Read Online Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt - Free Book Online

others who might be tempted!
    What? Of courseI didn’t wear the crown! How dare you make such a suggestion. I wear the compass, I am on the square. “Men before gods” is my creed. Such a crown is worthless to a true man. Take it, and go, and I shall not swear a complaint against you. It is against my beliefs, but I shall not stop another from becoming a god, clearly I cannot stop you in any case.
    You do not want to become a god, Sir Knight?And you, Master Puppet, with your sorcerous needle, what are you doing? Yes, yes, this time I shall shield my eyes, but that crown is valuable in itself …
    I should not have believed it if I had not seen it myself. To destroy such a beautiful thing, even though it be tainted with … with evil magic. But I presume that completes your business here. Allow me to show you to the door, and I trustthat we shall not meet again.
    Another needle, Master Puppet? What can you need with another needle? The crown is destroyed, the old goddess is dead, all is right with the world, or will be once I am finally left alone!
    What? I told you I would never put on the crown. How can you see signs of … I don’t understand … energistic tendrils … unlawful protrusion of entities … it is all Khokidlian tome, pure nonsense, so upsetting in fact that I need a drink. I will fetch a bottle and we might share it as a stirrup cup for your departure … ah … that really did hurt and was quite, quite unnecessary. We are all friends here, are we not?
    Yes, I confess, I am a curious fellow. I collect oddments, ancient jewelry, that sort of thing. Perhaps I did just touch the crown to my forehead, but nothinghappened, nothing much, and anyway, how could you know? I tell you I am not a godlet, I am just a man, I will cause no trouble, I am just a—

 
    A UTHOR’S N OTE …………………………………
    Like a lot of people, I first encountered Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” in its filmic form. I liked the John Huston–directed movie a lot. I suspect I would like anything that teamed Michael Caine and Sean Connery together, but having them in a really good film based on a great story was even better. When Tim and Melissa first suggested the
Rags &Bones
concept to me, Kipling was one of the authors I immediately thought I might like to pay my respects to with an homage. Possibly because I worked in a bookstore when Kipling’s books first entered the public domain and thus they are inextricably linked in my mind: I still have nightmares about the sudden influx of dozens of new editions of
The Jungle Book
.
    Once I had the idea of revisiting“The Man Who Would Be King,” I thought about the two central characters. Who would my buddies be, my Peachy Carnehan and Daniel Dravot? It wasn’t a great leap from there to decide I would use my existing duo, Sir Hereward and his puppet companion, Mister Fitz. The other main character is, of course, Kipling himself, who in the original narrates the story in the first person. Possibly because I’drecently been rereading a text from my university days (the story collection
Points of View
, edited by James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny), I decided to twist this somewhat and write the story as a dramatic monologue, with the writer character “overheard” as he tells the story of two wayward goddesses and we, the reader, also apprehend what is happening as he narrates both past and present.

The Sleeper and the Spindle
    N EIL G AIMAN
    It was the closest kingdom to the queen’s, as the crow flies, but not even the crows flew it. The high mountain range that served as the border between the two kingdoms discouraged crows as much as it discouraged people, and it was considered unpassable.
    More than one enterprising merchant, on each side of the mountains, had commissioned folk to hunt forthe mountain pass that would, if it were there, have made a rich man or woman of anyone who controlled it. The silks of Dorimar could have been in