Meet Cherai, fugitive comtesse in *Dream a Deadly Dream

Here's a glimpse of Cherai, the second protagonist in Dream a Deadly Dream, book 2 in the Fae Mark'd Wizard, available exclusively on Amazon.

Chapter 1

Fire arced from the woman’s fingertips.  White fire, wizard fire, leaping from her hands to the  White sparks spattered over the kindling then winked out, snuffed by the wet.

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sticks and leaves.

Hidden beneath a leaf-shedding privet, Cherai strained to see what the wizard was doing.  Her breath fogged in the cold air.  She clamped her lips together and breathed slowly through her nose.  Caution nagged her to steal away, but she lingered.  The wizard couldn’t see her.  The privet with its burden of tangled woodbine provided a good shelter.  Nightfall would soon cloak the hillside with dark clumps and spindly silhouettes.  She was safe.

This woman—stranger and wizard—she was doubly dangerous. 

She looked like an outcast noble.  Cherai should feel sympathy for her.  She remembered her own first days on the road.  But welding power—no.  Vaermonde had outlawed wizardry three generations ago.  The iron-gloved Inquisition quickly disposed of anyone practicing magickal arts.  With troubles haunting her heels, Cherai knew she should slip away undetected.  She should get back to the road, find another camp for the night.  A dry camp.  A camp sheltered from the wind.  She would settle for either.  While the fire snared the woman’s attention, she could slither away.  Yet she ignored the prickling caution.  Her cold, cold fingers dug into the wet humus.  The power that jumped from the wizard’s hands might be fascinating, but it was the faint trickle of woodsmoke and the warmth it represented that captivated her.

Wizard fire arced from the woman’s hands again, bathing the kindling with its energy, but the wet wood lacked combustible heat.  Smoke trickled up, nothing more.  The woman rearranged the sticks then reached inside her dark gown.  Wondering what magical tool she would produce, Cherai strained to see in the deepening twilight.  The woman drew out something small and white.  It unfolded into a sheet of parchment, and Cherai subsided with disappointment.

Lips pursed, the wizard scanned the words.  Her mouth twisted.  Then she shrugged and tore the paper across.  She splindled the pieces for dry tinder.  Then she jerked at the white cloth cuffs of her sleeves.  She ripped them free and tucked them with the paper spindles.

Cherai used the noise to push off the wet ground.  The lute strapped on her back bumped into her head.  She shouldered it out of the way and shifted to her hands and knees.  Ready to crawl out of the privet’s shelter, she glanced back at the campsite.  Her chance had died.  The wizard had wedged one spindle against the kindling.  Then she cupped her hands against the stacked sticks and conjured fire.

Reddish light tongued the paper, licking across it until the sparks coalesced into white flames.  They consumed the paper in a flash then nibbled at the white cloth before licking at the rain-damp kindling.  The woman fed in twigs, another spindled paper, and crackling leaves until the magicked fire burned orangey red and real.  She added more twigs and larger sticks.  Hot now, the fire devoured the wood in earnest.  Only then did the woman sit back and savor the heat.

Cherai yearned for that fire-heat.  She was bone-weary and bone-wet.  Last night she had dodged angry villagers.  This day she had slogged through the mire and muck of the unrepaired road to Marsden.  Intent on getting a safe distance from Feuton, she hadn’t stopped to eat.  She was wet and tired and cold and hungry and alone.

That last addition to her litany of ills evoked a grimace, but the prickling caution was right.  She was alone—because Raul was locked up in Feuton.

She had begun wandering the backways alone, but Raul had soon met and joined her.  For the three years that they slogged back and forth across Vaermond, they had taken turns at watch and shared their hard-earned coins.  With Raul shouldering half the road-yoke, Cherai had penned caution in a corner.  He had dared anything, any game, any scheme, trusting to his quick tongue and nimble fingers to work them out of calamity.  Raul wouldn’t have scouted the clearing.  He’d have marched in and camped beside this woman, wizard or no.

Raul, though, was locked in the Feuton innkeeper’s cellar while Cherai crouched alone beneath the privet, watching a wizard warm herself at a favored campsite.

Prudence made for cold nights.

After a last yearning for that wizard-sparked fire, Cherai scooted backwards over sodden leaves and humus that sank under her hands and knees and seeped into her woolen breeches.  The frayed cuffs of her buff coat soaked up the wet.  The vine-twined privet dripped water and sticky leaves.  The water dribbled under her collar, and she craved that fire even more.

Then a vine snagged her lute.  The wood rasped across the strings and tangled into them.  Cherai tugged on the instrument.  The privet rained water and leaves, but the vine held fast.  She shifted to one side then scooted forward.  The strings whined.  She checked the campsite, but the wizard hadn’t looked up from tending the fire.  Still safe.

