The Making of a Wizard

 I've got a new book!  It's officially a prequel to my main fantasy series, The Royal Wizard of Yurt, and it's entitled "The Making of a Wizard."

 Like all the books in the series, it's told from the perspective of Daimbert, my wizard hero.  Daimbert isn't me, but he has my sense of humor.  Fans are fond of Daimbert (good choice), to the extent that they are reluctant to like my books unless they have Daimbert in them.  I finished writing the main 6-book series something like twenty-five years ago, but fans wanted more.

So I wrote three novellas (short novels) that take place in between the main books (the main series covers about thirty-five years in the lives of the characters).  Great, said the fans, but we want more!  So now I've written this prequel, a novelette (something longer than a short story but not long enough to be called a short novel). I fear this will inspire the fans to say they want more.  (I love you, fans!)

"The Making of a Wizard" tells how Daimbert, a young man from a family that imported and wholesaled wool to the weavers, decided to break out of the family business and study magic.  The wizards' school stood at the top of the hill, in the center of the great City, visible everywhere, but seemingly inaccessible to someone from the warehouse district, until the day Daimbert decided to climb up there.

Not sure what the excellent artist from whom I bought the cover art had in mind (he goes by the handle of "unique designs").  But I think it shows the wizards' school, mysterious and packed with books.

For someone who has never read the Royal Wizard of Yurt series, you could start here.  But the real "gateway drug" to all my fantasy novels is the first full-length novel in the series, "A Bad Spell in Yurt."  It came out originally in 1991 but is still attracting new readers.  For those who've already read and enjoyed the whole series, I hope you like this one too, as it fills in some of the background on Daimbert's life and character.

At the moment the book is just available on Amazon, as an ebook (buy or read for free with Kindle Unlimited) or as a slim paperback.  Here's the US link. Enjoy!

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

Is This Apocalypse Necessary?

 As those who read my fiction know, my main fantasy series is "The Royal Wizard of Yurt," six novels plus some novellas and a separate "next generation" series.  The final novel in the series is Is This Apocalypse Necessary?

 

Over the last decade, I've been slowly putting the novels into audio book format, and Apocalypse has just become available, on Audible, iTunes, and Amazon.  These days books can be read (or "read") in a variety of formats, in physical print form, as an ebook (on a computer, smart phone, or e-reader like a Kindle), or as an audio book, and I wanted to make my books available for whatever works best for the reader.  I know a lot of people enjoy audio books on long drives, or while jogging, or even while washing pots and mopping the floor.

The narrator for the whole series is Eric Vincent.  Some authors record their own audio books, but given that Daimbert, the wizard of Yurt who tells the stories, is male but I am not, I really needed a separate narrator.  (To say nothing of the fact that you need professional equipment and a sound studio to do it right.)  Originally it was sort of a shock to hear a voice that isn't the voice in my head doing the first-person narration, but Eric does a terrific job of voicing Daimbert.

For those who would like to try audio books for the first time, here are the Audible links for people in the US and in the UK to get you started.

Or for those of you who prefer a physical book, here's the link to Amazon, which is selling new signed copies.

And if you've never read Apocalypse, here's the opening to give you a taste.

__________________________________________________________________

The midnight knock came sharp and hard.  I had no way of knowing that the knock meant that in two minutes I would be kidnapped and in three weeks dead.

I rolled over, too sleepy to bother with a spell.  It had to be, I thought vaguely, someone from here in the castle, so eager for my wizardly wisdom that he couldn’t wait until morning.  “Mmm?”

The knock came again.  “Come in,” I mumbled, not recalling for the moment how rarely my wisdom was sought this eagerly.  “The door’s unlocked.”

It slowly creaked open, letting in a cool, damp wind but at first nothing else.  It was the darkest hour of the night, the hour when it seems that the sun must this time be gone for good, and the furniture has taken advantage of its absence to metamorphose into something large and predatory.  I sat up, abruptly wide awake.  Through the doorway stepped a pair of hooded figures, barely visible in the shadows.

Just inside, they paused to light a magic lamp, but their hoods hid their faces from the lamp’s glow.  The aura of wizardry emanated from them like heat from a stove.  Two strange wizards, in a kingdom where I was the only one?  My heart slammed against my ribs as I scrambled belatedly for a spell.

