Sneak Peak of the stories in The Story Lair
See what can you expect regularly as a member of the crew!
Hello again, adventurer!
As promised, here is a taste of what the Story Lair crew gets on a regular basis. Here is chapter 1 of my Steampunk Fantasy adventure Into the Tricksy Wood. And below that is Chapter 1 of my YA Fantasy romance, Queen of Fire, book 1 (I have yet to come up with a clever title- and as a Story Lair member, you’ll get to vote to help me decide!)
Finally, I have attached a link at the bottom to this month’s short story, The Feast, set in the Queen of Fire world of Daragon. I hope you like it!
If you enjoy these tidbits, you can read ahead at The Story Lair. Currently Into the Woods has 5 episodes published, Queen of Fire has two episodes published. I’m publishing more weekly. And the next exclusive short story, set in the Steampunk/Fantasy world of Aethos, The Click-Tock Goose, is dropping on August 1st.
Into the Tricksy Wood
Chapter 1: Mischief and Miscalculations
Rule number one in an inventor’s handbook: Never doubt yourself. There are plenty of people in the world who will do it for you.
“I don’t think that’s going to work.”
“That’s because you are an artist at heart, not a scientist, Carver.” Verity added another pinch of lime green powder to a glass beaker, held upright in a pair of tongs by a short, stout towheaded boy wearing a scowl and perched precariously on the arm of a settee upholstered in rich navy damask. “Hold still.”
“I am a scientist. I just like things to look good, too.” The boy jostled the beaker, sending a feathery wave of powder drifting towards the wood floor. “Speaking of which, what will your mother say if you spill your experiment all over her second best parlor?”
“I won’t spill.” She squinted at the beaker with a critical eye. “And it’s her fault she decided to have my workshop deep cleaned three days before we leave for Aethos, isn’t it? I can’t stop now. We’re almost there!
“And as to your previous comment, looks aren’t paramount. Precise results trump looks every time. See?”
She took the beaker, picked up a silver flask, and tipped 2 drops of amber liquid. Immediately the powder sizzled and turned the sickly yellow of three day old yogurt forgotten in the sun. Noxious vapor filtered up into the air.
Carver made a gagging sound. “What about smell, Verity? Does it matter that I’m choking to death on the stench of rotten eggs and week old meat?”
“The smell means it’s working.”
It did smell obnoxious. Verity pinched her lips together and stopped inhaling while she added the rest of the liquid and set the flask down, both to keep her hands steady, and to keep from inhaling any more vapor.
She swirled the liquid in the beaker, releasing more of the noxious fumes into the air.
Carver groaned and collapsed onto the settee, stuffing his face into a matching pillow.
Verity glanced at him and shook her head, resolutely sucking in a quick breath.Her eyes watered but she refused to give him the satisfaction of a reaction. “You’ll never make it in the Universitarium if you can’t even stomach the smells of alchemy.”
“It’s the Universitarium of Mechanics and Alchemy,” came the muffled reply, emphasis on ‘Mechanics.’ “I don’t need to touch alchemy to be successful.”
“You don’t need to touch it to smell it. It travels through the air and doesn’t care if your nose is an alchemist’s or mechanic’s.” Verity muttered, then concentrated on the task at hand.
A cat-shaped pile of metal was arranged in two pieces on the coffee table in front of her. She picked up the separated head, made from odd bits of metal and glue that she had appropriated from the steam car mechanic when he was on his lunch, turning it over in her hands until she found the face. Using an eye dropper, she dripped three drops of the noxious brown fluid into each eye, manually opening and closing each eyelid for maximum penetration. Then she twisted the head back onto the body and set the creature upright on his paws.
“There. That should do it.”
Carver peaked up from the pillow. “How do you know it will work?”
Verity grinned. “With a field test, of course.”
“A field- oh no, you didn’t!” Carver bolted upright.
Verity recognized that note of panic in his voice. It was the same one that always showed up when she decided to test her experiments. She hurried to the fireplace behind the round wrought iron wood rack, where she’d hidden a small towel covered container.
