Because life happens…

Growing older means now you can smile
When you think how it was for a while
In your youthful years
When all of your fears
Were about if you had the right style

E.M. Swift-Hook

One For Sorrow, an impossible steampunk love story from Jane Jago, is out today…

It was an unremarkable chop house in an unremarkable street. The gas lamps hissed, the waitstaff hustled, and the ‘companions’ of both sexes cruised the room like hungry alligators. In the darkest corner, two people sat at a table eating pie and mash of the day. The man was handsome, in a narrow-featured sort of a way, and his well-pressed city clothing might have marked him out for a chiv in the ribs had he not been well known in these parts. His companion was less remarkable, if you discounted the scar that marred the smoothness of her face, drawing down the left-hand edge of her eye and twisting her lip into a permanent sneer.
She pushed her chair a little back from the table. “Lovely though it is to see you, Louis the Lip, I’m pretty sure you never asked me here for old home week.”
His smile was humourless and didn’t reach his fish-cold eyes.
“I might have a job for you, Marta.”
“Go to hell, Louis. I ain’t forgot where the last job you talked me into got me.”
He showed her his teeth. “Do this one and you can forget you ever owed me a debt.”
“That’s what you said last time.”
“I did. But you never done the job, did you.”
She reached across the table and bunched her fist in the snowy whiteness of his shirt.
“Careful Louis Boy. You know what that train wreck cost me.”
He couldn’t meet the cold anger in her eyes, instead he tried and failed to pull his shirt out of her hand. He gave up and grabbed her wrist exerting all the pressure he could, but she was immobile. He tried another tack.
“Be reasonable Marta. That weren’t none of my fault.”
She let go of his shirt and snarled deep in her throat.
“No. But I bet you enjoyed it. You’re the sort of son-of-a-bitch that’d take pleasure in that kind of carnage.”
He snarled and snatched for the pistol that hung at his side, but his hand never got there. Marta laughed, though it was a sound as cold and smooth as the skin of a winter rattlesnake. Louis looked towards the sound and found himself staring into the twin hexagonal ‘eyes’ of a short-barrelled flintlock.
“Don’t move, asshole. If’n that’s your idea of a fast draw, it’s a wonder you managed to survive this long. You want to be careful or you’ll end up in the ground with a cross at your head and a stone at your feet.”
Louis put his hands on the table and a big red-headed man in the next booth laughed.
“Smart Mouth Louis. Died of a case of the slow.” He mocked.
Louis’s neck went puce with anger, but he knew not to push his luck any further. At the moment the clientele of the chophouse was amused, but if he drew down on Marta after being beaten fair and square he knew he could expect to wind up as full of holes as his cooking cousin’s best colander.
She looked at him and the contempt in her face might have seared his conscience if he possessed such a thing.
“Frag off Louis, and don’t forget to pay for the food.”
He leaned towards her. “You owe me.”
“Louis. If we’re talking about owing, I think the shoe’s on the other foot.”
“Oh, yeah. Who paid your hospital bills?”
“The same man that bought my arm, Louis. And it warn’t you.”
“Arm?”
Marta stripped the thin leather glove off her right hand to expose the contraption of brass and wire that was her arm from the elbow down.
“Yes, Louis. Arm.”
He stared, mesmerised and she crooked a brass finger at him.
“Why don’t you come a bit closer? Let me get these fingers around your throat.”
He reared back as if he had been stung.
“Marta. Please.” He sounded desperate. “It’s a bodyguard job for Lyonette Firedrake. Just for one journey. She wants you and her daddy already paid me.”
“Then you’re gonna have to pay him back ain’t you.”
“I can’t.” His anguished voice rose towards falsetto. “I don’t have the money no more.”
Marta lifted a shoulder. “I should care.”
“What about what I done for your man?”
He only just managed to leap back in time to avoid her grasping hand.
“Don’t you mean what you done to him, if it really was you. If you’re telling the truth for once in your miserable life you better be afraid because when I catch you, I’ll rip your head off and shove it up your arse.”

If you would like to keep reading you can snag your copy here…

The cover is designed by Ian Bristow, you can find his work at Bristow Design.

