Began here.

Chapter 2 here

There was a tower in a castle in the sands on the edge of the border Malina had never seen before, certainly not like this.

There was a room at the top of the tower, a room high up in an intact tower in a half-ruined castle.

There was a throne in the room, a cat on the throne, a sand-cat, who had not signed the Last Treaties.

And in the middle of the room was Malina.

There was only one chair, something Malina’s feet were protesting loudly. She considered the floor. She considered the cat.

She considered the windows – the glass was wavy and speckled, so that she couldn’t see through them – the piles of documents, the map in sand. Continue reading →

Warning: Dark. Discussion of death and dying, although mostly a bit sideways.

👻

They lived, if you wanted to call it that, down by the river, the Trade Street Bridge providing the roof and a back wall to their residence , the steps of the Riverside Inn down to the water providing another wall.  Their floor was the gravel and slate of the river-shore and the river was their front porch, their food provider, the road they took out of there where they needed to and the barricade that kept most others away.

There were generally four or five of them there; on the coldest nights, there were fewer, and on the full moons, sometimes as many as twenty. The one with the long, long hair (black as a raven’s wing) and the one with the piercings (eighteen of them), they were always there.

Under the bridge, there weren’t names and there was rarely talking, but the one with the long, long hair, others called Godiva; the one with the piercings, some of them called Nails, because the nose-piercing was a nail.

When nobody else was there, they existed wordlessly.  They’d collect the interesting debris the river provided and sort it out – Gloves could use this and Hammer could use that; Blue might want that photo but Clacker would definitely want that sock.  They fished and smoked the results, muddy bottom-feeding fish that were far better once you’d gotten them full of some stolen mustard – and they might not steal, but someone did. They bribed the gendarmes which could be bribed and scared off or hid from the other ones. Continue reading →

Began here.

Chapter 2 here

Malina, who was a Princess of a very long name and had until very recently been lost in the desert, regarded the castle before her. She looked over the door hanging off its hinges; she looked at the lovely, ornate doorframe.

She took a breath. She’d come this far, let the cat and the mustang lead her. She was letting the cat rush her. She was still lost in the borderlands, even if she now had a destination.

She held her breath and stepped forward through the doorway, moving the door aside.

The door moved slowly under her hand, the bottom corner dragging in the sand. Malina glanced at the cat, who was walking very close to her, and then pushed the door again.

She made it through the doorway; the door was far easier to urge back closed than it had been to open. She latched it, feeling silly – there was nobody around, for one, and for another, it was still missing a hinge & only half connected to the other.

Still, she felt better for having it shut and latched.

“The tower.”  Continue reading →