The parlor door snicked open on silent hinges.
“Miss Quinn-Pecke?” A young woman in a blue and gray maid’s uniform appeared in the doorway.
Verity pulled her hand away from the towel and straightened quickly “Yes, Emily?”
Emily’s gaze bounced between the towel and Verity’s face, her brows pinching suspiciously before smoothing out. The servants were all used to Verity’s antics, and they were inclined to ignore them as much as possible. The smell might have been too much, for as she spoke, she crossed the room and yanked up a window.
“Your mother is expecting you in the drawing room.” A cleaning rag appeared from her apron pocket and began waving it vigorously. “You have a guest.”
Verity grimaced. Ever since she’d celebrated her sixteenth birthday last month, she had become something of an obsession of her mother’s. Lady Cavill’s penchant for arranging ‘guests’ in an attempt to arm her with the most affluent and influential peers possible was exhausting. Especially since she’d recently started dragging Verity around to all the ‘most appropriate’ Ladies Academies in the country. Verity and her mother had very different ideas of what constituted ‘appropriate’. “We’ll be down shortly.”
“Lady Cavill asked me to tell you that Mrs. Huntington sent a whirbird. She needs her son to come home.”
Another thing they disagreed on was the fact that Verity’s best friend was the son of the local midwife. “Oh. Thank you, Emily.”
The maid disappeared back into the hall, and Carver stood up from the couch.
“Too bad, Vee. Looks like we won’t get to test Catter after all.”
Verity slanted a glance at him as she picked up the parcel and set in in the middle of the floor.
“Who said? It will only take a minute. I know I’ve increased his accuracy and awareness with this new concoction. I heard Spokes say that harmony root and rosemont extract combined in mixing fluid will increase sensor clarity by at least twelve percent.” Spokes, the barnmaster, was a skilled amateur mechanic and he liked to talk while he worked.
“And Uncle Del said the Cogswell alchemists have found evidence that evermint contributes to an air of awareness in certain recent automatons.”
Carver made a face. “Catter is not a recent automaton. He’s a mish-mash of parts mined from trash.”
“Not all of him. Have faith in my process.”
She whipped off the towel to reveal a small cage containing one nervous-looking rat. “Now we find out!”
“You are not releasing that in your mother’s parlor!” Carver backed up, shaking his head. “Not again!”
Verity turned and glared at her best friend in all the world. They had been tinkering together since before primer school. So, maybe it was telling that his face was pale and he was slinking towards the door at the mention of one of her experiments. She arched a brow in his direction, an unspoken dare that stayed his retreat.
“My mother said she needs me…,”
“Your mother won’t notice if you are five minutes late.”
He glanced longingly at the door.
“Oh, get some steel in your spine, Carver. I just told you I fixed him! Catter will be quick, just you watch.”
The buttons on his pinstripe vest strained against the weight of his sigh, but Carver reluctantly dropped into an upholstered armchair and nodded. “What if it doesn’t work?”
Verity grinned in triumph and waved off his worry with a careless hand. “How can one improve if one didn’t fail some of the time? Now, first we activate the e-Rat-icator 13-,”
“I think first we need to come up with a better name,” Carver muttered, but Verity ignored him.
She flicked the switch hidden behind Catter’s left elbow. Immediately his eyes flickered to life, glowing red as his head darted this way and that. “Good. His sensors are already picking up the presence of a rodent.”
She set him on the floor and hurried to the cage. The rat squeaked and pushed backwards against the bars, but surged forward the moment she lifted the latch and pulled up the door. It’s claws ripped at the antique rug as it raced for the cover of the wood rack. It came so close. But Catter was on the job.
The automaton’s ears pricked at the sound of the rat’s squeak. Its head swiveled, eye sensors flickering and hissing as it focused on the galloping rodent. Razor claws snicked out of eight metal toes, and the race was on.
Verity watched the chase intently. The rat zigged and Catter zagged, cutting off escape behind the rack. The rat doubled back and tried for dubious cover under a footrest. Catter flattened himself out, his gears clacking gently as he shoved underneath to flush out his prey.
