Chapters 29-End

Twenty-ninth

  

Elizabeth fell out of the dumbwaiter into the secret passage in Adri and Walton’s apartment...now, just Adri’s. She wondered if the woman knew yet that she had been widowed.

The apartment was deserted. The stark silence of the rooms was filled only with the ticking of clocks. This place remained a haven within the chaos of the city. Surely there weren’t many such enclaves that endured untouched by the violence that had destroyed so much of Aldergate.

Chapters 26-28

(In which Elizabeth wakes as a prisoner of the Guard, attempts a daring escape, and the tunnels come under attack)

Twenty-sixth

Noises and thoughts arrived in bits and pieces, like missives adrift on an intermittent wind. The clearest signal came from her left shoulder, the pain hauling her through the veil of unconsciousness. Following its biting insistence, she acquired other details until, finally, she burst through the borderline of wakefulness like a swimmer breaking surface for a long-awaited breath.

Her arm had been wrenched into an awkward position, held as high as it would go, rotated and stuck to the wall by something wrapped around her wrist. Her feet touched the ground, though in her slumped position, the arm supported most of her weight. Her back rested flat against a hard, stone wall that felt cold and emitted a musty smell, as though the space she occupied had not been opened for a very, very long time.

Chapters 23-25

(In which the trainees get to stretch their legs a bit, attack a boat, and Elizabeth gets to act the part she was born to play)

Twenty-third

      Graves was as good as his word; though she remained the least competent of the trainees in almost every way, and light-years away from Graves himself, Elizabeth was no longer the hopeless bumbler she had been when she first stepped off that dumbwaiter.
      She learned to swing a sword, executing the delicate movements he taught her, relying more on balance and momentum than brute force. "It's almost a guarantee that your opponent will be bigger'n ye, Totem. Ye canna' win a contest of strength. The trick is to make your opponent acutely aware of this, so much so that he forgets that relying too much on strength is in itself a weakness."
      Graves showed her how to get a swordsman to overcommit with their movements, how to feign weakness and slowness, then to strike. "Ye have an advantage over almost anyone ye'll face, since they're not likely to see ye as a threat. Our side may be fooled into thinkin' ye're the second comin' of The Knife-Fingered, but The Guard'll just think ye're a girl with an obsession. They'll see ye as a lamb, and themselves as the wolves." He turned to the rest of the group. "That goes for all of ye. If they be the wolves, then what are ye?"

Chapters 21 and 22

(In which Elizabeth emerges into a war-torn city and becomes part of the revolution against Silas)

Twenty-first

     No one traveled on High Street in the early hours of that autumn morning, no one driving or walking past the burned-out wreck of a block that, months before, housed the Griff Inn. Whether it was the light drizzle, or the hour, or the fact that there was not much to see in this section of Aldergate would be difficult to discern. But, regardless of the reason, no witnesses were there to watch as a lone, dirty hand emerged from the pile of rubble that had, at one time not that long ago, been a landmark of the city. The grubby fingers were followed by a second hand, more remarkable because it was made of shining metal, and then by a head, one whose hair was caked with dust and ash. 

Chapters 19 and 20

(In which Elizabeth gets caught up in the revolution against Silas, has an altercation with the Black Guard, and brings misery to the Inn)

Nineteenth

Elizabeth paced her bedroom, her mind too busy for sleep. Every time she closed her eyes the inn’s floorboards would creak as they settled, or a cat would move through the dark night, and her eyelids would fly open in anticipation of Lang’s arrival.

She tried reading, but her eyes swam without comprehension over the pages of spiral-writing she had procured from the inn's lounge. She tried making lists of things, a strategy that always worked for her on those nights when she lay awake worrying about her mother, but her ability to catalogue had taken a vacation. Finally, she settled back onto her bed, content to stare at her metal hand.

Chapters 17 and 18

(In which Elizabeth spends some time in the Wilderness, discovers a really creepy tree, and gets discovered and threatened by a bee shepherd)

Seventeenth

    Elizabeth had only five minutes to change from her cooking-clothes into her serving ones, and that was being generous. Winnie had returned from market without half of the ingredients the dinner would require, so last-minute alterations to the menu had to be made, and what was supposed to have been Elizabeth’s free afternoon was instead spent in the kitchen, chopping and stirring to the sounds of Clara’s good-natured muttering, cursing the rationing and the shipping lines and the tides, all of which had stood in her way from presenting the dinner she really wanted to serve that evening.

