Technically, I’m not yet on holiday. That’s next month. But I’ve finally finished the first draft of CLOCKWORK MAGICIAN (only 2 months late, whoohoo!) so it’s holiday time!
Which means that I’m up for some serious downtime this week! W.R. on holidays likes to read all the books that W.R. at work doesn’t have the time or mental space for; I’ve already got a pile of books and a few ebooks ready to go. And, like the good little student I am, I’ve already asked my Korean tutor for a webtoon rec so I can expand my fun to my studies as well.
W.R. on holidays also means W.R. having fun with short stories: I’m planning to finish up a short story this week to send out in the newsletter at the end of the week. Fans of the City Between series in general and Detective Tuatu in particular should expect to be made Very Happy. I’ll do a limited time release of the short on my blog here before it goes in a compilation of all the Short Things from the City Between universe thus far and goes up on Amazon for sale, so make sure to read it when you see it!
Are we having fun yet? Don’t know about you blokes, but I definitely am!
NaNoWriMo is over; and although, paradoxically, I was writing less words per day than I was doing the month prior, it’s still a relief to be finished with it. I may have written less words per day, but I felt more stressed with the words I did write. Now that we’re well into December, my writing feels less stressful again. Hooray!
I’ve been more-or-less steadily working on Staff & Crown all through the month (as well as making decent wordcount on Lady of Weeds and Between Jobs) and it now sits at a bit over half way. Which means that I’m actually behind where I wanted to be with this book. Unfortunately, that means that Staff & Crown may be a month later in the publishing than I expected: February 2018 instead of January 2018. I don’t want to leave myself with a single month to edit and make changes, while at the same time running a preorder and giveaway campaign. One of the things I want to be working on in 2018 is the quality of my books, and I want to start the year by publishing my best work.
In the mean time, here is an excerpt from the first chapter. You can expect a finalised blurb and a cover reveal next week (as well as news about the audio narrator for Twelve Days of Faery).
Enjoy!
-oOo-
Suspiciously now, Annabel demanded, “What do you know? Have you been talking to Rorkin? Where is he?”
Melchior grinned. “I haven’t talked to Rorkin since the castle.”
“What did he say then?”
“You’re growing up to be a very suspicious young woman, Nan.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t lied to me all the—”
“Don’t start that again!” Melchior said hastily. “I managed to have a bit of a talk with Rorkin—actually, he managed to have one with me—and I understand that your friend has something he needs to do somewhere else.”
“Somewhere or some time?”
“That’s the impression I got,” Melchior said, shrugging. “But you know what Rorkin’s like. It could have been what he wanted me to think.”
“Yes,” agreed Annabel. Talking with Rorkin was inclined to leave her a little bit dizzy and certain only that anything she thought she knew was likely to be something she was meant to think and not necessarily true. One thing Annabel was really very sure about, on the other hand, was that the letter at present forgotten between Melchior’s fingers was from Mr. Pennicott, the driving force behind the group who had sent Melchior to find her.
Three years ago, that thought would have prompted Annabel to thought but not to action. Now, she rose without a pang for her comfortable seat by the window and wandered around behind Melchior’s sofa, ostensibly to look at the books in the bookcase there. Lately Melchior, who had always curled up on her pillow and in her lap in his cat form, had taken to deliberately distancing himself—sitting on the sofa opposite instead of the same one, for example. Annabel was quite sure he was receiving more notes, too.
Annabel leaned her forearms on the sofa back and looked over Melchior’s shoulder, scruffing his hair by reflex. It was three years since Melchior had been a cat, but the habit of patting his head and tickling his ears had stayed with her. Tugging on his short, dark hair as she’d used to tug on his ears, she said: “Is that from Mr. Pennicott? Do you have to go away again?”
“Don’t do that, Nan,” he said, batting her hands away. The letter vanished at the same time, though Annabel wasn’t sure if it was purposely or simply a result of that small squabble.
“Why?” she demanded, evading his swipes and ruffling his hair even more vigorously, this time with both hands. “I like patting your head.”
This time, Melchior moved away entirely, twitching around to look at her. “I’m not your cat any more, Nan.”
“Yes, you are,” Annabel said. “You’re mine, my cat. You should purr like you used to.”
“Then it seems rather awkward to mention at this stage that I am, in fact, a man,” remarked Melchior. His thin lips had a rather curious curl to them. “Have you never noticed?”
“Of course I have,” said Annabel. “You take up a lot more space and you’re not as furry. But it’s still nice to pat you on the head.”
“Nice it may be,” Melchior retorted. “It’s certainly not proper, however. And for that matter, neither is leaning over the backs of sofas and whispering in gentlemen’s ears.”
“I wasn’t whispering in gentlemen’s ears!” Annabel protested. “I was talking, and it’s your ear! You were muttering in the back of my mind for five years, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t pat you on the head and talk in your ear now and then.”
Melchior’s hazel eyes gazed at her for quite some time before he said pleasantly: “I feel that I should mention once again that I am no longer a cat.”
“But I can see that!”
“I don’t think you do.”
Annabel, crossly, said, “I wish you’d speak in proper sentences. You’re as bad as Rorkin.”
It’s only a week before BLACKFOOT’s release date of April 17th! Hooray!
For those of you who don’t know/didn’t realise: BLACKFOOT is the second book in the Two Monarchies Sequence and continues almost straight after the events of SPINDLE, though with a few different characters. Or, at least, some of ’em are still characters you know, just mixed up a bit. Those of you who have read MASQUE as well as SPINDLE will also meet some young characters who seem a little bit familiar…
And since I can, I’m posting the first chapter of BLACKFOOT for you guys, by way of whetting your appetite (and annoying the heck out of you when you realise that you can’t read the rest until next week, muahahaha).
1
Annabel was certain she remembered being born. Peter said that was rubbish, but Peter was always inclined to think that no one was quite as special or clever as he was. Annabel remembered the worried faces bent over her in her mother’s arms, and the long, clever, brown face that came later when all the others had gone. The clever brown one tied a sparkling rattle to a thread around her wrist and went away, and after that the rest of the faces looked less worried. They wouldn’t let her take the rattle off, even when she cried for hours on end. By the time she was two, Annabel was used to the tug of thread about her wrist and the tinkling of the rattle when she moved. The only time it was silent was when she held it under the water in the bath.
When she was old enough to know the faces around her as Father, Mother, and Cookie, Annabel was allowed out into the garden to walk, her tiny silver rattle tinkling at her wrist. It was understood that this was a Great Privilege, and that Annabel was Not To Wander Off.
Annabel didn’t mean to wander off. The thread around her wrist had seen one too many baths and was brittle and tenuous. Cookie had looked at it that morning and declared that it would have to be changed that afternoon, which made Annabel sigh. It was always such a business, changing the thread. Father had to be there to carefully snip the it with silver scissors, and Mother had to be there to thread the new one through the eyelet at the end of the rattle. Cookie stood by the chair each time to hold Annabel’s wrist with one pudgy hand, and the rattle with the other. It was the only time Annabel saw the worry come back into her parent’s faces.
The thread was woolly and loose when she was let into the garden. Annabel spun the rattle between her fingers without thinking about it, and the sound of bells followed her as she walked, so familiar that she no longer heard it. It wasn’t until she was at the decorative fountain that a queer kind of silence fell on her ears, and she realised with a nasty lurch of her stomach that the thread was gone.
Annabel gave a small squeak of dismay and pressed two plump fists to her mouth. She was never sure what was supposed to happen if the rattle came off, but it had been implied that its loss would lead to Terrible Things. She made a frantic dash back the way she had come, her eyes scanning the ground for the silver gleam that would give it away.
She wasn’t sure when she noticed the difference. It could have been when she tumbled over a ragged clump of grass (Father made sure the lawn was scythed every third day), or it could have been the sudden, horrible chill in the air (home was always warm), and the smell of something unfamiliar in the air. Annabel picked herself up carefully, a tear trembling at the edge of her left eye, and as carefully stood still until the tear went away. Then she looked around her. The sky was darker than it had been, and Annabel, who hadn’t yet begun to learn about the cycles of the triad, was confused. Why did the suns look so odd in the sky? Where was the house, the fountain, the gardens? Had she fallen asleep? Had the afternoon passed to dusk while she was sleeping? Was she, perhaps, like the Sleeping Princess?
