Excerpt: Tea & Sorcery

Feeling rather out of place, he left his mistmare behind and wandered off through the ruins with his familiar, unable to shake the thought that wherever he stepped, someone had likely been cut down twelve hundred years ago. The faint voices that he had been hearing in the woods were silent; in their place, he could occasionally hear a snap of flame or a crack of burning timber—less often, it was the whisper of arrows in flight or the flap of leather wings that reached his ears.

He wandered into one of the old towers when he found that a good third of the building was missing, and found the shattered remnants of an orrery bent and broken against the inside of the wall. He made a circuit around the inside of the tower with his fingers trailing along the stone and over the corroded metal before he sat down outside. It stood on a hill overlooking the lake, and now that he was too far away to hear the water spirits, the forest had become quite silent.

It was a peaceful spot, perfect for reading—which was exactly what he did. It seemed thoroughly inappropriate to enjoy such a place, given the atrocities that had taken place there, but somehow he couldn’t imagine such a scholarly race taking offence to someone reading by their graves, so to speak.

He thought he heard a childlike murmur a short while later, and glanced up from his book. The demon readjusted his spectacles and looked around, but there was no one to be seen—and yet he could not quite shake the feeling that they were not alone. Beside him, Tiramisu’s ears flattened and then perked as she took a sniff of the air. The vaguest hint of watery laughter tickled his hearing as the winged cat reached up to swat at something unseen.

After a moment’s consideration, Mebrit marked his place in the book of short stories he was reading and turned back to the first page. He cleared his throat with a quiet cough and started to read it aloud from the beginning. There was another murmur at first, and he paused and cast a nervous glance about the hilltop, but then all was quiet, and he went back to reading.

He was interrupted about a quarter of an hour later by the arrival of Lady Kos, who gave him a puzzled look as he finished the sentence he was reading.

"What are you doing?"

Mebrit looked up at her, his expression deadpan. "I’m fairly certain that I’m reading a novella about airship pirates to an audience of dead children, but it’s possible that I’m mistaken."