In lieu of actual content...
Apr. 18th, 2007 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbSo, I was looking through my old files last night, bits and pieces of stories I started years ago, and -
Man. I have improved.
I don't know why this amazes me so. I've been practicing, on and off - mostly on - for the last twelve years, even if I only have evidence from the last six or so. But my stuff from five, three, two years ago - hell, even a year ago -
- It's purely cringeworthy now.
Less on the individual sentence level - although it's cringeworthy there, too, I assure you - than in plot, character, worldbuilding, and all the little ways those individual sentences fail to make up a meaningful, or decent, whole.
I'm nowhere near good, or even good enough...
But I'm better. And in five or ten years' time, I'll be better still.
#
For the amusement value, I reproduce hereunder some opening passages from my earlier efforts to tell a story.
2000
Beneath the scorching face of the burning desert sun, on a flat, scrubby plain, the companies gathered in the aftermath of a long campaign. Fighters gathered near the pitched tents, talking, gambling, grumbling, joking. Standards rose above certain sections of the sprawling camp; patches worn on armour identified members of the same company. They weren't exactly soldiers, although some came close in skill and discipline, and some were better. No, these were mercenaries, the outcasts of the known world.
The messenger walked swiftly through the jumble of tents, drunken arguments and vicious brawls. His eyes swept the carefully ordered chaos, searching for the one he had been told to find. His dented armour and dark cloak made him merely one among many. Only the sharpest of gazes would have detected the royal medallion on its thong around his neck. Three horses had foundered to get him here before the camp dispersed: the dust of the road was still fresh on his boots.
And later or earlier, from the same work:
The night wind of autumn blew hard and cold around the battlements. The darkness of the Plain of Terenor stretched out to the jagged edge of the mountain-lined horizon, the depths of its shadow broken only by the orange glows of enemy cookfires. Tattered clouds drifted across the deep midnight arch of the star-specked sky.
Karlin Tatherai tugged his cloak closer around him as he strode the walls of Forn, his boots striking sharply on the stone. He was a tall man, still in his early twenties. Black-haired, with eyes the clear blue of a winter sky and the look of a stooping hawk about his youthful features. His cheeks had the hollowness brought on by weeks of inadequate rations, but the sword at his hip rode with the easy familiarity of long companionship.
His steps slowed as he stared at the distant fires. The siege had gone on for almost three months, since midsummer. Half the citizenry of Forn were dead of hunger or the plague by now, and the other half were dying. Almost three months to the day the army of Forn marched onto the Plain of Terenor to be slaughtered
2000: it feels so long ago. I hadn't the slight clue, but I thought I was the shit.
I did finish this. 12,000 words of demons, and people running around in confusion which was a reflection of authorial confusion and ignorance, and swordfights, and sieges, and Then Everyone Died, The End, because I didn't know how to finish it any other way.
I appear to have misplaced the complete 40,000 word not-a-novel I spent the year of my Junior Cert - 2002 - working on. This is probably not an entirely bad thing.
2003/2004
She woke to darkness, and the damp scent of brine. Creaking timbers and the flap of sails, the hammer of feet and the muffled bellow of shouts. For an instant, poised between sleep and wakefulness, memory and identity hovered out of reach. Drifting air currents brushed light, tactile; the mould of cloth against her back. No dream. She hung in a hammock, suspended in mid air. Aboard a ship.
Memory trickled back. The Wavedancer sailed for the Northern Alliance, a two-master trading sloop too quickly refitted to serve military needs. Bound south along the Red Coast to land a raiding party deep inside Saur territory. Suicidal, maybe, but the sole chance to distract attention and divert resources from the front, and perhaps salvage a frail advantage for beleaguered Alliance forces struggling to stem the relentless flood of the Saur advance.
The door swung open. Dim light seeped into the cabin. She sat up, feet finding the floor, wary of the tangled web of hammocks that crowded the small space. The outline of a man stood in the hatchway, a bundle under one arm. Automatically her hand went to her belt. She frowned, feeling an absence that she did not - quite - understand.
