Once upon a time . . . that’s how the old stories always begin.Once upon a time there was a king of a fallen kingdom. He was just and he was beloved. Or so the numbers said. One day, he gathered together the greatest, wisest minds in all the land—not sorcerers, but scientists—and he bade them fashion him a son. A prince. A perfect prince to embody his father’s legacy.
The scientists each brought the prince a gift: beauty, strength, ambition, intellect, pride. But they must have forgotten something because when he saw the mermaids dance at the Cirque de la Mer, he ran away to join them.
For a year, he trained them, performed with them, thought he was happy. For a year he thought he was free. But then Nerites came: A merman who refused to be tamed. A captive from another kingdom. A beast in a glass cage.
The old stories always end with happy ever after. But this isn’t one of the old stories. This is a story of princes and monsters.
*Warning, reader discretion advise this title contains depictions of extreme violence *
Grab your copy of Sand & Ruin & Gold from Riptide Publishing today!
A note from the author...
Hello, and welcome to my fourth ever blog tour (I really do have to stop counting), celebrating
Riptide Publishing’s release of Sand and Ruin and Gold. Yay! Thank you so much to this site for
hosting me, and, to you, dear reader, for stopping by. If you’d like to come with me and keep me
company on my virtual wanderings, you can find a full listing of when and where I am here on
Riptide’s tour page.
Oh, and there’s a giveaway. Nothing very dramatic I’m afraid, as I don’t have any mermaids in my
possession right now, but if you want to enter the Rafflecopter below, I’d be delighted to offer a
book from my backlist, in either hard or soft copy.
An excerpt from Sand & Ruin & Gold {excerpt may contain content not suitable for anyone under the age of 18}
I must have been very young when I saw the mermaids at the Cirque de la Mer because it was my nurse who took me, and her place in my life was soon surrendered to tutors. I don’t think my father ever found out. He would not have approved.
The day is little more than a sensory haze of pastel children, the laughter of strangers, and the burn of salt and chemicals at the back of my throat.
The mermaids, though. They are as vivid as stained glass, even now.
There were three I saw perform—Neaera, Arethusa, Ianessa—though it was for Neaera that the crowd went wild. She was the number one attraction, her image on every poster, shining, beautiful, and perfectly iconic: copper skin, burnished golden scales, the untamed waves of her dark-green hair. I didn’t know, then, that she was the cirque’s seventh Neaera.
It is that particular combination of hair and skin and scales, at least according to market research, that best meets our ideal image of a mermaid.
And it’s right.
She was sun and sky and flame that day.
And I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful, or so free.
I was young. I didn’t know any better.
When I turned eighteen, I ran away from home to join the cirque.
***
I had tried at fourteen, and sixteen, but they always brought me back. I never told anyone where I was going or why. I never told them about the mermaids.
My father was bewildered. He had hired the best geneticians in the country to create me. I was supposed to be flawless, and when he returned me to the lab, once, twice, three times, they assured him I was.
I was. I am.
Everything he coded into me is there. Everything that should have made me just like him.
But something got into my heart that day at the cirque. A piece of grit, love, or beauty, or hope. Words we didn’t use so much anymore.
I thought you would need special knowledge or advanced training, perhaps some kind of background in marine biology, to be allowed to work with the Mer. But, no, all you need is the desire and—I would learn later—the ability to look good in a wetsuit, and I possessed all those things. My father was vain enough to make me an ideal in ways beyond the merely intellectual.
I didn’t know if the years had changed the Cirque de la Mer, or if they had changed me, but it was strange at first to see beyond the veil of enchantment to dingy pools and peeling paint, grey concrete beneath a grey sky, in the empty times after closing when there was no laughter left. But, in some ways, that was when I liked it best, when it was ours again—we who waited when everyone else went home.
You have to understand, we did it all for love. We offered these glimpses of glorious things, too dazzled ourselves to see the truth of what we did. And the crowds flocked.
I worked without particular affiliation at first, going wherever I was needed, doing whatever I was told—scrubbing buckets, cleaning tanks and filters, injecting the necessary vitamins and antibiotics into the frozen fish that were delivered daily in huge crates. But whenever I could, I watched the mermaids, learned their names, their ways. Neaera who would sometimes lie with her head in her trainer’s lap, letting her comb the tangles from her mane. Tempestuous Arethusa who had skin of lapis lazuli and hair the colour of moonlight. Ianessa, slighter and shyer than the others, whose blushes were as pale as cherry blossom. And then there was Taras, Neaera’s son, who was her shining, golden shadow. Everyone loved to see them perform, mother and child together, breaking the blue-green water into diamonds as they leapt for the sun.
Those were good seasons, before Taras grew too restless and had to be taken away.
To read the entire excerpt click here.
Alexis Hall was born in the early 1980s and still thinks the twentyfirst century is the future. To this day, he feels cheated that he lived through a fin de siècle but inexplicably failed to drink a single glass of absinthe, dance with a single courtesan, or stay in a single garret. He can neither cook nor sing, but he can handle a seventeenth century smallsword, punts from the proper end, and knows how to hotwire a car. He lives in southeast England, with no cats and no children, and fully intends to keep it that way.
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The book sounds so good and the cover art is so beautiful!
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