Chapter 6: The Bad Place

Chapter 6 of

Eyes of Fire

by Lauren Stinton

[Click here to read chapter 1]

Hamal knew he was asleep. He was a healer, so all he had to do was set his hand on his chest and his gift would tell him what his body was doing, even when unconscious. Based on his heart rate and breathing, the way the blood moved through his body, and several other signs, he knew he was asleep. 

That meant this scene before him was a dream. It did not exist the way the inn existed or the way the dirty town of Redsprin existed.

And yet, as he turned around in a slow circle and stared, it seemed to him that this place did exist—and in the same way the town and the inn existed. Something he could touch. He could smell the smoky air and feel the sand shift under his boots as he adjusted his weight. The sun was a dull, orangey globe above his head, and the sky was a strange shade of brown, almost like cinnamon. He frowned up at the sky and didn’t even need to squint or shade his eyes as he peered at the sun, because the brightness that should have been there wasn’t. 

A dream with a brown sky and a sun that looked shadowy? How strange, he thought.

Lowering his gaze, he examined the land around him. Everywhere he turned, he saw nothing but dry, lifeless sand and—oddly—wide, uneven puddles of black wetness. They reminded him of ponds or some kind of swamp, despite the sand, but they didn’t appear to be filled with water. He thought it might be tar, though he could not smell anything but the smoke. So much smoke in the air. Tar, he knew, could be quite smelly. His head was starting to feel tight, and he lifted the collar of his tunic and held it over his mouth and nose. This dream was turning out to be stranger and stranger—now it was trying to give him a headache.

He stood there for a long time and waited for something to happen. That was usually how dreams began—someone came along, or something changed, or you realized you had to be somewhere. 

But nothing changed. The dream stayed exactly the way it was, and Hamal’s head felt tight, and the sky was brown, and he barely cast a shadow, because the sun seemed to be covered up with blankets. 

Shel Galen, his grandfather, had much to say about dreams and how the gods sometimes spoke through them. Hamal shook his head. Well, if this dream was a message from a god, that god must not be very happy. 

He paused. Wait.

Rosy.

He knew the little girl was asleep in the room with him. And she was an oracle—a powerful gift that could peer into the realm where the gods lived and see what they were doing. Was this a Rosy dream? Did this place look and seem real to him not because of his gift—but because of hers?

Oh no. Was this horrible place where she lived all the time? Was this what she saw whenever she used her gift? Hamal’s heart began to ache. This place was not a good place. No child should live here or even visit here. It wasn’t safe, and it wasn’t healthy. He had to find her.

He let go of his tunic, and the protective fabric fell away from his face. He took a deep breath of the foul air and called out, “Where are you, Rosy? Where are you?”

She did not respond. The land lay empty and still. 

He had no idea where he would find one tiny child in this huge, smoke-filled place, but he didn’t want to keep standing here and doing nothing. He couldn’t keep standing here, so eventually he picked a direction and started walking. 

He walked and walked. A hot wind came by and told him more about this place and how it wasn’t good for children. The wind carried a smell much worse than smoke; he could tell that something had died very close by. One time he stopped walking and cocked his head, listening as an animal shrieked in the distance. He didn’t recognize the cry and—considering the rest of the dream so far—knew he probably wouldn’t like the animal, whatever it happened to be. 

Step after sandy step. The sun slowly moved in the sky and revealed the unexpected passage of time. He repeatedly called Rosy’s name and tried not to think about what his grandfather would say about the dark, sticky puddles that lay like dozens and dozens of traps in his path.

“Oh, Rosy,” he said and felt like his heart was breaking. “We are going to get you out of here. We are going to find you and we are going to save you. And you will come back with us to King’s Barrow, and you will do what a good god is doing, and you will be able to be a child again.”

As far as he could see—and everything was flat in this place, so he could see a long way—the land looked exactly the same. No changes in the scenery. No signs of growth. No good things at all. 

