Page 1 of Heartsong
Prologue
Long ago, in a time when time was kept through song and stone and crown, a desperate people did a desperate thing. When Julius Caesar stepped onto the shores of Albion, with five legions at his back, the Pritani, the Celts of the Green Isle, turned to magick to save themselves.
Their magick-weavers, the druids, called upon the magicks of Albion using a language older than man. From the earth the druids pulled great stones, carving them into mighty warriors. To give them warmth, the druids offered their own blood—and to give them life, they used ancient magick. From the stones sprang terrible creatures with wings and claws and fangs.
Fiercer than a pack of wolves and stronger than the bears that once roamed Albion, the guardians fought alongside the Pritani against Romans, Angles, and Saxons for six hundred years.
But the magick that gave life to the guardians had been stolen, ripped from the earth and the fae who imbued it there so long ago, when they were the lords of Albion. And the fae did not suffer thieves. In one terrible blow, the vicious Faerie Queen Titania attacked, stripping away the magick that gave the guardians life and rendering them stone once again.
Killed or cursed, the guardians were no more.
For over a thousand years, what remained of their kind slept in stone slumber, time passing and the human world turning around them. Relegated to the mists of myth and legend, hope faded for the guardians.
But one escaped her kin’s fate. One lived on to keep their stories and their memories alive.
Now, it is time for their story to begin again.
1
San Francisco, Present Day
With a puff of relief over her large knit scarf, Anna Kincaid hustled into the lobby of the newly renovated Milton Building. Sleek stone and an immaculate water feature with cascading ferns were the backdrop of her wide desk that faced the front doors.
Slipping behind it with her cup of piping hot macchiato—a little habit she’d picked up now that a cup of coffee wasn’t an unaffordable luxury—Anna went about her morning routine, getting ready for the day’s visitors to the new Gwyneth Collection. There was something soothing about the routine, something that helped her make baby steps every day in accepting that for once, something had gone right in her life.
If anyone had told Anna a year ago that she’d be happily sitting in a quiet museum, a genuine smile on her face for the visitors trickling in, she’d have called bullshit. With a degree in history with a focus on early-medieval England, Anna thought for sure she’d be bound for some crappy-paying admin job that slowly sucked the soul out of her. She’d resigned herself to that fate—if it paid and had benefits, she wouldn’t complain. Aloud.
Instead, Anna found herself twirling in her ergonomic chair, looking forward to the day. Just over two months ago, after years of working in minimum wage and temp positions while performing financial acrobatics to make ends meet, Anna had applied to this position on a whim. A rich, eccentric couple had spent their lives collecting statues—mostly grotesques from around the world—and had decided to share their collection with the public. Anna’s eyebrows had nearly hit her hairline in surprise while reading the job posting; it seemed too good to be true. Decent pay, not high but it had benefits and enough to pay the rent and fill the fridge. Mostly admin and front desk work mixed with docent duties. Yet the chance to work with actual history was too much temptation. That and the healthcare.
She’d promised herself she wouldn’t go another year without it. Not with how bad her migraines were getting.
So Anna had pasted on the fake smile she’d worked her life to perfect, the one she threw at family court judges and skeptical welfare agents and unyielding debt collectors, and nailed the interview. Just a few minutes in the collection made her desperate for the job, if only to stay with the amazing pieces. She swore she could feel the weight falling off her shoulders when one of the co-owners of the collection, Carrie Gwyneth, called to offer her the job the next day.
Wednesday through Sunday, she sat in her cushy chair, waiting to greet visitors to the museum. Though not affiliated with other big museums in the California Bay Area, like the MOMA or de Young, the museum still pulled in regular traffic thanks to its prime location in the Presidio. Anna was proud to help show this place off to the public—and thrilled with the steady paycheck that paid the bills, bought occasional meals out, and provided her cat Captain all the wet food he could want.
The icing on the cake was that the Gwyneth Collection was, in a word, exquisite. During her first tour of the museum with Carrie after being hired, she’d openly gawped at the exhibits. The statues transfixed her in a way nothing, not even classical statues, ever had before.
Which was a little odd. There was nothing overtly beautiful about the Gwyneth statues. Most of the collection consisted of grotesques. People mistakenly called them gargoyles—though the Gwyneths had some of those, too—but the grotesques weren’t used to divert rainwater. Instead, they were free-standing statues that had adorned this cathedral and that capitol building. Many of them were monstrous, with flashing fangs and bat-like wings. They looked like demons, or what medieval Christians must have construed demons from. Some had horns like a ram, others like an ibex. All had claws on their hands and talons on their feet. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about them was the very stone they were carved from.
Like many of the patrons who visited the Gwyneth Collection, when Anna had originally thought of gargoyles, she’d imagined dreary gray monstrosities, carved from the gray or blonde stone used for the buildings they perched on. But the Gwyneths’ came in all varieties of colors, from gray to white to a few pinks. Many looked to be cut from various shades of marble, others limestone or granite, and she swore one was hewn from an enormous block of obsidian.
Her favorite piece of the collection, however, wasn’t one of the marble statues, not even the obsidian behemoth. No, her grotesque was a dark slate gray with veins of white and gold running through him, and sometimes Anna wondered if it was real gold striating his chest and arms. The statue had been rendered as a creature readying to attack. So many of the pieces crouched or had their wings unfurled, as if already in the heat of battle. Hers stood with knees slightly bent, wings just starting to unfurl. His arms flexed, claws extended. Ready for whatever came.
A familiar blush crept over Anna’s face at the thought of calling the statuehimandher statue. It felt wrong to be so proprietary over a hunk of rock, especially one she didn’t and would never own. Still, whenever people gathered around her gray warrior, ogling and taking pictures and tittering over him, Anna felt an inexplicable wave of jealousy. Which was silly. Absolutely nuts.
“Good morning, Anna.”
Anna smiled up at her boss and co-owner of the exhibit, Carrie Gwyneth. Carrie was one of those women who could’ve been a mature thirty or a young fifty; she had that ethereal quality to her, skin luminous and blonde hair always in place. She didn’t wear any makeup aside from a swipe of lipstick and mascara that Anna could see, and her nails were always perfectly manicured points. She was curvy, almost plump, and a little taller than average height, but the way she carried herself, she could’ve been one of those tall leggy early Hollywood stars, flouncing across a movie set.
With her regal air and color-coordinated pantsuits, Carrie could’ve come across as intimidating and cold; instead, she was one of the warmest, kindest people Anna had ever met. If a little odd.
“Morning. The new brochures arrived last night and they look great. I think the new graphic designer is going to work out,” she chirped, still not totally used to this peppy person who now inhabited her body. She was used to quips and sarcasm and giving the world the middle finger because that’s all it’d ever given her. Was this who she was when she was content? It was a strange feeling.
Carrie smiled, the hazel-gold of her eyes glimmering. She took the offered brochure, unfolding the paper to look at the high-res pictures they’d had a freelance designer come and take last month. Anna thought they showed all the photographed statues to the best effect, especially her gray warrior. She might be biased, though.
Carrie hummed in pleasure. “These are wonderful,” she said, letting loose a trace of the lyrical accent Anna just couldn’t place. The best she could determine was British but that didn’t quite fit. It wasn’t the posh accent of period dramas, nor the thicker northern accents. The Gwyneths said they came from Wales, but Anna didn’t think that fit, either.
“Very good lighting and angles,” Anna agreed.
