(Re)Introducing the Prequel Series + An Excerpt

In the Shadow of the Palace update:

Today’s words: 57
Manuscript total: 78,052

So I’m working on the first of at least three planned prequel books.

Hi, it’s me. Sorry that I haven’t blogged since, ohhhhh, November. Lately, I have moved most of my update type stuff over to my Patreon page. And just for the record, I’m not doing more Patreon than public blogging for greedy money purposes, but because I’m busy AF with my day job during the school year, and I can barely keep up with Patreon for people who are kind enough to pay for a little extra content, let alone keep up with a blog, too.

So anyway, I’m sorry for not blogging for literal months. The other thing is that blogging takes time, and when I ask myself, “Do I want to spend 30 minutes blogging or 30 minutes working on my actual book?” the book always wins the battle.

Anywho! I was going to tell you about my prequel books!

The first one is going to be titled In the Shadow of the Palace, and some days I worry about how readers are going to react to it.

One thing that’s important to me is never writing the same book twice. That means never writing the same plot twice, the same theme twice, the same characters twice, etc. Stylistically and story-wise, I always try to write something that feels fresh and different from the last book.

As I work on Shadow, some days I fear that I’ve gone too far in that desire to do something different.

So here’s my list of warnings to you about the first of the prequel books:

1. Nobody’s a sword master.
2. I’m roughly halfway finished writing the initial draft, and so far there are no…
   1. battles or wars,
   2. assassination attempts,
   3. council room dramas,
   4. or sex scenes.
3. The romance subplot is more slow-burn than Princess.
4. As the title suggests, almost the entire story takes place within Port Lorsin’s palace.
5. There are no trips to the Shadowlands.

Having mentioned all the things I worry you readers might not like, I will also say that I personally really like this book. I like that it’s different, that it breaks new ground for me as an author. I also like that it goes back in time — WAAAAY back in time, it’s set 800 years before the time of Princess — and fills in some of the key missing details that the flagship series only hints at. Most of all, I’m pumped about the themes the book deals with through a new cast of characters that I’ve really come to love.

Story Themes in Shadow

What are those themes? Well, the book has a lot to do with identity — how our identities form, how and why we pretend to be someone we are not, and how, sometimes, if we pretend long enough, we end up actually becoming that which we pretend to be, both for better and for worse.

More cool stuff — cover designers and map designers!

Covers:

I’m super pumped to be working with a new cover artist this go-round. He’s adorably British and we’ve had some great conversations about the direction I want to go with the cover. I have to say, I think he’s the best designer I’ve ever worked with.

I have appreciated all my previous cover designers, but I was never in love with the Chronicles of Dorsa covers. By the time I got to Empress, I didn’t even want people on the cover. Joslyn in particular never looked like the Joslyn in my head. I put people on the covers anyway because I needed the visual unity and wasn’t ready to invest in three brand new covers, but I knew I’d be doing something different for the next series.

So speaking of making things different and fresh, my new designer and I have something totally different up our sleeves for Shadow. If you want to check out his work, go here. I think you’ll see why I am excited to be working with him.

Maps:

Meanwhile, I’ve been wanting to refresh my story universe maps for a while now. It was fun an’ all to draw them out by hand at the beginning of COVID when I was locked down and had nowhere to go, but the longer I’ve sat with them, the more I look at them and cringe at their lack of professionalism. I had been working on refreshing them myself with some software, but lately I’ve just had an “F*** this” attitude about finishing that project and I want to hire someone who would end up doing a better job than I could anyway.

It’s not just the broader universe maps, either. Because In the Shadow of the Palace takes place almost entirely within the palace and its grounds, I want to make a new palace map, too. To be honest, it’s been a long time coming. I’ve had to keep track of where things at the palace are in my head for far too long, ever since I first started working on Princess in late 2017.

And now, an excerpt: The first three BETA chapters of Shadow.

Wow, I first started working on this novel back in 2019. I totally forgot it’s been brewing in my head for that long. The original first chapter is here, and it hasn’t changed thaaaaat much from what I’m going to post below. The original second chapter is here, but I am basically not using any of it.

Here are the first three chapters of the new draft. I’ve posted five more chapters for my Patreon supporters already over here, and I’ll probably continue to post chapters periodically as I go.

Let me know what you think!

—

1

Growing up in a whorehouse wasn’t really as bad as most people might imagine.  There were always new people to meet; there was always a drama of one sort or another in progress; and, unlike other people’s families, fortunes and food on the table never fluctuated due to drought or blight or politics.  In fact, whenever Cara was especially naughty, the worst thing Mama or Drustan, the man who owned the whorehouse (though he preferred to call it a “brothel” or sometimes an “inn”), would threaten her with was to send her away to an orphanage.

