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.

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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.

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© 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.

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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

 Thirty years ago this summer, I published my first fantasy novel, A Bad Spell in Yurt.  I've been writing stories since I was in kindergarten, and I'd already published two scholarly books and a number of articles, but this was very exciting.  Fiction uses a different part of the brain than scholarship.

Yurt went on to be a national Science fiction/fantasy best-seller and is still my perennial best-seller.  Originally it was published as a mass-market (small size) paperback by Baen, a New York SF specialty publisher.  Its excellent sales meant that Baen was happy to publish the next four books in the series, as well as a couple of non-series books.  I had originally rejected the idea of a series, because the story was (and is) complete in itself, but my husband talked me into it.  I'm glad he did, because Daimbert, the wizard hero, is an excellent character and had lots more adventures ahead of him.  Also, fantasy readers like series.

In spite of Yurt's success, Baen became bored with me when each book did not sell more than the last one (their plan).  So I ended up publishing the sixth book in the series, Is This Apocalypse Necessary? the boffo finale, with a small press (Wooster Book Company).

Fast forward ten years.  The Yurt books were all out of print, so I started bringing them out as ebooks, first on Amazon for their Kindles, then at the other major ebook platforms, iTunes (now renamed iBooks), Nook (for Barnes & Noble), and Kobo.  A gratifyingly large number of new fans appeared!  Because a lot of them, including me, still prefer to read a physical book rather than read on a screen, I started bringing the books out in new editions in trade paperback (large size), mostly in omnibus volumes with more than one book per volume.

In addition, I decided that Daimbert had had a few other adventures I'd never written about, so I wrote three novellas (The Lost Girls and the Kobold, Below the Wizards' Tower, and A Long Way 'Til November) that took place in between the adventures in the six novels.  (They are also available in an omnibus volume of their own, called Third Time's a Charm).

Now I've taken the next step, and in honor of its thirtieth anniversary, I've brought the original Bad Spell out in hardcover!  It's what's sometimes called library binding, sturdy covers with the cover image printed on them, the same great Tom Kidd illustration that's been with the book from the beginning, rather than a monochrome cloth cover with a paper dustjacket.  Here's the link on Amazon.

And here's the opening to whet your appetite:

 

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.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2021

The Sapphire Ring

 I've published a new book!  As with all of my fiction, there's plenty of magic interspersed with elements of medieval culture.  This one is entitled The Sapphire Ring, and it's the third in the "Starlight Raven" series, also known as "Yurt, the Next Generation."  It's available as an ebook on Amazon (link here).  A paperback version is also available, and ebook versions on other major platforms are also available (B&N-Nook, Kobo, iTunes).  Here's the cover.  Note the badger and the chicken-legged house in the background.

 

Antonia, daughter of a witch and a wizard, continues trying to find a way to combine men's and women's magic, the heritage of both her parents, which is difficult because male and female magic-workers distrust each other thoroughly.  She has been touched by the Starlight Raven, which may mean she is prophesied to save her people, but she doesn't believe in prophecy, and she isn't even sure who "her" people are.  Meanwhile, she's just turned 18, too late to be a girl, not quite ready to be a woman.

Here's the opening, to give yourself a taste:

