A little girl willing to battle a dragon for the sake of a wish. A young resistance fighter questioning everything he's ever known. A princess laboring under an unbreakable curse.

A daughter claiming the legacy denied her. A son seeking vengeance for his father's death. A clever hedge-witch gathering knowledge in a hostile land. This isn’t by any means unusual for the collection itself, but the tone and effect of the story is just a few shades lighter than the other stories, and it feels purposeful and definitely left me closing the book with a small smile on my face and feeling, in some way, refreshed by a genre I hadn’t touched in quite a while.A quiet fisher mourning the loss of xer sister to a cruel dragon. There’s no way to affect the world around us with one wish.ĭespite my moment of sadness, the story itself is triumphant, and closes out the collection with a final win. Most especially, I enjoyed the discussion of how the people had two perfectly good colours to clothe everyone in, and why would they need more? But as the wishmaker’s wish is made, and the townspeople find themselves relieved to have the child not only back and unharmed but with the wish granted, there’s this melancholy I couldn’t help but feel while I read: we don’t have wish giving dragons, so the power to change on this level has to be battled over and over again. What follows is a tale about this child, and the wish the child makes, but it’s a larger story as well, with some not-so-subtle jabs at our contemporary world among the rest. Then we focus smaller, and smaller, until we follow a child toddling up the mountainside and into the Dragon’s den, wooden sword in hand. “The Wish-Giver” almost feels like a fairy tale, in that the set-up starts large and winnows down: we hear about a dragon capable of granting wishes, though she must first be defeated, and then a community that has formed around said dragon, catering to those who come to seek wishes (and are more often not successful, at the cost of their lives).

With this story, my journey through the transgender and nonbinary fantasy stories of No Man of Woman Born concludes, and I have to say it ends on a lovely, gentle note.

No Man of Woman Born by Ana Mardoll