“Cara,” Drustan would growl, looming over her with the belt he’d used to discipline her still hanging from one hand, “ye ought to be grateful I haven’t sent ye to the orphanage already.  Yer grateful, aren’t ye, Cara?”

“Aye, Dru,” little Cara inevitably replied between tears, cringing away from the belt.  “I’m grateful.  Please don’t send me to the orphanage.”

The orphanage that he referred to wasn’t far from the whorehouse — three or four blocks, perhaps.  It was close enough that Cara would sometimes see the children paraded down the street before by the priestess of Mother Moon who ran it.  The children were always skeletally skinny, dirty, and had rags hanging from their narrow shoulders that Cara supposed had once been clothes.

“They sell them, ye know,” Mirabelle whispered in Cara’s ear one day as they watched the orphans marched down the street.  “She’s takin’ ’em t’the docks, to an Adessian pirate who takes ’em to a slave market.”

Cara was six at the time.  Mirabelle wasn’t sure how old she was, but she was bigger than Cara, so they guessed she was eight.  Maybe nine, because Mirabelle always knew so much more than Cara did.

Cara studied the orphans as they passed.  “They ain’t eaten in a long time,” she observed.  “Who’d want to buy ’em, bein’ so skinny?”

Mirabelle just shrugged.

Cara had an awful thought then, perhaps because she’d always been given to flights of fancy:  she imagined that the Adessian pirates wouldn’t take the children to a slave market at all.  Instead, they would roast them aboard their ships and eat what little meat they still had on their bones.

“No,” Cara said aloud, shaking her head.  “No, they’d be nothin’ but gristle.”

Mirabelle peered at her curiously.  The girl was cross-eyed, one of her brown eyes never quite focusing on anything properly.  “Too skinny fer what?”

But Cara had already turned and ran back inside the whorehouse.  She was in the kitchens in a flash.  And before Nash, the cook, could protest, Cara snatched half a loaf of stale bread and a small apple and dashed out the door again.

She tapped a boy at the back of the line of orphans on the shoulder.  His eyes were hollow, and he flinched when she shoved the food to his chest.

“It’s for ye,” Cara said.  

Looking at the boy was looking at her future, if she wasn’t careful.  If she was too naughty, if she angered Dru too much.  And although she didn’t have the words to express it then, she hoped that if she was in the boy’s place one day, someone would take pity on her and give her food, too.

Some kind of emotion almost flashed through the boy’s dead brown eyes.  Almost.  But then he wrapped his bony arms around the treasure Cara had given him and hurried to catch up to the other orphans, who had marched on without him.

“Share it!” Cara called after him.

He didn’t give any sign of having heard her.

Nash told Dru about Cara’s theft immediately, of course.  Cara had known he would even in the moment she’d taken it.  

“So yer a thief now?” Dru asked from the doorway of the whorehouse as Cara turned away from the line of orphans.

His broad shoulders took up almost the whole doorframe, and standing on the top step as he was, a few feet above the street, he looked more like an evil giant from a children’s tale than a man.  Mirabelle was nowhere to be seen.  But Cara was glad.  She didn’t want her friend mixed up in what she’d done.  Dru would’ve accused Mirabelle of being an accomplice to this crime if she’d still been standing there, even if they all knew that Mirabelle wasn’t quite bright enough to be Cara’s co-conspirator.  

“Is that how I’ve raised ye?” Dru went on.  His tone had shifted from offended to plaintive, as if it would be Cara to whip him and not the other way around.  “Ye’d steal from me?  From ol’ Dru, who’s been naught but a father to ye?  Ye’d take the food I’ve bought for ye, for yer mother, and ye’d give it away, just like that?”  He snapped his fingers with the last word.

Cara’s stomach twisted, both out of fear of the whipping she was about to receive but also from a sudden pang of shame and guilt.  She’d stolen from Dru.  Dru, who provided her and her mother a home.  Dru, the closest thing to a Papa she had.  She hadn’t thought about it that way when she’d grabbed the bread and apple.  She’d only been thinking of how skinny the orphans were.

But that was Cara’s problem, as Dru always reminded her.  She never thought.  She always acted on impulse like the naughty child she was.  It was why he was forced to discipline her so often.  It was how she would learn.

She dropped her head.  “I’m sorry, Dru,” she said, and she meant it.

“Aye, an’ ye’ll be even sorrier when I’m done teachin’ ye a lesson,” he answered, the plaintive tone already replaced with his usual snarl.

Cara nodded obediently, and her feet carried her towards him on their own accord.  He seized her elbow and yanked her inside so hard that for a moment she thought her shoulder would come loose from its socket.

