The god they serve is as fickle as a crow...
Publication Date: November 1, 2015
Genre: Fantasy
Series: The Fylking, Book One
They call themselves the Fylking. Unseen by all save those sensitive to the Otherworld, the Fylking taught seers to build and ward over the Gate, an interdimensional portal spanning the realm like a sigil shining on the surface of the world. The Fylking’s enemies, pitiless beings who think nothing of annihilating a world to gain even a small advantage, are bent on destroying it. They succeeded once, leaving Dyrregin in abandoned desolation for a thousand suns.
Twelve centuries have passed since the Fylking returned. Dyrregin is at war. Seers are disappearing and their immortal guardians are blind, deceived by their own kind. A Gate warden with a tormented past discovers a warlock using Fylking magic to gather an army of warriors that cannot die. A King's ranger who defends the wilds of the realm is snared in a political trap that forces him to choose between love and honor. And a knitter touched by the gods catches the eye of a dark immortal warrior with no name and the power to summon storms.
Bound by synchronicity, forced to find allies in unlikely places, these three mortals are drawn into a maelstrom of murder, treachery, sorcery and war, fertile ground for both their personal demons and those of their immortal masters, who cast long shadows indeed. When they uncover the source of the rising darkness, they must rally to protect the Gate against a plot that will violate the balance of cosmos, destroy the Fylking and leave the world of Math in ruins.
The god they serve is as fickle as a crow.
Read an Excerpt
Melisande lay in bed in the loft of her cottage in Graebrok Forest north of Odr. Wide awake and blinking in the dark, she listened to the mice above her head. Nearly a moon past, her swordsman had repaired a crack in the eaves before returning to the towers and yards of Merhafr, the great port on the Njorth Sea, where he served as a King’s Ranger. His name was Othin, taken from a god of wisdom, trickery and war. What such a one knew of carpentry, well, that was open to question. But he knew other things. Nice things.
The thin moon wheeled over the night as the mice worked, their tiny feet pattering in the rafters, claws scraping, teeth gnawing. How such small creatures could make such a racket eluded Melisande almost as much as her lover’s carpentry skills. She reached for a boot and slammed it into the ceiling, causing dust to drift onto her face. Silence fell…then the chewing started again.
“Pisskin!” she hissed. Where was that cat? Not here, if the mice knew anything.
With a sniffle and a yawn, Melisande threw aside the covers and swung her feet to the floor. She dragged on her boots beneath a woolen nightshirt and climbed down the ladder into the kitchen. Tilting her head to avoid the clusters of plants drying on the rafters, she lit a fire and put on water for tea.
The earth’s pulse crept into her feet and up into her hands as she regarded her latest knitting project, which she had left folded on the table late the night before. Bythe, a goatherd who lived within sight of Tower Sif, had requested the tunic in return for a pair of goats. Melisande smiled. Goats were trouble, but she liked them.
She sat down and absently traced her tingling fingers over the oaken tabletop darkened by a century of use. Steam rose from the water in the kettle. Her hand crept to the stitches of her work, rows and rows of them, nearly finished. She picked up the tunic and studied it. Dark brown as the smoke-stained rafters of the cottage, the stitches formed gaps where the sleeve joined the yoke, much like the cracks between a wall and a roof. Deep in her mind stirred a visceral awareness of interconnection, the wisdom of the natural world, a tapestry of patterns, lines, curves and counts as perfectly cast as a well-stitched swatch.
Pattern sense, her mother once called it; at least Melisande thought it might have been her, though it could have been her grandmother or one of the old women in the village. Come to think of it, her mother had turned a blank eye on such things.
Being of a wilder mind, Melisande picked up her needles, hummed softly and wove a neat kitchener stitch over the gaps in the armpits of her work. Then she folded the goatherd’s tunic into her tattered old knitting bag, removed the kettle from the fire and returned to bed.
She didn’t hear the mice the rest of that night, the night after, or the night after that. Of course, Pisskin might have had something to do with it. Clever hunters, cats. So she told herself as her pattern sense curled quietly as a snake in an ivy patch, to rest with both eyes open.
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This sounds like something that Chris would love to read and thank you for your review.
ReplyDeleteThanks for hosting Kathleen!
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