Trial of Spirit Chapter 2

Author's note: still don't have those pesky revisions done, and still not going to publish till it's perfect. So here's Chapter 2 for your enjoyment!

My father rounded on us as the door closed. 

Me, that is.  He apparently completely forgot that Seph had come in too, and rounded on and then focused the brute force of his royal bearing on me. 

“What, precisely, did you mean by ‘she can have it,’ Alyssa?”

I tried to meet his gaze directly, but it was impossible to shield from the glower.  When my eyes finally settled comfortably on the tops of his boots, I said, “I meant that she can have it.  Just that. Pure, simple, direct, no strings attached, give me a marker to color in a dragon on top of her tramp stamp and I’ll just be heading home to Momma.  Y’all will have your queen, and the elf lands will be happy, and you can come home to Mississippi and live with us, and….”

My voice trailed off, as I hadn’t any idea how I was going to finish that little rant.  I’d figured he would jump in and start yelling.  He didn’t, though, and after a few seconds of silence I pushed my eyes back up to his face.

He was crying.

Okay, I admit, crying is a stretch.  But I saw a tear; I know I did.  Slowly, his hands reached out and grasped mine.  He led me gently over to the table in the middle of the small home, and together, as one, we sat.  With one hand Dad pushed a tiny lock of my hair out of my face from where it’d fallen.

Finally my father, the ruler of the entire realm of the elves, spoke, his voice rumbling out of his chest like the muted thunder of a spring rain.  “Alyssa…. It — it is not fair, what Kiirajanna has asked of you, my daughter. I know, because I said the same thing many years ago in my own training to take the male throne.  The idea of being a ruler, of having servants, of everyone bowing and saying, ‘Yes, Sire,’ and ‘Your Majesty’ all the time, is but a siren’s song compared to the reality of the burden of leadership.  You, my daughter, are just starting to step into that burden, and yet if the prophecy is to be believed — and I have no doubt that it is — then you have to look forward to the toughest monarchy in our entire history, all four epochs combined.  It would be absolutely terrifying to an experienced ruler. I can only imagine how daunting it must be to you.”

“It is, Daddy.” That wasn’t the biggest problem, though.  I figured there was no point beating around it. “But my real worry, over and above the weight anyone would feel in the crown on her head, is that this society that I’m destined to lead despises me.  Remember the talk we had last time we were sitting at this table?”  He nodded; right after we’d returned from the disastrous library-burning trip, his brother had verbally, and strongly, taken me to task over accessing the forbidden powers of outright, visible, magic.  I’d satisfied my uncle, and my father had helped me convince High Priestess Naissa that I shouldn’t be banished because of it, but the battle of Ganolog as well as the shunning I’d received in more nearby villages told me that the people hadn’t followed their lead quite like Dad and I hoped they would.  Outright attempts on my life had stopped, granted, but the quiet and secretive whispers and the glares cast my way were sometimes even worse than that. At least an attack on my life was overt, and I could see it and deal with it. What had happened up in the northlands, with the outright challenge not only to my own life but to the leadership of my father’s most loyal chieftain, terrified me for the future of my reign on Kiirajanna. There were a group of elves—a large group, it seemed—who were willing to take up arms against what they viewed as a challenge to their traditional way of life, and I wasn’t sure if there was anything I could ever do to convince them that I was not the dire challenge that they imagined.

Heck, sometimes I couldn’t help wondering if they were right. Would I actually become that challenge?

Even here, my father’s own home village, there was a hidden resentment problem.  I’d learned enough in my studies on the history of elf government to suspect that Dad was the most popular king there’d ever been.  Before my use of magic, that popularity seemed to rub right off on me, with elders and children alike flocking to shake the Earth-born princess’s hand, sharing in an alien-feeling gesture from the exotic and far-off realm of Mississippi. Ever since word of magic had reached their ears, though, they avoided me entirely, only gathering around my father when I wasn’t there. 

I saw it, clearly, and it hurt. Just as clearly, it hurt him a little, too.

“Do not worry, my dear daughter; they are only afraid of what you represent,” my father’s favorite attempt at comfort sank sloppily. The logic only went so far. I was afraid of what I represented.  If the prophecy were to be believed—and, according to everybody who mattered, it was—then I was bound to absolutely, personally, violently decimate the countryside.  I would lay waste to their customs, divide the elves brother against brother, and all sorts of other miserable things. “Alyssa” would soon, if prophecy were to be believed, be the Kiirajanna version of the cursed name “Adolf Hitler.” Back in the library I’d read all these evil outcomes of my reign and figured there had to be some way out of it all, but then I managed to fulfill the first one right then and there by burning the dang building down to the ground.  A library.  To me, a nearly sacred space.  I burned it completely down, and that I hadn’t done it on purpose didn’t matter much. Then I’d gone and answered other prophecies, like lighting the sky up with radiance and starting wars among brethren and so on.

It was really darn depressing, all things considered.

“Alyssa, they do not—” Dad started, but I interrupted.

“Oh, yes, they do, bless their little hearts.  Don’t tell me you don’t see the dark looks.  Don’t tell me you don’t sense them holding back and away from me.  I’m going to be the first elf queen to be ruler of a people who don’t want her rule at all.”

“Not the first,” Dad joked. At least, I hoped he was joking.

“Right. What, the second?”  Hey, I’d studied elf history nearly as thoroughly as he had.

