Unexpected Magic

by

Kidnapping on WIP Wednesday

In Unexpected Magic, due for publication on June 16th, my heroine is saved by being kidnapped by a dragon. Is it out of the boiling kettle into the fire? Or something else?

***

Delia had no idea how much time had passed before she surfaced into consciousness. It was long enough for her to be somewhere else—somewhere she did not recognize. She was lying on her side on a grassy slope, looking down from a height across a body of water to the steep side of a mountain.

She moved cautiously, lifting herself up on her elbow. Every part of her ached, though she could see no visible wounds, and her limbs moved without increasing the pain. A glance told her that the lake, or perhaps river, had mountains on both sides, and that the gentle slope beneath her dropped away suddenly a dozen paces from her hands.

As she looked around, she realized she was not alone. The other occupant had been unseen behind her until she turned her head. He took up the full width of the slope and most of the length, and even so, his forelegs draped over the edge of the drop, as did his tail.

He—she could not have said why she thought the dragon was male, but she could not think of him by any other pronoun—gazed at her with large, calm, yellow-brown eyes. Perhaps she was still in shock, for she did not feel afraid. The dragon could have eaten her in one gulp, but he had not done so. Not yet, in any case. Indeed, if one looked at the situation dispassionately, he had saved her from the Welsh mage.

“Thank you for saving me,” she said.

The dragon inclined his head, as if acknowledging her comment. He was rather beautiful—a deep emerald-green, shading to mint-green on his belly and throat. His wings, folded now against his sides, were the deep green of his body but laced with gold, and the spine ridge that ran from the tip of his tail to the horns behind his ears was also gold.

As to his shape, he was everything she had ever imagined a dragon could be. On first sight, she had compared him to the chicken-house dragon, but up close and now that she was calm, she could see how wrong she had been. It was like comparing a pigeon hatchling to an adult peacock, or a rat to a thoroughbred horse. The same number of limbs, ears, eyes, and so on, but on one functional and on the other, elegance personified.

“Where are we?” she asked him, sitting up and looking around.

The dragon stood and walked away, heading along the ledge and around a corner. With no other viable option, Delia followed him, but stopped at the threshold of a cave whose entrance was so high that the dragon had gone ahead of her into the gloom, crouching and moving forward with his head down and his body nearly touching the ground.

A sudden burst of flame in the interior had her leaping backward. She looked longingly around at the landscape, but could see no signs of habitation, no hint of a possible rescue. If she ran, the dragon could catch her in moments.

He saved me from the mage, she repeated to herself, and stepped resolutely into the cave.

After several steps, it opened out into a great vaulted cavern. The dragon had lit a fire in the middle, and by its flickering light, Delia could see several smaller caves around the perimeter of the spacious central area.

It was cooler here underground, but the fire was not necessary. Except to see by, she supposed. But those tawny eyes had slitted pupils, like a cat’s. Did the dragon need light to see by?

She could not afford to be soothed by the sudden notion that he had lit the fire for her convenience. The dragon was a dangerous beast. He had already killed at least one person in front of her eyes—for she did not see how the man who had been holding her could have survived, and the mage might well have died from being thrown against the wall. Furthermore, the dragon had brought her here for an unknown purpose.

But he seemed mild enough at present. He lifted a forearm, claws outstretched—it took her a moment to realize he was pointing to one of the caves, for his paw, with its outstretched claws, looked nothing like a pointing hand.

But he waited patiently, his eyes moving back and forth from her to the cave in the direction of his gesture.

Once she guessed what he wanted and obeyed, she found the cave had been set up with an untidy bed of bracken covered unevenly with a blanket. “Who lives here?”

She did not realize she had spoken out loud until the dragon made a noise that sounded more like a gurgle than a roar, and she looked at him to find that he was gesturing to her.

“I live here?” she asked. “You set this up for me?”

The dragon nodded.

 

by

An excerpt for WIP Wednesday – Unexpected Magic, coming soon

This is the opening of the first book in my new series, Many Kinds of Magic. In Unexpected Magic, my heroine’s life is upended all in a day, starting with a miniature massacre in the henhouse.

***

On the morning that changed everything, Cordelia Nettleford was woken by a cacophony from the henhouse. The sound of panicked hens squawking blue murder suggested that a fox or a stoat had somehow managed to enter the enclosure, despite the protection charm that should have prevented any such invasion.

Delia groaned, and reached for the clothes at the bottom of her bed. The hens were her special charge—or one of her special charges. No doubt everyone else in the manor was snuggling back down under the blankets, smugly content in the knowledge that it was not their problem.

“And I shall be blamed if this means fewer eggs,” she grumbled, as she dressed any-old-how under the covers, left the bed, wriggled her toes into an extra pair of socks, grabbed a warm wrap, lit her lantern with one of the fire spells that waited on the mantel, and hurried downstairs.

The hens kept up their noise as she pulled on a coat, boots, mittens, and a knitted cap, and let herself out the back door, first grabbing the wooden club that rested in the umbrella stand. Were there fewer hens? It sounded like it. She hoped they had not been massacred. Probably they had not. Probably some of them had taken to the high perches out of the way and were hiding there, pretending to be feathered statues so the fox—or, as it might be, the stoat—did not come after them.

It was so early that dawn had barely touched the edges of the sky above the hills, though a full moon gave sufficient light for her to see beyond the lantern’s reach. Not enough for the other person out this morning to seem more than a darker shape within the shadows under the stable eaves. Delia froze in place, peering into the gloom with no success.

The voice was a relief. “Miss Nettleford? Are you going to check the hens?”

It was Millie Pickard, the stable girl, carrying her own club. She was a workhouse brat, taken on when she was twelve to work in the stable. Delia had been teaching her to read, though not where Delia’s mother could see. In Mama’s view, the daughter of even such an impoverished manor should not associate with stable hands.

Delia, on the other hand, felt the need to do something useful beyond the manifold duties that her mother had abdicated onto her slim shoulders,  duties for which Mama nonetheless still took credit.

Marriage was clearly not going to be an option. She was, after all, twenty-three years of age and those gentlemen who had seen her at local assemblies had long since ceased taking an interest.

By teaching Millie, she was making a difference to one other person, and it was an accomplishment all her own. Not something Mama would claim as her work.

As to why Millie was here with her in the dark, no doubt Millie’s fellows had decided it was her job—an orphan, and a girl at that—to leave the warm rooms in the loft above the stables and find out what the noise was all about.

“Yes. That protection charm was only applied a week ago. It must have something wrong with it.” Delia kept walking to the henhouse, and Millie fell into place beside her.

“It was one of Madam Greensmith’s charms,” the girl objected. “Her charms are famous.”

“The hens are complaining about something,” Delia pointed out. Though as they walked it sounded like fewer and fewer of them, and when they came through the orchard gate only two or three of the eighteen hens that should be there still raced, flapping their wings and squawking, up and down the run, chased by something Delia could not quite make out.

“Not a fox,” she said. It was too small for a fox. Too small for a stoat, too, she thought, but moving so fast it was hard to make out. What is it?

In a dozen more paces she was standing by the run, and the little creature had stopped, mainly because it had caught, and was ripping the throat out of, another hen. “Millie,” she said. “Run and get the carry cage for chicks. I’m going to have to try to catch it.” Clubbing the beast was not an option. Not given what she now recognized.

“Miss Delia,” said Millie, in the heat of the moment forgetting that the correct form of address was Miss Nettleford, “is that what I think it is?”

“It is. It’s a dragon,” said Delia.