Faery Worlds - Six Complete Novels (21 page)

“Fool girl,” a woman who sounded suspiciously like Gwenika’s mother, Zavaedi Brena, called to her impatiently, “Stop spinning in circles like an idiot, and just go to the woman holding the torch!”

Still woozy, Dindi struggled to her feet. She staggered to the woman holding a torch.

“Present your totem,” said the woman. It was Zavaedi Brena.

Dindi braced herself for another Vision. To her surprise, nothing happened when she released the corncob doll from its ribbon to present to the Zavaedi Brena, except that Brena handed Dindi an obsidian mortar.

“Congratulations, Dindi, daughter of the Lost Swan clan of the Rainbow Labyrinth tribe. You are now a woman.”

Dindi stared at the grinding bowl blankly. A bowl in which to mush corn and crush spices. The companion piece to the pestle some young man—Yodigo, perhaps—had been given this night. How practical for a new wife and mother. But utterly useless for a Tavaedi. Where was her windwheel? What had happened to the invitation she’d dreamed of hearing for so many years?

I failed.

Her stomach collapsed on itself in a fierce cramp, her jaw worked up and down of its own accord. Her head felt like someone was hitting her with rocks.

I failed. I failed.
It was all she could think.
I haven’t enough magic. I can never be a Tavaedi. I can never dance again.

Continue reading Dindi’s story in the sequel
:
The Unfinished Song: Taboo.

Author's Note

Every story starts from a seed, the tiniest grain of an idea. The seed that began this story planted itself in my mind ten years ago. It was simple: I wanted to tell a fairy-tale. With the fairies left in, as they so often aren’t in the retellings.

This is just the beginning of the story, of course. I hope you wouldn’t think I’d end a fairy-tale in failure. Even the Littlest Mermaid, in the original Hans Christian Anderson story, though she perished because her lover was untrue, gained a soul. Besides, the older, true “folk” fairytales almost always have happy endings. A gruesome sort of happy, in some Grimm versions, but happy.

This story has a happy ending too, and it’s already written, in case you were worried I was one of those authors who might depart to another plane of existence before finishing my story. I am the morbid sort who worries about that a lot, so I wrote the ending first.

That wasn’t hard to do, because the whole thing is based on a myth. I shan’t tell you which myth, because then you would know the end, but chances are, you haven’t heard of it anyway. It’s Polynesian, and I’ve only found one reference to it.

Some stories are omnivorous. They overlap and interweave, they transform and transmute like the lycanthropes and pumpkins they describe. Therefore, although
The Unfinished Song
began as a simple retelling of an obscure Polynesian legend, it quickly gobbled up other fairytales, legends and myths, churning and turning them into something a little bit old, a little bit new.

The first fairytale I learned as a child was Cinderella. Not surprisingly, there is a bit of Cinderella in this story. (We’ll get to that bit in a later novel in the series. There’s a pretty dress involved, but no glass slippers, since they haven’t invented glass yet.) A bit of Beauty and the Beast. (Oh, just wait til we meet the man in black! What? Of course there has to be a man in black. Come now, really.)

But many of the fairytales that found their way in were stranger ones. If you’ve read the novella
Tomorrow We Dance,
or the Author’s Note about it in the anthology
Conmergence
, you may know that it draws on The Pied Piper and The Emperor’s New Clothes.

The very idea of the Tavaedies, and their secret societies, and their power dances, comes from Native American and African sources. The fae of Faerarth are not Celtic, despite the familiar name.

Originally, I wrote the first three chapters of Dindi’s story set in a quasi-medieval landscape of castles and peasants, knights and princesses. Familiar ground for fantasy readers, and a reasonable setting for fairytales.

Yet wrong.

Something about it didn’t satisfy me. Maybe it was just that the medieval period is overdone in the genre, and I wanted to stretch further than that. In addition, though, I wanted to set the story in a primordial time when all the fairytales of the world were first being written, an age when the population of the world was limited to the first seven tribes. I called it Faearth because it is a time when fae still openly roam the earth. There are seven tribes of peoples in Faearth, seven and no more.

So the technology and social structure of Faearth is neolithic. Neolithic means “new stone age,” which means they have all the major inventions to make them more civilized than cave dwellers: weaving, sewing, clay thatched houses, beaten gold. But they have no bronze, and definitely no iron. They have bows but not swords. I did decide to allow them horses, but horse-riding is new to them, and in many clans, they still think it more fit to eat than ride a horse.

The astute reader will also notice that I have mixed European fauna with North American flora. They grow corn, but they have wild horses, and so on. Other customs are shamelessly stolen from real cultures too. There was a culture in India that used to raise slaves as their own children, until some need arose for a human sacrifice. Then the
mariah
(their term, which I borrowed) would be ritually killed. This struck me as a particularly heartwrenching form of human sacrifice. It’s one thing to kill your prisoners of war. This is more like killing your foster children.

Another suspect combination is the sequoia forests of Yellow Bear, roughly based on my own native California, and the hakurl, beloved rotten shark dish of Blue Waters. Hakurl is a real dish, but not served anywhere near California. You can buy it in Reykjavik, Iceland (officially as far from California as you can get without leaving the planet). In case you thought such a food could exist only in fiction, or that I exaggerated its charms, Michael M. described hakurl in an article on, “The Worst Meals on This Earth”: “So what does hakarl taste like then? It tastes like crying. It tastes like broken promises. It tastes like the Lord God Almighty ripping the Bible out of your hands and saying, “Sorry, this doesn’t apply for you. I think you want ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’” It tastes like the Predator wading into a Care Bears movie and opening fire.” Exactly what you would expect Vikings to eat, in other words.

This eclectic mix is not due to botanical or anthropological ignorance on my part. It was a deliberate decision, to show a primeval earth yet undivided into continents. Not that I want to insist Faerarth is our earth separated only by time. If it is our earth at all—I am agnostic on this point—it is separated from us by a great deal more than time, and by a great deal less. I cannot explain more clearly, as faeries are involved, and their sense of time and space is notoriously suspect.

Continue reading Dindi’s story in the sequel
:
The Unfinished Song: Taboo
.

Contact Me

If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving an honest review of it on Good Reads, Amazon, your blog or my blog. Also be sure and check my site for various contests and prizes or just to chat.

Also, don’t forget you can tweet, highlight or share your favorite quotes!

Questions, comments and fawning praise should be sent to my email: [email protected]. Complaints should be sent to my agent. Send an email to my account if you’d like to join my newsletter list or click the link below.

Want to review or blurb a book of mine and read it for free? Just let me know. Are you a writer of science fiction or fantasy with a book coming out that you’d like me to blurb? Please let me know.

Come be my friend on
Goodreads
,
Facebook
and
Twitter
!

Blog:
http://taramayastales.blogspot.com/

Email:
mailto:[email protected]

Newsletter:
Sign Up for Release Dates and Special Deals on Books

Also by Tara Maya:

The Unfinished Song Series

Initiate

Taboo

Sacrifice

Root

Wing

Blood

Mask
– Coming soon!

A Vampire Carol and Other Christmas Tales

30 Daily Tips for NaNoWriMo: No Fail Formulas to Finish Your Novel

Conmergence

– Join my
newsletter
to find out release dates and receive special deals on my books.

Copyright © 2010, 2011 by Tara Maya

Cover Design by Tara Maya

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of

1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or

transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval

system, without the prior written permission of the publisher

Misque

Misque Press

First North American Edition: December 2010.

Second Edition: February 2011.

Third Edition: January 2013.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real

persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

WAR OF THE FAE

Book One

The Changelings

Elle Casey

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my daughter Skye ...

my kickass little fae-blooded girl who never ceases to amaze me with how awesome she is.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

© 2012 Elle Casey, all rights reserved, worldwide. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, copied, emailed or uploaded to or downloaded from a file sharing site without author permission. Please support artistic expression and help promote copyright protections and anti-piracy efforts by only downloading from authorized retailers and by NOT uploading or sharing this book via any site, email, or other transfer device or software, with the exception of Amazon. The author thanks you deeply for your understanding and support of her efforts and creativity.

Chapter One

I can't take much more of this high school nonsense. I feel like I'm not supposed to be here. Where would I be if I weren't here? ... I don't know. All I
do
know is I'm in the middle of all this crap, going to class, taking tests - but I'm on autopilot, going through the motions, waiting for life to start happening.

I'm sitting in World History, and there's a girl one row over who's the polar opposite of me. She's staring attentively at the teacher, her pen poised above an already nearly full page of notes, eager to write down every nugget of educational wisdom he's throwing our way. She loves it here, and she has big plans for moving on to college next year. She has cheer practice after school and a boyfriend named Mike who plays wide receiver on the football team.
Ugh.

I own a pen. I probably have some paper somewhere in my backpack too. Today, however, I'm using my pen to draw symbols all over my right hand - temporary tattoos. I write and eat with my left hand but do just about everything else with my right. My own body is confused with what it's supposed to do.

I'm in the minority in this school. It seems like just about everyone else knows exactly what they're doing now and what they're going to be doing until the day they die. Me? I don't have a clue. All I know is,
this
isn't it. Today the bathroom scale said I'd lost another two pounds. I was literally wasting away with boredom. Maybe I was going to just disappear altogether. I wondered if anyone would miss me.

"Jayne? May I ask what you're doing?"

Uh-oh.
I'd been spotted by the droner. I tucked my hand under my desk, hiding my artwork.

"Um, nothin' ... just taking some notes." My face was the picture of innocence. Or so I thought.

He walked over and stopped at my desk, looking down at its empty surface. "Where are these so-called notes?"

I reached up with my non-tattooed hand to tap my temple, looking up at him. "Right here, Mr. Parks; it's all riiiight here." I gave him a saucy wink just because I knew how much he'd hate it. Sometimes I do that kind of stuff - my mom calls it cutting off my nose to spite my face. I'm not sure why I do it; maybe to make life more interesting, give myself more of a challenge ... or maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment.