On Sale Date: January 25, 2022
9780778331797
MIRA Books
Hardcover
$27.99 USD
480 pages
THE MAGUS TRAPPED JUDAH AND GAVIN IN THE tower. He wanted
her to kill Gavin, to accomplish something he called the Unbinding. And
obviously she refused to do that, but the only other way out of the tower had
been to jump. So she’d jumped: away from Gavin and the magus and their hands
that tried to grab her, through the empty space where the tower wall had been
sheared away long before she’d been born, and into the clear emptiness of
midair.
Where she’d had time to look down to the brush at the bottom
of the light well, contemplate what she’d done, and think, Oh, no.
Then she’d seen—felt?—an enormous flash of purple, and a
bizarre sense of being emptied and filled at the same time. Faces flashed
through her mind: the magus’s mother and an unfamiliar old woman with flinty
eyes. Then everything was white and silent and nothing and peace.
Only gradually did she become aware once more of her own
existence, of the actuality of a person named Judah. Eventually she remembered
her body, and at some point later, that bodies usually wore clothes; and then
she was wearing her gown from Elly and Gavin’s betrothal. The gown was the pale
green of new grass, the loveliest thing she had ever owned. Experimentally, she
thought feet and felt the dry crunch of leaves beneath her toes. Then she
thought trees, and tall smooth trunks melted into view out of the mist. She
decided she’d died in the jump after all, and death was a featureless span of
white from which a person could form whatever they wanted. Which was an
infinitely more pleasant afterlife than any she’d ever been promised or
threatened with; who could complain?
She’d kept walking through the forest where she found
herself, where a great many ferns grew no higher than her ankles, and round
silver-white boulders broke through the soil like fish through water. When
she’d first thought trees she’d been thinking of the orchard, where the trees
were short and neatly pruned and the air smelled like cider. Here, it smelled
like loam and something brackish that she could taste in the back of her throat
but not quite identify, something that crept over her like winter fog. The
leaves on the straight, white-barked trees had a bluish cast to them, as if
chilled.
Barefoot, with her shoulders exposed in the elegant dress,
she realized that she was cold, too. She tried thinking coat, envisioning
Gavin’s quilted riding jacket, and then boots, picturing the ones she’d adopted
from Theron and then lost in the pasture with Darid. Nothing happened. Whatever
power she’d had to create in the white was gone. After a while, she realized
that the taste in the back of her throat and the creeping chill meant snow.
Further, she realized that regardless of what had happened to her when she’d
leapt from the tower, regardless of where she’d landed, regardless of whether
she was alive or not, and regardless of a dozen other factors that presented
themselves in fairly short order—lack of fire, lack of food, lack of shelter—regardless
of all of that, she was coatless and barefoot in a strange forest, which
appeared, despite all theories to the contrary, to be real. And she was wearing
a ball gown. And the snow was beginning to fall.
All of which led to one final realization: she was in
trouble.
Excerpted from The Broken Tower by Kelly Braffet, Copyright © 2022 by Kelly Braffet. Published by MIRA Books.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Photo Credit:
Missy McLamb
Author website: https://www.kellybraffet.com/
Twitter: @KellyBraffet
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