Eeza doesn't answer hard questions right away. She counts them out first, three breaths, always three, whether the question is about the road ahead or where to make camp before the light goes. Hadna noticed it early enough to time it once, silently, under her own breath, and never told her. It isn't hesitation. Ask anyone who's travelled with her, and they'll tell you the opposite: she's the first to decide, the first to move. The pause comes after she already knows the answe

Hadna has three separate names for her, depending on mood, and swears none of them count as an insult. Tahlira never explains why she answers two of them and ignores the third. She just does. Dhaelen learns this the hard way, early on. He tries clearing his throat. Nothing. He tries her name, clipped and impatient, the way he says everyone's name when he wants something done fast. Still nothing. It isn't until he slows down and says both syllables of it properly, like he's re

Hadna Drake travels with one instrument and calls it by name. Honey. Red-honey wood, worn pale at the neck where her thumb rides the same three inches over and over, whether she’s playing or not. She doesn’t clean it in taverns. She doesn’t hand it to strangers who ask to look. Dhaelen learned that the first week on the road, reached for it once, meaning nothing by it, and she’d moved the lute out of his hands before he finished the sentence. “Ask first,” she said. “Every tim

Nobody in Caelondor calls him by his given name if they can help it. Stableboys, tavern keeps, the guards who wave his horse through the gate before checking his papers: all of them settle for the Wolf, said low, said fast, like the word itself might turn and look at them if they lingered on it. It's not affection. It's the sound a crowd makes when it wants a threat to stay pointed somewhere else. The formal title comes out only in rooms with high ceilings. The king's blade.

Dhaelen doesn't get introduced so much as he gets deployed. That's how I think of it now, a year after finishing Whispers of the Wyrm: the line does the work before he ever opens his mouth. The king's blade finds what it was made to hunt. The bard it finds first. He's a weapon before he's a person, and the whole first act is watching him figure out which one he actually is. They call him the Wolf. Not because he snarls or postures, he doesn't, but because a wolf is a tool wit

It's happening. Whispers of the Wyrm is getting published. I've been sitting on this news for a few days, mostly because I wanted to be sure before I said anything out loud. Now I'm sure. Book one of The Bard and the Blade Saga is going to be out in the world, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and I get to finally hand it to readers instead of just talking about it. This one has Dhaelen and Hadna, dragons, phoenixes, a bond that costs both of them something real. I've l