I ran from her, I ran and I screamed horse-horrid, I rode and rode and Arthur could not keep with me, and I would not answer when he asked what had bitten my heels-how could I? How could I tell him I was his father, I was the giant, I was a hundred kings before him and after? The blood was never so hot in him that he could even dream that one day he might imagine that he could grind an old woman's back against a stone wall.

I left her there. I left her in the rain and the fire.

The winter passed and no one questioned me. Feasts were held for the giant's death. Games and hunts. I did not hunt, or play.

I went into the forest to cut wood, I told him. It is my way, never-mind how you chide me. My silver axe and my Hephaestus-gait, dragging the ash-handle behind me, leaving a furrow in the loam. I cut oak and pine and green birch, and held each log in place with my huge gnarled hand. I watched it every time the blade fell. I watched the hand that had held her down, the hand that had bruised her mangled breast, the hand that had whipped my horse away from her, leaving her in her clutch of bone. I watched that wicked, shaming hand, I watched it curl around a log like a throat, and it seemed better to sever it like a side of beef than to let it go on dangling from me after it had played a giant's paw.

An accident, I said. It might have happened to anyone.

Yet here I stand on a shore pebbled with clams, the holiest of things clutched in the other hand-as if that hand, too, did not clamp down on her mouth, as if that hand did not hold her hip to mine. I cannot cast off this thing: if there is something in that sea which wants it, which longs for it, it would not accept tribute from me, I am a monster, a giant, a thing to be slain, a thing to stand before a real knight and be cut down in his turn. I am no bright-souled saint, to deliver the divine to the divine. I have no right even to look at my king, even to look at his blade.

I cannot do it.

What saw thou there? said the king. Sir, he said, I saw nothing but the waters wax and waves wan. Ah, traitor untrue, said King Arthur, now hast thou betrayed me twice. Who would have weened that, when thou that hast been to me as life and dear? And thou art named a noble knight, and would betray me for the richness of the sword. But now go again lightly, for thy long tarrying putteth me in great jeopardy of my life, for I have taken cold. And if thou do not now as I bid thee, if ever I may see thee, I shall slay thee with mine own hands; for thou wouldst for my rich sword see me dead.

There is so much light here.

I cannot bear it. I have not earned the gold of this place.

The king was shivering, this time, when I left him, dragging that old cleaver after me, that metal which must still possess the giant's perfect sinews, some shred of his vein-stitched heart, too small to see. He does not understand. He thinks I am a magpie, over-fond of things which glitter and shine.

I think that while I stare out to sea like a child who cannot remember the simple task his father has set him, he will shudder his way out of this air, this salt, this sun. Bits of shell crackle in the furrow I leave-the sky sighs and blushes blue, blue as grace, blue as a hem. The moon is up, but not yet lit; it floats in the sky like a broken skull. Like a manacle of bone.

I am the giant, in the end. I hulk on a beach-head and keen my sorrows to the surf-I am penitent, penitent, but the wind in my mouth always and forever tastes of her, the crone I left bolted to a wall, buried in her own dead infants, and my child too-was there a child? Was there not?-squirming from her with my eyes, starving into a skeleton on the wall, another bone to link her chain. I became nothing after her joints bent under me, I only walked to her prison and exchanged seats with the colossus. If the book had but opened in another place, if I had but turned another corner in that moldering castle, come upon an empty creche, or a sack of gold, or a giant's broken bathtub, I might have been Lancelot, a knight of blue and silver and love perfect as pearls. The queen might have looked on me with cool black eyes and thought me the best of them all, might have loved me, too. But my pages opened onto gray hair and twelve little lumps in the earth, and I am but a hulking, bent-backed shadow of Lancelot, crouched and sneaking behind him like a starving bear.

