Upcoming release sample: THE KINDNESS CURSE, coming June 1

 By nightfall, she found her way to a village small enough that people noticed the elderly stranger among them. They offered her shelter in the little building that served as a general meeting hall and chapel. The bread and butter, mug of milk and bowl of porridge provided weren't up to her standards, but she said nothing. Demanding better because she was a queen would earn her mockery. She curled up on the bench cushion the circuit judges used, wrapped herself in the blankets several people offered for the night, and told herself she was quite comfortable. She was, compared to how she could have spent the night.

She finally fell asleep, trying to persuade herself that she liked the silence and solitude. The porridge reminded her of her nursery days, before Nanny Starling fell from grace and Nanny Tulip took over. Her dreams were full of her long, secret, magical correspondence with Leffisand, and all the advice he had given her, helping her to grow wise and insightful, to become a queen worthy of him. He had taught her the truth behind all the tales of faeries and godmothers and other majjian folk. He claimed they were lies, sweetened to trick people into trusting magically gifted folk. The witless, ignorant and undeserving always expected to be helped, rather than picking themselves up by their own bootstraps and fighting for what they wanted.

As the days and moons passed while she journeyed, Merrigan thought long and hard about the things Leffisand and Nanny Tulip had taught her. The truth behind the tales of majjian folk. While she trudged from village to town, she had many chances to see majjian injustice at work. It galled her to realize some of the too-sweet-for-their-own good twits who helped her with a loaf of bread, a coin, a ride down the road, were often rewarded soon afterward. 

If faeries were waiting around every corner to reward every village idiot and simpering twit for performing charity, why did none of them show up just ten minutes earlier and help her? She was Queen Merrigan of Carlion, daughter of King Urson and Queen Daylily of Avylyn. Surely she deserved their help.