“Don’t struggle, Daimbert,” said one, “and don’t make a sound.”  His was no voice I recognized, though he seemed to know who I was.  “Is anyone here with you?”

“No!” I said loudly and stretched out a hand, adding the two quick words that should have knocked them flat.  The words had no effect.

Instead a loop of air around my chest suddenly became solid.  They were using a binding spell on me.
I struggled to free myself, but with two of them joining their magic together I didn’t have a chance.  The binding spell held me tighter than any rope and kept my mouth closed, so I could do no more than thrash and make inarticulate grunts as they advanced toward the bed.

“We told you not to struggle, Daimbert,” said one reprovingly.  “And stop making that sound before we have to paralyze you, too.  Good thing we practiced our binding spells before we came!”

So they wanted me alive.

________________________________________________________________________________

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

The Starlight Raven

 A lot of readers like series.  They get to know and like the characters, they enjoy the world in which the characters function, and they are eager to see what happens next.  This is why some authors keep a series going for dozens of books (mysteries are especially wont to do this), and why both TV shows and movies keep bringing out the same people to have new adventures.

I like a good series myself!  And I write them.  When I first wrote and published A Bad Spell in Yurt, I assumed it was a stand-alone.  At first I resisted suggestions that it become a series.  I'd seen too many series in which the problem solved in the first book turns out not to have been solved after all in the second book, thus undercutting what had been the first book's happy ending, or the same problems being presented repeatedly and unoriginally (as in the classic, Defeat the Dark Lord in book 1, defeat the Purple Lord in book 2, and in book 3, look, there's the Plaid Lord), or the author becoming so fond of his characters that he won't let anything exciting or dangerous happen to them.  But my husband persuaded me that my characters could mature and grow and face entirely different challenges, so "Yurt" ended up being a series, with 6 novels (and 3 shorter novellas).

But the series wrapped up well in the sixth novel, all the long-term plot lines resolved, our hero in a very different place than he had been at the beginning.  I didn't want to continue the series with lame adventures.

So instead I went with "Yurt, the Next Generation."  This series focuses on the hero's daughter, offspring of a witch and a wizard with the skills of both.  The Starlight Raven, the title of the first book about Antonia, has become a series in itself, with three books published and a fourth on the way.  It will probably be five or maybe six books in all.

These are quite different, I've found, than the original Yurt series, even if set in the same world.  A teenage girl (Antonia) is quite different from a perhaps overly-confident young adult male (her father when his series begins).  She has to worry about sex discrimination and unwanted attention from the opposite sex, things which never bothered him in the slightest.  I've added the dimension that witchcraft, female magic, is quite different from male wizardry, and Antonia has to try to find her way in both, while still being a girl.  Although the wizards' school gets mentioned a lot in the original Yurt series, Antonia's stories are actually set there, at least in part.  I've also done a lot more with inter-generational issues.

The result of introducing real teen-girl issues into fantasy is that a lot of people think of "The Starlight Raven" series as darker and for more mature audiences than the original Yurt, even though Antonia begins the series at age 14, whereas her father began his own series in his late 20s and has been killed at least once, although she's never been killed a bit.

 

Anyway, I hope that both "Yurt" fans and people who just enjoy teen fantasy will like "The Starlight Raven."  A sample is given below to whet your appetite.  Here's the link to the book on Amazon.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Of course I knew my mother was a witch.
She never needed a match to light the fire.  She knew immediately if someone new had come to town, even if she had spent the entire day at home, sewing.  Sometimes in the evening, after she had finished tailoring a new ballgown for the mayor’s daughter or embroidering a new altar-cloth for the church, women would knock quietly on our door, giving quick glances up and down the cobbled street, and Mother would tell them if they were going to have a baby boy or a girl.
But I had no intention of living an uneventful life as a small-town witch.  I was going to study to be a real wizard.
That would be easy, I thought.  My father was head of the wizards’ school in the great City, a much more interesting place than our little town of Caelrhon.  He’d said himself that I could come and study there when I became fourteen, the first girl the wizards’ school had ever admitted.  Already I knew how to turn someone into a frog, something even my mother couldn’t do.
But on my fourteenth birthday it all became much less easy.

