Title: Lunav
Author: Jenn Polish
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: March 26, 2018
Heat Level: 1 - No Sex
Pairing: Female/Female
Length: 89600
Genre: Fantasy, LGBT, fantasy, YA, dragons, Fae
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Synopsis
They don’t have dragons where
half-faerie Sadie was born—not living ones, anyway—but in the Grove, everyone
knows dragon eggs grow on trees like leaves and need Dreams to hatch. Without
faerie Dreams, the dragons won’t survive. And neither will anyone else.
Brash, boyish sixteen-year-old Sadie
uses her half-human status to spy on the human monarchy, who’ve made it illegal
to Dream. But spying is a risky business. Still, Sadie thought she was a pro
until they sent a new human magistrate to the Grove. Evelyn.
Evelyn might be the most beautiful girl
Sadie’s ever seen, and Sadie might be betraying her family by falling in love
with the ruthless leader who locks them up. But that’s not even the biggest
obstacle between the two: Evelyn is leading the charge against Dreaming, and
there’s something she doesn’t know. Sadie can still Dream.
Excerpt
LUNAV
Jenn Polish © 2018
All Rights Reserved
Chapter One
The night hangs over us, in us, and I
shiver a little in the cold. Even in the safety of my disguise, I swallow
loudly. Lerian shoots me a look, pawing snow away from the packed dirt of the
Tread with her front hoof. We both stare at the ground ahead of us, our ears
straining for the signal that will indicate that we can proceed with our plan.
We only have until the moon starts setting to infiltrate and sabotage the
monarchy’s weapons shipment. A small thumping ahead of us, in the clearing
where the caravan has curled in on itself, gives us the sign we’re waiting for.
“No need to hang back anymore, you two,”
Osley tells us through the beating of quer paws. “Sadie, the freeze spell
worked. Come see.”
Lerian meets my eyes before I reach down
to receive permission from the grass for us to move forward. Her hooves and my
feet barely make a sound as we slip across the thick layer of snow past the
first wagon and the first pair of magically frozen guards. I pause to pat one
lightly on the shoulder. He won’t wake—not as long as my growns are holding
their freeze spell on the encampment—but in this weather, the small dribble of drool
on his chin will be stuck to his face when we’re done here.
Osley stamps quer feet impatiently, quer
long rabbit ears twitching with irritation, as Lerian bends way down to move
the other guard’s temporarily stiff fingers into a position that would for sure
offend Mom.
“Do I seriously look like them?” I
whisper.
“Yep. Spitting image. With your wings
tucked away, Sadie, you look exactly like a non.” I arch an eyebrow at the way
she so casually refers to humans as nons: non-faeries, non-centaurs.
Non-Grovian. Not like us. Except, I kind of am like nons, too. Ler pauses to
consider me, running her fingers through her reddish hair. “Except probably
you’re uglier.”
I roll my eyes and suppress a grin, not
bothering to remind her that the front half of centaurs’ bodies pretty much
look like nons too.
Osley’s thumps grow more insistent.
“Sadie, we’re on a mission. Get Lerian over here.”
“All right, all right, we’re coming.”
I give Lerian a sharp tug, and we follow
Osley as que leaps toward the heart of the coiled wagons. The air itself is
crystallized with particles of dirt and flakes of snow, all hanging suspended
around us, like bubbles floating in the ocean. There’s a fire pit in the middle
of the encampment, but it, too, is still, with flames frozen in midcaress of
the tree flesh it consumes, still midspark, midcrackle. The closer we get, the
harder it is to breathe. The freeze spell has the Energies so deeply entangled
it feels like walking through nectar. I limp even deeper than I usually do when
I’m forced to walk.
A sharp smack from behind the fire pit
makes our cautious steps turn into an awkward run and a graceful gallop. We
round a bend in the encampment’s wagons to see Mom and Mama, hovering over two
chained faeriesand their frozen non guards.
The faerie prisoners look like they’re
from the Samp, a marshy province a few days’ journey from the Forest. The
Sampians don’t look much older than Lerian and me. They’re nears, like us, but
their wings are hidden away inside metal clamps, their necks connected by a
piercing necklace. Their ankles and wrists, too, are chained together, and
they’ve been propped up back to back, to sleep outside on the snow while most
of the guards are around the fire or tucked into the relative warmth of their
wagons.
One of the Sampians is flailing around,
the chains from his wrists and ankles tugging on his fellow prisoner,
threatening to both topple her over and whip her with their force. Mama’s
webbed hand is on her cheek. She looks like she’s just gotten smacked—with
flesh or metal, I can’t tell. My stomach is as shaky as my bare fingers.
One of the prisoners is reaching out to
Mama, apologizing for her partner-in-chains, crying softly, explaining that he
can’t help it, that it’s not his fault.
