Excuse me, I must make a point. It might not be the most popular point in the world, but it is a point that must be done.

A lot of you seem to be running with “Well, even if Soviet propaganda made us unreasonably scared of nuclear war, this is to the good because it prevented a nuclear war.”

Um…. it sure did. Or at least it prevented us from doing a first strike… Which honestly given the presidents we had those years was probably not very likely.

On the other hand, it also prevented us from using conventional warfare for real, or pretty much do anything except oppose Soviet expansionism and adventurism — which was essential to their survival since socialism is always parasitic and extreme examples, the kind we call communism are parasitic and destructive, meaning the only way to avoid complete starvation is to devour other countries — in a token way, with our troops hemmed in by ridiculous ROE and not allowed to win. Though even then, most of the time, unless the thing was in our face, we just sent the Soviets sharp worded letters. And leftist presidents? They didn’t even do that.

While we were avoiding very hard offending the Soviets because after all they had the same arsenal we did or more, and they were on an hair trigger and if we said boo, they’d eliminate us.

But that’s okay, right? Because we didn’t send a first strike.

Look, this is nonsense. It’s fossilized “nukes will kill da urth” shite in the back of your brains.

Peace is lovely. War is always awful. But sometimes war is needed. Period. And peace is sometimes too costly.

Arguably the “cold” part of the cold war, that counterfeit peace, cost a lot of people all over the world. It cost the deaths of the “little wars”, the destruction of economies, wealth and ability to create and invent all over the world. It caused the deaths of American service men fighting with both legs in a sack of ROE. It cost us our overculture and academic integrity being infiltrated and corrupted by the soviets, because of course the intellectuals were so scared of the superior Soviet might (and just a little turned on, as they always are by despots) and hoping they’d been eaten last. It might in fact have cost us our country. I don’t think it will, because we’re still fighting. But except for a few lucky breaks, it could have, plunging the whole world in a morass of civilization (and population) destroying “socialism” for a while.

Is that worth it? Because we avoided the big bad nukes (largely non existent on the Soviet side. Oh, they had some, but nowhere near parity, and for a while at the beginning, they in fact had almost none) and deaths from hot war?

I don’t know. I don’t know and neither do you. And don’t go pretending you do because you can paint mind-pictures of little girls dying in nuclear explosions.

Do you know how many graves were filled all over the world by the Soviet expansionism that we allowed? I heartily advise you to read a history of Cuba since the Castros. I advise you to read the black book of communism. I don’t know if any books have been written about what the Soviets and their Cuban mercenaries did in Africa. What I know are mostly first person, eye witness accounts, but if you distill the worst of The Black Book Of Communism, then steep it in the juice of nightmares you’ll be there.

So, would it have been better if we’d realized how much stronger than the Soviets we were and had put an end to their blustery larceny and mass murder? Maybe. Or maybe, as I suggested on Monday’s post if our more “progressive” leftist presidents had realized they had the ability to remake the world to their crazier dreams, we might be in a worse position.

My husband likes to believe we’re living in the best of all possible worlds. And maybe we are. Maybe.

But here’s the thing: we don’t know. We can’t now. Even now, a lot of our thinking and still a lot of our war theory, a lot of our thought, a lot of our calculations of war and peace are polluted by the propaganda pounded into our heads.

It’s entirely possible that really, refraining from pounding the Soviet horror and letting it prance all over the world was the best result of a bad situation. Or possibly it could have been better and fewer people might have died.

But we have no way of knowing. And it’s irrational and stupid to pretend we do.

Look, to give a more recent example: perhaps locking down was the best thing that could have been done with COVID. Oh, not because the virus was terrible, but because the propaganda machine of the dems might have managed to start a civil war to set themselves up to steal the election. Maybe this is the best of all possible worlds, and it will presently rain ice-cream from a clear blue sky.

But the events happened because of massive propaganda. Not only didn’t we make the decision clear-eyed, we still don’t know what happened. And we might never know. And this burns me beyond what I can reasonably explain.

It is the same thing with the lies and pervasive propaganda by the Soviets. It caused us to do things in a way we might not even have considered if we knew the truth.

Is the result still the best?

I don’t know and neither do you.

This upsets me terribly, but not as much as people pretending that it was all worth it.

As though they could know.

Newspeak Nations: How Language Erases Struggles – by Charlie Martin

I’ve been re-reading George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” again, something I recommend anyone interested in politics or writing should do regularly. Here’s a bit that struck me today:

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.

Orwell, like Ayn Rand, wasn’t so much inventing a fictional world as he was fictionalizing the world he knew, enhancing it to make a point. To clarify it, Orwell wrote in the Appendix to 1984:

“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible,…”

The thing is, we’re not dealing with Newspeak, at least in detail. Instead we are seeing people on both sides parroting phrases they’ve heard elsewhere in place of thinking about what they mean.

My maternal grandfather Bill McClintock was born in the Choctaw Nation. Now, by definition, a nation is a group of people with a shared culture, history, and identity. There’s no question that the Choctaw Nation was and is a nation.

But when he was born there in 1895, the Choctaw Nation was part of Indian Territory, along with the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, and the others of the Five Civilized Tribes. The Indian Territory was part of, and under the authority of, the United States. Grandfather was born in the United States, not in some country — I don’t know, Choctawland maybe.

Through a succession of decisions made by the Great White Father, Indian Territory was broken up, opened to white settlement, and eventually became part of the state of Oklahoma.

Now, by definition, a country is a defined geographic area with an independent government, and borders.

There was no country of Choctawland because while it had more or less fixed boundaries, it was wholly contained in the United States, and while there was a tribal government, it was effectively subservient to the Federal government and not really independent or sovereign at all. (Oh, there was some face-saving assertion of sovereignty, but it was subject to regular intrusions, more in sorrow than in anger.)

This linguistic distinction—nation versus country—matters. I felt it sharply when someone claimed Israel was a country long before May 14, 1948. My objection isn’t about doubting Am Yisrael, the Jewish people, who have existed for millennia, nor do I question their deep historical and spiritual connection to Judea or their right to return to their ancestral homeland. My issue is the sloppy conflation of nation with country, which muddies history and erases struggle.

To unpack this, let’s look at the Balfour Declaration:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The language there is instructive—hard to beat the imperial sleight-of-hand of a British diplomat—in that it says “a national home for the Jewish people.” The phrasing is cagey, leaving room for endless interpretation, but it was declaring that Jews should have the right to enter Palestine when it was removed from Ottoman control.

What it didn’t say was that the Jewish nation was to be a Jewish country. And, under the Balfour Declaration, it wasn’t. In effect, the British were asserting their intention to create a Jewish Reservation in Palestine, just as the United States created an Indian reservation following the Removal. You remember, the “Trail of Tears.”

There followed 30 years of struggle and a revolutionary movement to establish the country, the state of Israel in the territory once called Palestine since the Romans.

Insisting that Israel had been a country since time immemorial denies the struggle that made Israel a state, and denies the ability to think about that struggle.

When someone insists Israel was a country “since time immemorial,” they’re not just wrong—they’re wielding language to erase history, much like Newspeak aimed to erase thought.

Just as the Choctaw Nation’s struggle for autonomy was buried under U.S. promises of “sovereignty,” the Jewish nation’s (Am Yisrael’s) fight for a state was no foregone conclusion but a hard-won victory against imperial odds.

To conflate nation with country is to deny those struggles, to dull our ability to think about power and resistance. Clear language isn’t just pedantry—it’s a rebellion against the fog that hides truth.

So, the short version of this is: I decided to go on a trip through how I fell in love with the science fiction genre. My voyage was facilitated by there being only one imprint of science fiction books when I was in Portugal (though there were some fly by night imprints and the occasional Brazilian translation. Also at one time this amazing collection supposed to be read by artificial light without glare. It was light blue. Lasted like 3 books, but that was when I was in my early twenties.) Anyway, it’s not absolutely certain that I real all of these books, let alone in this order. For a look at what reading science fiction in Portugal in the seventies, at least for an oddball young girl was a different experience. I gave a fuller account here.

However, there is a chance I’ve read any book of Colecção Argonauta if not owned, at least borrowed. (I had entire friendships because my friend’s parents had a shelf of science fiction books. I regret to say I was a terrible human being when in pursuit of books to read. Truth is, my parents didn’t speak to their daughter about science fiction. I could have had a safer, more socially acceptable like pot. But nooooo. It was science fiction.)

This is the first of the books I ran into that I remember reading, and of course, I remember Ray Bradbury. Ray Bradbury was one of three authors I’d buy sight unseen, look for in every shop that carried SF, and in the bookshelves of friends, casual acquaintances and teachers. (The other two were Heinlein and… Clifford Simak.)

I selected my favorites with no particular encouragement and knowing absolutely nothing about them. The reasons I liked them was that their books gave me pleasure. Later I added other favorites, and some of them are on the list of books ahead. There were also a list of other authors marked “Sometimes like” and a list of “can tolerate.”

But those three never disappointed.

They are, of course, completely different in voice and texture, but I loved them all.

You can look his bio up, if you need refreshing. I’ll give my non-bio impressions of Ray Bradbury. He reads as wonderfully in English as in Portuguese translation (that’s rare. Though Heinlein does too. The texture of both is remarkably consistent in both languages. Again, very rare.)