It started two weeks earlier.  A gentle hand on my shoulder interrupted my dreams.  “Antonia, wake up.”
“It’s too early to get up for school,” I mumbled into the pillow.
The hand remained on my shoulder.  “It’s not a school day.”
Then I remembered.  “We’re going to the City!”
I was out of bed with a bound, and then, with another bound, right back under the covers.  The air from my casement window was cold.  “It’s not even morning yet!”
Mother flicked a flame into life on my candlestick.  She was already dressed, her brown braids neatly wrapped around her head.  I loved her hair, smooth where mine was always tangled, darker than mine but showing golden highlights in the glow of the candle.
“I want to go there and be home again before it gets late,” she said firmly.  “After all, tomorrow is a school day.  In fact I hear,” she added with a smile, tugging the quilt off me, “that at the wizards’ school they give the new students only one warning.  Then, if they aren’t on time for the first early-morning class, they set the dragons on them.”
I swung my legs out of bed and kept them out.  “Sometimes I think everyone’s seen dragons except for me.  Father even killed one once when he was young, even though he won’t talk about it.  And there was the time we arrived in the City just too late to see a whole flock of them.”
“I’ve never seen a dragon either,” said Mother.  She had the brush and was working the snarls out of my hair.  “I think it would be more terrifying than exciting.  And I’m not at all sure they come in ‘flocks.’”
I let her work on my braids, thinking that once I was a wizard I would go visit dragons myself, rather than waiting for them to come to me.  A herd of dragons?  A pack?  A clutch?  I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be a gaggle.
“Besides,” I said after a minute, “I know they don’t punish students for sleeping late.  Father told me that when he was a student at the wizards’ school, he hardly ever made any of his morning classes.”
There was a chuckle behind me.  “Antonia, your father is an admirable man in many ways, and he’s made himself an excellent wizard over the years, but I would not recommend using him as your model when you become a wizardry student.”
I shrugged and laughed myself.  Having my hair braided was very pleasant.  I glanced toward my window, still nearly dark, and was hit by a sudden memory.  “I had the strangest dream,” I said slowly.  “It was about a bat.  He tapped at my window and squeaked this really high squeak, but when I sat up he flew off.  And for some reason I wasn’t frightened at all.”
“Of course not,” Mother muttered through hairpins.  “Bats won’t hurt you.  I’m glad you knew that, even in a dream.”
“And the strangest thing of all,” I went on, “was that he had a little cylinder tied to his leg—you know, like the carrier pigeons wear.”
“Who would send messages by a bat?” said Mother abruptly.  The last pin went sharply into my hair.  “Really, Antonia, you’re old enough to know that nobody finds someone else’s dreams very interesting.  Get dressed and come downstairs.”
She slammed my door behind her, leaving me wondering why she could possibly be so irritated by a dream.
No time to worry about it.  I splashed cold water on my face from the washbasin, pulled on a school dress, and laced up my boots.  In front of the mirror I smoothed out the hairs disarranged in getting dressed.  I grinned at my reflection and blew out the candle.  I was the daughter of a witch and a wizard, almost fourteen years old, and I didn’t think there was anything I couldn’t do.
When I clattered down the stairs into the kitchen, Mother was frying bacon and smiling again.
But then I saw it, lying on the table amid dressmaking scraps:  a tiny piece of parchment, half unrolled.  It looked like the kind of message usually brought by a carrier pigeon.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015, 2022

A Bad Spell in Yurt

I'm sort of an amphibian author, who has been published both by a traditional New York City publishing house (Baen) and independently (by me), with books available both as paperbacks and as ebooks. But don't worry, I haven't been turned into a frog.

My first published book was A Bad Spell in Yurt, originally published by Baen in 1991.  It was a national fantasy best-seller when it first appeared and has continued to gain new readers ever since.  It doubtless benefited from the fact that I'd had lots of experience in writing stories—one gets better at writing the more one does so, just as one gets better at everything from tennis to cooking with practice.  I've been writing stories since I was five years old, and had first tried to get a novel accepted by a publisher back in high school.  So after 25 years I was an overnight success!