He kept walking.

The sun was slowly changing from orange to a deep red-brown as it dipped toward the horizon. The weak shadow he cast was trying to stretch as tall as Cale and Satha’s house, and suddenly Hamal found something. 

Until this point, the ground had been like a sand-covered table under his boots. There were no hills or mountains or trees or anything else to break up the flatness. He trudged through a little girl’s dream where nothing changed.

But all at once, he came to the edge of the table. At the toes of his boots, the earth dropped away, and he barely managed to catch himself before he toppled off a cliff that had appeared out of nowhere. He teetered on the edge, arms flailing as he looked down into some kind of ravine. 

His heart jerked. 

There, in the ravine’s center, surrounded by dull flames that moved and twisted in a wind Hamal could not feel, stood a large black desk. It was the size of the king’s dining table, but somehow Hamal knew it was a desk, a space meant for working in. Stacks of coins covered the desk’s surface—a forest of coins—and someone was counting them. The man seated in the chair behind the desk matched the desk length for length. His bare shoulders were like the shoulders of a mountain, and his arms were twice as long as Hamal’s entire body. A black crown encircled his bald head, and—as Hamal tried not to topple into the ravine—he saw the man’s skin change colors, and none of the colors were the colors of men. Gray. Silver. Yellow—a sickly kind of yellow, like an old bruise no one had bothered to heal.

Hamal thrust himself backward and dropped into a crouch on the sand. For a moment, he just squatted there, frozen like the land around him, and then  eased forward slowly and looked over the edge.

One at a time, the man picked up the coins and moved them from one pile to another. Every ten coins, he stopped to pick up a quill pen and scribble something in a huge book. Then he would lay the quill aside and resume his counting. 

Hamal released his breath slowly. Those were not real coins. They looked like coins, but even from this distance, he could sense them almost the same way he could sense another healer. A horrible feeling began to rise up inside him. This scene, those coins the monster was counting—this was something bad, something so wrong that the land itself tried to hide what was happening. It buried the desk, the chair, and the monster in this hole in the ground. 

A dream, he thought, his heart pounding fiercely. Rosy’s dream. Why is this terrible thing in Rosy’s dream?

He knew he hadn’t spoken aloud. Not here, with this creature facing him from the floor of the ravine. But the large head with the black crown lifted, and dark, vile eyes met Hamal’s gaze. The creature looked right at him, and with its gaze came a torrent of thoughts and emotions. Not Hamal’s thoughts, not his feelings, but things he suddenly and swiftly knew to be true about this being. He knew in less than a breath that this creature was something that loved death and longed for death. Something that captured souls and counted them for pleasure. Something that eagerly desired brokenness and twistedness. 

Never in his life had Hamal sensed this kind of brokenness—this type of disease. That’s what this was like: a horrible disease that had taken on a humanlike form.

The monster-god did not rise from its chair to chase after him. Instead, it smiled, slow and wicked, and reached over to pick up a coin. A single coin from the desk covered with coins. Between powerful-looking fingers, the creature lifted the coin and turned it so Hamal could see its face. Distance and shadows stretched between them, but somehow in Rosy’s dream, these things didn’t matter, for Hamal could still see the image etched on the coin’s surface. 

A crown and a jewel. 

Confusion rushed through Hamal’s system. He could feel it everywhere. He stared at the emblem and tried to understand. A crown and a jewel? Was this Rosy’s coin? He could not understand how this coin went with an oracle. She was not a jeweler. Nor was she a queen.

The wicked smile widened. The monster-god set the coin back on its stack and resumed his counting, marking the book for every ten coins. He didn’t look up again. It seemed he didn’t even care that Hamal was there.

A wind rose, spilling into the ravine from the north. The flames burning along the ravine floor shuddered at the wind’s strength. All breathable air disappeared from Rosy’s dream, and Hamal gasped. He jerked backward and—

—upright in the bed. 

