Hello, dearest readers!
Two news items for you today folks, and they’re big ones!
FIRST!
Just in time for Christmas! Hope you guys enjoy. And for
your pleasure below: cover, blurb, and sneak peek.
Blurb:
Darkness is falling.
The dragon Sherduan is free, and the fate of the world
balances on its claws. The Jin brothers and their friends are separated. Alone,
they face shadows deeper even than those in their dreams.
Litnig wrestles with his heritage. Cole and Dil cling to
shards of happiness as the world crumbles. Quay finds that, in the end, his
weakness may outweigh his determination. Ryse and Leramis find in their
homecomings not solace but soul-crushing ordeal.
And others enter the stage. Len Heramsun’s daughter follows
Tsu’min as he tries to summon a force to oppose Sherduan. A prophet offers
guidance to those he can find. In Nutharion, a boy of great power plots to
reunite those spared by the dragon. And elsewhere, a ghost and a necromancer
contend with the wages of sin.
Those who stood before the black wall when Sherduan was
summoned were chosen. But by whom? And for what?
And will their courage create enough light to break through
the darkness?
Sneak Peak!
ONE
One hundred
days before the destruction of Nutharion City
The black rocks rose.
The black rocks fell.
The black rocks rose.
The black rocks fell.
“It’s not working,” Cole muttered into his sleeves.
He leaned on the railing of an old Aleani fishing vessel. The sea
frothed and heaved. A wide, taut sail snapped and creaked over his head. In
front of him, a series of flat rocks bobbed in the waves.
His stomach tumbled and rolled and dropped until he could barely
pick out which direction was up anymore.
“Just hang in there,” Dil said. Her hand rubbed slow, gentle
circles on his back.
His stomach tried to throw up, but there was nothing in it. He dug
his fingernails into the railing and grimaced.
The fit passed, and he let his head slump again.
“I thought they said we’d see land by now.”
“They did.” Dil’s fingers continued their circling. “It’s out
beyond the rocks, hidden in the fog.”
Cole raised his head. There was a heavy bank of clouds beyond the
flat-topped rocks. He couldn’t see anything inside it other than spots of
lighter and darker gray.
“Ugh,” he said.
He put his back against the rail and slid down until he reached
the deck. Aleani sailors bustled in front of him in flashes of blue and brown
and white. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against his temples.
“Do you want some water?” Dil asked.
He nodded, and her feet danced away.
The Aleani had sent a ship, but it hadn’t exactly been what he was
hoping for.
The Skellup was maybe
forty feet long and ten wide. It was crewed by seven tanned, bearded fishermen
from some town in the Aleani borderlands that Cole had never heard of. The ship
seemed seaworthy, but it was slow, the area belowdecks was crammed and stank of
fish, and there almost always seemed to be somebody working its bilge pump.
Only the captain spoke any Eldanian. When Quay asked why the Skellup had been sent to find them, the
red-capped Aleani had spit over the side of the ship and muttered about crimes
and judgment.
Cole wondered what sort of welcome they’d get when they reached Du
Fenlan.
The wind raced over his neck, and he shivered.
He felt squashed and adrift, as if all the months of pent-up
change that had started with Litnig’s dream were crashing down on him all at
once. He no longer had a mother, no longer had a home, no longer had the
thieves who’d been his adopted family for so long.
All he had left was Litnig, Dil, and Quay, and Litnig was changing
too. There were times that Cole looked in his eyes and couldn’t find the
brother he’d grown up with.
Those times scared him.
A lot.
Thunder grumbled in the northern sky. Cole felt a storm coming,
even over his pulsing nausea. The air was getting heavier. The wind ripped like
a wild beast out of the endless ocean.
Dil’s footsteps returned.
“Here,” she said.
Cole took a cup of water from her and sipped it. He hadn’t been
able to keep more than the thinnest broth down at sea, and his body was
starting to feel weak and jittery.
The wind picked up again, and a curtain of frigid spray blew into
his face.
“You sure you don’t want to head below?” Dil asked.
Cole stifled the urge to shake his head—doing that would set it
spinning for minutes.
“No,” he said. “It’s better out here.”
He looked up. Dil’s eyes glowed golden against the gray river of
clouds behind her. Her dark hair, matted and caked with sea salt and dirt,
swirled in the wind.
“You know,” he said with a smile, “your head looks like a charging
octopus.”
Dil grinned and rubbed his arm. “Yeah? Well your face looks like a
dead one.”
Cole laughed. Behind Dil, three Aleani sailors and the captain
broke into a shouting match. A gust of wind shook the sail and spattered him
with water.
“How’re the others?” Cole asked.
Dil shrugged and settled down next to him. “Same as they’ve been.
Litnig’s grumpy. Leramis and Ryse are whispering. Quay’s a million miles away.
Tsu’min isn’t talking to anybody.”
