An Excerpt of Sorts

I haven't been blogging much lately because we STILL don't have our laptop back, the one my daughter broke a week and a half ago.

I don't usually post excerpts from my WIP (and, strictly speaking, what I'm about to post isn't an excerpt). But I'm part of an online community that has a weekly drabble challenge. Each Sunday the moderator posts a topic, usually a word or phrase but sometimes an image, and if you're inspired by it you write a 100-word story, poem, essay, etc. about it. (Opinions differ on whether it has to be exactly 100 words. I'm not a purist and will post anything from 90 to 110 or so, but the drabble below happens to come in right at 100.)

This week's topic is "transformation," and it got me thinking about key moments for each of my main characters--the moments where their world shifts, or they accept the challenge to change the world. So I'm trying to distill those change moments down to 100 words and write them so they make sense without the epic context of the story.

Anyway, without further ado, here's the first one. I haven't written the scene surrounding this yet--it's from somewhere near the climax of Book 2, and I'm only halfway through Book 1:

If This Be Treason

An island castle in a mountain-ringed lake. The land where her ancestors’ bones rest, the hearthside where she learned of Gordon courage and loyalty.

Now her loyalties divide her. Stay and be true to family and heritage, but betray the war-leader who trusts her, the queen to whom she pledged fealty, and the friend she loves more than a brother.

If she leaves this valley now she can never return.

He’s watching her—her friend the Sassenach soldier. She can see he’ll understand, and forgive her, if she stays.

“Hurry,” she says. “If we ride fast, we can warn them.”