“Kai? Kai Adenos?”
For a moment the name sounded strange to her ears, like words in an unfamiliar tongue. It was her name, but briefly she had expected… What? Something else? She didn’t know, and it troubled her.
She shook her head, dismissing inward confusion. The wanderings of a sleep-fogged mind had no place with the waking. “Here.” She looked up as the man stepped over the threshold of the cramped compartment, and her glance sharpened. “Who are you?”
This one made it to 80,000 words before I realised I had no idea what it was about, and the logic errors had become too glaring to ignore. It reads like a really bad cross between Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings, and if that sounds screwed-up and confusing, well. It was.
late 2004/early 2005
The horse screamed.
The sling spun wildly as the grey gelding kicked against the hull of the ship and screamed again, the sound of his enraged terror slicing through the general noise and bustle of Cirlathel’s dockside. The stench of fish and harbour-rot reeking in her nostrils, Kai Adennos shielded her eyes against the mid-morning sun and squinted at the winch that worked to raise the grey up and into the hold of the Wavedancer, a two-masted trading sloop hastily converted to troop transport to serve the needs of the war. She clenched her jaw as the gelding’s hooves slammed against wood once more, and turned to glare at the fat loading steward standing beside her. “Tell those idiots to be more careful with my horse!”
This one is an attempt to rewrite the previous one to have it actually make sense. I spent the better part of six months, on and off, at that rather futile past-time, before the Leaving Cert came along and hit me upside the head.
2004/2005
Breath of air, brush of quiet. Shayna woke, instantly alert, fingers already closing on the hilt of the knife beneath her pillow; afraid, without knowing why.
The spill of moonlight through the flimsy drapes across the balcony washed the tiled floor in pale, colourless shades. The corners of the chamber retreated into thicker blackness. A breath of breeze stirred the thin, transparent hanging. A whisper of wind in the silence almost hid the soft scuff of leather on stone.
She slipped from her bed, soundless. The tiles were ice against her bare feet. Air rasped along her nerves with the painful tautness of stretched wire. She tightened her grip on the rough leather of the knife-hilt, breathing shallowly. Of a sudden, the balmy night seemed chill.
She tasted the air, rolled the warm scents of the tropical darkness around on her tongue. Behind the natural odours of stone-dust and spices, and sun-warmed greenery, the familiar iron tang of oiled steel lingered; faint, bitter, slow to fade. And behind that, fainter still yet undeniable, the dry musk of sweat.
She swallowed, tasting the acrid bitterness of fear. The damp silk of her shift clung to skin slick with perspiration. Across the room, slender deadliness rested, sheathed, on the pale wood of a table. The moonlight leached all colour: her sword, out of reach, a dark shape on the white grain. For an instant, dark eyes flickered.
Shayna pressed her lips together, drew a breath. A shadow moved against the drapes.
This one... Despite what the prose might suggest, it wasn't actually too bad. It certainly never progressed far enough to become appallingly confused, thanks to the Leaving. Maybe I'll revisit it some day.
Well, I was fond of it, anyway.
2005
Darric woke to the touch of a hand on his shoulder and the smell of a spring night after rain. His nose twitched. The faint scent of woodsmoke drifted on the breeze. The stars were clear in the sky, half occluded by the black shape that leant over him.
“Tick?” Darric levered himself up on one elbow, searching for the other man’s face in the dimness. Out of instinct, he spoke softly. “What is it?”
“Signal fire on Breacon head.” Tick crouched, leather hauberk creaking. His voice was a low, harsh rasp, legacy of an old wound. “Do I wake the others?”
“Wake them.” Darric rolled to his feet, seeing the yellow glow against the sky in the northeast for himself as he came upright. The glow from the signal fire that meant armed raiders had struck at Breacon village. “And get ready to move,” he added sharply as Tick moved off.
