*I promised a peek at my husband’s novel.  Okay fine I didn’t promise it but — eh eh eh eh eh — he left his computer unwatched (foolish man) and I — eh eh eh eh eh — took the first five pages or so off his drive.  Mwah ah ah ah ah.  Enjoy, because I’m going to be in SO MUCH trouble.*

Chapter 1

Meet Ninth Euclid

 

 

          When I was a skinny boy working on my daddy’s farm, I loved watching the sun rise over the fields.  There was a quiet just before the Oasis dawn that’s simply unparalleled on any other world in the Eternal Empire.  I’d sit in the hayloft in the south barn, whose single window faced the magnificent sunrise, close my eyes, bask in the blissful silence and pretend I was the only child of parents who didn’t talk much.

          It’s the kind of fantasy that could only be created by someone like me, the youngest in a family with ten children.  My surname is Ancel, but nobody remembers to use it, since there’s no other Ninth Euclid in memory. 

          My daddy, displaying a certain lack of imagination and not a little eccentricity, saw fit to name me and each of my eight brothers Euclid.  He said once that he had no idea what the name meant, but that he liked the way it sounded.  The first two boys were twins, and Daddy couldn’t figure which one should be Euclid, so, after two weeks of arguments with my mama, he gave them both the nonsense name.  Everyone called them First Euclid and Second Euclid, so when the next boy came around, he named him Euclid, too. 

          My one sister, Hannah, thought it was funny to call out, “Euclid-one-to-nine,” for family dinners.

          We Euclids all slept in a single room with three large beds, which made for a cacophony of snores keeping me awake most of the night and frequent bruised ribs whenever one of my bedmates decided to turn over.

          So I’d sneak out of bed under the cover of the dark  — easy enough, since with chocolate-colored skin and coal-black eyes and hair, I tended to fade into the background at night.  

          Later, after Lord Oswald hired me away from Daddy’s farm, I found my ability to blend in to be detrimental to dealing with the governors, who tended to assume from my size that I was just some hired muscle, so one day early on in Oswald’s employ, in a fit of utter insanity, I dyed my short, curly black hair bright blue, the predominant color of the skies over my Daddy’s farm.  Coincidentally, as I soon found out, it was also the color the ladies from a particularly discriminating pleasure palace dyed their hair.  After my Lord’s initial shock and a good laugh at my expense when we walked into The Hen’s Coop that very night, I found to my Lord’s delight that it had the unintended benefit of confusing the governors immensely, so I’ve kept my hair blue.

          But, as a child, my hair was still jet black, and I’d stagger unseen, half-asleep, half-awake, the quarter mile or so to the south barn, where I could get some sleep in the pre-dawn silence.  I’d be up with the first rays of ambient sunlight splashing across my eyes, which gave me a few minutes for my only-child fantasy.

          Eventually, one of the roosters — there were two of them sharing a coop, each one somehow believing he was the only rooster around for miles — would stagger out of his coop directly below me and shriek a wakeup alarm.  The other rooster would blurt out a short quip, apparently surprised that there was another rooster around.  He’d crow even louder than the first.  Naturally, the first rooster, amazed that another rooster had encroached on his territory, responded even louder.  Before long, there was a din equaling the crowd’s noise when old Emperor Seraphim VI deigned to visit one of the eighty three planets in his empire.  Well, at least the crowd’s noise when his new Empress, Jewel, stepped out of the space-to-ground transport, in one of her famous shimmering, is-it-transparent-or-isn’t-it gowns and her long, black hair both fluttering about her shapely curves with every step.

          No, on second thought, the roosters were louder.

          Those dueling roosters signaled the start of my day for many years before Lord Oswald happened upon me. 

          Lord Adrian Oswald is actually a prince, one of the many heirs to the emperor — His Grace’s first wife’s sister’s grandson, to be exact — but he prefers to use the title Lord instead.  He says it’s less pretentious.

          A humbler man I’ve never met, perfectly satisfied with his position, with never a thought about advancement beyond the planetary governing of my Oasis.  Although, judging from the way he looks at the Empress Jewel, he’d be more than happy to accept a promotion to emperor if it includes the lovely Jewel as well.

          For nearly a decade now, I’ve been his personal secretary, keeping his appointments, scheduling his entertainments and frequent travels, sometimes even helping with battle strategy when the need arises.  Lord Oswald claims I have a knack for killing people in interesting ways, even if it’s just vicariously through the legion, Prince Oswald’s personally-selected planetary-wide defense troops.

          That’s not to say that I couldn’t kill someone personally.  I stand more than a head taller than most people, almost two heads more than Lord Oswald — even that tall pretty-boy Prince Vere, the emperor’s favorite heir and, not incidentally, grand-nephew, shrinks beside me — and my arms are as big around as a forty-foot elm tree.  Working on a farm for most of my childhood, I developed the muscles to match my size, so killing a man isn’t beyond my abilities.  I’ve just never done it.

          For the last half hour or so, I’d been listening to Lord Oswald’s regional governors bicker among themselves about who was entitled to what taxes and what kind of trade limitations were appropriate and other boring government crap.  I was reminded of the roosters back home on the farm, and I kept drifting away from the arguments, trying to decide if the governors were louder than the roosters or not, even though I was supposed to be taking minutes for the interminable meeting.

          The sound swelled and ebbed cyclically, hypnotically, until at last the spell was broken by the slam of a door.  The echo bounced around the hall in the ensuing silence as every eye in the room instantly found Lady Redwing standing by the only exit.  I glanced at my Lord, who looked ready to admonish the Lady for her interruption before wisely checking his watch.  When he realized what time it was, he merely shut his eyes to the Lady and massaged his temples in a vain attempt to ward off the inevitable headache that accompanied Lady Redwing’s Thursday afternoon visits.