No, she decided. She had been awake the whole time. That meant magic. Magic had taken her somewhere else. Annabel trotted onward, her brown eyes studious and her chubby cheeks pinked by the chill, until she found that she was stuck. She couldn’t see what she was stuck in and the ground was just ground, so she decided that was magic, too.
Annabel was still stuck in the enchantment when a witch came along to prod her and chuckle gleefully.
“Oho, you’re a nice specimen!” said the witch. “What a fine fish for my net!”
“Not a fish,” said Annabel, biting her lower lip. Tears were threatening again– proper tears, this time, and she didn’t at all like the looks of the witch.
“No, but you’re a tasty little trifle just the same,” said the witch. “Who would have thought that Old Grenna would pull such a plump little morsel! How have you escaped the clutches of every wizard this side of the Ice Wall?”
This didn’t make sense to Annabel, so she said again, cautiously: “Not a fish.”
“No, dearie,” said the witch. “Not a fish. Certainly not a fish. Come along with you: it’s bread-and-butter time.”
*
“And that was it,” said Annabel, plopping herself down on a half-block of marble. She and Peter had sneaked away to the old Ruins, the skeleton of a grand castle that had been their playground since the day they first met there. “That’s all I remember.”
“Yes,” said Peter, “but that’s just a dream, Ann. You know it didn’t really happen that way.”
Annabel looked at him without blinking, her chin perched on her plump fists.
“But it didn’t, Ann! It couldn’t have! If you had a cook and gardeners, that would have to mean that your parents were nobles, at the very least!”
“I don’t know about that,” said Annabel, “but I remember. They’re not just dreams.”
“You’ve been with Old Grenna for as long as I can remember: you were sitting in on her spells when you were four. People don’t remember things that long ago.”
“I know Old Grenna isn’t my mother,” Annabel said positively.
“Anyone with a lick of sense knows that,” said Peter. “She’s a thin old stick and you’re as fat as butter. Goodness knows which cradle she pinched you from. I just said you’ve been with her for as long as I can remember.”
Another time, Annabel would have asked why his remembrance was any more to be trusted than hers; but it was a pleasant, sunny, and not-too-cold day, and it was too much effort. Besides, Peter had brought sweets and hadn’t yet shared. Instead, she said: “What are you working on, anyway?”
“One of the tickerboxes has started cannibalising the others,” said Peter. He had the little black box on its back with its jointed legs stiff and curved above it, a hatch open on its stomach. Through this hatch, he prodded doubtfully at miniscule cogs and screws with an equally tiny screwdriver. Annabel could just see moving clockwork in layers, tick tick ticking away as he worked at it. “I wouldn’t mind, only I want to know why. I didn’t program it to do that. I think it’s building something from the pieces.”
“What things?”
Peter shrugged and hunched his shoulders over his work. “Something different. Extra parts for itself. I don’t know what.” There was an irritated line between his straight brows that Annabel perfectly understood. Peter didn’t like not understanding things. He liked to think that he knew everything. “Ann, tell your cat to leave my cog pieces alone!”
“He’s not my cat,” said Annabel, but she scooped Blackfoot up anyway. He bit her nose gently and let her pat his head.
“I don’t understand what you see in that cat,” grumbled Peter.
“That’s because he scratches you.”
“Did you notice that another one’s turned up?”
“Yes,” said Annabel. She’d seen the second cat yesterday, a small ginger thing slinking around the edges of the Ruins. Blackfoot had arrived first, five years ago, and sat scratching at her shutters each night until she finally gave up and let him in. Annabel was entirely disinterested in cats, but it wasn’t long before Blackfoot was sleeping on her pillow by sheer force of personality.
“Well, stop attracting them. One’s bad enough.”
She tickled Blackfoot’s ears. “Maybe it’s an invasion.”
“You can’t call two cats an invasion,” said Peter, always willing for an argument. “Pass the magnifier.”
Annabel went back to Grenna’s cottage by the long way that afternoon, Blackfoot trotting along behind her. In theory, she disliked any path that made her walk further than she had to, but Grenna had sent her out that morning in search of lillypilly berries and water from the old well, which meant that there was magic happening that afternoon. And magic meant that Annabel would be sitting for hours, stiff and crosslegged, on cold, hard flagstones. Grenna would draw chalk lines on the stones around her, mix ingredients, and mumble. Then the magic would start up, but Annabel never knew exactly when, so it was always safer to keep her hands tightly folded in her lap. She only knew when it was over because Grenna told her so, smudging out lines and dismissing her irritably to her room. By then, Annabel would be exhausted. She sometimes hoped this meant that she had done magic along with Grenna, but none of the spells she tried by herself had ever worked, and Annabel now thought of herself as merely one more of Grenna’s ingredients.
Annabel arrived at the cottage as the triad was making long, late afternoon shadows from the hedgerows. The lillypilly berries were in her apron pocket, slightly squashed, and a tiny, leather-covered flask sloshed with water from the old well. Annabel had collected them before she met Peter in the Old Ruins, and they were rather the worse for wear.
She stopped at the gate while Blackfoot leapt lightly through the bars, and then quite deliberately rubbed a handful of dirt across the side of her face. Blackfoot stopped and sat on his haunches, staring accusingly as Annabel pulled a handful of hair from her plait and let it flop messily on her shoulder.
“Oh, shut up!” she told him crossly, wiping the last of the dirt on the front of her pinafore. It was faded, but it had been clean this morning. She carefully slumped her shoulders, hunching them forward and frowning at the dirt until she felt the familiar look of blank stupidity settle across her face. Then Annabel opened the gate and plodded up the path and into the cottage.
Grenna pinioned her with a glare as the door opened. “Home at last, are you? I suppose the well got up and walked away?”
Annabel blinked once, slowly and heavily. “No,” she said. “It’s still there.”
Grenna gave vent to her own particular inarticulate crow of annoyance and snatched the bottle of water from Annabel’s outstretched hand.
“I fell down,” said Annabel sorrowfully, into the silence. “I hurt myself.”
“Where are the berries, idiot child! Curse me sideways for having the kindness to nurture an imbecile!”
“Here they are,” Annabel said, plopping two handfuls of battered, juicy lillypilly berries onto the table. “They’re not squashed.”
“Not squashed! The juice streaming from them and she says they’re not squashed! Don’t lick your fingers, stupid child! We’ve work to do and I won’t have you dreaming away while you should be concentrating.”
“What work?”
“Never you mind, nosy niggle. Wash your face and change into your flannels.”
“It’s hot,” said Annabel. “Flannels are hot. Ow!”
“Get away and change before I clip the other ear!”
Annabel shuffled toward her room, one hand clasping her red ear. Flannels meant big magic, and she regretted coming home at all. She could have slept on the heather in the back hills if she’d stayed away: Grenna would only have stomped around the house for a while and cursed her for an imbecile.
When Annabel entered the workroom, hot and uncomfortable in her flannels, Grenna was busy drawing chalk circles. In the centre of one of those circles was a sleek, smoky grey cat. It was so sleek and smooth, in fact, that it wasn’t until Annabel got closer that she understood how very big it was. Sitting on its haunches as it was, its head was just above knee-level.
“There’s a cat,” she said, not troubling to hide her surprise.
“A very special cat,” said Grenna, her face shiny with satisfaction. She turned back to her work and added curtly: “Don’t smudge the lines, or I’ll wallop you from here to the turnpike. Sit down.”
Annabel obediently sat down and waited. Much to her perverse delight, when Grenna turned around again it was to huff in annoyance: “Don’t sit there, you stupid lump! Sit in the circle!”
“You said sit down,” Annabel said mournfully, climbing heavily to her feet. Sometimes the stupidity could be a kind of game. “I sat down.”
“Did you change out of your cotton underthings?”
Annabel said: “Yes,” and sat gloomily in the centre of the circle. Her flannel underthings were particularly itchy, but under the grey cat’s blue gaze she didn’t quite dare to scratch. There was a reason Grenna didn’t work magic around cotton, but Annabel didn’t really understand it and was always resentful of the discomfort of flannel.
“Stop fidgeting!”
Annabel stopped fidgeting, but the cool amusement in the grey cat’s eyes made her say: “Are you going to use the cat?”
Grenna gave a high, crowing: “Ha! Use him! Use him! I should be so addled!”
A tight little ball of fear clenched in Annabel’s stomach, and she thought that the amusement in the grey cat’s eyes deepened. She settled herself more solidly on the floor, sinking into herself until she was looking out on the room with bland, stupid cow eyes, and readied herself for a long wait.
