Friend of the blog Lisa Henry is here today promoting her new fantasy novel from Dreamspinner Press, Anhaga! Find out more and read an excerpt below!
Hi everyone! It’s been a while since I’ve had a new release out, and I’ve missed it! It’s a great feeling to finally be able to share Anhaga with you, and I hope that people enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Today I’d like to share an excerpt with you. The excerpt takes place just after Min has been strong-armed into leaving the city of Amberwich to travel to the cursed village of Anhaga in order to kidnap a recalcitrant hedgewitch. Min would love to refuse the job, but his nephew Harry has had a curse placed on him that will only be lifted if Min succeeds. I hope you enjoy it!
A cool breeze shuddered through the leaves of the trees lining the path as they left the shrine complex. Acolytes darted here and there like frantic squirrels, gathering up the leaves as they were shaken free. They laughed and chattered as they worked.
Behind them, a line of hedgewitches made their way from their quarters to the temple building where they would perform the daily Blessing of the Waters. The priest who had tutored Min had dragged him along once as a child. The ritual had involved a lot of chanting, singing, and an unexpectedly exciting finale when saltpeter had been tossed onto the braziers inside the temple, and flames had fizzed and sparked and burned. At eight, Min had been very impressed and even a little scared. These days it took more than flash-and-bang tricks to frighten him.
Some things still did, though.
Like Anhaga.
Min pushed his thoughts away from that and wondered instead how his name had come to the attention of a man like Edward Sabadine. He had taken jobs from representatives of noble Houses before, but they were the sort of jobs Min had assumed his employers would wish to keep secret. Min’s crowning glory had been two years ago now. He’d returned to a nobleman a family heirloom—the ugliest necklace Min had ever seen, for the record—that had made its way to another noble family courtesy of a cheating husband enamored with a daughter of the second House. Messy all around, but the sort of mess that, if exposed, would have led to mutual mockery of both Houses.
The necklace had been kept under no special guard but the existing magic wards of the household. Min’s client had been unwilling to send his own Gifted against those of another household and risk escalating a private affair into what amounted to a declaration of hostilities, and Min had a reputation for being able to bypass all kinds of security, even magical. His services weren’t cheap.
A routine job, all in all, but maybe audacious enough that someone must have talked, and word had gotten to Edward Sabadine. At the time Min had been too drunk on his own success to consider that perhaps he might one day become a victim of it.
Or that Harry would.
He tightened his arm around the boy’s shoulders as they walked.
At the crest of the hill, he looked back. The Shrine of the Sacred Spring was an inviting swathe of green in the shallow valley. Behind it, in the distance, rose the Iron Tower. If the Shrine of the Sacred Spring was the heart of Amberwich, the Iron Tower was… well, it was the dick, wasn’t it? It jutted proudly from the top of the King’s Hill in the western quarter of the city, arrogant and bellicose and demanding attention. The tower was surrounded by the king’s private parklands, which contained the barracks and the stables of the Royal Guard, the fortified Treasury, the Sorcerers’ Guildhall, and the old palace. The king lived in the Iron Tower, and who could blame him with a bunch of sorcerers as neighbors? In the Iron Tower, the king could command his sorcerers without fear of one of them putting him in thrall. The purpose of the Iron Tower had always been twofold: it protected the king from his own Gifted as much as it protected the city from the fae.
The Iron Tower dominated the King’s Hill. It was six storeys high and topped by a sharply pitched red roof that gleamed in the sunlight. The walls of the tower were white, the paintwork weathered by the years. Barred windows overlooked the parklands. Under the roof, a parapet extended out from the tower wall. The tower was hundreds of years old. There were grander buildings now in Amberwich, but none as fortified as this. None as solidly imposing.
Min turned his back on it.