All I have to do is throw it. Easy, yes? For any other of his boys, easy. For Lancelot, easy. I should not be the last. Some other man should remain to witness us. What loyalty can I give him who could never confess how far I fell from the gold-shot grace of his hall? The loyalty of carrying his jetsam to the sea. Am I a pall-bearer, hoisting his last living limb, or a garbage-carrier, shifting scrap-metal from one sand-dune to another?

Could I but erase myself in this, erase my name and all my deeds in this light, scrub my sinews clean. Could I but be remembered for this only, and not that other shore, that other sea, that other self. Once, I was a good man. We were young together, Arthur and I, and the catalogue of our deeds unspooled from an angel's mouth.

So much light: the moon ignites itself, sparking into silver like an altar candle. In its shadow, I see-do I? Yes? No?-something break the sheen of sea. A hand, it must be a hand, whole, perfect, scaled in trout-mail, a hand from every story he told when he was drunk and sloshing over with sorrow, a hand open, waiting, a hand open and lying on a birch-trunk, axe-shadows playing on the lines of its palm, a hand, withered and wiry, clenching and twisting, caught in a cuff of bone.

It strains towards me. Open, beckoning. Calling me to drown, calling me to kneel and serve her as I ought to have done. Palm-lines curve away from my sight, and I want to believe that the hand does not open only for the sword, that the fish-scale nails and looping threads of silver-pregnant silk do not only rise from the foam for him. I want to believe there is forgiveness in that hand. I want to believe there is grace. I want to believe that it will take my stump in its grip, which will be soaked with brine and draped with seaweed, and that in the press of its fingers will be understanding.

Leave your giant-skin behind, that press will say, and become Bedevere again.

The moon glints on the sword-edge as it turns, hilt over point, in the air. The hand catches it, as I could not. The ivory chain-links jangle. The blade whirls once, twice, three times. An ocean beyond any blue I have known closes over hand and blade and all, and I am alone, on a long, low shore, in a dusk so deep and bright.

There is so much light here, unbearable light. Water which conceals a forest of crones' hands seems to open before me, seems to promise, seems to cajole. I can almost see them in the waves, when the moon shines through them. Fingers like kelp, kelp like fingers.

The taste of the sea is so like skin, you know.

III.

A wide green field, and grass like water waving. There is dusk here, and thin, over-tilled soil, and hiding hills, still those blessing hills. Clouds skitter across the hedgerows like rocks skipping on a lake. There are stones: here, there, great gray things, knuckle-knobbled. They lie where the walls once were, corners and lengths and thresholds. You can almost see the glimmer of what stood then, hovering shadow-still over the slabs.

There is no one here. Old, dry-clawed crows hop from stone to stone, pecking at the first blocks of the cathedral, which are also the last. A wild, shag-pelted pony wanders, chewing at the tough grass. The market has gone, so too the farms and the monks and the cows. The ground refused to give up any further beans or turnips-it was hoarse and tired and coughed up its last cucumber long ago. The wells are brackish and thick with slime; a slow drip wears away the cisterns. A withered grapevine crawls along a low line of stones, hung with yellow leaves that are almost, but not yet, dust.

The base of the old tower lasts longest-rain and wind pit and streak it until it forgets all the queens it ever knew, and dreams under the new hills, which cover the ruin like grave-mounds, snaking around the valley, eating what is left of this place, modestly drawing themselves up over the bones like shrouds.

In a century, no one will remember what this place was called. In five, someone will say that it was seventy miles south and in another country besides. Someone else will say they have dug it up and wouldn't you like to buy a bit of soil, a bit of rock, a bit of bone? Someone else will say there was never a castle here-the land is too poor to support a population.

Occasionally a shepherd will try to feed his sheep on the yellow, fibrous grass that is left. The animals bleat pitifully and will not touch it: it is so bitter. The flock moves on.

Under the blessing hills, a thousand dreaming bones shiver in their sleep.

XX JUDGEMENT.