“Third, I think, but that is not the point. Do you really believe that I was Mister Popularity when I was crowned?”

He had me there. “Well, yeah. I do, Dad. You’re a pretty cool guy.  And you’ve never, that I know of anyway, used magic.”

“You are right, but you cannot keep dwelling on the use of magic.  I know, I know, it has been forbidden by your High Priestess Sternyface, and by others,” he said, grinning with me as he used my epithet for Naissa. “And yet, at the same time, it has been prophesied, and it was done, and there is no possible path from where we are except forward through time.  It gladdens me more than it should, I must admit, that you think I am a pretty cool guy, but I have not always been labeled so, nor ever by all.  It is the nature of being in charge that you garner dislike as you move along.  When I was young, it was even worse.”

“He was an arrogant asshole when he was young, I’ll tell you what,” his brother, my uncle, chimed in as he moved past the table.  “Like some tea?”

“Oh, yes,” I breathed.  My uncle was a smith of soft items—leather and wood—by trade, but he also had a knack with herbology that made his tea incredible.  His concoction would make the saddest sad happy, and the gladdest glad even happier. And, as I’d learned the hard way in my first trip to the village, it makes the worst hangover—well, it made it a little less painfully horrible, a feat that I have come to believe is pretty much legendary.

“He is right,” Dad nodded as his brother got busy with the water.  “I was—I suppose, an arrogant asshole when I was young.  And some would say the same about me even now. That is my point, in matter of fact. You see, it is the norm for rulers to be regarded as arrogant at first, especially when they follow behind someone who is popular.  That is the curse of taking over when things are going well.  You cannot adopt the same behavior and policies as the one who governed before you, or else you are considered weak and unoriginal.  At the same time, doing your own thing marks you as an agent of change, and change is both feared and rejected whenever it is not seen as absolutely essential, and it is often feared even then.  That is likely a significant part of the angst you are picking up on, my lovely daughter.  You are already taking over for a very popular queen, and it is the change you cannot help but bring that they fear.”

“That, and the magic,” I reminded him.

“Well, there is that,” he agreed, and then the table grew silent as we stirred the tea that my uncle had just warmed up for us.

He finally broke the tea-infused silence by continuing, “Alyssa, as difficult and even painful as it may prove, you must continue to move forward and become the queen you are destined to be.”

I ignored my uncle’s disapproving grunt as I said, “I know, Dad.”  I did, really. I knew none of us had a choice, but I didn’t have anywhere near as much to complain about as he did. Here was a man who’d given up years of his life to train to be king, and then years of his life to find a human woman to love and to bear his child as elf custom required, only to be followed by nearly two decades away from that woman, and the daughter they’d made, in order to return to his duty as sovereign over his people.  Sure, I’d hated him for it at first, but we got past that as I came to understand the burden he was carrying.  Now, the only thing that stood between him and the love of his life—my mother—was for me to put on my big girl panties and take the throne, and then for his own successor to be appointed and trained.  If I were to step aside in someone else’s behalf, bless her heart, custom as well as reality said it would be years, if ever, before Dad could join Momma full-time at home.

“And no more public outbursts, okay?”

“Can’t promise that.” I gave him my most precocious smile, but he ignored it.

“You must.  For it is that degree of discipline that is required of a queen, dear.”

“Okay, Dad,” I said, getting serious.  “I’ll promise, no more public outbursts.  Now, drink your tea, and I’ll drink mine, before the water gets cold again.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” Dad said with a smile.  I couldn’t quite tell if he was lightly mocking me or gently deferring to me, but to be honest, I liked it either way.

“Maybe her standing among the people will be helped once she has completed her hunhymgais,” Seph offered from behind the safety of her own cup of tea. 

Dad nodded tentatively and said, “It should, definitely.  I cannot say by how much, but our peoples’ opinions should certainly rise once you become truly one of us, Alyssa.”

“Yay.”  One corner of my lip twisted up into my best, most sarcastic, smile.  “Into the woods naked go I.”  Literally, hunhymgais means “quest for self,” and it is the rite of passage to adulthood for the elves.  I hadn’t had one, of course. In Mississippi they frown on prepubescent children running off “nekkid as a jaybird” into the woods by themselves. The elves’ quest for maturity, on the other hand, required a young elf to fend for herself for six weeks—thirty-six long, cold, and probably hungry days—using just her wits and nothing else, not even clothes—and then return, hopefully with a story to tell of facing down one or more of her worst fears. 

My worst fear?  That would be running off into the woods nekkid, especially in the wintertime.  That was just not my kind of thing.

“Not naked,” Dad argued, shaking his head.  “A child leaves naked and is expected to return an adult in whatever attire pleases them—fashioned, of course, by their own arts.  You, on the other hand, come a bit late to the questing, physically well past your childhood, and I will not have my daughter, our future queen, run off into the woods with her womanhood displayed for all to see.”

“But if I don’t do it just like an elf, won’t that diminish the effect?  Won’t people just gripe that I didn’t start it naked like everybody else?”

“No. Well, maybe. But I invited the counsel of the High Priestess before we left, and she informed me that there is precedent for beginning the hunhymgais clothed, especially insofar as the crown princess is concerned.  It has always been done, in fact. We will make sure to inform everyone that you wanted to run off naked like your brethren but were prevented by tradition.  How is that?”

