New Medici book coming up!
Mika's story is coming along nicely in her fourth book in the series. I've just about finished it and have stuck it in the drawer to give my brain a rest while I keep going on the fifth and final part. I think it'll be about six weeks until it's ready so in the meantime, here's a short piece to wet your appitite.
Blood Debt
Mika rubbed her face, wishing for the day to be over. She checked that her bedroom door was locked and for once, stripped naked in front of the mirror. Still slim, her spare body was flat bellied. Never eating enough, there was nothing to her. The voice floated up through the years, who’d said that? Rylan? A brief image of shaded morning light through windows and a table spread with breakfast. Rylan himself was a dark shadow, his face erased with the passage of years. The corset she wore to flatten and hide her breasts hadn’t been kind to them, they lay against her ribs. Not for the first time she wished for a more feminine body with some curves like Lissina’s. Mika reminded herself that she pulled off her deception purely because of her shape and height, Lissi’s body fitted in with her size, a daintiness with a tiny waist hands could span.
Mika sighed and dressed, this was the reason she avoided standing in front of the mirror naked - it reminded her of what she wasn’t. She dressed, becoming the dapper Medici she was known for being outside of this room. She combed her hair, noticing the dark blonde roots. She’d need to bleach it again, something that her servants did know about. They respected her wishes on this and kept it private. They knew of her needs for privacy and she made life easy for them. No access to her rooms unless she was there allowed her to wash her women’s things without the risk of discovery. A slender man stared back at her in the mirror. The scars on her face were pale with age, only to be seen in the strong sunlight.
Not for the first time did she wish she could be a Medici as a woman. Mika checked her tin to make sure she had enough of the rolls of sweetroot she smoked and stirred the herbs stewing in the cup. She grimaced as she drank, several years of drinking this stuff hadn’t improved the taste and nothing she’d tried disguised it. Thankfully few people remembered her biological father and his drug habits, time had blurred any mentions of Jace to his skills with the sword and the cat that had followed him around like a dog. Even the scandal with Lissi had been hushed to the point where she was simply considered eccentric living with a man from a foreign land.
She gazed out of the window, staring out over the city and the plains below and yawned. What with the manoeuvrings of court and her normal work, she was tired. She wondered if she could get more sleep, she was sure she was dreaming more vividly at the moment and in colour too. Mika frowned, the last time she’d dreamed like that had been before she’d changed for the first time but those had been dreams of the forests of home and in monochrome. These were almost ordinary in comparison, of walking through the castle at night, nodding to the guards in the corridors and walking outside to feel the breeze running through her hair...