Blackfoot was curled up on her pillow when Annabel, weary and sore, returned to her room. She closed the door behind her and propped herself against it, rubbing her hands across her face to rid herself of the tiredness and stupidity and lingering nastiness.
Blackfoot sat up, managing to stretch in an entirely sarcastic manner, and regarded her with slit eyes. Well, it was quite the exhibition today, he said.
It was always a bit of a surprise to hear Blackfoot speak. Annabel blamed Peter: he was so insistent that Blackfoot didn’t—couldn’t—speak, that it was hard to persevere against his determined disbelief. It didn’t help that Blackfoot’s voice wasn’t an audible one: it made Annabel feel, somewhat uncomfortably, that it was quite possible she was merely mad.
“Mind your own business,” she told him. It was easy to be rude when she was half certain that his voice wasn’t real. Besides, Blackfoot was almost invariably sarcastic, and, real or not, could always be said to deserve a rude remark or two.
It is my business, said Blackfoot, leaping to the floor. It’s embarrassing to have a human who pretends to be imbecilic.
“If Grenna knew I’m not an idiot I wouldn’t be able to spend so much time in the ruins with Peter.”
Not to mention having to work much harder, mocked Blackfoot.
“She tells me things she wouldn’t tell me otherwise,” said Annabel. “It’s safer like this. I can get away from some of the bigger magic when she thinks I’m out drooling in the forest. Anyway, I’m not your human. I didn’t ask you to stay. I didn’t want you sleeping on my bed– or eating half my dinner!”
You could do with a little less dinner in any case, said Blackfoot, but he twined himself around her ankles and purred anyway.
“I’m sure no one else has voices in their head that insult them,” said Annabel gloomily.
Don’t start that again. I told you, I’m not a voice in your head. I’m–
“I know, I know,” grumbled Annabel. “You’re using the enhancement field to amplify and project a meta-stream of conscience–”
–consciousness!
“Yes. That. I don’t understand it.” Annabel thought about that, and added darkly: “Peter would.”
Peter is a cocksure little ragamuffin, said Blackfoot.
“Yes,” said Annabel again. “Only he is very clever.”
Hmf. Fishing for compliments, are we?
“No,” Annabel yawned. “I’ve always been the stupid one. I know that.”
Oh, go to bed, said Blackfoot. He vanished into the inky shadows beneath the bed, but when she had changed into her cotton nightie and climbed beneath the covers he appeared again, startling Annabel by springing noiselessly from the shadows to her pillow.
“I’m allergic,” she told him, half-heartedly shoving him off the pillow. Blackfoot, a slithery whisp of shadow himself, merely flowed around her shoving and curled back up on the pillow. Annabel huffed, turned her ear to his furry warmth, and went to sleep.
*
By the next day there were twenty or so more cats at the ruins. Annabel saw them when she climbed into the crumbling courtyard, each stalking the others with the greatest of dignity. Blackfoot hissed at them with his ears flattened and said something beneath his breath that Annabel didn’t catch.
She said: “Don’t be rude,” anyway, and then: “Why are they all coming here? And where’s the one from last night?”
Blackfoot hissed again, his ears back. You didn’t say anything about a cat last night.
“You were too busy being sarcastic.”
“Still talking to the cat, I see,” said Peter’s voice. He must have been right behind her, because he leapt from the huge outer stones as Annabel turned her head.
“There’s more of them,” she said, ignoring the remark.
“I noticed,” said Peter. “Keep them away from my tickerboxes.”
“They’re not mine!” Annabel protested. “I can’t stop them from doing whatever they want to do!”
Peter gave the half-shrug that conceded a point. “Oh well, I’ll think of something.”
“Did you bring it?”
“Of course I did. Here: it’s proper quality stock.”
Annabel caught the carelessly tossed book with reverent fingers and caressed the blank pages. “It’s perfect! Tell your mother I’ll send her a portrait for payment just as soon as I can make the ink and find another pen.”
“I’m not sitting still for a portrait,” said Peter ungratefully. “She’s got piles of paper and books at home, what else could she do with them but give ’em away?”
“Well, I think it’s lovely to have a paper merchant for a stepfather,” Annabel said enviously. “All that wonderful paper, and ink you don’t have to mix! I’d never stop drawing.”
“You never stop drawing anyway. What are you meant to be doing today?”
“Nothing. Grenna said I was getting in her way.”
“You might as well come to lunch, then,” said Peter, shrugging off his coat. His shirtsleeves were already stained with greasy brown marks and there were spots of the same on his suspenders.
“Thanks,” Annabel said, not at all perturbed by the backhanded invitation. Grenna had her on a diet of bread and water, claiming that Annabel was eating her out of house and home. Peter’s Mother, on the other hand, was free with cheese, apples, and pastries, and was round enough not to care if Annabel was more than a little bit round too.
Annabel settled herself on a convenient slab of stone with her new book and searched for the nub of pencil that was always tucked away in her front pinafore pocket. She preferred drawing with pen and ink, but when neither were to be had, her tiny pencil was nearly as good. It had the added advantage of not leaving her face and hands ink-stained at the end of the day. It also had the advantage of a tiny eraser at the other end, a luxury to which Annabel didn’t otherwise have access.
She amused herself with sketching different angles of Peter’s face, content to sit cross-legged on her stone while he amused himself with his tickerboxes. She didn’t understand them, anyway.
You don’t try to understand them, said Blackfoot. He was sitting on her shoulder, his whiskers tickling her ear. He always liked to watch her draw. You like to think you’re stupid.
“I am,” said Annabel equably, shading the cracks between flagstones.
“You are what?” Peter demanded, shooting her a sharp look. “You know, if you keep talking to yourself you’ll soon be as mad as a pair of wet gnau in a hole.”
“I was talking to Blackfoot.”
“Got a lot to say this morning, hasn’t he?”
“He’s always got a lot to say,” said Annabel, with a private smile for Blackfoot. He hissed, but not at her: over Peter’s shoulder, three more cats were springing lightly into the ruins. “Did you figure out what your tickerbox was up to?”
“Oh, that’s actually very interesting!” said Peter, immediately losing interest in Blackfoot. Blackfoot made a rude noise somewhere around Annabel’s ear, though she wasn’t sure if it was aloud or not. “It was cannibalising the others, just like I thought, and it was building itself a secondary engine.”
“Oh. What for?”
“The main engine was getting overheated with the speed of the rotor shaft–”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Speed and movement cause heat– don’t do your cow eyes at me, Ann! The simple explanation is that the tickerbox was getting too hot, so it made itself a cooling engine with the rotor shaft and a few blades from another tickerbox.”
“Should it be able to do that?”
“Of course not. It’s not magic, it’s clockwork. It can’t think.”
Piffle, said Blackfoot. He may think it’s just clockwork, but he’s got so much magic dripping off him that he couldn’t stop it influencing the clockwork if he tried. Not to mention the enhancement field– you’re not listening to me, are you, Nan?
“Blackfoot says you’re wrong,” said Annabel, applying herself to a profile view of Peter.
“If the cat thinks it can do better, it’s welcome to try.”
Annabel drew in the annoyed crinkle in his brow.
You said one of the cats was at the house last night, Blackfoot said to her. What was Grenna doing?
“Don’t know. Something big, though.”
How was the spell performed? Was it laid out, item-based, or free-form?
“She laid out the spell,” said Annabel, sketching another view of Peter with one of his brows up and his head cocked to hear better, his eyes still stubbornly on his tickerbox. “But the laying out looked like it was for item-based spells, only instead of items in the circles it was me and the cat.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Peter, plucking at a wire strung tightly through his tickerbox. “The spell wouldn’t work. It’s meant to flow from the ignition point and through each of the components to its conclusion. You’re not a spell or an item. The flow would stop at you.”
You should have told me this last night, said Blackfoot.
“What’s the cat saying now?”
“He’s saying I should have told him this last night,” said Annabel. The odd quality to Blackfoot’s voice was setting off uneasy flutterings in her stomach. It almost sounded as though he was afraid. “Wait, I thought you didn’t believe Blackfoot speaks to me.”
“I don’t,” said Peter, hunching his shoulders over the tickerbox again. “I just find your psychosis interesting: you’re having conversations with yourself. Why would you have told the cat about the spell last night?”