Ray Bradbury is the kind of writer you read not only for his thoughts — though they’re often quite incisive or even surprising (a quality you want in science fiction) — but for the dream-like, poetic quality of his language. (Or at least I do.) He is a writer you can get drunk on. I knew enough to know he was more acceptable to high fallutin’ literature teachers and professors than my other vices. So when I needed to convert bunch of them to allow me to write papers about science fiction or include science fiction in the school library, it was Bradbury I handed them.

He’s also the graveyard of newbies. I haven’t been in a lot of writers’ groups, but in almost every one of them, there was a kid who came in who wanted to write like Bradbury, and mostly was writing very bad Bradbury pastiche.

The reason for this, of course, is that Bradbury has the bardic gift. No, hear me out. It is a condition of mind, perhaps of being touched by the divine or eternity, which makes you a little unmoored in time and a lot attuned to language and a sort of dream state that evokes deeper truths beyond what they actually think they’re writing.

No, of course I can’t tell you that objectively, but it is the internal explanation I’ve come up with for how Bradbury did what he did. And it helps understand his books at a deeper level and beyond the mere plain storytelling.

Yes you can take me to take a hike on that. And I can tell you “Fight me.”

Which brings us to The Martian Chronicles.

https://amzn.to/3GQQvRWThe Martian Chronicles

(This edition, which yes, has my associate’s link which means I win a tiny commission at no cost to you comes with an introduction by the author.)

I know it was the first Bradbury I read, because I expected something completely different when I first read it. I was I think 12 or maybe 13, and I remember reading it in Summer, because I remember reading it on the terrace, atop of my parent’s garage. And I remember I expected something very different. You see, the spine said Science Fiction, so I expected … well, calculations, and how to build a rocket, and the detailed colonization story.

What I got instead glossed over the exact measurements and the calculations and went straight into … well…. fantasy. Or at least more fantasy than what I expected.

And yet, it grabbed me right up and transported me into a world that was impossible, and which yet I completely believed. I’m not going to say short story by short story, and of course this is a novel composed of short stories.

I no longer remember how I felt about it at 12 other than “I like” but I know how I feel about it now. First of all, obviously, I enjoyed the book. Now a bit of deeper analysis.

The things he gets incredibly right:

1- this quasi-dreaming fantasy feel might be the best way to narrate the encounter between two cultures so alien to each other as humans and (this story’s) Martians.

2- He doesn’t make the Martians into noble savages and the humans into crude invaders. In fact in the very first stories, the Martians come across as pretty awful.

3- He gives us humans good and bad and makes us root for them.

4- the xenophobic idiot is the bad guy.

5- well, he’s BRADBURY. The worst story in this is better than anything I’ve ever written. He suggests things he never says, and we’ll get into that in a moment.

The things he gets wrong — in my opinion! —

1- he partakes of the belief in the nuclear war fear mongering propaganda which was quite normal in this place and time and honestly he probably couldn’t have been published without it.

2- This one is utterly baffling but I finally figured it out by noodling: He has all the new colonists abandon Mars to go back to Earth when war broke out. This broke me out of a it for a day or so, and I had to walk around to process it.

You see, I couldn’t understand it, because I am me, and I belong to my generation. Years and years, growing up I heard how the Earth was just going to break out in nukes all over, and after that it would be unlivable.

If my generation had gotten away and be in Mars for twenty years, and war broke out on Earth, and it were the kind of war where everything completely falls apart and will not be habitable for a long time? Hey, we’re staying on Mars, perhaps toasting the explosions in the night sky.

But this is not what Bradbury’s experience was. He was born in 1920, so he would have grown up on stories of immigrants in America abandoning everything to go back and to Europe and fight for the countries they left behind. And he probably saw it again in WWII, at least among the British immigrants.

Other than that, as I said, I greatly enjoyed the book, probably as much, maybe more than I did when I was a teen.

There is one hinted at thing that I think struck me the first time. I think so because at some other time, I read Dark They Were And Golden Eyed, and I agglutinated to this novel so i was convinced it would be in it.

Why did I think that. Well, of course, in DTWAGE the humans who have immigrated to Mars become the Martians we saw at the end of beginning of the Martian Chronicles.

The reason this made perfect sense to me is a story in the middle of The Martian Chronicles, in which a Martian Youth headed to a party in one of his cities crosses time-paths with a young Earth colonist headed for a party in one of his cities.

They argue over which of them is in the future of the other. And you get this sense of vertigo, like they don’t know and neither do you. And of course, DTWAGE ties a bow in that, so maybe they are both right.

Anyway, highly enjoyable and evocative and it gave me a little chance to enjoy the same magic I experienced when I first read it.

Next week, well… next week is complicated.

Next up is Tomorrow Sometimes Comes, by F. G. Reyer. The book can be obtained from Amazon, but in paper and for $30. And since I have no memory of it at all, I don’t want to take the plunge. The next book after that is even worse. Its the first book of the Lucky Starr series, and it runs into the hundreds of dollars.

With your permission — right? — I’m going to skip these two and advance right into this beauty:

Since you probably are looking at it and going “er… what?” … well, this is The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle by A.E. Van Vogt. (And again, I earn a small commission if you buy it through that link.)

I have mixed feelings about it. I’m fairly sure I never read it, because having read about the voyages of the Beagle in my early teens, I’d have remembered this. And I used to love A. E. Van Vogt. While not making it into the top three, he was solidly in the second tier, with such people as Poul Anderson.

However, I’ve tried to read him in English, and I haven’t been able to get into any of them. (Which, I grant you, were some of his later, more psychadelic works.)

All I can say is I’m going to try it, and we’re going to see! See you next week for our next installment of Reading The Future of the Past.

I have finished Martian Chronicles, and will give you a review tomorrow.

There are a couple of big flaws in the book, but not enough to outweigh the fact it is a bardic masterpiece in a 100 ways.

The other flaw, which I will discuss tomorrow is understandable and it’s just “the limits of a person in his/her time.” but this one…. This one sticks out like a sore thumb, because it doesn’t feel organic to the story.

Yes, of course I’m talking about the anti-nuclear-war propaganda. The “nukes are going to end the world and life as we know it.”

It might have been truly his feelings. Of course, it might. Again the “man of his time, in his time” thing, and in his time, when he wrote the book the propaganda and the fear mongering of “we’re all going to dieeeeeee” was so total and so present in everything that it was impossible to think it might be… well, paid for by the enemy. Which, yes, we now know it was.

But somehow it doesn’t feel organic. It feels like something that was inserted because at the time to publish in science fiction, you must “put in the bit against nukes” or they’d never publish you.

This, you know, is the problem with any centralized industry, much less one that is supposedly dealing in “art” or at least in expression of art-like products.

I could write chapter and verse on it, but of course there was nothing doing at the time. production facilities, distribution facilities, concentration of publishing in a few companies with large offices, (though not as gigantic as they would become) mostly in big cities, all militated to making publishing part of what the immortal Sabrina Chase calls “The entertainment industrial complex.” Which, of course, was staffed by people who’d attended the best colleges and all “knew” the same things.

What they “knew” at that time is that nuclear war would end life on Earth as we know it, including a lot of utterly senseless bs like the nuclear winter, all of it propagated by the USSR the same way the anti-war demonstrations, etc. in W’s presidency were all propagated by communist fronts. (Probably mostly Chinese financed. A lot of things are these days. Might have been Russian, though. They might have had a few pence left over from their anti-fossil-fuel efforts. Oh, heck, who am I kidding, it was probably the commies in USAID.)

But they “knew” it and were filled with urgency to propagate the danger, and therefore any book talking about the future must include at least a reference to the dangers of nuclear war, or nuclear energy or something.

Everyone, from Heinlein on was doing “urgent” stuff about the dangers of nuclear war, though most of Heinlein’s truly scare-writings were in short stories and essays. The novels just sort of waved at it.

We can argue, and will in the comments, I suspect about how real the risk of nuclear war; how real the USSR’s nukes were, how functional most of the nukes around the world (maybe even ours) are now. (Incidentally and interestingly, the last time I was at the Cosmosphere, there was noticeably a lot more cheering for “international” cooperation in space (bah) and in the cold war exhibit the quote from Khrushchev and a notable absence of the plaque saying they actually didn’t have “anything” but these large metal tubes they drove around the country to give us the impression they had more missiles than we did. If I’d known there would be revisions, I’d have taken pictures. Also, I wonder why. Ah, well, humans.)

What we can’t argue though is that the study on the “nuclear winter” was falsified, the idea that it would sterilize the ruin the land forever has been proven nonsense, and while — doubtless — a nuclear war would have been horrible (would still be horrible, if there are still more than a few functional missiles around the world) and wrecked the world for a while, but it would not be the end of the world for by any means.

And coming across stuff that might as well be underlined and highlighted “propaganda to make the US give up right now and get rid of all its nukes and quietly surrender” drives me incoherent.

But, you’ll say, perhaps that propaganda, while it didn’t make us give up our nukes and surrender to the Soviets (thank heavens we elected Ronald Reagan, people!) did it perhaps do a good job in preventing us from going head to head with the Soviets and destroying a lot of things?

Shrug. I don’t know. And neither do you. We don’t have a parallel world to run that experiment on and observe. (And now I have a plot idea!) but here’s the thing: yes, it prevented a lot of destruction. It also created a lot of destruction, because for fear of a head on confrontation we let the USSR stomp all over the world accruing mountains of corpses, misery and ruined futures in Europe, Africa and Asia.

More or less destruction than a nuclear war would have caused? Well, again, I’m out of a parallel world to run the experiment on, but depending on how real and what maintenance they had (kicks imaginary spaceship. “Russian Technology!”) it is arguable and in fact QUITE likely that we got more damage from letting the commies stomp all over the world, for fear of a nuclear war.

