This new epic fantasy series begins a tale of magic and danger, as a healer finds herself pulled deeper into a web of secrets and hazardous magic that could bring about the end of the world as she knows it. Intrigued? Well read on to discover an excerpt from Violette Malan’s The Godstone, which releases on August 3rd 2021.
SYNOPSIS
Fenra Lowens has been a working Practitioner, using the magic of healing ever since she graduated from the White Court and left the City to live in the Outer Modes. When one of her patients, Arlyn Albainil, is summoned to the City to execute the final testament of a distant cousin, she agrees to help him. Arlyn suspects the White Court wants to access his cousin’s Practitioner’s vault. Arlyn can’t ignore the summons: he knows the vault holds an artifact so dangerous he can’t allow it to be freed.
Fenra quickly figures out that there is no cousin, that Arlyn himself is the missing Practitioner, the legendary Xandra Albainil, rumored to have made a Godstone with which he once almost destroyed the world. Sealing away the Godstone left Arlyn powerless and ill, and he needs Fenra to help him deal with the possibly sentient artifact before someone else finds and uses it.
Along the way they encounter Elvanyn Karamisk, an old friend whom Arlyn once betrayed. Convinced that Arlyn has not changed, and intends to use Fenra to recover the Godstone and with it all his power, Elvanyn joins them to keep Fenra safe and help her destroy the artifact
EXCERPT
Arlyn
This morning Fenra’s clothing changed to the White Court’s tall black boots, buttercup yellow trousers with two rows of buttons in front, white shirt and cravat, crimson waistcoat, and black frock coat with crimson reverses. Rich green stones in her ears where she’d had silver knots before. The very model of a City practitioner, down to the gray gloves, the silver-headed stick, the black, flat-crowned, curly-brimmed hat.
Even her hair was behaving itself.
I offered her the reins once we were both seated in the barouche. She refused with a polite smile and settled herself into her corner, spreading the lap robe over both of us.
“Have I got something on my face?” I asked her once we were a good piece away from the inn. I know the horse doesn’t change, but somehow the beast seemed sleeker, livelier.
“No.” Fenra took a deep breath, shifted in the seat until she could face me more easily. She had a look in her eye that promised me nothing good. “I have been watching you react to things.”
“It’s been a long time since I traveled, I can’t enjoy the scenery?”
Her expression didn’t change. “Ten days ago you smiled at drainage ditches. Yesterday you smiled at gutters. No one smiles at gutters. You looked at my hat this morning as though at a long lost friend. I think you see what I see. I think you are a practitioner.”
Her tone was dry enough I had to lick my lips to answer. “If I am, why don’t my clothes change?”
“If you are not, how do you know that clothing changes?” She folded her hands in her lap, tapped her thumbs together, like a teacher waiting for an answer from a backward pupil.
“My cousin might have given me the gift of a practitioner’s sight.”
She snorted. “Not much of a gift if you never travel. And yes, I did think of that, but it’s improbable. As the philosopher Jennock says, the simpler solution is almost always the true solution.”
“It’s simpler if I’m a practitioner?” I made my tone as sarcastic as possible.
She sighed again, turned her head away from me, spoke as if to the horse’s rump.
“You knew there was an inn up ahead and that it had hot water. You knew where the Solni Desert is. You remembered the colors of the apprentice uniform. You knew that there was a time fetches didn’t appear close to the Road. You knew that practitioners are discovered when they travel on the Road.”
“My cousin could have told me all of that.”
“You saw the lines of light between my fingers when I banished the fetch. No matter what your cousin might have told you, you would not have been able to actually see that. And you saw.” She looked at me sideways, the brim of her hat casting a shadow over her eyes. “You could have been told many things, but you saw what you saw.”
I had no answer.
“Was there any truth in what you told me? The highwayman and the cousin who rode to the rescue?”
“All of it was true.”
“Just not for you.”
“Just not for me.”
“You are not the highwayman, you are the cousin.”
“I’m the cousin.”
“Why?”
I decided to misunderstand her. “He was a little older than I, funny, and smart and charming. And he’d been very good to me as a child. He was the only one in the family besides my mother who was pleased for me when they found I was a practitioner. The others were pleased with the advantage they thought it might bring the business.” I glanced at her and she nodded. It didn’t work that way, but people always thought their own case would be different.
“I loved him, but the others all said he would never amount to anything, that he was born to be hanged.”
“And he was hanged?”
I nodded. “I got there too late. I was angry with the family, bitter, most of all because they’d been right.” I gathered the reins into my practitioner’s hand, rubbed at my face with my right. A gentle touch of her fingertips and Fenra took the reins from me.
“So you pretended you had been on time? That you had saved him?”
“In revenge on them. It sounds childish now.”
“Not really. You loved him, and he loved you. The rest of them?” She made a flicking motion with the fingers of her right hand, not unlike the one she’d used against the fetch. “Much sillier things have been done for love.”
“I did more. I kept him alive—at least in the eyes of the world. I pretended he’d reformed, set up his own small business in a far-off village, was doing well. I sent letters to him, pretended to get letters back. I even arranged for letters to be sent to the rest of the family, sometimes with money in them. Repayment of loans.”
