Sunday Morning Coffee: Soldier of Dorsa Update

Fifty-thousand words in, and I still haven’t managed to hit the 25% mark, which means this book is due to be about 200,000 words. Where’s that grimace emoji, again??

Ah, yes, I found it.

“One-hundred and twenty-thousand words,” I told myself.

“Hit your 25% mark by 30,000 words,” I told myself.

“Stop adding words to this chapter; it’s already almost 5,000 words long,” I told myself.

But here’s the thing — and I really hope I’m right — I think Soldier of Dorsa is going to be better than Princess of Dorsa, and Princess was a pretty solid book. And if it has to be 200,000 words, well, then, that’s how long it has to be.

I just think it’s gonna take me a dang long time to write it.

The reason it’s so long is that I’m a sucker for flashbacks.

I think I fell in love with flashbacks from the show Lost. The flashbacks were always as compelling as the current timeline — so compelling that I never minded them or felt like they interfered with the main part of the story.

In Princess, I forced myself not to include any flashbacks. It was hard! I almost always write them. I didn’t include any in Eastside / Westside / Love, either.

But with Soldier… I don’t know, it just feels right to include them.

Here’s one I was working on this morning… I hope you enjoy it.

Joslyn’s Painful Past

It had been at least a few years since Master and Mistress had taken them to Paratheen, and for eleven-year-old Joslyn, the city was even brighter and livelier than she remembered it.  Without doubt, of all the towns and cities she had visited, Paratheen was her favorite.  There was something about being inside Terinto, yet being in a city — a real city — that made the place extraordinary to her.  Regardless of what names Terintans were called in the rest of the Empire, Paratheen made her believe that her people were capable of marvelous things.

Besides, Paratheen was so much more colorful than other cities.  Yes, most of the buildings and all of the streets were all the same dingy, dusty beige, but the people themselves were draped in so many colors that they were like living banners.  The merchants, some of whom Joslyn knew were also smugglers, were the most colorful of all, wearing tall turbans of bright Adessian silks and long, loose robes that had to be far more comfortable than her own old trousers in the desert heat.  

Then there were her own cousins, the nomadic apa-apa herders and other desert tribesmen, who visited Paratheen only briefly for business.  The men also wore turbans, the women wore headscarves, and although the pale yellows and pale greens they chose were less exotic than what the merchants wore, it seemed to Joslyn that they still possessed more farzun in their dress and manner than people in other parts of the Empire.

The other sight in Paratheen that somehow lightened Joslyn’s step was that of all the slaves.  She didn’t much mind being a slave.  She hadn’t known much else — she could barely remember her childhood with the tribe of Marisan, and Master and Mistress generally treated her and Tasmyn quite well.  The sisters were beaten by the tinkers only rarely, only when they deserved it.  But they never saw slaves in other parts of the Empire.  Slavery was not illegal elsewhere, but neither was it common, and most people regarded her and Tasmyn as if they were circus creatures.  Adults and children alike kept their distance from Joslyn and Tasmyn, as if their condition of being enslaved was something that might be contagious.

But in Paratheen, slaves were everywhere, and no one looked at her askance for being the possession of Master and Mistress.  Everybody seemed to have a slave in Paratheen, from the merely middle class merchants, to the café owners, to the Adessian sailors who were only passing through.

Joslyn could tell the slaves from the free because the slaves would catch her eye as they passed in the streets, giving a quick, acknowledging nod, or a smile, or a quiet “Fleeting blister.”  That last note of camaraderie, which sounded to most ears like a nonsense phrase, was actually Paratheen slave slang.  To keep their conversations private from their masters, the slaves replaced common words with words that rhymed, which meant “Fleeting blister” actually translated into “Greetings, sister.”  Some of the slang was common, while in other cases the listener had to think fast to decode what their compatriot was trying to tell them.

Joslyn had learned pieces of the Paratheen slave slang the last time they’d been to the city, and while Tasmyn arrogantly refused to learn the slang or communicate with it, Joslyn had soaked up as much of the street talk as she could.  Knowing it made her feel like she was a part of something greater than herself — nearly a family of sorts.  And for a slave girl, a poor, loose substitute for family was better than no family at all.

She had expected Master to stop and set up his cart when they reached Paratheen’s largest market square, but instead it was Mistress and Tasmyn who stopped.