Morgan le Fay And when they were at the water side, even fast by the bank was a little barge with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur. Now put me into the barge, said the king. And so he did softly; and there received him three queens with great mourning; and so they set them down, and in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head. And then that queen said: Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me?

-Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur Away in the apple-groves I dreamed of you, and you seemed so still and grave-once, you and I ran laughing from our mother's house, and hid in the forest, and told each other tales of terrible boars who would snatch us away to prisons made of pomegranate and whalebone. Even then you tried to kiss me, when the afternoons were thick and yellow, and the dust-motes swam in the air.

I blushed-I was not brave enough.

They took you from me-remember how you cried? You grabbed at my dress, my hair, clung to me, trying to stay. For your safety, they said.

I cut my hair the day they took you. I burned it in our forest. The ash smelled like us.

Why have ye tarried so long from me? Away in the mint-fields I clapped a hand against my shorn hair and learned things I will never tell you about. I did not see you again until after the crown clamped on you like a lamprey. You had married her already-and do not think I did not note her deep black eyes, so like mine.

They will say we didn't know; they will say it was an accident. How could I not know? How could I not see how tired you had become? How could I not see your too-thick hair that still would not obey and the three little lines in your forehead-how could I not know my brother?

Do you remember how we walked together, in the forest which was not our old forest but was green enough for walking, for talking of grain and crops and how green sashes were in fashion at court that year, and I could hear the weariness in you, how it pulled at me like a hook in my throat? I stroked your head against my breast like I used to, innocent as a sister, innocent as a nun, and you kissed me again, and I was brave that time, wasn't I? I was brave and the dust-motes floated in my hair which was not as long as it had been, and you moved against me in the shade of a old hollow oak, and your kisses became cries, and your cries became a son- Oh, my brother, I should not speak of our son. He will say he had nothing like a mother, and I do not call him a liar, but we all try, we all try so hard. Sometimes I think it is all our trying that has brought us here, all our struggling and trying that sets up all these tragic scenes.

We grew old-did you notice? I did not. One day I had white hair instead of black and spots in my skin like a leopard. I was suddenly slow, and bowed under a woolen hood. I could not stay with you-I went over the bridge to the other world, the other Camelot that is called Avalon and hell and California. I learned to make orange-cakes, learned to make the rain come.

I learned to look both north and south.

And I tried, once every decade or so, to pull you over the bridge with me, I tried every colorful thing I knew to draw you: I sent my girls out into towers with red armor in their arms, I sent you a dream of a beast with a dragon's head and a leopard's skin, I took a boy down into the water not once but twice, just so that you would come after him. But you did not come. I sent my champion all wrapped in leaves and green, in a mask, with an axe. I sent unicorns; I sent giants.

But you would not come. You would not come to me no matter how I lined that bridge with sweets. You loved your wife, more fool you. You loved that place. You thought, I know, that I would always be here when you reached out in the dark to find me.

I suppose you were right.

I have missed you so. Why could you not come into the golden country with me? We would have been happy. There would be now no cold seashore and a widow's barge. Do not laugh-the blood is too bright in the fog. Yes, I am your widow. I have mourned you all your life.

My brother, why have ye tarried so long from me? Away in the orange groves I once made a rind-golem of you. I piled up the wet, sour peels into something like the shape of you. I was lonely, and it was an easy trick.

I gave it eyes and breath and life and it was golden like you, and sweet like you, and it looked at me with eyes of dusty green leaves and said: I forgive you.

I forgave the orange, too, and they fell into a pile of lifeless husks, already turning brown at the edges.

Do you see the light in the distance? That is Avalon, which is the underworld, an island in the Pacific where where I have spent my days in apple orchards and mint-fields and orange groves and rose-thickets and glistening lakes. I am your Hades, and you are my spring. I will steal you away to sit on a yew-throne and tell me stories of your knights and how you were so young, once. I will feed you pomegranates and make you a shield of whalebone, and we will chase each other through the forest on knees that do not crack or buckle, and I will be brave, always brave.

