This is fic for a book I’m almost positive nobody following me has read: Frostflower and Thorn, by Phyllis Ann Karr. It’s about a world a few centuries post-apocalypse. Specifically, about a sorceress named Frostflower, a female warrior named Thorn, and Thorn/Frostflower’s newborn baby. Thorn bore it, Frostflower’s raising it. I’m only a quarter of the way in, and the les-yay is strong in this one. It makes me so, so happy.

***

“Tell me about my mother,” Starwind says, when he’s a boy of nearly seven. Frostflower’s breath catches in her throat, harsh grief swamping her at the mention.

“Your mother?” she asks, wiping her hands of the worn cotton of her apron. “Wind, where did you even hear of her?”

“Ironcreek told me that you came back with me and a body, and you buried her beneath the tangle trees,” Starwind says, looking up at her with Thorn’s twilight-colored eyes. “You didn’t buy me, did you?”

Frostflower laughs, instead of crying as she wished to. “Oh, Wind. I did buy you from her. Thorn never wanted to be a mother. But she was a good friend. The best.”

Starwind nods, looking up at her hungrily. “Mother’s name was Thorn,” he repeats, rolling the name on his tongue. Frostflower smiles weakly.

“Her name was Thorn, and she was a warrior of the common sort. She drank and she whored and she gambled, and she’d have had a borter take you out of her if I hadn’t offered her another way.” Frostflower fall silent. The rest seems too raw and too intimate to share. How could she tell her son his mother had thought she was destined for the Hellbog, and she sacrificed her life to save them anyway? The words she could not say choked her.

 She had scars all up and down her body, and she cursed every other word and she had a temper like sparks falling on straw. She believed in the farmer-priest’s religion, and it twisted her up inside, but she was as kind and just and principled as any woman could be after such upbringing. She was so brave and she was the best friend I’d ever had, and I’d have given up my powers for her.

I love her, and I think she loved me.

Frostflower swallows back her tears. She is not a very good sorceress anymore, she thinks. She lies too much with silence.