I am stoked to be hosting a stop on the
blog tour for TITANIA ACADEMY BOOK ONE: FAERIE MISBORN by Samaire Provost! I have an excerpt to share
with you today check it out and enter to win the giveaway below!
Author: Samaire Provost
Release Date: October 22, 2019
Publisher: Black Raven Books
Formats: Paperback, eBook
Pages: 400
Wonderful.
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Freezing cold winters, constant hunger: This was the life of a homeless orphan. This was my life. Then I got the letter.
I've been on the streets since I was born. It got very rough after my aunt got sick and died. But I made do.
The streets of New York city can very unforgiving, especially when times get desperate. Like in winter.
At least I never had to worry about the cold.
But then I got hurt. Things were looking very bad.
Then Chance showed up with the letter.
The letter that said I was misborn of the fae. A bastard, but the magic still counted.
The letter that said I'd been accepted into Titania's Academy.
When the magic blood of the fae runs through your veins, they will find you, no matter what.
~ ~ ~
So I get to the school. The Faerie Academy Chance said was soooo great. And before I even step one toe on the ground, these girls are doing double takes and giggling behind their backs at me and I just want to plant my fist in their faces.
Then I get upstairs to my dorm room and find some Barbie doll is bullying a girl.
Then she mouths off at me, giving me attitude.
Well, that was it. I couldn't hold back.
I punched her. Yeah, I did it.
Called into the headmistress's office on the first day.
Wonderful.
Chapter
One
Thief
“HEY! COME BACK HERE!” The shopkeeper shook his fist
at me as I ran. “THIEF!”
I was thirteen years old, skinny as a rail, and small
for my size.
So I was fast. Really fast. I could run like the wind,
even while carrying the two loaves of bread.
I heard a police whistle behind me, but I didn’t stop
to look.
If you stop to look, they catch you.
I raced down the alleyway, stuffing the bread into the
sack hanging from my shoulder as I ran.They were hot on my heels; I could hear
them breathing behind me.
More like puffing. Fat old man, you can’t catch me.
I reached the end of the alley, and leaped, catching
the top of the dumpster with both hands and swinging my feet up. Scrambling to
the back edge, I jumped up and caught the side of the second-floor fire escape,
and swung myself over the eight-foot-high chain-link fence to the next alley.
This alley led away from the street where I’d just
swiped the bread, the deli that had the table on the sidewalk full of
just-baked bread, to tantalize people with the smell and lure them inside. The
soup they were then sold was gross. I’d seen a rat fall into the vat last
month, and the gross thing was, so did the cook. He hadn’t fished the thing
out; he’d left it in. I guess he figured, “more meat for the soup.”
I didn’t eat rat. Aunt Clare always told me they
carried disease and to avoid them. We’d been lucky: We hadn’t had to eat rat
yet. Though things had gotten lean in the last year. Aunt Clare had gotten
older, and she didn’t really gather food anymore.
That was up to me. And I was good at it. She’d taught
me well, after all.
But it was still hard.
“Being skinny will help you, Holly,” Aunt Clare had
said. “You can run faster, you can squeeze through gaps in fences better, and
you can jump farther. Sometimes jumping rooftops is the only thing that’ll get
you away from the coppers, and it’ll save your hide. So stay thin and lean and
live to read another day.”
Aunt Clare love to read. She had two books she kept
guarded and read to me most nights.She’d taught me to read from those books.
I ran down the alley, my feet padding the ground
noiselessly in my sneakers.
Aunt Clare had procured the canvas sneakers one night
six months ago, and they were already
getting tight.
“You’re growing like a weed, Holly,” she’d said,
smiling.
“I am a weed, Aunt Clare,” I said ruefully, trying to
brush out my wild hair with my fingers.
My hair was kind of white, at least after I went
swimming in the canal. Most days it was grey, and wild. An untamed mess of
tangles, Aunt Clare called it.
It flew behind me when I ran, a white/grey silvery
beacon, and helped the coppers spot me in a crowd. It was not an asset, let me
put it this way.
I wore a brown hoodie, the hood covering my head of
crazy platinum hair, the drawstrings tied snugly under my chin. It helped to
hide me in a crowd, and in dark alleyways.
I turned and ran down a sidewalk, slowing as I
approached a crowd.
Slipping in through the edges, I lost myself in the
throng of people walking, and I disappeared.
New York City was a great place to live if you were
homeless, Aunt Clare had always said. Whenever she would say that, I wondered
why she didn’t mention the winters, which were cold as ice, the rats, which
managed to get in everywhere, and the dangers.
Dangers of being grabbed by coppers.
Dangers of being robbed by the others who shared the
streets with you.
Dangers of getting sick.
Dangers of getting stabbed.
Lots of dangers.
I was now walking rapidly through the crowd, one hand
firmly wrapped around my bag holding the precious bread loaves. Aunt Clare and
I hadn’t eaten since yesterday, and I had a hollow feeling in my stomach.
Ten minutes later, I turned down between two buildings
and into a side door that led down to the subway system.
Ten minutes after that, and I was walking down a
nearly dark subway tunnel beside tracks that had been abandoned before I was
born.
I trotted faster, then ducked into an alcove, lifted a
heavy metal grate, and slipped into our home.
The spot was barely seven feet square. It was lined
with discarded coats, blankets from the shelters and giveaways, and a small,
flea-infested old mattress Aunt Clare and I had dragged in five years ago.
“I’m back,” I whispered, setting the candles I had
swiped on the crate that served as a table. A button lamp sat there, flickering
fitfully.
Aunt Clare had made it last month.
“Let me show you how to make a button lamp,” she’d
said. “My parents had these when I was a child.”
