the next book

My current writing project is done! So now on to the next book.

I’m going to write a book about a woman.

Specifically, a woman of about twenty. Short and lean, with black hair and blue eyes. She’s pretty enough, and seems little different than any other young woman of station and wealth.

Yet anyone who spends enough time around her starts to notice…oddities. Like how very cold those blue eyes are. The servants are used to being ignored, to fading into the background, yet she sees them. She sees almost everything.

She smiles brightly, and laughs at the jokes of her elders. Yet sometimes she says…other things. She’ll glance at a man’s hand, and know his occupation by the pattern of the calluses on his palm. Or she’ll look at his boots, and the dust upon his laces will tell her upon what streets he has trodden.

And sometimes, very rarely, she’ll lift her hand to cover a laugh, and a glint of metal will show in her sleeve. As if she had knives strapped to her forearm.

But such glimpses come but rarely. Because the mind behind those cold blue eyes is always turning, like the gears of an endless clock. Or a razor forever sharpening itself against a stone. Pain and loss forged that mind into a weapon, and by her cunning she has defeated adversaries of terrible power, and thrown down ancient horrors out of legend.

She goes by the name Anna Callenius, daughter of Basil Callenius of the Imperial Collegium of Jewelers. In other cities she has called herself Countess Marianna of House Nereide, a noble house proud in lineage but poor in wealth.

But her true name is Caina Amalas, and she is a nightfighter of the Ghosts.

And now the storm has come for her.

-JM