Welcome back to my excerpts from upcoming fantasy novel Far From Mortal Realms! In this one, Adira is defending their unusual law practice to an official from the county bar association. (For an explanation of bar associations, see here. "Bar" is often used to mean some legal organization or function: for example, the journals law schools publish with articles about various legal topics are called bar reviews. And I'm now yielding to the impulse to mention that when I was in law school, we had a bar-crawling club called the Somerville Bar Review.) The official asks how her father, who started the practice before Adira joined it, had come to pick this peculiar specialty, and Adira explains.
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“He became aware of several unfortunate incidents. For example, there was the owner of a new dry cleaning business – quite a nice fellow, apparently – who somehow met a fae from the Winter Court. They’re the most likely to be malicious, which the owner hadn’t heard. He didn’t want to waste the opportunity, and asked for an enchantment to clean the most delicate fabrics without damaging them. When he asked what they would take in exchange, he should have known better than to accept the answer that it would be their pleasure, and that they had a use for the stains. Given what those fae take pleasure in, it was true, as it had to be . . . From that moment, every stain he removed, with the enchantment or without it, stained his skin and that of his customers, and nothing would remove those stains.”
Fells seemed less than impressed. Now that she’d gone this far, she’d tell him the grimmer complete version of what had spurred Dad into action, and see how he liked the taste of it. “Then two horrendous encounters came to my father’s attention. First, a man who taught creative writing wanted to write a best-selling novel and become famous. The fae arranged for him to get arrested for some gruesome crime that got lots of publicity, and a great many people bought his book out of morbid curiosity.” Fells’ eyes widened, and he gulped. Well, he’d asked for it. “And then someone went for that old favorite, wanting to live forever. He ended up permanently asleep, and from what family observers could tell, having frequent awful nightmares.”
Maybe it had been a mistake to dwell on these details. She’d had a few of her own nightmares when she first joined the practice, and she’d been happy to see them fade with time. Too late now. “After more than a month of this, the man’s wife got desperate and tried killing him – a mercy killing. But it didn’t work. The man woke up just long enough to realize what was happening, and then fell asleep again, healing as he slept. The wife could only guess what new nightmare he had afterward.” She’d ended up killing herself instead, but Fell had clearly heard enough. He looked somewhere between pale and green.
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As always, you can follow this link to read the book's teaser, see the cover, and/or preorder. There's something new this time: the description now has a tag line. Tell me what you think of it!
Stay tuned for more excerpts!
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