His Majesty's Elephant, page 15
“Too easy,” said Rowan with sudden fierceness. “My father shouldn’t have stained his hands.”
“Oh, shouldn’t he?”
She twisted her head to glare at him, but he was gone, sliding down the Elephant’s side.
Cursing every trick of men and elephants, she slid as Kerrec had, but without the grace. The Elephant’s trunk held her up as she started to fall; it lowered her carefully to the ground, face to face with Kerrec.
She turned her back on him. That turned her outward toward the rest of the world.
Her aunt was standing just out of the Elephant’s reach, looking more amused than not. “Gisela’s herself again,” the abbess said, as if that was all she had come to say. “She woke up this morning, somewhat before your father did, with no memory of anything that happened after sunset yesterday.”
“That’s a mercy,” said Kerrec. “And before sunset? Does she remember her bewitchment?”
“I think not,” the abbess said. “She’s a little indisposed this morning, but then she often is. She’ll have to learn to dispense with that if she expects to survive the discipline of a convent.”
“I don’t think she ever will,” Rowan said. Her temper was cooling, whether it wished to or no. It often did in front of the abbess. “She has dreams. All the Emperor’s daughters do. But we can’t be anything but princesses.”
“Even you?” Kerrec asked.
She spun. He was not visibly making fun of her. His eyes were wide and level and bright, but not with mockery.
She answered him straight, and let her temper find its own way out. “I as much as any. Isn’t that what you were trying to teach me?”
“I was trying to teach you to be Theoderada. Who is Rowan. Who is anyone she wants to be.”
“Except a plain man’s wife, with no magic in her.”
“Oh, you could be that,” said Kerrec. “You only have to want it badly enough.”
Her heart thudded. She was aware of her aunt, listening but not speaking, and of the Elephant, standing like a wall behind them, and of the sun over them, growing warm as it rose toward noon.
And of her father. He had left the place of his justice and come round the wall that was the Elephant, and stood listening as the rest of them did.
Words died in her throat.
“Do you want that?” her father asked. “Do you really want that of all things in the world?”
Yes, Rowan tried to say. But her tongue was numb.
She stared at the Talisman on his breast. There was another on hers, invisible but as heavy as the world, and its name was magic. She could use it one last time, to make her father give her what she wanted; then give it up, cast it away, be nothing more or less than Rowan.
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t want it, any more than Gisela really wants the convent. I’d be bored silly in a week.”
“I don’t suppose,” her father said, “you want to be that man’s wife.”
She looked around in incomprehension. “What man?” Then she saw the flush on Kerrec’s cheeks, and felt her own rising to match it.
He was the one, this time, who said, “No. You don’t want me.”
“And why not?” Rowan demanded, grandly contrary.
“I’m only the Elephant’s boy. I have no lands, no honor—”
“Nonsense!” Rowan snapped. “Father, do you know who he is?”
“Am I supposed to guess?” the Emperor inquired. “What is he, one of Roland’s kin?”
“Yes,” said Rowan.
Carl’s face lit with pleasure. “Why, boy, why didn’t you say so? What were you trying to do, play some outland game of proving yourself worthy in spite of your family? Roland tried that on me once, he and Oliver. Took me the damnedest time to see through it.”
Kerrec had gone an interesting shade of crimson.
Finally the Emperor paused for breath, and Kerrec could get a word in edgewise. “No! Did you hear me, sire? I have no honor.”
“But how can a kinsman of Roland’s be without honor?”
Then Carl’s brow furrowed. Rowan watched him remember. “No. No, I never believed it, in spite of what everyone said. So you’re Count Everard’s boy, are you? I’d heard he had a son, but they said you were dead. Else I’d have sought you out.”
“And when would you have done that, my lord Emperor?” asked Kerrec. “You have a whole empire to think of. Brittany is the merest appendage, its people more rebellious than complaisant.”
“So you thought you’d try me from behind, did you, then?”
Kerrec kept his head up, which was more than Rowan could have managed. “I thought I’d earn my way as I could, and if you honored me, then I would return that honor to my father.”
“You should have come straight to me,” the Emperor said.
“I thought of it,” said Kerrec. “But what if you believed our enemy? Everyone else did. Then what would I have? This way I had the Elephant, and respect enough to go on with.”
“And my daughter?”