Chapters 15 and 16

(In which Elizabeth discovers the cost of a flimsy disguise, becomes a pariah, and witnesses a battle of giants)

Fifteenth

"What did you tell Katrina about her play?" Flint had gone back to caring for the horses, and Elizabeth joined him, ostensibly to check on her belongings in the carriage. She had left Grim deep in conversation with Katrina and Dorveille, the actress who had played Penumbra, about details of Shade society. Grim looked as if he might have needed a rescue; it was too bright for him to slip away into the shadows.

"I should have warned you, she can be a bit defensive when it comes to her writing. I mean, she's like a mother to us all, but when it comes to her artistic endeavors, you'd best tread lightly. She may ask for honesty, but even the truest statement goes down smoother when it's sweetened with a bit of flattery."

Chapter 14 (plus stage directions)

(In which Elizabeth and Grim escape the town, and we learn more about Eliza and her adventures through the majesty of puppet-shows!)

Fourteenth

Elizabeth had no way of knowing if the likeness was accurate...if the Silas that walked Edge in the current day bore any resemblance to this image, or if the ravages of time had caused divergence between the carved face and the one that he now wore. But she had to suspect that the statue had at least at one time been realistic. There were too many similarities to the child’s face in the pictures for the visage to be entirely of the artist's imagination.

The almond-shaped eyes were an adult version of those in the photographs at home, the ones inherited from their mother. The set of his jaw and the shape of his mouth were their father's, hinting at a firm, strong personality.  A short-clipped beard adorned the statue’s chin, and his hair was plastered to his head as though wet from rain.

Chapters 12 and 13

(In which we learn of Pockets and of Grim's trip to find Priest, and oh, hey, there's a freakin' minotaur, too)

Twelfth

Elizabeth's pants were damp from the dew, and her back felt as if someone had tied it into knots. But she had to admit, after the labors of the day before, she should have felt worse. She flexed her limbs experimentally: her legs moved without complaint, and even her palm felt a bit better. She was, however, starving.

The blood-red sun was just visible over the hills in the distance, painting the clouds on the opposite horizon a rosy pink-orange. The air felt thick and primed for rain, though the sky directly overhead remained clear. Perhaps not the greatest day to start a journey, she thought, unless the rain held off. Not unless they were going by car, or whatever Edge’s equivalent was...a carriage? Or would the rain help them, masking their tracks somehow?

Chapters 9-10

(In which we learn a little bit about chicken entrails, and Elizabeth and Priest get into a bit of a row, I'm afraid)

Ninth

Elizabeth had left Grim alone, to allow him to go back to sleep. He had read to her the legend of Garren and Marjorey, as detailed in one of the books stacked next to his sick-bed, ones that Priest had read to him during his fevers, in what struck her as an uncharacteristic kindness from the harsh man. Grim told her that he had first heard the tale in childhood, told to him by his parents or siblings or friends or by a traveling bard, though this last was a rarity in the realms of the Shades.

It was hard to believe that Priest could be the Garren from the story. His given first name of Gareth was close enough, but he did not appear much older than Grim. And the book from which Grim read was ancient, its leaves oiled with age, so the story had to be much older.

Chapter 8 and Interlude

(In which we learn the tale of Margaret and Priest, and a bit about Eliza and Silas's earlier days in Edge)

Priest shook her forcefully back and forth, his jaw clenched and the curlicues of his hair wavering with the momentum. She balled her right hand into a fist and flung it against the side of his head. He winced, then grabbed at her wrist with his free hand, immobilizing it. "What did you do to her?", he repeated, hissing, covering her face with a thin spray of spit.

An unexpected calmness washed over her. She slowly, carefully reached up her left hand and placed it on the forearm that held the front of her hoodie. She rested it there, not pressing, not slicing, not stabbing. She looked at Priest flatly.

Chapter 7

(In which we find Grim, encounter another maze, and learn what is held in Priest's tower)

     The door was thick mahogany, a sharp contrast to the slats composing the walls around it, and had been carved with minute detail, swirling smoke-like patterns and fist-sized faces emerging in bas-relief. But it was almost comically small, its top no higher than Elizabeth's mid-thigh. Priest had to bow down low, almost crawling. He held the door open, a pained and impatient expression on his face as he waited for her to enter.

Despite the diminutive entrance, the inside of the barn was vast, appearing even larger than it did on the outside. The sunken floor was a full body-length below the level of the door, connected to it by a stairway with wooden steps worn smooth with age.