Ten men. Breath caught in his throat as he folded his bedroll into his pack and checked the hang of his baldric, hearing the waking grumbles of his small command. Ten men were too few to take against a raiding force strong enough to take a village. Three days out from the ducal castle of Uline, near the limit of his patrol. The nearest aid was hours’ ride away, at Baron Forlayn’s keep. In cold truth there was only him and the nine others of his command to answer the beacon’s summons, and grim fear gripped his bowels.
In his heart of hearts he prayed that they would arrive too late.
“Alright,” he said when there were nine shapes facing him around the embers of their fire. The sliver moon and clear stars gave his eyes almost light enough to make out their features, though he knew that to them his own face was invisible. He sensed more than saw their apprehension, and made his voice firm and confident in answer. Better to say a few words now and bolster their self-belief than wait and chance fear and confusion later. He had learned that under the armsmaster’s harsh tutelage in Siegods, years ago
2005: You don't want to know how tangled in my own plots and counterplots I ended up with this one. Unfinished and has been cannibalised for characters: I didn't know what I was doing, and worse, didn't know what I wanted to be doing. Dragons, kings, succession troubles, regencies, witchfinders - I threw everything in, and I had no idea how to make it fit together into a coherent sum-of-its-parts, much less a whole. :)
I did like the characters, though. I'll be using them, sometime.
2005/2006
One more death.
The breeze through the unglazed window stirred the dead man’s hair. The assassin lowered the body down to the floorboards, grunting a little at the weight. Arlan rò Tolemaos had been a broad, strong man, his swordsman’s muscle only slowly giving way to middle-aged paunchiness. His death might not have been so easily achieved, if he had seen it coming.
But he had not seen it coming. The assassin had years of practice in his trade; time enough to render him expert, to remove all the flaws in his method. A careless assassin did not long remain a living assassin.
Though sometimes he wondered why he cared to stay alive. Habit, perhaps: it could not be hope.
His knife had entered Tolemaos’ back between the third and fourth ribs. A clean blow, directly into the heart. Very little blood. A thin trickle welled from the wound as he reclaimed the blade, staining Tolemaos’ white linen shirt.
Paper fluttered where his hands, cast out in a dying spasm, had disarrayed the desk. Ignoring the rustle of upset pages and the bowel-stink of death, the assassin cleaned his steel and rose. The smell would bring Tolemaos’ servants to investigate before evening, if nothing else brought them sooner. In the heat of summer’s afternoon in Stabla, dead flesh rotted swiftly.
2006: I'd figured out what a sentence is supposed to be doing. Making it work consistently was - and is - still a hit-and-miss proposition. Plotwise, though, I tried to get too complicated too quickly, and ended up tangling myself up what I thought was my own cleverness. And then, of course, I managed to get tangled up in college and bad brain chemicals before I got more than 25K words straight.
But I do have plans to go back.
2006
I am not afraid.
Dust and jasmine scented the night air through the latticed window. Sabila Eldivan scratched her signature at the end of the papiros scroll and laid her pen aside. Candleflame fluttered at her sigh. "Darric."
"I'm here," her brother said quietly from the door.
"The Celestial Light has made me an offer," she said. She didn't turn around.
"Yes?" Sandals scuffed on the tile.
"He wants me as his concubine." Sabila leaned her shoulders back into her brother's hands. Comfort, a small comfort. I am not afraid. But saying a thing did not make it true. "I tell you this, Darric, because I intend to refuse him. And refuse him in such a way that he will not be able to force my compliance."
"Publicly?" he asked, soft. His hands were warm and gentle on the back of her neck.
"Publicly. Public heresy. Public treason. You and father must be prepared to disown me, Darric." She twisted, met his eyes for the first time. "I've written him a letter..."
"Disown you? Sabila --"
"If you don't," she said softly, cutting through his protest, "that will be treason too. Keos Eirene has need of you, Dar. It's too soon to move against His Celestial Eminence. We're not ready. Don't throw that away. Don't throw this away. The old blood will know why I speak public treason. It may move them, when they see that even one of their own is no longer safe."