Heck, considering the parlous state or our art, culture, history and everything infiltrated by the covert and not so covert Marxism and hatred of our own country… a nuke might have been less damaging. (Stop shouting, and think, really think about how much cr*p we allowed the USSR and for that matter Russia and China to do by treating them as equals.)

OTOH it could be argued, and if I had a parallel world to run tests on (what if our world is where tests are run?) that having the “progressive” establishment know the US was the only super power would be very bad indeed. Would you trust LBJ or for that matter even JFK to not go completely nuts if he knew no one could oppose whatever crazy ideas they came up with. (No, I’m not going to forgive JFK for USAID!)

So, other than the crying need for a world to run tests on is this all about.

Propaganda. In hindsight it is absolutely starkly clear how much we were propagandized and how many lies were in it.

The same can be said for the covidiocy, though a lot of people remain under that panic. Just like, for that matter, there’s a lot of panic still about nuclear war. and a lot of it is hangover of that propaganda.

Propaganda, particularly that pervasive, takes a long long time to work through a society.

Cold war kids, who voted Reagan in, didn’t know that a nuclear war wouldn’t destroy the world either. We were just so tired. Our entire lives we’d been told the hammer might fall at any minute. And honestly we didn’t care anymore. We just wanted to have a chance to win, and let the hammers fall where they may.

And again, even now, not all of us are past the after effects of the propaganda. The trauma comes roaring back every time Putin stomps.

So– remember we didn’t die. Remember that the propaganda melted away when challenged.

And remember how real propaganda can seem, and how it can fool the best of us: scientists, geniuses, artists, poets, even divinely inspired bards like Bradbury. There is no shame in falling for the propaganda, but–

But we must do our best to get at the truth, and mitigate poisonous propaganda. Because in and of itself, it can create as much destruction as any nuke.

Nowadays with a more decentralized information regime, there is a much better chance to get at the truth.

And we — both the cold war kids, those who came after, and the newly minted Covid kids — must always, always, always dig to get at the truth.

Before the lies detonate and destroy our entire world.

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM DAN MELSON: Bubbles Of Creation (Connected Realms Book 3)

It’s fascinating at the junction of universes – until one of them starts throwing shockwaves!

Alexan and Petra have settled into an idyllic life as Jarl and Frue of Ygg, each satisfying their respective divine curses. But Siluria next door starts generating massive shockwaves, unable to absorb the energy being generated by the scourgings every seven days. Worse, Siluria is home to the warlike diligar, who are likely to launch an invasion as their home is ravaged.

It’s hard to unravel a puzzle the size of several universes. Alexan has only just begun to solve it when one of his experiments poisons an enigmatic divinity far greater than himself or Petra.

But mistakes can also provide opportunities.

Book Three of Connected Realms

FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: Theophany

Ten years ago the Savients took over Niban, forcing the independent inhabitants into poverty and despair. Bass White saw the careless cruelty of the Savients kill his mother and his father. When a resistance cell is discovered in his city bloc, the Savients seek to make everyone pay.

With his wife Amie, Bass races into the caverns to escape the Savients’ brutal enforcers: the Atrasai. The couple barely make it to the limits of known territory outside their underground city, however, before the Atrasai catch up with them. It would take a miracle to save them…

…or a combat medic robot.

Join Bass and Amie in this sci-fi story of healing, hope, and wonder. After a decade of fear and pain, even a little light can bring out the best in man and machine. But will the best be enough to heal?

FROM J. MANFRED WEICHSEL: The Calydonian Boar Hunt

King Oeneus has just been given the secret of wine by the god Dionysus. Unable to hold his liquor, the drunken monarch forgets to honor Artemis at the harvest festival. In revenge, the angry goddess sends a crazed wild boar to ravage the kingdom with burning breath and razor-sharp tusks. Nothing can stop it.

The befuddled king, desperate to save his land, calls upon the greatest heroes of Greece to hunt the beast. Meleager, the king’s son, reluctantly finds himself leading a group of men he doesn’t respect or trust.

Soon the party of mighty mythical heroes is on the trail of the fearsome monster – but one of them is a heroine! Atalanta is a huntress to match Artemis herself, and quickly wins the heart of Meleager, despite the objections of the others.

Will one of the men make the kill, or will they be humiliated when the prize goes to a woman? Will Prince Meleager woo and win Atalanta, or will the gods intervene? Who will die and who will survive in this tale of loves and even greater lusts in ancient Greece?

A rip-roaring tale of jealousy and foul play, a family at war with itself and a battle of the sexes – told in Weichsel’s unique, no-holds-barred style. A pulse-pounding adventure that will appeal to fans of fantasy and horror, a wild ride through the weirder corners of Greek mythology. Strap on your sandals, grab your spear, and get ready to hunt the wildest boar of them all.

FROM JOHN DAVID MARTIN: The Lost Sword and Other Stories: A Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Alternate History

Jared Thorne: A para-human detective and his dryad wife hunting for a legendary lost sword in a multi-dimensional city.
Eysteinn Bjarnarson: A descendant of the viking who settled North America fighting to win the love of the town beauty. His only opposition? A monster of Indigenous Canadian legend and…her father.
Captain Faust of the North American Marine Corps: A descendant of one Dr. Johannes Faust who learns some deals are heriditary. But can they be re-written?
Milo “Wolfkiller” Patel: A teenage bullrider on an alien world facing the challenge of his young career.
Pawel and Tamar: Newlywed asteroid miners whose wedding cruise from the trans-Martian orbit out to the belt turns deadly.
These are the characters whose stories I have faithfully recorded for you here.

FROM JESSICA MEIGS: The Becoming (The Becoming Series Book 1)

The Michaluk Virus is loose.
It will take all of Cade’s skills to survive it.

A deadly virus has escaped the CDC in Atlanta, and Cade Alton is blindsided when it reaches Memphis and strikes down the heart of her family in a frenzy of blood and terror. Forced to dredge up military skills she hasn’t used in years, Cade teams up with her best friend in order to survive the onslaught and escape the city.

But fleeing Memphis doesn’t mean the end of her troubles. As the virus continues its relentless spread across the Southeastern United States, she finds herself surrounded by virtual strangers who have banded together for survival. And not everyone is getting along.

When the virus reaches their Mississippi safe house and they’re forced to flee, Cade is faced with a difficult choice: accompany her best friend back to Memphis in a search for his wife, or travel with the others to rescue a survivor trapped in Biloxi. No matter which she chooses, the options will have deep repercussions not only on her life, but on the group’s very survival.

If you love survivor-focused post-apocalyptic stories in the vein of the Rot & Ruin Series by Jonathan Maberry or Mira Grant’s Feed Series, then you’ll want to take a bite out of Jessica Meigs’ The Becoming!

Pick up your copy of The Becoming and start the epic tale of survival today!

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Last Pendragon (Legends Book 1)

“The last thing I expected when I went to grieve in the mountains was to get chased by werewolves, kidnapped by a dragon, or meet a legend. But that was exactly what happened.”–Sara Hawke

Sara Hawke, a highly-educated former PhD candidate in Linguistics, is plunged into a situation that strains her skepticism: first she meets a pack of werewolves while camping on the night of the full moon, then she’s rescued by a man the werewolves seemed to fear. Her rescuer then decides that she’ll be good company until he decides to let her go. Then he tells her that she has the potential to be a sorceress, and offers to teach her.

Along the way, she learns that legends aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be, and are occasionally more than they seem…

FROM KAREN MYERS: Tales of Annwn – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Story Collections Book 1)

A Collection of Five Short Stories from The Hounds of Annwn.

The Call – A very young Rhian discovers her beast-sense and, with it, the call of a lost hound.

It’s not safe in the woods where cries for help can attract unwelcome attention, but two youngsters discover their courage in the teeth of necessity.

Under the Bough – Angharad hasn’t lived with anyone for hundreds of years, but now she is ready to tie the knot with George Talbot Traherne, the human who has entered the fae otherworld to serve as huntsman for the Wild Hunt. As soon as she can make up her mind, anyway.

George has been swept away by his new job and the people he has met, and by none more so than Angharad. But how can she value the short life of a human? And what will happen to her after he’s gone?

Night Hunt – When George Talbot Traherne goes night hunting for fox in Virginia, he learns about unworthy men from the old-timers drinking moonshine around the fire and makes his own choices.

Who could have anticipated that the same impulse that won him his old bluetick coonhound would lead him to his new wife and the hounds of Annwn? Every choice has a cost, he realizes, but never a regret.

Cariad – Luhedoc is off with his adopted nephew Benitoe to fetch horses for the Golden Cockerel Inn. He’s been reunited with his beloved Maëlys at last, but how can he fit into her capable life as an innkeeper? What use is he to her now, after all these years?

Luhedoc needs to relearn an important lesson about confidence.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Bowl of Red (The Shifter Series Book 4)

Dragon shifter Tom Ormson wanted two things: to serve killer souvlaki at his Colorado diner and enjoy married life with his pregnant panther-shifter wife. Instead, he got unwanted psi powers and a dragon triad syndicate demanding his leadership.

When Kyrie’s grandfather is found murdered, police officer Rafiel—Tom and Kyrie’s closest friend—must solve the case while being pulled into a power struggle for lion clan leadership. With all shifter clans in turmoil, separating allies from suspects becomes a deadly game.

