Teaser from my new novel!

I’ve just finished my first Young Adult Fantasy novel, and I’m beginning to look for an agent. Wish me luck! Comments welcome!

Synopsis:
Fleeing from the invaders who killed her father, 13-year-old Rowan must pass as both a harper and a boy to keep her family safe. Enrolled at the prestigious Master Herrins’ all-boys’ school for harpers, Rowan faces challenges in keeping her own identity secret while also being recruited for a spy ring passing messages through their music to aid the Resistance as the conquering force destroys the land and her people. After a series of strange occurrences, however, Rowan finds that her harp can do more than just pass messages. Can she unlock its special powers in time to save her people from the Outshorers’ devastating new weapon?

Harper

CHAPTER 1

Shilling sank to his knees in the muddy expanse and could go no further.

“On, Shilling!” Ma urged and clucked at the old cart horse, as he strained against the traces, and Ma, Danaan, and I strained, shoulders to the back of the cart, feet slipping and sinking in the calf-deep muck.

“On, Shilling!” Ma shouted.

We pushed again, then sagged, panting and mud-crusted. No way forward and no way back. We were marooned in a lake of mud at the bottom of the long hill from town. It wasn’t Shilling’s fault. Though we’d paid only his namesake for him, he was worth his weight in gold, long though his years were. Shilling’s great sand-colored sides heaved from the effort, his flaxen locks dipping into the dark mud as he bowed his shaggy head in defeat.

It was waning from the gold to the bronze hour, the tops of the stand of titter trees bordering the mud hole were alight, their shadows lengthening towards the hill, as the sun dipped past the quarter point. We should have been to the turnstile by now if we were going to make the inn at Bannsbury by nightfall. The river murmured just out of sight, thristles dipping for water and returning with their characteristic bobble through the air to their mud and wattle nests in the trees. The birds and the fluttering leaves made a music together. It was beautiful for a moment before I remembered that we were fleeing for our lives from an invading army, an enemy that was ravaging the land and slaughtering our people, that had killed Fa. Thinking of Fa twisted my stomach, and strangled something in the center of my chest. My throat tightened. I shook my head. This wasn’t the time for tears, even if we were leaving everything and everyone I knew behind, abandoning the village to the ravages of the Outshorers. I knew Ma felt guilty for leaving, for seeking shelter in the fortified city of Kilcarnon when the rest could not. But after losing Fa, she was determined to keep my brother and I safe, no matter the cost.

Ma looked more an ironwood tree, tough and resigned and rooted in the soil, than the mother who’d held and laughed with us these last thirteen years. Silently, she unworked the knots that secured our household treasures in the cart. Her face was all straight lines. Danaan and I could only stand and watch her. My hope chest was first to go. “You’ll have time to make new, and you’ll be able to do them better when you’re older,” she said of the heavy chest that was my dowry containing a few badly embroidered handkerchiefs, a sampler, a half-finished nightie, and a length of fabric that was to have been a tablecloth, along with odds and ends Ma had made and that had been passed down to her from her mother, and her mother’s mother, and beyond. All of it sank slowly into the mud, which sucked it down with the consistency of duck fat.

From the chest of brassware, she lifted out a goblet and a plate we’d never eaten off of, wrapped them in a spare blanket to keep in the cart, as memories or for trade I wasn’t sure, and we shoved the chest off the back of the cart into the mire.

She eyed the harp I’d left on the driving bench. I’d grabbed it on impulse. Ma had bid me gather the quilts from the back of the bureau in her and Fa’s room, and I’d remembered it, kept safe behind a hidden panel Fa had built into the back of the bureau. It was old and ugly, but it had been Fa’s, so I’d grabbed it, even in our rush to escape the coming Outshorers. It would make more sense to leave it now than take it, but something in me couldn’t let it go.

“I’ll bet we can get it now,” I said, and began to push at the back of the cart again. Ma rolled her eyes, but she and Danaan took up their positions beside me and shoved with all their strength. The cart rocked a little in its rut, but still would not budge.

Ma bid us stop pushing. She inhaled slowly and placed her hands on the trunk containing her memories of Fa. His favorite books, his winter cloak, tankard, and woodworking tools, the pendant he’d won in a singing contest at Gilden in his youth. His shaving razor and strop. Ma removed the medal, Danaan Fa’s favorite book. I already had the harp. Then Ma closed the trunk and closed her eyes. Danaan and I lowered ours. She was saying goodbye. She and Fa had married for partnership, but learned to love, and never stopped loving. She’d already mourned him in so many ways, but this was a kind of final parting. At last, she looked up, her eyes far away, and shoved on the chest. Danaan and I intervened, each taking a handle, so we could lower it down without spilling its contents. It, too, sank in the mud, as though we were burying him here, the body that had never come back from Donnewarden. He’d gone, with most of the local men, elders and boys alike, to try to push back the invaders as they’d begun their march inland, but the enemy was strong, with strange, new technologies we’d never seen the like of and had no defense against. He, together with 500 men, were pushed back against the walls of Donnewarden, and then finally, with winter oncoming, they’d fallen back into the city. But the Outshorers cut off the trade routes. The townspeople and the rebels, as the Outshorers called them, starved that winter, until the Outshorers finally breached the gates in the last turning of the moon and slaughtered them all. Carricksdown had lost most of its men and many of its boys. If Donnewarden could not stand against the Outshorers, Carricksdown could never. Carricksdown’s only chance was to surrender outright and endure whatever life under the Outshorer masters would bring them.