His grip was tight enough to bruise as he pulled her past the kitchens, but she didn’t cry out.  Nash glowered at her from the doorway as they passed, arms crossed above his huge stomach.  Dru dragged Cara past the stairs that led up to the warren of rooms  that lined the mezzanine, where the whorehouse made most of its money.  Cara’s mother was up there in the tiny room they shared, no doubt still asleep, because it was barely even noon.  He pulled her past the bar, where a single, lonely sailor nursed a mug of ale and didn’t look up as the whoremaster and little girl went by, and then Dru dragged Cara through the mostly empty common room.  Philip the mandolier sat on a worn divan, talking to Big Reina, whom everyone knew he was in love with, but neither Philip nor Big Reina bothered to look up as man and child passed.  Zane, one of the few males under Dru’s employ, did look up, and his dark, kohl-lined eyes said he disapproved of what was about to happen to Cara.  But even Zane knew better than to challenge Dru.

Then they were past the common room, heading down the narrow corridor on the room’s far side, towards the back exit that led across the alleyway and into the stables.  Cara liked the stables, liked the scent of fresh hay and the sound of the gentle whickering of the whorehouse patrons’ horses, but she knew that wasn’t where they were going.  Whenever Dru disciplined “his girls,” he did it down below, down in the cellar where they kept extra casks of ale and produce and broken chairs.  In the cellar, if a girl Dru was disciplining screamed or cried out or begged for him to stop, the sound wouldn’t travel far enough to concern the patrons.  

Without a word, Dru shoved Cara towards the far wall of the cellar, where a few chains hung from hooks in the wall.  Cara braced her palms against it and closed her eyes, waiting for the sting of Dru’s leather belt.  

When the whipping was done, he said, “Never steal from me again.”

“I won’t.  I promise.”

“If it ever happens again, ye’ll be one o’ them orphans ye fed today.  Stay down here for an hour to think about what ye’ve done.”  He stomped back up the wooden stairs and slammed the door behind her, leaving Cara in the dark with only the cellar rats to keep her company.

Forever trying to will herself to be the good, obedient girl that Dru wanted her to be, Cara did think about what she’d done.  She told herself she was stupid, stupid, stupid to steal the bread and the lonely little apple from the kitchen.  

What had she been thinking?  

She hadn’t been thinking, as usual.  That was the only explanation.

Then her mind turned to the orphans themselves.  The filthy rags they wore as clothes.  Their gaunt bodies, limbs like sticks.  And most of all, she thought of the hollow expression in the boy’s eyes.  

Cara shuddered.  She couldn’t be a bad girl anymore, because she didn’t want to go to the orphanage.  A thousand whippings would be better than becoming one of those haunted children.

It took Cara several more years to realize Dru’s threat to send her to the orphanage had always been an idle one.  Dru didn’t send the girl-children of the whorehouse to the orphanage, only the boys.  Once in a while, he’d keep a boy with fine features for a while, until the boy reached that awkward pubescent phase.  Then Dru would find an excuse to put him out on the street, left to fend for himself.

By the time Cara understood that she’d never been truly in danger of going to the orphanage, she also understood why she’d never been in danger of it.  Mirabelle had just started her monthly blood, and everyone guessed she was either thirteen summers or maybe fourteen.  She was pretty by then, despite that one eye that still wouldn’t ever focus.  Dru opened an auction amongst the whorehouse’s richest patrons for her virginity, and Mirabelle was proud of the fact.  She took to strutting around the common room and painting her face like Big Reina taught her, and bragged to Cara that soon she’d have her very own bedroom.

Cara was ten summers on the night when Mirabelle’s auction closed, and as the lucky patron took his prize upstairs, Cara realized with sudden, cold clarity that she did not want the profession all the rest of the whorehouse residents had.  She did not want to be auctioned.  

Better to be a haunted orphan than be Mirabelle.

2

The black-haired beauty who disembarked from the Adessian merchant ship and stepped onto the bustling dock in Port Lorsin’s main harbor was both hard to miss and yet somehow hard to see.  She glanced this way and that, a traveler getting her bearings in an unfamiliar city.  Idly, she fingered a silver pendant that hung in the hollow of her neck as she looked about, as the eyes of sailors and merchants and street urchins selling flowers slid towards her, grew confused, and then slid away.

It was a simple trick, a trick that belonged to the illusionist shadow arts, that took very little effort on her part to maintain.  It wasn’t invisibility, which required a great deal more concentration, but just a sort of obscurity, so that people would see her for an instant and then convince themselves they hadn’t seen anyone after all.  Hence the confused expressions that trailed in her wake wherever the beauty walked, like subtle ripples in a shallow puddle.