It will be wonderful, Arthur, you'll see, and if I was nothing but a white arm before, I am your sister now, and I love you, and I will wrap you warm in my best samite, and my white arms will carry you home.

It is so bright, the sun on the water, on the lake, on the sea, and the dust-motes are so thick I can hardly see the shore.

STORY NOTES.

In an odd turn of synchronicity, I sit down, by a tall window looking out on a Maine bay, to write about my first novel nearly exactly nine years after I began writing it, by another tall window, looking out on another bay, in Rhode Island. It's pure coincidence that I started writing fiction in New England-a place haunted and possessed by its writers-and now, years down the way, I live and love and write there in a more or less permanent fashion. New England has been good to me. All those wide grey seascapes and sudden snows and endless tiny graveyards, like monuments to tribes of hobgoblins. All those winding, narrow streets and mists and cobblestones. How much like another world. How much like Europe, as seen through Poe's eye.

How much like a maze.

It sounds so silly now: I wrote The Labyrinth to see if I could. To see if a piece of long fiction was something I had any facility with or ability to accomplish. I had no idea if it was. Until then I had been a poet, and not a very successful one. I had written exactly one short story, which appears, fittingly enough, as a chapter in another novel in this volume. I had no idea if I could write something longer, something more complex. I had no idea, to be honest, whether I was really a writer at all. I was planning to teach Greek at some university at some point. Like many folks right after college, I loved to write, wanted to write, but had no notion of how it was actually done. Writers seemed like superheroes to me, and the thing about superheroes is that you're either born a mutant or you're not. (I know that's not really true now, but it I believed it then, and writing a novel was a kind of personal laboratory test: Did I have the mutation?) So in my little apartment, on my little computer a friend had bought me (after its predecessor had been mutilated and finally killed dead by a stray cup of coffee and a drunk freshman) because he couldn't bear the thought of me not writing, I wrote a few words, and then a few more.

I was twenty-two, my poems were too full of fairy tales and adjectives, and I was terribly lonely. I'd just graduated from college and moved back to the States from Scotland. My boyfriend was in the Navy, we were supposed to be getting married but I don't think either of us really knew why, other than that the Navy offered certain concrete encouragements to do so, and I was working in Newport, RI as a fortune-teller. I was good at it-after all, it's not much more than sizing a person up and telling them a story, guided by a few symbol-dense images, designed to evoke a feeling of surprise, recognition, and finally, revelation. And I found myself typing away between readings, in this little room in a gothic tower that used to be an armory, on a velvet covered table. The room did double duty as storage for a local theater company, and I spent my afternoons surrounded by Macbeth's throne, Ibsenesque dressing tables, Yorick's skull-I'm sure Chekov's gun was in there somewhere. There, and at a local Starbucks, in case this is getting too atmospheric for you, and at a particle-board desk in an apartment with no air-conditioning, I wrote The Labyrinth.

I wrote it quickly-I have always been fast. And when I look back I feel as though I was waiting to write it for a long time. Saving up for it, mulching. And when I actually sat down at the keyboard, I wrote what I knew to write. What formal training I'd had was as a poet, and little enough of that. I had three freshly-baccalaureated languages banging around my head and a lifetime of voracious reading, but I didn't know the rules. I didn't know what I was or was not supposed to do. I didn't know how to reign myself in in any real way. I smushed words together and I made up new ones because I liked to and it seemed to me to have meaning. I don't think this is a bad thing-just doing it, before you know how it's meant to be done. It was terrifying and exhilarating and I had no idea whether I could ever get it published. Later, when told it was not really a book at all, and accused of passing off some kind of neo-Beat poetry as a novel I was righteously indignant, but the truth is that's about the size of it. I didn't know how to write a novel. I knew how to write a two hundred page poem with no columns and my whole heart. It was, if not perfect, at least pure.