“Great, Dad. Anybody who knows me will believe it when you say how much I wanted to run off naked like everybody else, or, for that matter, how I was prevented from doing it by that thing I cherish most—tradition.”

“Sarcasm, dear?”

“Ya think?”

My uncle’s snort sounded from the tiny pantry-kitchen combination that was the third room of the house. When he stopped chortling, he added, “One additional thing to consider, my brother, is that she cannot leave Draignerthol behind when she undertakes the quest.  It is too precious a relic, and even under the castle’s own vaunted security it’s too inviting a target for thieves. She should wear it with her quest, and of course that means she must wear something to cover it up.”

“Right, Dafydd,” Dad said, his eyes going to the lump on my chest that indicated the hidden presence of the legendary elf pendant. It had been fashioned in the early days of elf civilization, back when magic was cool, by some of the most powerful sorcerers in Kiirajanna.  Then, when the great priestess-queen Rhiannon had crossed over to Earth, intending to forever seal herself away from the land of magic and the elves, she’d taken it with her, and the entire elf race had assumed the pendant lost to the hands of time and humans. Somehow, thousands of years later, the striking dragon-shaped pendant had been handed to me by Momma the night before I crossed back into its original homeland. Its blue gemstone eyes flared to life when touched by anyone who could wield magic, and it seriously magnified my own puny grasp on the power. It had protected me from poison when I didn’t even realize it was doing so, and later I’d pulled enough power through it to save us in a fall from a cliff, to defeat Padrig’s foes’ sorcery, and yes, to burn the library down. I treasured it and cursed it, both at the same time.

“Can we at least wait till after Yule?” Since we were talking in English, still, for security, I used the English term. “Like, a few months after Yule?  I doubt the people would believe the claim that tradition made me wear an overcoat, too.”  In truth, the area of Kiirajanna the castle was located on was pretty close to the equator, and so it wasn’t all that cold, but the possibility of being out in real winter weather without overgarments still terrified the Mississippian in me.

Heck, the whole bit terrified me—all of it, especially the part that involved traveling to the other three clans to gain their approval, after the little war I’d started with Padrig’s clan. That scared me every bit as much as the hunhymgais thing. It was just that I didn’t want to die of hypothermia along the way.

My dad chuckled.  “No, Alyssa, we do not specify the timing of hunhymgais to suit ourselves. That is part of the challenge. You must go when the time is right, once you have marched yourself into the hearts of the eastern, western, and southern clans, whether that requires a month, or twelve, to complete.  Besides, you can never know where you will end up, so judging the time to leave based on the weather pattern near the castle is an exercise that is entirely useless.”

“What do you mean I never know?  Don’t I just run there?”  I hadn’t gotten too much into the details; all I’d heard so far was “naked,” “alone,” “woods,” and “six weeks.”  That had been quite enough.

“Absolutely not.  We hold a ceremony, you take a special staff with you, and you step into one of the ley-gates.  It transports you to wherever you need to be to successfully complete your quest.”

“Earth?” I asked, confused. “Or do they go to random places on Kiirajanna?” The ley-gates were the system of energy spots used to transport people from Earth to Kiirajanna and back, as far as I knew.  We’d taken one from Memphis when I’d first made the transition. There was another used by trappers far to the north that had both entrance and exit in the same realm, but I’d been led to believe it was a rare one. That, and it always ended at the same two points, just as the other I’d taken did.

Dad nodded and said, “Maybe Earth, but most of us, I think, end up going to another location on Kiirajanna.  At least, I did.”  Seph nodded from behind her cup; she’d stayed on Kiirajanna, too, apparently.

“How do you know it’s Kiirajanna?”

“Most elves do not know the difference, I suppose, but those of us who have made the journey to Earth do, as do you. You recall the emptiness you felt when you made the trip back to the world in which you were born, yes?  It is less a sensation, and more a lack of sensation, the lack of awareness of your surroundings that you have already become accustomed to here.”

“Oh, right. Magic,” I said, and then I wished I hadn’t.  Dad had sprinkled the term freely through our first conversation to get me excited about coming back to Kiirajanna, describing the magical realm of magical creatures and magical elves and magical this and that, but as soon as I’d crossed over I’d found that using the word magic was nearly as taboo as the act of using the power itself.  They still held that singing the trees to shape and healing each other, in addition to all their ranger powers, were somehow different from using magic, but I knew the distinction was fake.  Part of the reason I hated using the word myself was my frustration that nobody would listen to me about what I already knew to be true regarding the true nature of magic.

“Yes,” Dad said, pursing his lips to make it clear he was not using the word on purpose.  He rose.  “Well, Brother, thank you for the tea. It was wonderful as usual.  Do you believe that we could get the men of the village together for some wrestling fun?”

I looked across the table and caught my cousin’s eye; she was as bored with the idea of watching wrestling as I was.  She rose, shrugged, and said, “I’m going to head into the woods with Booboo for a while, Alyssa.  Would you like to come with?”

I nodded a lie.  No, I had no desire to walk through the woods for a while, with or without my cousin and her familiar.  The wolverine still scared me, with his looks and actions both. He reminded me of a small bear.  He’d proven himself an incredibly powerful, fast, agile, and strong ally, though.