The suspect list grows wilder by the minute: murderous chicken shifters, a skull-collecting otter who teaches art history, a Minotaur delivery man, chaos-causing spider monkeys, and an alligator shifter who might be a double agent. Meanwhile, Rafiel’s dragon girlfriend visiting town might get caught in the crossfire.

In Goldport, Colorado, the special of the day comes with a side of shapeshifter chaos. Just don’t ask about the capybara incident.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Sound of One Child Crying

Who is the child Reza can hear crying every time she goes to the new addition to the Royal Library? Her boss insists there is no child, that it is nothing more than her uncanny sensitivity to the unseen world making a nuisance of itself.

Worse, searching for answers gets her angry rebukes about respect for the dead. The further Reza goes, the more certain she becomes that someone is hiding an ugly secret.

It’s a secret that traces back two generations, to a dark period in this land’s history. A time most people would prefer to forget, not caring that denial doesn’t make a problem go away.

The truth may set you free, but not without a price. And Reza fears that death itself might turn out to be an easier price than the one demanded of her.

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: 202504 Here Comes the Judge

Collection of current events and various thoughts from April 2025. Things are getting messier and we’re all just trying to hold on. This is my attempt to keep track of what’s going on and why. Whatever court of law we’re headed towards, we’re all defendants and don’t even understand all the charges. Can we trust the judge to do the right thing?

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: JEALOUS

Yeah, yeah, things got delayed because …. well, I hope I’m not getting sick again. It is possible. The thyroid prescription has been upped to maybe stop this cycle.

I’ve actually been up since — much too late 10:30. I mean the cats thought we’d died. But it was the two of us, so maybe it’s something else? — but exceptionally ADD with it and not getting much of anything done, though much started.

Anyway, part of the … interruption …. was a young friend who’s been down a long time, and her normal “popping back up” mechanisms aren’t working.

And I want to talk about that, and about the whole whole mess with health. Not whining this time, I hope, but explaining why I keep making the hand I was dealt worse. I’m doing this because I think a lot of us have that problem, and I suspect at least one of you out there needs to hear this.

First, look, when our cats start getting older, we take them for checkups every six months. Because they hide when they’re sick. And sometimes a checkup catches something that can be fixed with a tablet, and it means they live another five years, not five months.

And if you’re saying “But I’m not old”. It all depends on perspective. At this point, to me, everyone looks alike babies. And at the same time, I still feel like a kid, just beginning. I think humans have an internal certainty of their being eternal beings, and as such they know our entire life here, were it a century just makes us infants in eternity. Which is fine.

But talking of the body… Look at my cats. I start taking them for six month checkups at around 10 (unless we’re really broke, then it’s 12. Or beyond broke, in which case neither cats nor humans get checkups.) Because they’re considered elderly at 10. Which in the wild, eating what they can catch, etc. is about right. But you get them checkups and most of ours live 17 to 21 years.

Humans in the wild… ah, you’re good for 35 to 40 years and then things go wrong. You might tick on a couple of decades more, but you’ll be old. Really old.

So–

Yes, things can go wrong younger too, but after 35, consider things might be breaking down, okay?

And here’s the thing, I was talking tot he endo and pointed out I don’t even know what’s a sign of low thyroid or just being sick, or my auto-immune being spicy again, since the three tend to synergize each other into vortex from hell.

But one thing I know, and it’s comforting of a sort: I’ll always blame it on myself, my mind, my personality defects and my not trying hard enough until someone says “Hey, there’s something wrong physically.”

The weird thing? No matter how much I beat myself we wouldn’t have caught this latest thyroid issue, which we only caught because my GP tried to diagnose it as hyperthyroidism (apparently it’s fairly common for GPs to misread the results that way. Heck, I had an endo in Denver do that too.) And one thing I know for sure, having had friends who were hyperthyroidal, when you’re sleeping your life away, your get up and go got up and went, and you’re 80lbs overweight, there is no way in heck you’re hyperthyroidal. So I asked for a referral to a specialist, and yes, the meds helped, though not all the way. (And yes, I was diagnosed as hypothyroidal, not hyper.)

The thing is low thyroid which is disturbingly common in middle aged women is heck to diagnose if you are … me.

If you are chronically depressed, forever checking yourself against reality, and ADD — but can’t medicate because it makes you into a paranoid, aggressive moron — causes you to have to kick your butt into actually working, finishing things, fullfilling obligations, etc, it’s really hard to figure out when things have gone seriously wrong.

The first time my thyroid went wonky (Yes, it got better, but not all the way… And then it went bad in another direction) I went through years of brain fog — which I’d never had before, but you know what it is when you feel it — and until the symptoms were alzheimers-like and the writing stopped, it didn’t occur to me I needed medical help. I was just depressed and being a wimp, you know.

And the other thing I’ve had (and fortunately it’s just annoying) since I had first son (the caesarean) I’d get these black spots on my abdomen, gross black spots, and over time, sometime, these black things came out. I figured out it was because I was so fat, and–

Turns out it’s stitches from the Caesarean working themselves out of the body. (Yes, the OB used the wrong stitches. What else is new.)

Or take my infertility issues. I’ve felt guilty about it for decades. If only I’d not done this, I had done that, if I had– Now they have a diagnoses which also matches stuff that happened when I was 19. Autoimmune. Which shouldn’t shock anyone, but– So, the surprise is not that we only managed two kids with years of treatment and all. It’s that we managed kids at all. Most women with my condition never do.

Honestly, this is such a pattern that while I feel guilty as heck over my weight and the fact I don’t exercise enough, it wouldn’t surprise me even a little bit to find out it’s some problem that you can’t fight with will power and strong enough work ethic.

Because that’s the hardest thing, right? You know yourself. Or at least I know myself. I’m lazy, scattered and have a tendency to get depressed when someone drops a hat across the world.

Again, my solution to anything that goes weird is “kick yourself harder.” And sometimes it works. Heck, most of the time. I’ve managed to be unmedicated for depression for most of my life. (Holds up fingers in V — sixty two years, still at large! The fools! Mwahaahahah.)

So…. how do you know?

You don’t, but there are some reliable guides:

If something is weird, and isn’t exactly hurting but is just “Uh, that’s weird!”: A spot on the skin, lightheadness at certain times, after certain actions? Sure, maybe it’s nothing, just your body chanting, or whatever. OR– Or it could serious. Drag yourself to a checkup, mention the thing and don’t minimize it. See what it is. (Minimizing meant my husband went with something untreated for 20 years, so…)

If all of a sudden you can’t do anything you’ve done for years, whether that is hiking a mile or writing a novel in a month? Get it checked up. (The most likely cause for a slow down in writing or reading is your eyes, BTW.)

If you’re a depressive and have your protocols in place to deal with it — reality check, take a break, do enjoyable activity, see friends, sleep more, whatever — and it’s simply not working, go in for a checkup. And don’t prejudice them towards psychological issues. Have a blood test. A lot of serious issues, including some cancers first present as “depressions I can’t kick off.” (I remember Eric Flint describing the onset of his cancer long before they figured out it was there as “Depressions from the pit.”) So, check that. Check as much as you can. Your GP will gladly give you happy pills and not look at underlying causes. So describing exhaustion and sleeping too much or whatever and not hopelessness or depression is best to begin with.

And if you find yourself engaging in suicidal ideation out of the clear blue sky? First check if you’re taking Montelucast. No, seriously, it now has a black box warning. And you can take it for years and suddenly the symptom appears. Which is what happened to me.

If you’re not, run, don’t walk to a doctor, and yes, tell them what is going on. Because nothing is solved by the world having a you shaped hole in it.

…. And now I’m going to have some caffeine and go revise. Speaking of explaining things just not working, would you believe I forgot caffeine this morning? No wonder I have nothing done. Argh.

This is not my post about the Martian Chronicles, or not the full post at any rate. Mostly because I’m still at 25%. I’ve been rationing it — it’s not difficult to read — because Bradbury is contagious on the word sense level, and I’m in the middle of a revision that I don’t want full of poetic light and sound.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the poetic vision. On the contrary. But if the middle chapters are THAT people will wonder what good drugs I had for those chapters and why I didn’t take them for the rest of the book.

I will say though when I first read The Martian Chronicles, sometime in the long summer of adolescence, between 12 and 18 or so, and being UTTERLY baffled by it. You see, I was expecting a normal science fiction book about colonizing Mars.

But I liked poetry.

Coming from a long line of poets and people who told epic tales in beautiful language, having been trained to “no, that’s not the right word, try again. That word in that sentence is cacophonic. Try for euphonic.” from the moment I could speak, or at least as far back as I could remember (the injunction was usually more subtle.) poetry worked for me.

Bu the book disturbed me and left me with the sense I’d missed something.

As it turned out, I was right. Though perhaps getting Martian Chronicle the way it’s hitting me this go round takes having immigrated and acculturated, as well as having spent the last thirty years reading tales of first encounters, civilization, discovery, colonization around the world.

Which is weird since Bradbury never did any of that. But then poets are weird. There is a reason it used to be considered one of the poetic gifts. Like prophecy or soothsaying. Their minds are not all in the same dimension, nor do they move in a linear fashion.

Anyway, this brings us to how the stories are hitting me: the lost expeditions, the reactions from the Martians, how things work out…

They hit …. about right, including the flying language reaching for what can’t quite be expressed in words.

Look, even on Earth, when cultures long-separated meet, the misunderstandings, not understanding at all and either imbuing with supernaturally good characteristics or… well, the opposite, go on forever.

