Amid a snow-locked city, inside a sleek glass-walled office, Nat makes her plea and is whisked into a terrifying new world. For the skyscraper holds a hungry winter goddess who has the power to cure her mother… if Nat finds a stolen object of great power.
Now Nat must travel with a razor-wielding assassin across an American continent brimming with terror, wonder, and hungry divinities with every reason to consume a young woman. For her ailing mother is indeed suffering no ordinary illness, and Nat Drozdova is no ordinary girl. Blood calls to blood, magic to magic, and a daughter may indeed save what she loves…
…if it doesn’t consume her first.
This is the way to the Dead God’s Heart.
BLACK HORSE, CHERRY TREE
The handlebars stretched into reins, but were stiff metal at the same time. It was unsettling, feeling two such different things at once. There was the steady hum of an engine and the low sweet wind in her ears like riding her pink childhood bike; at the same time there was a gallop, jarring until something deep in her bones woke with a twitch and the rhythm of hoof-fall and brief lift melted her into a steady, ever-changing equilibrium.
It was just as wonderful as her voracious childhood reading said it would be. Black Beauty, Thunderhead, even The Black Stallion, not to mention the magazines at the library with red-jacketed girls in jodhpurs smiling as they clung to saddles.
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Spring’s Arcana
Don’t be silly, Natchenka. No horses in the city.
Oh, but she’d dreamed, and she’d longed, and once she was done with all this, maybe she could return here and learn.
The black horse ran as if he felt her joy; he tossed his head and uncoiled in a leap over strings of barbwire holding the road back from prairie. Under an endless winter sky they galloped, clods spattering from those sharp, sharp hooves; the horizon blurred and green raced under iron shoes. The cold wind turned soft, then warm, and Nat’s lungs burned as the sunlight changed, a flood of gold.
The horse wheeled to the right, and there was a valley with bright icy-blue water foam-chuckling over rounded stones at its bottom. Willows reared on either side, their long winter-bare branches whipping past; one cracked close to her cheek and Nat flinched. But the horse neighed like an engine revving and tensed before bulleting forward. He followed the river, leaning first to one side then another to keep his rider from the clutching branches—and that was wrong, it was winter, but now the trees were green.
A stony slope rose before them, the horse leap-climbing surefoot as a shaggy mountain goat, and now the prairie had turned green as well. Tiny dabs of blooming color spattered by too quickly to name the flowers they belonged to. Nat clung to the beast’s back, bending low, breathing in a good scent of hay and simmering heat touched with a tang of wild fur and freedom. Strands of black mane brushed her cheeks, a rough caress, and the rhythm wasn’t just under her now. It was in her breath, in her bones, in her pounding heart.
Her tiny bipedal self melted into something bigger, becoming a single creature with four hooves thundering as a massive heart churned, her vision flattening until there was a blind spot directly before her and the horizon widened on either side. A tail lifted high and proud, a sweet strong wind combing a long mane—her ears flicked, laid flat, her nose untangling a thousand different shades of grass, brush, flowers, the breeze bringing tales from far away where herds of her kind galloped for the joy of it, knowing no bridle but their own whims.
The footing changed, hoof-falls no longer sinking into sod but cushioned by dry, crumbling stuff. The prairie blurred, bleached and widening until there was nothing but rolling dun sand, the sky bright hot blue with a white coin hanging in its arms.
Now the scents were harsher—the water dove deep, hiding, and there was no grazing. The specter of starvation loomed rib-sharp, an ancient memory in a creature who lived on grass and could find none. Hot sand tickled her nose, burned her deep-heaving lungs, and foam streaked the great beast’s glossy black flanks.
I’m sorry, Nat thought. Oh, I’m so sorry to bring you here.
The horse arched his neck, slowing to a canter; he wasn’t sorry. This was the road, this was the journey; besides, there was a dark spot far away, a single break in the monotony of sand and glare.
It hurt to separate. She wanted to stay in that thumping bass forever, a single mote on the back of a rocking sea. There was no isolation among the herd, just the thunder of running and the sudden terror of predator-things with sharp white teeth and cruel slashing claws, the fear of lightning-crack when storms swept the grasslands. And over it all was the deep warm comfort of others like her, pressed flank to heaving flank.
She didn’t want to be lonely again.
Excerpted from Spring’s Arcana, copyright © 2023 by Lilith Saintcrow.
