Nevertheless, she persisted.
This month marks my 10th year of blogging. Wow. Here at Writer’s Diary I will be celebrating that milestone.
For example, I’ve lowered the price of Lord Ruin to $.99 for a limited time — until April 11. It seems to be taking a bit for the price change to populate out so if you still see it at $3.99 wait a bit. The change is there, I promise!
Very shortly I’ll be announcing the winner and results of the Rename My Blog contest. Watch this space.
I did some website updates today. Exciting stuff.
I’m allowed to have up to 20% of the story on my website. Below is way less than 20%. the longer excerpt here is a bit shy of 20%, more like 18% but it was a really good stopping place.
Magic pressed on Mair’s heart when Dal Atul emerged from the barracks at the far side of the parade grounds. As she watched him, the sensation enfolded her, slid through her, around her, deep and mysterious. The moment of recognition, when it hit, shook her so hard her breath stopped. So hard she couldn’t hear what the others were whispering. Nothing existed except Atul, that old, savage magic, and her conviction that her life had just re-formed itself into a new and terrible shape.
This awful sense of desperation and futility had to spring from fear she told herself. What could her fast-beating pulse mean but that, like the others, she was afraid of the king’s Dragon? By reputation alone, he was not a man who would ever be the subject of romantic fantasy. Today’s tourney was for the entertainment of the Tallend delegation, but it was no accident the participants were soldiers. Dangerous soldiers. Each one chosen from among Veren’s best, including, of course, from members of the King’s Own Guard. Men such as Dal Atul
Mair Barrence, the eldest of three children, had spent the whole of her twenty-five years at the northern border. Northerners were not a soft people. How could they be, in a land where conditions crushed the weak until there was nothing left? The folk there dressed plainly, spoke plainly and did not coddle their children or their women. They could not afford to. Mair was Northern to her marrow. Thus, she confronted herself and admitted that the emotion that rocked her to her core was not fear, but the same unknowable emotion that had twisted in her since the day she set eyes on the Dragon.
Atul had been given his epithet not out of respect or fear, but because his father was one of the Dragon sept Elves. He was the result of one of the rapes that occurred during the third and final battle for control of the Tallend Province. Half-bloods who survived childhood and could pass for fully human did so. Atul had survived despite his obvious parentage.
That he’d been brought into the King’s Own Guard said a great deal about King VerenÑand yet more about Atul. The King’s Own were the elite of Veren’s army, under his private command. His personal guards were drawn from them. They had no internal rank or hierarchy; whether noble-born, baseborn, sons of whores or bastard half-bloods, they were soldiers now and for the rest of their lives. No one left the King’s Own except by dying. They were men who had been killers, intriguers, assassins, thieves and poisoners. Some, so rumor went, were even sorcerers. King Veren prized magic highly. And the men recruited into the King’s Own did whatever was necessary to protect him. They carried out his will without question or hesitation.
The gallery spectators fell silent as Atul approached. Every soldier within fifty paces, be he the King’s Own or otherwise, stopped what he was doing to watch.
My son has a really rotten cold. I’m praying I don’t get it. Batman is running away with the hot sex poll, but Alexander Skarsgard is making a good showing considering he wasn’t actually a legitimate choice except in some rather lusty hearts.
