Excerpt: Glass Onions and Rose Water

At sixteen, Col had run off. His dear sister had been killed, and he wanted desperately to get revenge—one way or another—on the man who had killed her. The drunken lout of a man that had killed her had also inspired Col’s dreams of rebellion. There were nights where, as a boy, he could remember his father waking him and asking him to pledge his allegiance to a fallen empire. As a child, his father had been larger than life, drunk off his rocker, and always smelling of the tavern they lived above in squalor. They had been poor. His sisters had been forced to marry young, so their father wouldn’t have the burden of providing a roof over their heads. Such dreams his father had woven—of living like the ladies and lords of LaCarumba, claiming back what he claimed had been their birthright until the uprising had shaken them down into the slums. But for all his father’s ranting and raving, and singing and reciting, it had taken the death of his sister for Col to do something. Lashing out in anger, he joined a travelling band of thieves, and had lived the merry life of the fool—never caring once for the sorrows of his ma and sisters and younger brothers.