Auralia's Colors
Page 35
Someone had worn this in Abascar. Either Cal-marcus had lifted the Proclamation of the Colors, or…he had taken another queen.
The possibility had never crossed her mind. She had never considered that someone else might take her place.
The guardbeast threw the cloak into her cell. “Take. Keep. Feel better. Chieftain…he needs you to be well.”
She regarded it with dread as the guardbeast wheeled the clunking cart back up the winding path.
For days she walked in a torment of hauntings, rejecting the cloak and all it suggested. Whatever had become of Abascar, she was free of it. She was subject to no one, a thread floating on a current of wind, true to her heart, denying the chains around her wrists and her feet.
While she slept, other voices rose in sharp contradiction, leaving her helpless and wanting.
She saw a multitude meandering in wonder through a pageant of color and life, their threads spread across the land in a tapestry. Each participant was distinct and bold. And yet they were interconnected and thus stronger and brighter, gathered together in glory. They were coaxed and guided by luminous hands, which bound weaker threads to sturdy cords, connecting them in an enduring design that ran off the map and into the source of all colors. She lay to the side, faded, forgotten, powerless to draw any eye, having detached herself.
She might have turned to dust there in that cruel despair.
When she woke, her hands were clenched around the rusty shears. All about her, spread like sunflares, lay her long, tangled hair. Fire and gold. She placed her hard, cold hands against her bare crown and wept.
That hands of mercy might unlock this prison or eyes might see her kindly in this wretched state, she never dared to hope.
For comfort, she groped for the colorful cloak, lifted it, and drew it about her shoulders. As she did, a strand of thread came free of the cloak and floated in the air before her.
It was a dark thread, deeper than red. It had not been woven into the cloak, she decided, for she could find no broken strands, no frayed seams. Having bound so many cloaks at the collar in just this fashion, she reached to the shiny stone clasp at her throat and laced the thread around to bind it.
And so it was that Jaralaine’s open eyes opened, and she basked in the mysterious ways of Auralia’s colors.
This is the end of The Red Strand in the Auralia Thread.
The story will continue in The Blue Strand in the Auralia Thread—Cyndere’s Midnight—in which a Cent Regus beastman, haunted by the memory of Auralia’s colors, follows the tracks of the Keeper into an unlikely adventure with a woman from House Bel Amica. What happens between them will change the course of their lives, weaving them together with the threads of the ale boy, Cal-raven, Scharr ben Fray, and the remnant of Abascar.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey Overstreet composed his first fantasy novel on a black Royal typewriter when he was seven years old, and he’s been writing stories for all ages ever since. Since 1996, his film reviews, music reviews, and interviews have been regularly posted at his Web site, LookingCloser.org. His perspectives are frequently published on Christianity Today’s Web site and in many other periodicals, including Paste, Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, and Risen. His “travelogue of dangerous moviegoing,” Through a Screen Darkly, was published by Regal Books in February 2007.
Jeffrey and his wife, a poet and freelance editor named Anne, spend time writing in the coffee shops of Shoreline, Washington, every week. He works as a contributing editor for Seattle Pacific University’s Response magazine. And now he is hard at work on many new stories, including three more strands of The Auralia Thread.
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Praise for
Auralia’s Colors
“Through word, image, and color Jeffrey Overstreet has crafted a work of art. From first to final page this original fantasy is sure to draw readers in. Auralia’s Colors sparkles.”
—JANET LEE CAREY, award-winning author of The Beast of Noor and Dragon’s Keep
“Jeffrey Overstreet’s first fantasy, Auralia’s Colors, and its heroine’s cloak of wonders take their power from a vision of art that is auroral, looking to the return of beauty, and that intends to restore spirit and mystery to the world. The book achieves its ends by the creation of a rich, complex universe and a series of dramatic, explosive events.”
—MARLY YOUMANS, author of Ingledove and The Curse of the Raven Mocker
“In Auralia’s Colors, Overstreet masterfully extends the borders of imagination. Whereas so many writers sacrifice characterization for plot or substitute weirdness for substance, Overstreet does neither. His characters are richly crafted but still recognizably human and, therefore, inhabitable. This is a wild and intricate tale, a high-octane, full-throttle fantasy. Fasten your seat belts.”
—GINA OCHSNER, author of The Necessary Grace to Fall and People I Wanted to Be
“The late John Gardner said that a good story should unfold like a vivid and continuous dream. With Auralia’s Colors, Jeffrey Overstreet has crafted just such a story, one that will leave readers ready to dream with him again.”
—JOHN WILSON, editor, Books & Culture
“Jeffrey Overstreet weaves myth and reality, hope and loss into his tapestry, and he ties off The Red Strand with a cataclysmic flourish.”
—KATHY TYERS, author of The Firebird Trilogy and Shivering World
“Welcome to the land of the fangbear, the muckmoth, and the Midnight Swindler. To a story brimming with lovely literary rewards and a cast of characters by turns loathsome and hilarious, winsome and mysterious. It’s not often one gets to be present at the birth of a classic, but Auralia’s Colors is that kind of storytelling. A true delight on so many levels.”
—CLINT KELLY, author of the Sensations Series: Scent, Echo, and Delicacy
“In this new fantasy novel, Auralia’s Colors, Jeff Overstreet weaves together a wide cast of compelling characters and an intriguing story in the setting of a world both imaginative and arresting—a world phantastic in both old and new meanings of that word. Readers will care what happens both to the characters of the tale (all of them) and to the realm of Abascar itself and will not want to put this book down.”
—MATTHEW DICKERSON, coauthor of From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy and Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J. R. R. Tolkien
AURALIA’S COLORS
PUBLISHED BY WATERBROOK PRESS
12265 Oracle Boulevard, Suite 200
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80921
A division of Random House Inc.
The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Jeffrey Overstreet
Map copyright © 2007 by Rachel Beatty
Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920, www.alivecommunications.com.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
WATERBROOK and its deer design logo are registered trademarks of WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Overstreet, Jeffrey.
Auralia’s colors: the red strand of the Auralia thread/Jeffrey Overstreet.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-44620-6
I. Title.
PS3615.V474A95 2007
813’.6—dc22
2007017881
www.waterbrookpress.com
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