Sometimes he made me wish that I had my own familiar, one just as powerful, fast, agile, and strong, but only a little bit cuter and fluffier. My tree didn’t count. As much as I cherished, and was cherished by, Little Treebeard, my potted elm that I’d somehow found a weird, magical connection with, it was still just a tree, growing in a pot. Oh, it could make its intentions clear enough, and loudly, by smacking the walls with its ever-lengthening branches, but it couldn’t go on vacations with us like Booboo could. I’d had to leave it in the few remaining palace guards’ care, and, weird as it sounds, I missed the little guy.

We stepped out of the village into the open forest.  The elves loved their forests to look more like well-manicured lawns, and rangers like my cousin were tasked with keeping everything growing in a neat and orderly manner.  Even the grass grew to a uniform height and no farther.  It really was pretty, if you weren’t looking for the mangled wildness that a good Southern old growth forest contained.  I wasn’t, so it was good.

As we stepped lightly through the trees, I couldn’t help noticing with pride that my own stride was matching that of the elves more and more every day.  They were very good at passing through the woods silently, and my cousin, trained as a ranger, was exceptionally good at it.  When I’d arrived I had felt like an elephant compared to her cheetah walk, but even she occasionally commented on how much more like an elf I was moving.

As we walked it started snowing lightly.  Strangely, I didn’t feel all that cold.  Then again, I’d spent much of the winter so far outdoors, with a lot of that in the far northlands. I figured my body was becoming used to the lower temperature, at least more than it ever had in Mississippi.

“Cousin?”

“Hmm?” I could tell from her quietened, serene reply that she was in her attuned mode. Somehow, out in the woods, I could lightly whisper something and she’d still hear me, thanks to the same powers she used to know exactly where I was without looking. I could do it, myself, out to a limited distance, but her sensitivity was—well, not to overuse the term, but it was magical.

“Gwenda’s not a ranger, is she?”

“No, she’s learning to craft with leather. From my pa, in fact.”

“How does she have a dire wolf as a familiar, then?”

“Oh, Cuddles isn’t her familiar. He’s more of a pet.”

“That’s—not what I expected,” I admitted. “In fact, that’s a little more unnerving than if he’d been a familiar. How does she keep a dire wolf as a pet?”

Seph shrugged as though the answer should’ve been plain to see all along. “She feeds him. Same way you keep a tree as a pet, though I’m certainly not one to judge.”

“L.T.’s not a…. So, what does she feed him? Never mind,” I added quickly, correcting myself based on the glare she shot my direction. Obviously, whatever you feed a dire wolf to keep it as a pet wasn’t something I would want to have described to me.

We walked along in silence, leaving me to contemplate my upcoming vision quest, whenever that would be. We still had a couple more days of relaxation and frivolity left in the holiday for me to worry about it. I planned to spend a few days at some point out camping with Seph learning all I could about which parts of which plants were edible, but not knowing which part of the world I’d end up in made that seem mostly useless.  The thought briefly flashed across my mind to ask Seph to start teaching me a little of what she knew now, but it was Yule, and we weren’t supposed to do such things at the end-of-the-year celebration.

Yule time was party time.

In fact, when we’d arrived, Dad had physically, publicly, symbolically, doffed the crown of the Elf King in order to just be himself for the one and only true holiday of the year.  I figured it would probably end up being my absolute favorite holiday once I became queen.

If I became queen.

Chapter 1, Trial of Spirit

So I've been such a slacker that I haven't got Book 3 of Elf Queen of Kiirajanna, Trial of Spirit, done yet. I mean, it's done, but there are lots of edits still to be completed, and I am absolutely not going to put a book out if it's not as close to perfect as I can humanly make it. So mid-February, perhaps?

To make it up, I hope, here's Chapter 1 to enjoy. Every couple of days I'll post another chapter till the whole thing is ready.

I’ve always had a thing for dogs, but not when they tower nearly my own height, have long, sharp fangs, and want to kill me.

Okay, fine, I’ll admit that the dog wasn’t acting much like it wanted to kill me, but it hadn’t been that long since several others that looked just like it had tried very hard, and that was a bit of a challenge to overcome. And to be fair, the dog wasn’t acting much like it didn’t want to kill me, either. I stepped back and raised my hands defensively, one out front to physically stave off the imminent fang-led charge, and the other to my chest, pressing Draignerthol against my skin through the thin fabric of the blouse I wore. I felt the relic’s magical power swell and surge within me, thrilling me with the possibilities. Then, with supreme force of will, I stopped and bottled it up, knowing I’d likely cause a riot if I let it loose in the busy town square.

“Don’t be scared — Cuddles would never hurt you, Princess,” Gwenda said. She flicked her eyes about before bringing them back to rest on my face, her expression pleading. She licked her lips in a nervous gesture. Apparently meeting the crown princess of Kiirajanna wasn’t something she’d been prepared to do.

“Cuddles? You named a dire wolf Cuddles?” I was incredulous, myself.

“Of course. He’s…” Gwenda began to argue, but then she looked over at my cousin, her eyes begging for help.

Sephaline did help, stepping up to scratch this monster named Cuddles a couple of times behind the ears before turning a kind, peaceful smile my way and gently explaining, “Gwenda, the only experience Alyssa has with dire wolves is from our now-fabled dash across the blight to the library. It’s not surprising that she’s a little bit hesitant to accept Cuddles as a friend. Give her some time, okay?”