The book is a story of a young wizard who believes the tiny kingdom of Yurt is the perfect place for someone who barely graduated from the wizards' school, after all that embarrassment with the frogs.  But as he takes up his duties as new Royal Wizard he senses malignant forces at work....  Finding out who is responsible and saving his kingdom will take all his ingenuity and all the magic he didn't exactly learn properly in the first place, with his own life the price of failure.

Part of the success of Bad Spell I'm sure was the excellent, eye-catching cover by Tom Kidd.  Although the original Baen paperback is out of print, it's now back in print as a trade (large-format) paperback with the same great cover art.  Tom made my wizard hero, Daimbert, look a lot like himself, even though he's never worn a hat like that in his life.

The book is available (both ebook and paperback) from Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and B&N/Nook.  Here's the US Amazon link.  If you buy the paperback from Amazon, you can get the ebook for a substantial discount.

Here's the opening, to whet your appetite.

PART ONE - YURT

I was not a very good wizard.  But it was not a very big kingdom.  I assumed I was the only person to answer their ad, for in a short time I had a letter back from the king's constable, saying the job was mine if I still wanted it, and that I should report to take up the post of Royal Wizard in six weeks.

It took most of the six weeks to grow in my beard, and then I dyed it grey to make myself look older.  Two days before leaving for my kingdom, I went down to the emporium to buy a suitable wardrobe.

Of course at the emporium they knew all about us young wizards from the wizards' school.  They looked at us dubiously, took our money into the next room to make sure it stayed money even when we weren't there, and tended to count the items on the display racks in a rather conspicuous way.  But I knew the manager of the clothing department—he'd even helped me once pick out a Christmas present for my grandmother, which I think endeared me to him as much as to her.

He was on the phone when I came in.  "What do you mean, you won't take it back?  But our buyer never ordered it!"  While waiting for him, I picked out some black velvet trousers, just the thing, I thought, to give me a wizardly flair.

The manager slammed down the phone.  "So what am I supposed to do with this?" he demanded of no one in particular.  "This" was a shapeless red velvet pullover, with some rather tattered white fur at the neck.  It might have been intended to be part of a Father Noel costume.

I was entranced.  "I'll take it!"

"Are you sure?  But what will you do with it?"

"I'm going to be a Royal Wizard.  It will help me strike the right note of authority and mystery."

"Speaking of mystery, what's all the fuzzy stuff on your chin?"

I was proud of my beard, but since he gave me the pullover for almost nothing, I couldn't be irritated.  When I left for my kingdom, I felt resplendent in velvet, red for blood and black for the powers of darkness.

It was only two hundred miles, and probably most of the young wizards would have flown themselves, but I insisted on the air cart.  "I need to make the proper impression of grandeur when I arrive," I said.  Besides—and they all knew it even though I didn't say it—I wasn't sure I could fly that far.

The air cart was the skin of a purple beast that had been born flying.  Long after the beast was dead, its skin continued to fly, and it could be guided by magic commands.  It brought me steeply up from the wizards' complex at the center of the City, and I looked back as the white city spires fell away.  It had been a good eight years, but I felt ready for new challenges.  We soared across plains, forests, and hills all the long afternoon, before finally banking steeply over what I had been calling "my" kingdom for the last six weeks.

From above there scarcely seemed to be more to the kingdom than a castle, for beyond the castle walls there was barely room for the royal fields and pastures before thick green woods closed in.  A bright garden lay just outside the castle walls, and pennants snapped from all the turrets.  The air cart dipped, folded its wings, and set me down with a bump in the courtyard.

I looked around and loved it at once.  It was a perfect child's toy of a castle, the stone walls freshly whitewashed and the green shutters newly painted.  The courtyard was a combination of clean-swept cobbles, manicured flower beds, and tidy gravel paths.  On the far side of the courtyard, a well-groomed horse put his head over a white half-door and whinnied at me.

A man and woman came toward me, both dressed in starched blue and white.  "Welcome to the Kingdom of Yurt.  I am the king's constable, and this is my wife."  They both bowed deeply, which flustered me, but I covered it by striking a pose of dignity.

