The Chronicles of Elantra 6 - Cast in Chaos (59 page)

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Authors: Michelle Sagara

Tags: #Soldiers, #Good and Evil, #Fiction, #Fantasy fiction, #Fantasy, #General, #Secrecy, #Magic, #Romance

But Kaylin watched the blood drip toward the cobbles, and Kaylin saw that as the blood seeped between the stones, this new earth that the Maker had created in his brief passage absorbed it. And it returned blood to sunlight in an entirely different form: a red, red flower.

Mejrah, watching, had seen, as had Tiamaris and Effaron, and the old woman’s eyes did widen then, and the tears she had refused to shed fell in silence down her weathered cheeks.

She whispered a single word, and Kaylin thought she even understood it.

Home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I think by now people are aware of the debt I owe my family for more or less patiently living with and supporting me through the highs and lows of writing any novel. Both my home team—my husband, my two sons, my parents—and my away team—my Australian alpha reader and sounding board, share credit and long-suffering status in equal measure.

But I think people are less aware of the other half of any book’s team, so I’d like to mention the fabulous job that the Luna Art Director (Kathleen Oudit) and her team have done for all of the Cast novels. The overall look, the consistency of type and design, the strong sense of a contemporary tone in an otherwise entirely other-world that those covers convey have really, really, helped these books reach their audience. People sometimes assume that authors choose or design their own covers—and believe me, you are grateful in my case that this is so not true. I can’t even draw consistent stick figures.

I would also like to thank Mary-Theresa Hussey, who shepherds the book—and me!—through the various stages, from lengthy first draft to finished novel, because she is patient and perceptive, and she
gets
these books. Had she not seen something in them from the very beginning, they wouldn’t exist.

CAST IN CHAOS

ISBN: 978-1-4268-6414-8

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