The dash to the library — that was fabled, alright. Both widespread and fabled, already, just a few months after it had happened. I’d been dead-set on reading the prophecy related to me, and so I’d talked Seph into making the journey. That was when we’d discovered the Cult of the Wyrm, who started out just trying to hold me, but then they decided to kill me.
What a nice welcoming party, right?

So my answer? Oh, I just — accidentally, I swear! — burned the entire library down, using powers I’d never even dreamed I had. That’s what made the trip fabled. It wasn’t the numerous waves of attacks by dire wolves and ravens we rode through to get there, nor was it the wyvern that Seph had to defeat. No, it was the whole “she used magic!” bit. Fabled, in this case, meant that I couldn’t walk into a normal elf village again without people looking at me sideways, fear filling their eyes over a power they just didn’t understand.

Seph succeeded in convincing Gwenda that the pet dog thing was a bad idea, and so Gwenda pushed Cuddles away with an order to “go play!” The massive beast thundered off into the nearest tree line, its tongue lolling out to the side like Old Yeller. I shook my head as I watched it run. It made sense that Gwenda, who was abnormally tall for an elf — and elves are tall folk, anyway — would claim something bigger than, say, a Chihuahua, as a pet.

“So, Alyssa,” Gwenda tried the friendship thing again, “who’s your favorite team in cylchoedd?”

I had no answer. I’d never even heard of cylchoedd, much less its teams. Well, once, or maybe twice, back when Prince Keion was grumbling over how our trip to the north threatened to make him late in starting cylchoedd practice. But I hadn’t held any desire at the time to discuss the game, the league, or its teams with the guy who was constantly grumbling about it.

It was a strange way to start a conversation, but to call Gwenda strange would be an understatement. She’d walked up to greet Seph, who I’d been told was her only friend since childhood, wearing a dapper-looking long tunic over embroidered pantaloons. It was the kind of outfit I’d expect to see on fancy days in the castle—only, on a guy. And her shoes! Elves normally wore moccasin-like things that only become fancy in court, and then only by applying a little paint and polish in places to make them shiny. Gwenda, though, sported bright red built-up platforms on her feet, and that just made her abnormal height even more pronounced.

Because of her friend’s strangeness, I watched my cousin closely for cues. Seph wasn’t much help, though; she just rolled her eyes.

Cylchoedd — that’s the elf word for hoops. Hoops meant basketball to me, normally. I couldn’t see the elves having any sort of national basketball association, though. I decided to go ahead and bite on the verbal lure. She was, after all, just trying to make conversation.

“What’s cylchoedd like?”

Gwenda looked shocked and injured at the same time. “You’ve never seen cylchoedd?” she challenged.

“No. No, I haven’t. Keep in mind that just a few months ago I was a normal Earth-bound teenager who would’ve thought ‘cylchoedd’ was a strange cough. But I would love to hear all about it,” I finished in my sweetest voice, noting how Seph’s expression was begging me to make nice with her old friend.

“They probably don’t have any organized sports in the primitive region Alyssa comes from,” Seph said with a wink. “Missikippi, right, Crown Princess?”

I sighed playfully. “It’s Mississippi, and it’s not that primitive, Cousin. Well, okay, maybe it is in some ways, but we do have our sports teams. No professional ones, of course, but on Earth those only exist in big cities, and anyplace with a population more than a few thousand scares the daylights out of me.” I wasn’t kidding; the trip to Graceland had been fine because I was with Dad, but my friend Sarah had been talking about taking a trip to Chicago after we graduated, and I’d had to tell her there was no way I was going. Absolutely no way at all, in fact. Just the thought of all those people made my skin crawl.

Then Dad turned that on its head with a trip to New York City over Christmas. Granted, it was a little different being supported by all the crown’s immense wealth, staying in the nicest of hotel rooms, and experiencing the nicest that the city had to offer. It was, I was certain, a completely different experience from what Sarah and I would have had on a tiny budget in Chicago. But the idea of being in a huge crowd of people still scared me. That was one good thing about the crown princess gig, I guess. After all, the biggest city on Kiirajanna was the crown complex at Cysegredig, and it just felt like a large village with a couple of huge buildings in the middle. Ganolog, capital of the north, had seemed bigger, but that was only because its population of a few thousand was all enclosed in a fortress. There were other cities that felt a little different than either Ganolog or Cysegredig, according to my teachers, to the south and the west, and I actually looked forward to journeying there as I sought the clans’ approval. Once the holiday was over, I knew it was coming.

For the time being, though, I was enjoying the end-of-year holiday, Yule in English but amser calan in elf, in the tiny village where both my father and my cousin had grown up.

It is a strange holiday, but it does make sense. The name literally means “time period at the renewal of the year.” It works out to be the days left over in the solar year of three hundred sixty-five days, plus a bit more, after the elves’ regular six-day week is cycled through. Nobody, not even the king and queen, can work during that time other than simple tasks of lighting cook fires and such. Everybody pretty much just abandons the massive castle and cathedral complex and goes home.

A throat cleared, bringing me back to the present. “So how is this cylchoedd played?” I asked.

“Like that,” Seph said with a shrug and a confused look. I followed her pointed finger with my gaze. Oh, right, of course. Every elf village I’d visited had featured kids by the twos and threes or even by the dozens rolling hoops along the ground with sticks. “Only with some adult rules, like the need to hit each other. That’s usually the one with the hoop, but not always. It’s really fun to watch.”