Black eyes met blue ones. “I doubt that your daughter has ever uttered a civil word to me. Are the stories false, after all, that you don’t allow them husbands? Are you trying to marry her off?”
Carl’s mustache bristled. His eyes blazed.
Suddenly, with no warning at all, he laughed. He laughed loud and he laughed long, and he did not care in the least that no one else laughed with him.
When he could talk again, he had to do it in bursts, through new gusts of mirth. “I see,” he said, “that you know my Rowan. Prickly, isn’t she? We should have named her Thornbush. And do you like her, then?”
“Do I dare?”
Carl grinned like a wolf, a grin that matched Kerrec’s.
It was quite beyond bearing. Rowan thrust herself between them. “Stop that, you two! I’m not a mare you’re chaffering over.”
Their grins did not even waver. She glared at them both. “Well, Father? Are you going to give him his honor back, and give us all some peace?”
“Honor,” said the Emperor, “and lands, and all else that he has lost.”
Kerrec looked faintly winded by his good fortune, but he would never give up his grin for that.
“And you,” Rowan said to him. “Why in the world would I want you for anything but a friend?”
That wiped the grin off his face.
“Friends can be lovers,” Abbess Gisela observed. “Eventually. When they outgrow their very natural urge to kick and squeal at one another.”
Rowan was blushing again. So was Kerrec. And her father was going to collapse if he laughed much harder.
She had enough wits left to make sure of one thing at least. “Kerrec has his honor back? Your word on it, Father?”
“My word and my bond,” he said. “Everything that was taken from him, he shall have again.”
“But,” said Kerrec, “what if I don’t want it?”
“Of course you want it,” said Rowan. “You’ve spent your whole life trying to get it.”
“No,” said Kerrec. “I’ve spent my life trying to get my honor back. If I have that, I don’t care what else I have. I’d rather stay here and serve the Elephant and be simply Kerrec, than be a lord in Brittany.”
“You children are two of a kind,” Abbess Gisela observed.
“And why,” demanded Rowan, ignoring her, “can’t you have both? You can be a lord and look after Abul Abbas. I don’t see why you have to be so difficult about it.”
He was going to be even more difficult, she could see. But her father headed him off. “Why, young lord, if it pleases your fancy to be the Elephant’s boy, then so you shall be. He likes you, even I can see that. But you won’t escape the rest of it. Honor costs, sir. It never comes free.”
Even Kerrec could see the truth of that. Maybe Abul Abbas helped him: the Elephant’s trunk slithered over his shoulder and curled around his body, as if to keep him from escaping.
He managed not to look too terribly trapped. After all, the Elephant was what he wanted. He could evade the rest of it without excessive trouble, as long as he had Abul Abbas to hide behind.
“It won’t be so bad,” the Emperor said, “to have a name and possessions and a place in the world apart from my lord Elephant. If nothing else, you’ll be able to afford a new coat.”
Kerrec shrugged in his old and ragged one. He was trying to be nonchalant, but Rowan could see the joy bubbling up in him as the truth of it finally struck him.
It had taken long enough. She met the Elephant’s eye. He was laughing at them all.
And no wonder. They had yattered so much, only to end up back where they started. The Emperor was as hearty as ever, Gisela her mooncalf self, Kerrec restored to his name and his honor.
As for Rowan, she had magic, singing in her, and a friend who was an elephant, and—yes—one who was a Breton witch.
He would look well in scarlet silk. She knew just the bolt she would cut it from. And if he objected, why then, she would remind him that he was a lord again at last, but she was a princess, and he must do as she commanded. That would put him in a right temper.
Somewhere in the air, she felt her mother’s presence. It was a little warmer than the sun, and it glimmered among the apple boughs.
It did not linger long. Just long enough for her to know that it was there; to touch the Emperor with a whisper of breeze, ruffling his hair; and to pause before the Elephant, bowing to his great magic and wisdom. Then, like a breeze, it was gone.
The Elephant raised his trunk as if in farewell, then lowered it gently to rest on Rowan’s shoulder. She glanced at Kerrec, who stood on her other side. He laid a hand on the Elephant’s trunk, as if to close their circle.
Rowan knew a moment’s urge to fling herself away from them both. But she stayed where she was. It was, not comfortable, no, but somehow right.
The Elephant’s eye caught hers. As clearly as she had ever heard her mother’s voice, she knew what he was telling her. Is it better, then, than being simply Rowan?