"Thank you," I said in my deepest voice.  "I'm sure I will find much here to interest me."  The air cart was twitching, eager to be flying again.  "If you could just help me with my luggage—"

The constable helped me unload the boxes, while his wife ran to open the door to my chambers.  The door opened directly onto the courtyard.  I had somehow expected either a tower or a dungeon and wondered if this was suitably dignified, but at least it meant we didn't have far to carry the boxes.  They were heavy, too, and I had not had enough practice with the spell for lifting more than one heavy thing at a time to want to try in front of an audience.

The air cart took off again as soon as it was empty.  I watched it soar away, my last direct link with the City, then turned to start unpacking.  Both the constable and his wife stayed with me, eager to talk.  I was just as eager to have them, because I wanted to find out more about Yurt.

"The kingdom's never had a wizard from the wizards' school before," said the constable.  I was unpacking my certificate for completing the eight years' program.  Although, naturally, it didn't say anything about honors or special merit or even areas of distinction, it really was impressive.  That was why I had packed it on top.  It was a magic certificate, of course, nearly six feet long when unrolled.  My name, Daimbert, was written in letters of fire that flickered as you watched.  Stars twinkled around the edges, and the deep blue and maroon flourishes turned to gold when you touched them.  It came with its own spell to adhere to walls, so I hung it up in the outer of my two chambers, the one I would use as my study.

"Our old wizard's just retired," the constable continued.  "He must be well past two hundred years old, and when he was young you had to serve an apprenticeship to become a wizard.  They didn't have all the training you have now."

I ostentatiously opened my first box of books.

"He's moved down to a little house at the edge of the forest.  That's why we had to hire a new wizard.  I'm sure he'd be delighted to meet you if you ever had time to visit him."

"Oh, good," I thought with more relief than was easy to admit, even to myself.  "Someone who may actually know some magic if I get into trouble."

I took my books out one by one and arranged them on the shelves:  the Ancient and Modern Necromancy, all five volumes of Thaumaturgy A to Z, the Index to Spell Key Words, and the rest, most barely thumbed.  As I tried to decide whether to put the Elements of Transmogrification next to Basic Metamorphosis, which would make sense thematically but not aesthetically, since they were such different sizes, I thought I should have plenty of quiet evenings here, away from the distractions of the City, and might even get a chance to read them.  If I had done more than skim those two volumes, I might have avoided all that embarrassment with the frogs in the practical exam.

"You'll meet the king this evening, but he's authorized me to tell you some of our hopes.  We've never had a telephone system, but now that you're here we're sure we'll be able to get one."

I was flabbergasted.  In the City telephones were so common that you tended to forget how complicated was the magic by which they ran.  It was new magic, too, not more than forty years old, something that Yurt's old wizard would never have learned but which was indeed taught at the wizards' school.  How was I going to explain I had managed to avoid that whole sequence of courses?

He saw my hesitation.  "We realize we're rather remote, and that the magic is not easy.  No one is expecting anything for at least a few weeks.  But everyone was so excited when you answered our ad!  We'd been afraid we might have to settle for a magician, but instead we have a fully-trained and qualified wizard!"

"Don't worry the boy with his duties so soon," the constable's wife said to him, but smiling as she scolded.  "He'll have plenty of time to get started tomorrow."

"Tomorrow!  A few weeks!" I thought but had the sense not to say anything.  I didn't even have the right books.  If I did nothing else, I might be able to derive the proper magic from basic principles in four or five years.  I was too upset even to resent being called "the boy"—so much for the grey beard!

"We'll leave you alone now," said the constable.  "But dinner's in an hour, and then you can meet some of the rest."  I had seen faces peeping out of windows as we went back and forth with the luggage, but no one else had come to meet me.  While I unpacked my clothes, I tried gloomily to think of plausible excuses why Yurt could not possibly have a telephone system.  Nearby antitelephonic demonic influences and the importance of maintaining a rustic, unspoiled lifestyle seemed the most promising.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

An Autumn Haunting

It isn't autumn right now, it's spring, but my newest book takes place in the fall and is called An Autumn Haunting.  Here's the cover, thanks to Dane at eBookLaunch.