Gwenda’s face lit up in the too-big smile that is a standard fixture on elf faces. Seph’s description had made her very happy, it seemed. She said, “I love the Bees. You’ll have to go to a game with me.”

“Why would you name a sports team after an insect?”

Seph and Gwenda both looked blankly at me. Oh, right. I was still thinking mostly in English, despite the fact that I was speaking in the elf tongue. Bee isn’t a word in elf. It’s a letter.

“I mean, a letter. Is there a Ch team?” Yes, Ch is an elf letter; it’s one of my favorites, in fact, because it’s so much fun to say. A good girl, even one everybody regarded as a tomboy like me, would never have hocked up anything in public in Mississippi, but that letter let me do it repeatedly in Kiirajanna.

“Of course there is,” Seph said, and Gwenda added, “but they suck. They always cheat, and their fans are so obnoxious. Tell me you’ll cheer for the Bs with us.”

“Okay, I’ll cheer for the Bs with you,” I agreed. What difference did it make, really?

“No, no, no. She can’t,” Seph told Gwenda, shaking her head. “Remember, she’s the crown princess. Royalty doesn’t choose sides in cylchoedd.”

Oh, right. It made that difference.

Gwenda looked disappointed for just a second and then brightened up. “Say, when you’re crowned queen, don’t forget that I’m the one with the dragon birthmark.”

Well, that got my attention. The prophecies we’d gone to the library to read spoke of someone born with a dragon birthmark. Someone, it seemed, who would turn elf society over onto its head, someone who would bring sorcery back and not in a good way, someone who would somehow involve the now-mythical dragons of old.

Someone like me, who’d actually been born with a dragon birthmark on my right shoulder blade. I wondered about the thing growing up, but Momma just smiled and shrugged whenever I asked. When Dad waltzed back into my life, he’d proven himself my father by knowing about it. It seemed a big deal to him then, and it was an even bigger deal now that I knew what it meant.

Yes, I had it, but I really didn’t want it.

“You have a dragon birthmark?” I asked, ignoring Seph’s look of alarm. My cousin rolled her eyes as her old friend nodded, skipped over to me, and hauled the back of her tunic up for me to see.

It was a birthmark, for sure. It was kind of cute, too. Sitting right above her hips in the middle of her back as it did, it looked like one of those tribal tattoos people on Earth get. Only…

A heart. It was a cute elongated heart, not a dragon. I caught Seph’s frantic wiggle of her head, though, and so I chose my words carefully. After all, mirrors weren’t common outside the palace in Kiirajanna, and so how was Gwenda to know that she didn’t have a dragon birthmark?

“It’s — nice, Gwenda. Very clear. I will most assuredly keep this birthmark in mind when I gain the throne.”

“Yay!” Gwenda said, letting her tunic fall back down and then bouncing for joy. “It’s my lucky day to have met you, Princess!”

“Yeah,” I said, not sure what else I could add.

“And now, I have to go. Chores, Your Highness. I hope to see you upon the morrow,” the weird one said. She slipped me a precarious combination of curtsy and bow, one that her height combined with the platform shoes made grotesque, and then she spun back around to run home.

Only she didn’t get far. She tripped over her own feet.

“Oopsie,” she said, and it was even more irritating thanks to the way she raised her high-pitched voice even higher. She must have been nearly seven feet tall and yet she sounded like a pixie.

She dusted herself off as Seph helped her up.

“Oopsie, indeed,” Seph said, watching her long-time friend jog away. “That was what everybody called her growing up: Oopsie. It was what we heard her say most often.”

“She seems nice, bless her heart” I said.

“She is nice. She’s just a little bit eccentric.”

Pot, meet kettle, I thought but decided not to say. Seph was the queen of eccentric herself, a ranger whose familiar was a wolverine named Booboo and whose battle cry was eep. But she was the first cousin I’d ever met, and as far as I knew the only one I had, and so that made all the eccentricity okay in my eyes.

“How come she wears that getup?” I switched to English in case her friend managed to hear.

“She’s going to be the Dragon Queen, at least so she believes. The Dragon Queen should dress nicely, and wear masculine clothing because the aspect of the dragon is masculine, she says.”

“The aspect of the dragon is—what? Are dragons masculine?” I was having a hard time separating what sounded like astrology talk from the reality that dragons had once actually existed on Kiirajanna.

“How should I know? She’s the one who constantly says dragons are still around, thanks to her strange queenly dreams. By this point you know as much as, if not more than, I do about them,” Seph reminded me.

“Right. I guess. So why the shoes, then?”

“She wears tall shoes to look down upon her subjects, like a —”

“A dragon. Right. Makes sense.” It didn’t, not really, but whatever. “Why red?”

“Dragon, remember?”

“We don’t know what color dragons were, though.”

“She does. Or at least she’s convinced herself that she does. Look, now we both know that my old childhood friend is — what’s your word?”

“Kookoo sums it up pretty nicely.” I added the standard Earth hand gesture, my index finger circling my right ear.

“Kookoo. Fine,” Seph said, sounding dejected. I realized belatedly that I was, after all, attacking a long-time friend of hers.

“So does she have, like, a boyfriend? Or is she promised to one from a faraway village like Prince Charming?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.

“Um,” Seph stalled, not answering. It was clear I’d hit a nerve.