Annabel shrugged one plump shoulder. “Don’t know.”
Things are happening far more quickly than I expected, said Blackfoot, as though to himself. I should have taken you away the minute the first one turned up.
“Taken me away?” said Annabel blankly. “Why should I go away? And do you mean the cats?”
They’re not cats.
“What’s it saying?”
“He says the cats aren’t cats.”
Peter tutted. “Wrong again.”
“Don’t be smug,” Annabel told him.
He’s right and wrong, Blackfoot said broodingly. They are cats. They just weren’t always cats. And some of them are less cat than others.
Annabel thought about it, and came to a surprising conclusion. “Like you, you mean?”
Blackfoot bit her ear. That’s not important. What’s important is that you don’t go back to Grenna tonight.
“I have to go home tonight!” protested Annabel. “Where would I sleep? What would I eat?”
Peter gave a rude snort of laughter, and she threw a pebble at him.
“Blackfoot says I shouldn’t go home tonight.”
“Oh, if that’s all, you can use one of our guest rooms. Mum likes having you around: says you’re restful company and you eat everything put in front of you.”
“I bet you said something rude when she said that,” said Annabel.
“And she clouted me for it,” said Peter cheerfully. “All right, if your psychosis is telling you that something’s up, you’ll probably be safer at our place: Grenna gets up to some nasty bits of magic.”
“Well, we’d better go soon,” Annabel said, with a doubtful look at the positive stream of cats that had begun to flow into the ruins. “We’ll be swimming in cats if we stay here much longer.”
***
That’s it! That’s Chapter One of Blackfoot! If you want to preorder before April 17th, you can access the Kindle and Kobo preorder pages by clicking on the respective names. For Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, iBooks, and Google+, sign up to THIS NEWSLETTER that only gets sent out when I release a book. You’ll have the right links in your inbox on April 17th!
As you may have guessed from the title of my blog post, today is Monday. Also, it’s rainy.
You’re always gonna get the truth from me, you blokes.
On this particular rainy Monday, I’m feeling very cosy and relaxed. Part of that is because of the rain: there’s nothing better than curling up beneath my mum-made patchwork blanket and watching the rain make a watercolour painting through my window-frame. Well, it’s always better if there’s a book, and tea, and you know what? I’ve got both.
Another facet to my contentment is the fact that Blackfoot is–more or less–done, and I now have a week off.
Last week, when I was writing the last few bits and patches to join other bits and patches together, I was feeling insanely fed up with the whole book. Being the second book in the series, it was flamin’ hard to write, and by the end, I felt as though it was complete and utter rubbish. I was disheartened, and depressed, and could only think about all those preorders going out to a general reception of “Oh my word, what is this rubbish? I’ve been waiting for this for 6 months now and it’s garbage!”
I honestly couldn’t believe the amount of work it was going to take to bring Blackfoot into publishable condition–in only two weeks! It didn’t feel possible, and mostly I just wanted to sit in the shower and cry.
I didn’t do that because a.) there’s a mushroom growing in there and I seriously don’t want to get near it, cos I read a horror story about that years ago, and b.) we would run out of hot water before I ran out of depression, and if you think being depressed in a hot shower is bad, try being depressed in a cold shower.
It’s adorable and hilarious and cringe-worthy, all at the same time…
Instead, I took a day off between writing those last words and doing my quick, pre-printed-MS run-over to catch glaring inconsistencies. I watched the latest episodes of 힘쎈 여자 도봉순 (Strong Woman Do Bong Soon)–hilarious, by the way–started to read The Eyre Affair–also excellent, though in a completely different way–and watched an insane amount of Gag Concert and Would I Lie to You?
After the last two weeks of writing 2k-5k words per day, I felt as light as a butterfly.
And I’m SO GLAD I did it, because when I went to do the pre-print run-over today, I found that Blackfoot wasn’t actually the huge train-wreck I was convinced it was. In fact, it wasn’t too bad. Maybe even good. The pacing was consistent, there were no glaring plot holes, and everything seemed to flow well, unlike the patchwork thing I’d imagined it to be.
Thus, my contentment is complete.
Also, I have tea and sticky buns and biscuits…
We’ll see how contented I am when I start final edits for Blackfoot next week, and how contented I am when I start the edits for Lady of Dreams a week or two after that…
MerryChristmasandaHappyNewYear, guys! Today’s blog post will be a post in three acts, courtesy of my insanely rushed-and-jumbled Christmas season.
Part One: Merry Christmas!
And if you’re Jewish, Happy Hanukkah! For anything else, I offer a blanket “Happy Holidays!” in my ignorance, with my good wishes.
This year was a pretty quiet Christmas, low key and enjoyable. Cheesecakes were made. Food was scoffed. Presents were given. Little sis’ fiance has been visiting, which is lovely, and although the part-time job was more than usually insane, I was able to recuperate with three days off.
The Dad, modelling his new bow tie, spots a camera.
Best of all, I managed to get a couple of reasonably decent pics of The Dad, which is nearly impossible given his penchant for pulling faces and weird poses whenever a camera appears.
Literally one second after the camera is spotted…
Part Two: Happy New Year!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Orright, orright, I know it’s early, but I want to discuss New Year’s resolutions. More specifically, I want to discuss my New Year’s resolutions.
I’ve not been as prolific toward the end of 2016 as I was hoping to be. There were a range of different reasons, some of which I’ll discuss in my next blog post, but the upshot of it all is that:
1) the publication date for BLACKFOOT (the 2nd Two Monarchies Novel) has been pushed to late February 2017 instead of December 2016 (bright side–got a blurb sorta finalised!)
2) the publication date for BRIGHT AS THE EYES OF YOU has been pushed from early January 2017 to (hopefully) late January 2017
3) early 2017 is gonna be a VERY busy time for me
My New Year’s resolutions, therefore, are as follows:
1) publish BRIGHT AS THE EYES OF YOU no later than early February
2) finish BLACKFOOT by mid-January and publish it late February
3) publish the COMPLETE SHARDS OF A BROKEN SWORD TRILOGY in paperback and ebook January 31st
4) write the 2nd TIME-TRAVELLER’S BEST FRIEND novella in February
5) get started on the 3rd Two Monarchies novel in March
6) write, write, write…
There’s more, but they get kinda repetitive after a while, so I’ll let #6 stand in for the rest of ’em.
Part Three: The Search for a New Title
I’ve loved writing BRIGHT AS THE EYES OF YOU. Getting it ready for publication…not so much. Reason being, when I first used excerpts from The Monkees songs as chapter headings, I had no idea I’d have to seek licensing to use said excerpts. I thought that a couple words from a song didn’t fall under copyright laws.
I was wrong.
It took ages to find the holders of the copyright. It took even longer to send off requests and wait for the answers.
And when the answers came back, they weren’t good.
I could use the excerpts (3-7 words each), but I would have to pay $1500 AUD for the privilege.
Not $1500 in total, you understand. $1500 FOR. EACH. EXCERPT.
Yeah, I’m starting to earn half a living at my writing, but I can’t afford that.
And now I’m really scared to hear back about the licensing rights for my title. Because *coff*I was dumb enough to make the title of my book an excerpt from a Monkees song as well*coff* I have no idea if I’m going to be able to afford to use BRIGHT AS THE EYES OF YOU as a title after all. Which means I’m now looking for alternative titles, because even if I can afford to use the title, I don’t want to wait forever to hear back. Song licensing, like trade publishing, tends to move at a somewhat glacial pace. If I don’t hear back by mid-January, I’ll go ahead with an alternate title.
So basically, throw some titles my way, guys. If you’ve read BATEOY on Wattpad and know something of what it’s about, give me your best shot. Help an author out!
I don’t like politics. Don’t much like politicians, either.
In Real Life, that is.
In books, now, it’s a totally different matter. And when it comes to Yes Minister, I positively love politics. The reason for loving Yes Minister politics should be obvious (and if it’s not, go watch all the seasons NOW), but the reason for loving book politics is quite different. I love book politics (in reading) because I like to see other peoples’ ideas and how their worlds fit together.
I love book politics (in writing) because I’m a megalomaniac who needs to be in control of my own little paradigm. If I don’t like policies, I can simply change ’em. So easy! So refreshing!
All of this is by the way, really, to introduce my topic, which is Politics & MASQUE: or, Who’s Who In The Triumvirate, or Why Does Lacuna Hate Everybody?