As you can probably tell, it's fantasy with a teen-age heroine.  For those of you who have been C. Dale Brittain fans, it's the second book in the "Yurt, the Next Generation" series, the sequel to The Starlight Raven.  It's about Antonia, daughter of a wizard and a witch (a very rare union), trying to find her way as the only girl at the all-male wizards' school.  In this book she's in her third year at the school, and is hoping things will look up now that they've finally admitted a second young woman.  But her life is complicated because too many of the male students seem unduly interested in her, and then a terrifying haunting shows up….

(And let us all note that I had already been publishing books with a wizards' school for many years before "Harry Potter" showed up.)

It's available both as an ebook and as a paperback (your choice), available through Amazon here.  In the near future, it should also become an ebook on other e-tailers.  Amazon assumes most ebook readers will read on a Kindle, but they have free apps so you can also read on your computer, on a tablet, on an iPad, or even on your phone if you like reading one sentence at a time.

For those of you thinking, "Gee, haven't you been writing a lot of books lately?" the answer is that I've finally been able to retire from that pesky day job and get back to some stories I'd sort-of written as long ago as a dozen years, and get them into final form.  (Besides, aren't more books good?)

Here's the opening to whet your appetite:

AN AUTUMN HAUNTING

PART ONE 

To the left of me, Chlodomer gasped.  “They’re not supposed to do that!”  Something very strange was happening to his rats’ tails.

To the right of me, Harduin’s rats were growing bigger and bigger, until the wires of the cage made deep dents in their fur.

But mine, giving me what I could have sworn were reproachful looks from their little pink eyes, just keeled over, paws in the air.

“Antonia,” said the Potions teacher from the front of the room, “if the spells are beyond your abilities, you know you should have come and talked to me.”

This was not “beyond my abilities.”  I’d known exactly what I was doing.  This couldn’t be happening!  Unless—

“Hey, ’Tonia,” said Chlodomer in a whisper.  “What a change!  You messed up even worse than me!”

Five more minutes.  Potions Practical would be over in five more minutes.  If I gritted my teeth I could make it out of the room before rather than after I started screaming at somebody.

If I’d had to choose someone to slam into, it wouldn’t have been Prince Walther.

But then it was hard to make a choice, running down the stairs so fast I was barely touching the steps.  Only a quick spell saved me from going right over the railing at the last landing.  When Walther stepped out the doorway directly in front of me, it was much too late even to think of a spell.  We both sprawled across the staircase, and the books he’d been carrying sailed in all directions.

“Antonia!  Slow down!” he said, standing back up and taking me by the elbow.  He sounded as serious and sharp as one of our teachers.  Two words in the Hidden Language drew all his scattered books together, and they tidily stacked themselves on the step beside him.  “You are going to hurt yourself if you’re not careful!”

The last thing I needed was to be lectured by someone the same age as I was.  I picked myself up slowly.  He was smiling, or at least showing his teeth.

But I had to talk to somebody.  “They’ve sabotaged my potions!  And now they’re blaming me!”

He stopped straightening his student robe to look at me, one eyebrow lifted skeptically.

Walther had excellent eyebrows, heavy and black, under a thick shock of dark hair.  I was never able to make one of my brows lift independently, as much as I practiced in front of the mirror.  I could probably have raised one with magic, but that would be unfair.  And I wasn’t about to be distracted now by facial hair.

“We were working on potions in class,” I said, a little more calmly, “herbal potions—some to strengthen, some to make a creature grow, some to give it a new color.”

Prince Walther nodded soberly.  A smile never looked right on his face anyway.

“And we tried them on rats.  Everybody else’s potions worked—some rats turned green, some shrank so small they were almost able to squeeze through the bars of their cages, some got so strong they were able to rip their cages open and the teacher had to stop them with a binding spell.  Chlodomer’s rats all grew a second tail, though I don’t think that’s what he intended.  But all my rats just rolled over on their backs and died!”

When I looked away from him I could still see their reproachful little pink eyes.

“And you think this was sabotage,” he said quietly.

“Well, what else could it be?” I demanded.  “I know I did the spells right.  And everybody else’s were working fine.  But when I told the teacher somebody had been messing with my potions, he didn’t believe me!”

“What did he say?”  Walther lifted an eyebrow again, and he looked as if he didn’t believe me either.