Mama dodges another blow. Both of his
eyelids are closed, relaxed, but his body is the opposite. Mom is trying to
calm him, like she tries to calm me when I…My heart threatens to fall out of my
throat. He’s sleeping, yet he’s moving about in his chains like…
I step closer, in a daze, my attention
on nothing but the Sampian boy. His wings are in those clamps, so he can’t move
them except by thrashing his entire back around. To compensate, he’s flapping
his golden brown arms about, as much as his chains will let him, just like a
sparrow does when she’s taking flight. Soon enough, the motion of his arms
evens out, like they’re catching the wind underneath them, rising…
I don’t realize I’ve stopped breathing
until all my breath bursts out of me in one massive, cloudy white exhale,
staying in the freeze spell instead of dissipating like it normally would. I
step through the cloud so my attention doesn’t have to leave the sight in front
of me. My mouth is desert dry.
The imprisoned Sampian can Dream. Like
me.
No wonder he’s in chains.
Without even turning around, Mom calls
back to me, “Sadie, don’t.” Don’t act as if I’ve just found my kin. Don’t act
as if I’ve just seen, for the first time since I was a young one, another near,
a nearly grown person, who sleeps as I do. Who hasn’t been Sliced.
I grind my teeth at the thoughts of
Slicings—when they cut into the skull of newly born faeries, nons, and
centaurs, and inject dragon blood into our brains. Sometimes, it kills us right
then and there from so-called complications. Always, it stops us from ever
Dreaming. From ever forming the connections we need to with our hatchling trees
and dragons. From ever connecting with any of the lives across Lunav beyond our
own.
I clear my throat and bend over to help
Mama twist the Energies, already so stiff around us from the freeze spell, to
unlock the chains around the Sampian who’s awake. When she notices me, she
jolts back like she’s been burned, her thin golden eyes wide with terror.
Mama grimaces and holds up her own
hands, showing the Sampian girl the webbing between her fingers, the way she
flies horizontally with her stomach facing the ground, instead of upright, like
Grovians.
“Look, it’s all right. I’m Sampian too.
This is my daughter. She’s Grovian. Her wings are hidden under her cloak,” she
says in Sampian faeric. The girl continues to stare at me. I look away. Lerian,
shuffling behind us awkwardly, doesn’t even scoff. For once.
Osley hops between the girl and me,
thumping out a message urgently. “Mara, these are the people I told you about
on the Tread this sunup. These are the people the Grove has sent to help you
sabotage the weapons shipment. To help you escape. It’ll be all right.”
The girl—Mara—sighs and glances toward
her companion. Mom’s started to rouse him from his sleep, from his Dream. I
wouldn’t wish a bad Dream on anyone, but I hope it wasn’t a great Dream,
either. Waking from those is never exactly fun. Then again, it seems he was
Dreaming some sort of bird, so compared to his chains… I look away and focus on
Mara.
“Blame my moms. They made me tuck my
wings away tonight so in case we got caught, I could pass as a non and maybe
escape. I don’t usually look this—” I glance over my shoulder at Lerian and
grin. “—ugly.”
Mara just bites the inside of her cheek.
She turns to the boy and touches her webbed hands to the back of his neck,
right above the chained collar. He jerks awake, eyes wide and pained. His
breathing is ragged and shallow, and when his wild brown eyes find mine, he
almost lets out a scream. Mama puts a gentle but urgent hand over his mouth.
“I’m sorry, so sorry, but you’re safe,
and so is your secret. This is my daughter; she’s a faerie. We’re resistance,
and we’re here to help.” He twists his neck and finds Mara’s eyes. She nods in
the Sampian way, tilting her head all the way down to her right shoulder,
confirming my mom’s words. He closes his eyes again, and even though I don’t
know him, I can still tell what he’s doing. He’s willing himself back into the
life of that bird. Willing himself to Dream again. But it won’t come back. They
never do on command. Dreams only come when we’re in our deepest rest, when our
Energies are most primed to be utterly synced with someone else, someone awake.
After a moment, the boy sighs and opens his eyes again.
“You’re here to help us sabotage the
weapons, right?” He turns his gaze down to Osley. Que shakes quer hind legs at
him in confirmation, and Mom and Mama set about twisting the Energies to ease
Mara and the boy out of the rest of their chains. They clank to the ground and
force soft tufts of freshly fallen snow up into the air. The clumps of white
just hang there, suspended.
“H-how’s it doing that?” the boy asks as
he rubs his wrists, his neck, and sweeps his wings up eagerly, stretching them
and sighing in relief.
“You never heard of a freeze spell?”
Lerian asks as she tugs him to his feet, the boy’s thick sunset-red wings still
crumpled from the clamps.
