to find Arlynia

Fayrawey Castle, a novel by Laura Peters.

teaser:
The great gryphon is awake. Things are going to start happening, but maybe the prophesies won't be quite as safe and predictable as the scholars expect.

excerpt:
In that single moment, a flash of moonlight stamped an image forever in Matilda’s heart. The moon moved beyond a cloud, and a moon-beam lit a path through the window to Myrtle who was held tightly in the princess’s arms. The image was fixed.

“The doll is a scry,” Matilda thought the words. Her thoughts fell flat, like dull things spoken in a room with heavy, humid air. Her brain fought to think again, “a scry,” and once she grasped the thought, Matilda wished only to let it go. She looked at the doll in horror, riveted by realizing the truth.

“Very powerful,” Matilda thought that realization too, and then she forced herself to concentrate on gently lifting the doll from the princess’s arms, but Alys woke and hugged the doll more closely.

Matilda was careful. It could be dangerous, she knew, to pull a scry from the one it fastened on, and as Matilda soon learned, whether dangerous or not, it was nearly impossible.

She hid the doll a hundred different places, and yet the princess found it every time. If the doll was hidden far from the nursery, perhaps in the stables, the princess wanted to ride her pony, and when she returned from her ride, she carried the doll. If it was hidden somewhere the princess could never reach, say the bottom of the kitchen servants’ garderobe cistern shaft, it was somehow found by someone else and returned, freshly washed and clean as new, to the princess.