And are sometimes lethal. I’ve pointed out before that things like the Boer war with the Zulus stemmed from a fundamental mistake on the part of the Zulus. They were waging perfectly normal, effective war, as our ancestors did in the Neolithic, if the tales of the grave are to be believed.

When a new tribe appears in your territory, or territory you want, you go all our and commit what we’d consider heinous massacres, doing horrible things to everyone, including women and children. This shows the other tribe that you’re scary and mean business. They retreat. (Unless they’re stronger, or can’t, in which case they do the same to you till you retreat.)

But they weren’t prepared for meeting an…. international culture that communicated by writing and was so far from tribal they considered all humans people.

In that light their atrocities weren’t scary. I mean, they were that, but they were more. Enough to make the Westerners looking on wonder if they were human or even had souls.

From then on their loss was spelled out.

The story with Amerindians is the same. (Yes, they are indeed Native Americans. They were born here, most of them. Seriously. Just because their legends say they were here since the Earth and the sky, blah blah blah, we KNOW that’s a lie. I don’t like lies. Maybe they were here forever “spiritually”. It doesn’t matter. Is “Indian” a misnomer based on a mistake. Sure is. What? Are other peoples in the world not misnamed. I’m not at home to this kind of linguistic insanity.) Only they had better PR and Europeans, bedazzled by Rosseau endowed them with “noble savage” clothing. (Savage they indeed were, since they waged neolithic-like war.)

Viewed in that light, what the Palestianians did on 10/7 is the same kind of cultural mistake –but it begs the question: Where did these people come from? Were they imported wholesale from the neolithic? And while on that, why do they think this is their territory? — and is at long last getting the same kind of response from civilized humans. Because cultures don’t change any other way and use humans as mere vessels.

Anyway, now imagine you’re not meeting another human culture, separated a few thousand — or a few hundred — years, but something totally and completely alien, with no frame of reference.

I particularly like the story of the second expedition in Martian Chronicles, in which the Martians never even know an expedition landed because they know these people are crazy and causing infectious hallucinations via telepathy.

That is, of course, unlikely. Or is it? Have you seen some of humanity’s more… interesting explanations for what they don’t understand and which doesn’t fit our frame of reference? To save yourself embarrassment look up “scientific” theories of the past. I bet you we’re doing the same a few places, but of course we’d never know it. Because it’s us doing it.

I laugh, every time I hear announcements that the government is going to “reveal” aliens.

If aliens are here, there’s a good chance they’re so different we’re not aware of them.

And probably they’re not aware of us either.

That light in your house that turns on and off for no reason any of you can figure out?

It’s because the aliens who share your house and think it’s a natural formation like it that way.

Alive and also still under the weather. Thyroid medication got upped.

I will in fact try to put up a post a little later today. Until then….

Have a pretty pic or two. Tell me what stories they suggest. (They’re mine, but they’re on Pixabay, so free. Why? Well, because they were cluttering my drive and while Pixabay doesn’t really pay artists, I’ve had a lot of pics from them over the years.)

Oh, yeah, a side-note that will amuse you: my kindle stopped functioning suddenly early morning two days ago. Okay, fair. It was an oasis, now four years old, and had issues. (They discontinued the Oasis for a reason.)

I got an old kindle I’ve got by, which has a crack, but still works, and ordered a paperwhite. (The use I make of them … it’s worth it.) I’m still using the old one though till it arrives….

…. found Indy chewing on it. He ate part of the cover.

Not sure what to do about this. Something will come. I think he’s attacking it because it takes mom’s attention. Sigh. THAT CAT.

Post anoon. Or probably right after noon.

I have a doctor’s appointment today which will allow him to wrap up the thyroid saga.

Still, why no post. As we all know I often write these the evening before.

Well, the problem is this: I’m actually working again. As in at normal rate.

I might or might not have told you that I got grabbed by the scruff of the neck and dragged to the computer room, two months ago to revise the monster novel.

To explain, I’m not over-revising or guilding (which as we all know is a combination of gilding and deguelo?) gilding the lilly. It’s just that this novel has been in my head so long that there’s a ton of stuff I know so well I think it’s in the text and is not. Stuff like “did I tell them in my weird world adoption and real birth are blurred?”. Put it another way, there is a lot of this book in my head, which is why the inner writer grabbed me and took me to the desk to do a full go-over.

And it should have been done at least a month ago. At least a month ago.

But then the once and future upper respiratory infection came back. I’m now at the other end of it at last. I swear this was worse than the first instance of it, and as bad as the one in October. (Why it keeps recurring? Well, asthma. Chronic and untreated. Mostly because I dislike inhalers of the daily kind. But younger DIL has talked me into talking to doctor about a daily pill. (NOT Montelucast. I got the suicidal depression side effect from that. But now apparently there are alternatives.) but also my thyroid is screwed up and that does weird things to your immune system.)

Anyway I’m now at the other end of it, and with thyroid and two hard and fast upper respiratory infections, I am three months late on the book, and I’m impatient, so I’m trying to get on with it.

Two days ago I did two chapters. Yesterday I did my normal — seven — but the problem is that by night time I was unsure of my name and iffy about any other words. So I can work normal amounts, I just can’t bounce back from it like normal. Yet — YET!

Now, on making my assistant happy. She says since I’m moving on on the edits it’s time to publicize (you guys please keep the prayer wheels spinning that I don’t get sick again. Until this is done I can’t seem to finish Rhodes or Witch’s Daughter. And you know you’re waiting. Even if you guys hate this or it sells ten copies and it’s to the alpha readers! (The assistant AND Dan are going to kill me for saying this.) Anyway, she says I have to put up the new cover and the first and second chapters.

You’ve seen the first chapter, which would give you the impression this is a mil SF. (I hate that. I hate chapters that lead you…. weirdly. But it is what it is.) It is not. Remember this book was created by my reaction — AT FOURTEEN — to the left hand of Darkness.

So, in the second chapter the weird starts. If you remember the first well enough, that’s fine. Head on to the second. Or not. I’m just doing this so the assistant is happy. I have, after all to work with her. (And she’s busy with her other job today so it’s going to take her till tonight to read this. Mwahahahahah.)

Oh, yeah, and wish me luck at the endo!

So first the two prospective covers. There’s argument over which is best.

Or

UPDATE: I still like the movement of the cape, and also FOR ME (you don’t have to agree!) capes say space opera. But the face issue is taken. So, hear me out:

And now the text!

AHEM: Coming soon!

No Man’s Land

Sarah A. Hoyt

© 2025 by Sarah A. Hoyt

Hero

Skip:

Everything was going fine, until my father stopped giving orders.

Okay. No. So everything was not fine. For one we had been ambushed.

Which was the problem.

There are no ambushes in space battles. My father had dinned the theory and practice of space battles into my skull before I entered the Academy at twelve.  Which is as good a place as any to say I was a child prodigy.

Or maybe I wasn’t. There isn’t really any way to tell. Late born son of a brilliant father and a demanding mother — My father named me Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, for crying out loud! —  it was clear enough what I was supposed to do. What I was supposed to be. I wasn’t genetically improved – or not so that anyone would ever admit to – so it was just…  Look, I had to be what I had to be.  And that meant I was a young boy admitted to a private but prestigious military academy five years earlier than everyone else there.  Which meant I had to graduate as fast as I could.

This is how I ended up as my father’s second in command at the battle of Karan. At seventeen.

And we were ambushed.  But there are no ambushes in space. Just like there are no ambushes on the high seas.

You see the enemy approach for days on end. The best you can do is conceal your strategy or your capabilities from them. But you can’t hide. There’s nothing to hide in or behind. Certainly not with a Schrodinger-drive ship. You can’t port near enough to a planet that would hide you. And you certainly can’t port close to the enemy. Or rather you can, but then the risk of porting to the same space as the enemy and achieving the most pyrrhic victory of all time is high.

And we had intelligence – we had intelligence! – from the Nivirim side.  They had no technology we didn’t have, and their ships had a tendency to fall apart because, well, forced labor doesn’t build good ships.  And there was no way to hide a ship in space.

There was no way.

So my father, commanding five battle cruisers, the entire war fleet of her royal majesty Queen Madeline of Britannia On High, empress of the Star Empire had ported to a nowhere convergence called Karan.  Oh, there was some reason for it, including the fact that Karan gave access to other port points, which gave access to other port points which would put our colony worlds of Eire and Hy-Brasil and Prester within reach.  Which meant if we let the Nivirim fleet port there and hold it, with no contest, those colonies would be vulnerable, or call it actually enslaved, given the Nivirim system of government.

That’s the high-level version of the situation, which is all I knew at the time.

The trip to orbit, in order to port to Karan took a day, and then we were there.  There was the middle of nowhere in space.  In full view of Nivirim vessels. Ten of them, but Father said not to worry. “Battles in space aren’t a matter of ship count, Skip,” he said.  “They’re a matter of capabilities, of maneuvering, and of training. And we’re better at all of those.”  He said it after dinner, leaning back in his chair.  His blue eyes crinkled at the corners, the way they did when something amused him.  “Always remember, Skip, free men fight better than slaves.”

I believed him. I still believe him. My father, you see–  My father never gave me any reason to doubt him. Not even then.

Before I tell the story, something must be rightly understood: I look like my mother, Lady Harcaster.  Her ancestors, who had financed the colonization of and ruled over Aeris, all looked like me: colorless, narrow nosed, thin faced, tall and spare, the kind of people who grow older by getting thinner and dryer and harder, like aged wood.  There are ‘grams of them going back to the time of colonization and they probably look more lifelike than the originals.