With the rotting potato having been given a decent burial, life returned to something like normality, although…
Some days later, Oisin was seen staggering across the croquet lawn with a book clasped in his skinny arms. He stopped beside the stone seat where ‘Dolphus nome sat reading his little volume of pomes. The ensuing conversation was loud and recriminatory.
“Brenda said no poteen.”
“I ain’t axing you to make poteen.”
“No. But you’m axing me to tell you how to do it.”
“Don’t be a bumwipe ‘Dolphus.”
Even reading nomes have a breaking point—as Oisin and his book discovered.

©jj 2022

Roguing Thieves is a previously unpublished Fortune’s Fools story by E.M. Swift-Hook.

Dekker walked in, bouncing on the balls of his feet and grinning. Beside him was a heavyset woman, her long hair braided and a younger woman, looking barely out of her teens with a face like the business end of an energy snub, blunt and hard. Dekker waved a hand towards her. “Daiyu, Goldie, this is Panvia, our new engineer. And I’m going to guess Tols has been a bit of a naughty lad and not told her quite the truth.” An edge of menace had slipped into his tone as he finished, banishing the banter. Pan’s brain seized with cold terror, leaving her unable to move or make a sound.
Tolin had taken a step towards the three when they first came in, placing himself beside Pan as he did so. Now he moved to stand between her and the others.
“I already told you, she didn’t need to know. She didn’t…”
“But now she does,” Dekker said quietly.
“I don’t think it’s quite the big deal you two seem to think it,” the heavyset woman, Daiyu, put in. “Why don’t we ask Panvia herself what she thinks instead of you two making like grets in rut at each other. It might come as a real surprise to you both, but she’s got a voice and a mind of her own.”
They were all looking at Pan now and something in Daiyu’s words released her from internal lockdown. The fear seemed to take a step back and she was able to draw breath again.
“It’s just all a bit much to take on board,” she said, hearing how thin and weak that sounded. Tolin put his arms around her and drew her to him. She didn’t resist and turned her head so her cheek was pressed against his shoulder.
“I know,” he said. “And I’m sorry. I meant to tell you. Dek isn’t a regular kind of pirate. He’s been a good friend to me. To others too. And after I lost my ship, it was Dek who set me up with the new one. Without him, I’d have had nothing.”
Pan’s brain was working again – running in overdrive. The odd conversations she’d noticed in the past between Tolin and other freetraders, taking an excessive interest in where they were going and what they were carrying. Sometimes to the point of rudeness. Even asking her to talk to some of the more reticent freetraders to find out for him. It was always explained away as part of sussing out trade opportunities, but now…. Tolin was a pirate’s runner and she had never even realised. She had been working for pirates all that time too, even if she had never known it.
And piracy was a capital offense under Coalition law.
Her mind reached back and reframed all that had happened from the moment they met in the stark and ugly light of that revelation. Even the way they met, like something out of a romantic drama, he must have set that up too. The blood ran cold in her veins freezing her emotions into grotesque ice-sculptures in her psyche. They glared at her with hideous leers – guilt, betrayal, hurt, rage, terror, despair. One day there would be a reckoning needed with each one of them. But none could touch her at this time. With the calm clarity that bestowed, she knew that whatever she said next was going to determine her prospects of survival in the short term and the course of the rest of her life.
Gently disentangling herself from her betrayers arms, she stepped back and gave a nod of acknowledgement to Daiyu before addressing her words to Dekker.
“If Tolin says you helped him out when he was in a bad place, that means we both owe you, big time. I’m not sure what you want of me. But if it’s a just a decent engineer, I can do that.” This time she knew her voice sounded steady and strong.
Dekker’s old-too-young eyes bored into her and she met them unflinching. Then he grinned. Sudden and hard. His fist thumped into her arm, painfully. “Welcome to the crew, Pan.”
Tolin pulled her into a new hug and Daiyu was smiling.
“And yes,” Dekker went on, “what we really need is a decent engineer to keep this place running, fix up the ships we bring home and tweak our best girl so she’s at the top of her game. Randja had an accident on our last run. Didn’t make it home. So we’re sorely in need of your skills here.”
The other woman, the one Dekker had called Goldie, stood slightly apart, her face expressionless.