Bracing on one hand, Cherai reached back and blindly worked her fingers along the strings to the snag.  The whorled vine was thick with age, leafless and hollow with death, yet it refused to give.  One by one, she fumbled the strings free, slowly working each over the gnarled wood.  The strings hummed as her callused fingers slid over them.  The last, thinnest string had sawed into a twist of the vine.  It bit sharply into her pushing thumb.  She coaxed and prodded, but it refused to work free.  A trapped feeling swamped her.  Run, run, her brain sang.  Desperate, she hooked a bent finger and jerked the string.  It twanged free.

“Who is there?”

Cherai dropped to the soaked ground.  The lute’s tuning pegs banged into her head.  She cried “ouch” into the wet leaves then risked a peek.  The wizard scanned the hillside, searching with a slow sweep that covered the overgrown slope.  She called again.  Cherai hid her pale face in her sleeve.  She didn’t dare breathe.  The wizard couldn’t see her, not in this tangle, not in the dusk.

“Come out.  I will not hurt you.”

She risked a look.  The wizard remained by her fire, but her gaze scoured the vine-rampant hillock, lingering on bushy mounds like this one.  Ducking her head, Cherai let her warm breath ooze into her sleeve.  As long as she stayed still, the slipping time would aid her.  Dusk rapidly leeched light from the day.  In a few minutes, smothering night would cover her escape.

The wizard’s eyes slowly trekked the hillside while the blackness descended.  She might have searched in earnest, tramping up the slope to beat out the watcher, but the young fire clamored for attention.  She turned to add good-sized sticks to the starving flames, and Cherai seized the chance to slither from under the privet.  She scrambled to her feet and sidled through the densely branched pines, her passage muffled by the carpeting needles.

Despite her racing heart, she hesitated when she gained the mucky road.  Wispy clouds sailed across the rising moon, round and silvery bright.  The road to Marsden lay bare and open while trees shadowed the road to Feuton, offering hide and shelter.  A mile back and over a hill was a leaning barn, long since abandoned to birds and rodents.  Going to Feuton might backtrack her into Raul’s trouble, but the dark and the barn seemed safer than open expanse.

A last look down the open road to Marsden, then Cherai slewed around—and collided with a human wall.

She recoiled, but iron fingers had manacled her wrist.  “No,” she cried and twisted away, but the grip didn’t break.

Her struggles dislodged the lute strap from her shoulder.  It slipped down her arm, its weight dragging against her struggles, hampering her.  Cherai clawed the hand cuffing her wrist.  Her captor repaid the injury by ensnaring her other arm in biting talons.  The grip was strong, her captor was tall, and fear rippled over her.  She was shaken, a rattling of bones to get her attention.  And it did, kicking in with logic as she realized her captor was the wizard.

“Hold still, boy!  I will not hurt you.”

Cherai forced herself to be still.  The memory of the white fire around the woman’s hands set off a different fear.  Against such wizardry, her fighting was nothing.  She tried to slow her breathing, but fear had a long jump on logic.  As she struggled with wild emotion, the wizard kept a hard grip on her arms.  She acknowledged that sense on the woman’s part, but it sorely clashed with her renewed desire to escape.

“You were watching me?  Answer me!  Were you watching me?”

“No!  I-I was—.”  She scrambled to get her wits in order.  “I camp here, whenever I come this way.”  There, that was safe.  What else?  What should she add?  She didn’t dare lie.  Lore said that wizards could spot liars, and she was in trouble enough.  Keeping close to the truth, she stammered, “I—I was—I wanted t-to s-see if it was s-safe.”

The rising moon reflected in the wizard’s eyes, shining like white-gold in her dark face.  “How long did you watch from the hill?  What did you see?”

“Nothing.  I s-saw nothing.  I s-saw your fire.”

“And you wanted to see who made it?  If friend or foe?”

“Yes!”  She snatched the proffered reason eagerly while her road-wary mind worked rapidly.  The woman’s accent named her outlander.  A faint change of cadence, a soft muting of syllables, placed her home far from Vaermonde or Tebraire.  Cherai had to tread carefully.  This woman was doubly dangerous, both stranger and wizard.  “I didn’t—I don’t want trouble, madame.”

The white-gold eyes swept over her.  Moon-bright, they seemed to pierce the darkness.

Cherai straightened her shoulders and returned the scrutiny, undaunted by the woman’s height.  No one had ever penetrated her disguise.  The road had carved her body into an angularity unexpected on a female.  Shoddy clothes and a badly cropped mop of curls hid any feminine softness.  Her contralto, low enough to be a youth’s tenor, completed her disguise.  And this woman had bought her disguise, for she called her “boy”.

The wizard’s fingers shifted to curl loosely around the jutting bones of her wrist, testing her racing pulse.  “You are wet and shivering, boy.  Tired as well, I warrant, if you have been on the road all day.  You can share my fire,” and she released her and stepped back.