"Sabila --" He took her hands, clasped them with a looseness belied by the dark tension in his eyes. "We may never be ready."
I am not afraid. She bit her lip and stood to kiss him gently on the forehead. "I know." Her smile hurt her cheeks. "No, don't speak. I've made my choice. Will you lend me your arm? I have an appointment in His Eminence's presence chambers." A bitter smile. "It must needs be kept."
Apart from this passage and a couple of other paragraph-y bits, this one doesn't exist yet. But I am determined that it will. It has gods and dragons and megalomania and rebellion and sorcery and siblings who become enemies and then need to reconcile for the greater good. I'm currently trying not to be seduced by its promises, in order to actually finish what I'm working on now. :)
current
Jolay unbolted the door onto the Street of Masques shortly after dawn.
The passage between the kitchen and the street door of the salle was still dark and damp this early in the morning. The stone flags chilled her bare feet. The metal ring of hammering from the blacksmith's forge on the far side of the rear courtyard came dimly to her through the heavy stone walls, and she wondered in passing what urgent commission had persuaded Master Iralin to work through the night.
The bolts were stiff and needed oiling, but the door swung back on its hinges with only a minor creak of protest.
There was a stranger standing on the stoop, a decorous three or four paces back from the entryway. A gentleman by his clothes, tall and dapper and ever-so-slightly shabby, neither old nor young, particularly poor or particularly well-to-do. He tipped his hat slightly and held out a folded paper without speaking.
He had been waiting, then. If he'd meant to leave a note, he could have slipped it beneath the jamb. No, he wanted to deliver it into someone's hand.
He didn't speak, but he raised an eyebrow and she realised she'd stood unmoving for more than a handful of heartbeats. Remember where you are. Noble gentlemen of Alusind considered it beneath their dignity to exchange a single word more than necessary with a servant. And if she was no one's servant now except at her own whim, she still played the role.
So play the role, Jolaenia.
Not brilliant, by any means, but better than I was even two years ago. And I was still in love with it this morning.
Yeah, I have to laugh at myself, sometimes. :)
Man. I have improved.
I don't know why this amazes me so. I've been practicing, on and off - mostly on - for the last twelve years, even if I only have evidence from the last six or so. But my stuff from five, three, two years ago - hell, even a year ago -
- It's purely cringeworthy now.
Less on the individual sentence level - although it's cringeworthy there, too, I assure you - than in plot, character, worldbuilding, and all the little ways those individual sentences fail to make up a meaningful, or decent, whole.
I'm nowhere near good, or even good enough...
But I'm better. And in five or ten years' time, I'll be better still.
#
For the amusement value, I reproduce hereunder some opening passages from my earlier efforts to tell a story.
2000
Beneath the scorching face of the burning desert sun, on a flat, scrubby plain, the companies gathered in the aftermath of a long campaign. Fighters gathered near the pitched tents, talking, gambling, grumbling, joking. Standards rose above certain sections of the sprawling camp; patches worn on armour identified members of the same company. They weren't exactly soldiers, although some came close in skill and discipline, and some were better. No, these were mercenaries, the outcasts of the known world.
The messenger walked swiftly through the jumble of tents, drunken arguments and vicious brawls. His eyes swept the carefully ordered chaos, searching for the one he had been told to find. His dented armour and dark cloak made him merely one among many. Only the sharpest of gazes would have detected the royal medallion on its thong around his neck. Three horses had foundered to get him here before the camp dispersed: the dust of the road was still fresh on his boots.
And later or earlier, from the same work:
The night wind of autumn blew hard and cold around the battlements. The darkness of the Plain of Terenor stretched out to the jagged edge of the mountain-lined horizon, the depths of its shadow broken only by the orange glows of enemy cookfires. Tattered clouds drifted across the deep midnight arch of the star-specked sky.
