PodCastle is the world’s first audio fantasy magazine. Weekly, we broadcast the best in fantasy short stories, running the gammut from heart-pounding sword and sorcery, to strange surrealist tales, to gritty urban fantasy, to the psychological depth of magical realism. Our podcast features authors including N.K. Jemisin, Peter S. Beagle, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Jim C. Hines, and Cat Rambo, among others. Terry Pratchett once wrote, “Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.” Tune in to PodCastle each Tuesday for our weekly tale, and spend the length of a morning commute giving your imagination a work out.
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PodCastle 392: The Lady’s Maid
* Author : Carlea Holl-Jensen
* Narrator : Kim Lakin-Smith
* Host : Keffy R. M. Kehrli
* Audio Producer : Peter Wood
*
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First appeared in Fantasy Magazine’s Queers Destroy Fantasy! special issue. Get the full issue here!
Rated R
Guest hosted by Keffy Kehrli, editor and host of the Glittership podcast
The Lady’s Maid
by Carlea Holl-Jensen
Sometimes she wonders about the girls whose heads her mistress wears. Sometimes, though not often, she wonders where they came from, who they loved. She wonders who, if anyone, keeps their memory now.
Mostly, though, she doesn’t trouble herself. It is her lady’s right to take what she desires. Everything is hers, as far as the eye can see: the mirrored sitting room and the marble statues in the courtyard and the deer in the forests to the east and the endless farmland, now fallow, to the west—all hers. Any passing milkmaid with a handsome head of curls, any traveling fortuneteller with changeable sea-green eyes—they are all hers, too, if she wishes it. This is the order of things.