“Holy hominy, Vee,” Carver crowed, caught up in the excitement of the hunt. “I think you did it!”
“Aces!” Verity lifted her chin proudly. “He’s got it, now!”
Indeed, Catter had the rat trapped in a corner. He loomed over the creature, stretching out both clawed front paws-
And the rodent ducked, dodged, and rocketed out the door and down the hall.
“No!”
Catter twisted and, faster than Verity could grab him and flip the off switch, he disappeared out the door in full pursuit.
Continue Reading at The Story Lair!
Queen of Fire, Book 1
Chapter 1
The third time Reyna ruined the piped icing on Lady Phillipa Latterney’s bride cake, she was ready to find something else to do. It wasn’t her fault that “P” was just naturally followed by “I-G”. Or that “Lady” looked so very much like “Lazy”. (Or that the latter so much more accurately described the girl of the hour!) But when she had to approach Big Mona for yet another top cake, the Head Baker’s eyebrow began twitching ominously over a face the shade of a wicked sunset, so Reyna prudently called another bakery worker over to finish the job and smiled innocently up at her employer. “Is there anything you need me to get at the market?”
Now, this method of dealing with Big Mona’s wrath would not work with any ordinary workers. But luckily, Reyna was no ordinary worker. She might be only a fifteen-year-old girl, but she’d been indentured to the bakery since she was five (or thereabouts- no one knew her exact age). Next to the actual bakers and sugar artists, she was the most experienced servant Big Mona had.
Also, the thread-thin yellow bracelet that tattooed Reyna’s left wrist marked her as an indentured servant of Tarro Bakery. As in, under Big Mona’s protection. As in, if a dead or mortally injured Reyna turned up unexpectedly (or, not so unexpectedly, truth be told!), the magistrate would descend on the bakery for an explanation, and Big Mona’s dreams of becoming the foremost baker in the land- the King’s Baker- would be shot. So Reyna could push the boundaries.
A little. Big Mona did know how to pack a wallop if things got too far out of hand. The matching bracelet on Big Mona’s wrist magically linked Reyna’s servitude to the head baker, and Big Mona could punish her at any time from any distance by activating one of three glyphs on her bracelet- water, air, or fire. Reyna had been zapped by all of them, although fire was usually the punishment of choice.
This morning wasn’t one for wallops, luckily. The eldest children of the Bitterlings and Latterney’s, the most prestigious families in Tarro Village, were getting married. Rumor had it that the King and his Mad Queen were preparing to descend onto Tarro Village for the first time in almost sixteen years in honor of the auspicious occasion. As Big Mona had explained- over and over again, LOUDLY- this was it. Her big chance. And no one had better mess it up!
The bakery had only four more days to prepare for the wedding of the year. So Reyna bet, considering her options, Big Mona would rightly decide that getting Reyna out of the picture altogether was the quickest way to reach her goal of an embarrassment-free wedding cake.
The head baker glared down at her for a moment before slapping her kitchen towel on the table. She disappeared into the larder briefly and returned with a pouch of coins on a string and a flour-smudged list written on a scrap of cloth. Reyna hid the triumph in her eyes with a bow and slipped the pouch around her neck, tucking it safely inside her shirt. She pocketed the list without glancing at it.
Big Mona scowled. “Don’t mess around, you! Be back before noon meal or you’ll regret it!” She held up her own tattooed wrist as a threat.
With a wave, Reyna was off like a shot, running from Tarro Bakery with all the enthusiasm of a prison break. As she did, she tore at the ribbon holding her braid in place, not stopping until waves of hair the color of a raven’s wing tumbled free down to the middle of her back. Of course, she had a list and not much time to fill it, but any time spent away from the plain white uniforms and dead hot ovens was time to rejoice, and she planned to!
