Teaser Tuesday
From the fae novel, Power Lines, currently being reworked and revised, I bring you a random snippet.
(In which Prince Scott, having run into a brick wall in his search for Lady Flower, ends up asking his family for help and voyages home...)
“Which one?” I asked Simeon.
He barely looked back, but the glance over his shoulder was enough. I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Rushing him wasn’t going to accomplish anything.
As we walked down the narrow hall, various little clusters of old men in rich satin robes nodded to my cousin. They all smelled of freshly turned soil or summery flowers. There was some subtle smoke in the air, but mostly it just smelled of the Ush. Reeked, really, after being away from it for years. A few old men shook his hand and murmured quiet words in his ear. Most paid no attention to me at all. A few gave me a quick look that was very familiar from my childhood. Fear.
“How do they know it’s me?” I asked him as we cleared one hallway, stopping at a small circular room. A table in the center of the room held various drinks and he snagged one for himself and one for me as he motioned down the next hall.
“You haven’t been gone that long, Scott,” he said in his calm voice.
“Twenty years.”
“Is nothing to some of these Ush. Some were old when I was your age,” he reminded. I had to think about that one. Although he’d been an adult when I was a child, I always thought of Simeon as something like a slightly-older brother. It rarely crossed my mind that he’d been an adult when my mother was born.
“But they aren’t really reacting.”
He smiled, looking back over his shoulder at me. Just a brief glimpse, but with that knowing smile. The one that meant I was supposed to think for myself. Then he turned back, winding down halls and through little rooms. I stayed close on his heels, not sure how he could navigate the maze.
He stopped for a moment to greet a knot of palace guardsmen. All of them were tall, lean and decked out in forest green cloaks marked with the symbol of the God Queen of the Ush. They all beamed back at him. The pointedly ignored me, even though that was likely a breach of some decorum given my titles and such. I was really too tired to start something with them over it. Then we turned down another corner and into another round room, this one filled with couches. A variety of old men and scandalously young women who were not their nieces sat close to each other.
“It’s an Ush thing, Scott,” he said, and it took me a moment to remember what we’d been saying before. “You’ve been gone long enough that you’re not thinking like you’re fae.”
“Fill me in, then.”
“No enemy would walk the halls of the Learned Ush. It’d be a greater offense than blasphemy against the God Queen. If you’re here, you can’t be trying to kill them.”
“That’s silly. At best.”
“To your way of thinking.”
“So each and every one of these nobles is forgetting everything supposedly done by the Dread Lord, because I came through the front door?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so glad I left here when I did.”
“Don’t believe their smiles, Scott. They are even more glad than you.”
(c) 2008 T.M. Thomas