Growing up with Mother I always knew exactly what she expected of me.  And what she expected of me was always impossible. So, of course, I did it.

Father, on the other hand was my anchor. From my earliest memories, I knew Father loved me. So I did what he wanted me to do, not because I feared him, but because I didn’t want to disappoint him.

I suspect that’s why I accepted the appointment as his second in command aboard the HMS Victoria, commanding Britannia on High’s space fleet. Because I got to spend time with father and away from Mother.

Was it stupid? Oh yes. My stupidity or his? Who knows?

“Look, Skip, your rank is largely ornamental,” he said. “And temporary and probationary.  The only reason for you to be Vice-Commodore, fresh off the Academy, is that you stick close to me and you learn. You learn, Skip. That’s all. That’s all you’re doing here. You’re learning.”

I learned. Oh, the blue uniform with the half cape was pretty nice, too. But mostly I learned. Because sure, I’d be the Earl of Harcaster when mother died, and have full rule over Aeris, which I loathed because it was not Capital City. But that was a function of being born to mother, who’d brought the title into the marriage. Being called Lord Harcaster wouldn’t mean anything. Being called Viscount Webson, the junior title of mom’s family, made me feel stupid. It wasn’t something I’d earned. And I wanted to earn something.

When I was at the Academy people kept quoting Father and talking about the victories he’d achieved. I wanted to learn that. I wanted to earn that.

Three days, while Father maneuvered, and the enemy maneuvered, and he planned for every eventuality, was like being back at the Academy. There was a hollo table, and the ships on it, floating in air.  Father moved them. And firing capabilities, and where the weapons were in each ship were discussed, as well as the shielding capabilities though these consisted mostly of turning the proper points to where we knew the enemy weapons were.

It was on the third night, with father and the eight captains and vice captains of the other ships, all assembled, that I asked the stupid question.

They’d just gone over the plan, and something that was constantly mentioned at Academy hadn’t been mentioned at all. I cleared my throat and before I could stop myself, heard my voice say, “Sir, what about boarding? What about preparations for boarding or to prevent boarding?” My voice sounded young, wishful, naïve. In fact, much like the voice of a student. Or a child. I was momentarily glad I hadn’t called him “Father” or – as in childhood – “daddy.”

Look, that was the reason that ships carried each a complement of some five hundred men each at enormous cost.  Because ships got boarded. At the Academy we’d studied five battles where defending your ship from boarding  had turned the tide of the battle. One of those was the first battle my father had fought as commodore, the battle of Ryrr.

But all nine men stared at me as though I’d lost my mind.

“It never happens,” Father said. “Not these last thirty years, Skip. It doesn’t happen. We board. They don’t. Their ships aren’t that agile. They have outmoded maneuvering.”

“But,” I said, feeling that if I’d already made a fool of myself, I might as well go on.  “Why do we have infantry on alert aboard, then? And why do we wear side arms into battle?”

Father patted my shoulder.  He actually patted my shoulder. “It’s the Force, Skip. Things change very slowly. It’s just tradition.”

All the captains had smiled, indulgently, and I wasn’t even mad that Father had called me Skip and not Vice Commodore Hayden. Because I knew it was from an excess of feeling and not a desire to humiliate me.

It was the last time he called me Skip.

Because in the night, while we all slept, we were ambushed.

You probably read about in the history books, but here goes: our intelligence was faulty or suborned. Which one, it doesn’t matter, and it wasn’t ever established although investigations and interrogations ran for years.

Until Karan boarding between spaceships had been done with boarding sleeves.  So a lot of maneuvering went on, until you could be in the right place where you knew the ship shielding was weak enough that the piercing machinery at the end of the sleeve could attach and make an entry.

Our propulsion and navigation systems were better than theirs. Which is why it hadn’t happened in thirty years.

But you know what those extra five ships apparently contained? Lots and lots of small vessels, each of which could carry twenty-five infantry troops. Ships equipped with an explosive prow.

I woke up to the sound of alarms. Our ship had been penetrated. Every officer and serving man was fighting with our utterly inadequate sidearms.

I put my uniform on in the dark, only because I was so fresh from the academy that waking with an alarm and dressing in the dark, without thinking, was second nature.

But the hallways were choked with people fighting and dying, and only the enemy was in uniform. Our people were in pajamas, in their underwear, or very against regulation, mother-naked and rocking holsters, or in one case that sticks in my mind, dripping wet and with a towel wrapped around himself, Roman style, with a blaster in each hand and one between his teeth. He was making good work, too.

I remember that. I remember snapshots of the battle in the corridor. I remember blood. I remember dismembered bodies, mostly ours. I remember people, their bodies torn, pouring out blood onto the glassteel of the floor. Many still fighting even as their life ran out in red rivulets and pooled in dark patches on the floor.

I remember sweat, shortness of breath. I remember the stink of blood and death. I remember running out of charges on my weapons, and picking them up from corpses without stopping.

All through it, I knew one thing: I should be in the command room with Father. Father would know what to do.

And then my mind becomes clear as I entered the command room. It was filled with dead. Dead in piles.

In the middle of it, Father. He was also in his uniform. He was getting up.  There was a gaping wound in his chest, and he was lurching up, trying to reach the com.

“Son,” he said. “Son.” It was a bare rasp.  “They knew. They had—They came here first.”

He didn’t need to say it. I could see the path from the outside, through a protected wall, through two adjacent storage rooms. It was plugged with the Nivirim ship, or we’d be leaking air into space.

“Father,” I said. “Commodore, please don’t talk.”

“I must give orders. I must warn—”

But even as he spoke his voice got fainter, and his knees folded under him, his body toppling.  And I – with my academy training, got on the com, and called, ship by ship, for status.

Our ship was the only one fully breached, though one of the small ships had attacked the Belcaria. Sentinels had seen it in time, blasted the disembarking attackers as soon as I called out.

I got on the coms. I screamed into them, my voice by turns hoarse and shrill.

Did the captains understand this was Vice-Commodore Hayden? Did I even tell them? Was it even true? Technically Father was hors de combat. I was in command. I was the Commodore.

I roused the ships. I gave them instructions. Textbook instructions. It’s all I knew But the hollo of a man in uniform bellowing instructions to the just awakened can be effective.  The ships spun. And fired on the small would-be intruders before they got near.  The few that penetrated were met with a full complement of wakened-in-time, in uniform, in their right minds infantry.

Me? I stayed at the coms. I stayed with it, calming, cajoling, ordering.

Do you know I don’t remember firing my side arm even once, while I was at the coms  But I must have, because Father was unconscious, and there was no one else there with us but the dead. So unless the dead got up to fight – I don’t know. It’s as plausible as anything else – while I talked I fired and fired and fired, and accounted for about thirty-five of the enemy, which effectively choked the door, so they couldn’t come in any more from inside our own ship, to stop the commands going out to the fleet.

They must have been working on breaking through the barrier of corpses when our people, commanded by me at a distance, and mostly from the Belcaria, took the Victoria, cleaning up as they went.

When it became clear the people trying to enter were our people, I got off the coms. I had the vague idea that if I could only keep Father alive till the medics got there, the regen would make everything all right.

He was on the floor where he’d lain down.  His eyes were closed and his hands were cold, and I thought he was dead.

I have no memory of all the orders I gave in combat, but I remember what I cried, then, “Father! Daddy!”

His eyes opened.  I lifted his head. I babbled about medics, about regen.

Father stared at me and smiled.  He said, “Good man, Scipio. Well done, son.”  And then he died.

My father had the most amazing eyes.  Blue, sure, but a very dark blue, so that from across the room they looked black.  But up close, you saw them blue and deep like the night sky in summer, blue and deep like the whole universe.

One moment they were looking at me, shining, deep blue. The next they were black.

I looked into my father’s eyes and I lost myself.

I forgot what I’d been meant to be, what I was.

They came in. They pronounced Father dead. I was wounded, they said. Nothing vital hit. Or nothing vital that couldn’t be regened.

I didn’t want to leave Father. If I didn’t leave him, perhaps he would come back? They had to tranq me to drag me away to the infirmary.

When I woke two weeks later, they told me that father was dead, but I already knew.

I wore the blue uniform with the half-cape once more, on a freezing winter day, in blowing snow, as I stood in the family cemetery next to the Earl’s palace of Aeris, and watched father’s coffin lowered into the grave, while space force captains and countless infantry stood at attention, wedged awkwardly between statues of angels and spacemen, of kings and imperious women holding aloft wreaths of victory.

There, in a deep hole, they buried what remained of the most important person in my life to that day.

When it was done, they let loose a 12 cannon salute, Earth cannons, the kind not used in battle since Old Earth, then a military band played the sweet, haunting “Home of the Spacer” consigning father’s memory to the stars.

I stood at attention there, and then I stood beside Mother and received the condolences of a grateful Empire.  The Queen herself, with frost-blued fingers, pinned the Wreath of Valor upon my chest, the big one, in gold, with the replica of the first colonizing ship in the middle.

I removed it after the funeral.  And then I removed my uniform. I sent my resignation to her majesty.

And then I lost myself in the fleshpots of New London, the Empire’s capital city.

The King Is Dead

Eerlen:

As he’d feared, the cries and screams echoed, even up in the guarded family wing, at the top of the ancient palace.

Eerlen Troz had rushed up five flights of stairs, the screams and baying of grief accompanying him every step of the way, as he climbed up and up and up. 