The old frame creaked beneath the sudden change in his position. His heart felt like it shouted in his chest and in his ears. A fire gleamed on the hearth, and a lamp burned on the small table next to the bed, but the light was not enough. Not enough light. The room seemed horribly dark.

A hand landed on Hamal’s arm. A strong grip held him. “Hamal.” Cale’s voice. “It is I—Cale. Are you all right?”

Gasping for breath, Hamal scanned the room a second time and saw no fire other than the one on the hearth and the small one burning cheerfully in the lamp. There were no fiery eyes to greet him. “Where’s Rosy?”

“Peace, Hamal,” Cale said before—slowly—letting him go. “She’s fine. She’s in the next room with Chestirad, who seems to think he’s good with children.” Cale shook his head and paused. 

Hamal felt the seer’s eyes.

“What happened? You have been asleep for two full days.”

Hamal gaped at him. “What? Two days?”

“We could not wake you, no matter what we tried. And departing with you in that condition did not seem wise. So we have remained here in Redsprin. What happened?” he repeated.

“Two days? It was hours and hours, but it did not seem that long.”

“What was ‘hours and hours’? Can you tell me?”

Hamal touched his face and discovered he was covered in sweat. He groaned, remembering the dream—if it was a dream; perhaps it was more than a dream—and rubbed his face with both hands. “I think I saw the god that Rosy is shadowing.”

Cale grew still. “Yes?”

Hamal nodded sadly. “Oh, Cale. This is not a god we want in King’s Barrow. This is a bad god. I don’t know who it is, but I think it’s the one in charge of diseases. Plagues and horrible things like that. It had a desk full of coins—hundreds of coins—and I think they’re all the people who are sick. It was proud of its coins, and it was counting them.”

Cale leaned back slowly in his chair, looked at Hamal, and did not speak. A log cracked on the hearth, and a small cloud of sparks stretched toward the bottom lip of the chimney.

“You were wise, I think,” Hamal said at last. “You chose to sleep in a different room last night!” He laughed once, but it was not a happy laugh. 

“Two nights ago,” Cale corrected. His brows rose. “Last night none of us slept. Except for you.”

“I want to see Rosy. I want to make sure she’s all right.” Everything Hamal had seen in the dream returned to him, and his stomach felt strange, and he just wanted to hold her—to hold this little girl who had known only pain and had no idea that there was any good in the world at all. He knew more about Rosy than even what her bones had told him, and he wanted to comfort all the fear from her. 

The chair scraped across the floor as Cale stood. “Let us go now.”

They stepped out into the hallway and crossed to the next room, which held a few more people than was naturally comfortable for such a small space. Chestirad was pacing back and forth by the fireplace; Masly Hawl was pacing by the window. Gregory Almes was writing rapidly in a notebook. Hamal could hear the pencil scrape the page, which gave him an idea. A good idea, but it needed to wait for just a few minutes. Right now, there was only a little girl who needed kindness.

Rosy was sitting on the floor in the corner. Again she had returned to the corner, Hamal noticed with sorrow. She was watching the door as he and Cale came in, and she didn’t take her gaze from Hamal as he walked up to her slowly and crouched down.

Brown eyes just now. She watched him steadily.

He wanted to touch her, but he remembered what her bones had felt like and every detail of the place he’d seen in her dream. So he just squatted there and didn’t try to lay his hands on her. “Rosy.”

The room grew even quieter. 

“I know what you see when you use your gift,” Hamal said, speaking slowly so he wouldn’t scare her even more. “You see a large, terrible land filled with sand and smoke and a monster-god who sits in a ravine, at a desk, and counts coins.”

When he heard the jump in her heart, he wanted to put his arms around her even more. Not a single spot of emotion appeared anywhere on her face. There wasn’t even a twitch. She was used to hiding, to revealing nothing to those who might cause her pain. But her heart gave her away.