The beauty probably didn’t need to spin this particular illusion.  It was quite likely that she could accomplish what she had come here to do without it, but knowing that the people of Port Lorsin couldn’t quite see her, would never be able to remember her if pressed, gave her both an extra sense of security but also a smug satisfaction.  She couldn’t help but revel at how easy it was to use the tremendous power of the shadow inside her, the one she shared her soul with, to create this little glamour.  Before the joining ceremony, she never would have been able to maintain this illusion so easily and thoughtlessly, wearing it the way she wore the pendant around her neck.  Since the ceremony, though, weaving the illusion was like drawing a thimbleful of water from a deep and vast ocean of power that laid within her.

Left, whispered the shadow inside her, more an instinct than voice.  

That was how it manifested most times — just a hint, a nudge, within her mind.  If she didn’t know she had a shadow inside her, inhabiting her, she might have called it intuition.

She turned left, following the slight uphill curve of the street.  Before long, the paved street gave way to dirt and the well-maintained inns and taverns, designed for the wealthy new arrivals to the kingdom’s capital city, disappeared.  In their place, dilapidated warehouses, livestock pens that buzzed with flies, and narrow buildings.  The warehouses, long and low, looked stable enough, but the two- and three-story buildings leaned precariously over the street.  They looked, the black-haired beauty thought, like a child’s building blocks stacked one atop the other by a careless giant.  Brick chimneys zigzagged up their sides; upper stories jutted out — and in some cases sagged — above the muddy street below.  Such buildings would never be permitted at home, the beauty thought with disdain.  Where she could, she walked in the middle of the street so that she didn’t have to pass beneath the wilting upper stories on either side of her.  She only walked underneath them when a passing rider or horse-drawn cart forced her to the side.

She passed through a market square.  Fishmongers took up the side closest to the sea, their hoarse voices echoing against makeshift stalls as they competed to garner the attention of passersby.  Across from them, a group of washerwomen scrubbed clothes in time to their shouts beneath a tattered and faded green awning, and a greasy-haired man with a too-smug smile waved over potential customers to a table of jewelry that had almost certainly been stolen.

The shadow inside her showed absolutely no interest in anyone or anything inside the market, so she kept walking.  Women and boys drawing water from a well did a double-take as she passed, but then she was gone, and they shook their heads as though they were one of the penned animals shaking away flies.

Livestock, said a disgusted voice inside her head, because that was what all these people were — little different from the penned creatures transported from elsewhere and patiently awaiting the butcher’s blade.  She couldn’t quite be sure who the thought had belonged to, herself or the shadow.  

Not that it mattered.  Livestock was the perfect word for these people, living out their bland, small lives with little regard for the final butchery of death that awaited them.  She might have felt sorry for them, once.  She didn’t now.  And just like she couldn’t quite tell if the word livestock had come from herself or the shadow within, she also couldn’t quite tell if the lack of compassion was due to the shadow or if, now that she was no longer livestock herself, her contempt came because she couldn’t understand why the people of this kingdom had so willingly separated themselves from the Shadowlands.  It wasn’t as if the shadow arts were unknown to them; some in her own kingdom even said that the Brotherhood of Culo might be superior to the Order of Targhan, at least within certain arts.  

But then the market square was behind her.  The shadow urged her left again, so she turned up a narrow side street, pausing only momentarily as she passed an apothecary’s shop that smelled of shadows.  The hair on the back of her neck stood up, but nothing about the shop was immediately threatening.  A  practitioner of the shadow arts dwelled inside, yes, but not someone like her.  Not someone whose soul had been merged with a shadow.

There were practitioners of the shadow arts within Port Lorsin, that much was true.  But there was no one, at least that she had detected so far, who was like her.

The black-haired beauty smiled to herself, turning right down another side street.

Here, said the shadow inside her mind.  Stop.  Look.

If anyone had been looking at her in that moment, which no one was, they would have seen the irises of her eyes momentarily fill with the orange-red of fire.  Before her, another three-story leaned over the muddy street.  Hanging above the door was a bland wooden sign painted with a black sea serpent.  Its mouth was open, and from it, a long tongue unfurled towards the sign’s edge.  There were no words, only the letters TST printed unevenly above the serpent.

And if anyone had been looking, they would have seen the black-haired beauty grin in a way that was cold and predatory, and they would have been afraid.

Wait, said the shadow.  Sleep.

So the beauty turned into the alleyway between the brothel and a warehouse, wended her way towards its back, and made herself a nest.  

Then she slept.

3

“Mama,” Cara said, shaking her mother in the bed.  “Mama, wake up.  Yer client is here.”

But her mother only groaned, mumbled something incoherent, and rolled away from Cara.