“Is she — is she gay?” I’d never thought of the elves being like that, but it didn’t make sense why I wouldn’t have. Nothing wrong with it, certainly, but — well, it just hadn’t occurred to me.

“Gay?” Seph shook her head in confusion.

“Sorry,” I continued in English, and then tried in elf after searching for a moment. “Hoyw?”

If you’re new to elf, the best I can say is that it’s based on Welsh, from Earth. Or, if the history is to be believed, Welsh is based on elf. Whichever is true, it’s a beautiful language. But w’s and y’s are both vowels, which takes some getting used to. The word I’d just said is, phonetically, ho-ee-yoo.

Seph shook her head, still clearly not comprehending my meaning. Then I remembered the word I’d been taught once in one of my more private lessons.

“Gyrywgydiwr?”

As fun as the word is to say—phonetically, goo-roo-goo-dee-oor—it literally means grabber-of-man. That works fine with gay men, though I couldn’t get anything different from my teacher for gay women. But at least Seph finally got it. Her face lit up with horror.

“No! No, she’s not. Well, maybe. She, um, isn’t certain. Look, that’s not something we talk about.”

“Ah, okay.” I gave up, chalking it up to repressed elf society.

“So what’s with the birthmark thing?” I asked in English, trying to venture into more comfortable territory.

“When she was young, somebody joked with her that she was special, that her birthmark was a dragon. She took it to heart, and nobody’s been willing to break that since. We even go so far as to hide the mirrors when she comes around. She’s convinced that she’s the one with the dragon birthmark.”

“Well, she can have it.”

“What?” Seph turned to face me, scandalized.

“No, really. She can have it. The birthmark, the castle, the crown, everything. I love Kiirajanna, and I love the elves, but—me? Queen? Seph, you saw me in Ganolog. I started a war, Seph. I’m a Mississippi girl. A rabid dog’s got more diplomacy skills than me. I did well in school, and was headed to college at State to study engineering, or something. Now here I am, learning to be all regal and stuff, and—and I burned a library down, Seph. I burned a library down. And not just a library—the library.” Seph’s face clouded over at that; she apparently remembered the scene as vividly as I did, with me standing in the middle of the most ancient, well-stocked, library in the land, my newfound magical powers swirling about me as I threw tendrils of energy this way and that. Oh, yes, we won, Seph and Booboo both survived, and the Cult of the Wyrm was defeated, rounded up, and imprisoned, but all that paled in comparison to what I’d done. I’d used magic, something forbidden to elves for countless centuries, and worse, I’d used it to burn a library down.

“This conversation should not take place out here in the village commons,” a strong, familiar voice interrupted my rant. Seph and I both turned to face the elf king, who was standing with his hands on his hips casting a royal shadow over the pair of us. His expression made it clear that neither of us had any choice but to follow him.

“English is rare outside of the royal family, but it is still known throughout the realm, and you must remember that for your own safety as well as that of the crown,” he chided us.

“Yes, Daddy,” I said meekly as Seph and I let him lead us into her father’s house.

Five Myths, and One Important Truth, About NaNoWriMo

It's that glorious time of year again! Trees are turning, and fall is falling! Homecomings are homecoming, and little and big kids alike are putting together their scariest costumes.

How cool is Autumn, right?

More important, though, we're running rapidly up to my favorite month of the year: National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo .  I'm going to assume that since you made it here, you already know what the NoWri part is all about, so here are five myths, and one important truth, about what happens in November, based on my own several years of wins now.

1. It's scary

Yeah, this one's probably true if you let it be, but NaNo doesn't have to be scary. What's there to fear? Carpal tunnel takes a while to set in. Overcaffeinating yourself as some folks do has some deleterious impacts, but that's why we also drink water in November.

Failure? Is that what you're scared of? Nah, come on. Nearly everybody I know has failed NaNo at least once. That is, of course, everyone who's even attempted it. Truth is, you can't fail it if you don't try it, so let's all go into the effort secure in the knowledge that even if we fail, we're gonna wear that badge proudly.

Think of it this way: most people fail to write a novel every single day of their lives, and the only big news is that they aren't showing any real progress toward turning that trend around. Us, though? If we fail, we'll at least have written more words than those people, right?

Drop the fear. Punt it all the way into December. You're going to write. You're going to write a lot. What you write is going to suck, because everybody's first draft always sucks. But by then you'll have accomplished something very few people do, and you'll have a draft to revise, as well.

2. It's hard

Yeah, no. I mean, everything's hard. Some days getting out of bed is hard. Drinking enough water is hard for me. But I do it, nearly every day, and you know how I accomplish it? One drink at a time.

Same approach here. I just read someone else post to the Gospel According to Facebook: "It's hard to write 1667 words a day when you work also." I totally disagree. What's hard is to do anything I don't care to do when I work also. It's hard to get laundry done when I work also. It's hard for me to waste time at a bad movie over the weekend when I work also. It's not hard for me to write, though; in fact, it's hard for me to stop writing to go to work. That's partly because I've written a lot, and I've developed a habit and an enjoyment for the magnificent sport of prose-jockeying. My message? You can, too.

Back at West Point I became quite a runner. I'd do 10 or 12 miles a day if I had time. It wasn't hard. What was hard was doing other things when I really wanted to be running. I didn't start like that at first, of course. In the beginning I'd do a mile, maybe two. Then I worked up to longer, and then longer. In each case, though, it was by taking one step, and then another, and then another. Running is like that; a few steps add up to a long distance, which over time becomes an enjoyable and healthy habit.

