The Pearl Savage
Authors: Tamara Rose Blodgett
Tags: #Romance, #Mystery, #Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Young Adult
The Pearl Savage
Book
One of the Savage Series
by Tamara Rose
Blodgett
The Pearl Savage
by
Tamara Rose Blodgett
Copyright
© 2010-2011 Tamara Rose Blodgett
http://tamararoseblodgett.blogspot.com
This
ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may
not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to
share this book with another person, please purchase an additional
copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not
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purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of
this author.
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.
This
book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and
incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used
fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to
persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is
entirely coincidental.
All
rights are reserved.
Edited by
Stephanie T. Lott
For Sirena
Table
of Contents
CHAPTER
2
13
CHAPTER
3
17
CHAPTER
4
20
CHAPTER
5
25
CHAPTER
6
31
CHAPTER
7
41
CHAPTER
8
44
CHAPTER
9
49
CHAPTER
19
102
CHAPTER
20
106
CHAPTER
21
108
CHAPTER
22
113
CHAPTER
23
116
CHAPTER
24
122
CHAPTER
25
126
CHAPTER
26
144
CHAPTER
27
147
CHAPTER
28
150
CHAPTER
29
154
CHAPTER
30
165
CHAPTER
31
179
CHAPTER
32
185
CHAPTER
33
218
CHAPTER
34
222
CHAPTER
35
228
CHAPTER
36
234
CHAPTER
1-TSB
243
A
Love Letter to My Readers:
252
Prologue
1890
Samuel laid on his back, gasping for
air as a fish out of the sea…
laboring
.
They had done all they could, now the burden lay with their
descendants. His gaze lingered on the house that he loved, now
covered in ash, the sun no longer a bright orb in the sky, but
shrouded in gray. A hush fell over the land, the environs a pewter
wasteland of nothing, cold seeping into his marrow inch by insidious
inch. Many would enter the spheres that had been constructed by the
Guardians. They spoke of selective population, which rang false to
Samuel, or true, as the case may be, his grandchildren safe and
beyond the pale of this time,
this
world that he was leaving.
He turned his head, rolling limply
on its side, where his gaze captured Mae, also prone, a strange
contraption with hand-hammered copper and a complex, inky black
netting covering the greater part of her nose and mouth, leather
thong-like straps braided and wrapped her skull, pushing strands of
hair around like lost silver. She made odd, whistling noises as she
breathed.
“Samuel, wear it,” Mae said, her
voice distorted as she lifted the matching mask the Guardians had
fashioned in the few preceding months they had been given.
“No, Mae. I wish to enjoy this
fore-night without the chains of their advances.”
Samuel knew his stubbornness would
cost him his life. The Guardians who were equal part savior and
bearer of terrible news had made concessions for the elders. But
those which survived would be the
strongest, most virile, agile, smartest and etcetera among
them. Samuel and Mae understood at their advanced age of sixty and
one years both, they would be excluded from the mercies of the
sphere.
With blurred vision, Samuel saw a
familiar dimmed figure approach. “Father! Why do you not take rest
in your own bed?” Stella asked, her comely face a salve in his
approaching death. Her wool skirts swirled as she knelt, setting an
illuminated candle beside him, hissing steam from its seams.
Raising his hand, he cupped the
loveliness of her face, knowing the time had come to enter the sphere
the Guardians had constructed for the
select.
Her eyes brimmed
with tears. “Papa, the Guardians have told you that you might
survive… all is not lost.”
Samuel put a finger to her lips.
“Silence now, child. This is your place now. Do not forget the
things you have been taught. Take this, Dear Heart, hold it safe to
your breast, guard it. It is our history.” Samuel handed her a slim
leather book bound with a black silk tie.
Stella pressed it to her chest, the
tears once held in check, now overflowing down unprotected cheeks.
Mae’s eyes met hers. “Go now Stella-girl… take the opportunity
you have been given.”
Her knuckles white as she clutched
the book, misery etched its path on her countenance. “It will never
be the same without you both.”
A clear bell-tone pealed, reminding
Stella of duty. Her duty to leave her parents behind. While the
knowledge of
her
future, the
safe environment of the sphere was a burden laid on her heart.
Stella’s face turned to look at the
sphere, shimmering in a watery iridescence as a giant cloche. But
people were not plants, their future safekeeping a promise of a life
with a family, fractured by separation.
Stella bent her head to kiss Samuel
and Mae goodbye. Gently unwinding the face mask the Guardians had
constructed, she laid a kiss, soft as butterfly wings on the woman
who had nurtured her every desire. The skin giving way like
tissue-thin silk under the pressure of her lips. Turning to her
father, his pale blue eyes watering, she cradled his head while she
pressed a kiss to his forehead. She lowered his head and took a last,
lingering look, knowing this was the final time she would view her
parents in this realm.
