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.Evelina meets the Abbess and is impressed by the woman’s power.Evelina can see herself in that role quite easily.Sure, she’ll have to act the part, but she’s used to acting.Meekly, Evelina folds her hands and kneels down to pray.EPILOGUEDraconas appears before the Parliament.The dragons have been thrown into chaos.Three of their number are dead, including their leader.Tales of half-dragons and humans who have dragon magic, stories of humans fighting dragons and winning, has sent the Parliament into a state of shock.Draconas tries to reason with them, but some of the dragons want to immediately declare war on the humans.Other dragons furiously oppose them and swear that they will go to war against their kin if that happens.Draconas realizes that he can do nothing.No one is listening.The Parliament of Dragons disbands.War is declared among dragon kind.Draconas changes back to his dragon form, deeply saddened, for he realizes that the world teeters on the brink of a war that could prove devastating to both human and dragons.He and Lysira depart, hoping to do what they can to avert this catastrophe.***Judith Tarr(photo by Lori Faith Merritt)Judith Tarr’s first epic fantasy novel, The Hall of the Mountain King, appeared in 1986.Her YA time-travel science fiction/fantasy/historical novel, Living in Threes, appeared as an ebook from Book View Café in 2012, and will debut in print this fall.Her new novel, a space opera, will be published by Book View Cafe in 2015.In between, she’s written historicals and historical fantasies and epic fantasies, some of which have been reborn as ebooks from Book View Café* and audiobooks from Audible**.She lives in Arizona with an assortment of cats, two dogs, and a herd of Lipizzaner horses.When I was in graduate school, my professors often despaired of me.I was a fair to middling scholar, but too often, rather than focusing on proper and academically correct historical or literary analysis, I was likely to take a single line from one of our good grey sources and spin it into a story.His Majesty’s Elephant was one such story.By now my seminar papers and even my doctoral dissertation are forgotten, but this small excursion into a different world is still in print and still drawing in the occasional reader.—Judith TarrProposal: His Majesty’s Elephant(YA Fantasy Novel: 50,000 words)By Judith TarrHis Majesty’s Elephant is Abul Abbas, gift of the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid to his friend the Emperor Charlemagne.Along with him, history tells us, came many other wonders, including a golden Talisman containing a fragment of the True Cross.This talisman was found by Napoleon, according to tradition, on the breast of the Emperor in his tomb, and hangs now, a gleam of gold at the end of a long corridor, in the Tau Palace in Rheims.This much is history, or at least interesting tradition.Suppose that the Talisman was more, and that the Elephant had a part in its magic.As the novel begins, the Emperor’s daughter attends the high court in the newly built palace of her father in Aachen.Her name is Theoderada.When she was young, one of her father’s more fanciful poets gave all the princesses pretty nicknames, and hers, by which everyone knows her, is Rowan.Rowan is not quite fifteen.Her mother, who has been dead since she was a child, was known as a witch, but Rowan does not want to believe the stories.She calls them malice and envy, and harbors dislike of the Empress’ strong will and firm ways.Her father is indulgent to all his many daughters, except in one thing: He will not let them marry.Too many bulls in a herd, he likes to say, are not wise husbandry.His daughters react variously to this prohibition.Most have lovers, and even children.Gisela, the Emperor’s favorite of all his daughters and commonly agreed to be the beauty of the family, has inclinations toward the cloister, but her father will not let her go.Rowan herself wants chiefly to be away from the crowding and the intrigues of the court.She loves to ride and to hunt, but she has no desire to be a boy or to learn the warrior’s arts.She is not called to the religious life.She thinks that maybe she could be a plain man’s wife, and keep his house and bear his children, and be happy as simple women and princesses can seldom be.On this day of Pentecost in the year of Our Lord 802, she stands with her sisters and their women, watching the presentation of the Caliph’s gifts to the Emperor of the West.The elephant astounds and delights her.The Talisman disturbs her.As soon as she comfortably can, she slips away to see the elephant [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]