She’d taken a small metal disk that we’d used to burn
candles in, it had wax at the bottom, and she’d put a small tear of fabric from
her shirt, threaded it through a large plastic button from an old coat long
since lost, and stuck it in the wax.
Then she’d lit it.
It didn’t give much light, but it lasted forever and
stubbornly refused to go out.
“It will stay. It will stay for a long, long time,”
she’d said.
Aunt Clare was asleep on the bed, wrapped in an old
tattered blanket.
I leaned over to her face and kissed her cheek.
Her eyes opened, fluttering softly in the dim light.
I pressed one of the loaves of bread into her hands,
and she sat up and began to eat.
I sat facing her in my own little nest. My back
against the wall, and my knees drawn up to my chest, I began to nibble on my
own loaf of bread.
She was all I had.
“Aunt Clare?” I whispered, rubbing her arm. “How are
you feeling today?”
“Ohh,” she yawned. “I think I’m feeling better,
child.” She took a bite out of the small loaf of bread. “Mmmm, this is
delicious!”
The bread loaves were about ten inches long and crusty
on the outside, baked to a golden brown. The inside was soft and fluffy, just
the way Aunt Clare liked it.
I smiled.
“Mmmm, it is good, isn’t it?” I crunched the bread
with relish.
We ate in silence for a few minutes.
Our little corner of the world was small and dirty,
and the walls were stained with old water runoff, and no matter how much I
tried, I could never keep all the insects out, but one thing that set it apart
from the other cubbies underground in this old subway tunnel was that it was
warm.
A few years back, we’d had a woman who befriended us,
and shared her food with us. She’d been homeless a few years and had learned
the ropes from others in the city.
She’d been nice and asked to sleep in our cubby in
exchange for sharing the food she stole, and we let her.
That had been a mistake.
After two months of this situation, she’d pulled a
knife on us and forced us out of our cubby.
“Yours is the only one that’s not freezing!” she’d
screamed.
It was true that the underground could be brutally
cold during winter. But she was right: ours was the only cubby not freezing.
In fact, it was warm enough so I could take off my
coat.
So, we’d grabbed our stuff and fled, while she’d
brandished the knife at us and glowered. We’d spent a day looking for a new
space to sleep in, and finally found one, about a half mile down the tunnel.
It was another warm cubby.
I wasn’t sure I understood what was going on, but Aunt
Clare and I had spent the evening talking in whispers about it.
“Holly, sweet baby girl, you’re the reason why the
cubby was warm,” Aunt Clare had hugged
me and whispered, then put a finger to her lips. “No
one can know.”
No one can know.
I never understood this thing I did, but I did realize
that it was because of me. When I left the cubby for a long time, the
temperature slowly dropped until it was freezing.
Once, I had been gone for two days, because I got
caught in a bad deal with several people chasing me and the coppers were
around, and I just ran. I ran and ran and ran, then found an old coal chute I
could hide in. I had some food in my bag since it’d been the end of my
hunting-forfood day, so I was fine. Even though there’d been snow on the ground
outside, I was able to huddle in the three-foot space and wait it out.
It had grown warm while I crouched there, and I’d
decided to stay.
But when I finally emerged and was able to make my way
back to Aunt Clare in the cubby, I’d found her shivering and the cubby had been
freezing.
When I entered it, she’d been so happy to see me, and
had hugged me for a long time.
“You’re so warm,” she’d said through her chattering
teeth.
I thought about all these things as I ate the bread,
chewing slowly, savoring every bite.
I glanced around our little cubby. It was our world.
It was home. I always felt better when I was back home after a day of foraging
for food in the city.
Food.
It was a constant worry. I usually went to the park or
the fountain and watched people eat their lunch, waiting for one of them who
glanced at their watch, realized they were late, and tossed the last half of
their sandwich or meatpie into the trash. I was there like a flash, picking it
back out and running off as I stuffed it into my bag.
Sometimes no one threw out half-eaten food, and I had
to go hunting for something to eat. Then I’d walk down the streets and look for
stores that had food out front, displayed to entice shoppers to enter and buy.
I could often get away with grabbing an apple or
orange, a banana or a pecan pie, or a small loaf of bread without being seen.
But sometimes they saw me. That’s when I ran.
They’d never caught me, not once. It was a point of
pride.
A far-off noise rattled outside in the tunnel and
brought me back to the present.
I finished the last bite of bread and began picking
the crumbs off my coat and licking them off my fingers.
Samaire Provost grew up in a lot of
different places, and now happily resides on the
Samaire Provost grew up in a lot of
different places, and now happily resides on the
Tour
Schedule:
Week One:
10/21/2019
|
Excerpt
|
|
10/22/2019
|
Excerpt
|
|
10/23/2019
|
Excerpt
|
|
10/24/2019
|
Review
|
|
10/25/2019
|
Excerpt
|
Week Two:
10/28/2019
|
Excerpt
|
|
10/29/2019
|
Spotlight
|
|
10/30/2019
|
Review
|
|
10/31/2019
|
Review
|
|
11/1/2019
|
Review
|
Week Three:
11/4/2019
|
Review
|
|
11/5/2019
|
Spotlight
|
|
11/6/2019
|
Excerpt
|
|
11/7/2019
|
Excerpt
|
|
11/8/2019
|
Review
|
Week Four:
11/11/2019
|
Fyrekatz
Blog
|
Review
|
11/12/2019
|
Shelf-Rated
|
Review
|
11/13/2019
|
bookmark
and fork
|
Review
|
11/14/2019
|
The Hidden
Bookshelf Club
|
Spotlight
|
11/15/2019
|
Good
Choice Reading
|
Spotlight
|
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