“No,” said Rowan, too quickly. But then her tongue caught up with the rest of her. “Yes,” she said in wonder. “Yes, it is. Who’d ever have thought it?”
Who indeed? said the Elephant.
She could not tell if he was laughing. After a moment she decided that it did not matter. A moment more, and she was laughing, too, laughter that let the sunlight in and drove all the dark away.
“For a while,” said Kerrec, reading her as easily as letters on a parchment.
A while is long enough, said the Elephant.
Postlude
In the world we know, Abul Abbas did not live three hundred years as people had been expecting that he would, or even the fifty that would be usual for an elephant. He died in the year 810, eight years after he was brought to Aachen. Germany was too cold and wet for him, and he never quite recovered from the rigors of his journey from the east.
His death was much mourned. He had been one of the great wonders of Charlemagne’s realm, the only elephant in the west of the world.
www.bookviewcafe.com
Copyright & Credits
His Majesty’s Elephant
Judith Tarr
Book View Café Edition January 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61138-240-2
Copyright © 1993, 2013 Judith Tarr
First published: Harcourt, 1993
Cover elements courtesy Andrey Popov, Dreamstime; Potowizard, Dreamstime
Cover design by Dave Smeds
v20130111vnm
v20130118vnm
v20130119vnm
www.bookviewcafe.com
About the Author
Judith Tarr holds a PhD in Medieval Studies from Yale. She is the author of over three dozen novels and many works of short fiction. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and has won the Crawford Award for The Isle of Glass and its sequels. She lives near Tucson, Arizona, where she raises and trains Lipizzan horses.
Other Books by Judith Tarr
Novels
Ars Magica
Alamut
The Dagger and the Cross
A Wind in Cairo
Lord of the Two Lands
His Majesty’s Elephant
The Hound and the Falcon
The Isle of Glass
The Golden Horn
The Hounds of God
Nonfiction
Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting it Right
BVC Anthologies
Beyond Grimm
Breaking Waves
Brewing Fine Fiction
Ways to Trash Your Writing Career
Dragon Lords and Warrior Women
Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls
The Shadow Conspiracy
The Shadow Conspiracy
The Shadow Conspiracy II
About Book View Café
Book View Café is a professional authors’ cooperative offering DRM-free ebooks in multiple formats to readers around the world. With authors in a variety of genres including mystery, romance, fantasy, and science fiction, Book View Café has something for everyone.
Book View Café is good for readers because you can enjoy high-quality DRM-free ebooks from your favorite authors at a reasonable price.
Book View Café is good for writers because 95% of the profit goes directly to the book’s author.
Book View Café authors include Nebula and Hugo Award winners, Philip K. Dick and Rita award winners, and New York Times bestsellers and notable book authors.
www.bookviewcafe.com
Sample Chapter: Living in Threes
Chapter 1
That was the absolute best and the absolute worst summer of my life, the summer I turned sixteen.
Sixteen is a weird year. Make it sixteen with your dad off finding himself again—not that he’d been around much even before the divorce—and your mom in remission from ovarian cancer, and you can pretty much figure you’re being dumped on from somewhere.
What I didn’t figure, and couldn’t ever have figured, was how bad it was going to get—and how completely impossible both the bad and the good part would be.
Magic. It’s dead, they say. Or never existed.
They aren’t looking in the places I fell into, or finding it where I found it, that wonderful and terrible summer.
I had plans with the usual suspects: Cat and Rick and Kristen. They had their licenses already, got them before school let out. I was thisclose to mine, with the September birthday and being the class baby.
It was going to be our summer on wheels, when it wasn’t on horseback or out on the beaches. We had it all mapped out.
Then Mom dropped the bomb.
I came home from the barn early that day, the day after the last day of school. Rick had the car, but his dad wanted it back by noon. So we’d hit the trails at sunup, then done our stalls and hay and water in a hurry with him already revving up the SUV.
When I got home, wringing wet and filthy and so smelly even I could tell I’d been around a manure pile, Mom was sitting out by the pool.
That wasn’t where she usually was on a Thursday morning. She still had her work clothes on, but she’d tossed off the stodgy black pumps and splashed her feet in the water.
Her hair had all grown back since the chemo. It was short and curly, and still a little strange, but I liked it. I thought it made her look younger and prettier.