Karlin Tatherai tugged his cloak closer around him as he strode the walls of Forn, his boots striking sharply on the stone. He was a tall man, still in his early twenties. Black-haired, with eyes the clear blue of a winter sky and the look of a stooping hawk about his youthful features. His cheeks had the hollowness brought on by weeks of inadequate rations, but the sword at his hip rode with the easy familiarity of long companionship.
His steps slowed as he stared at the distant fires. The siege had gone on for almost three months, since midsummer. Half the citizenry of Forn were dead of hunger or the plague by now, and the other half were dying. Almost three months to the day the army of Forn marched onto the Plain of Terenor to be slaughtered
2000: it feels so long ago. I hadn't the slight clue, but I thought I was the shit.
I did finish this. 12,000 words of demons, and people running around in confusion which was a reflection of authorial confusion and ignorance, and swordfights, and sieges, and Then Everyone Died, The End, because I didn't know how to finish it any other way.
I appear to have misplaced the complete 40,000 word not-a-novel I spent the year of my Junior Cert - 2002 - working on. This is probably not an entirely bad thing.
2003/2004
She woke to darkness, and the damp scent of brine. Creaking timbers and the flap of sails, the hammer of feet and the muffled bellow of shouts. For an instant, poised between sleep and wakefulness, memory and identity hovered out of reach. Drifting air currents brushed light, tactile; the mould of cloth against her back. No dream. She hung in a hammock, suspended in mid air. Aboard a ship.
Memory trickled back. The Wavedancer sailed for the Northern Alliance, a two-master trading sloop too quickly refitted to serve military needs. Bound south along the Red Coast to land a raiding party deep inside Saur territory. Suicidal, maybe, but the sole chance to distract attention and divert resources from the front, and perhaps salvage a frail advantage for beleaguered Alliance forces struggling to stem the relentless flood of the Saur advance.
The door swung open. Dim light seeped into the cabin. She sat up, feet finding the floor, wary of the tangled web of hammocks that crowded the small space. The outline of a man stood in the hatchway, a bundle under one arm. Automatically her hand went to her belt. She frowned, feeling an absence that she did not - quite - understand.
“Kai? Kai Adenos?”
For a moment the name sounded strange to her ears, like words in an unfamiliar tongue. It was her name, but briefly she had expected… What? Something else? She didn’t know, and it troubled her.
She shook her head, dismissing inward confusion. The wanderings of a sleep-fogged mind had no place with the waking. “Here.” She looked up as the man stepped over the threshold of the cramped compartment, and her glance sharpened. “Who are you?”
This one made it to 80,000 words before I realised I had no idea what it was about, and the logic errors had become too glaring to ignore. It reads like a really bad cross between Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings, and if that sounds screwed-up and confusing, well. It was.
late 2004/early 2005
The horse screamed.
The sling spun wildly as the grey gelding kicked against the hull of the ship and screamed again, the sound of his enraged terror slicing through the general noise and bustle of Cirlathel’s dockside. The stench of fish and harbour-rot reeking in her nostrils, Kai Adennos shielded her eyes against the mid-morning sun and squinted at the winch that worked to raise the grey up and into the hold of the Wavedancer, a two-masted trading sloop hastily converted to troop transport to serve the needs of the war. She clenched her jaw as the gelding’s hooves slammed against wood once more, and turned to glare at the fat loading steward standing beside her. “Tell those idiots to be more careful with my horse!”
This one is an attempt to rewrite the previous one to have it actually make sense. I spent the better part of six months, on and off, at that rather futile past-time, before the Leaving Cert came along and hit me upside the head.
2004/2005
Breath of air, brush of quiet. Shayna woke, instantly alert, fingers already closing on the hilt of the knife beneath her pillow; afraid, without knowing why.
The spill of moonlight through the flimsy drapes across the balcony washed the tiled floor in pale, colourless shades. The corners of the chamber retreated into thicker blackness. A breath of breeze stirred the thin, transparent hanging. A whisper of wind in the silence almost hid the soft scuff of leather on stone.
