The Pages of the Mind Tour
@jeffekennedy #blogtour #PagesoftheMind
AN ORPHAN’S THRONE
Magic has broken free over the Twelve Kingdoms. The population is beset by shapeshifters and portents, landscapes that migrate, uncanny allies who are not quite human…and enemies eager to take advantage of the chaos.
Dafne Mailloux is no adventurer—she’s a librarian. But the High Queen trusts Dafne’s ability with languages, her way of winnowing the useful facts from a dusty scroll, and even more important, the subtlety and guile that three decades under the thumb of a tyrant taught her.
Dafne never thought to need those skills again. But she accepts her duty. Until her journey drops her into the arms of a barbarian king. He speaks no tongue she knows but that of power, yet he recognizes his captive as a valuable pawn. Dafne must submit to a wedding of alliance, becoming a prisoner-queen in a court she does not understand. If she is to save herself and her country, she will have to learn to read the heart of a wild stranger. And there are more secrets written there than even Dafne could suspect…
Coming May 31, 2016
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EXCERPT
We
sailed into the harbor of the biggest island a few hours later. By then the
volcano towered overhead, dominating the sky much like another Sentinel. Only
instead of fog-wrapped, glassy silence, this one rumbled as a disturbed god
might, not yet angry, but leaning in that direction. Like Uorsin had been most
days toward the end—quiescent for the most part, then erupting at the least
thing. Never predictable. I really wished I’d thought, in my packing frenzy, to
include a few books on volcanoes, and what set them off.
As I
looked, I recalled some scrolls I’d found in the Tala’s collection in Annfwn.
The drawings, vividly inked, had caught my eye and stayed in my memory. They
showed islands dominated by perfect conical peaks, draped in jungle foliage—and
dragons flying through the sky. No dragons in sight here, but the islands were
uncannily like those.
Ash filtered through the air like snowfall,
settling on my arms and leaving dusty smears behind, like the wings of moths. A
heavy stink filled my nose, burning acrid at the back of my throat unlike any
smoke I’d encountered—though I recognized a faint cousin of it from the depths
of Windroven. The narrow entrance to the harbor stole all my attention. Formed
of two points that came close together but did not meet, sporting two great
beasts facing each other.
Dragons.
They’d
been carved from the rock of the landscape and then built up with matching
stone. As fearsome as the Sentinels and probably twice as high as the tallest,
they reared up toward the sky, toothed jaws gaping wide. As we passed between
them, the detail became clearer—their great tails looping down the rock ridges,
the scales exquisitely executed. The wings, like those of bats, lay folded
against their backs, but so lifelike that the membrane seemed as ready to take
wind as the sails of our ship. A shiver ran through me as we passed between the
towering sentinels. Warning received.
As
Zynda had reported, the harbor appeared to be far more elaborate than I’d
expected of such a remote realm. No city or many buildings were in evidence,
though the heavy jungle foliage could easily obscure anything but a castle.
Piers and docks of the same elaborately carved rock, however, vividly displayed
the high level of civilization. Everywhere sculptures twined through the
architecture. Cranes and pulleys stood waiting, with a cart-and-rail system
beyond to convey goods. No space wasted that could be decorated. Cranes and
herons stalked in stony splendor along the pylons of the piers, the floor of
which formed the back of a sleepy tortoise. Snakes twined to form the pillars
of the arcade.
The
place was eerily empty, however, with no ships at harbor. The ghost twin of the
Port of Ehas, as abandoned as that place bustled.
“Are
they all dead?” Jepp wondered in a hushed voice. Between the abandoned harbor,
the fuming mountain, and the lingering hangover of doom from passing through
first the Sentinels and then the dragons, she sounded as I felt. Not afraid,
precisely. But ready to be.
“No,”
Kral replied, striding up. He’d donned his full armor again—they all had—and I
felt exposed in comparison. It seemed another ill omen that they dressed as if
preparing for war instead of a diplomatic mission, though Kral told me not to
be concerned, as it was protocol. Maybe I’d been around the Hawks, Vervaldr,
and Tala too much, with their more relaxed ways and preference for fighting
leathers over mail, but the armor made me as nervous as it had that day the
general first strode into Ordnung’s hall. “They moved the ships to protect them
from burning. Look there. King Nakoa KauPo and his entourage.”