There will be more Roguing Thieves next Sunday…

So my rosebuds have been gathered
And my harvest taken in
As my life draws into winter
Though the season it is spring
And the days are getting longer
Though they always seem too short
Now the sun is shining brighter
Than I had sometimes thought
Yet still the world seems darker
Than twas in my days of youth
The ever-growing shadows
The cold and bitter truth
But there are still always pastimes
And often good company
With bonhomie and laughter
And honey still for tea…

E.M. Swift-Hook

Winter had come to the central belt of Temsevar’s Western Continent, but not as a gentle embrace of soft flaky flurries and decorative crystal icicles hanging from picturesque gables. It came as it always came: rapacious and violent with high winds driving dense sheets of hard-packed snow at sub-zero temperatures into every unprotected nook and cranny. It covered everything in a blood-freezing, impenetrable white shroud, armour-plated with ice.
The girl, who stood by the window, looked out into the maelstrom with storm-riven grey eyes. Before, she had only ever gazed upon the softer onslaught of cold which descended on Harkera. South of its protective mountains and warmed by the seas of the Lesser Ocean, the southern kingdom was blessed in suffering a less violent assault of the elements than that which now raged beyond her window. But despite being aggressively invasive, she found the bitingly chill draft that seeped around the window frame and through the shutters, almost comforting. It reminded her that beyond her own, ruined world, the pall of isolation was being inflicted on all Temsevar. And whilst it remained surely no army could march.
Everyone made mistakes.
A lady of the court might choose the wrong shade or weave of fabric to make a fashionable gown, a notary might add up a column of figures inaccurately, friends might fall out over false gossip. Those were all mistakes that everyone could understand and forgive. But to betray one’s country by mistake was a different kind of miscalculation. It was not the kind of error that anyone could ever understand or forgive – worse, it was not the kind of error one could ever understand or forgive in oneself.
It was odd how romance, fuelled by the flames of ardour and simple animal passion could capture even the most detached and analytical of souls, making it slave to the senses. She, who had always prided herself on the strength of her intellect and impartiality, had fallen hostage to the same blind emotions which she had despised in her friends. She had watched all her contemporaries becoming simpering spouses before they had reached their twentieth summers and had shaken her head at their folly in sacrificing their independence for an effectively subservient role in a life-time partnership.
She had believed herself immune to the snares of those more flaccid sentiments, and immured in a severe and secure maturity of affection. But all that had counted for nothing when she met Ralik. His presence had transformed her from being a sensible, well-founded and emotionally stable adult into something more like a giddy fifteen year old. Swept along by her own treacherous emotions, she had not only condoned but actively engaged in kidnap, treason and probably murder. She felt a stab of self-revilement and her lips twisted with irony. Yes, everyone made mistakes but Lyned Islin made hers on a scale of life-sweeping grandeur and shook the destiny of nations, careless, as she went.
One thing Lyned was not ignorant about was history and she knew Temsevar had always been politically unstable. Based on the city-states, each ruled by its own Castellan with feudal powers over the Vavasors of dependent smaller towns and villages, bound together by bonds of blood, marriage, trade and the necessities of survival and driven apart by power plays, intrigue, politics and war. A few of the city-states had on occasion grouped themselves through conquest or mutual design, into loose alliances or nascent nations.
Alone, from earliest times, Harkera had been a sovereign nation, proud of its strength and its heritage of high culture. Never, since the founding of the nation – an event long lost in myth and legend – had it been anything other than the wealthiest and most powerful of Temsevar’s political forces. Protected by the mountains which separated it from the central lowlands and deserts of the Western Continent, nurtured by the balmy currents and winds that came in from the Lesser Ocean, Harkera had been blessed by the gods with every advantage of nature: fertile soil, warm climate and in the mountains, reserves of precious and common minerals. Nothing had threatened the towering independence of Harkera, until Qabal Vyazin had begun his meteoric climb to power.