“He told me that I needed to study the chapter again, ‘properly this time.’  And that wasn’t even the worst!  He said that maybe my ‘pretty little head’ just wasn’t made for doing magic!  He thinks I can’t study magic because I’m a girl!”

Walther sat down beside his books.  I noticed absently that the top one was a history of the Black Wars.  He tried to smile again, but it was not a success—he looked for a second as though he felt someone might not think he could study magic.  Which was silly.

I wished I didn’t feel overawed by him.  It was only, I told myself, because he was a prince, and because he was the only student in our year who might be as good at magic as I was, and because he had grown so tall in the time we’d both been at the wizards’ school.

The momentary look of pain on his face was gone as if it had never been there.  “Antonia, don’t start that,” he said, almost lecturing me.  “You’ve a third-year student now, not a beginner.  All the teachers know you’re smart.  You’re one of the best wizardry students in our class.”

“If they think so, then why haven’t they admitted any other girls?  No, they all just believe I’ve done as well as I have only because I’m the Master’s daughter.”

I sat down next to him, wishing gloomily that there was another wizards’ school somewhere I could attend, somewhere I wasn’t related to anyone.  But without Father they would never admit me in the first place.

“If you want them to respect you, storming out of the middle of class isn’t going to make you look responsible,” said Walther severely.  I started regretting having said anything to him.  At one time I’d thought we were friends.  What had gotten into him lately?

“It wasn’t the middle of class,” I said, glaring at the floor.  “We were done.  All that was left was cleaning up.  And I wasn’t about to clean up a potion that someone else had poisoned!”

And it was feeling so guilty about the dead rats that made me want to scream, run, anything but look at their lifeless little forms.

“I would have thought,” said Walther slowly, “that you’d have been very careful to save the sabotaged potions.  They could show you who did it—if you didn’t, of course, just do the spells wrong.”

Why hadn’t I thought of that?  I jumped up, almost knocking Walther over again as he too rose to his feet.  “I’d better get right back!  Sorry I bumped you!” I yelled over my shoulder as I shot up the stairs.  So the apology was five minutes late.  So at least I’d given one.

Back in the classroom, the other students were pouring the last of their potions into the big tub, over which our teacher mumbled neutralizing spells.  The teacher’s assistant, Nivard, one of the older students, was helping clean up.  Right now he was trying unsuccessfully to calm down a rat enough so that it would drink a potion to reverse the spell put on it.  It was one of Chlodomer’s that had grown a second tail, and it bit madly at the tail, squealing with pain and bleeding hard, and did not stop biting.

After a minute Nivard shrugged, took the rat firmly by head and hindquarters, and jerked hard to break the spine.  “Sorry, little one,” he said as the rat went limp, and he dropped the body into the incinerator.

My own dead rats were already gone.  In fact, my bench space was strangely clean and empty.

“I cleaned it up for you, ’Tonia,” said Chlodomer, coming over and smiling.  He gave a quick glance toward our teacher.  “I knew you were upset, and I didn’t want you to get into more trouble by leaving your bench space messy.”  Tall, gangly, and freckled, he was five years older than I was, because I had entered the school much earlier than students usually did, but it was always hard to remember he wasn’t younger.

I forced myself to smile back.  He’d meant well, and I couldn’t expect Chlodomer to have known that I wanted to save the potions, since I hadn’t thought of it myself.

Our teacher saw me and nodded rather distantly.  Some of the potions in the tub appeared to be interacting badly, bubbling and sending off smoke.  He added new phrases in the Hidden Language and poured in another potion that seemed to settle things a bit.

“Let’s go get something to eat before our afternoon discussion section,” said Chlodomer.  “I can tell you how I figured out a potion to make my rats return to normal—all except for that one,” he added regretfully.

I wasn’t hungry, but there didn’t seem any point in hanging around—especially since our teacher might have been planning to tell me that even girls with pretty little heads needed to clean up their own failures.

We slipped out and walked down the stairs, Chlodomer speculating on why a potion that was supposed to make his rats able to run very fast had given them extra tails instead.  He’d been able to reverse the spell by adding a handful of chopped dragon’s-bane to his original concoction, but he still wasn’t sure what had gone wrong in the first place.