Sometimes a fresh note broke in, and he could almost follow the progression of the news through the various parts of the building.  “The king is dead,” was spoken, and the screaming started. 

Visiting city and league dignitaries in the guest quarters, traders and nomad clan ambassadors, also in the guest quarters, some muffled sounds that might be from the guard quarters, and he surely hoped the military commanders staying in the palace weren’t howling like peasants who’d lost a child, like nomads who’d lost a lover.

Up and up and up, rushing and breathless, nodding to the guard at the bottom of each flight of steps, ignoring their pointed looks of inquiry, Troz held up his long, ceremonial tunic so as not to trip on it and cursed that he’d not been prepared for this. 

He’d not been prepared for any of this. He’d expected nothing more than a dinner with Myrrir and the commanders, a discussion of forces and schedules of shield holders.  And then a quiet night with Myrrir in royal quarters. Perhaps a game of Etarresh before bed.

Maker’s womb, this was the last thing he’d expected.  But he must get to the child before someone else did.  And it wasn’t even because the child was young and the shock would be great. There were far worse outcomes in play, when the heir to the throne was only sixteen.

By the time he reached the top floor, where the royal family slept, he knew the child – his sireling – would be awake.  Eerlen was also out of breath, panting, cursing that he was too old for this.  Much too old for this. And that it had been far too long a time since he’d crossed Erradi with his bed roll, hunting for his keep. Much too long since even his last ceremonial partial route to check on the Troz clan of which he was titular head.

He opened the door to Brundar’s room, and rushed in, freeing his arm from the guard’s hand which had gone so far as to clutch at him.  The guard couldn’t think he was protecting the heir or that Eerlen meant the child harm.  It was curiosity.  Mere curiosity.

The child was awake and sitting in the middle of the bed that was still too big for him, even now that he was adult height. He sat, his eyes wide open, staring at the door, giving every impression he expected an attack.  Which meant his instincts were good at least.

He was tall, but not yet filled out, a sketch of an adult without the shading, his eyes too large in a too thin and pale face.  His green eyes turned towards Eerlen.  Surrounded by the child’s disheveled red locks, that face had something not quite real, or at least not quite tame.  It was a face one expected to see peeking from the shadows of trees in the deep forest, a face that disappeared as soon as seen.  The mouth worked.  “The screams…. The…” Brundar said, his voice too thin, as though he were much younger.  “Was there a breakthrough? Is—”

Oh. That.  The historical Draksall breakthrough that killed everyone in the palace four hundred years ago, and gave the throne to the infant saved by his nursemaid.

Well. When there were tapestries and paintings of that catastrophe all over, how could the child not think of that?

Eerlen shook his head, more hoping than sure that it was reassuring.  His breath had almost steadied.  He took a big swallow of frigid air.  These walls didn’t keep the heat in, no matter how big the fire in the ornate fireplace. 

The palace might be a confection of something they no longer had a name for, in shapes stone could not copy. But whoever the ancients were, they had been more resistant to cold than Erradians or had something other than fire to keep them warm.  He was grateful for the air’s coolness at any rate.  And for the need to do something, to keep the horrible after-effects of the death of a ruler from swallowing all, before he could stop and think he’d lost his lover, he’d lost his sworn lover, he’d lost his best-friend and helpmeet and support. Because if he stopped and thought of that, he’d break down and cry like a nomad at a funeral.

But I am a nomad. At least at heart. And this is a funeral. Or a wake, he thought, but didn’t say.  Instead he stepped towards the bed and knelt so as not to tower over the child.  Stretching his hands, he took hold of Brundar’s hands, and held them in his.  “Brundar,” he said and hesitated for a moment.  “Your parent came home….  Was brought home. He was wounded. He has … he has died.  You are the ruler of Elly.”

He meant to swear his fealty then and there, but he should have known better.

It is not like he doesn’t come by his wildness naturally.

When that thought came, it was already too late, and the child had leapt from the bed, running on bare feet, wearing only a knee-length nightshirt.

Eerlen got up and followed.  He didn’t waste his breath in calling.

Brundar was running like a scared colt.  And he’d been running towards what scared him since he’d learned to run. Perhaps not the best survival strategy, but he came by that naturally too.

Brundar knew where to go, of course. It wasn’t the first time that Myrrir had been carried in wounded.  Warrior king. Eerlen could have spit. He had tried to argue for moderation. In vain. Given the age of the one heir, given the multitude of others who could have claimed the throne sideways, by right of siring, and given that some of those had troops in their following, Myrrir should have had more care for his life. For the sake of the child, Eerlen had begged.  He’d been told, He’s my child. He’ll survive.

Yeah, well, he thought, as Brundar, far faster, vanished around the last turn of the last flight of stairs, and into the ground floor receiving room that had too often served as an infirmary.  The guards on the last three flights of stairs had been crying.  The news spread.

The bottom floor was a bedlam of people crying, and wiping noses to sleeves and hems of tunics.  Eerlen ran past them without even really looking, registering only that there were groups and couples, and people standing alone, pale and crying.  Crazy, brave, heedless, and often far too willful.  But loved. Myrrir was loved.

Tears prickled behind his eyes, and he shook his head, as he hurried.  No time. Not now. He could always howl later.

He noted without pausing that the yelling in the death chamber – the heated argument that had seen drawn swords – stopped dead as Brundar ran in, and lifted a short prayer to the Maker that the child not be run through by those swords, thereby clearing the way to the more ambitious of the arguing people.

By then he was mere steps behind and erupted into the room in time to see the five adults in the room standing, frozen in the poses they’d obviously held when Brundar ran in.

Khare Sarda of Karrash, his sword still drawn, his blue eyes flashing and Parnel Haethlem of Erradi, wearing his blood-stained tunic, his face almost as pale as his pale hair, standing beside him, while facing them were Guinar Ter of Lirridar and Kalal Ad Leed of Brinar.  Ad Leed appeared to have put his sword, flat over the others’ swords as though trying to bring them down. Lords of the four subdomains of Elly, and two of them Brundar’s cross-siblings and used to ruling. All of them either with drawn swords or about to draw them.  But worse in that respect was the person by the bed, who had not drawn his sword.  He was muscular and somber, the biggest person in the room overtopping the others by a head, his dark battle leathers stained with blood – how much of it Myrrir’s Eerlen couldn’t guess. He’d carried Myrrir in – his lips clamped firmly together, his face an unreadable mask. That would be Lendir Almar, commander of the royal guard and over-commander of all the armies of Elly, at least the second commander after Myrrir.  The child of the last commander. And Myrrir’s sireling, who had always seemed to loathe Eerlen and therefore Brundar, for reasons not quite clear.

The only good thing in this was that Nikre Lyto, Eerlen’s adopted child, Myrrir’s adopted sireling and heir to the role of archmagician was holding shield at the battle front. Without that, he’d have been killed by now. Nikre neither wanted the throne nor had defenses against the court’s intrigues.

You couldn’t have arranged things more disastrously if you’d meant to, lover, Eerlen thought, looking to the hasty pile of cushions and furs on which Myrirr had been lain, and which had become his death bed.

Myrrir had never been beautiful. Too many Erradians, too much Draksall in his ancestry.  A jaw too square, a mouth too strong, and the uncompromisingly direct glance that had flashed from beneath those too-straight eyebrows.  Of course, if he talked and moved everyone forgot his plainness.  But he’d talk and move no more.  Someone had closed his eyes. His hair was still bound for battle, braided and tied and securely pinned to his head.  He still wore his battle-leathers, slashed and soaked in blood.  They said the dead looked like they were sleeping.  Myrrir didn’t. He looked dead.

It was nothing too horrible, though his lips had contorted and remained in a final twist of pain, refusing to cry out. And he was pale. Deathly pale.  But most of all, it wasn’t Myrrir.  The shape might be the same, but something had left. Something was not the same.  What was on the bed might be the same form, but it wasn’t Eerlen’s lover. Not his sworn. Perhaps because Myrrir had never been able to stay completely still, even when asleep.

There was blood – a pool of it – under the body on the furs. Some of it dripped from the edge of the furs onto the floor, but sluggishly, starting to congeal. The child should not have seen that. The child—

Brundar stood very still.  A statue in the shape of an adolescent on the edge of maturity. Arrested where he’d stopped in his flight, two steps from the corpse, one hand forward, as though to touch Myrrir and wake him – if anything could! – one foot advanced, bare against the age-darkened oak, his nightshirt looking flimsy and far too short, even his hair seeming to have frozen in place, a mass of curls thrown back by his flight.  He was so still he might not have been breathing.

And the other five watched him, their eyes intent.  Eerlen would feel better if he could swear the look was not that of a wolf staring at a rabbit.

He didn’t dare touch Brundar.  Almost afraid to break the moment, which would break, inevitably, the minute the child started to wail, Eerlen reached under the hem of his tunic for his ankle knives, one worn on each ankle, and that against etiquette and risking Myrrir’s laughter – Are you afraid a dire wolf will jump you in the palace, or a Draksall, sweetling? – and fuck the settled habit of not carrying swords except in battle.  He was a fool to have complied even minimally and outwardly.  Now he wished for his sword, his lance and his bow. And all too little. 

His considerable magical power for defense or attack, couldn’t be used in the palace.  The shields would not allow it. It was old interdiction, designed to stop Draksall breakthroughs, but it put the throne at risk now.