Lifting her skirts, she pivoted
away, dropping them as she walked…no,
as she ran,
brushing
tears from her cheeks, the book clutched tightly in her other hand,
the candle hanging from its copper loop in her squeezed finger.
Approaching the doorway to the sphere, she was the last
select
to be ushered inside, casting one final glance, she saw her parents
supine forms, clasped hands held tightly, her mother’s mask forgotten
beside her.
Stella whirled toward the entrance,
losing hold of the book, dropping it on the earth now laden with
ash. She picked it up, her last gift from Father. Seeing the title,
she peered closer:
Asteroid; A History of When the Rocks Fell.
Stella moved forward as the hole
closed behind her, a fierce idea blooming in her consciousness to
remember…
who they had been
.
As an indeterminate future stretched before her….
CHAPTER
1
One
Hundred Forty Years Later
Clara beheld the shrouded exterior
as she did each morning, her hands pressed against the pliable
interior of the sphere, fingers sinking into its surface, stopped
before breaching the Outside. The yearning was the same,
she wished to experience the Outside
.
Sighing, Clara turned from the misty
view outside the molded window. Her petticoats swept together,
wrapping her bare legs, stockings laid out for her on the bed.
Olive knocked on the door.
“Mistress, may I enter your chamber?”
“Yes.”
She entered with steam-pressed
clothing draped over her arm, scads of material in a rich turquoise.
Clara hated it, hated it all.
“Princess,” inclining her head.
Clara recognized she was penalizing
Olive unfairly. Who truly wished to celebrate her Day of Birth? Utter
nonsense.
Olive peered at her Princess from
under her lashes, she was a formidable young lady, aquamarine eyes
which flashed with energetic temper, deep mahogany hair that cascaded
to her waist, very handsome but…uncooperative when it came to
dressings.
“Please Princess, they await your
appearance this day.”
“Does my mother await?” Clara
asked.
Olive knew that the Queen was deep
in her cup and it was not yet midday. “Our Queen has begun her own
celebration.”
No surprise to Clara, deep in
spirits,
celebration or no.
Her people wished to see her adorned
in her finery (a loathsome pursuit) to be reminded that she was their
Princess, the one that saw to their happiness, where her mother, the
Queen, failed them at every turn.
Olive interrupted her internal
musings, “My lady, please employ the bedpost.”
Grabbing the stays that bound the
corset, pulling each cross-member, Olive took up the slack, when
reaching the end, she pulled with all her might, Clara gasped, “Must
it be so tight, I cannot breath properly.”
“It must be hand-span,” as the
last stay was tightened to faint-worthiness.
Finally, Olive bent to use the shoe
hook on Clara’s high heels, each button a luminescent
mother-of-pearl.
Clara took in the altered version of
herself, the one that did not roam any space in her head. “Do you
not think you are agreeable, mistress?”
Clara gazed at her image, creamy
expanses of pale skin met the weak light from the sphere window
climbing up to a heart-shaped face with high cheekbones and
strange-colored blue eyes, a dark fall of hair that was red in a
certain light, brushed her hips where they swelled. Her mother would
be pleased, she supposed. But Clara wanted to change into her
waistcoat and linen skirt she wore when she visited the oyster
fields.
She turned to Olive. “I look
comely enough to satisfy the Queen.”
“And Prince Frederick,” Olive
added.
Yes, she must not forget her
upcoming nuptials to the Prince. The thought brought a searing tide
of resentment, coiling in her breastbone painfully.
Clara sat at the vanity while Olive
began weaving the pearls into her hair, a rainbow of shimmering
colors began to wink and disappear in the plaiting. “Do you wish to
wear it all at the,” she indicated the back of Clara’s head, “your
highness?”
She wished to not attend her Day of
Birth celebration.
“No, Olive, just the forward
section… leave the remainder down.”
She swept the forward part of
Clara’s hair off her face in an elaborate coil, twining at the top,
back of her head, the pearls the size of a pinky nail, weaving around
it like a crown. Then arranged and rearranged Clara’s hair until she
was satisfied.
“There. That will do,” she said
with satisfaction.
Clara stared at her reflection,
voluminous eyes gazed back, huge in her small face with part of the
rich, deep red hair piled on top, the pearls shimmering in the low
light.
She stood, giving Olive a gracious
nod. “You are most clever with your ministrations.”
Olive gave Clara a deep curtsey,
which she bore as she did her other royal obligations.