Tad Williams' Shadowrise
Last week, I covered Deborah Beale’s use of Twitter to market (husband and business partner) Tad Williams‘ upcoming release–Volume 3 in the Shadowmarch series, Shadowrise. In a follow-up to the interview, Beale was kind enough to provide compilations of her tweets. Here is the first of three excerpts. Over the next few days I will post two more excerpts.
In this first installment, enjoy an excerpt from Chapter Three (Silky Wood):
“I have a plan, bird.” Barrick Eddon unwound another strand of prickly creeper from his arm, hook by barbed, painful hook. “A very clever plan. You find me a path that doesn’t take me through every single thorn bush in Fairyland…and I won’t flatten your nasty little skull with a rock.”
Skurn hopped down to a lower branch, but prudently remained out of Barrick’s reach. He fluffed his blotched feathers. “It all do look different from up in sky, don’t it?” The raven’s tone was sullen. Neither of them had eaten since the middle of the day before. “Us can’t always tell.”
“Well, fly lower.” Barrick stood up and rubbed at the line of small, bleeding holes, then pulled his ragged shirtsleeve back down.
“’Fly lower,’ says he,” Skurn grumbled. “Like he were the master and Skurn the servant, ‘stead of equable partners as us’n be by agreement.” He flapped his wings. “By agreement!”
Barrick groaned. “Then why does my…partner keep leading me through all the pointiest bits of territory? It’s taken us a day to go a few hundred paces. At this pace, by the time we bring the…” It suddenly occurred to Barrick that perhaps a dark forest, filled with who knew how many or what kind of listening ears, might not the best place to talk about Lady Porcupine’s mirror, the object he was sworn to carry all the way to the throne of the Qar. “At this pace, by the time we find them even the immortals will have died.”
Skurn seemed to soften a bit. “Can’t see the ground from high because trees be too thick, ‘special them Hartstangle trees. But us daren’t fly no lower. Don’t you see? Silks be strung in the high branches and some even wave above the treetops, just to catch fine fellows like us.”
“Silks?”
My thanks to Beale for providing these excerpts.