Eerlen had a feeling the minute Brundar wailed, the tableau would break and minutes later the child would be dead, leaving the throne of Elly to be fought over by the three half-siblings remaining in that room.  Eerlen bet on Lendir who outmassed both Sarda and Ter. And was more battle hardened than mere governors. But that wouldn’t matter to Eerlen, because he’d be dead before they cut down his sireling, his daggers broken against those swords.

Brundar took a deep shaky breath. It sounded too loud in the absolute silence of the room.  He wheeled around, standing, square shouldered and crossing his arms on his chest, looking much like Lendir Almar probably without knowing it.

The voice that came out was controlled and even, with an edge of offense.  “Why wasn’t I informed before it came to this? Why wasn’t I called before the news went out?” The two questions flew like slaps at Lendir whose eyes opened wide, startled, and then Brundar turned to the four across the death bed.  “And what is this? Why are swords out in a death chamber? Is this the behavior of the Lords of the Land of Elly?”

For a moment it hung in the balance.  Eerlen didn’t know but could suspect how fast the child had thought and judged the reactions of those in the room, and taken advantage of his moment of absolute quietness to plan. It probably wouldn’t work, but if he had one chance it was that: sound as much as possible like Myrrir, assume authority and carry it through on that.  Myrrir had been loved. For all his faults, for all his errors, he had been loved. And three of the adults in this room were his sirelings.  And vassals of the new king. If they’d own it.

Eerlen became aware of his heart thudding so fast his head spun.  And he hardly dared breathe.  The daggers felt cold as he gripped them, one in each hand.

Lendir broke first.  The look of surprise passed.  For a second something like laughter fled behind his eyes, and then left his features impassive again.

He fell to kneeling without grace, the sound of his knees hitting the floor resounding on the wood. “King of Elly,” he said, looking up at Brundar. “Defender of the lands, Lord of the people, receive my fealty.”

If Brundar was surprised, he didn’t show it.  He nodded and waved his fingers at Lendir, without lifting his hand.  “Stand, Almar. Commander of my guard.” The off hand acknowledgement and confirmation of post might have been done by Myrrir himself.  Absolutely sure. Certain of his own authority.

Brundar looked enquiringly at the four governors, tilting his head to the left.  He said nothing.

Eerlen, weak with relief they had Almar and his sword, and by extension the armies behind Brundar, swallowed hard, because he would not cry, not even with relief. He caught the edge of a glance from Almar, a minimal lift of the corner of the commander’s lips and wondered if he was being mocked or consoled, but it didn’t matter. He wiped his sleeve down his face, to hide his expression. Nothing mattered as much as Brundar’s survival.

Ter tried a protest. He would. He was the oldest of Myrrir’s sirelings, thirty eight, and he had thought himself the heir to the throne for half that time.  “Almar, you cannot be serious,” he said.  “Brundar Mahar is a child.  His sire who will reign behind the throne is an ice nomad, barely broken to civilization! Unless you mean to rule behind the throne yourself.”

Lendir knew better than to answer. Brundar wheeled around on his half-crossibling, snapped, “No one will reign behind the throne, Ter.” It was said in the tone of an adult correcting a child.  No real anger, though plain irritation.  And no defensiveness.

Kahre Sarda, Myrrir’s youngest, best beloved natural sireling put away his sword, in measured gestures, and Haethlem slid his into the sheath at his waist. Small, dark and lithe, Sarda fell to his knees first, with the gentle drop of a dancer upon a rehearsed movement, inclined his head and pledged his fealty and his domain of Karrash to Brundar.  Haethlem, tall, blond and square shouldered, dropped to his knees behind Sarda, before Sarda stood and pledged fealty and Erradi – for what that was worth with war raging and invaders at its core and Haethlem’s own household more often threatened than not – and then Ad Leed gave Lendir Almar a quick glance. Was there an imperceptible nod from Almar? Why? What would a Lord of the Land owe Almar?

Ad Leed pledged.  Leaving Ter standing, looking sullen.  To be fair, he always looked sullen. Or at least peevish. The force of Myrrir’s features had been softened in the Lirridarian, but he compensated for it by scowling.

“Ter,” Brundar said, once more the adult in the room. “We do not have the time or resources for a civil war, while the enemy has broken through into Erradi and occupies a good portion of it.” Just that. Not so much a threat as a statement. The implication being that but for the invasion foothold in Erradi, he and his forces would wipe any resistance Ter could mount off the map.”

Ter let out his breath in a sort of sigh of impatience, and shoved his sword, with force, into its sheath, so hard that the clang of guard hitting metal trim rang like a bell, raising echoes from the high ceilings.  He knelt measuredly, and said his oath like spitting.

Brundar looked at Eerlen then. “Archmagician?” he said, lilting.  And for the first time in the whole wretched evening, Eerlen remembered he was more than Eerlen Troz, out-of-practice-ice-nomad-and-fur-trader, and the sire of the … of the new king of Elly.  He felt the weight of the silver chain around his neck and the ancient jewel it held, the red jewel of the Archmagician, the chief of the Magicians of Elly.  The one who must remove its complement from Myrrir’s dead finger and slip it onto Brundar’s, before he was de facto as well as de jure king of Elly.

He bowed, slipped his knives back into their sheaths, noting Lendir’s amused look at that – he really was mocking Eerlen! – and, bowing, stepped past his sireling, now his king, to the royal corpse.  It helped to think of it as the royal corpse, and not Myrrir’s remains.

He had to remove the blood-darkened, worn leather gauntlet from Myrrir’s right hand to get at the ring, at the ruby of kingship.

Unbidden, in his mind, he remembered twenty years ago, being the newly minted Archmagician making his bow to Myrrir, king of Elly.  The chain was unaccustomed at his neck, the ruby of office shone on his chest. He was still in shock, feeling ill awakened as the ruby muddled his mind with a sense of immense power and a confusion of impressions of his predecessors.

He remembered thinking it would have been easier to swear fealty to Mahar in battle, where Myrrir Mahar would be dressed in leathers and look much like the other commanders.  But of course, he’d had to do it at the palace, in a formal reception. The ruby informed him that was how things were done.

He could see himself in his mind’s eye, just seventeen, wearing his nomad furs: tunic and pants of white fur, home sewn and crude, his magician’s blue cloak still new. He’d been initiated less than a year before that. He could feel the stares of the dignitaries and courtiers, and hear that one person – he’d never figured out who, either – laughing in the corner.

And Myrrir — in green silk with gold embroidery, a long, formal tunic and court slippers of gold- embroidered leather, that kept tapping rapidly beneath the hem, even as he sat on his ancestors’ gilded throne — looked impatient and bored.

Had Eerlen not noticed the king’s diadem lay askew on his hair, and that the hair was bound at the back, like a warrior’s, as though the king had rushed in from battle, gotten hastily dressed, and dropped the diadem on his own head as he ran down the stairs – which was exactly what had happened, with an added swear word at the need to formally meet the new Archmagician – Eerlen might never have found his voice.

But he’d smiled at the diadem and whispered his oath about laying his magicians: healers, illusion spinners, spell makers, portalers and shield holders and all at the king’s disposal.

And Myrrir had looked amused and also as though he were thinking the words that he had whispered into Eerlen’s ear much later after the celebratory banquet the intricate dancing and the obligatory music. “Never mind the magicians and healers. Can one lay the Archmagician?”

Remembering, Eerlen swallowed hard. Smooth, really smooth, my love, he thought as he pulled the ring from the stiffening finger.

He turned and knelt before slipping it onto Brundar’s finger.  Brundar instinctively curled his finger.  Later a goldsmith would have to be engaged to make an insert to conform it to the new king’s finger.  Stupid to cut it to size before Brundar stopped growing.

Eerlen bowed his head, “I, Eerlen head of the Troz line and the Troz clan, Archmagician of Elly, swear its brotherhood of Magicians and all its functions, its healers, shield holders, illusion weavers and judicial magicians and all creators of portals and spells to the command of Brundar Mahar, King of Elly.”

Not for the first time it occurred to him to think that Brundar was an odd name.  Who called his child Vengeance? The child would grow to ask the same question.

But Myrrir had done it, and Eerlen was honor bound to answer the question when it came. Not that Myrrir’s name – Blood Oath – was any better. The Mahars were strange people.  And kings for thirty unbroken generations.  One more. Let there be one more. No, two more. Barren of a line-child himself, the end of his long, storied line, Eerlen wanted to see his sireling’s children.

“You may leave,” Brundar said, waving his hand at the four governors.  “Almar, keep watch at the door please.”

Eerlen turned to leave. He could do with some kind of privacy. Tears were going to overwhelm him any moment, and he’d promised himself a good howling. Not that there was ever full privacy for the royal family. There would be an ear at the door, a valet’s intrusion. Just enough to allow him an unguarded moment.

But Brundar said, “Stay, Troz,” calling him by his line name for the first time in Brundar’s life.  And Eerlen stayed.  He heard the door close, by Lendir Almar’s hand, softly, as if he feared disturbing the dead.

Brundar turned a desolate face to Eerlen and opened his mouth as though to speak, but before Eerlen could so much as move, he closed his mouth turned away, took the remaining steps to the bed, fell to his knees, buried his face in Myrrir’s shoulder and shook.

Well, at least he isn’t howling. Nothing that can be heard outside.

At length he heard the word Brundar whispered, “Emee.”  It was the baby word for parent.  And there, in the silent death chamber where the fate of the whole world had just been decided by the child on his knees by the bed, it made Eerlen Troz’s hair rise at the back of his head.