Buried Deep and Other Stories

A thrilling collection of thirteen short stories that span the worlds of the From the dragon-filled Temeraire series and the gothic magical halls of the Scholomance trilogy, through the realms next door to • A mushroom witch who learns that sometimes the worst thing in the Scholomance can be your roommate. • The start of the Dragon Corps in ancient Rome, after Mark Antony hatches a dragon’s egg and bonds with the hatchling. • A young bride in the Middle Ages who finds herself gambling with Death for the highest of stakes. • A delightful reimagining of • The first glimpse of the world of Abandon, the setting of Novik’s upcoming epic fantasy series--a deserted continent populated only by silent and enigmatic architectural mysteries. Though the stories are vastly different, there is a unifying theme: wrestling with destiny, and the lengths some will go to find their own and fulfill its promise.

Auteur

Naomi Novik has written the Scholomance trilogy, the novels Uprooted and Spinning Silver, and the Temeraire series. She is a founder of the Archive of Our Own. Her upcoming project is called Folly.

Échantillon de lecture
Araminta, or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake

My house growing up was full of words; my mother read widely. She had a specific taste in romance novels: thin and smooth, to be drunk up like a glass of wine in the evening and the empties taken back to the used bookstore in large bags to exchange for a case of new ones, or ones that had been read long enough ago to be good to taste all over again.

The Regencies were my favorites; Heyer of course, but almost any would do, except I had violent feelings about the ones that were wrong, by which I meant the ones where the characters were modern people playing dress-­up in diaphanous muslins and riding in carriages, just pretending. Because I was interested in the rules, so inviolate and so obvious to the characters themselves, these people living inside narrow boxes, especially the women—­in the short length of these books, their world couldn’t be more real and complicated, so instead they had to believe in the rules, inhabit them, or else it didn’t feel right. And I didn’t mind if they cheated, but they had to be clever about it.

So this is a Regency story: about a world with a different set of rules, and a very good cheater.

Lady Araminta was seen off from the docks at Chenstowe-­on-­Sea with great ceremony if not much affection by her assembled family. She departed in the company of not one but two maids, a hired eunuch swordsman, and an experienced professional chaperone with the Eye of Horus branded upon her forehead, to keep watch at night while the other two were closed.

Sad to say these precautions were not entirely unnecessary. Lady Araminta—­the possessor of several other, more notable names besides, here omitted for discretion—­had been caught twice trying to climb out her window, and once in her father’s library, reading a spellbook. On this last occasion she had fortunately been discovered by the butler, a reliable servant of fifteen years, so the matter was hushed up; but it had decided her fate.

Her father’s senior wife informed her husband she refused to pay for the formal presentation to the Court necessary for Araminta to make her debut. “I have five girls to see established besides her,” Lady D—­ said, “and I cannot have them ruined by the antics which are certain to follow.”

(Lest this be imagined the fruits of an unfair preference, it will be as well to note here that Araminta was in fact the natural daughter of her Ladyship, and the others in question her daughters-­in-­marriage, rather than the reverse.)

“It has been too long,” Lady D—­ continued, severely, “and she is spoilt beyond redemption.”

Lord D—­ hung his head: he felt all the guilt of the situation, and deserved to. As a youth, he had vowed never to offer prayers to foreign deities such as Juno; and out of obstinacy he had refused to recant, so it had taken three wives and fourteen years to acquire the necessary son. Even then the boy had proven rather a disappointment: sickly and slight, and as he grew older preferring of all things literature to the manly arts of fencing or shooting, or even sorcery, which would at least have been respectable.

“But it is rather messy,” young Avery said, apologetic but unmoving, even at the age of seven: he had inherited the family trait of obstinacy, in full measure. It is never wise to offend foreign deities, no matter how many good old-­fashioned British fairies one might have invited to the wedding.

Meanwhile Araminta, the eldest, had long shown more aptitude for riding and shooting than for the cooler arts, and had a distressing tendency to gamble. Where her mother would have seen these inappropriate tendencies nipped in the bud, Lord D—­, himself a notable sportsman, had selfishly indulged the girl: he liked to have company hunting when he was required at home to do his duty to his wives—­and with three, he was required more often than not.

“It is not too much to ask that at least one of my offspring not embarrass me on the field,” had been one of his favorite remarks, when chastised; so while her peers were entering into society as polished young ladies, beginning their study of banking or medicine, Lady Araminta was confirmed only as a sportswoman of excessive skill, with all the unfortunate results heretofore described.

Something of course had to be done, so a match was hastily arranged with the colonial branch of a similarly exalted line. The rumors she had already excited precluded an acceptable marriage at home, but young men of good birth, having gone overseas to seek a better fortune than a second son’s portion, often had some difficulty acquiring suitable wives.

In those days, the journey took nearly six months, and was fraught with considerable dangers: storms and pirates both patrolled the shipping lanes; leviathans regularly pulled down ships, mistaking them for whales; and strange fevers and lunacies thrived amid the undersea forests of the Shallow Sea, where ships might find themselves becalmed for months above the overgrown ruins of the Drowned Lands.

Naturally Lady Araminta was sent off with every consideration for her safety. The Bluegill was a sleek modern vessel, named for the long, brightly painted iron spikes studded in a ridge down her keel to fend off the leviathans, and armed with no fewer than ten cannon. The cabin had three locks upon the door, the eunuch lay upon the threshold outside, the maids slept to either side of Araminta in the large bed, the chaperone had a cot at the foot; and as the last refuge of virtue she had been provided at hideous expense with a Tiresian amulet.

She was given no instruction for the last, either in its use or in how it would act to preserve the virtue in question, and only told with great emphasis to always keep it in its box and put it on only if the worst should threaten—­the worst having been described to her rather hazily by Lady D—­, who felt suspiciously that Araminta already knew a good deal too much of such things.

There were not many tears in evidence at the leave-­taking, except from Lady Ginevra, the next-oldest, who felt it was her sisterly duty to weep, though privately delighted at the chance of advancing her own debut a year. Araminta herself shed none; only said, “Well, good-­bye,” and went aboard unrepentant, having unbeknownst to all concealed a sword, a very fine pair of dueling pistols, and a most inappropriate grimoire in her dower ches…