Hey so here’s the prologue of Sing The Angry Children. Hopefully you guys like the writing enough to be curious about the book, and maybe read it when it comes out in 2020!!
Time is a steady march of stories through the darkness. They are a tangle of light and song and tears. The trees bow low and the stars weep. The are endless. They are The Night Parade.
First comes a story that you already know. The One-day Queen will turn seventeen. She will turn seventeen at the end of a long hot summertime, and then she will be kissed twice. Once by the bite of a spindle upon her finger, and once by the softness of a true love. With the first kiss, she will fall into a sleep deeper than the wine-dark ocean as it stretches across the horizon.
The fae things tell this story again and again in the dances of their endless procession. They set the scene with shadows. A ballroom made of twirling skirts and tables piled high with tangerines and apricots and bread pastries and lamb. Wine flowing red and sweet. A small brown lump of a babe, swaddled in a satin lined blanket. Her name is wound tight inside her chest, a gift newly received.
Lords and Ladies have come from neighboring kingdoms. A Valtinian man bows as he takes the hand of an Amorian maiden. She does not betray the hatred in her eyes as he twirls her under his arm. Her brother died during The Conflict.
A little Ushakkish girl with a hundred thousand beads in her hair accepts a sweet cake from a woman with eyes blue as death, and pretends not to remember the slave ships that came in the night.
And the baby, snug in the arms of her mother as the lords present their gifts. A golden rattle. A diamond necklace. A bottle of wine that will grow sweeter and stronger as she does and mark the last day of her youth with a stain upon her lips.
The father stands beside his wife. Their marriage was a marriage between nations. A threat. A dead diplomat. A raised fist. A siege. A treaty and a vow and a kiss and a painful wedding night and a childbirth. She is subjugated.
His God, the new God, is raised like a song by a man in white as he blesses her child. Her own god is not welcome here, in the place where she was born. Her god has no face to etch bearded and smiling into chapels, no name to call in worship. They are not a god like other gods–they are the spirit of a place that is flipped over onto its back.
Still, she would have worshipped. She would have smeared honey over her daughter’s eyelids and pressed gold and iron into her hands. She would have carried her into the forest until she found a place where the veil between worlds grew thin as a spider’s silk, and she would have prayed to her nameless god of the Nether.
No more and no longer. She is a defeated kingdom, bleeding under the foreign rule that shares her bed.
They are angry, her Nameless One of a Nameless Place. They are angry and so are their children–their children who raise their fists in rebellion to this subjugation, this unholy matrimony, this troubling conclusion to troubling times.
They come uninvited, the fae children with Nether on their tongues. Because the babe is small and dark and crying as a handmaiden takes her up in her arms and shields her with a blanket, but she is the blood of the conquerer as much as she is the blood of the conquered. And the Nether with their hundred animal eyes and blackened wings would not see her eat the fields and forests and livelihoods as her father has done before her, with fire and steel in his hands.
They would have killed her. The Nether cursed The One-day Queen to grow up as kind or cruel as she pleased, and then it–they–would have her prick her finger on a spindle and fall cold and still as the razed fields.
They would have, if her mother’s handmaiden had not saved her that morning with honey and iron, hand in hand at the edge of the forest. The Veil had not been thin and the Nether had been far, but she had been consecrated.
The Nether wove one kindness into the fate of The One-day Queen and set it upon her small head like a crown.
With a second kiss from one who loved her dearly, she would wake up to a world that might have changed by a day or a hundred years.
The nameless god does not give away their secrets. They do not share the hopes and dreams of an aching land. They only lay their curse and hope that one day their children will grow wild and free under the hands of the Golden King who is fated to come.
The baby clutches at her handmaiden’s necklace as the fae dance back between the shadows and through the veil, her small fingers caressing the smooth metal. She does not yet know that she is not a person in the way she is supposed to be. But that is for later.
Now, all will be good. All will be gold.