Lyned knew civil war had weakened Harkera politically and economically, but it had also strengthened it in military terms, but not enough, never enough, to stand against the precocious ferocity of the Warlord from the north. Then, with the wolves of Vyazin virtually at the gates of Harkera’s capital city, Cressida, a miracle had delivered the military genius of the age to defend her – Jariq Zarengor, the Black Vavasor. He who had been the architect of so many of Vyazin’s own victories, the Warlord’s most loyal right hand, had betrayed his lord, defected, and come to succour Harkera.
It should have meant the survival of Harkera, the turning back of the Warlord and the breaking of his sharp fangs upon the white walls of Cressida. But she, daughter of the most trusted Castellan in the councils of the Regent of Harkera, had committed as great a treason as Zarengor.
In her father’s service had been an exiled northern nobleman: tall, dark, and more than handsome enough to inflame her senses, kind and honourable enough to hold her heart and intelligent and educated enough to engage her mind. At twenty-five, she had long since set aside any thoughts of marriage and romance and considered herself wedded only to her studies. In her teens she had persuaded her father to allow her to travel to Keran, the capital of all Temsevar by virtue of its space port, to study there and all her ambitions since she returned were focused around the development of Cressida’s nascent university, which would have been the first ever founded on the continent. But Ralik had broken through that complacency and left her in an alien landscape of passion, blind to anything except the need to be with him.
And that would have been impossible in Harkera where a disinherited northern noble held the same status as a mercenary soldier and was not the fitting husband for the only daughter of a Castellan. The anguish of it had dominated her life for over a year. She had survived on snatched moments in his company, never more than brief encounters in private. It had become harder and harder to bear.
Then, at the height of the frustration, Ralik had come to her and offered her the chance to be his bride. He told her he had found a way that he could regain favour with his kinsman, Qabal Vyazin. He had been promised a grant of lands and the title of Castellan. And she, lost in the pangs of an exquisite emotional agony, had agreed that he should do it. She would have done anything to be with him. The price had been to deliver Harkera’s only hope back to the Warlord. But it had been a price she had agreed and even helped to pay.
It had only taken the violence and hardship of those events and of the subsequent journey to Tabruth to convince her of her mistake. She knew now that whatever burning desire she had felt for Ralik Vyazin, it had not been rooted in any genuine or meaningful affection and she also knew, that by some tragic jest, his affection for her was not only deep but possessive. Ralik remained entranced and in her sudden, frightening, awakening to wisdom she had come to realise that it was only through using that blinded enchantment she could hope now to survive.
She was like a rose cut from its briar, unable to live untended and alone in this alien soil, utterly reliant upon Ralik’s goodwill to keep her safe. The dangers around her were vivid and real and, although gently raised and sheltered in so many ways, she was far from naïve. She could still recall the hard hands of Warlord’s Commander Caer as they had bruised her body and the cold appraising stare of the Warlord himself when Ralik had presented her.
“You are the daughter of Morvyn Islin, Castellan of Kyphra,” he had said, the hooded eyes looking down his long nose, making of the words a statement not a question. She had nodded and lowered her eyes. The clear, carrying voice had taken on a note she found hard to place, something of amusement or irony perhaps. “Well Harkera’s loss is our gain. I am sure your father will be pleased to learn you are safe and well with us here. I shall see a messenger is sent to inform him.”
She had coloured then, feeling the deep red of shame flooding into her face at the thought of exactly how her father would receive such a message. Then the Warlord had dismissed her and spoken a few words to Ralik in private before they were allowed to withdraw.
She had never believed even in her most profound flights of fantasy that she would be one to shape world events. But in that moment of sudden shame she had seen that because of a single word of Lyned Islin – because she had said ‘yes’ and not ‘no’ – at that point, the very course of destiny had been shifted and its bedrock shattered. That in the moment she had given her agreement to Ralik’s plan, she had taken the axis of fate into her own hands and spun it in a new direction.

