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Welcome to Tandara, where gods are fickle, nightmares are real, and trolls make excellent bakers . . .
Raine Stewart is convinced she’ll die young and alone in Alabama, the victim of a chronic, mysterious illness. Until a man in a shabby cloak steps out of her mirror and demands her help to defeat a bloodthirsty wizard.
Raine shrugs it off as a hallucination—just one more insult from her failing body—and orders her intruder to take a hike. But the handsome figment of her imagination won’t take no for an answer, and kidnaps her anyway, launching her into a world of utmost danger—and urgent purpose.
Ruled by unpredictable gods and unstable nations, Tandara is a land of shapeshifters and weather-workers, queens and legends. Ravenous monsters and greedy bounty hunters patrol unforgiving mountains. Riverboats pulled by sea-cattle trade down broad waterways. And creatures of nightmare stalk Raine herself, vicious in the pursuit of her blood.
But Raine isn’t helpless or alone. She’s part of a band as resourceful as it is odd: a mage-shy warrior, a tattered wizard, a tenderhearted giant, and a prickly troll sorceress. Her new friends swear she has powers of her own. If she can stay under their protection, she might just live long enough to find out . . .
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Books by Alexandra Rushe
A Meddle of Wizards
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
A Meddle of Wizards
Alexandra Rushe
REBEL BASE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
Copyright
Rebel Base Books are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp. 119 West 40th Street New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2017 by Alexandra Rushe
Illustration by Rodica Prato
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First Electronic Edition: January 2018
eISBN-13: 978-1-63573-010-4
eISBN-10: 1-63573-010-4
First Print Edition: January 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1-63573-011-1
ISBN-10: 1-63573-011-2
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
To the dreamers and those who see the magic . . .
FOREWARD
Med∙ dle of Wiz∙ ards (med∙´’l uv wiz´ǝrds) [[ORIGIN medlen < OFn meddler, mesler (Trolk mȇlagga) ORIGIN < OFn, unstressed var. of af, ӕf, away (from); akin to Trolk ka < Tan base *apo-, from, away from > Elv ab (see AB-), ORIGIN wizard, prob. , wis, WISE + -ards, -ARDS]], n. 1 a group of three or more wizards [Better to face a hungry rock troll armed with a bent spoon than to trifle with a meddle of wizards.] SYN.— trouble
Chapter 1
Through a Glass Darkly
Raine settled deeper into the upholstered armchair and opened her book. It was after midnight, but she wasn’t sleepy. God knows she spent enough time in bed. A breeze blew through the screen window, and she tucked the blanket around her thin legs. The April air was cool, but she didn’t mind. Alabama summer lurked around the corner and this might be her last spring.
“Watch this,” Mimsie said, whizzing around the bedroom like a helium balloon escapee from a birthday party.
Raine smiled at the ghost’s antics. Mimsie was a vision today in a polka dot Suzy Perette dress with rounded shoulders, full skirt, and cinched waist. A triple strand of pearls graced her slender neck and she wore her light brown hair curled and brushed away from her youthful face, a face Raine recognized only from faded photographs. The elderly relative who’d taken her in after her parents had died, the woman she remembered, had been more than half a century older, wrinkled and riddled with arthritis.
Mimsie paused in her aerial high jinx. “You look awful. When’s the last time you ate?”
“I don’t know. I’m not hungry.”
“You’re skin and bones. I’ll see what’s in the kitchen.”
The ghost sailed through the bedroom wall, leaving a cloud of Arpege in her wake.
Raine shook her head in amazement. It had been five years since Mimsie had died. Five years without so much as an ectoplasmic peep and then bam! Mimsie was back. The ghost’s sudden appearance a few weeks earlier had sent her scurrying to the doctor, convinced she had a brain tumor. Headaches, nausea, blurred vision, and now the ghost of her dead aunt—what else could it be?
The scans had come back negative. Raine had been sick her entire life, tested for every disease known to man with no diagnosis. The MRI to rule out a brain tumor was just one more procedure. She was twenty-five years old and she was dying, and no one could tell her why.
In the ghost’s absence, quiet settled over the old house, unbroken but for the creak of a settling board and the hum of the electric clock on the table by the bed. Raine returned her attention to Ghosts of Behr County, a worn volume of eerie tales, and one of her favorites. She was engrossed in the story of the Wampas Kitty, a feline banshee whose shriek warned of impending death, when a sudden gust of briny air made her lift her head. The tangy scent of the sea blowing through the open window was overpowering and intoxicating.
Raine loved the smell of the ocean, but she lived sixty miles from the Gulf. Inland. The universe wasn’t satisfied with hallucinations. Now she was imagining smells.
A flicker of movement in the dresser mirror caught her eye, and the book in her hands tumbled to the floor. A ship rode a wintry sea in the silvered glass, the image shaky as an old silent movie. The sky above the vessel was sprinkled with stars, hard chips of brightness against the inky black, and a sliver of moon peeked from behind dusky clouds. A tall, broad-shouldered man strode about the narrow deck, flags on a mast snapping in the breeze. He paused and looked back, as though sensing her regard.
Time slowed and stilled. How long she sat there—seconds? hours?—Raine did not know. The neighbor’s dog barked, breaking the spell. She blinked, disoriented for a moment, and shook off her paralysis. Brain tumor. Definitely. Closing her hand around the heavy flashlight by her chair, Raine hurled it at the mirror. The glass shattered, and the ship and the man disappeared.
Mimsie