The market was not far from the bakery, just two streets away in the village square. There was a shortcut through the alley between the blacksmith and livery stable. She ran as fast as she could just to feel her heart pumping in time with her legs and arms, to savor the wind making her hair fly back free, not letting up until she reached the edge of the square. She collapsed against a hitching post next to two saddled ponies and a pack mule and stayed there for several seconds with her hands on her knees, gasping until she caught her breath.
Her fists closed on the plain white trousers that were her only choice of clothing. Maybe today she’d be able to find a bargain at the clothiers- some splash of color in a scarf or pair of stockings that she could hide away from the others to wear on her free days. Only one way to find out. Tucking a chunk of hair back behind her ear she straightened up and grinned. Before her was the Market, in a riot of color and chaos.
One hand in her pocket gripping the silver piece she’d managed to squirrel away from the searching fingers of the other children, Reyna began a casual stroll around the marketplace.
Identical tables protected by canopies of gray canvas were spaced out evenly all around the village square, set up in two nice rows that trisected the green field. That was the extent of the similarity between the booths, however.
Each vendor worked hard to make sure his booth would stand out among the competition, the result being an incredible assortment of colored flags, painted wood signs, and interesting displays of products that were for sale. Elaborate braids of garlic and onion hung like a garland over a farmer’s booth, with baskets of vegetables and ripe fruit laid out according to color in a clever checkered pattern.
A carver had created a masterpiece from the log of a massive oak depicting a fierce looking man in a baker’s hat brandishing a wooden spoon and spatula. The expression on the man’s face was so reminiscent of Big Mona that Reyna laughed. The carver must be a frequent visitor to the bakery!
Next to it was a table draped in royal purple cloth set with piles of wooden utensils, carved bowls of many shapes and sizes, and fine polished wood grain chopping boards.
The spinners and weavers hung elaborate tapestries and braided hangers for a breathtaking selection of beautiful cloth and yarns.
And so it went, with the vendors grouped by their wares. Competition for business was fierce and loud, with a hawker at almost every booth shouting out the wares and why theirs was the best.
Luckily, the vendors recognized Reyna as Tarro Bakery’s official runner. Since the bakery had long-standing agreements with many of the local folks, she was able to set quickly about her business without getting screamed at by vendors hopeful of a sale.
She ordered rye flour for bread and white flour for cakes, sweet maple sugar and a large quantity of honey, and several baskets of fresh berries for breakfast pastries the day after the wedding. There was just enough coin to pay for delivery and that freed up her hands and her time for the next candlemark before she was expected back.
Almost without thought her feet led her away from the bustle, down a short path to a separate clearing and into her favorite part of the market.
Entering Geltian Corner was like coming to another marketplace altogether. The King refused to recognize the Gelts themselves as citizens of Bon Temmes since they traveled throughout the lands as nomads. Therefore they were segregated from the village folk in the farthest corner of the marketplace, in a meadow shaded by the great trees of Little Wood. Booths and canopies were withheld as privileges for citizens, so the caravans were forced to sell their wares directly out of wagons. Reyna thought these edicts, meant to keep the Gelts from belonging, actually helped them by making them exotic.
The very air here was different- quieter as there were no hawkers trying to over-shout each other. The wagons were also their homes, so children played and grandmothers sewed and cooked in the same place where the goods were sold.
The wagons themselves were as unique as the people who drove them. Here was a small pony cart with an improvised canvas cover over the bed. A wizened old man dozed in a rocking chair made of bound together twigs and a fancy tasseled cushion of royal purple velvet. Beside him stood a cloth covered table with an assortment of metal spoons and eating knives arranged next to a plate of coins for self service change. An ancient-looking, shaggy gray pony drowsed nearby, his nose touching the ground.
Reyna paused as she saw a hand reaching for the coins. She recognized the faded yellow calico dress and messy blonde hair.
Moving quickly, she grabbed the girl’s wrist and pulled her away several steps.
Continue reading at The Story Lair!
As promised, here is a link to the Daragon based short story, The Feast
I hope you liked reading these as much as I enjoyed writing them! Let me know what you think by commenting below! And of course, feel free to share this with any friends you have who love a good magical adventure.
Cheers!
Terri :0)