  “There, there, Rosy,” he said, lifting his hand in what he hoped was a soothing gesture. “It is going to be all right. I don’t know how to do this, not yet, but I am going to find a way to rescue you. One day you will turn your back on that evil place and never go back there again.”

She didn’t move. 

He waited a moment, giving her time to respond. When she did nothing, he nodded to her once and stood up. He turned and looked at Gregory, who had paused, pencil in hand. He, too, was staring at Hamal.

Hamal pointed to Gregory’s notebook. “May I borrow that?”

– H –

Comment below or click here to find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2021 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.            

"Should I Choose to Die Again" Chapter 1

Hamal was cold, and he didn’t like it. It snowed in King’s Barrow every winter, but this wasn’t normal, all this white on the ground.

It had been snowing since last night, which he spent in the Kladis Tunnel beneath Scarlet Road. The flamemakers liked the tunnel, so it was usually warm down there, even when it snowed. It had been warm last night, and it would be warm again tonight—as long as the flamemakers still claimed the territory. You never knew what would happen in South Barrow. Nothing ever stayed in the same hands because of all the fighting.

The flamemakers fought with the weathermakers, and the jewelers fought with everybody. Jewelers needed goals, and when nothing good presented itself, they sometimes chose bad goals just for something to do. Sometimes the Kladis Tunnel was a battlefield, and those were the dangerous nights, because the king’s soldiers would come to put down the riots. They would arrest every person they could get their hands on. Hamal had lost a few friends that way. One was killed after he landed a solid punch on a soldier’s jawline. Another time, two of Hamal’s friends—Rinny and Fen, both flamemakers—had taken off into the night, running as fast as they could, which wasn’t very fast at all apparently, because they had ended up facedown on the ground as the soldiers beat the resistance out of them.

Hamal was lucky that night. He had reached the tunnel a couple of hours after he normally did, and by then, the soldiers had already broken up the fighting. Hamal crouched down and watched as about a dozen men were chained hand and foot, tossed in the back of a heavy wagon with bars over it, and taken across the river, where they would be sold. Hamal heard that flamemakers were in high demand across the river. He didn’t know if the rumor was true, but it seemed true.

Some men preferred slavery to street living, but that was only the case if you had a good master. Some masters made street living look simple and easy. Hamal had heard horrible stories from men who used to work for masters who made them suffer for things that didn’t seem important.

Hamal had had a master once—a good man named Richart. Though they had started off as master and servant, Richart had become Hamal’s closest friend. He had taken good care of Hamal for ten years, but then he died and Hamal hadn’t been able to save him. Richart’s son had been angry, so very angry. Hamal still shuddered when he remembered how they had found Richart’s body and how the son had responded, demanding that Hamal heal him.

But Richart was dead. He had been dead for hours.

So Hamal lived on the streets now, but he didn’t mind. The men typically liked him, and there were many benefits to living with flamemakers, the warmth being one. He could put up with hunger much more than cold. There wasn’t much he could do about the cold, because he wasn’t a flamemaker—or a weathermaker. Weathermakers were crazy. They didn’t even notice when it snowed, and they seemed to think about ice the way they thought about flowers. It was a thing of beauty to them.

He pulled his coat tight about him. At least he had a coat. And he had boots, too, though the toes were wearing out, and there were holes in the heels. But at least he had them. You were thankful for any kind of boots in crazy weather like this. He hunkered down as the wind picked up and blew snow ghosts across the street. That was what he called them—clouds of snow, driven off the drifts by the wind.

Hamal was hurrying, and his head was down, and the wind was blowing, so he didn’t see the coach until he nearly ran into the back of it. He stopped so fast that his boots skidded through the snow, and he wobbled, arms flailing, to get his balance. As he righted himself, he stared at the back of the coach and reached up to rub his bare head in confusion. The night sky was thick with clouds and the lighting along the street was poor, but he knew that emblem on the back of the coach. He couldn’t remember the name of the family now, but Richart, his old friend, had made him memorize the emblems of all the lords of the king’s court.