He stares around at the still guards
blankly expanding the gill flaps on his neck. “Wish we could do ourselves a
freeze spell,” he mutters to Mara. “How long will it last?”
Mom hovers in closer, seeming relieved
that we can get started and do what we came here to do. “Long enough. But we’re
gonna have to get going. Can you conjure any magic?”
“We can’t do anything like that freeze
thing you did, but we can put some impurities into these weapons for sure,”
Mara says before grabbing the boy and pulling him in for a deep,
hands-everywhere kiss.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so
I study my feet intently. Lerian bends down to pack some snow into her fist,
and Osley’s long ears press down into quer gray-speckled white fur. Mom bows
her head, touches her forehead to Mama’s, and flies off toward one of the
transport wagons, letting out a deep whistle into the disturbed Energies.
That’ll be the signal for the others surrounding the enclosure to come and help
her sabotage her chosen wagon, full of palace weapons.
Mama gestures for the rest of us to
accompany her into another wagon. She peeks inside its Izlanian buffalo-skin
covering before nodding at us—no nons are sleeping in this wagon. It’s just for
weapons. Perfect.
I wiggle my fingers, preparing them to
twist the already tensed Energies, which will work imperfections into the
weapons they’re shipping to the Samp. My stomach churns as the buffalo skin
brushes my shoulders when we crowd into the wagon, swords and arrows and axes
scattered around in skin bags, hanging from the skin walls. I catch eyes with
the Sampian boy, who’s slipped into the wagon behind me, still flexing his
wings like he can’t quite believe they’re free of their clamps. I wonder if
he’s ever Dreamed an Izlanian buffalo.
I have.
I look away quickly so he won’t see the
question in my eyes. I know his secret. That doesn’t mean he has to know mine.
“Know what to do, all?” Mama asks as she
tenses her arms, conjuring a fire out of the freeze. It hovers in midair in
front of her. Ler and I nod, and Os stamps quer feet on the dead tree floor.
The Sampian boy just tilts his head and grabs a sword off the skin wall. He
sticks it into the fire, warming it so we can magick invisible impurities into
it.
I follow suit, tossing arrows from their
quivers onto the floor for Osley. Que starts chewing away, making slight
adjustments in the arrows that will make them snap under tension, downing them
on release from their bows. A genius at this sort of thing, que is. Quer black
eyes are steely as que works. I wonder if que’s thinking of the non hunters who
shot quer family with arrows like these.
“So name what yours is?” Lerian asks my
fellow Dreamer in terrible Sampian faeric. She never was great at language
learning pods.
“Leece,” he tells us quietly. Lerian
puts her forehead to Mama’s before grabbing two swords at a time from the racks
on the skin walls. I yank at the Energies to make a fire of my own, and Leece
sticks a metal axe into it. We work in silence except for the crackling of the
floating fires and the steady clicking of Osley’s teeth on wooden arrows.
“So,” Leece starts after a while, his
attention carefully fixed on the axes he’s holding, now one in each hand.
They’re glowing as red as his wings, and I’m sweating with the effort of
pulling the Energies to magick impurities into the slightly melted parts.
They’ll still look sharp, but they’ll be blunt and brittle in a battle. Or
another massacre.
“You’re half non, huh?”
I nod in the Sampian way, not taking my
focus off the axes or the swirls of purple and blue haze flowing from my
fingertips into the reddened metal. Lerian nudges me, gesturing for me to pass
her another sword. I grab one off the rack next to me.
“Ever gotten with a non with your wings
tucked away like that?” he asks.
I drop the sword. Lerian swears and
reaches for it, but Mama stills it magically, yanking the Energies hard enough
so the blade stops just above my thigh.
“Thanks,” I breathe in relief, picking
it up and passing it to Lerian. I look up at Leece, and the ghost of a playful
grin is on his thin lips. I glance down at Osley with an arched eyebrow.
Lerian’s glowering at the Sampian boy, but Osley contents querself with a
twitch of quer ears.
“If by ‘gotten with’ you mean gotten
information out of them for the resistance, yeah. The one good thing my non
looks have done for me,” I tell him.
Mama smirks.
I change the subject. “So are you and
Mara…a thing?”
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Meet the Author
Jenn Polish is the author of two young adult books, Lunav and Lost Boy, Found Boy. Their debut novella, Lost Boy, Found Boy, is a scifi re-telling of Peter Pan in which Neverland is a holomatrix, Hook is a bisexual cyborg, and Tink is an asexual lesbian computer interface. Their debut novel, Lunav, a lesbian faerie tale, features dragons that grow on trees and friendship amongst rebellion. They teach Theater and English in the CUNY system, where they are also a doctoral candidate in English. They live in New York with their fiancée and their fantasies of having multiple puppies.Website | Twitter | Instagram
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