Cole finished off the water in his cup and sighed. “How far are we
from Du Nordt?”
“Still a few days, if the wind holds. Quay says we’re passing
between Patch’s Fingers and the Bay of Reeds.”
Great, Cole thought. He’d heard stories
about the Aleani expedition to colonize the Bay of Reeds. All lost but a few.
Famine. Cannibalism. Disease. He shivered and stood up to look back over the
rail. This time he spotted hazy strips of land swimming in the clouds—a stripe
of light colors that might signify a beach, a darker line that was probably
forest beyond, and mountains disappearing into the gray cotton of the sky to
the southwest.
We’re too close, he thought.
As if he’d called it, a gust of wind hit the ship and knocked it
toward the rocks. His stomach leaped into his throat. More shouting erupted
from the Aleani.
Cole’s cup clattered to the deck, and he braced himself against
the railing with both hands.
After a moment, the ship stopped pitching any more than usual. His
stomach settled and he turned back around. Next to him, Dil peered into the
wind, her nose high in the air like she was sniffing for something.
Cole thought he might be able to see the storm. A line of cloud
darker than the rest masked the northern horizon. Rain, probably. Lots of it,
falling hard. It was moving toward them.
“Yenor’s balls,” he muttered.
The wind got worse, and the ship rolled sickeningly to port. Cole
clutched the railing and stared at the horizon, willing his guts to calm down.
Voices speaking Eldanian broke the air behind him.
“—don’t really care right now, Lit. I want to find out what the
heck—”
“How long did you keep it from me, Ryse? Who else did you tell?”
The second voice was his brother’s, and it sounded angry.
Cole followed the sound and found Litnig, Ryse, Quay, and Leramis
exiting the staircase that led belowdecks. Quay strode to the aft castle of the
ship, where the Aleani captain was standing next to his pilot at the wheel,
looking nervously at the rocks to portside and the storm to starboard.
Ryse made to follow him, but Litnig held her back. “Who else knew,
Ryse? Who else did you tell?” The wind picked up, but his voice cut through it.
His face was getting flushed. His eyes flashed.
Nine-tailed, stepdancing hells, Cole thought. He stumbled his way
across the deck.
“Did you tell him?” Litnig thundered. He jerked a thumb toward
Leramis.
Ryse looked at her feet.
That seemed to say enough for Litnig.
“Yenor’s eyes, Ryse!” He ran a hand through his hair and grabbed a
tuft of it. “Why didn’t you trust me?
Why didn’t you—”
The ship rolled to port again, and Litnig stumbled into Cole.
Litnig outweighed him by a solid eighty pounds, but Cole had
always been good at leveraging his weight. Even the sea couldn’t take that from
him. He caught Litnig and wrapped his arms around him.
“Easy, Lit,” he said. The ship righted and his head tried to turn a
somersault, but he controlled it. “Calm down, all right? Just calm…”
Litnig turned his head. His hair had grown long and shaggy, and
his cloud-colored eyes were red-rimmed and underlined with shadows. “Cole,” he
growled, “stay out of this.”
Cole squeezed. It was the same thing Litnig had done to their
father at least a dozen times.
He hoped Lit would get the message.
“Cole—”
Cole squeezed tighter.
“I’m warning you, Cole. Don’t—”
A few fat drops of rain struck Cole across the face. The storm
clouds were growing closer. The rain began to drum against the deck. The wind
shoved them toward the rocks.
None of that mattered. He couldn’t control it. He couldn’t even
affect it. All he could do was hold on to his brother, and if he was very
lucky, make him listen. “Lit,” Cole said as quietly as he could, “do you
remember when ’Ta would get mad?”
Litnig’s muscles bunched underneath Cole’s fingertips. “Don’t talk
to me about ’Ta,” he growled. “You don’t understand, Cole. You don’t…”
“So tell me,” Cole said. His arms were starting to get tired.
Litnig mumbled something.
“What?”
“I said, ‘I can’t!’”
Litnig roared. He lowered his hips and broke free of Cole’s grip. His elbow
slammed into Cole’s gut and sent him stumbling backward.
As he did, the ship rolled to port again, deeper than it had
before.
Cole scrambled to keep his balance. His arms wheeled. The ship
rolled deeper, and he found himself staring upward and northward into the
darkening sky. Litnig reached for him, but he was too far away, and Cole was
falling toward the portside rail, falling toward the sea—
He crashed into something warm. Something just about his size.
Something that grabbed at his arm and yelped as it was knocked into the ocean
in his place.
The Skellup righted
itself and began to climb another swell. The wind screamed. Cole turned in a
slow circle.
Dil was gone.
It took a second for him to register the fact.
Dil was gone.
There was a warm place on his shoulder where he’d crashed into
her. He craned his head over the side of the ship, but the swells were so high
he couldn’t spot her.
Gone, he thought again. The word didn’t
seem real.
