Excerpt: How to Stop a Giant

Chapter One: Jenil

It was raining. In the desert. It simply had to be a sign.

Jenil sighed and her elbow slid a bit on the balcony railing, still holding up her pushed cheek and pitiful sad expression. She was overdressed for a rainy day, but then again she assumed she always was.

Jenil Vati was a princess. In name, birth, station, class, caste and upbringing. Her life was one almost entirely of privilege. She didn't choose this life, of course, but she could hardly make many choices to stray from its path. Her days were pre-programmed and stewarded by at least a dozen servants. A typical day looked as such: Wake up, dress and prepare for lessons (possibly breakfast in bed on week-ends); Stroll the gardens before having lunch with mother and friends; A midday nap; Dress for outside play; Horseback riding; Bath, dress and then etiquette; Reading until dinner with mother and father; Reading and any entertaining of guests before changing for bed. There were variations of course, some involved swimming, and some days Jenil could choose where she rode her horse (within the confines of the palace grounds, of course).

Some days she would sneak to the armory under the guise of finding a new spot for reading and persuade the royal armorer and his boyish assistant to teach her how to use the khopesh or saif blades. This was the most dangerous of the errant days as they violated not only the normalcy of the day, required lying to a gaggle of otherwise sharp-eyed attendants, and put the careers of palace laborers at risk, but also because it suggested that the only daughter, the only child even, of the royal family had any sort of desire or designs on the life that existed outside of the palace grounds.

"Outside the palace grounds" was a concept that she barely knew beyond book teachings of the tremendous variety of lands and people that existed outside the confines of a royal life. She had accompanied the family on holidays to other palaces, traveling in individual carriages pulled by umpteen horses and surrounded by a hundred armed guards. Beyond the tips of spears and the sides of horses, one could see so little of the journey itself it could hardly be enjoyed. When they arrived, there were certainly interesting and fascinating differences that Jenil became obsessed with, but having to adhere to merely another royal life schedule meant that by the time she began to understand the significant changes and cultural abnormalities it was time to take the long, boring journey back. She made a point, however, to fill her carriage with as many books about the various lands as they would let her. She could at least return home with the opportunity to learn more.

Home was a place that Jenil was still curious about, despite the fact that she lived there. She absorbed details, language lessons and cultural facts from her teachers and her insatiable love of reading. But even with all of that knowledge she yearned to actually interact with the people, places and things that existed outside of the walls around her life. Around the palace. Around her world. Sometimes she was able to plead for gifts that reflected the world outside and allow her imagination and curiosity to spin off of just a simple item. When she was young she would ask for dresses with far-away styles, then games and toys, then music instruments, then more books and more recently she had asked for very specific things like a type of jewelry, a ceremonial weapon, a headdress and such. She would construct models and tiny buildings from the pictures in her books, asking her servants-in-waiting to help her carve tiny details and dress the small set for her outside-the-palace fantasies. Over the years her father would also summon animals from far outside their country's borders. So many, in fact, Jenil often joked she saw more exotic animals from foreign lands than she knew of her own homeland. Jenil wasn't always happy with this practice of providing her with unique beasts. She was very concerned for their well-being and some clearly did not enjoy the hot climate of their sandy palace. She finally convinced her father to stop after the dolphins.

The dolphins did quite well, actually. Jenil watched them play in the canal built off of the river, running within palace grounds. She could see them from her balcony most days, a strange reminder of the uniqueness of the world she had yet to experience.

At seventeen Jenil was wise beyond her years and yet completely naive. She was aware of her tremendous weakness, something she felt many in her situation were often not. In her trips to meet other, usually larger families of royals she was more often unimpressed with the arrogance and laziness of the princes and princesses she met. They seemed to have even less of a relationship with reality than their birthright would dictate. She was also unimpressed with the way they looked down on her own country's culture, as though theirs was in some way superior or more time-tested. She knew they looked strangely on her father's royal rule and the fact that his younger brother would inherit the throne after his passing (which would not happen for many, many years, Jenil hoped). This took pressure off of her mother, the queen who could have no more children after Jenil. The royals of the lush tropical climes, or the plains, or the mountains all felt their systems and people were better. It was a strand of silliness, Jenil felt, that joined all royals.

And so even as she stood on the balcony of her opulent room, in a palace with no equal in seven adjoining nations, in a prosperous country among an uncertain world, Jenil may have known her place in the scheme of life but she did not know her purpose. Not really, anyway. And while it's true that Jenil occasionally made decisions that ever-so-slightly nudged a day's activities or direction of an unusual trip outside the palace, but the sum of those nudges did not satisfy the wanderlust that was building inside her.

A rainy day was said to be a boon for harvest, for life to spring forth. In Jenil's culture, rain was good luck.

It was one of those rare days where there seemed to be more water falling from the sky than running in the important, wide river that careened through the lives and country that Jenil's family ruled.

She propped her head up on two hands and stared from her balcony, flanked by exotic roses, wearing a massive dark blue dress and white-gold tiara, staring at the gardens and at the canal in the distance, a small dolphin fin breaking the surface of the rain-spattered water.

It must be a sign, she thought.