A request, not an order.  The freedom reinforced that it was her choice.  Cherai wanted the proffered fire, but prudence whispered, Beware.  Her eyes blinked as her mind shifted, torn between fire’s warmth and caution.

As her wavering stretched, white teeth flashed in the wizard’s dark face.  “I am safe, boy, not some vulture who preys on younglings.”

That mis-reading of her hesitancy decided her.  That and a desire to believe—for if she did, she would get to camp by the fire.

. ~ . ~ . ~ .

And the fire was hot, bone-thawing and skin-searing hot.  Cherai knelt, her knees touching the ring of stones, and savored the heat.  Cold seeped away.  Tension dribbled away with it.  She closed her eyes, absorbing the heat and serenity.

Wood cracked.  She leaped to her feet.  The wizard, a broken limb in her hands, cocked a dark eyebrow before laying the wood by the fire-stones to dry.

Embarrassed, Cherai settled down, but her peace had shattered.  She kept a wary eye on the woman.  With the fire’s aid she saw more details than height and pale eyes.

The wizard might have sparked fire, but she looked as bedraggled as any wanderer this late in the season.  Her unbound blond hair straggled over her shoulders, too short for a woman’s pride although it curled like a primping courtier’s.  Her wet clothes were mud-spattered, but Cherai recognized their cost.  The dress was a deep grey velvet, slashed with primrose silk on the puffed sleeves and full skirts.  The rich fabric was crushed and stained from wear, the hem crusted with mud.  The fire revealed tiny rents and straggling threads on the wide bodice.  Missing lace and braid didn’t disguise her clothing’s richness.  Her only preparation for the road seemed to be her tanned boots.  Although wet and muddy, they were soled and stitched, not the softened hide that Cherai wore.

The wizard’s clothes, thought, might look far better than Cherai’s frayed and resewn garments, yet patched breeches suited the road better than skirts, another lesson she had learned during her first weeks on the roads.  She envied only the woman’s cloak, spread over a pack to dry.  It was dark, with threads hanging where its trimming had also been ripped off, but its worth was in the oiling to repel the wet.  With winter nearing, Cherai would have bargained away her lute for that cloak.

The woman looked up and spied Cherai’s scrutiny.  Her mouth twisted, but her question was a common opening.  “You camp here often, boy?”

“It’s a good spot.”  She shed her lute and her pack.

“You play?”

“I s-s-s—.”  The damnable stammer made its appearance.  She sighed and tried again.  “I s-sing, too.”

“You are a traveling bard, then?”

“From one end of Vaermonde to the other, hamlet, village and t-town.”  She tossed the question back, “And you?”  When the woman hesitated, Cherai knew she sifted through several lies.

“I “I suppose you would call me a healer.  Simple medicines, a few remedies gathered from here and there, very little that is special.  It is a chancy business I have learned, so I also do a little sleight-of-hand, enough to earn a coin or two and the good will of the villagers.”

Sleight-of-hand?  Is that what she calls fire-starting?  Cherai ducked her head to hide her questions.  “You’re new in Vaermonde?  From where?”

The wizard motioned vaguely east, beyond the border at Feuton.  Abruptly, she got up to break more wood over her knee, a boy’s trick.  She set it drying by the fire.

As she poked the burning wood, Cherai furtively studied her.  No silver streaked that blonde hair, but her light eyes had the weariness of those pushed without respite.  The fire cast her face into stark planes and shadowed hollows, chiseled out by weeks without a substantial meal.  This wizard might wear fine clothes, but something had disrupted her life enough to throw her onto the road.

Her own lean times were not so far removed that she’d forgotten what gut-empty meant.  “Are you hungry?  I have s-some food.”

The wizard looked up, her pale eyes reflecting the fire’s glow.  Then she smiled, an open expression that relaxed the harsh lines bracketing her mouth.  “I have been trying not to think of food since my supplies ran out.  I cannot say I have been successful.  Last night I had the most mouth-watering dream of succulent pork and sugared apples.  The acorns and over-ripe berries that I gathered this morning were not very appetizing.”

Laughing, Cherai burrowed into her pack.  “I’ve had those dreams.  They go away only when your belly’s stretched with tavern stew and brown bread.”

“Hardly comparable to the dream.”

“But just as hearty.  And much easier on your purse.  There’s not much,” she warned.  Only the little she’d scrounged before fleeing Feuton.  The biscuits were hard and tasteless, the meat salty and greasy, but it was food.  She passed it over.

When the wizard stretched out her hand, her gown sleeve shortened.  Firelight flickered on her exposed wrist, revealing an unusual tattoo around the fine bones.  Vivid with colors, the inks writhed like entwined snakes in a strange bracelet.  Surprise halting her hand, Cherai looked up.  Those clear eyes watched her.  She handed over the bread and meat.