Chapter 6

(In which we rejoin Elizabeth, who has landed alone, in the middle of a vast and confusing garden-maze)

    Elizabeth wasn’t sure if she was awake or still dreaming. There were fleeting moments when her limbs responded to her commands, but even then they felt like they were swaddled in cotton. Her eyes did not seem to be closed, but the only information they passed to her brain was the sort of ghosts-of-light images seen on the underside of her eyelids, too slippery to bring into focus.

     She gradually became aware of an insistent, pressing feeling; an urgency not unlike a full bladder, but it seemed to come from outside of her, as though she was being squeezed through an aperture too small for her body. She wondered if this was what it felt like to be born. The pressure transitioned to pain, starting with a hot pinprick from her scalp into her skull that quickly progressed to a chorus of similar sensations that struck parts of her body in a seemingly random pattern: her throat, now her abdomen, now her toe, now her lower spine.

A quick note to you.

Everyone reading this,
       The book takes a bit of a break/shift with this most recent chapter, what's meant to give a bit of a pause and tries to place a bit of perspective/contrast on present-day Elizabeth's experience in Central with her coming adventures in Edge. I think what I just wrote makes sense. Read this after you've perused the Interlude and let me know if it's coherent,
       Anyway, while we're taking a little breather, I just wanted to again say a huge "Thank You" for stopping by. As I mentioned on facebook (sorry for the repetition), the response (both in personal missives as well as the pageviews that blogger is tracking) has been better/larger than I could have expected, or hoped. This all started as a personal project, with little hope that anyone else might actually read it, let alone enjoy it as much as some of you are.
       I started out with comments disabled, mostly because I was sure they'd be nothing but spam. They're up and running now, though, on a we'll-see-how-this-goes basis. So feel free to write something if you wish. No spoilers, sweetie (said most intentionally in the tone of Dr. River Song). Or, if you're more comfortable, I may be reached at soupbather@gmail.com. Or just yell out your window. I'm hiding in your bushes. It's muddy out here.

       Love,

       Matt

Interlude

[In which we take a small break and shift our perspective back a few years. Stay with me, people. It's gonna be okay.]

             Silas had disappeared.

     Eliza woke with a start, her joints sore and stiff from a night on the cold ground, only to find him gone. He had fallen asleep before she had, and the last thing she remembered was his rhythmic breathing, the faint slurping noises of his lips around his thumb. His nocturnal twitches. The small area of tall grass they had stamped down didn't have any place for him to hide, and there were no signs of a struggle. The morning dew clung to the tall winding strands of grasses that formed the wall of their little hideaway, but there was no obvious break to suggest from which direction he might have exited.

Chapter 5

(In which we are treated to more action and less exposition, and a house is rudely shaken from its foundation)

      Grim did not return the next night, or the next, or the one after that. Elizabeth had taken to checking on the hidden room--what she was gradually thinking of as Silas's bedroom--daily to look for signs of Grim’s return. She became adept at stepping around the end table without moving it from its place or knocking anything off its top.

Initially, her visits were quick ones, just glances to see if the Shade was back. But as the days stretched on, she took to spending more time in the room, examining the clothes left in the drawers and the toys in the closet, trying to imagine what it had been like when she had been younger and the boy in the photograph had still lived there. Had he woken up early on Saturdays and run into her room to wake her? Had she read to him while they shared the rocking chair? She stripped and remade the bed, smelling the sheets to see if any trace of young Silas remained, but the years had bleached them free of odor.

Chapter 4

(In which we explore grieving beneath a blind spot, and learn more about Grim's mission, and Silas, and Edge)

At breakfast, it took all of Elizabeth’s will not to openly gape at the details now evident around the kitchen: the crayon drawings yellowed with age but still tacked to the walls; the photographs with the extra face spliced in; the ceramic plate with a child's handprint in the center, sitting atop the cabinets. Just as she had first noticed with the picture in the bedroom upstairs, the whole house now seemed...clearer. Like she had been looking through a veil and it had just been lifted.

She ate in silence, afraid that she might say something that would give her away, instead spending the time staring at an open newspaper without reading it. Anything to avoid meeting her father's gaze. They had both had something stolen from them, but she was the only one who knew it. His continued ignorance made her feel complicit in the crime.

Chapter 3

(In which we meet a Shade, learn of our villain, and are taught how to clear away a blind spot.)

Elizabeth stood too stunned to speak, her mouth half open. She was suddenly very conscious of the feeling of the air against her eyeballs. The man seemed as surprised as she was, and his hands lost their grip on the book, which slid and bounced off the bed, landing spine down on the floor, its pages swaying in the breeze from the open window

Finally, after a long moment, he cleared his throat and in a hesitant voice, gravelly from disuse, said, "Could you...close the door?" 

Chapter 2

(In which we clean up the aftermath of an avian assault, explore for heretofore undiscovered sources of light, and a foo dog bookend is sacrificed to further the plot.)

     Jacob Warren grumbled as he shuffled through the papers from the insurance company. Most of his words were incomprehensible, the only exceptions being the expletives and something about an “act of God.” Elizabeth looked up from the book she was reading, finished her mouthful of egg and toast, and raised one questioning eyebrow at her father.

     He halted his muttering and cast the papers onto the table. “It’s going to be okay, ‘Lizabeth,” he said. “It’s only the cost of a couple of windows. Even if they don’t pay, I think we can afford it.”

Chapter 1

The house emerged from the gloom like the face of a cliff.  Without a light in any of its windows, and with no signs of life on its broad front porch, it looked as if it had been carved by the erosive decades of wind and snow, a product of the elements rather than anything man-made. It had been painted white with black shutters, but the cloud cover and the failing light of the day conspired to turn it into a dull gray. Elizabeth was home.

The cab was idling at the mouth of the driveway, the driver refusing to go further, fearing he would get stuck in the oceanic puddle that had collected in the hard-packed dirt. Across the yard, fat water droplets congregated as they fell, assuming the shape of walls of glass as they moved across the lawn. Elizabeth tightened the straps on her bulky backpack, took a deep breath, and plunged into the wet.

Instantly, her arms were stippled with goose bumps; the rain was far too cold for an early summer shower. She started running across the lawn, slipped on the grass, and changed to a wide-based waddle. Her clothes were soaked through by the time she reached the steps to the porch, the water on her glasses obscuring the details of the path.

Introduction (read this first)

     So, I wrote a book.
     I know what you're saying: That's easy, anyone could do that. Well, I did it, and here's the proof, jerk. Here's the freakin' book. Right. Here.
     Wait, come back!...Okay, I'm sorry, that got antagonistic kind of quickly. That's not me at all. Nor is it my book. I promise, the book won't call you names. Even when it gets kind of slow, even when it strains credulity. That's the Matt Brown guarantee.
     Synopses are hard. It seems like if you spend a year writing a book, you should be able to boil it down to a couple of paragraphs pretty easily. But, as anyone who's had the pleasure of listening to me stumble about with an explanation of what Im writing could tell you, it's nowhere near as easy as the back cover of a book would lead you to believe. Sometimes you get too close a story, too immersed into it, to adequately break it down with a dozen "Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you about"s. Anyway, here goes:

A teenage girl discovers that her memory has been altered to remove all evidence of a younger brother, a boy who has grown to become the fanatical tyrant of a magical land.

Alone during a summer storm, Elizabeth's home is attacked by an army of foreign birds. Nights later, she wakes to find a light emanating from a room that shouldn't exist, the bedroom of a younger brother her world has been made to forget. Within is a mysterious stranger named Grim, a traveler from a mystical land who is seeking help in defeating Silas the Pretender, the tyrant who rules over the land of Edge...the tyrant who was once her little brother. Eliza of Edge is the story of a girl who is forced to confront not only a powerful magical ruler, but her own forgotten adventures in a world where her name lives within legend.

      That's all accurate, but it's only the first few chapters, really. Just supposed to be a little taste. There's way more that happens. It's really good, I think. It's YA but hopefully accessible to people of all ages. The literate ones, anyway.
      I hope you like it. No, I hope you love it. I hope you want to take it to prom and grope it in your best friend's backseat and then have to make awkward conversation with it until graduation. That's how much I want you to like it. Awkwardly.
     The actual book digresses way less. It's also less icky.

     I would be remiss if I didn't take a second to honor the original readers, the people who pored through this monstrosity and gave me (hopefully) honest feedback and made it a better read. In no particular order: Katie Rathbun, Fran Reed, David "Forrest" Caskey, Alison "Mink" Railsback, John Malboeuf, Kat Lauer, Wendy Roemer, and J. Steven "Explosteveo" Parsons. Thanks, guys. But the biggest of all the gratitudes has to go to Amber Brown, my first reader and most vocal supporter, and unafraid to tell me when an idea is just plain stupid.

     If you like the first few chapters, stick around. More to come, probably posted weekly until it's done. If you really like it, tell your friends. If you don't, and you can vocalize why, then drop me a line (soupbather@gmail.com). Constructive criticism is always welcome.

    I hope you enjoy your time in Edge. I definitely had a lot of fun creating it.

                                                      --Matt