I wrote it merely to write it, and I poured into it everything I thought I knew, all of the hurt and uncertainty and depression and mania and wildness and misery of my twenty-two years. At the time, I thought it was probably the only book I'd ever write.

Of course, I made myself a liar almost immediately. A few days further into October, I opened up a blank file and wrote the first words of what became The Orphan's Tales.

It was a strange, long, inchoate summer. But out of it came everything else.

Three Days in the Archetype Mines Fast forward a year and I had just gotten married, just moved to Japan, just gotten a fluffy yellow dog and a house in the suburbs of Yokosuka. I was installed in it like any housewife of 1957, meant to wait for my Naval officer husband to come home at infrequent intervals and entertain myself.

I wrote Yume no Hon as an entry for the Blue Lake Books 3-day Novel contest. The thing I remember most about those three days was that Blue Lake required someone else to sign a form certifying that you had written your manuscript in three days as per the rules-and I didn't have anybody. My husband was at sea and I had no friends. I called the only other person in town I knew, who happened to have been my high school sweetheart, years ago. He'd joined the Navy, too. He signed the form and we had nothing to say to each other.

Yume is a novel of loneliness first and foremost. A hymn or paean to being alone-though it does not praise it. It seeks for the light and the hollows in solitude, solitude being what I possessed in abundance. I had discovered the strange, gorgeous names of the Heian calendar, and as I watched those times of year come in Japan, an utterly other calendar than the one I, California girl, was used to, I began to think of Ayako, and how she might dwell within those seasons, in and among and beside them.

I have occasionally referred to Yume as the suicide note I never delivered on. How's that for an introduction to a poetic little novella? Well, so it goes. It is the work of a person profoundly not alright, a person living a Betty Friedan life in a post-Paglia universe, a white woman living in Japan, a twenty-three year old who saw no end to the isolation and sameness of the life she had chosen for herself. It is all of those things, and it is also a novel of feminine archetypes, of Pele and Tiamat and Isis and the Sphinx, all of whom live in a broken old hermit named Ayako, as they live in all of us or they wouldn't be archetypes. How those archetypes want us to survive, and to survive in us, how they evolve and force us to evolve. It deals in physics, the physics of infinite paths and worlds and states of being, infinite ways of being here and yet not-here.

In my life I have often been accused of being deliberately obscure in my writing, of meaning nothing, of being pretty for pretty's sake. Perhaps you can see that all the things I write about, and am still writing about, have always seemed vitally immediate to me. They are not even truly metaphors. Ayako is her dream. There is no difference. And everything she dreamed was everything I could not process outside of fiction. What it meant to be alone. What it meant to be a woman. What it meant to make choices I imagined a better woman would not make. I have always been a confessional writer, and if anything can be said of the period of my work covered by this collection it is that this was my most confessional time. I had not yet learned how to tell anyone else's story, only to drape silk and history over my own. Of course, perhaps we never really do anything else.

This is, at its purest essence, a book of choices, and the punchline, if such a thing applies, is that they are all taken eventually. That literally, not metaphorically, we life every life, and some of those are lava-goddesses and some of those are husks that used to be human, clinging to a mountainside. It is a book that helped me live.

I lost the contest.

When, ultimately, Yume no Hon was published, we decided to print two editions, one red and one blue. Given that the novel deals with light and physics as much as dreams and myth, I chose to separate the book along the light spectrum. It seemed to me to say that this one book could be any book, any path taken, any choice, any author, any reader. We have chosen to print the blue version here.

Some 170 words are different between the two editions, and to make it easier on readers who are not collectors, I print the differing texts here: Blue: On the other hand, the wavelength of each potential self is determined by its distance from the fulcrum-crone. But if we understand any of an infinite series of women and ur-women to be fulcra, the wavelength of each self is also infinite, both infinitely short and infinitely long, infinitely red and infinitely blue. Instinctively, these selves seek each other out and merge, unable to comprehend the depravity of their conviction that a single woman can serve as a hinge around which they all turn. The resulting sea of constantly merging and disengaging selves resembles the primordial mitosis-swamp-the infinite female, treading water in a mass of pure, white light.