She turned and smiled at me. She looked tired, part of me said, but the rest of me told that part to shut up. “Good ride?” she asked.
“Good one,” I answered. “Bonnie only threw in a couple of Airs. And that was because Rick was riding Stupid, and she was living up to her name. Bonnie had to put her in her place.”
Mom laughed.
As long as I was out there, I figured I’d do the sensible thing. I dropped my shirt and riding tights and got down to the bathing suit any sane person wears under clothes in Florida summer, and dived into the pool.
The water felt absolutely wonderful. Mom watched me do a couple of laps.
Finally I gave in. I swam up beside her and folded my arms on the tiles and floated there, and said, “All right. Tell me.”
She was still smiling. It must be something really good, to bring her out of court and all the way home.
“I’ve been talking to Aunt Jessie,” she said. “She’s staying in Egypt this summer, instead of coming back home to Massachusetts.”
I knew that. I talked to Aunt Jessie, too. She Skyped in at least once a week. Checking on me, and on Mom through me.
But Mom was in story mode. I kept quiet and let her go on.
“She’s really excited,” Mom said. “She’s made some discoveries that she thinks are very important, and with everything that’s been going on over there, she hasn’t been at all sure she can keep getting the permits. She actually got a grant, which is just about unheard of these days.”
“She must be over the moon,” I said.
“Oh, she is.” Mom paused. “It’s a big grant. Big enough for a whole team.”
“Including you?”
That came out of the way Mom was smiling—excited, as if she had a secret and she couldn’t wait to share. She’d been dreaming about Egypt for years, following all of Aunt Jessie’s adventures and reading and studying and talking about maybe someday, if she had time, if she could get away, if—
There were always reasons not to go. First she had to make partner in the law firm. Then she got asked to be a judge in the county court, and that needed her to be always on. Always perfect. And then there was the cancer.
So maybe she figured it was now or never. I could see that. Even get behind it. But I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.
Mom away for the whole summer? Was she really ready to leave me for that long? I didn’t have my license yet. How was I going to—
All that zipped through my head between the time I asked my question and the time Mom answered, “Including you.”
That stopped me cold.
Mom grinned at my expression. “You really thought it was me? I wish, but there are a couple of big cases coming on trial, and I might be called to the bench for another one, and—”
“Oh, shouldn’t he?”
She twisted her head to glare at him, but he was gone, sliding down the Elephant’s side.
Cursing every trick of men and elephants, she slid as Kerrec had, but without the grace. The Elephant’s trunk held her up as she started to fall; it lowered her carefully to the ground, face to face with Kerrec.
She turned her back on him. That turned her outward toward the rest of the world.
Her aunt was standing just out of the Elephant’s reach, looking more amused than not. “Gisela’s herself again,” the abbess said, as if that was all she had come to say. “She woke up this morning, somewhat before your father did, with no memory of anything that happened after sunset yesterday.”
“That’s a mercy,” said Kerrec. “And before sunset? Does she remember her bewitchment?”
“I think not,” the abbess said. “She’s a little indisposed this morning, but then she often is. She’ll have to learn to dispense with that if she expects to survive the discipline of a convent.”
“I don’t think she ever will,” Rowan said. Her temper was cooling, whether it wished to or no. It often did in front of the abbess. “She has dreams. All the Emperor’s daughters do. But we can’t be anything but princesses.”
“Even you?” Kerrec asked.
She spun. He was not visibly making fun of her. His eyes were wide and level and bright, but not with mockery.
She answered him straight, and let her temper find its own way out. “I as much as any. Isn’t that what you were trying to teach me?”
“I was trying to teach you to be Theoderada. Who is Rowan. Who is anyone she wants to be.”
“Except a plain man’s wife, with no magic in her.”
“Oh, you could be that,” said Kerrec. “You only have to want it badly enough.”
Her heart thudded. She was aware of her aunt, listening but not speaking, and of the Elephant, standing like a wall behind them, and of the sun over them, growing warm as it rose toward noon.
And of her father. He had left the place of his justice and come round the wall that was the Elephant, and stood listening as the rest of them did.
Words died in her throat.
“Do you want that?” her father asked. “Do you really want that of all things in the world?”
Yes, Rowan tried to say. But her tongue was numb.
She stared at the Talisman on his breast. There was another on hers, invisible but as heavy as the world, and its name was magic. She could use it one last time, to make her father give her what she wanted; then give it up, cast it away, be nothing more or less than Rowan.
