Morigan lives a quiet life as the handmaiden to a fatherly old sorcerer named Thackery. But when she crosses paths with Caenith, a not wholly mortal man, her world changes forever. Their meeting sparks long buried magical powers deep within Morigan. As she attempts to understand her newfound abilities, unbidden visions begin to plague her—visions that show a devastating madness descending on one of the Immortal Kings who rules the land.
With Morigan growing more powerful each day, the leaders of the realm soon realize that this young woman could hold the key to their destruction. Suddenly, Morigan finds herself beset by enemies, and she must master her mysterious gifts if she is to survive.
Bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Feast of Fates, Christian A. Brown received a Kirkus star in 2014 for the first novel in his genre-changing Four Feasts Till Darkness series. He has appeared on Newstalk 1010, AM640, Daytime Rogers, and Get Bold Today with LeGrande Green. He actively writes a blog about his mother’s journey with cancer and on gender issues in the media.
A lover of the weird and wonderful, Brown considers himself an eccentric with a talent for cat-whispering
http://www.christianadrianbrown.com/
Excerpts
Feast of Fates by Christian A. Brown
From Chapter V: The Mouse
I
If Eod was known as the jeweled crown of the desert, then Menos was a black crown of iron forged from the chains of a slave. Where one was built of white stone, clean magik, and honest work, the other was a grim metropolis of dark metal towers that stabbed at a polluted sky as if in hatred of its existence. A city whose foundations were smudged in filth and steeped in the blood of forced labor. Look closer and the handprints of slaves could be seen on the poured stone of Menos’s gray roads, all slippery with oil or alchemical effluences that ran in rainbow trails into rusty grates. Mirthless folk glanced up to the overcast clouds, hoping that it would not rain today. For in Menos, the sky was filled with technomagikal contamination, and when it wept, it burned enough to give one a case of stinkeye, as the locals called it—an unfortunate malady that made the eyes weep with cheesy encrustations. Those not walking rode the streets in carriages, with metal-and-meat horses that carried the faint herb-and-formaldehyde waft of preserved flesh. Beasts animated and repurposed from dead parts were these; enhanced with plating, pistoned legs, and nictitating eyes so that they could navigate farther and faster than a natural of their species. Jealously, the masters in these coaches sneered out at the rows of steepled, iron-gated manses, and with disdain upon the dilapidated, filthy quarters of the city—some of these homes no better than shanties piled alongside and atop one another. Scarce was the smile that was seen on the cheeks of a Menosian, for it was a society that valued mind and power over empathy and weakness. It was a hierarchy of predators, where the weak were food for the strong.
Spare the rod, sell the child, was the quintessential Menosian proverb. How true that adage rang in the markets of Menos, where anything could be bought and sold, from death to life to sin. Under a girded metal wall that encircled the city—the Iron Wall—commerce flourished in a raucous marketplace. Here abounded a sea of black tents, clanging metal smithies, and magikal workshops that looked like chapels with tin chimneys—ateliers, the locals called them. But at these chapels, a man would not pray to the lost spirits of the land; rather, he would procure elixirs to poison, confuse, or incapacitate. Were the tools of treachery not of one’s interest, Menos’s greatest trade was on display upon bloody stages, where chained folk shivered before barking crowds; or in even less savory arcades deep under the streets, where the nameless tribesmen stolen from their homes were sold in beaten, naked herds.
From Chapter IV: The Brewing Storm
“I accept your offering,” she said. The Wolf’s face lit and she thought that he would leap at her. “Yet first, I have a request.”
“Anything, my Fawn.”
“I would like to see…what you are. The second body that shares your soul. Show me your fangs and claws,” she commanded.
Perhaps it was the steadiness of her voice, how she ordered him to bare himself as if he belonged to her, or that animal impression of ownership that made the Wolf’s heart roar to comply. He did not shed his skin but for the whitest moons of the year, and even then, so far from the city and never in front of another. In a sense, he was as much a virgin as she. With an unaccustomed shyness, he found himself undressing before the Fawn, confused for a speck as to who was the hunter. The flare of her nostrils, the intensity of her stare that ate at him for once.
I have chosen well for a mate. She is as much a Wolf as I, he thought, kicking off his boots and then shimmying his pants down to join the rest of his clothing. No bashful maiden was Morigan, and she did not look away from his nakedness, but appreciated what she saw: every rough, hairy bit of him.
He howled and fell to all fours. Bones shifted and snapped, rearranging under his skin like skeletal gears. From his head, chest and loins, the soft black hair thickened and spread over his twisting flesh. His heaving became guttural and sloppy, and when he tossed his head up in a throe of agony or pleasure, his beard had coated his face, and she noticed nothing but white daggers of teeth. Wondrously Morigan witnessed the transformation, watched him swell with twice the muscle he had possessed as a man, saw his hands and feet shag over with fur and split the soil with black claws. Another howl and a final gristle-crunching shudder (his hindquarters snapping into place, she thought) signified the end of the change.
Her dreams did not do Caenith justice. Here was a beast twice the size of a mare with jaws that could swallow her to the waist. Here was a monster that had stalked and ruled the Untamed. A lord of fang and claw. The birds and weaker animals vanished, knowing a deadly might was near. Around her, the Wolf paced; making the ground tremble with power; ravishing her with his cold gray gaze; huffing and blasting her with his forceful breaths. While the scent of his musk was choking, it was undeniably Caenith’s, if rawer and unwashed.
Morigan was not afraid, and was flushed with heat and shaking as she slipped the bracelet on and knelt. She did not flinch as the Wolf lay behind and about her like a great snuffling rug and placed his boulder of a head in her lap. No, she stroked his long ears and his wrinkled snout. A maiden and her Wolf. Soon the birds returned, sensing this peace and chirping in praise of it. And neither Morigan nor the Wolf could recall a time—if ever there was one—where they had felt so complete.
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