Cara glanced back at the Wise Man apologetically.  He was a middle aged man with steely grey hair that had thinned out on top, but besides his hair, nothing else about him suggested steel.  He’d been her mother’s client for as long as Cara could remember, and over the years, as his black hair had gone grey, laugh lines instead of frown lines had slowly stretched across his face.  What the passage of years never did change was his hands, which stayed softer than the hands of any man Cara had ever met, fingertips always stained with ink.  Cara wondered about those hands sometimes, what it might be like to be a scholar instead of a sailor or soldier or baker or butcher.  The Wise Man might as well be an exotic bird, a rare and pretty thing that Cara delighted in watching.

“She been smokin’ a lot of white cactus at night, more than usual.”  Cara grimaced as she explained the situation, afraid she would make the Wise Man frown instead of smile.  Afraid he would abandon the appointment with Mama altogether.

But he smiled after all.  Cara was almost thirteen summers, and the men coming and going from the whorehouse had started smiling at her all the time these days, but the Wise Man’s smile was never like theirs.  His was kind, not hungry.

“It’s all right,” said the Wise Man.  He lifted off the leather satchel he always against his grey robes and sat down on the dingy rug beside Mama’s bed.  “It gives us more time to read and work on your arithmetic anyway, doesn’t it?”

“Are you sure?”  Cara pronounced the word you carefully, doing her best to make it sound the way the Wise Man said it, and not the clipped ye that all the denizens of Port Lorsin’s less than desirable quarters usually used.

The Wise Man leaned his back against the bed and patted the empty spot beside him by way of response.

Cara settled onto the floor beside him, sitting cross-legged but being careful that her dress covered her long, gangly legs and that their knees didn’t touch.  She’d lived in a whorehouse her whole life, after all; she knew perfectly well what signal it sent to “accidentally” brush her knee against a man’s.  Mirabelle was masterful at such signals.  Cara prayed to always remain an amateur. 

“Shall we finish our readings on the history of King Dorsan I?” the Wise Man asked her.  “Or would you prefer Tales from the Grandsons’ War?”

“Do we have to study history?”  Both volumes the Wise Man referenced were dry as bleached bones as far as Cara was concerned.  “Would it be all right if we read the one about the small men and the dragon?”

The Wise Man clicked his tongue disapprovingly.  “That’s a children tale, Cara dear.  I thought we agreed that you are getting too old for such stories.  They might have value in terms of entertainment, but they do not sharpen your mind.”

“I know, but…” Cara dropped her gaze to her lap, picking at her nails.  Then she looked back up, hopeful.  “But they do teach lessons, don’t they?  The importance of wisdom, of using one’s wits to defeat a force physically larger and stronger?”

The Wise Man chuckled.  “You mean the way you are trying to use your own wits to defeat your history lesson?”

Cara blushed, but she could see the Wise Man wasn’t angry with her.  So she smiled at him tentatively.  “It is history.  It’s just history of the small men instead of our kingdom.”

“Folklore is not history,” the Wise Man admonished.  “At best, it has a kernel of truth embedded within layers of fanciful exaggeration.”  He looked as though he was about to say more, but then he seemed to reconsider.  “Very well,” he said, relenting.  “Grastinga and the Dragon, just for today.  But I’m leaving you Foundations of the Kingdom and Tales from the Grandsons’ War.  Between now and next week, Cara, I expect you to finish the first and make it at least halfway through the second.  Those who do not learn their history — ”

“Will not recognize when they travel down a path they have already traveled, and which will certainly lead them to ruin,” Cara recited.  “I know.”

“Precisely why we study it.”

Cara wanted to tell the Wise Man that, as kind as he was to work to educate her, it ultimately didn’t matter what she knew of the two-hundred-ish or so year history of the Kingdom of Dorsa, or if she could recite the names of all the Great and Minor Noble Houses, or if she could point to each region of the Kingdom on a map.  There was no point in reminding her friend, if she could call him her friend, that Cara was doomed to live out her days as a whore in a whorehouse, rarely leaving the Shipper’s Quarter, let alone seeing far-off cities like Aventia or Yount.  But she didn’t have the heart to mention such things to him.  The one time she had said something to that effect, his usual warm smile had faltered, and something bleak and melancholy clouded his kind face.

From within the leather satchel, the Wise Man produced a tattered volume of children’s tales, the same volume he’d been using to teach Cara to read from since her fifth summer.  It dawned on her that he must have specifically placed it in his satchel before he left the palace with her in mind, despite claiming she was too old for such books.  The understanding warmed Cara, coming over her like sunlight and a fresh salt breeze, temporarily chasing away the shadow of her own bleakness.  

She grinned at her favorite whorehouse patron and wriggled closer, nearly forgetting that she didn’t want her knees to brush up against his outstretched legs.  When she was smaller, she’d sometimes curl against the Wise Man’s side when they read together, but she was not a child anymore.

The Wise Man opened the book atop his thighs to her favorite story in the volume.  “Would you like to start?  Or shall I?”

