Garia spends a day around the city as the guest of the Guildsmen of Palarand. She sees the rapid strides they have made so far in the production of paper and in printing, and a lunch at the Guildhall produces some inevitable surprises. A surprise also awaits the Queen that evening...

Chapter 9

January snow blew hard against the cabin, building a thick blanket over the mountain, covering it in white. Kodiak had left the cabin and was heading to the smokehouse for meat that had been cured late in the fall. It was unmistakable that I was pregnant; there was no way to doubt the fact that our kicking child was growing inside of me.

Kodiak had become quite the caretaker of me. He wouldn't allow me to do anything physical. Though we had been forced to sleep in the same bed, only to stay warm...he never once had done anything to take advantage of our predicament...though, why would it matter now. I waited at the kitchen window for him to return, slowly sipping on my coffee. I too had grown accustomed to the fact that I would be a mother, slowly warming up to the undeniable truth that it would happen whether I liked it or not.

March 30, 2011; 2:30 PM:

“Thom...” the Chief began, his face solemn, “Sorry... Officer O’Meara. Your previous partner didn’t make it. Nor her new partner. Both died from inhaling too much of the nerve poison. They died while in the ambulance.” The chief of police betrayed absolutely no emotion, his entire body a rigid mask.

Absinthe, Opium and Honor Chapters 25.

*Due to some changes in my writing and posting I’ll be only putting out single chapters of this story for the foreseeable future.

Chapter 25

I’m in a very good mood as I attend the rest of my classes and I’m a bit glowing with all the flattering looks and the compliments that I’m getting. I actually had to reintroduce myself to two people.

It was seriously fun actually.

CHAPTER 60.
And so it went. I got up, I shaved as well as I could, Larinda did what she could to make the best of my face, I went to work, I got abused or not as the day passed, and a few kids would point in the street. There seemed to be some sort of armed truce in the office, where I had some true friends that I had always recognised as such, and to my gratified surprise quite a few more that I hadn’t spotted.