There’s a lot of history, political and otherwise, before Isabella sweeps onto the stage in MASQUE. This is because although it was written first, the events in MASQUE actually happen after the events of SPINDLE, BLACKFOOT, and THE STAFF AND THE CROWN (of which only SPINDLE has yet been published). In that time, a lot has happened. Civet and Parras, once uneasy neighbours, have become the amalgamated nation of New Civet. This has transformed the Three Monarchy alliance of Broma, Glause, and Civet into the Two Monarchy alliance of Glause and Broma. New Civet’s system of governance has changed into a two-party majority government system of competing Wizard Councils, and the minority parties of Old Parrassians and Royalists.
Governments rise and fall, as do monarchies.
In the years between the end of SPINDLE and the beginning of MASQUE, New Civet once more becomes a monarchy and allies itself again with Glause. Broma, on the other hand, sees the loss of its entire royal line in a violent attack by Lacuna, and the reins of government are taken up by Broma’s prime minister. By the time Isabella Farrah and her father are becoming known figures in Civet’s political circles, New Civet and Glause are making an effort to strengthen themselves against the threatening Lacunans on one side and the two sister nations of the Lacunan Triumvirate on the other.
As far as it goes, Glause is the country that has distinguished itself most by its solidarity. No coups, no open warfare, and no bloody history of death and destruction.
This could be said to be so because of the size of Glause: it is roughly twice the size of New Civet, three times the size of Broma, and much the same size as the Triumvirate combined. Those in the know, however, are perfectly convinced that Glause’s solid position is solely on account of Glause’s king. The king is much older than he looks, and he comes from a long line of clever, ruthless rulers who have not been afraid to serve their country in the swiftest, most merciless manner necessary.
Thus, when Isabella arrives in Glause as a part of New Civet’s entourage, her interests are many.
Most importantly, she has a military merger to negotiate; a merger whereby Glausian and Civetan soldiers will train side by side alternately in Glause and Civet due to significant differences in conditions. In addition to that is her usual interest in forming connections, her interest in the King of Glause–not to mention her interest in why he is interested in her–and her interest in Glause’s tenuous ties with the Triumvirate.
Then, of course, there is the small matter of a murder to solve…
And all of this is reckoning without Black Velvet. However, since most of my characters aren’t exactly sure who, what, or where Black Velvet is either, we can be excused from delving too deeply into the matter.
Well, that’s it from me today. As always this month, don’t forget to enter the MASQUE 1st Birthday Bash!
Also, feel free to message, comment, email or tweet me any questions you may have about MASQUE and Isabella: there’s still half a month left of MASQUE stories, posts, and giveaways…
I’ve been at it again! Writing short stories for MASQUE’s 1st birthday, I mean. This one is slightly–coff–er, heaps longer than the first, so I apologise in advance. Also, don’t forget to enter the giveaway, guys! I’m really excited to see where I’ll be sending all the swag!
A GLITCH IN THE PATTERN
-a MASQUE short story-
When you’re the only son of the best-known poet in Glause, people expect things. Things like picturesque dress and beautiful hair. Graceful manners and a way with words. They expect that you’ll sparkle at parties and whisper pretty nothings into the ears of all the most beautiful women.
Nobody really seems to know what to do when you turn out tall and awkward, with a big nose and bigger ears, and absolutely no talent at all for the written word. Father, after a few years of despondency, wrote a series of sonnets on the subject of his disappointment and moved on. I haven’t yet told him that I mean to join the Glausian Watch. I don’t think I could stand another series of sonnets.
My name is Tarquin, but everybody calls me Quin. It helps to keep expectations down.
***
I don’t like parties. I’m too clumsy to be a welcome dance partner, too uninteresting to be a sought-after companion, and too tall to hide from everybody unless I fold myself behind the furniture. Father loves parties: he sparkles, ripostes, and charms. Tonight he was in his element, reciting his new villanelle in sweeping, lyrical phrases with his arms high and graceful. I’d made out better than usual, fortunate enough to find an out-of-the-way seat in a line of five or six that were lined up along an inconvenient wall at the top of the room and all but hidden by two enormous urns. I wedged myself into one of the chairs with my knees as awkwardly high as ever, dwarfing its spindly legs with my own long ones. From there I could watch the crowd without having to be one of them. There was the usual swell around Father, a constant coil of attention that waxed and waned, its edges always in flux; and around his compelling current was a vast ocean of push and pull. There was the usual knot of determined-to-shine young women around the piano, glaring in concert at the one fortunate enough to have seized it first, and around them in gently wafting layers were doting mamas, reluctant swains, and sisters young enough to be counted on to vigorously jostle for position without outshining their older siblings. This knot would be dispersing when the dancing began, but for now it merged with Father’s circle in an undulating give and take, his voice sometimes rising over the piano, and the piano at times swelling above him. His circle met with the rest of the room, in all its familiar currents, knots and eddies. I knew those patterns almost better than I knew the streets of Glause’s Imperial City: everything swirled in the same unending patterns, predictable and calculable.
I liked to sit in the corner and watch the patterns move, calculating when this would happen, what was the likelihood of that couple meeting on the dancefloor, and generally making a satisfying exercise of it. It seemed like good practise, you see. I would be enlisting in the Watch just as soon as I could bring myself to tell Father, and I was an eager student of the Watch Commander’s methods. He was a great believer in surveillance and patience.
I’m not sure when I began to notice the contrary ripples in the pattern. It could have been when one of my predictions first failed. They didn’t often fail nowadays, especially when I was so familiar with the crowd and the house as I was tonight. It was a simple, silly thing, too. The man in blue should have crossed the room and asked the woman in yellow to dance. All the signs had been there, and the crowd had thinned enough: it was even flowing in the right direction. He took one step into the flow, met with a sudden surge of blue-uniformed horselords, and went back to his place against the wall as the gap in the current closed again. He wasn’t the only one going against my predictions, either. There was another gentleman, this one in a brown coat, working his way gently against the flow and up the room.
My first thought was that I’d calculated wrongly. Blue Coat could have simply been staring across the room without a thought in his head. I didn’t think so, but he could have been.
Then I saw her: red hair, elegant, her dress expensively plain. She was a steady, wrongwise current pulling through the crowd and leaving changed patterns in her wake. A touch here, a word there, and suddenly my patterns were no longer predictable and reliable. Who was she? What was she doing?
I watched her, frowning, and it occurred to me that she was following the other moving disturbance in the pattern; the smooth-faced older gentleman I had noticed earlier. His brown coat was drawing closer as he approached the top of the room and my hiding place, and she kept pace with him from the other side of the room. What was going on in the ballroom tonight?
I turned my head to watch Brown Coat exit the room via the top door to my right, craning to see him around the other urn.
As I did so, a friendly voice said by my ear: “Would you be so kind as to loan me your pocketknife?”
It was the woman who had been following Brown Coat. Her red hair was caught up in big loop down her back, and she had a narrow, clever face that was a lot closer than I had expected it to be. I stood abruptly in a rictus of politeness, and sent my chair tottering back into the wall as I looked uncertainly down at her. She wasn’t pretty, but her eyes were laughing up at me, and I felt my heart do something stuttery and pleasantly uncomfortable.
I gazed at her in silence for far too long: she must have thought I was an imbecile.
“I’ll bring it back,” she added.
I found my tongue, but only to say inanely: “I– yes. H-how did you know I have a pocketknife?”
“Enlisters always have a pocketknife,” she said.
“I haven’t enlisted yet,” I said, surprised almost into soundlessness again. How did she know I was thinking of enlisting? I hastily dug my pocketknife out of my pocket, and she took it with a warm smile that made my heart stutter again.
“Let me ask you something. What would you say if I said Brown coat?”
“Blue coat,” I said, without thinking.
Her grey eyes lit at once. “Ah, I thought so! You must find me at the end of the night, child. I’d like to introduce you to someone.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, in something of a gasp; but she had already gone.
I watched as she swept back across the room, this time following the current and threading effortlessly through the newly forming dance. Where was she going? What did she want with my pocketknife? Who was she? And was Blue Coat watching her intently, or was that just my imagination?
“You should shut your mouth,” said a husky little voice. “Something might crawl in.”