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t want it, any more than Gisela really wants the convent. I’d be bored silly in a week.”
“I don’t suppose,” her father said, “you want to be that man’s wife.”
She looked around in incomprehension. “What man?” Then she saw the flush on Kerrec’s cheeks, and felt her own rising to match it.
He was the one, this time, who said, “No. You don’t want me.”
“And why not?” Rowan demanded, grandly contrary.
“I’m only the Elephant’s boy. I have no lands, no honor—”
“Nonsense!” Rowan snapped. “Father, do you know who he is?”
“Am I supposed to guess?” the Emperor inquired. “What is he, one of Roland’s kin?”
“Yes,” said Rowan.
Carl’s face lit with pleasure. “Why, boy, why didn’t you say so? What were you trying to do, play some outland game of proving yourself worthy in spite of your family? Roland tried that on me once, he and Oliver. Took me the damnedest time to see through it.”
Kerrec had gone an interesting shade of crimson.
Finally the Emperor paused for breath, and Kerrec could get a word in edgewise. “No! Did you hear me, sire? I have no honor.”
“But how can a kinsman of Roland’s be without honor?”
Then Carl’s brow furrowed. Rowan watched him remember. “No. No, I never believed it, in spite of what everyone said. So you’re Count Everard’s boy, are you? I’d heard he had a son, but they said you were dead. Else I’d have sought you out.”
“And when would you have done that, my lord Emperor?” asked Kerrec. “You have a whole empire to think of. Brittany is the merest appendage, its people more rebellious than complaisant.”
“So you thought you’d try me from behind, did you, then?”
Kerrec kept his head up, which was more than Rowan could have managed. “I thought I’d earn my way as I could, and if you honored me, then I would return that honor to my father.”
“You should have come straight to me,” the Emperor said.
“I thought of it,” said Kerrec. “But what if you believed our enemy? Everyone else did. Then what would I have? This way I had the Elephant, and respect enough to go on with.”
“And my daughter?”
Black eyes met blue ones. “I doubt that your daughter has ever uttered a civil word to me. Are the stories false, after all, that you don’t allow them husbands? Are you trying to marry her off?”
Carl’s mustache bristled. His eyes blazed.
Suddenly, with no warning at all, he laughed. He laughed loud and he laughed long, and he did not care in the least that no one else laughed with him.
When he could talk again, he had to do it in bursts, through new gusts of mirth. “I see,” he said, “that you know my Rowan. Prickly, isn’t she? We should have named her Thornbush. And do you like her, then?”
“Do I dare?”
Carl grinned like a wolf, a grin that matched Kerrec’s.
It was quite beyond bearing. Rowan thrust herself between them. “Stop that, you two! I’m not a mare you’re chaffering over.”
Their grins did not even waver. She glared at them both. “Well, Father? Are you going to give him his honor back, and give us all some peace?”
“Honor,” said the Emperor, “and lands, and all else that he has lost.”
Kerrec looked faintly winded by his good fortune, but he would never give up his grin for that.
“And you,” Rowan said to him. “Why in the world would I want you for anything but a friend?”
That wiped the grin off his face.
“Friends can be lovers,” Abbess Gisela observed. “Eventually. When they outgrow their very natural urge to kick and squeal at one another.”
Rowan was blushing again. So was Kerrec. And her father was going to collapse if he laughed much harder.
She had enough wits left to make sure of one thing at least. “Kerrec has his honor back? Your word on it, Father?”
“My word and my bond,” he said. “Everything that was taken from him, he shall have again.”
“But,” said Kerrec, “what if I don’t want it?”
“Of course you want it,” said Rowan. “You’ve spent your whole life trying to get it.”
“No,” said Kerrec. “I’ve spent my life trying to get my honor back. If I have that, I don’t care what else I have. I’d rather stay here and serve the Elephant and be simply Kerrec, than be a lord in Brittany.”
“You children are two of a kind,” Abbess Gisela observed.
“And why,” demanded Rowan, ignoring her, “can’t you have both? You can be a lord and look after Abul Abbas. I don’t see why you have to be so difficult about it.”
He was going to be even more difficult, she could see. But her father headed him off. “Why, young lord, if it pleases your fancy to be the Elephant’s boy, then so you shall be. He likes you, even I can see that. But you won’t escape the rest of it. Honor costs, sir. It never comes free.”