She slipped from her bed, soundless. The tiles were ice against her bare feet. Air rasped along her nerves with the painful tautness of stretched wire. She tightened her grip on the rough leather of the knife-hilt, breathing shallowly. Of a sudden, the balmy night seemed chill.
She tasted the air, rolled the warm scents of the tropical darkness around on her tongue. Behind the natural odours of stone-dust and spices, and sun-warmed greenery, the familiar iron tang of oiled steel lingered; faint, bitter, slow to fade. And behind that, fainter still yet undeniable, the dry musk of sweat.
She swallowed, tasting the acrid bitterness of fear. The damp silk of her shift clung to skin slick with perspiration. Across the room, slender deadliness rested, sheathed, on the pale wood of a table. The moonlight leached all colour: her sword, out of reach, a dark shape on the white grain. For an instant, dark eyes flickered.
Shayna pressed her lips together, drew a breath. A shadow moved against the drapes.
This one... Despite what the prose might suggest, it wasn't actually too bad. It certainly never progressed far enough to become appallingly confused, thanks to the Leaving. Maybe I'll revisit it some day.
Well, I was fond of it, anyway.
2005
Darric woke to the touch of a hand on his shoulder and the smell of a spring night after rain. His nose twitched. The faint scent of woodsmoke drifted on the breeze. The stars were clear in the sky, half occluded by the black shape that leant over him.
“Tick?” Darric levered himself up on one elbow, searching for the other man’s face in the dimness. Out of instinct, he spoke softly. “What is it?”
“Signal fire on Breacon head.” Tick crouched, leather hauberk creaking. His voice was a low, harsh rasp, legacy of an old wound. “Do I wake the others?”
“Wake them.” Darric rolled to his feet, seeing the yellow glow against the sky in the northeast for himself as he came upright. The glow from the signal fire that meant armed raiders had struck at Breacon village. “And get ready to move,” he added sharply as Tick moved off.
Ten men. Breath caught in his throat as he folded his bedroll into his pack and checked the hang of his baldric, hearing the waking grumbles of his small command. Ten men were too few to take against a raiding force strong enough to take a village. Three days out from the ducal castle of Uline, near the limit of his patrol. The nearest aid was hours’ ride away, at Baron Forlayn’s keep. In cold truth there was only him and the nine others of his command to answer the beacon’s summons, and grim fear gripped his bowels.
In his heart of hearts he prayed that they would arrive too late.
“Alright,” he said when there were nine shapes facing him around the embers of their fire. The sliver moon and clear stars gave his eyes almost light enough to make out their features, though he knew that to them his own face was invisible. He sensed more than saw their apprehension, and made his voice firm and confident in answer. Better to say a few words now and bolster their self-belief than wait and chance fear and confusion later. He had learned that under the armsmaster’s harsh tutelage in Siegods, years ago
2005: You don't want to know how tangled in my own plots and counterplots I ended up with this one. Unfinished and has been cannibalised for characters: I didn't know what I was doing, and worse, didn't know what I wanted to be doing. Dragons, kings, succession troubles, regencies, witchfinders - I threw everything in, and I had no idea how to make it fit together into a coherent sum-of-its-parts, much less a whole. :)
I did like the characters, though. I'll be using them, sometime.
2005/2006
One more death.
The breeze through the unglazed window stirred the dead man’s hair. The assassin lowered the body down to the floorboards, grunting a little at the weight. Arlan rò Tolemaos had been a broad, strong man, his swordsman’s muscle only slowly giving way to middle-aged paunchiness. His death might not have been so easily achieved, if he had seen it coming.
But he had not seen it coming. The assassin had years of practice in his trade; time enough to render him expert, to remove all the flaws in his method. A careless assassin did not long remain a living assassin.
Though sometimes he wondered why he cared to stay alive. Habit, perhaps: it could not be hope.
His knife had entered Tolemaos’ back between the third and fourth ribs. A clean blow, directly into the heart. Very little blood. A thin trickle welled from the wound as he reclaimed the blade, staining Tolemaos’ white linen shirt.
