Twenty-eight days there are in the month of February, a cold month, a month in which the summer seems an endless dream one had once, long ago. We should not be tricked by the frost, for it was during the dreaming month of February that Amal El-Mohtar composed The Honey Month, a book that tastes and smells of sun. Each day she uncapped a vial of honey, letting the brew inspire the words that became this book. Amal offers us much more than poetry and prose, however. Her words wrap around us like spiderwebs, gently pulling us into the web she weaves, where honey girls tempt and tease us, where things lost return and sorrow paints the leaves. This is a colourful book, but it is by no means a frivolous one. Remember, not all honey is sweet.

These bewitching poems and stories unwind a fevered world of magic and longing and young women who chance the uncanny and gain wisdom beyond their years.

Fairy women have long been seen as embodying rulership of the land. The Melusinian tradition of marrying a fairy woman to validate rulership occurred across western Europe, but the Portuguese tales of Lady Goat-Foot and Lady Marinha from the Book of Lineages of Count Dom Pedro are particularly noteworthy. As these tales evolved over the centuries, they would demonstrate their longevity and power, cross-fertilising with grimoires, Quimbanda, and Cyprianic magic.

Rulership and politics go hand-in-hand, and the author demonstrates how noble fairy wives were seen at different times as a blessing and a curse. The fascinating history he details of the use of these tales is as curious and transgressive as their heroines, and shows how fact truly can be stranger than fiction, and that when these two blur, there is a liminal place of fairy and magic, where anything becomes possible.

The reprint of In the Forest of Forgetting by award-winning author Theodora Goss, first published in 2006 by Prime Books, with an introduction by Terri Windling and cover art by Virginia Lee. The table of contents has been slightly modified: Phalaenopsis has been replaced by Her Mother's Ghosts, which first appeared in 2004 in The Rose and Twelve Petals and Other Stories, released by Small Beer Press.

Scheherezade's Bequest Volume 1, Issue 1. AS YOU WISH: THE LOATHLY LADY gathers together fiction, poetry, and non-fiction in an exploration of what it is women (and men) truly want. We chose the theme of the Loathly Lady for this issue in order to challenge modern perceptions of beauty and to explore the notion of sovereignty. Authors responded to our call for submissions with a diverse arrays of stories, poems, artwork, and academic insights into the Loathly Lady trope. Their answers to our questions may surprise you.

Sometimes, we decide to try and live without our shadows. Sometimes we slip into someone else's and live in their shape for a while. But try as we might, the old shadows linger. They've grown dusty, perhaps, brittle and faded, but look there--straggling out behind you and before you--the shadows of every shape you ever were, or once hoped to be. And when a new shape grows too heavy, when it gnaws holes in you or binds you, when your feathers fall to the carpet or the sand drags you underground, all your old shadows are still there... waiting.

A hauntingly powerful new voice in British fiction, this highly anticipated short story collection from Claire Dean showcases fourteen stories of wonder and memory, wind and water, metamorphosis and regret.

Claire Dean's short stories have been widely published and are included in The Best British Short Stories 2011 & 2014 (Salt). Claire has worked as a bookseller, editor, project manager and lecturer, and is currently researching digital storymaking at Lancaster University. She lives in the north of England with her two sons.

Peasants, princesses, princes and fighting men. Wives, daughters, fairy queens and friends. They share in common triumph and loss, but what binds them all is love. This collection of includes five previously published and four unpublished short stories by Erzebet Barthold who is best known for her work as a publisher (Papaveria Press and Hadean Press). Inside you'll find fairy tale retellings, pure fantasy, and the weird, bound together by the subversive notion that while we can be damaged and broken, wholeness is our natural state.

Erzebet Barthold is an author, artist, editor, bookbinder, and independent publisher. She is inspired by fairy tales, folklore, and the wild places in the world. Her short fiction has been published by Fantasy Magazine, Not One of Us, Clarkesworld Magazine, Tor Books, Lethe Press, Mythic Delirium Books, and her novellas and novels by Prime Books.

Theodora Goss has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her prose-poem Octavia is Lost in the Hall of Masks (2003) won the Rhysling Award and her short story Singing of Mount Abora (2007) won the World Fantasy Award. SONGS FOR OPHELIA gathers together eighty of Theodora's otherworldly poems which lead the reader, as though under a spell, through the unfolding of the seasons and into the realm of pure magic. Delia Sherman, author of THE FREEDOM MAZE and CHANGELING, says about SONGS FOR OPHELIA, Willows, dancing maidens, gypsies, mothers, lovers, daughters, magic animals, living waters, and transformations of all kinds abound in these gorgeous poems. With her formal prosody, her fairytale subjects, and her insights on love and loss and longing, Goss manages, Janus-like, to look back to the Victorians and inward at the heart of a modern woman with intelligence and grace.

Maligned for her beauty, cursed for her role in causing a war, she has rarely been given her chance to tell her tale. Now Helen of Troy's voice breaks free, offering a new vision in this epic lyrical sequence that follows her journey from Sparta to Troy, from earth to hell, and back. A stunning debut novella from Mari Ness, THROUGH IMMORTAL SHADOWS SINGING will transform your view of Helen and the Trojan War, in a soaring poem of love and war, healing and pain, hatred and triumph.

Mari Ness spent much of her life wandering the world and reading. This, naturally, trained her to do just one thing: write. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and Fantasy. She blogs regularly at Tor.com, most recently with the Disney Read-Watch, a series about Disney animated films and their source material, which received a nomination for a Stabby Award. Her poetry has also been nominated for the Rhysling and Dwarf Stars Awards. She lives in central Florida.

Scheherezade's Bequest Volume 1, Issue 2. SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE: TALES FROM THE SEA called authors to draw from folktales, personal experience, and the vast ocean of the imagination to reveal selkies, mermaids, sea nymphs, the great flood, and more in this wonderful collection of short stories and poems, each one a siren song luring us into the waves. This issue continues our tradition of offering original fairy tales and retellings of the old stories that leave us with a sense of wonder, a sense that something rich and strange is always just around the corner.