From Transgressor: Dues of Blood a Fortune’s Fools book by E.M. Swift-Hook.

Write what you know, the sages insist
But they don’t understand the storytelling gift
They haven’t, not once, heard a dragon in their mind
Or seen rainbow-hued poo from a unicorn’s behind
They have not felt the touch of a silken gold gown
Or the lash of the scorn of a man with a crown
They have not held a sword that sings in their hand
Nor had legions of lizard men at their command
So the sages can write from their narrow small cages
But we’ll fly with dragons and discourse with mages
Because at the end we would die of frustration
If we could not show worlds from our imagination

©jj 2022

Admirable advice from Madame Pendulica’s mystic moggy!

Whilst reclining on the motheaten velvet of a window seat in the sun, one idly tuned into the conversation between the wispy female human one owns and a thin male dressed as if it were some sort of a bloodsucker or nightcrawler.
“Of course, the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats,” he said, as his narrow hands fiddled with the fringes on the table cover.
One pricked up one’s ears, and her muddledness nodded.
“They did indeed, and felines are so in tune with the moon and the stars.”
Which is, of course, arrant nonsense.
“Is he a Maine Coon?”
Wispy laughed, a sound she sees as tinkling bells, but one that grates on feline ears. “She is, indeed.”
He seemed to lose interest then, suddenly leaning forward and staring into the myopic pallor of her eyes.
“Why does nobody understand my poetry?” His previously carefully modulated voice degenerated into a childish whine and he flapped his hands like the wings of a demented butterfly.
The wisps of handprinted cheesecloth that serve one’s particular human as garments waved and undulated as his breath disturbed the air around her skinny frame. One wondered, briefly, if the young fool might attack her, but for all her fey ways she is adept at handling bruised egos and she there-there’d and patted him back to some semblance of adult behaviour.
While she stroked his over-inflated ego I regarded him in some hauteur. It seemed to me as if they were both missing the point of this interview— the fitting of a sadly deluded human for a better and more useful life. As I turned widdershins thrice and settled back to sleep it came to me that the phrase he would find most useful in his lifelong career would be ‘do you want fries with that?’

Ailuros the Mystic’s Mog predicts she will be offering more advice next week!

Big Brenda decided to investigate the mysterious goings on behind the compost. The smell almost beat her back, but she was made of stern stuff. Pushing her way past the terrible trio she found herself in the presence of an old margarine tub in which something was heaving and bubbling and emitting a smell guaranteed to turn even the strongest stomach. Keeping a firm hold on her breakfast she grabbed Oisin in passing and dragged him protesting in her wake.
“What the frag is that?”
“It’s fermenting potato. For the poteen.”
“Get rid of it.”
“But Bertha.”
“Bury it. Today!”

©jj 2022

…for a moment the silence was blissful. Then the screaming started…
Writing team Leo and Mike Johnson have their day disturbed when a body turns up near their house.

There was a uniformed policeman at the back gate and he flashed a very white grin as he ushered the two disapproving figures out. Mike got up and motioned the two policewomen to take the chairs at the head and foot of the table.
‘Coffee?’
‘Please.’
A little blonde halfway down the table looked up. ‘Can I get a proper coffee please. I hate this decaf crap.’
Mike grinned. ‘Course you can. Now would one of you like to explain twelve teenage girls and not a mobile phone amongst you.’
The blonde giggled appreciatively. ‘The prison guards took them off us before we headed here. Gave them to our folks to take home.’
‘Oh. OK. But don’t one of the wardresses have a phone?’
‘No. Our revered leader wouldn’t even think of it, and you saw the other two.’
Ro grinned unpleasantly. ‘Pair of dried-up virgins if you ask me.’
‘Shut up Ro’ Mike said amiably. ‘Don’t you have toilets to clean.’
Ro showed her teeth and ambled off.
‘Why’d she go when you told her to?’ one of the teenagers was curious.
‘I’m the cleaner’ a disembodied voice floated back into the room.
‘The cleaner? But why don’t she wear an overall and creep around quietly?’
Mike laughed. ‘Is that how it happens in your house?’
‘Yeah. My dad insists.’
Leo leaned on his wife’s shoulder. ‘Should I be taking notes?’
‘You can, but I don’t reckon they will be much use to you.’
He sniggered and dropped a light kiss on her head.
‘Tell us what you are doing here.’
One of the girls groaned. ‘Long story.’
‘Try us.’ The oldest girl pulled a sour face. ‘Our school is faith-based, and used to be run by the Methodist church. Then some people with much weirder sort-of Christian beliefs started dribbling themselves into positions of power within the school hierarchy. Eventually they got to be in charge. A lot of kids have been taken away by their mums and dads. We are among the very few who were there before the takeover, and we think we’re only tolerated because we come from well off families who pay full fees. Our parents were asked to send us on this summer camp thing. They were told it was about becoming women. We see it as more about brainwashing. It might even have worked if we had any brains between us.’
Leo snorted. ‘Do they want to turn you into clones of the miserable mice?’
‘Um. No. Obedient wives is what they’re after. We’re considered to be of age.’
‘Like fuck you are’ Mike was shocked. ‘It’s my bet none of you has seen sixteen yet.’
‘No. We haven’t. But this lot marry off their girls at fourteen. They say there’s no sex before sixteen…’
Leo frowned. ‘Have you lot talked to your mums and dads?’
‘No. Because we’ve only just put it together. But we will.’
‘Good’ one of the policewomen spoke up. Then she gave each girl a card. ‘You can call this number any time day or night. It was set up to deal with arranged marriages in non-Christian faiths. However, this sort of thing would be right up their street.’

From Shall we gather at the river? a hard hitting murder mystery thriller by Jane Jago which is available for 0.99.