I tore my eyes away from the red-haired woman and looked behind me. At first I didn’t see anyone, but as I turned the huge, spotted urn to my left seemed to move and split, and a girl in a spotted dress slowly segued from it. She was Bromian, her skin as dark as cocoa and her hair lopped off unfashionably in a short, curved bob that suited her face.
I said: “You– that– were you there the whole time?”
“Since you sat down behind the urn. You’re Armand Hillier’s son Tarquin, aren’t you? What were you doing?”
“Nothing exactly,” I said, feeling rather stupid. “Hiding, I suppose.”
“I know that. What were you really doing?”
I was surprised to find myself saying: “The patterns are off tonight. I was trying to find out why.”
The girl looked at me again, this time more closely. “I thought there was something different about tonight! I just couldn’t pinpoint it. What do you mean, the patterns?”
“The room is moving in different patterns tonight,” I told her. “There are random currents of people threading through the regular swirls. That woman, the one with the red hair: she’s one of the random currents.”
“That’s not surprising,” the girl said: “That’s Lady Pecus. People think she’s just a diplomat, but she’s not.”
“Oh,” I said. “She’s married. To the Commander?”
“That’s right. She broke the Pecus curse.”
I sadly meditated upon the unfairness of it all for a silent moment. Then it seemed to me that if I’d been hiding, so had this girl. What’s more, I hadn’t seen her until she’d allowed herself to be seen. She wasn’t a part of the patterns I was used to seeing, either.
I said: “I haven’t seen you at parties before. Who are you? And why were you hiding up here?”
“I’m Daily,” she said. “Daily Marchant. You might have classified me with the wallflowers.”
“No I wouldn’t,” I said. “You’re too dainty. There would have been men hovering, or– are you still in the schoolroom?”
She grinned, actually grinned. Ladies don’t, usually. “No, but only because they didn’t want me at the Academy any more. I’m still sixteen.”
“Why don’t they want you at the Academy?”
“I blew a few things up,” Daily said. “They weren’t big things, but Headmistress didn’t like it. So now Aunt Petunia is throwing me at parties and hoping someone will marry me.”
“Oh,” I said. She seemed far too young to be getting married. “Why were you hiding?”
Daily shrugged. “I don’t talk very well.”
“What do you mean, you don’t talk very well?”
“I don’t like people looking at me,” she said. “I get flustered and hot and then the words won’t come out in the right order. Sometimes I faint.”
“You’re not going to faint now, are you?” I asked, in some alarm.
“No,” said Daily decisively. “You were all stuttery and red, too. It helps when other people are as tongue-tied as I am.”
“Lucky you wore spots, then,” I said, refusing to comment on the subject of my face, which was only too prone to redness.
“I knew the urn would be here,” said Daily. “So I dressed in my spotted skirt. The chairs are just the right shade of walnut, too: I’m experimenting with urban camouflage. Now that Aunt Petunia is trying to marry me off instead of keeping me at school it pays to be prepared.”
“Why don’t you want to get married?”
“I’m too young,” she said. “Besides, I have other plans. Oh, bother! Aunt Petunia has seen us! Why are you so tall?”
“I can’t help it,” I said, slightly indignantly. I found that I’d automatically hunched my shoulders, and straightened them again. Horrible little girl!
“Quick! Pretend you’re talking to me!”
“I am talking to you.”
“Not that sort of talking,” she said quickly. I was surprised to see that she actually looked frightened. “Point your feet toward me and duck your head a bit. Like you’re interested in what I’m saying.”
I did as I was told, but I saw the small, stiff woman who swept through the room toward us, and so did Daily.
“Bother!” she said again. “You’d better dance with me. You don’t mind, do you? I’m not a very good dancer.”
I said: “I don’t mind,” and it was almost true. For the first time in my life, I actually wanted to be in the pattern instead of observing it. I couldn’t see Lady Pecus anywhere, and Blue Coat had begun to move again.
As Daily and I joined the dance, the yellow-dressed woman he had been watching from across the room left her chair, her face paper-white. Whatever had made her face go so very white also made her forget her big, unfashionable reticule: it remained beneath walnut-coloured chair she’d been sitting on.
“Dance that way!” said Daily, determinedly trying to edge us toward Blue Coat. “I think he’s trying to – he is! The cheek of it! He pinched her reticule!”
“Stop pushing!” I commanded. I had avoided stepping on her feet only because she was stepping on mine, and we were in danger of knocking several couples out of the dancing circle. “I can see him. He’s going toward the main hall.”
Daily made the dance more complicated by fishing about in her pocket with the arm that should have been on my shoulder. It interfered with the arm I had about her waist and made us more lopsided than ever.
“Get us closer, then!” she insisted. There was a dark spot of magic pinched between her fingers, black against the softer brown of her skin.
“What are you going to do?”
“Citizen’s arrest,” said Daily, her eyes martial. “Well, citizen’s imprisonment, anyway. Quick, we can skip out while that woman’s ridiculous dress hides us from Aunt Petunia!”
I had already seen the woman and her ridiculous dress. Even if it hadn’t occurred to me as a useful screen it would have been impossible to miss: the skirt of it was bright gold and wide enough to conceal a small troop.
We made a sprawling exit while the golden skirt sailed past us, and collided with Blue Coat just beyond the open doors.
Daily yelped, one hand clutching at Blue Coat’s sleeve. He shook her off with a short, barely polite bow, and turned on his heel with a black spot of magic glistening on his sleeve.
“Rude!” Daily said.
Belatedly, I said: “S-stop! Give that lady back her reticule!”
Blue Coat didn’t turn: if anything, he seemed to walk faster. Only he wasn’t walking toward the front door. He was walking further into the hall, toward the family apartments and…the grandfather clock?
“Is he trying to open the door to the grandfather clock?”
“Yes!” said Daily, her eyes bright with laughter as Blue Coat opened the grandfather clock and stepped decisively in. “He thinks it’s the front door! Right, he’s in! Quick, put this one on the outside of the clock door!”
I sprang forward to secure the door with one shoulder just as Blue Coat realised his mistake and began to shove at the timber. With my free hand, I took the spot of magic Daily thrust at me and slapped it on the clock. Abruptly, the thumping ceased, and with it the bulging of the clock door.
“What was that?”
“I can’t tell you,” Daily said primly. “It’s patent-pending. Mostly it locks and silences, though.”
“Why?”
“I think it was Aunt Petunia’s influence. Well, we’ve got him. What should we do with him?”
“And why did he steal her reticule? What kind of a gentleman does that?”
“I don’t know,” said Daily. “But what I really want to know is, where is Lady Pecus? She was just in the ballroom before, and now she’s vanished. I bet it’s got something to do with her.”
“Should we– we should try to find her. She might need help.”
“Doubt it,” Daily scoffed. “But she’ll probably know what to do with him, and I want to know what’s going on, so we might as well. Did you see which way she went?”
“She came this way,” I said. I hadn’t exactly seen it, but from the angle Lady Pecus had travelled down the room, I was certain she had exited the same way Blue Coat had exited. From there, it was anyone’s guess, but it wasn’t likely she’d gone home. I looked gloomily at the grandfather clock that imprisoned Blue Coat, and saw the corner of something white and thin protruding from the base of the door.
I bent and twitched it out, and Daily huddled closely beside me, craning her neck to see.
“What is it?”
“Something…not very nice,” I said slowly. It was a note, short and terse. My eye fell on the first sentence straight away. It said: I have your son.
With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I read the rest of it.
I have your son. Unless you are very clever and very obedient, he will die. You will attend the Glennings’s dance tonight as planned. You will bring with you the small, carved wooden box that your husband brought back from Lacuna. You will leave it beneath the fourth chair to the left of the second window in the ballroom, attended by this note. You will not try to find me. You will not involve the Watch. You will leave the box beneath the chair and go home. Your son will be returned to you tomorrow if you do as you are told.
Daily twitched it from my fingers, ignoring my instinctive attempt to pull it away, and read it swiftly.
“What did I tell you?” she demanded. “Lady Pecus got wind of it somehow, and she’s trying to help.”
“We should call in the Watch,” I said decidedly.
“Don’t be silly!” hissed Daily, seizing my cuff as I turned to find a servant.
The slight tug stopped me in my tracks before I knew what I was doing. “Why?”
“It says not to involve the Watch! What if they kill the kiddie?”
I hesitated. “What do you think we should do, then?”
“Find Lady Pecus, of course. If he’s got the money, who’s got the kiddie?”
