Celta Thursday (though Friday) Cut from Heart Duel

First, family stuff came up yesterday so I had to postpone Celta Thursday, my apologies.

Celta Thursday-Friday: The easiest thing for me to write are "intermals", thought musings, so I look to see if there are too many and some get cut. Here's one from Heart Duel:

Holm leaned against the brick wall of AllClass Healing Hall, eyes idly scanning the street as he waited for FirstHealer Lark Collinson. His personal glider, a small two passenger model, had already been programmed and hovered on the air cushion in the street before him.

He'd made it his business to know everything about Lark, had started gathering information a year ago, after he'd returned from his impossible journey with Tinne.

He'd kept telling himself that he was giving her time to recover from the death of her husband, that Holm, himself, needed to learn each facet of her character in great detail to plot the strategy of courtship. An impulsive man, from an impulsive family, Holm rarely dawdled about anything, but he'd feared to put his plan in action. Tensions between the Hollys and the Hawthorns had been on the rise throughout Holm's lifetime and had heated even more in later years. All of Celtan society was organized into clans and family opinion was formidable.

He was a fighter, happy to feel the zing of life pulse through his veins when he wielded a sword. She was a Healer, with personal experience of the grief that came from feuding, and a contempt for those who sliced open others, making dreadful work for her Flaired hands.

But the time had come and parental pressure had decreed the start of his wooing. Now.

So he waited.

He knew that after a long shift at the AllClass HealingHall she had no energy to spend on teleportation, and that she usually took a public SwiftGo to the AllClass beach to the southwest shore of Pict, the peninsula that Druida was founded on.




And you might note that this is the cover art I received and not the actual cover. I had enough of a warning to change the sword description, though.

Cut from Heart Duel

I am at the RWA conference and house/catsitters are helping out enormously. However, here is Celta Thursday, a cut from Heart Duel:

And, Lark realized with a jolt, deep in her heart she simply didn't believe in HeartMate love.

She blinked at herself in surprise. It seemed to be a tenet of Celta, a foundation of their philosophy that should have steeped into her very bones with all her other education. But it hadn't. Perhaps it was the fact that her parents hadn't been HeartMates. Nor had her father's parents. Her FatherDam still lived in T'Hawthorn residence, long after her husband's death. And everyone knew HeartMates died within a year of their spouses.

No couple close to her had demonstrated the deep love that the HeartBond was supposed to confer. The closest she'd been to HeartMates was when she'd participated in NobleRituals and HeartMate couples had also done so. She knew there'd been an unusual strength and blending to their Flair, between the two and when they joined the Circle to build the cone of power, but they had been adults and she had been a child, and kept on the fringes of the Circle to protect her from harm, so she hadn't felt it close at hand.

And there wasn't a HeartMate for her. Not in this lifetime. She hadn't experienced any metaphysical* connection to another person during the Passages that had freed her Flair, and that was the prime indicator that a person had a HeartMate -- some sort of link during Passage. No, her Passages had been stormy, but controllable, but with no outreaching to touch another's soul. With this knowledge, she hadn't hesitated to marry a fellow journeyman Healer. A man with the potential to be a great Healer, a Downwind man who'd grown beyond the disadvantages of his youth. Ethyn. A man who'd been literally cut down at the cusp of his career by a noble sword when he'd gone to help the fallen in a noble skirmish. The manner of his death had been as great a wound as his death itself, to Lark.

A note about Celta Thursdays.

Just reminding you all that what I usually post are CUTS/OUTTAKES, scenes that didn't make the book. Sometimes (like yesterday), they were just first-draft raw stuff. So they are not polished, and they can be clumsy, or irritating, etc. I DON'T reread, or revise. Yup, raw writing here. :)

Celta Thursday

First, copy edits for Heart Legacy have been turned in!
Next: A cut from Heart Thief.

Ailim struggled to keep her eyes open as dawn lightened the windows of her ResidenceDen. She sipped a cup of hot caff and concentrated on the numbers of the spreadsheet laying before her on her desk. The sheet covered the surface of her desk, lumpy where the outline of her blotter showed beneath. The numbers in all the tiny rows seemed to move around, except the huge, black negative total.

At least she had a new, substantial income to place in the "credit" column. Her judicial record had been reviewed and she'd been appointed the Supreme Judge of Druida. There were few telempathic judges, and she was arguably the most powerfully Flaired. She hadn't had much doubt that she would be assigned the post.