I

“I know who you are.”
It took me a moment to locate the voice in the middle of a loud and busy market.  But then I saw her, an old woman with a face wizened like last year’s apple, but with eyes of piercing blue.  At one time I would have called her a witch.
But I was a witch too, a member of the Sisterhood, and we didn’t use that word.  It was a word that men attached to us.
“You’re the one they call the Starlight Raven.”  She motioned me toward her, where she sat behind a table scattered with herbs tied together with string or twisted into a paper cone.
I turned to look out across the market, to where my Guide in the Sisterhood was negotiating for a new cooking pot.  She appeared fully occupied, laughing and gesturing, her long black hair swirling around her.  Half the men in the market were staring at her, and no one was looking at me.
I went over and sat down next to the old woman.  “My name is Antonia, but I’m afraid I don’t know yours.”
She smiled, flashing a gold tooth, but did not answer.  On her knee sat a little girl who gave me a long and serious look.  Probably age two or three, I thought.  I tried smiling at her, but she did not smile back.
“My granddaughter,” said the old woman, nodding at the girl.  “She likes to come to the market with me.  Her mother is probably glad to have a chance to be on her own for a few hours.”
For a moment I felt a pang—jealousy? wistfulness?  I had never known either of my grandmothers.  Had my mother ever wanted to be on her own?  If so, she had never said so—and I had never thought to ask.
But if she’d wanted a chance to live her life without a girl’s presence, then she had had her fill the last four years, while I was off with my Guide learning the ways of the Sisterhood or else studying at the wizards’ school.
“We’ve not given her a name yet,” the old woman continued.  “But Antonia is a good name.  We could name her for you.”
It took me a startled moment to respond.  This woman and child suddenly seemed very alien.  How could one leave a little girl nameless?  It seemed almost to be saying she was not fully human.  I had been baptized when just a few days old—unlike most Sisters, who tried to avoid the church and its male priests as much as they avoided wizardry and the male wizards, but who still had the sense to give their babies names.
“But best not to tell her it’s your name,” the old woman added, “the Starlight Raven, the one who either saves her people or who leads them into final destruction.”
I stiffened but tried to hide it.  Better cut short any notion of some prophecy.  “You can name her Antonia if you like,” I said, trying not quite successfully to chuckle, “but I’m not going to save anyone, much less lead them into destruction.  That’s just a story.”  A story I had almost believed back when I had first heard it, when the strange giant raven with stars glinting among its feathers had flown to me.  But I had only been fourteen at the time.
The old woman reached under her table and pulled out a pack of battered cards.  Her piercing blue eyes held mine.  “Let’s see what the cards have to say to that,” she said, looking amused, as though knowing far more about me than I did.  The voices and clamor of the market were all around us, but here with the old woman, her granddaughter, and her dried herbs, we seemed almost in a little private, quiet island.
She handed me the cards to shuffle.  They felt slick from much handling, edges and corners notched and nicked.  They were larger than the cards to which I was accustomed, and the deck felt thicker.
Both the old woman and her granddaughter kept their eyes on me as I shuffled.  “You’re a woman grown, Antonia,” she commented.  “You cannot deny your future much longer.”
She took the deck back and started dealing them out, face down.  “Earth, air, fire, and water,” she said in a low voice, dealing onto four piles.  “I mind you, I bind you, I call you out, from among the living, from among the dead.”
The hair on the back of my neck rose.  For the second time I thought:  This is a witch.
“Here is your birth, here is your death,” she intoned, slightly louder.  “Here is your loss, here is your love.  And here,” slapping down the next card so hard it bent, “are you.  Turn it and read your fortune.”
A fortune-teller, I told myself firmly, trying to steady my hand as I reached for the card.  Fortune-tellers picked up a few coins at fairs, telling the girls they would meet a handsome stranger, telling the boys they would fall hopelessly in love with someone unattainable, warning both not to trust false friends.  This woman was no different.  Why would I even think she had some ability to see beyond the world around us?
I turned the card.  It showed a young girl, standing in a flowering meadow and smiling.  “The Maiden,” said the old woman complacently.  “I expected that one to show.”
The Maiden was blonde.  I was brunette, chestnut-colored hair my father called it.  Good, I thought.  I don’t have to believe anything else.
“The Maiden,” she repeated, almost in a sing-song.  “A woman grown, yet still a little girl.  Eager for her independence, but almost afraid of it too.”
I was not afraid of anything, or at least not of independence, I told myself.
The little girl had been watching the cards with interest.  Now she gave a sudden and unexpected grin.
“Choose a card from the first pile,” the old woman continued, pointing with a gnarled finger.  Were these supposed to be the cards of Earth?  Or of my birth?  I had seen a few other fortune-tellers, but they had not told the cards like this.  I slipped a card from the middle of the pile and turned it over.
It was hard at first to tell what the card represented.  This really was like no deck I had ever seen.  There seemed to be all sorts of little symbols, drawn very small, in among swirling lines that might have indicated a wind storm.
But the old woman did not hesitate.  “This surrounds you,” she said.  “Magic.  Wild magic, tamed magic, magic in all its forms.  You are brimful of magic, maiden girl.”  She paused, then added, not quite as confidently, “I would have expected rather the card of the Sisters, or perhaps the Mother, to indicate our magic.”
She might think I was the Starlight Raven, but she clearly did not know I had been learning men’s magic as well as women’s.  Emboldened, I pointed at the second little pile of cards.  “So what does Air show?”
“Here we will see what crosses you,” she said, “what forces oppose you.  Choose your card.”  I took the top one.
This time it was “the Sisters.”  I recognized them at once, three young women, nearly identical although wearing different colored dresses, standing and smiling in the same meadow.  This time they were brunettes.
I showed the card to the little girl, since she seemed interested.  She nodded emphatically.
“I had not expected that card,” said the old woman slowly.  This showed there was nothing special about her fortune-telling—or so I told myself.  The first card, the Maiden, she would have known from its back, from long familiarity with the deck, but she had no control over which card I pulled from her little piles.
Whatever opposed me, it could not be the Sisterhood.  I had spent every summer with my Guide, learning the Sisters’ ways, since I turned fourteen.
And now they were supposed to be my death?
The old woman took a deep breath.  “The cards will all become clearer as we continue.  Choose from the cards of Fire.  This shows what is behind you.”
I hesitated, fingering the cards’ broken edges, then pulled one out from near the bottom of the pile.  The woman sighed as I turned it over.
The card showed a flock of crows swooping down into a field of grain.  “The Raven!” she pronounced.
Those weren’t ravens.  Those were crows.  And none of them had stars glinting among their feathers.  That she would try to pass off a flock of crows as the great black bird who had once landed on my shoulder showed she had already decided what she wanted to tell me, and she was going to force her cards to say it.
One pile remained.  “The full story will be revealed now,” she said.  “The card of Water will show what is before you.”
I still didn’t understand entirely how this was supposed to work.  Four piles of cards, earth, air, fire, and water, except the cards didn’t seem to have anything to do with the elements.  She had said they represented birth, death, loss, and love, but it wasn’t clear if those aspects were associated with the separate piles or the overall reading from all the cards.  But apparently the individual cards represented what was around me, against me, behind and before me.
It was going to be interesting to see how she made this into a coherent prophecy.  I reached for the final pile.
As I ruffled through the thick and slightly greasy cards, one slid out into my hand.  I turned it over.
If I’d had any doubts, now I really knew there was nothing here.  The card showed a majestic woman, sitting on a throne, a scepter in her hand and a jeweled crown on her head.  Whatever lay before me, it was not becoming a queen.
The old woman tugged at her lip.  “Magic, the Sisters, the Crows, and the Queen,” she said, half to herself.  I’d known that card was crows.  “The Maiden is facing many challenges here, but a future, with the Starlight Raven as the base….”

