As I’ve been lamenting a bit on social media lately, this year has, creatively speaking, blown so many donkeys that I’m pretty sure there isn’t a single unsatisfied donkey between here and Spokane.
But Dara having been working so hard on her Overwatch fic as of late (a fic which, by the way, you should read, because it’s totally awesome and you can find it here) has been a prod to my own ability to write, I think. So I’ve been lately instituting my strategy of “ridiculously stupidly low daily word counts”, just for the sake of being able to say I’ve written something.
I’ve also returned to dealing with my still-due novellas for the Warder universe, in no small part because I’ve realized that I really need to write Caitlin Hallett and Gabien Desroches’ meeting before I can really have them appear properly in Warder Soul.
So I’m back in dealing with their story. And hey, here’s an excerpt! Caitlin’s coming out of a very spiky conversation with her father Thomas, a conversation which has not gone well. Caitlin’s looking to console herself by busking on George Street.
Except she’s got a surprise waiting for her. Muahaha.
Excerpt behind the fold!
At the top of the wide stairway that led from Duckworth down to the George Street entrance, I could tell that my favorite spot for busking was already taken.
I heard them before I got a proper look at them—which I couldn’t help, because a fiddle in full voice will carry in the open air. Nor was there only a fiddle. Underneath the sizzling reel coming off the player’s strings, there sounded a steady, snapping rhythm, bum-ba-da-dum-ba-da-dum-dum-dum, and it took me a few shocked moments to realize that I was hearing somebody’s booted feet tapping out a beat against a board.
That’s podorythmie, I thought for a moment, blankly. They’re Quebecois.
In the next moment, as the fiddler’s reel jumped from B minor to a brighter D major, all I could think was that some Quebecois asshole had taken my busking spot.
I almost bailed then and there. And would have, except for the one other thing I picked up on: power resonating through every note of the tune. Power that felt familiar, a little like Dad’s but more like mine, young and vibrant and as of yet ungrounded in the life energy of a city.
Whoever the Quebecois fiddler was, they were also a Warder.
That, all by itself, would have been more than enough to propel me down the stairs. I knew everyone of the Warder lineage in St. John’s, and as far north as Torbay and as far south as Petty Harbour besides. Most of them were related to Dad and me, if you followed the family trees back far enough. This fiddler couldn’t be any of them, by sheer dint of what it meant to be a Warder. The magic wouldn’t let Betty Doyle leave Petty Harbour or Seamus MacDonald Torbay, any more than Dad could set foot out of St. John’s. And aside from the other active Warders on our side of the Rock, I’d met a lot of the younger Warder-bloods like me. None of them had power that felt like this.
For that matter, none of them played fiddle like a house on fire, with enough extra flame to take out the rest of the block.
Yeah, this is going to be fun. 😀