“You start,” Cara said.  “And I’ll read the battle scenes.”

 “Oh-ho, saving the best parts for yourself, are you?” he said with a wink.  But he began to read anyway, not waiting for Cara’s reply.  “Once, so long ago that the great King Dorsan’s people still lived in the far reaches of the Unknown Lands, the small man city of Xochitcyan was ruled by a wise and powerful queen named Grastinga, inasmuch as the small men have queens…”

Cara leaned closer to the Wise Man, letting his voice pull her into the story, then letting the story, in turn, lull her into a gentle forgetfulness.  It was a forgetfulness in which she didn’t have to be Cara, bastard daughter of a whore who would probably become a whore herself soon enough.  A forgetfulness in which she could travel to the magical underground city of Xochitcyan, where Queen Grastinga would battle and defeat the terrible wyrm that had snaked its way up from the deepest, darkest part of the earth and threatened to swallow her city.  

It occurred to Cara that she and Mama were not that different.  They both did what they could to make the whorehouse disappear for a little while.  Mama used her white cactus; Cara used her stories.

The Wise Man gave her a sidelong glance as he reached Cara’s favorite part, the description of the wondrous city of Xochitcyan, with its underground lake, its floating lights, the enormous crystals and sapphires and emeralds that had been carved into a honeycomb of towers where the small men lived.  The Wise Man was close enough to her that Cara could smell the soap he used, and she finally abandoned the attempt to avoid brushing up against him and leaned her cheek upon his shoulder.

She could do that with him — only with him.  He did not look at her as an inconvenient chambermaid, the way her mother did, or as a future source of revenue, the way Drustan did.  With the Wise Man, Cara could be nothing more than a child listening to a fanciful story.

Mama woke up an hour or two later, just as they were finishing Cara’s latest review of geography.  Cara couldn’t yet remember the names of all the known islands within the Adessian archipelago, mainly because they sounded funny and were hard to pronounce, but she’d managed to learn the four biggest ones, and could point them out on the map without help.  

Mama turned toward Cara and the Wise Man, propping herself up in bed on one elbow.  She let the thin blanket fall askew across her chest as she turned, revealing the curves of full breasts nearly falling out of her negligee.

Mama gave a lazy smile.  “Look it who’s here, fillin’ me daughter’s head with tall tales an’ book learnin’ again.  Strange use o’ yer time, Wise Man.  Not exactly what most men come here for.”

“Ye wouldn’t wake up when I shook ye, Mama,” Cara said, a note of defensiveness in her voice.

Mama frowned slightly at this, but then she sat up, groping on the floor on the other side of the bed for a moment before coming up with her pipe.  She opened her nightstand door and stuffed the pipe’s end full of dried white cactus flowers.

“Fetch me the candle, Cara,” she said, making a shooing motion with her free hand.

“Given the state you were in when I arrived, perhaps you’ve already had enough for today,” said the Wise Man, studying Cara’s mother with a small V between his brows.

Mama lifted an eyebrow and cocked her head like a cat inspecting a mouse.  A grin spread slowly across her face.  Beneath the smeared face paint and the excess flesh that she’d added over the course of the years, Cara could see a hint of the true beauty her mother had once been.

“We all have our vices.  Don’t we, Wise Man dear?”  Mama’s voice became a purr.  Cara handed her the candle and Mama lit the pipe.  The familiar, semi-sweet odor of white cactus smoke filled the room.  It made Cara’s head swim.

Mama looked her daughter up and down.  The gaze wasn’t exactly predatory, the way men stared at Cara’s changing body, but there was definitely something appraising in it.

Mama opened her mouth to say something, but a coughing fit overcame her, violent and wracking.  When it cleared a few seconds later, she said, far less sweetly than before, “I don’t know why ye bother teachin’ her t’read an’ do numbers.  Ain’t like she’s goin’ off t’the bloody House o’ Wisdom one day.”  

“Education is a gift,” said the Wise Man stiffly.  “A gift I wish I could give to everyone in the Shipper’s Quarter.”

“Oh, izzat right?  That’s why ye been comin’ here these long years?  T’ educate us?”  Mama barked out a laugh, which turned into more coughs.  “What time is it, anyway?”

“Nearly five o’ the clock,” Cara answered.

Mama grunted.  “Run along, girl.  Dru will be needin’ ye downstairs.  An’ ye know perfectly well what kinda mood he’ll be in if he thinks yer avoidin’ work.”

Cara went to the door, meeting the Wise Man’s gaze as she lifted her hand in goodbye.  He answered with a look that was pained and apologetic.

“Don’t forget about the two books I’m leaving you,” he said.  “History next time, along with algebra, whether you think it’s boring or not.”

Cara nodded obediently.  She opened her mouth, about to say that she promised she would read both books by next week, but the Wise Man had already turned towards Mama, who was patting the empty space in the bed beside her.