“You never know when you will need this information,” he had said, tapping the side of his nose. He always did that. Whenever he gave instructions, Richart would tap the side of his nose, as if that were the source of his words. “One can never be too careful in North Barrow. We have our own kind of thief here.”

What was a North Barrow coach doing in South Barrow at this hour of the night? And it was snowing besides. The driver must be very lost.

The people in North Barrow were wealthy and powerful—the king lived in North Barrow. East Barrow, meanwhile, was home to merchants and other working-class men; all the shipping yards were in East Barrow. West Barrow was the scholars’ district. Richart used to say that in West Barrow, you couldn’t toss a rock without hitting a student or a school. The nation itself was called King’s Barrow, and this was the city of King’s Barrow, the city of the king, and everyone was proud of it.

If this coach truly was lost—and of course it had to be; why else would it be here? Perhaps they would offer Hamal a coin to give them directions. He had been paid for such small jobs before. People who lived in the other barrows rarely entered South Barrow, the poor district. There were few jobs here and few businesses that offered anything of value to the wealthy, so it was almost a guarantee that if any of the rich folk did enter the barrow, they would eventually need to stop and ask for directions.

He was about to walk around the coach to talk to the driver, when the door on the right-hand side opened, and a man was tossed out onto the street. He hit the snow with a deep groan, the kind of groan Hamal was familiar with—a teeth-grinding noise of intense pain.

Two men jumped out of the coach after him. They were wearing armor, Hamal thought, but it wasn’t the armor of the king’s soldiers. The king’s men didn’t wear black armor; they wore polished silver armor that was so clean and bright that you could see it even at night. These men would have been like shadows but for the snow on the street.

One of them carried a large hammer. The other had a drawn sword. The man in the snow was moving a little, but only a little. Hamal could hear each breath the man took. He had fluid in his lungs. He had been badly injured.

The soldier with the hammer murmured something to his companion with the sword, and they both laughed. The man with the sword crouched beside the injured man on the street.

“You want a message, my lord? You are the message.” He then straightened up and put the tip of his blade through the fallen man’s chest. It was a very sharp weapon, or the soldier was very strong; either way, the blade passed through the chest without any sign of resistance until it hit the street on the other side.

The dead man’s hand came up and almost seemed to caress the blade. Then his arm flopped back into the snow and was still.

For a moment, Hamal didn’t know what to do. Part of his brain told him that these men were worse than the king’s soldiers. Another part told him to hold still and maybe they wouldn’t see him. The snow played with people’s eyes. Sometimes, it hid things that otherwise would have been visible. He realized his hands were shaking, but he thought it was probably from the cold. It was very cold out here, and the dead man was lying on his back in the snow—that could not be pleasant for him.

The man with the hammer turned and saw Hamal. The hammer lifted. “You there.”

Hamal swallowed hard.

“Yes, you. Tell everyone you see that this is what happens when the House of Kanyan is defied.”

Hamal suddenly remembered the name that went with the emblem on the coach. Kanyan. It was one of the most powerful houses in the city. They were in good standing with the king. Or they were in good standing with the king, Hamal thought.

The swordsman snickered, as if the hammer-wielder had told a good joke.

“Don’t forget!” Hammer-man insisted. “The House of Kanyan.”

They climbed back into the coach and drove away. The driver snapped a whip at the horses, and the coach slid through the snow at a speed that wasn’t safe.

Hamal stared after them until the coach rounded a corner.

“I don’t think those men were lost,” he decided and then looked at the “message” they had left bleeding in the street.

The man wasn’t moving. Hamal cocked his head and listened for a heartbeat. The wind was loud and insistent tonight, and so he had to move closer. About four steps away from the man, the familiar sound of a heart finally reached him, but the beat was faint and growing fainter. They had certainly killed this man. He was dying rapidly.