Even Kerrec could see the truth of that. Maybe Abul Abbas helped him: the Elephant’s trunk slithered over his shoulder and curled around his body, as if to keep him from escaping.
He managed not to look too terribly trapped. After all, the Elephant was what he wanted. He could evade the rest of it without excessive trouble, as long as he had Abul Abbas to hide behind.
“It won’t be so bad,” the Emperor said, “to have a name and possessions and a place in the world apart from my lord Elephant. If nothing else, you’ll be able to afford a new coat.”
Kerrec shrugged in his old and ragged one. He was trying to be nonchalant, but Rowan could see the joy bubbling up in him as the truth of it finally struck him.
It had taken long enough. She met the Elephant’s eye. He was laughing at them all.
And no wonder. They had yattered so much, only to end up back where they started. The Emperor was as hearty as ever, Gisela her mooncalf self, Kerrec restored to his name and his honor.
As for Rowan, she had magic, singing in her, and a friend who was an elephant, and—yes—one who was a Breton witch.
He would look well in scarlet silk. She knew just the bolt she would cut it from. And if he objected, why then, she would remind him that he was a lord again at last, but she was a princess, and he must do as she commanded. That would put him in a right temper.
Somewhere in the air, she felt her mother’s presence. It was a little warmer than the sun, and it glimmered among the apple boughs.
It did not linger long. Just long enough for her to know that it was there; to touch the Emperor with a whisper of breeze, ruffling his hair; and to pause before the Elephant, bowing to his great magic and wisdom. Then, like a breeze, it was gone.
The Elephant raised his trunk as if in farewell, then lowered it gently to rest on Rowan’s shoulder. She glanced at Kerrec, who stood on her other side. He laid a hand on the Elephant’s trunk, as if to close their circle.
Rowan knew a moment’s urge to fling herself away from them both. But she stayed where she was. It was, not comfortable, no, but somehow right.
The Elephant’s eye caught hers. As clearly as she had ever heard her mother’s voice, she knew what he was telling her. Is it better, then, than being simply Rowan?
“No,” said Rowan, too quickly. But then her tongue caught up with the rest of her. “Yes,” she said in wonder. “Yes, it is. Who’d ever have thought it?”
Who indeed? said the Elephant.
She could not tell if he was laughing. After a moment she decided that it did not matter. A moment more, and she was laughing, too, laughter that let the sunlight in and drove all the dark away.
“For a while,” said Kerrec, reading her as easily as letters on a parchment.
A while is long enough, said the Elephant.
Postlude
In the world we know, Abul Abbas did not live three hundred years as people had been expecting that he would, or even the fifty that would be usual for an elephant. He died in the year 810, eight years after he was brought to Aachen. Germany was too cold and wet for him, and he never quite recovered from the rigors of his journey from the east.
His death was much mourned. He had been one of the great wonders of Charlemagne’s realm, the only elephant in the west of the world.
www.bookviewcafe.com
Copyright & Credits
His Majesty’s Elephant
Judith Tarr
Book View Café Edition January 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61138-240-2
Copyright © 1993, 2013 Judith Tarr
First published: Harcourt, 1993
Cover elements courtesy Andrey Popov, Dreamstime; Potowizard, Dreamstime
Cover design by Dave Smeds
v20130111vnm
v20130118vnm
v20130119vnm
www.bookviewcafe.com
About the Author
Judith Tarr holds a PhD in Medieval Studies from Yale. She is the author of over three dozen novels and many works of short fiction. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and has won the Crawford Award for The Isle of Glass and its sequels. She lives near Tucson, Arizona, where she raises and trains Lipizzan horses.
Other Books by Judith Tarr
Novels
Ars Magica
Alamut
The Dagger and the Cross
A Wind in Cairo
Lord of the Two Lands
His Majesty’s Elephant
The Hound and the Falcon
The Isle of Glass
The Golden Horn
The Hounds of God
Nonfiction
Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting it Right
BVC Anthologies
Beyond Grimm
Breaking Waves
Brewing Fine Fiction
Ways to Trash Your Writing Career
Dragon Lords and Warrior Women
Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls
The Shadow Conspiracy
The Shadow Conspiracy
The Shadow Conspiracy II
About Book View Café
Book View Café is a professional authors’ cooperative offering DRM-free ebooks in multiple formats to readers around the world. With authors in a variety of genres including mystery, romance, fantasy, and science fiction, Book View Café has something for everyone.