Cara sighed and let herself out.

Downstairs, the common room was just beginning to fill up with patrons as the late afternoon leaned into evening.  A haze of smoke, both regular tobacco and white cactus, drifted towards the mezzanine as Cara descended the stairs, and it mingled with the scent of whatever meat Nash was cooking for the night.  Lamb, perhaps, or at least mutton, if the night’s guests were lucky.  Horse meat passed off as beef if they were not so lucky. 

Soon enough, the sun outside would fall completely, and the brothel would hit its stride for the night.  Philip the mandolier would get up on stage, maybe with his new apprentice Jimmy, who could play both the fiddle and the pipes with fair proficiency.  If Philip had his way, he’d talk Big Reina up onto the stage to sing a duet with him before the night was through.  It would depend upon her mood and on how much she had to drink.

The prostitutes who didn’t have appointments yet had begun to filter into the common room, too, faces painted and dresses neat, all hoping they might draw someone into their web so that they could pay Dru’s rent for another month.  

Cara spotted Mirabelle across the room.  She was smiling as she spoke, sitting in the lap of a man who wore a city guard uniform.  Cara watched her former friend for a moment.  She’d had changed so much.  Two years ago, she would still play make believe games with Cara in the stables, pretending to be the wyrm that threatened Xochitcyan while Cara played Queen Grastinga.  She’d stuff her clothes with hay to make herself look big and menacing, then curl her fingers to make them look like a wyrm’s talons as she chased a giggling Cara around the stables.  Now, Mirabelle’s costumes consisted of the expensive, revealing dresses Dru had gotten her, and instead of chasing Cara around the stables, she could be found on any given night sashaying around the common room like any proud alleycat, prowling for the next man she could take to bed.  Judging from the entranced look on the city guardsman’s face, it looked like Mirabelle had already caught her first mouse of the night.

An arm draped around Cara’s shoulders and she started, thinking at first it was a man who’d mistaken her as an eligible prostitute.  She turned, preparing to explain that she was still too young to be for sale — her monthly blood hadn’t come yet — but it turned out to only be Xalanna.

“Good evening, darling,” Xalanna said.  “And how was our lesson with the Wise Man today?”

Cara smiled.  Xalanna used to be the young man called Zane.  But curly black hair had grown long and trousers and tunics had been exchanged for dresses and scarves.  About two years ago, Zane announced that her name had been Xalanna all along.  Now she bristled when anyone dared to use that other name.  She grudgingly accepted it, though, when Sal Anne shortened Xalanna to Lanna, and that was what most people called her these days.  Only clients called her Xalanna.

“It was fine.”  Cara made a face.  “But memorizing the names of the Adessian Islands is so boring.  And he left me two books of history t’ read, which is likely t’ be as dry as Nash’s lamb a day after bein’ cooked.”

Lanna tut-tutted at Cara.  “Your education is a gift, dear heart, one you should not take so lightly,” she said, imitating the the Wise Man.  She was a good mimic, entertaining everyone when she played Dru or Nash or Philip when they weren’t around to hear her do it.  Lanna poked Cara in the ribs, making her giggle.

“Aye, Wise Man,” Cara said, playing along.  “And arithmetic is essential for anyone who doesn’t want to get swindled.

Lanna’s good humor faded as her gaze shifted from Cara into the common room.  “Oi, look at Mirabelle,” she said in a low voice.  “She’s shovin’ that cleavage in his face like it’s the tastiest thing since Nash’s strawberry cake.  The girl’s got no sense o’ class, o’ playin’ the game.”

Cara glanced up at her friend.  Lanna’s eyes were accentuated by kohl, as usual, and tonight she’d painted her lips a shade of purple so dark they were nearly black, making her already lovely face even more striking.  

But her beauty was marred by the glower she directed at Mirabelle.

“Why are ye always so upset with Mirabelle these days?” Cara asked.  “She’s still new.  She’s only trying to get her regulars.”

Hans, a smooth-faced, fine-featured youth a few summers older than Cara, bounced down the stairs at that moment and kissed Lanna on the cheek.  He’d started turning coin for the brothel about a year earlier and shared a room with Lanna.  Cara supposed Hans was something like Lanna’s apprentice.  

“Who’re we gossipin’ about t’night, girls?” he asked.

“Mirabelle,” Lanna answered, putting every bit of disdain she could fit into the three syllables.

“Ohhhh,” Hans said in understanding.  “That trick.”  He followed Lanna’s gaze to the city guardsman, Mirabelle still atop the man’s lap.  Hans clicked his tongue.  “Always puttin’ on airs, innit she?  One day she’s gonna realize she ain’t no highborn lady, just another dockside whore.”

“Dru’ll clip her wings before she flies too high,” Lanna said.  “If one of the clients doesn’t do it first.”

Cara glanced between them.  “I don’t understand why yer both so hard on her.  She’s doin’ the same thing all the other women who turn coin are doin.’”

Hans shook his head.  “It ain’t what she’s doin,’ it’s how she’s doin’ it.  She’s tryin’ t’ work the mistress magic.”

“What are ye even talkin’ about?”

Lanna was the one who answered.  “A lot of us, Cara, when we first start out, we tell ourselves it’s just for a little while.  We’re goin’ t’ charm some rich merchant or good-hearted pirate, an’ he’s gonna take us away from here, turn us into a wife — or at least a pampered mistress.”  

“Til we realize the Serpent’s Tongue ain’t exactly the kinda place a man looks for a wife,” Hans added sardonically.

Lanna’s eyes stayed on Mirabelle.  To Cara’s surprise, she sounded almost as if she was going to cry when she spoke again.  “We all think we’re different, at first.  We think we’re the one whore who ain’t a whore.  It doesn’t get us out from under Dru’s thumb.  It just makes us catty and cruel t’ all the other women here, who should be our sisters, not our rivals.”

“An’ then one day,” Hans continued, “ye figure out what ye really are.  What yer life really is.  Usually it includes a few stitches.”

Cara wasn’t sure she entirely understood her two friends.  Maybe it was because she had grown up here, whereas they’d come to the Serpent’s Tongue after they were already old enough to turn coin.  Cara had always known she was the bastard daughter of a Shipper’s Quarter prostitute.  Lanna and Hans, though?  Perhaps they’d had dreams of being something else, once.

But she did understand Hans’s comment about stitches.  Cara had seen plenty of women come down the stairs in the morning with broken noses or black eyes, or clutching a broken arm to their side or sporting bruise-colored fingerprints around their throats.  Even Lanna had lost a tooth last year, when a drunken client realized she was not precisely what he’d thought she was.  

Sometimes it wasn’t a client who administered the beating.  Sometimes it was Dru, making a point about how he expected his employees to behave.  Cara wasn’t the only one who’d been dragged into the cellar for such lessons.

Across from where the three of them stood, Mirabelle’s eyes widened in mock surprise over whatever the city guardsman had said, and she covered the O of her mouth with one delicate hand while she slapped him lightly in the shoulder with the other.  The city guard responded with a toothy grin.

Cara cringed.  “Yer bein’ too hard on Mirabelle.  She’s doin’ her best, even if she is more stuck up than she used t’ be.  Besides, that’ll be me soon enough.  Next year or the year after.”  

She hadn’t meant to say that last thought out-loud, but the words had slipped out anyway, resigned and mournful.

Lanna’s gaze slipped back to Cara.  “Mirabelle is vain an’ selfish, pet.  Ye won’t ever be like her.”  She paused.  “But are ye sure ye want t’ be here in another year or two?”

Cara blinked at her friend in confusion.  “What d’ye mean?  Where else would I be?”

“But do ye want t’ be here, once yer monthly blood starts?”

Cara was struck momentarily speechless.  No one had ever asked her such a question before.  No one had ever suggested she wouldn’t grow up to have exactly the same life as her mother had.  She’d assumed she would be here forever, turning coin for Dru until she was too old to get clients.  Then Dru or whoever took Dru’s place would send her off to Mother Moon’s temple to live out her last few years in relative peace.

Lanna was staring at her, still waiting for an answer.

“No.”  That single word was dangerous, and if Cara been speaking to anyone but Lanna and Hans, she never would have dared to utter it.  “I’d rather live on the streets of Arun’s Quarter than turn coin for Dru.  But it’s not as though I have a choice.”  She waved a hand at Mirabelle.  “It ain’t like I’m gonna end up the wife of a city guardsman.”

The look Hans gave her was bemusedly sympathetic, as though he agreed with the blunt assessment of her situation.

But Lanna put an arm around Cara’s shoulders and squeezed.  “Oh, pet.  Ye might not marry a city guardsman, but that doesn’t mean ye have no choices.  Choices are always there, when ye know where t’ look for them.”

Cara wanted to ask what that meant, but Lanna sauntered away, waving suggestively at a man at the bar who’d been glancing at her shyly the past few minutes.  Hans left, too, nodding at Cara once before heading for the crowd growing in the common room, no doubt having marked his first potential client for the night.

Cara glanced between them — Mirabelle, whom Lanna had called catty and cruel; Lanna, now flirting with the man at the bar; Hans, who’d just draped an arm around a man seated by himself in a booth.  Reluctantly, Cara headed for the kitchens, still thinking about Lanna’s last words to her.

Choices are always there, when ye know where t’ look for them.