Paper fluttered where his hands, cast out in a dying spasm, had disarrayed the desk. Ignoring the rustle of upset pages and the bowel-stink of death, the assassin cleaned his steel and rose. The smell would bring Tolemaos’ servants to investigate before evening, if nothing else brought them sooner. In the heat of summer’s afternoon in Stabla, dead flesh rotted swiftly.
2006: I'd figured out what a sentence is supposed to be doing. Making it work consistently was - and is - still a hit-and-miss proposition. Plotwise, though, I tried to get too complicated too quickly, and ended up tangling myself up what I thought was my own cleverness. And then, of course, I managed to get tangled up in college and bad brain chemicals before I got more than 25K words straight.
But I do have plans to go back.
2006
I am not afraid.
Dust and jasmine scented the night air through the latticed window. Sabila Eldivan scratched her signature at the end of the papiros scroll and laid her pen aside. Candleflame fluttered at her sigh. "Darric."
"I'm here," her brother said quietly from the door.
"The Celestial Light has made me an offer," she said. She didn't turn around.
"Yes?" Sandals scuffed on the tile.
"He wants me as his concubine." Sabila leaned her shoulders back into her brother's hands. Comfort, a small comfort. I am not afraid. But saying a thing did not make it true. "I tell you this, Darric, because I intend to refuse him. And refuse him in such a way that he will not be able to force my compliance."
"Publicly?" he asked, soft. His hands were warm and gentle on the back of her neck.
"Publicly. Public heresy. Public treason. You and father must be prepared to disown me, Darric." She twisted, met his eyes for the first time. "I've written him a letter..."
"Disown you? Sabila --"
"If you don't," she said softly, cutting through his protest, "that will be treason too. Keos Eirene has need of you, Dar. It's too soon to move against His Celestial Eminence. We're not ready. Don't throw that away. Don't throw this away. The old blood will know why I speak public treason. It may move them, when they see that even one of their own is no longer safe."
"Sabila --" He took her hands, clasped them with a looseness belied by the dark tension in his eyes. "We may never be ready."
I am not afraid. She bit her lip and stood to kiss him gently on the forehead. "I know." Her smile hurt her cheeks. "No, don't speak. I've made my choice. Will you lend me your arm? I have an appointment in His Eminence's presence chambers." A bitter smile. "It must needs be kept."
Apart from this passage and a couple of other paragraph-y bits, this one doesn't exist yet. But I am determined that it will. It has gods and dragons and megalomania and rebellion and sorcery and siblings who become enemies and then need to reconcile for the greater good. I'm currently trying not to be seduced by its promises, in order to actually finish what I'm working on now. :)
current
Jolay unbolted the door onto the Street of Masques shortly after dawn.
The passage between the kitchen and the street door of the salle was still dark and damp this early in the morning. The stone flags chilled her bare feet. The metal ring of hammering from the blacksmith's forge on the far side of the rear courtyard came dimly to her through the heavy stone walls, and she wondered in passing what urgent commission had persuaded Master Iralin to work through the night.
The bolts were stiff and needed oiling, but the door swung back on its hinges with only a minor creak of protest.
There was a stranger standing on the stoop, a decorous three or four paces back from the entryway. A gentleman by his clothes, tall and dapper and ever-so-slightly shabby, neither old nor young, particularly poor or particularly well-to-do. He tipped his hat slightly and held out a folded paper without speaking.
He had been waiting, then. If he'd meant to leave a note, he could have slipped it beneath the jamb. No, he wanted to deliver it into someone's hand.
He didn't speak, but he raised an eyebrow and she realised she'd stood unmoving for more than a handful of heartbeats. Remember where you are. Noble gentlemen of Alusind considered it beneath their dignity to exchange a single word more than necessary with a servant. And if she was no one's servant now except at her own whim, she still played the role.
So play the role, Jolaenia.
Not brilliant, by any means, but better than I was even two years ago. And I was still in love with it this morning.
Yeah, I have to laugh at myself, sometimes. :)
