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Daily Archives: September 3, 2013
- by Tara Maya
Excerpt: Graceling by Kristin Cashore
She caught the fall of every leaf in the garden, the rustle of every branch. And so she was astonished when a man stepped out of the darkness and grabbed her from behind. He wrapped his arm around her chest and held a knife to her throat. He started to speak, but in an instant she had deadened his arm, wrenched the knife from his hand, and thrown the blade to the ground. She flung him forward, over her shoulders.
He landed on his feet.
Her mind raced. He was Graced, a fighter. That much was clear. And unless he had no feeling in the hand that had raked her chest, he knew she was a woman.
He turned to face her. They eyed each other, warily, each no more than a shadow of the other. He spoke.
“I’ve heard a lady with this particular Grace.” His voice was gravelly and deep. There was lilt to his words; it was not an accent she knew. She must learn who he was, so that she could know what to do with him.
“I can’t think what that lady would be doing so far from home, running around the courtyard of King Murgon at midnight,” he said. He shifted slightly, placed himself between her and wall. He was taller than she was, and smooth in his movements, like a cat. Deceptively calm, ready to spring. A torch on the path nearby caught the glimmer of a small gold hoops in his ears. And his face was unbearded, like a Lienid.
She shifted and swayed, her body ready, like his. She didn’t have much time to decide. He knew who was she was. But if he was a Lienid, she didn’t want to kill him.
“Don’t you have anything, Lady? Surely you don’t think I’ll let you pass without an explanation?” There was something playful in his voice. She watched him, quietly. He stretched his arms in one flid motion, and her eyes unraveled the bands of gold that gleamed on his fingers.
“You’re a Lienid,” she said.
“You have good eyesight,” he said.
“Not good enough to see the color of your eyes.”
He laughed. “I think I know the color of yours.”
Common sense told her to kill him. “You’re one to speak of being far from home,” she said. “What’s a Lienid doing in the court of King Murgon?”
“I’ll tell you my reasons if you’ll tell me yours.”
“I’ll tell you nothing, and you must let me pass.”
“Must I?”
“If you don’t, I’ll have to force you.”
“Do you think you can?”
She faked to her right, and he swung away, easily. She did it again, faster. Again, he escaped her easily. He was very good. But she was Katsa.
Also, please visit today’s Mystery Sponsor (don’t lose your head over it or anything)…
- by Tara Maya
Why Are There Mysterious Things On My Blog?
Ok, I realize I started posting excerpts from Initiate on my blog without letting you know what I was up too, and maybe that was overly mysterious. You might be saying, “Hey, Tara, I’ve already Initiate. Duh! In fact, I just re-read it last night, for like the seventeenth time, because that’s how much I love it. What gives?”
Well, I know YOU have read Initiate, because you’re awesome like that.
But maybe you have some friends on Twitter or Facebook who haven’t? So I decided to post the ENTIRE NOVEL up on my blog, 500 words a day, and let your friends read the excerpts, or even the whole novel, if they like, here on my blog. If you’ve already enjoyed the novel, could you do me a huge favor and share it? Because if you do, pixies will bring you flowers. That’s what the pixies claimed, at least….
Now, other news.
I’ve been working on an anthology of science fiction stories all summer and I have been blessed to find some GREAT stories. Look out, because later this week, we are going to have the Cover Reveal!
- by Tara Maya
3. The Goose from Lost Swan
The Unfinished Song: Initiate
(Start at the Beginning of the Novel)
Dindi
… by their movements, tracing out incandescent symbols with their bodies. The dancers themselves glowed too, in the same color as whichever costume they wore. Even now that Dindi knew what to look for, she couldn’t see it all the time, only if she concentrated.
The human dancers encircled the last of the Aelfae dancers, who fell into an artful pile of corpses.
“The Aelfae are no more, the Aelfae are no more,” victors and corpses droned in a mournful dirge.
The chant hit her with a wave of melancholy. The interlocking patterns of light the dancers had created rippled outward like disturbed water, and when the light hit her, vertigo robbed Dindi of her balance. She stumbled, nearly fell.
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| “Rain of Arrows” by Xan-04 |
For a moment, instead of the Aelfae dancers, she saw beautiful beings with wings like swans, and instead of stylized flips and leaps, she witnessed atrocities she could barely comprehend. Aelfae men forced to eat their own intestines, Aelfae women with bloody thighs pinned down under grunting human males, Aelfae babes clutched by their tiny wings and smashed face-first into walls…. Underlying it all, she sensed not one battle, but decades of skirmish and ambush, truce and betrayal, wearing the Aelfae down, driving them to their final extinction, not just in the Corn Hills, but across all of Faearth.
She blinked, and the double vision cleared. Tears streaked her cheeks. It was not just a dance. Though the events reenacted had happened long ago, they were real. Her people had done this, wiped out the most beautiful and powerful faeries in the world, pushed them all to extinction save one. In all the world, except for the White Lady, who was the last of her kind, the Aelfae were no more.
On stage, the triumphant humans split into three groups. One carried a full basket, another a basket split into two halves, and a third a swan feather. They represented the three clans who now lived in the Corn Hills—the victors in the war with the Aelfae. That was the end of the dance. The Tavaedies formed a line and snaked back down into their hole, to their kiva beneath the square.
“Ooooh, look, it’s the goose from Lost Swan,” said a catty voice. Dindi whirled around.
Kemla and a few of her cousins stood there, young women from Full Basket clan who were always harassing Dindi.
“Crying because when Initiation comes, you won’t be invited to become a Tavaedi like me?” Kemla taunted. She always wore as much scarlet as a non-Tavaedi could get away with, and had arranged cardinal feathers in her breast bands to show off her cleavage.
Hastily, Dindi wiped her face. “You don’t know that.”
“It’ll never happen, goat-legs,” snickered Kemla. “No one in your scraggly clan has ever been chosen as a Tavaedi. The closest Lost Swan clanholders come to dancing magic is to go mad and run off with the fae.”
The Full Basket girls laughed. Dindi flushed.
“Goat-legs! Goat-legs!” The girls…