“That’s where Lady Pecus went,” I said, in cold realisation. “We’d better find her. I saw three disturbances in the patterns tonight– him, Lady Pecus, and a man in a brown coat. If he’s involved as well–”
“–Lady Pecus could have walked into trouble,” finished Daily, her brown eyes very wide. “Where do you think they’ve got the kiddie?”
“Why are you asking me?”
Daily shrugged. “I don’t know anything about kidnapping.”
“I don’t know anything about kidnapping, either!”
“Yes, but you know patterns. What do the patterns tell you?”
“That we’re in the wrong part of the house,” I said. “And if Lady Pecus is somewhere here, she’s in the wrong part of the house, too. Brown Coat left by the exit at the top of the room, and he’s been up and down the room all night.”
“Was he checking with someone, do you think? And where does the top door take us?”
“The upper rooms,” I told her. “Guest quarters, I think. It’d be easy to lock the kiddie in one of the rooms up there.”
“Funny,” said Daily. “I would have expected Lady Pecus to realise that.”
Slowly, I said: “Maybe she did. Someone’s bound to be guarding the door up there, aren’t they? Maybe there’s a way into whatever room they’re using, from down here.”
“All right,” Daily agreed. “Let’s go have a look, then.”
We found a door with a broken lock halfway down the hall. It was one of the older magic type locks, and someone had jimmied the whole thing out of the door, bypassing the locking mechanism completely.
“Oooh,” said Daily. “So that’s what she wanted your pocketknife for! I could have given her a lockpicking spell.”
“She didn’t want a spell, she wanted my pocketknife,” I told her coldly.
“Only because she didn’t know I had one,” she said. “Don’t be stuffy, Tarquin. Oh! What’s that noise?”
Whatever it was, it was heavy, muffled, and over as suddenly as it had begun.
“Maybe there was already someone in the room,” Daily said, her eyes very wide. “Maybe she had to kill them.”
“Lady Pecus doesn’t go around killing people,” I said impatiently. It was a ridiculous idea. Lady Pecus was clever and elegant and ladylike.
“How would you know? You hadn’t met her until tonight! I’ve seen her work before.”
“It sounded like something falling,” I said.
“It was probably a body.”
“It wasn’t a body!”
“I’m going in,” said Daily. She had pulled a pouch out of her pocket, a small leather thing with a belt-loop on it. When she saw me looking at it, she said: “It’s my multispell pouch. I have spells for everything in here.”
“I’ll go first,” I told her. I’d seen the efficacy of her spells, but a Watchman never lets a civilian go before him into danger.
Daily didn’t say anything, but she was right by my side as we cautiously entered the room. It was a small parlour that had obviously not been used in years, all heavy with dust and white with dust covers. To our right, in one of the walls, there was a darker rectangle of dust, broken wood, and rope.
I stared at it in perplexity, and it was Daily who said: “It’s a dumbwaiter! She pulled herself up in the dumbwaiter!”
“She won’t be getting back down that way,” I said, observing the decayed and broken ropes. “It’s a wonder she didn’t break her neck! She must have made it into the room, I suppose.”
“How will she get out, though?”
“We’d better go around the outside and see if we can help,” I said, my feet already suiting the motion to the words.
“Not that way,” Daily said. “Aunt Petunia will see. We can climb out the window.”
Fortunately, the window was easy to unlock and stood only a foot off the carpet. From there, it was less than a two foot drop on the other side to the grass. We shuffled through the dew-wet grass until we could see the second and third stories. The second floor was dark, but in the third story window directly above us was a slow-moving light.
“That’s her,” said Daily. “It’s got to be.”
“Yes,” I agreed, my eyes on the dizzying height. “But what can we do to help from down here?”
“We can’t help from down here,” she said. “But if we can get my multispell pouch up to Lady Pecus, we’ll be able to get her down safely. Up you go!”
I looked up at that horrible height again and swallowed. “I can’t,” I said at last, my voice barely audible.
“What do you mean, you can’t? It’s easy– look, there are handholds all the way up to–”
“I’m afraid of heights, all right?” I said angrily. “Once I get more than a few feet in the air I freeze.”
Daily’s face was upturned in surprise. “But you’re so tall!”
I looked at her and she looked at me, and we dissolved into silly giggles.
“Never mind,” said Daily cheerfully, when she could speak again. “I’ll do it. I’ve been climbing things since before I was walking. You’ll just have to give me a boost up to reach the first hand-hold.”
“But–” I opened and closed my mouth a few times before I could bring myself to say: “But your skirts– they’ll, well, you’ll show your drawers!”
“That’s all right,” Daily said. “I’ve got breeches on under my skirt. I always do. I like to be prepared.”
“You’re always prepared to climb up balconies and into windows?”
“Sometimes I need to climb up balconies and into windows,” said Daily, with dignity.
“When?”
“Well, this is the first real time,” she admitted. “But I knew I’d eventually have to do it. I’ve been practising. Here, unbutton my skirt, will you? My maid keeps sewing my things with hundreds of tiny buttons.”
I said: “Why?” because I didn’t feel like telling her I’d rather not unbutton her skirt.
“She thinks it will stop me climbing out of my skirts and running around in breeches.”
“She doesn’t know you very well, I suppose?”
“Not really. I didn’t have a maid until Aunt Petunia took over. Just the first three, Tarquin; I can manage from there.”
“I can’t unbutton your skirt!”
Daily, who was already struggling with the buttons herself, made an explosive series of muted and quite possibly rude remarks, and performed a short, violent motion that sent three small things pinging into the darkness.
“There! Now I’ve lost three buttons!” she told me, in accusatory tones. She seized her skirt below the waist and hauled on it until the buttons were at the front, and proceeded to unbutton herself until she could step out. I found myself in the position of feeling that I really ought to turn my back, without being able to tear my horrified eyes away.
“You’ll have to get used to it,” said Daily, her chin mulish. “Women won’t be able to wear skirts in the Watch, after all!”
“Yes, but– oh, never mind. Ready?”
“Yes– oh, wait! I’d best take off my shoes, too.”
“Good idea,” I agreed, feelingly. I would rather not be punctured by a lady’s high heel while I was boosting her up.
Daily was exceedingly light to boost. Part of that was because she did a lot of the work herself, but part of it was how very small she was. She climbed very swiftly, too: I lost her in the shadows almost immediately, what with her dark colouring and dark breeches. Eventually I saw a jumble of shadows tumble over the balustrade of the third floor window, and saw the flash of moonlight on glass as she opened the window.
There was a good deal of silence for a good deal longer than I appreciated. I was beginning to think that I ought to attempt the climb myself—or at least start throwing pebbles at the window—when Lady Pecus appeared on the balcony, a small bauble of light in one hand and a small, sleepy child in the other. Daily followed close behind.
“Here!” she said. “We can get down here without him ever knowing!”
“Oh,” said Lady Pecus thoughtfully. Her eyes were glittering bright in the moonlight. “My dear child, I’m afraid you’ve entirely overestimated my abilities! At a pinch, I could make the climb, but with my hands full–!”
“I have a spell for that,” said Daily, a little feverishly. I saw her fiddling with something in the shadows: her multispell pouch, probably. “Would you hold out the kiddie, your ladyship? I promise I won’t hurt it.”
I grimaced slightly. Daily was right: she didn’t ‘talk well’. I could see the lady’s face from my lowly place. It looked apprehensive, worried, and just slightly amused as she held the child out for Daily’s inspection.
Daily made a hasty, fumbling foray into the multispell pouch and came out with a dark spot of magic. She stretched out a hand to stick it to the child’s knitted cap as the child watched her owlishly, then snatched it back.
“Whoops, not that one!” She scrabbled once again, and produced a smaller patch. “This is the one, I promise.”
Lady Pecus didn’t look less worried, but she did look more amused. I was a little surprised that she didn’t immediately pull the kiddie out of Daily’s reach.
When she’d fixed the patch to the kiddie’s cap, Daily said: “All right, you can chuck him over, now.”
Was that Lady Pecus choking, or laughing, or both?
“Oh, just throw him over?”
“Well, he’ll float, I mean. He’ll be fine. I only broke one of my cousin’s dolls while I was testing it.”
“Lower him as far as you can, Lady Pecus,” I said. I was even less sure than the lady that Daily’s spells would work. “I’ll catch him.”
“I’m obliged to you, Master Hillier,” said Lady Pecus. She leaned as far over the balcony as she could manage, dangling the child by his chubby wrists, and I stationed myself below, anxiously blinking in the darkness.
“I’m ready,” I said, a little breathlessly. “I won’t drop him.”
There was a moment of silence and stillness before I repeated: “I’m ready.”
“Oh, how interesting!” said Lady Pecus, leaning forward in fascination. It was then that I realised she had let the child go. It was just that he was wafting so softly and gently towards me that at first he didn’t seem to be moving.
“Told you,” said Daily, and slung her leg over the balustrade. She made short work of the climb: in fact, she was beside me just before I caught the happily floating boy. “Here, turn around! Lady Pecus can’t climb down with you gawking!”
She grinned at the fiery red that overspread my cheeks as I hastily turned around.
“I wasn’t looking!” I said quickly. “I was just catching the kiddie!”
“And I thank you most sincerely!” said Lady Pecus, unaccountably behind me. She was almost as quick a climber as Daily. “We’d best make haste, children: I would very much like to prevent a certain man in a blue coat from leaving the party.”
“Oh, him!” Daily said. “I locked him in the grandfather clock. He’s not going to get out of there in a hurry.”
“You…locked him in the grandfather clock?”
“Um,” said Daily. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. He’s the one who was collecting the ransom. We didn’t want him to get away before the Watch could get here.”
“You beautiful child! How did you– no, let me guess: you had a spell in your multispell pouch!”
Daily’s fingers picked at her spotted gloves, which were now quite soiled. “Two, actually. One to confuse his intent and another to keep the door locked and soundproofed.”
“I see,” said Lady Pecus. Her voice was quiet, but there was a wealth of excitement in it. “Do you think you could make a pouch for me? I can pay you quite reasonably well.”
“No,” Daily said; and then, to the raised, amused eyebrows of Lady Pecus: “I mean, I’ll give you one. I have a spare one at home.”
“I’m greatly obliged to you, but I’ll need something of a regular supply, I’m afraid. I’d be much happier paying you for them. If it comes to that, I see no reason why you couldn’t set up shop—discreetly and selectively, of course!—with this kind of merchandise.”
“I don’t want to make a business out of it,” said Daily, looking surprised and slightly embarrassed. “I haven’t got the time. I’m going to be the first woman in the Glausian Watch. I’m going to invent equipment small and functional enough to be carried on a watchman’s belt.”
Lady Isabella’s brows rose. “Indeed? You’ve thought about this at some length, I take it?”
“All my life,” Daily said simply. “Anyway, Blue Coat won’t get out for a while, so if you want to take the kiddie back to his mum, it’s safe.”
“I don’t suppose you have a communications spell in that wonderful little pouch of yours?”
“Cuff-link comm-link!” said Daily, shoving a small, shiny circle in Lady Pecus’s direction.
“Simply marvellous! May I return it to you later?”
“K-keep it!” she said. “I have another pair at home. And please keep the pouch.”
Daily’s eyes grew so large that they threatened to take over her face. Her voice said, in a squeak: “You know my name?”
“I’ve heard something of you. I believe someone mentioned something about explosions, which naturally interested me. Won’t you both come and find me later? There’s someone I’d like you both to meet.”
We both said a fervent “Yes, Lady Pecus!” and I’m not sure my voice was any less squeaky than Daily’s was.
Lady Pecus left us in the shadowy grass, taking some of the sparkle and excitement of the night with her, and beside me, Daily sighed faintly.
“I suppose we’d better go back in.”
“Yes,” I agreed, just as reluctantly.
***
Just after midnight, Daily elbowed me and looked significantly toward the hall. We had seated ourselves where we could see into the grand hall, and through the gently mingling crowd we saw Lord Pecus arrive. A moment later, Lady Pecus’s sharp grey eyes had caught sight of us as well, and she gave a small jerk of the head.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” said Daily, clutching at her gloves again. In addition to the grime from scaling the wall outside, she had made a hole in one of them with her anxious picking.
“You’ll be fine,” I said, propelling her across the ballroom ahead of me. I could already feel my face getting hotter, and the tips of my ears were feeling distinctly scorched.
Lady Pecus smiled encouragingly at us, prompting the feeling of warmth to seep down my neck as well, and when we had joined them in the relative privacy of the hall, she presented me with my own pocketknife– which I had all but forgotten.
“Thank you, my lady,” I said, hoping desperately that my face wasn’t as red as it felt.
“No, thank you!” she said, with another sparkling smile. “Alexander, this is a young man you really should meet. He seems to be remarkably perceptive. He also loaned me his pocketknife, which was delightfully helpful of him.”
I found myself pinioned by two green eyes. “Perceptive, are you?”
“I– um– well, not really, sir. It’s the patterns, you see. Everything is in the patterns.”
Lord Pecus’s green eyes held mine for a moment or two longer. Then, to my disappointment—or maybe relief—he turned them on Daily. He had her multispell pouch in his hand, and he was hefting it up and down as if testing the weight of it.
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” blurted Daily. She was blushing so furiously that I could actually see the warmth glowing in her dusky cheeks.
“Will your—aunt, is it?—allow you to work for the Watch?”
“No. Won’t be legal age until two more years,” said Daily, almost feverishly.
“That’s a shame,” said Lord Pecus coolly. His green eyes dropped back to the multispell pouch, then at Daily again. “Do you want to work for me?”
“Yes!” Daily said. “I mean, yes, sir!”
“I don’t see the harm in having you stop by my lab a few times a week,” said Lord Pecus slowly. “I keep the more experimental things at Pecus Manor, and a visitor is always welcome for Isabella.”
“I– yes! Thank you!”
Lord Pecus looked then at me, and again I found myself just as red and flustered as Daily. “I’ll see you at the enlistment office soon, I hope? I’d like to know more about your patterns.”
“I will! I mean, yes, sir!”
Later, when we had raided the supper table and had managed to find a convenient pair of seats in which to hide, I said idly to Daily: “Just what have you got against men, anyway? Lady Pecus married.”
“Yes, but she married the Beast Lord. If Lord Pecus had asked me to marry him, I would have, too.”
I found myself nettled at her adoring tone. The faintly dreamy look in her eyes as she looked across the ballroom at Lord Pecus was irritating, too.
“Is that why you want to be the first woman in the Watch?”
Daily’s eyes sharpened at once. “Of course not! I want to catch criminals and blow things up.”
“I don’t think they blow things up in the Watch.”
“They will when they start using my patented grape-sized flash-bombs,” said Daily.
“What about your Aunt Petunia?”
“Well, I might marry, after all,” she said reasonably. “Only not right now, and he’ll have to be a Watchman. A gentleman wouldn’t like me being part of the Watch. As for Aunt Petunia, as soon as I’m of age, I’ll be at the recruitment office, signing up.”
“I’m enlisting tomorrow,” I said.
“That’s rotten!” said Daily, her cheeks flushing. “Why should you get to officially enlist before me?”
“You’ll be in Lord Pecus’s lab, though,” I reminded her. “Not officially, but you’ll be there.”
“That’s something, I suppose.”
“How will you work there without your Aunt Petunia saying anything?”
“Sneak out, probably,” Daily said. “No! I’ll pretend I’m stepping out with someone. She’ll be so overwhelmed by it that she won’t think to ask questions.”
“She’ll be a bit suspicious if no one ever calls,” I said sensibly.
Daily’s face fell, then brightened. “Oh! I know!”
“No,” I said.
“But Tarquin!”
“No! I don’t want to walk out with you!”
“You don’t have to really walk out with me!”
“No.”
“Tarquin. Tarquin! I’ll make you a special multispell pouch all of your own, Tarquin…”
Beauty met the Beast, and there was…bloody murder? Isabella is about to find out, because one of her best friends has been murdered, and she’s determined that a certain beast lord won’t stop her from investigating…
MASQUE’s 1st birthday is just around the corner, and my giveaway has begun! You can Tweet, Like, Follow, or Subscribe to earn entries.
Up for grabs is a signed paperback of MASQUE, a Tea-Time Necklace by Purple Bird Creations, 24k rose gold-plated MASQUE earrings, and an “I am ALWAYS up to something” MASQUE t-shirt.
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for loving Yes Minister politics should be obvious (and if it’s not, go watch all the seasons NOW), but the reason for loving book politics is quite different. I love book politics (in reading) because I like to see other peoples’ ideas and how their worlds fit together.