Book View Café is good for readers because you can enjoy high-quality DRM-free ebooks from your favorite authors at a reasonable price.
Book View Café is good for writers because 95% of the profit goes directly to the book’s author.
Book View Café authors include Nebula and Hugo Award winners, Philip K. Dick and Rita award winners, and New York Times bestsellers and notable book authors.
www.bookviewcafe.com
Sample Chapter: Living in Threes
Chapter 1
That was the absolute best and the absolute worst summer of my life, the summer I turned sixteen.
Sixteen is a weird year. Make it sixteen with your dad off finding himself again—not that he’d been around much even before the divorce—and your mom in remission from ovarian cancer, and you can pretty much figure you’re being dumped on from somewhere.
What I didn’t figure, and couldn’t ever have figured, was how bad it was going to get—and how completely impossible both the bad and the good part would be.
Magic. It’s dead, they say. Or never existed.
They aren’t looking in the places I fell into, or finding it where I found it, that wonderful and terrible summer.
I had plans with the usual suspects: Cat and Rick and Kristen. They had their licenses already, got them before school let out. I was thisclose to mine, with the September birthday and being the class baby.
It was going to be our summer on wheels, when it wasn’t on horseback or out on the beaches. We had it all mapped out.
Then Mom dropped the bomb.
I came home from the barn early that day, the day after the last day of school. Rick had the car, but his dad wanted it back by noon. So we’d hit the trails at sunup, then done our stalls and hay and water in a hurry with him already revving up the SUV.
When I got home, wringing wet and filthy and so smelly even I could tell I’d been around a manure pile, Mom was sitting out by the pool.
That wasn’t where she usually was on a Thursday morning. She still had her work clothes on, but she’d tossed off the stodgy black pumps and splashed her feet in the water.
Her hair had all grown back since the chemo. It was short and curly, and still a little strange, but I liked it. I thought it made her look younger and prettier.
She turned and smiled at me. She looked tired, part of me said, but the rest of me told that part to shut up. “Good ride?” she asked.
“Good one,” I answered. “Bonnie only threw in a couple of Airs. And that was because Rick was riding Stupid, and she was living up to her name. Bonnie had to put her in her place.”
Mom laughed.
As long as I was out there, I figured I’d do the sensible thing. I dropped my shirt and riding tights and got down to the bathing suit any sane person wears under clothes in Florida summer, and dived into the pool.
The water felt absolutely wonderful. Mom watched me do a couple of laps.
Finally I gave in. I swam up beside her and folded my arms on the tiles and floated there, and said, “All right. Tell me.”
She was still smiling. It must be something really good, to bring her out of court and all the way home.
“I’ve been talking to Aunt Jessie,” she said. “She’s staying in Egypt this summer, instead of coming back home to Massachusetts.”
I knew that. I talked to Aunt Jessie, too. She Skyped in at least once a week. Checking on me, and on Mom through me.
But Mom was in story mode. I kept quiet and let her go on.
“She’s really excited,” Mom said. “She’s made some discoveries that she thinks are very important, and with everything that’s been going on over there, she hasn’t been at all sure she can keep getting the permits. She actually got a grant, which is just about unheard of these days.”
“She must be over the moon,” I said.
“Oh, she is.” Mom paused. “It’s a big grant. Big enough for a whole team.”
“Including you?”
That came out of the way Mom was smiling—excited, as if she had a secret and she couldn’t wait to share. She’d been dreaming about Egypt for years, following all of Aunt Jessie’s adventures and reading and studying and talking about maybe someday, if she had time, if she could get away, if—
There were always reasons not to go. First she had to make partner in the law firm. Then she got asked to be a judge in the county court, and that needed her to be always on. Always perfect. And then there was the cancer.
So maybe she figured it was now or never. I could see that. Even get behind it. But I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.
Mom away for the whole summer? Was she really ready to leave me for that long? I didn’t have my license yet. How was I going to—
All that zipped through my head between the time I asked my question and the time Mom answered, “Including you.”
That stopped me cold.
Mom grinned at my expression. “You really thought it was me? I wish, but there are a couple of big cases coming on trial, and I might be called to the bench for another one, and—”