The streets grew narrower and more crowded as they passed farther into the eastern quarter. Clouds were moving in, the sort that promised just enough gentle rain to make the way slick and to sharpen the stench of the streets. Skinny dogs nosed in the gutter, accompanied by skinny kids. People went about their business in the stores and workshops that lined the way. Min’s fingers itched out of habit as they passed a vendor’s cart loaded with apples, and his stomach growled, but he kept moving. They passed a painted booth set up on a corner where the pedestrian traffic was forced to slow and watch the show: a puppet, its smirking face painted green and a silver crown on its head, pulled tufts of knotted red wool out of another puppet’s belly. The older children laughed and jeered at the spectacle. The younger ones wailed.
Min’s stomach clenched as he and Harry passed.
Anhaga.
The word was as sharp as a curse in his mind. Anhaga was a fishing village. It lay several days north of Amberwich. Min had never been there. And nobody in their right mind wished to go there. It was said the Hidden Lord walked in Anhaga. There had been a time when the village had been full and prosperous. A time when Min could remember his mother proclaiming proudly that she served her guests nothing but the finest snipe eels fresh from Anhaga. And then the Hidden Lord, king of the fae, had come. Anhaga sat on the edge of his shadow kingdom now. The Hidden Lord walked its streets at night. Those who had fled Anhaga had come to Amberwich with nightmares clinging to them like wraiths. Those who had stayed… well, Min didn’t know why anyone had stayed. He wondered if they were in the thrall of the Hidden Lord now, and if he summoned them to dance with him until they died and then feasted on their entrails like his puppet counterpart did.
Anhaga Blurb:
Aramin Decourcey—Min to his few friends—might be the best thief in Amberwich, and he might have a secret that helps him survive the cutthroat world of aristocratic families and their powerful magic users, but he does have one weakness: his affection for his adopted nephew, Harry.
When the formidable Sabadine family curses Harry, Min must accept a suicide mission to save his life: retrieve Kazimir Stone, a low-level Sabadine hedgewitch who refuses to come home after completing his apprenticeship… and who is in Anhaga, a seaside village under the control of the terrifying Hidden Lord of the fae. If that wasn’t enough, Kaz is far from the simple hedgewitch he seems.
With the Sabadines on one side and the fae on the other, Min doesn’t have time to deal with a crisis of conscience—or the growing attraction between him and Kaz. He needs to get Kaz back to Amberwich and get Harry’s curse lifted before it kills him. Saving Harry means handing Kaz over to his ruthless family. Saving Kaz means letting Harry die. Min might pride himself on his cleverness, but he can’t see his way out of this one.
The Hidden Lord might see that he never gets the choice.
Buy links:
Bio and social media links:
Lisa likes to tell stories, mostly with hot guys and happily ever afters.
Lisa lives in tropical North Queensland, Australia. She doesn't know why, because she hates the heat, but she suspects she's too lazy to move. She spends half her time slaving away as a government minion, and the other half plotting her escape.
She attended university at sixteen, not because she was a child prodigy or anything, but because of a mix-up between international school systems early in life. She studied History and English, neither of them very thoroughly.
She shares her house with too many cats, a dog, a green tree frog that swims in the toilet, and as many possums as can break in every night. This is not how she imagined life as a grown-up.
Lisa lives in tropical North Queensland, Australia. She doesn't know why, because she hates the heat, but she suspects she's too lazy to move. She spends half her time slaving away as a government minion, and the other half plotting her escape.
She attended university at sixteen, not because she was a child prodigy or anything, but because of a mix-up between international school systems early in life. She studied History and English, neither of them very thoroughly.
She shares her house with too many cats, a dog, a green tree frog that swims in the toilet, and as many possums as can break in every night. This is not how she imagined life as a grown-up.
Lisa has been published since 2012, and was a LAMBDA finalist for her quirky, awkward coming-of-age romance Adulting 101.
You can connect with Lisa here:
Website: lisahenryonline.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.henry.1441
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LisaHenryOnline
Email: lisahenryonline@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment