Allaigna’s Song: Aria is the second novel in the Allaigna’s Song trilogy by equestrian swordswoman, artist, and editor JM Landels. Along with her first book, fantasy bestseller Allaigna’s Song: Overture, it is available from Pulp Literature Press and Amazon.
Previously in Allaigna’s Song: Aria, fourteen-year-old Allaigna’s ability to sing music into magic takes a deadly turn when, defending herself from rape, she accidentally kills her betrothed-to-be. With the help of travelling singer and father figure Morran Rhoan, she flees Aerach, still unwilling to return to her family, and still hoping to find her true father. Poor judgement on the road from Werrancross leads the pair into the Sandhorn desert, where they become unwilling guests of the Sidharen people’s Sage Clan. Allaigna negotiates their release by taking a blood oath with the Clan leader’s daughter, Kîan.
Enjoy this excerpt from Pulp Literature Issue 22.
Allaigna’s Song: Aria
JM Landels
Verse 21: Ghosts
It rained that night, a rarity in that part of the world, a quick and heavy thunderstorm that sent torrents of water pooling down into the Sage Clan’s hold. It delayed our departure by another day, for although the morning dawned bright and fine, the path up the side of the gorge would be soft and treacherous until the sun had baked it again.
Amid the flurry of activity, such as rolling away rain barrels for later use, diverting runoff, and mending shutters and awnings, Kîan’s father, Gerran, sought me out.
“I apologize,” he said, as we rested on the shady side of the enclosure, “for my outburst last night. I had no right to call your words into question.”
I looked up at the sunworn face and away again, not used to accepting apologies from my elders.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I know I don’t look much like a duke’s daughter right now.”
He shook his head. “It’s not that — it’s not your paternal lineage I was questioning.” I looked up at him again, but this time it was he who would not meet my eyes. “Lauresa of Brandishear died fifteen years ago, not twenty leagues from here.”
“She’s alive, I assure you. Or was two months ago,” I insisted, puzzling at the vague suspicion hovering just out of reach.
He sank his back against the cool rock wall and put his face in his hands. I heard him murmur something and realized his shoulders were shaking. It only occurred to me now that he had not been speaking the strange pidgin Ilvanin dialect used by the Sage Clan, but perfect, fluid court Ilmarin, with a southern accent, no less.
“You were …” I said, as I put the final pieces together at last, “you were part of my mother’s escort on her wedding journey.” He didn’t respond, merely continued to hold his head, his body quivering. “But they all died. Shot down by raiders’ arrows. Only my mother survived. All the world knows that.” Though, I continued silently, hardly anyone knows how or why.
He lifted a face wet with tears. “I was wounded.” He pulled open the neck of his shirt to show an ugly scar below the right collarbone. “The arrow knocked me from my horse, and the fall left me unconscious. Duinir found me, saved my life, and brought me here. There was no one else left alive.”
“Did you not hear how Lauresa of Brandishear turned up a fortnight later in Aerach, and the wedding went as planned?”
He gave a minimal shake of the head, his eyes focused somewhere in the past. “We don’t receive your heralds or broadsheets here. The less contact with the world, the safer we are.”
For all these fifteen years he had believed himself the only survivor. And so did my mother. “And you’ve been here ever since?” It was a foolish question. I followed it with more. “Do you miss it? Court life? Civilization?”
He had regained his composure. “I was only a few years older than you when I came here. Of course I missed it at first. But I was on my way to a new and unknown life in Aerach anyway. With Ceilaf and the princess dead” — he cleared his throat, composure not fully established — “there was little for me to return to.”
“No family?”
“My father was more liberal with the rod than with family feeling. My mother lived in her cups and hadn’t missed me since I left for Rheran.”
“So they think you dead still?”
He shrugged, and I felt for those parents the way I still didn’t for mine.
“I’m glad she lived,” he said quietly. “How did she do it?”
I hesitated, wondering whether to give the official story, or the true one.
To find out what happens next, pick up your copy of Allaigna’s Song: Aria or Issue 22, Spring 2019 here!
JM Landels is torn between travelling the world to teach writing and swordfighting, and never leaving her idyllic farm in Langley, BC. Her first book, fantasy bestseller Allaigna’s Song: Overture, and the sequel, Allaigna’s Song: Aria, are available from Pulp Literature Press and Amazon. You can follow her adventures with pen and sword at jmlandels.stiffbunnies.com.
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