But she had doubted. Before her mother's death, she wouldn't have doubted. It was returning from her circuit rounds to find the Family's financial mess that had shaken her, left her off-balance and still struggling for her feet.

She pulled her gaze from the darkly paneled walls covered with golden-framed antique paintings of still-lifes. Just sitting in this chair caused a resurgence of grief that she firmly shifted aside.

When she'd realized she hadn't the time or the luxury to grieve properly, she'd gone to a MindHealer who'd distanced the emotional storms. Little by little the grief worked itself out of a huge tangled knot into the small, even threads of memory and life.

Ailim sighed and bent again to the figures. She was expected at Judgement Grove by Eighth Septhour chime. At least, she'd already reviewed the several cases she'd be judging. Those were understandable, those were interesting, those were fixable. These figures weren't.

Celta Thursday - Heart Journey, lost Tabacin Diary Entry

HA! I found a Tabacin Diary entry that didn't make it into Heart Journey. The Cherry ancestress who'd been on the starship Lugh's Spear. Writing that was one of my favorite things. Here it is:

Today we finally finished traversing the mountains and there was much rejoicing when we saw people – people! – waiting as we came through the canyon.

I was not the only one to weep. These were some of the other colonists, from Nuada's Sword, and they came to greet us! It was a big group, about twenty, and they said it would only be another three eightdays before we will reach the city.

It was so strange and fearful and good to see faces I've never seen before in my life. Another jolt of this new life. I thought my head would explode.

They don't quite talk like we do, though those "FirstFamilies" who passed the journey in the cryonics tubes spoke more alike than the rest of us.

An incredible day. A day of thanks.

Celta Thursday, Cut from Heart Thief

Celta Thursday: I literally have 3-4 versions of Heart Thief. Here's a cut from version 2:

Two Eight-days Later

"We have replaced the warped panels in the energy storage area," the Ship said.

Ruis smiled. He was getting used to the Ship speaking in the royal We. When asked, it stated it was an amalgam of departments integrated to communicate with him.

"We request further orders."

This made Ruis' smile widen and a kernel of pride in him unfurl. The first time the Ship had asked him for orders had startled him. He, Ruis Elder, the despised, asked for orders. People had always avoided him. He had no good friends and mere acquaintances. Lord and Lady knew, Samba, his only companion, never asked for orders.

"List priorities."

It did.

"Repair additional maintenance androids," he decided.

"Yes, Captain," the Ship replied.

Ruis whistled through his teeth and gloated. He was Captain. The Captain's quarters, his quarters, contained a small room the ship had converted into a workroom at his request. On the table before him was his latest project, an Earth motor the Ship was teaching him to repair and renovate. That was his passion.

He glanced at the table on the right and sighed at the items spread out there, stolen items to be returned when he was emotionally able to do so. That was his disgrace. Now that he no longer needed to steal to survive, his impulsive thefts brought a great wave of guilt.

But it didn't matter what rank he held inside the Ship, when he left its confines and spent time in Druida all the old rage returned as he was cursed, cuffed, ignored and generally abused. He'd tried to keep his hands to himself, but his temper cracked as the disparity between the way he was treated in the Ship and outside in Druida diverged so greatly.

Yet, he'd managed to keep his backsliding ways to only picking noble pockets. Spread on a velvet background were expensive baubles -- an antique haircomb of D'Reed's, a dangling set of sapphire D'Ivy earrings, a brace of engraved silver blasers from the Holly's. No doubt Tinne had endured a tongue-lashing for that loss!

Nothing from T'Oak. The man had stood up for Ruis, in a very minor way. Nothing from D'Vine. She had voted against his banishment and against death. Nothing from D'Ash. Never again would Ruis cross T'Ash, and he still owed D'Ash.

And nothing from D'SilverFir. Oh, he'd been tempted. A haughty woman had swept past him in a crowd, not deigning to even see a person garbed in less than silkeen. His nimble fingers had slid deep inside her sleeve and plucked out a softfur pouch full of gilt. He'd noticed the crest of D'SilverFir and caught up with the woman -- not a lady -- and gently replaced the thing.

However arrogant, the woman had belonged to D'SilverFir. And D'SilverFir was the only woman in his memory that had been personally kind to him.