When we reached the lower landing, Prince Walther was gone.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017 

Daughter of Magic

I've got a new audio book just out!  It's called "Daughter of Magic," part of my Royal Wizard of Yurt series.

It's available on Audible as well as Amazon and iTunes.  You can get it for free with a trial membership in Audible, or buy it for $1.99 from Amazon if you also buy the ebook version.  And if you're an Audible listener, make it one of your choices this month!  It should soon have "Whispersync" turned on, where you can alternately read and listen, read and listen, and have your devices (Kindle and mp3 player) remember your place.

Here's the description (a ruined castle plays a prominent role):

She's the daughter of a witch and a wizard, with the talents of both - and the world had better watch out!

Daimbert the wizard just wants to spend some quality time with his daughter Antonia. He loves his peaceful kingdom of Yurt, but he and those around him are increasingly finding themselves hampered by their society's strictures and silent rules. The king doesn't want to marry any of the princesses offered to him, the duchess' twin daughters want to be respectively a knight and a priest, and Daimbert himself is forbidden by the norms of wizardry from a liaison with a witch - much less having a daughter.

And then the peaceful kingdom is suddenly not so peaceful, between the arrival of an exotic eastern princess and her elephant, a ravening wolf, an army of undead warriors, a bogus miracle worker, and an old enemy seeking vengeance.

Can Antonia save the day? She already knows how to turn someone into a frog. But she is after all only five years old. And the bogus miracle worker has a strange power over children....

An audio book (what we used to call "Books on Tape") is an interesting experience.  It gives you more of the feeling of stories-told-out-loud around the campfire than sitting and reading.  The narrator is called on to do different voices, to bring out the tension in the exciting parts, to make you want to know what happens next.  The story is told by Daimbert the wizard, and when I first heard my stories being narrated, it was an odd sensation, because in my own head of course Daimbert sounds like me.  The excellent narrator, Eric Vincent, brings out intensity I hadn't realized I'd put in.

If you've never read or listened to any of the Yurt series, you could plunge in here for a wild ride, but you might prefer to start at the beginning, with "A Bad Spell in Yurt."  Happy listening!

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

Third Time's a Charm

My first foray into independent print publishing, "The Starlight Raven," was quite a success.  So I'm going to try again with an omnibus of the three Yurt novellas.  Its title, appropriately enough, is "Third Time's a Charm."

It's an ebook, available on Amazon and all other major ebook platforms, and also available in print as a paperback.

I've been working with a graphic artist, Jan-Michael Barlow, who did the cover.  Most of my ebook covers are just my own photos of scenes in Europe, but I figured I should try to up my game a bit.  Feedback welcome!

A novella is a short novel, with events taking place over a certain period of time, challenges and character development, but not nearly as many subplots as a full-length novel.

The three novellas came about in the last few years because fans kept asking for more stories about Daimbert, and, what can I say, he's a favorite of mine as well.  They are self-contained adventures set in between the six Yurt novels, but they continue the overall story arc, of a young wizard who originally doesn't have a clue to what he's doing, but gradually gains experience and ability and has to take on responsibility as the plots he barely knew existed begin to thicken.

The first novella, "The Lost Girls and the Kobold," falls between "The Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint" and "Mage Quest" in the overall Yurt storyline; the second, "Below the Wizards' Tower," between "Mage Quest" and "The Witch and the Cathedral"; and the third, "A Long Way 'Til November," between "Daughter of Magic" and "Is This Apocalypse Necessary?"  The three novellas are also available individually as ebooks as well as in this omnibus.

Here's the book description:  "You would think that life as Royal Wizard of the tiny kingdom of Yurt would be easy, but somehow it never works out that way. Daimbert the wizard expects things to be simple: finding a girl lost in the mountains, visiting old friends at the wizards' school, or taking a trip in a gypsy caravan. But then he discovers that the mountains are more than they seem, a doppelgänger threatens the school, and his pleasant trip turns ugly with suspicion and bigotry. Good thing he knows how to improvise!"

I realize that, although the whole series is called the "Yurt series," more often than not they don't actually take place in the kingdom of Yurt itself.  In fact, most commonly they are set in Caelrhon, the kingdom next door to Yurt, the second-smallest (after Yurt) of the Western Kingdoms.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015