Happy reading!

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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 

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

The Starlight Raven

I've just published a new book!  It's an ebook, available on Amazon, BN/Nook, Kobo, and iTunes; a paperback version has also been published (on which see more here).

The story can be considered "Yurt, the Next Generation" (by those who have read the original Yurt series), or it can be enjoyed as a stand-alone.  It's a "YA" book (aimed at a young-adult audience), because Antonia, the heroine, is fourteen when it begins.

A sneak preview is below.  Enjoy!

THE STARLIGHT RAVEN

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.

We took the air cart.  It was barely light as we hurried down the streets to the livery stable, where we rented space for it.  The building was still locked this early in the morning, and after Mother had concentrated for a moment she said that there was no stable boy inside who might have answered our knock.

But that didn’t slow us down.  The wind tugged at our cloaks as I used a tiny lifting spell to turn the tumblers in the lock and drive the bolt back.  The spell worked perfectly the first time—a good sign, I thought, for my future as a wizardry student.  Mother led the cart out into the street, talking soothingly to the horses in the stalls, and I relocked the big doors.

The air cart was the skin of a purple flying beast, a gift to us from Father a few years ago.  It had been born in flight, and even though long dead it would still start flying if not carefully tethered.  This was wizardry, not witchcraft, and I had learned the spells even before Mother had.  We climbed in, and I confidently gave the commands in the Hidden Language.  The cart took off, wings flapping steadily, to circle above the narrow streets and dark tile roofs of Caelrhon.

I glanced sideways at Mother, saw that she seemed deep in her own thoughts, and quietly muttered the spells that made the air cart pick up speed.  I loved to go fast.

The sun rose behind us as we headed toward the City.  It was springtime, and the trees and meadows below us were fresh and green in the light of breaking dawn.  Finally I got up my nerve to ask.  “What was that letter I saw on the table?”

Mother shrugged, unconcerned.  “Just a message about a dress I’m supposed to be making.”  I would have believed her and thought no more about bats—except that no one in Caelrhon would have sent her a pigeon-message.  They would have used the magic telephones or walked over to talk to her in person.

Most of the time it was fine having a mother who kept her concerns to herself.  She had calmly bandaged me the time I’d come home all bloody from beating up a boy who’d invented an insulting song about witches.  She’d just shaken her head when the teacher sent her a frosty note saying she hoped I would never cover another student with green spots again—I didn’t even have to explain that I had virtuously resisted turning him into a frog.

And this last year, when I’d gone to a few school dances with the same boy who’d come closer to being a frog than he realized, she just asked me when I got home if I’d had a good time.  She didn’t quiz me about what we had and hadn’t done—as I’m sure my father would have in her place, as if I didn’t have excellent good sense!

But if someone had trained a bat to carry messages, which I’d never before heard of anyone doing, then the content of that message must itself be interesting.  If I’d been waked in the middle of the night by a bat, I thought, and the bat was carrying a message, I’d certainly tell my daughter about it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015