Ma didn’t wait for us to join her again at the back of the cart, but called, “Shilling!” and heaved with all her might at the back of the cart.

Danaan and I took up our places, braced against the cart with our shoulders, and pushed until I thought my veins would burst and my muscles snap. The mud sucked, and gulped, and then released its hold on the cart wheels so suddenly I fell on all fours into the muck.

“Well, now,” said Ma, looking us over and assessing the cart. We were mud-crusted head to toe. I squelched back through the mud to Fa’s trunk, but pull as I might, it was stuck fast.

“Rowan!” Ma called. I tried again. “Rowan!” The tears had started. How could she leave him here?

Ma waded through the mud to me, put her arm around my shoulders, and led me back to the cart. She left him because she must. Because of us. Ma handed us each a quilt. They were mud-sprayed from the wheels. She gave me hers and Danaan her mother’s. She, in turn, took her grandmother’s. The quilts were each a story of a woman and a family, an invocation and a blessing against trouble. Danaan wiped mud streaks on Gran’s neat stars and swallows, running the thistles over his hair. Ma rubbed Great Gran’s flying geese and rowan tree blossoms across the grime on her arms and neck. I held Ma’s in front of me. Fa, the bear; she, the elk; I the upstream running salmon; Danaan, the hare. There was no room on it for getting stuck in a mudhole, for a flight from marauders, for my filth. But Ma had no time for my reservations. She took the quilt from me and wrapped it tightly around me, scrubbing me down before directing us all to take our places as before. Ma spared one look and one sigh for the half-buried trunks we were leaving behind, then urged Shilling on.

We followed the broad wend of the River Velga through the valley, soughing high against its banks, almost flush with the grass to either side of the path. One good rain storm and it would spill across the floodplain from foothills to foothills, a mighty lake, making the valley unpassable. I uttered a silent prayer to Thisne to keep the river in its bed until we could safely reach Kilcarnon and Great Uncle Theorn in the mountains beyond. “Sleep, river,” I muttered. A lullaby came to me, from my father, perhaps. I tried to find it on the harp resting awkardly across my lap, plucking this string, then that, to find the tune. I thought I almost had it, or something very like, considering how out of tune the thing was, when Ma snapped,

“Oh, for Silva’s sake, child, leave that thing alone!”

I turned my attention instead to studying the construction of the harp. The neck curved gracefully, about the length of my arm, coming to a point where it joined the column, which arched in turn to the base of the soundboard, a height of about my shoulder to mid-thigh. I couldn’t make out the method of construction. It seemed all of one piece, but there was no tree big enough to carve such a thing from. It would have been a very clever carpenter. I wondered if Fa had made it, but the harp seemed much older than that. All of it was covered with intricate carvings, though dulled with time. I wiped thick dust with the hem of my cloak from the winding knots. I could make out here a serpent head, there a mighty tree, and again, a bird. There were people, too, I thought, in miniature, here rushing to battle, there feasting and dancing, all of it connected as one single twisted strand. It was as though the harp told a story of things become other things, of old, old magics of transformation, but I didn’t know how to read it. There were bits of color—red, green, blue, even gold—as though the whole thing had once been brilliantly painted like a manuscript, but the colors had long been fading and flaking. It could have once been a pretty thing, if ornery sounding.

I’d only ever seen it a pair of times. I’d surprised Fa once in tuning it. Ma, Danaan, and I had all gone out berry picking one Longedye morning. It was a bumper day, so midday I was sent back to the house for more baskets. As I’d approached the yard, I’d heard a faint, sweet music coming from within. I’d slowed my steps, drawn to the sound. I recognized the strains as those of a harp as I tiptoed through the house to find the source, aware that I was eavesdropping, though why music should be done in secret, I didn’t know. Music was something to be shared. We only had a harper in town maybe two or three times a year. We weren’t an important stop on their routes, without an inn or tavern to host such a guest, so the townsfolk would gather in the meeting room that took up the bulk of our downstairs, besides the kitchen. When the harper played, the house was filled with ale and dancing. Why was the house empty now despite the holiday and the harp?

Then a voice joined the tune, and I recognized it as my father’s, a warm, strong baritone, the one he sang me to sleep with. I didn’t recognize the tune or the words in another language. I tiptoed up the stairs and watched him through the cracked door. His eyes were closed as he played, as though he were entranced. When he finished, he tuned a string or two, and then I saw him open a panel in the back of the closet and hide it away with a sigh. He’d seen me then and shook his head. The expression on his face unreadable, somewhere between conspiratorial delight and fear. It was a secret, then. Though I still didn’t know why. If he could play, why hide it away, when a harp would bring so much joy?

There was the other time, too, but that was just as like a dream, my memory of it hazy as I lay in fever, so nevermind it.

I didn’t know why the harp had been hidden or what it was to Fa, but in my gut I knew that the harp could not be left to the Outshorers. Ma hadn’t been happy. There was little enough room in the cart. “Only essentials,” she’d said. But for whatever reason, as soon as I’d seen it, it had become my new essential. When I’d lifted it, I’d found it lighter than I expected, but somehow also more solid. An oldness coursed through it, a conversation with something deep in time. But it was a conversation that would have to wait.

Want to read more? Let me know what you think!