Red: On the other hand, the wavelength of each potential self is determined by its distance from the fulcrum-crone. But if we understand any of an infinite series of women and ur-women to be fulcra, the wavelength of each self is impossible to determine, being both identical with and impossibly far from its point of origin. In the yolk-riddled void, these photon-bodies float, flashing red and blue, containing within them all possible redness and blueness, joining together like spinning gears, and at each notch exploding into a third (or fifth, or eleventh,) mirror-self, gashing the darkness in its birth pangs -a wash of pure, white light.

An Eight-Headed Problem If every novel has a seed, this one lay in a confluence of myth and history and my traveling in Japan-that Susano-no-Mikoto, the Shinto god of storm and wind, completed his major myth cycle, destroying an eight-headed dragon, in the city of Hiroshima.

These things seemed to go together to me in some fundamental way. Huge ribbons of history pinned in this one place. And yet, at the same time, I had such terrible sympathy for Yamato-no-Orochi, the dragon in question. He or she or it spent most of their time roving the countryside and eating maidens, a common hobby for dragons in all cultures. Yet it is summarily executed, by Susano, who is no one's idea of a hero and is not meant to be seen as one. Instead, he is a trickster, and I found it hard to exult in his victory.

This is probably the most textually experimental and angriest of my work. Its feminism is not only one of giving the maidens names and hopes and dreams, of speaking for the monster, but of rage at the constant helplessness of simply being female in a world of hyper-idolized masculinity, of being traded, a trophy for one god or a meal for another. There is a small comfort in community, of women similarly devoured, similarly in the dark, turning the identity of the monster into their own identity. You are what you eat, you become what you destroy. Having often been treated as a problem to be solved rather than a person in my familial and romantic life, well, I felt I had something to say about all that.

I have always been fascinated by the monster and the maiden-they are my yin and yang, constants in mythology and folklore, constants in life, though in life the innocence, if there is any to be had, is not always all on one side or the other. Japanese art is full of examinations of young girls and monsters, and though in American geek circles this is often played as a joke, I felt there was something deeper there. I wanted to write the book of the monster and the maiden, and in connecting that to Hiroshima and the monstrous acts there, it came to encompass the entirety of the Shinto creation myth, which begins with an act of terrible, brutal denial of feminine agency, even existence, and bounces through another and another-not terribly different from Western creation myths, really.

I should mention that in the original myth cycle, Yamato-no-Orochi is not the leech-child born of Izanami and Izanagi's first meeting. No further mention is made of the child in any text I could find. I struggled for a long time over this change in the original story-it seemed to me to fit, like a puzzle piece, but I am not a Japanese woman and I did not want to appropriate or disrespect a culture I had come to call, at least in some uneasy part, home. In the end, however, I realized that I would change a piece of Greek or Roman or Celtic myth, if it opened up a new window into the story. I felt that in the absence of an ending for the leech-child's story, I could fill in the corners, shade and shape. I hope I have done well by that poor creature.

This novel bridges my last days in Japan and my coming back to America. My world was changing, the snakeskin of my old marriage falling away, the mutant maiden-monster of my new self emerging into a new world. I was working on the second book of The Orphan's Tales, what would become The Book of the Sea. In the end the two books came out within weeks of each other. This was a difficult book to write, because of its anger, perhaps, because of the trapped women in it, who so nearly resembled my own situation. In the end, however, it is one of my favorite of my own books, I am proud of it and its anger, and it is a gift to the country I lived in for so long, struggled with, and finally came to love.

My Dinner with King Arthur The inclusion of this last novella might seem anachronistic, as it came out in the fall of 2009, three years after The Grass-Cutting Sword and four years after The Labyrinth. In fact, it came out on the day of my second wedding, on a bright day in November when the world was much better than it had been for some years. However, it was written much earlier. Novellas are notoriously difficult to find publishers for, and it stayed in my "trunk" the word we still use to describe the no-man's-land of our crowded hard-drives where unpublished work lives until it does or does not find a home.

In fact, the Galahad chapter of Under in the Mere is the first piece of fiction I ever wrote when I was twenty, for a class in experimental writing in which I wholly failed to impress upon my professor that I had any ability whatever. She thought there was something to this chapter though, written as though Galahad were wandering through San Diego, where I then lived, looking for his Grail.

All of these books have strong ties to the places I lived when I wrote them. Under in the Mere is no exception-but I wrote pieces of it in San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Japan, Virginia, and finally I finished it in Ohio. It is part of that confessional style, that other period of my writing, before I ran out of my own angst and had to start figuring out how to tell someone, anyone else's story.

And this was the beginning of that.

I have been obsessed with Arthuriana since I was a child and my father, who had some peculiar ideas about baby's first King Arthur, gave me Steinbeck's Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights. I loved Morgan le Fay-she was described in Malory as a "clerk of necromancy" which I took to mean she worked at some kind of magical grocery store, packing bags of spells and potions. Later, I found out clerk meant cleric, and my image of her changed to a magical secretary. Morgan was the hero of my childhood. When I grew to be a teenager, my circle of friends and I not only obsessed together, but wrote an Arthurian play and, when it was performed, we played the parts we had always assigned to ourselves in our fey afternoons in the California woods It's not hard to guess who I was. It is to that circle that the book was eventually dedicated.

And yet when I came to write about King Arthur, it was in the 2000s, when Morgan and her sisters had been done to death in the fantasy of Arthuriana market. And really, no one writes about Arthur himself-it's always his friends that steal the show. I felt I could say little more about her, other than my grocery-girl or my secretary. I was moved instead to the minor knights, and the idea of the Otherworld all Arthurian knights must eventually travel into as California. California, where I moved when I was thirteen, has always seemed to me a kind of Fairyland, a desert of illusion, full of the fey and the cruel as well as the kind. I couldn't let go of that connection, and this book, which took as long to write as books of mine three times the size, came out of that. Each chapter is a connection between the modern and the ancient, and the knight is the path between them, with it's Kay as a Turing machine or drunken Galahad. It is a work full of both my youthful not even knowing what rules to break, just rushing pel-mel at literature like Chung Li in the old Streetfighter game, her legs on fire, and my graduate study in medievalism. If you are a medievalist, well, you're welcome-this is a book full of the tiny and irrelevant and beautiful and mad things we know. If not, I hope it will lead you to our little fortress.

It was also my first work to deal primarily with masculinity and masculine POVs, something that excited and worried me-would I get it right, so many do not, when dealing with the opposite gender. I hope I have done well by that, and most especially by the stories that have possessed me since I was a girl.

I sit by my long window in Maine and a storm slowly clears outside. Blue sky peeks through the deep forest just outside my house, the old hoary New England forest that might be full of anything, maidens or monsters or knights. Spatters of rain start to dry on the glass, and my chickens crow for the sunshine.

There is a kind of map that connects these four novels, a ley line connecting Rhode Island to Japan to Ohio to California and finally to Maine. A map with strange place names and stranger roads, perhaps the kind of map a kid draws when they don't know how to stay in the lines, perhaps the kind men drew a thousand years ago, when the difference between the real and the unreal seemed less important. It is a map of my heart, a heart in four chambers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan's Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and enormous cat.

OTHER BOOKS BY CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE.

Deathless.

A Dirge for Prester John, Volume One: The Habitation of the Blessed.

A Dirge for Prester John, Volume Two: The Folded World A Dirge for Prester John, Volume Three: The Spindle of Necessity.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making.