Hamal rubbed his hands together and cupped them to his mouth, blowing hot air into his fingers. He hadn’t done this in a while, and most of the wounds he treated now were burns. His friends the flamemakers weren’t injured by fire of course, but they could be injured by lightning from the weathermakers. The two elements were different, Hamal supposed, though it seemed a little odd to him why they would be. Both produced heat. Just lightning produced something more. And sometimes he thought it seemed very angry.

He pulled up the man’s blood-drenched tunic and laid his hand on the wound. The open skin was warm against his fingers, and beneath his touch it began to shift, responding to Hamal’s gift. He sealed the vessels back together—that was always the first step, to stop the bleeding—and then he began to repair the tissue. The human body was like fabric; it often needed sewing. There were multiple broken bones and more bruises than he could count, but he wouldn’t worry about those—not just now, out in the middle of the street, in the snow. He could fix all of those later.

The blood tried to speak to him, but he ignored it. He was busy. The bones tried to start a conversation, but he ignored them, too.

The initial process didn’t take him long. He was usually quick. But as always, he left a scar. He wasn’t that talented of a healer. Some healers could leave the skin as fresh as an infant’s, but even when the cut was small, Hamal had never been able to make the skin perfect. He was good with bones, but skin? There were certain things he couldn’t fully heal because of scar tissue.

The man didn’t awaken, but that was normal. Brushes with death could leave the mind a little . . . absent for a while. The body needed time to recover.

Hamal looked the man over. “I need better lighting,” he muttered.

There was blood all over the face; he could see that much, despite the shadows of night and snow. The eyes were swollen. The man had been hit repeatedly. The real damage, however—besides the sword through the chest—was the man’s right hand. Hamal understood now why that man in the black armor had been carrying a hammer. The hand was just destroyed. Every bone broken—not just cracked, but beaten into shards. Why beat a man’s hand this way? Especially if you were just going to kill him later? It seemed rather rude.

Hamal lifted his head and frowned up at the clouds and the falling snow. It was cold. He was cold. Standing to his feet, he stared down at the man and listened to a heartbeat that was stronger now. “Good. You’ll be fine, won’t you? I’m sorry about the scar.”

On the other side of the barrow, there was a mission that took in the weak and injured. They fed them, clothed them, and let them heal. They had good healers working there. Hamal had once seen them heal a man’s foot that was turning black and stank with gangrene.

But the mission was next to King’s River, the massive body of water that cut the city in half—it was blocks and blocks away from here. It would be better to take this man to the Kladis Tunnel, Hamal decided finally. The tunnel and the warmth offered by the flamemakers were only five or six blocks north of his current position. That was a much easier distance.

But how to get him there? Hamal was not a strong man. He had small hands and small arms, not good for lifting anything, especially not a dead weight like this man was going to be. Richart used to tease him and say, “It’s a good thing you’re a healer, because you would never make it as anything else.” And it was true. After his removal from Richart’s house, Hamal had tried to find work, but no one was interested. Most houses in North Barrow already had at least half a dozen healers on their staff—men and women who had been born in the house, so they were at an advantage—and like Richart said, Hamal was too small to do anything else. He had been willing to do anything.

Then the king had died, and no one in North Barrow had wanted to hire anybody new. So Hamal sometimes went and helped at the mission where they were careful with him and never let him have any of the tough cases. It was true that he was a little slow in his thoughts. He knew this. He became confused easily. That was true, too. They were kind to him at the mission, just as the flamemakers were kind, and they gave him only the easy cases—the scrapes and bruises. Never the broken bones. Never anything with lots of blood—of course, most of the blood cases died before they could reach the mission. If you were going to be doing any fighting, it was best to have a healer as a friend.

Hamal crouched down next to the body. “My lord,” he said, remembering what the soldier had called this man. “I’m going to drag you. I’m sorry about the snow. I’ll work the frostbite from your hands when we get there.” He paused. “If you get frostbite.”

