Welcome to Reality! Today is release day for the first book in my new fantasy series, Uncertain Sanctuary. For anyone who has ever dreamed of new worlds and their own castle, this is for you: The House That Walked Between Worlds.

Buy link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083ZNMK34

A tornado of chaos is tearing through Reality and in its path is the newest House, a bleak and forbidding fortress built of magic and grief by the most unlikely of sorcerers, a human.

A reckless act of compassion costs Dr. Kira Aist her family and her future on Earth. To escape her enemies, she calls on her heritage as a descendant of Baba Yaga and walks between worlds.

As Kira roams the paths of Reality, strangers are drawn to her House. Some seek refuge, some seek power, and one just wants kitty treats.

With the fate of multiple worlds hanging in the balance, Kira must discover what it means to be a sorcerer and the keeper of a House.

The House That Walked Between Worlds is a compelling and original fantasy novel of multiple worlds and beguiling mystery in the tradition of Ursula Le Guin and Diana Wynne Jones.

Excerpt

A lesser witch would have used a dowsing rod to locate the essential component of the world walking spell. Perhaps she’d have chosen to employ a wishbone from a turkey, on the premise that like calls to like. Then she’d have dug for hours with a shovel. No heavy machinery could reach this remote, steep-sided valley in New Zealand’s South Island.

I wasn’t a lesser witch. I was a grieving, furious, self-loathing, murderous witch. Having hiked into the valley in which the moa bones lay buried, I yanked them out of the earth with raw magic and temper.

The dirt belched up two pairs of massive leg bones that landed on the tussock grass.

Rain drummed on the hood of my blue jacket and ran down my face like tears.

Lessons two decades old had me moving the bones into place: one fossilized leg at each corner of the square.

Baba Yaga had taught me with the legs from two freshly butchered chickens. After the lesson was done, we’d plucked the carcasses. That had been a messy process of sticky feathers everywhere. My babushka had welcomed the addition to the stewpot, but not the blood and skin caught under my nails. She’d scrubbed them ruthlessly with a nailbrush, repeating her practiced lecture on hygiene.

Five centuries older, Baba Yaga muttered about such nonsensical ideas. “The child’s a witch, oh fussy one. She won’t die of dirt.”

“It’s blood, Baba Yaga, not dirt,” my father’s mother corrected our ancestor. “And Kira will live as an ordinary human.” She turned her stern blue eyes on me. “Remember, Kira. You must never use magic. No one can know you are a witch.”

The old women bickered then. Baba Yaga criticized Babushka for teaching me to fear part of myself. Babushka, having grown up in the Soviet Union, argued that caution and hiding one’s differences kept a person alive.

“Pah!” Spit flew with Baba Yaga’s explosive disgust. “The child has more magic than you. Let the wolves learn to fear her.”

“It’s not wolves we must worry about.” Babushka dried my hands, then hers. She was a doctor in the remote Siberian city that my parents had fled as teenagers in the 1980s. Her hands were always scrupulously clean. “It is rats. Vermin. They hide in the shadows and grow in numbers. They can take down the strongest person because they take them unawares. Kira’s a good girl. She knows not to attract their attention. They would eat her alive for her magic.”

Babushka meant well, but her grim teaching instilled in me a phobia of rats. I understood that she meant the rats as a metaphor for power-hungry people, but I dreamed of wriggly noses, sharp teeth and claws, and ugly, hairless tails.

Babushka would be so angry at me, now; looking down from heaven and sighing at how my arrogance had gotten people killed.

Mom and Dad.

Little Tahlia.

The three enemies I’d massacred.

I blew on my hands. The tips of my fingers were white with cold. Bloodless. I rubbed them together, feeling the roughness of the grains of sand sticking to them.

Baba Yaga had told me that when I needed to run, my House—and it had been House with a capital “H”—would know where to go. “Just call it to life, Vnuchka.” Granddaughter. “But you need the legs of the giant birds. They will allow you to walk between worlds.”

She’d found her fossils in Siberia when spring floods had collapsed a riverbank. She’d been a bone witch, long ago. According to her story, the bones had called to her with the song of the stars.

I’d found my valley of moa bones by dowsing a map of New Zealand, using Babushka’s thin and worn wedding ring dangling from a strand of my hair.

The bones of ancient, massive birds had been discovered around the world, from the giants of the Crimea to the so-called Demon Duck of Doom found in Australia (Dromornis planei). Not all were the bones of world walkers, but I could feel the magic in these.

I took a deep breath.

Mom always said that revenge was regret turned outward, and to let it go.

If I stayed on Earth, I would fight the rats until they overwhelmed me and ate me alive.

I couldn’t permit them to access my magic. Running, now, wasn’t cowardice. It was about owning and correcting my mistakes.

Living with the consequences of my actions meant exile.

“The magic will make your House,” Baba Yaga had said. “Once the bones are in position, one at each corner so that the House can walk, you tell the magic that you want your House. Earth has very little magic, but there is enough for my vnuchka.”

I’d felt the magic five days ago and reveled in it, satisfied by what I’d wrought. Then I’d felt it a day ago and been too late.

Now, I called every bit of magic I could and said the simple words Baba Yaga had taught me. They weren’t a spell. They were a focus for my intent.

“I want my House.”

I’d positioned the fossilized leg bones in approximation of my memory of Baba Yaga’s one-room log cabin. Maybe I’d remembered it as larger than it was, but I’d placed the bones eighteen feet apart.

The House didn’t think that was large enough.

The leg and foot bones fused and grew, finally stopping when they’d grown enormous scales and claws. They resembled dragon legs more than that of any bird I’d ever seen. And if dragons existed, then this was the sort of home you’d imagine for them.

My House crowded the valley. Rain ran down smoothly jagged, black obsidian walls. It was immense; far too big to view it from a single vantage point. Its towers obscured the sky.

The legs crouched as a stone staircase unfolded toward me. The invitation was unmistakable.

I climbed the steps. My thigh muscles shook with the strain. I’d hiked in over steep mountain trails, and then, across open country. I needed rest and food and to be out of the weather.

Before me, a grand double door swung open. Warm air gusted out, smelling of coffee and cinnamon and freshly baked bread.

Behind me, the rain turned to sleet and fell like a curtain across the end of the valley. The wind tore at my hood. I grabbed for it with hands grown clumsy from the cold. I’d forgotten to put my gloves back on. Now, I smeared dirt over my jacket and the side of my face.

I’d anticipated a future in a tiny log cabin where my worst problem would be locating the bathroom facilities. Instead, I was faced with a dragon’s castle. How…why had the magic given me this?

All I wanted was a dark corner to crawl into.

But I had called this House into existence. Refuge or risk, it was mine. I walked in, and the great doors slammed shut behind me.

Read now: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083ZNMK34