Treat writing the same way. This is a perfect month to limber up those "muscles," if for no other reason than you get to enjoy the wacky zany activities with everybody else. Hey, you don't have to write 1667 words. Set your goal at 10. Ten words is easy peasy, right? Then do that five times, and then do that 35 times and you've got it.

How long does it take to write 1667 words? If you say a matter of hours, I'll argue that you're overthinking it. I type upwards of 90 words a minute, and I've literally gotten my 2000 words onto the page in less than half an hour before...and not just once, either. If you don't type that fast, that's okay (though hey, this is a perfect month to practice that, too!). How fast do you type? 40? 1667 words should take you 42 minutes to type at that rate. To go more than an hour for 1667 words you have to type slower than 28 words per minute, and I've seen hunt-and-peck two-finger typists go faster than that.

"Oh, but I have to think about them first!" No, you don't. Try it. Try imagining the scene you're going to do -- heck, spend 15 minutes doing that. Then type it. Don't think. Literally, don't edit. If you misspell a word, leave it. You can fix it later. Grammar error? Fix it later. Character says something out of character? Fix it later. You're a writer now. Write. Write, for goodness sake.

Write, for your sake.

Writing's not hard. Learning to let yourself write is hard. 

3. You have to be prepared

We always hit this point in late October when people start chickening out. "I only have two characters and a short situation!" So? Write that, then blow something up, and write more. Most of us started our first attempt with less than that, after all.

Look, if you don't want to write a book, then don't write a book. Find something else to do in November, and I promise I won't judge you for it (much). But if you do want to write a book, there's only one way to start: write the first word. And then, write the next one. And then eight more, and do that five times, and you'll be 50 words into the 1667 goal for the day. And here's the secret for that point: don't stop. Keep going.

It's going to suck. Stop judging. You may be able to fix it next March, and you may not. At least by that point you'll have confidence. At least by that point you'll have experience. But to get there, you have to learn to turn that part of you completely, totally, utterly off, and just write.

Write. Don't prepare. Or do prepare, I don't care; the first draft is still going to suck. But don't let not preparing be the same as not writing. Don't fuss and fumble and fume over anything.

Just...write. 

4. You get something for "winning"

Know what you get for winning? You get to print out your own certificate. Yay, you. And you get a JPG you can use as your Facebook image to show your friends just how crazy you are. Oh, and you get half off of Scrivener, which is my go-to app for writing these days. That saves about twenty bucks, I think. Worth the whole month, it's not.

Nope, sorry. You don't win diddly squat when you win NaNoWriMo.

5. You get nothing for "winning"

"The only source of knowledge is experience." - Albert Einstein
"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes." - Oscar Wilde
"Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing." - Oscar Wilde

You know, while you're busy celebrating on December 1 at your Thank Goodness It's Over party, I'm sure you're going to be terribly, horribly depressed over the diddly squat you didn't win when you verified your >50K word count at the NaNo site. Or maybe it'll be the diddly squat you didn't win when November 30th hit you in the face and you only had 23K words.

Not.

You'll have a novel, or at least part of one. And it's nobody else's novel -- it's yours. Yes, it will suck. No, it may not even be fixable. But experience is priceless.And once you build on that experience, as I did, you'll find, as I did, that initial effort is worth punting and doing a deep rewrite on. Or not. But I guarantee you, one way or another, you'll be glad you did it.

And that leads us to the one Important Truth:

It's (totally) worth it.

Hey, nobody ever said writing a novel is easy. Nobody ever said running a marathon is easy, either, and yet I've done it. Once. Just once, because I got what I needed out of that one time and I don't feel the need to do it again. Writing a novel, though, is worth doing again, and again, and again.

First is the experience, which I've already touched on. My first attempted NaNo sucked worse than any prose on the planet has ever sucked before. I'm willing to bet, especially since it can't be called, that Vogon poetry sounds better than my first effort at prose. But it's there, still, and I've wrangled it into a useful plot these ten years later, and sometime in 2017 I hope to craft a viable novel out of it.

My second novel sucked, too, but after 13 revisions and two professional editors it sucked a whole lot less. I'm actually pretty proud of it. The third sucked, too, and after nearly as many revisions and only a single professional editor, I'm afraid it's not ever going to be my best prose. And...you get the drift. Every novel I've written has taught me something about the craft of writing, though, and so I've gotten significantly better each time. Not that the first drafts don't suck, regardless!

Second is the novels themselves. Look, folks, it takes a LOT of effort to produce a readable novel. Frankly, anybody who goes into November thinking, "I'm gonna produce a readable novel in this one month" is fooling themselves. I mean, one or two probably do it, granted, but the vast majority of us mere mortals just plain suck at first drafts. For us, we need to spend months after the initial draft doing revision after revision, painstakingly roping the text into something we and others will enjoy reading. That's the part of novel-writing that people never see. I didn't, back when I was getting angry over my favorite author's not publishing books fast enough.

Editing is hard. Revising is hard. Please know that if you do this NaNo thing you're going to create something that will eat up hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of revision time, if it's even worth that. But one way or another, it's yours, and it's yours forever.

That's why NaNoWriMo is worth it, to me.

- TOSK