He crept around to the man’s boots and took hold of the cuffs of his trousers, one hand on each pant leg. “Here we go,” he called over his shoulder. He stood up as best he could and commenced dragging the man down the street. Soon he didn’t feel the cold anymore...

Should I Choose to Die Again (The Hamal Books) (Volume 1)

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How Satha Told Her Parents

Behold...the newest side story. I love this 3-chapter short story because it shows you more of who Satha is and also the difficulties she and Cale endured when she decided to marry a "commoner." Her noble-born parents did not appreciate this... Hopefully this will be up in the store next week!

Watch an excerpt from "Flicker," a new short story on Kindle!

Guys! I love this short story. Flicker is daring and cute, and hey—making fire with your hands is pretty sa-weet. Available on Kindle only. 

The Great Adventure of Gregory Almes (excerpt)

This side story introduces a character you'll get to meet in book 2. His name is (you guessed it) Gregory Almes, and this is his love story. (Awwww…) It's also interesting because it explains more about two unique gifts: readers and feelers. But did I mention the love story part? Yeah, totally—read it for the love story!

— Lauren

Gregory Almes was thirty-one years old when Adventure decided to marry him.

Some people might consider thirty-one a little too old for her, but Adventure didn’t think so. She liked the way he frowned. She also liked the way he spent so much time in his library, and she liked how smart he was. He was a reader, and readers had a very intelligent way of looking at the world.

They also hated everyone, which Adventure found amusing.

Gregory constantly griped about this man or that man, and he obviously thought himself better than every person around him. It was wonderfully refreshing. Adventure found many things amusing about Gregory Almes, and when she told him they should get married, he spilled his tea all over his desk.

“I would never marry a feeler,” he told her straight out and gave her one of his severe, endearing scowls. “If you ever mention this again, your family could lose their position in my home.”

We’ll see, she thought and flounced away, knowing he would do exactly what she said. He hadn’t said, “I would never marry a servant.” He had said, “I would never marry a feeler.” That was an important difference. It must be that he didn’t mind she was from a poor family. She knew he was arrogant—he was thoroughly arrogant—but it had nothing to do with his wealth. It had to do with his mind, and she already liked that part.

The only thing that bothered him was that she wasn’t a snotty-nosed reader, like he was. And, well, there were ways to get around that.

Having made up her mind, fourteen-year-old Adventure started reading. Every book. Every free hour. All the time. She went to his library and chose a bookcase and a certain shelf on that bookcase and started left to right. Gregory allowed his servants and the families of servants to read whichever of his books they wanted. The books couldn’t be taken out of the library, of course, but that was all right, because Gregory used one corner of the massive room as his study. This meant Adventure would be able to keep an eye on him...

To read the rest of the story, head over to our store!

The Night Hamal Delivered the Baby (excerpt)

This is the story of how Hamal meets Cally the flamemaker and goes with her to live with the flamemakers in South Barrow. I love this story because it shows what Hamal looks like from someone else's perspective…and it also shows how cool he is! Did you know he has a lot of experience delivering babies?! Neither did I!

— Lauren

As she mopped the sweat from her sister’s brow, Cally eyed the healer standing on the other side of the bed and tried to think positively. It wasn’t the boy’s fault he was young. Nor was it his fault that the healer they had carefully saved for—taking extra jobs, going without sleep and food and repaired boots to pay for—was nowhere to be found the night they needed him.

Ruby had gone into labor last night, but when they sent for the healer they had “purchased” to come as agreed, no one had been able to find him. After a desperate search, Essek had sprinted to the mission for another healer and found only one: this child. Was he a talented healer? No, he was a boy who wasn’t trusted with the hard cases—he had actually volunteered that information on the way to the public birthing house. He did only small healings at the mission, like broken fingers. Scrapes and bruises.

His name was Hamal. And he barely looked capable of putting on his boots...

To read the rest of the story, head over to our store!