A few weeks ago I posted the beginning of a thing — this post a continuation of a thing, tentatively titled Oaths. The title will change if I ever publish this because Oaths just doesn’t roll off the tongue very well, but it’s apt for now. I’ve decided to post excerpts of what I already have written, in the hopes of soliciting some feedback. I’ve already done some heavy edits on what I’ll be posting, but it’s far from a finished product. I, personally, benefit greatly from people giving me their thoughts on what I’m working on, even if they ultimately tell me that it’s shit. Knowing the specifics of why someone thinks it’s shit is a big help. “Why didn’t this work for them? Is it something I should fix, or is it just not clicking with this particular person?”
I think it also might be fun to provide a little information on my mindset when I was writing a particular piece. Maybe useful to all of you, definitely useful to me — I can look back down the road and see where I was coming from. So here is that for this part!
Forethoughts
This excerpt comes immediately after what I posted here previously. What I posted before is what I now consider the prologue. Originally the story kicked off right from there and we saw a child’s journey away from home to find her place amongst strangers in a place she’s never seen before, a place so massively different from her home that she needs to relearn how to live, essentially. Ultimately I ended up not being happy with that. That’s not the sort of person I am, writer or reader. One of my criticisms of The Farseer Trilogy was that the first half of the first book was completely dedicated to setting up the world Fitz lives in, and that wasn’t terribly exciting. Informative, yes. Exciting, no. I realized that I was repeating exactly what I didn’t like about those massive fantasy tomes: too much exposition for too long.
I scrapped all of that, kept the initial scene as a prologue, and restarted the story with the child already a young adult, living in this new world and accustomed to its ways. Essentially: she’s the same brave little girl, but she’s grown up, been through boot, and been exposed to What Lurks Below(tm).
Enjoy!
***
“You’re bleeding.”
“Oh, really?” Tylien, the elf I shared my apartment with, asked dimly. He had just climbed in the window and sat on a wooden crate in the corner. “I hadn’t noticed the blood leaking into my eyes while I walked clear across town with the gaping head wound.”
I replied with a grunt and dug into my crate on the opposite corner. You could hardly call our apartment such — in exchange for a little coin each week, an old widow let us stay in her spare, second floor bedroom. She didn’t want us walking through her home, of course, so she had nailed the door shut. Our sole entrance and exit was the second story window. Inconvenient, that.
It was a dark, damp little place with a low ceiling and creaky floorboards, but it was cheap and it was ours. There was only enough room for our beds, a chest each for our clothing, and a few small crates to hold our other belongings. Decent enough for sleeping in, but not a place for leisure. Certainly not where you’d host friends, either — and we never did. That was our rule. We never talked about this place. We never talked about where we lived at all.
While Tylien’s crate was a glorified stool that held nothing of worth, mine contained rows of rolled bandages and little brown pots: herbs, salves, and poultices. They were amateur, but they got the job done. The Academy didn’t leave much time for practicing these things over the years, but being forced out of the barracks drove me back to considering to self-sufficiency. That was the whole point of being forced out of the barracks before ascension. The threat of living in a gutter is an effective motivator.
I took a few items from the crate and crouched near Tylien. He had removed his tunic and the cord holding back his long dark hair, so it could flow freely. He tilted his head back for me. This had become routine for us; he would come home beaten, and I would tend to it. We were both in training to be Champions and spent a lot of time together, even when we weren’t home. More people than I’d care to admit assume we’re lovers. It isn’t true. To be honest, he disgusted me, physically. He was decent enough company, but I’ve never managed to grasp the attraction to elves most of humanity seems to have. The angles of his face were all wrong, his limbs were too gangly, and the tilt of his eyes was unsettling. Beyond that, he wasn’t a bad person.He was strong. A warrior. He was kind, usually. All very admirable traits. I’m sure an elf would find him perfectly handsome. To me, though, he was another creature entirely. I couldn’t be attracted to him any more than I could be attracted to a bird or a fish.
I twisted the lid off of a jar of water and washed the blood from his face, rinsing the wound clean. We didn’t have a basin up here, so I just let it all spill to the floorboards. I set the jar aside, lifted the lid off of one of my little pots, and scooped some of the moist paste out with my fingers.
“You’re already squirming.” I scowled down at Tylien, just barely above eye level with him. He was tall. I was not. Even when he was sitting it was hard to call it looking down at him. “Stop that.”
“Do you have any idea how much it hurts when you use that?”
I pressed the poultice into the long cut — it ran straight along his eyebrow, which explained all of the blood. Forehead wounds bleed more than they have any right to. “It can’t be any worse than being beaten.”
“Yes,” Tylien said through clenched teeth, “it can.”
“If you would stop taking beatings, we wouldn’t have to do this anymore.”
I wiped the poultice remnants off of my fingers and onto a bandage, which I wrapped around Tylien’s head. He shrugged his shoulders and stood up, pushing past me. The two of us worked odd jobs for money now that we needed to learn how to live outside the barracks — you can’t take on an apprenticeship in a real trade, because that will never come to pass. You’ll be a Champion. That is your profession. There is no becoming a smith or an alchemist or a cobbler. So you make whatever income you can, where ever you can. You would be surprised how much you can make just by doing what nobody else wants to do. A housewife will give you a bit for sweeping up bedstraw for her so she doesn’t need to do it. Her husband will get angry with her for throwing good coin away on petty errances, but ask him about it later and he’ll give you a silver so he doesn’t need to lay the fresh straw himself.
Tylien did work as a translator. If an elf doesn’t live in the city, it’s unlikely that they know how to speak our tongue. They don’t teach it behind the Everwood. Any elves that come to the city for business or politics will need a translator — Tylien’s name is at the top of a short list of competent ones. In the minds of the elven nobles, however, he’s also a cultural traitor. He left his people’s ways behind for ours. Elven traditionalists will work with him, but they don’t like it. He gets beaten for it, and he just accepts it. He’s an idiot.
He rose from his crate and knelt down by the chest at the foot of his bed. “If the difference between being beaten and not being beaten is a sovereign or a silver, I’ll take the sovereign.”
That much was true, as the traditionalists tended to be among the nobility — those who held the vast majority of the wealth among elves. They’ve long forgotten the actual worth of a sovereign. Beg long enough and they’ll give you a sovereign just to make you go away.
I leaned beside the window. “Did you stop at the market at least?”
“What? No.” He pulled a clean shirt on over his head. “I didn’t think to stop at the King’s Market and pay for a meal while I bled out.”
“Damn it all,” I cursed. “It was your turn. What are we supposed to eat?”
He shrugged at me.
I shook my head, turned, and swung out the open window, climbing a rickety wooden ladder to the street below.
***
Afterthoughts
This situation is a bit absurd by design. After the heavy prologue, I wanted something less serious as an introduction to these characters. Their living situation is still a little dark, but it’s the sort of dark that, after having been through it, you look back on it years later and you can’t help but see how ridiculous it was and laugh about it. “Yes, that was awful, but I got through it.”
Some criticism I’ve received about this so far from my editor is that the world seems “dry.” My first thought was to say, “but you’ve barely seen the world yet. How can it seem dry?” Maybe that’s the problem, though. I haven’t shown anything particularly notable about the world yet, because I deemed it unnecessary — but I have shown things that aren’t that impressive. Maybe I shouldn’t show anything, until I’m ready to show the good stuff. It’s something I intend to keep in mind for future edits.
As usual, I would appreciate any feedback you all have to offer.