Being an Ace isn't easy, but really? Being twelve isn't easy. Being in a cast isn't easy. Being asked to accept that, once again, someone who had been like a father seems to be gone isn't easy. Being asked to write poetry isn't easy.

Eileen, brilliantly, will be focusing on how poems are hard and dumb and not thinking about anything else ( Read more... )

This weekend is the semi-annual trip to New York. It's fairly routine, really. He has lunch with Becky, his agent - she's sixty-five, the grandmother of a pair of sprites named Maisie and Tierney, and brings him a pumpkin pie every year for the autumn summit - followed closely by Hell Day at the publisher. It involves signing the contracts, which ( Read more... )

It had started because some punk kids around the green. One had decided it was a good idea to pelt wandering adults with snowballs as they wandered to close to the Green- and apparently Hadyn counted as an adult these days. But getting hit with a rock hidden into a rather hard clump of packed snow was not something that Hadyn, adult or not, was ( Read more... )

[Standing. Brooding. Debating...

Sapphire or emerald?

...Which would be better for Athena.]

He's not trying to step on Edith-Felicie's toes - as long as she doesn't try stepping on his - but when the Heart guards do their training work. Normally he's actually mostly watching, and making notes, mental or otherwise, on improvements that needed to be made. But catching Hadyn training at Clubs when he was on his way back from Natalia Ambrosi' ( Read more... )

Things will get better. [No 'might'.]Säde is being fiercely optimistic about- well, 'the last week' encompasses everything, but her optimism is being parcelled out into things like 'Rachel will heal and be back to the way she was', 'disrupting the Magician's spell will have the least negative results possible for the Deck', 'the Arcana will go far ( Read more... )

( Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination. )

Some days Iggy thinks he ought to move out and to the castle. Then he looks at the squabbles he always sees ongoing within and decides he's better off with his parents and the gaggle of nephews and nieces that come with his siblings and in-laws ( Read more... )

Ceiro felt the first pains when he tried to relieve himself. And try though he might, nothing seemed to relieve that gut twisting, soul shattering pain. It honestly had come to the point that he'd excused himself from the office, making the excuse that he was seeing Mr. Browning off as he was finally returning home (with the assistance of the ( Read more... )

Doctor Catadlo had been perplexed by the results. And had decided to take more blood- and run the test himself this time. Something was amiss, the man said, not only in how long it had taken them to return...but that nothing was there. Nothing- as if the king was not sick. But Ceiro hardly looked the picture of health at the moment ( Read more... )