He faced his brother. Litnig’s eyes shone wide and panicked. His
face had gone from flushed to ghastly pale.
The Aleani shouted and heaved and pulled at things. The storm grew
fiercer. Another wave struck the ship.
Cole shivered in the wind and the rain, and then he began to move.
He spotted a coil of unused rope hanging by the stairs to the aft
castle. Not too heavy, not too light. Enough to hold his weight but not drag
him down. He picked up one end. It felt old and coarse.
Everyone was talking, but he didn’t care.
Dil was gone.
He fumbled numbly to tie the rope around his waist.
He used good knots. Climbing knots that had borne his weight as he
scrambled up stone walls in Thieves’ Rise. He handed Litnig the other end of
the rope.
“Cole…” said Litnig.
Cole stepped toward the portside railing. His body still felt
shaky and weak, but that hardly mattered anymore.
Litnig’s hand landed on his shoulder, pulling him back, keeping
him on the ship, keeping him from Dil.
Something inside Cole snapped.
“Don’t you fucking touch
me!” he shouted. He whirled around, elbow first, harder than he meant to,
harder than he’d hit Lit since they were kids. There was a heavy crack. A dark red welt formed under
Litnig’s left eye.
Litnig let go and reached for his injured cheek. Cole spun around.
The ship rolled and heaved. His stomach tried to jump out of his throat.
Cole ran forward, planted one foot on top of the railing, and
leaped into the sea.
It was an ugly dive, and his face hit the water with a cold, wet
slap. His chest contracted, but he’d spent enough time in thrice-damned
freezing water not to lose his breath or his head anymore. He didn’t sink too
deep, and soon he was back on top of the salty swells, treading water and
sucking in breath while the wind sent drops of spray skittering along the
heaving ocean surface.
“Dil!” he screamed into the storm. The Skellup’s low, rolling gait had already taken it past him. He took
a few strokes away from the ship, keeping the rocks to his right. The swells
pulled at him more strongly than he’d expected them to. He bobbed six or eight
feet up and down with every one. The cold sapped what strength was left in his
arms and legs.
“Dil!” he screamed again.
The water churned in dark, angry mountains. The rope around his
waist played out foot by foot. He kicked and pulled and spat and shouted.
“Dil!”
A voice called out in return, far to his right. Toward the rocks.
The water swelled, and for a moment he was on top of everything.
He spotted a dot in the water near one of the rocks.
Cole’s legs scissored, and he swam as fast and as hard as his
numbing body would take him. The line stretched out. The rock drew closer, even
as his face lost feeling and the outsides of his arms and legs grew rubbery.
When he was on the crests of the waves, he saw that the dot was coming out to
meet him. It grew closer, closer, larger, larger. No longer a dot but a person.
No longer a person but Dil.
He’d almost reached her when the line caught around his hips and
dragged him backward.
He cursed and shoved down on the rope belt as it took him
underwater. It didn’t budge. His knots were strong.
Cole rolled over. His head broke the surface again, but he was on
his back, not swimming but trolling through the water like a worm on the end of
a fishing line. The cold, briny sea filled his mouth. He spat it out and
spotted Dil in front of him. She was just out of reach, struggling through the
chop. She looked worried, and she was getting farther away. She wouldn’t catch
him, couldn’t catch him—
His fingers closed around the handle of his knife.
Cold, confused calculations ran drunkenly through his brain. He
pulled the knife.
He cut the rope.
It didn’t take much. He slid the blade back and forth twice, and
then he was free—no longer being dragged anywhere but with the current. The
frayed end of the rope skimmed across the tops of the waves and flew beyond his
reach.
Arms grasped his shoulders. Legs kicked next to his in the waves.
He turned to face them.
Dil wrapped her arms around him. Her eyes shone a bright, lustrous
gold. “Cole—why?” she whispered.
Cole kicked to stay above the churning surf. The wind whipped
sheets of spray into his eyes. A sheet of lightning forked across the bottoms
of the clouds.
“I love you,” he mumbled into her shoulder.
As if it solved everything. As if it solved anything.
They floated together, a mile or more offshore, a mile or more
from safety, surrounded by wind and water and black, jagged rocks.
And filled by desperate, flickering love.
SECOND bit of news!
I’m going to make an audiobook of Soulwoven. I’ve gotten a
lot of interest from people I talk to at signings and conferences, but I also
want to poll you the hardcore fans so that I can make sure you get what you
want. To that end, I’ve put together a quick survey about your audiobook
preferences. If you’ve got a minute,
fill it out and let me know
what you’re after!
That’s all for now, friends and readers. Thanks as always
for being the wind in my sails. I am so, so excited about Exile. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written, hands-down. It’s tighter,
deeper, darker, and more beautiful than the first book was. Early readers have
been excited about it, and I hope you will be too. I can’t wait to get it to
you. :-)
Yours in sweat and ink as always,
Jeff
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