I
followed the line of his finger to see the group emerging through a vine-draped
archway and striding onto the stone dock. Surely that was the infamous King
Nakoa KauPo, leading the way, just as Ursula would want to do. Our ship drew up
to a berth at the deserted pier, the men throwing out ropes to secure the Hákyrling in place, and I tucked myself
into a corner of the rail out of the way, where I could observe and take notes
in my journal. As the king and his party came near, it became clear that the
Nahanauns were as naked as the Dasnarians were armored. Darker skinned than
Jepp, King Nakoa KauPo’s chest was bare, decorated with tattoos a few shades
deeper. They reminded me of the dragons and other creatures carved into the
rock, the muscles of his chest and abdomen similarly hard and ridged as the
volcanic formations. As if he’d been created of the same substance and then
animated. A fanciful thought indeed. Something about this place brought out my
imagination—in a dark and twisted way.
He
wore his black hair loose like the Tala, but not as long. Instead it coiled
around his shoulders like a living thing, and what I took at first for ash
dusting the dark locks turned out to be silver and white streaks threading
throughout, like lightning spearing through thunderheads. More than his
coloring evoked that image, as his expression was also stormy, brooding and
stern. Some of what I’d taken for tattoos turned out to be what looked like
flexible scaled armor at the vulnerable points of his shoulders, elbows, and
ankles and over his groin. His only other garment was a sort of skirt—though
that seemed the wrong word for it, as it wasn’t feminine in the least. More
like the kyltes the Vervaldr sometimes
wore when off duty, short and mainly to cover the groin. He went barefoot as
they all did, with some sort of similar shields over his ankles, and wore a
copper torque at his throat.
Utterly
fascinating.
Male
and female warriors attended him, the women with the same scaly plates over
their breasts, but their slender, toned waists also bare. They carried bows and
spears instead of swords, and all looked as fierce as Jepp. None had the white
streaks King Nakoa KauPo did. Was it a sign of age or something else? Not age,
I thought, as his face seemed not lined enough. Ridged, yes, set in those
brooding lines, but not wrinkled. I found myself sketching that face, rapt.
At
that moment, though I hadn’t moved, he looked up, fixing me with a stare so
penetrating I startled. His eyes were as black as the obsidian Sentinels, and
equally sharp and forbidding. He studied me, as if equally fascinated by me,
though I couldn’t imagine why.
“Danu
take me.” Jepp whistled. “We have to
go ashore, if only for one night. Look at those people. I’ll never forgive
myself if I don’t taste one—male or female. I wonder if they’d be willing to do
a threesome with me. I’ll ask. What can it hurt? After all, we’re only here a
night, if that.”
“You’ll
have a difficult time asking,” I told her quietly, as if King Nakoa KauPo could
hear me. It seemed as if he did, as hard as he stared at me, a ridiculous
thought, as he couldn’t understand Common Tongue. “Remember—they don’t speak
Dasnarian.”
Jepp
gave me an arch look. “You might be the smart one with all your knowledge, but
the language of the body is one I know and communicate in very well. Some
things don’t require words.”
Between
Jepp’s salacious remark and the discomfort of King Nakoa KauPo’s intense
regard, I flushed. His expression didn’t change from the stark lines, but his
full lips curved into a slight smile, though he couldn’t possibly guess at our
conversation. He dipped his chin and turned to greet Kral, now that the
gangplank was down and the general, along with his own set of guards, strode
ashore. They raised hands, palm out, and King Nakoa KauPo gestured to the ship.
Kral pulled something palm-sized from his pocket and handed it to Nakoa, who
glanced at it, at me again. Nodded.
Then he turned and beckoned to
me.
Jeffe Kennedy is an award-winning author whose works include
non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and novels. She has been a Ucross
Foundation Fellow, received the Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship for Poetry, and
was awarded a Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award. Her essays have appeared
in many publications, including Redbook.
Her most recent works include a number of fiction series:
the fantasy romance novels of A Covenant of
Thorns; the contemporary BDSM novellas of the Facets of Passion,
and an erotic contemporary serial novel, Master of the
Opera. A fourth series, the fantasy trilogy The Twelve
Kingdoms, hit the shelves starting in May 2014 and book 1, The Mark of the
Tala, received a starred Library Journal review was nominated
for the RT Book of the Year while the sequel, The Tears of the
Rose was nominated for the RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2014
and the third book, The Talon of the Hawk, won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2015.
Two more books will follow in this world, beginning with The Pages of the Mind May 2016. A fifth
series, the erotic romance trilogy, Falling Under,
started with Going Under,
and was followed by Under His Touch
and Under Contract.
She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with two Maine coon cats,
plentiful free-range lizards and a very handsome Doctor of Oriental Medicine.
Jeffe can be found online at her website:
JeffeKennedy.com, every Sunday at the popular Word Whores blog, on Facebook, on Goodreads and pretty much constantly on
Twitter @jeffekennedy. She is represented by Connor
Goldsmith of Fuse Literary.
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