“We have another appointment,” Master said to Joslyn.

She nodded obediently and followed him through the crowd without bothering to ask where they were going.  

Over the past year, Joslyn had begun to work with Master more and Mistress less.  These days when they arrived at a city or a town, Tasmyn and Mistress would stay behind with the bliva, telling the fortunes of whatever young women (they were almost always young women) might arrive, while Joslyn went with Master to set up his tinker cart in the market square.  There, they would sharpen farm tools and knives and repair broken things until sundown, then pull the cart back to the bliva to eat and sleep.

So when Tasmyn and Mistress stayed behind and Joslyn was told to follow Master, the only odd thing about the arrangement was that they left the cart behind and traveled through Paratheen empty-handed.

It wasn’t until they left the crowded markets behind, then the cafés behind, then the beehives of tenement homes behind and emerged into the wealthier northern section of town that Joslyn finally asked:

“Master?  Where are we going?”

“You’ll see,” he said over his shoulder.

They finally stopped at a fine, large home with a low wall around it.  Two date palms — a sign of real wealth — stood on either side of a round wooden door set in the wall.

Master knocked on the door.

A small window at the top of the door slid open, and a pair of dark eyes looked out at them.

“Yes?” said the owner of the eyes.

“I am tinker N’Galyn.  I have an appointment with your master.”

The door swung open, revealing a brick-paved courtyard.  Joslyn had been taught by Master and Mistress that it was rude to gawk, but her eyes widened and her jaw fell despite herself; she had never seen a home so grand up close.  She’d seen the houses of lords and ladies from a distance, of course — nearly every town in the Empire larger than a village had a lord with a fine house — but she’d never been inside the walls of one.

A man — an Adessian-born slave, given the star-shaped symbols tattooed on his left cheek — ushered them into the courtyard.

“Commoners and slaves enter through the kitchen.  At the back,” he said curtly, and pointed.

“Come, Joslyn,” Master said, and there was something in his voice that Joslyn had heard only rarely:  unease.

Joslyn followed him around the side of the large house, not bothering to hide her wonderment at the three tall spires that rose from it and reached towards the blue sky like they were trying to touch it.  The tower in the center had a mushroom-shaped dome at its top and had been painted in bright green and yellow stripes.

Who could live in such a home as this?  And what business could Master possibly have with the owner?  Mistress was always telling Joslyn that she had far too much imagination than a girl her age had a right to, but now Joslyn couldn’t help but imagine that she must be inside  the home of one of the merchants who ruled Paratheen, or maybe the second home of an Adessian prince, or perhaps even a sorcerer of the Brotherhood of Culo.

They found the kitchen at the back of the house primarily through scent; the afternoon meal, it seemed, was already being prepared.

Two sides of the kitchen were open; the other two connected to the main house.  This was practical, Joslyn saw, because the two large clay ovens, which to her eyes looked like giant, upside-down cooking funnels, spilled their extra heat not back into the house, but into the sky and the courtyard.  A freestanding partition wall separated the far end of the kitchen from a secondary courtyard, which was covered overhead with what looked like a giant bliva.

“Fleeting color,” said a skinny man in a blood-splattered apron to Master.

“I’m not your brother,” Master snapped irritably.  “I’m the tinker, here to see your master about my girl.”

The skinny man’s eyes flitted from Master to Joslyn, and Joslyn felt the first stirrings of apprehension deep in her gut.

She was the only girl Master could possibly mean.  What business could Master have with an Adessian prince that had to do with her?

“Apologies, tinker,” said the skinny man in formal Terintan.  He turned to a girl a few years older than Joslyn and rattled off a sentence in slave-slang that was too fast for Joslyn to follow it.  

When the girl turned to go, Joslyn saw that one side of her face looked like melted candle wax, and the eye on that side was milky and unseeing.  It was such a horrific sight that Joslyn did a double-take.  The girl must have immersed half her face in fire to earn a mass of scars like that.  Joslyn supposed that was the natural consequence of working in a giant kitchen like this one, and she thanked her luck that all the tinker made her do was sharpen tools and run errands for him.

The scarred girl returned only seconds later.

“Our master will see you now, tinker,” she said in a voice that rasped and wheezed when she spoke.  Maybe she’d burned more than just her face in her accident.

She gestured for Master and Joslyn to follow her.  Joslyn’s stomach knotted.