Two reprints, two originals.

‘Ill Spirits’

Qamty used masculine speech tags for himself and kept a curl of bristle on his chin, and he wore what was a woman’s hat in Merqot, white stoat, with pearls and silver strung into his hair. His deer, the one he rode and the others under bags, six of them, were soft stags that had a doe’s proportions. These were sacred creatures, but uneasy in a camp.

‘Spirit Writing’

The Cosmocrat of Ping had outlawed origin spirits for the peoples of the north. Instead, you must have ancestry, orderly, recorded, and limited to men. Ishet had to close her mouth once the court official addressed them. Even her presence was an impropriety.

‘A Truce with Evil’

The truth was, her brother’s riding-stag still represented to her Talisy’s disastrous decision, in the first place, to join the Agyr knights. Too often she saw, instead of his empty seat, the Talisy of two years ago in his splendid fishscale armour astride a young Batrad, the stag’s white hair and the opalescent armour both polished to a fine shine. Batrad already with a strut. To be picked out for a steed – on rude size and strength and the whiteness of his coat – immediately went to his head. In the home herd he had been all disruption and no sense, like any stag his age. Fit to run around the forest with a lance and act out twaddle from the epic quests.

‘A Visit from the Scythians’

Hands the size of shovels; her feet sprawl like a camel’s. I have never seen a woman walk like that. I think her hips are the axle of her cart. This is not athleticism, but rather ignorance of human motion – the opposite, in fact, of our sports. They walk rawly, as if never taught.

Together, 17000 words.

‘Ill Spirits’ first published in The Knot Wound Round Your Finger: An Anthology on Memory, History & Inheritance, edited by Devon Field, Bell Press, 2021.

‘A Truce with Evil’ first published in Queer Weird West Tales, edited by Julie Bozza, LIBRAtiger, 2022.

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Update
A review thick with insights from E.M. White at Sad but Building Worlds:
https://sadbutbuildingworlds.blog/2025/11/15/im-reading-more-steppe-fiction-a-visit-from-the-scythians-a-collection-by-bryn-hammond/