“So when you wanted to disappear, you had a ready-made life to step into.”
I spread my hands. “Xandra the practitioner became Arlyn the carpenter.”
Fenra
I pursed my lips. I was not so easily distracted. “You still have not answered my question. Why did you hide? Oh.” My throat stiffened and made my voice flat. I felt stupid. “The lowness.”
“The lowness,” he agreed. “At first.”
“A practitioner with lowness.” I shook my head. “Between apathy, despair, and sudden rages, you could have destroyed so much . . .” I touched the back of his right wrist. “Is that why you tried to kill yourself?”
He sat back against the barouche’s green leather upholstery and crossed his right leg over his left. “Turns out we can’t.”
Again, not an answer. “Practitioners can be killed.” That, after all, was why I had been preparing to leave the village—in case things got out of hand.
“By others, yes. Apparently we can’t kill ourselves.”
I had certainly never heard of a practitioner committing suicide. On the other hand, I had never seen a case of the lowness before Arlyn. “You believed you would do less damage in an outer Mode? In a small village?” I glanced at him again but his color was no better and he had a bitter smile on his face. I remembered what he had been like when I first saw him. “You would still have had to be very careful.”
“No, actually.” He looked ahead, mouth in a straight line, eyes focused on Terith’s ears. “I don’t have any power.” I must have made some protesting sound because he brought his gaze back to me. “The Godstone took it.”
Something in his face, his tone, the whiteness of his scarred knuckles made me shiver as though our carriage passed through a mob of ghosts. “Is that the dangerous artifact you have hidden? A ‘Godstone’?”
His nod was stiff, as if he also felt cold. “I tried to destroy it. I failed. Sealing it away took all my power.”
And maybe a little more. “And if they open the seal, this dangerous thing will be loose?” Another nod. He still looked at me, but as if he did not see me. “Perhaps we will be lucky, perhaps the law of the Red Court will side with you and not the White Court.” His eyes snapped into focus. I grinned. “It could happen.”
“Well, we do have a secret weapon,” he said. I barely felt the pat on the knee he gave me through the thickness of the lap rug. “We have you.”
“Somehow I do not feel better.”
Two days later I suggested that we stop at Last Inn before the City, rather than press on. We would have arrived before dark, but not much before, a bad time to be looking for lodging. You tend to take the first you find and that’s almost always a mistake. Last Inn, while not up to City standards, looked comfortable and inviting, the flagstone area wide enough to allow the largest carriages to turn around. The windows were sizable, though paned with small pieces of glass. The stables were off to one side rather than behind the main building. This Mode is so narrow, I wondered if we would still have the barouche in the morning, or something more elegant still.
“Once we reach the City, you can stay in the White Court,” Arlyn pointed out. I felt that thinking of him as Arlyn was safer.
“And leave you where? Do you know the City better than I do? Have you ever stayed anywhere other than the Court?”
He frowned, thinking. “Maybe, but it was so long ago . . .”
It must have been. Despite what I had said before, I should have heard of Xandra Albainil before Arlyn mentioned him. I had never seen the name on any of the lists, never heard him talked about. His was a story we would have studied, surely? If only for an object lesson on the dangers of overreaching.
How long ago did all this happen? Just how old was Arlyn?
“There we are then,” I said aloud. “We will stay here for the night and go in fresh first thing in the morning. I am sure this landlord can suggest a good hotel.”
We allowed ourselves to be helped down from the carriage and escorted into the inn while Terith was led away, glancing back at us before he was out of sight around the western corner of the building. We were given a double room, no doubt because of my status, but, oddly, my smiles weren’t returned very warmly.
Once in our room, Arlyn swung open the window and stood watching the traffic on the Road. Hooves struck sharp sounds from the hard surface. He rubbed at his face before leaning forward, bracing his hands on the windowsill. Knowing what I knew now, it felt wrong to see him in fawn trousers, low tight-fitting boots, deep blue waistcoat and jacket over a pale lilac shirt and cravat.
“Is there any point in telling them the truth?” I wondered aloud, pulling out the room’s one upholstered chair and sitting. “You are not dead, and if they cannot declare you dead, they cannot open your vault.”
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I squared my shoulders and crossed my arms. “Well?”
At first I thought he would not answer. Finally he turned away from the window, straightening his cuffs. “Logic isn’t a great defense when people in power want something. Someone wants to open my vault badly enough that they’ve gone to the trouble of creating false documents, having a relative tracked down and summoned,” he pointed out. “Somehow I feel a small matter like my being alive won’t stop them. Alive and powerless, remember. Besides, if there’s a way for me to come out of this without having to reveal myself, I’d like to try.”
I thought about his intention to return to the village. Could he do that if everyone knew he had been a practitioner? Would the White Court even allow it? “Wheels within wheels,” I said. “They might very well decide that if you are not a practitioner anymore, your vault is no longer your property.”
“I hope that wasn’t meant to make me feel better.”
