Editorial Sample · Literary Fantasy
A short look inside
A brief editorial passage, rendered in the same prose the book holds itself to. The full novel opens with a much longer dedication, then a chapter called The Trade.
The first map Iliana made under her grandmother's eye was of a country she had never visited, in a language her grandmother never taught her, on a piece of paper that turned out to be a single sheet from the inside back of a book no one in the family could later find. She was nine. The country had no name anyone in her grandmother's generation could pronounce; her grandmother pronounced it anyway, perfectly, every weekday morning, into a teacup that had gone cold sometime during the previous spring and never came back to temperature.
What Iliana remembered, and would remember for the rest of her life, was not the country but the fact that her grandmother had been willing to remember it on a schedule, and that the schedule had produced a map. It is a small thing to be taught a craft. It is a different thing, and possibly a stranger one, to be taught that a craft can be practiced in defense of something that no longer exists.
The book came later. The country came later. The fact of having drawn the country came first, and stayed.