Modern Ink Society Featuring Marissa Meyer

September 23, 2015

FEATURING GUEST

Marissa Meyer

A Teaser from FAIREST

Welcome to the twenty-second session of

THE MODERN INK SOCIETY!

“Don’t be afraid of being different,

be afraid of being the same

as everyone else.”

— Unknown

Introducing the lovely

Marissa Meyer

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A Teaser from FAIREST

SHE WAS LYING ON A BURNING PYRE, HOT COALS BENEATH

her back. White sparks ﬂoated in her vision but the mercy of

unconsciousness wouldn’t come. Her throat was hoarse from screaming.

The smell of her own burning ﬂesh invaded her nostrils. Smoke stung her

eyes. Blisters burbled across her skin, and entire swaths of ﬂesh peeled

away, revealing raw tissue underneath.

The pain was relentless, the agony never ending. She pleaded

for death, but it never came.

She reached out with her good hand, trying to drag her body from

the ﬁre, but the bed of coals crushed and col- lapsed under her weight,

burying her, dragging her deeper into the embers and the smoke.

Through the haze she caught a glimpse of kind eyes. A warm

smile. A ﬁnger curled toward her. Come here, baby sister . . .

Levana gasped and jolted upward, limbs tangled in heavy

blankets. Her sheets were damp and cold from her sweat, but her

skin was still burning hot from the dream.

Her throat felt scratched raw. She struggled to swallow, but her saliva

tasted like smoke and made her cringe. She sat in the faint morning

light shuddering, trying to will away the nightmare. The same

nightmare that had plagued her for too many years, that she could

never seem to escape.

She rubbed her hands repeatedly over her arms and sides

until she was certain the ﬁre wasn’t real. She was not burning alive.

She was safe and alone in her chambers.

With a trembling breath, she scooted to the other side of the mattress,

away from the sweat-stained sheets, and lay back down. Afraid to close

her eyes, she stared up at the can- opy and practiced her slow breathing

until her heartbeat steadied.

She tried to distract herself by planning who she would be that day.

A thousand possibilities ﬂoated before her. She would be

beautiful, but there were many types of beauty. Skin tone, hair texture,

the shape of one’s eyes, the length of a neck, a well-placed freckle, a

certain grace in the way one walked.

Levana knew a great deal about beauty, just as she knew a great

deal about ugliness.

• 4 •

Then she remembered that today was the funeral.

She groaned at the thought. How exhausting it would be to hold a

glamour all day long, in front of so many. She didn’t

want to go, but she would have no choice.

It was an inconvenient day for her focus to be shaken by nightmares.

Perhaps it would be best to choose something familiar.

As the dream receded into her subconscious, Levana toyed

with the idea of being her mother that day. Not as Queen Jannali

had been when she died, but perhaps as a ﬁfteen-year-old version of

her. It would be a sort of homage to attend the funeral wearing her

mother’s cheekbones and the vivid violet eyes that everyone knew

were glamour- made, though no one would have dared say so aloud.

She spent a few minutes imagining what her mother might

have looked like at her age, and she let the glamour settle over her.

Moon-blonde hair sleekly pulled into a low knot. Skin as pale as a

sheet of ice. A little shorter than she would become full grown. Pale

pink lips, so as not to detract from the vibrancy of those eyes.

It calmed her, sinking into the glamour. But no sooner had she

tested the look than she felt the wrongness of it.

She did not want to go to her parents’ funeral in the garb of a girl-

now-dead.

• 5 •

A tap ﬂuttered at the door, interrupting her thoughts.

Levana sighed, and quickly fell into another costume that she’d

dreamed up days before. Olive skin, a graceful

slope to her nose, and raven-black hair cut adorably short. She shifted

through a few eye colors before landing on a striking gray-blue,

topped off with smoldering black lashes.

Before she could second-guess herself, she embedded a silver

jewel into the ﬂesh beneath her right eye.

A teardrop. To prove that she was in mourning.

“Come in,” she called, opening her eyes.

A servant entered carrying a breakfast tray. The girl curtsied

in the doorway, not lifting her gaze from the ﬂoor— which rendered

Levana’s glamour unnecessary—before approaching the bed.

“Good morning, Your Highness.”

Sitting up, Levana allowed the servant to set the tray across her

lap and tuck a cloth napkin around her. The ser- vant poured jasmine tea

into a hand-painted porcelain cup that had been imported from Earth

several generations ago, and garnished it with two small mint leaves and a

drizzle of honey. Levana said nothing as the servant uncovered a tray of

tiny cream-ﬁlled pastries, so that Levana could see what they looked like

whole, before using a silver knife to saw them into even tinier bite-

size pieces. While the servant worked, Levana eyed the dish of

bright-colored fruits: a

• 6 •

soft-fuzzed peach set into a halo of black and red berries, all dusted with

powdered sugar.

“Is there anything else I can bring for you, Your High-

ness?”

“No, that will be all. But send the other one up in twenty minutes to

prepare my mourning dress.”

“Of course, Your Highness,” she answered, although they both knew

there was no other one. Every servant in the pal- ace was the other one.

It didn’t matter to Levana who the girl sent up, so long as whoever it

was could properly stitch her into the sleek gray gown the seamstress

had delivered the day before. Levana didn’t want to bother with

glamouring her dress today in addition to her face, not with so

many other thoughts in her head.

With another curtsy, the servant ducked out of the room, leaving

Levana to stare down at her breakfast tray. Only now did she realize

how very un-hungry she was. There was an ache in her stomach, perhaps

left over from the hor- rible dream. Or she supposed it could have been

sadness, but that was doubtful.

She felt no great loss at the death of her parents, who had been

gone now for half the long day. Eight artiﬁcial nights. Their deaths

were terribly gory. They were assassi- nated by a shell who used his

invincibility against the Lunar gift to sneak into the palace. The man

had shot two royal

• 7 •

guards in the head before making his way to her parents’ bedroom on

the third ﬂoor, killing three more guards, and slitting her mother’s throat

so deeply the knife severed part of her spine. He had then gone down the

hallway to where her father was lying with one of his mistresses and

stabbed him sixteen times in the chest.

The mistress was still screaming, blood spurts across her face,

when two royal guards found them.

The shell murderer was still stabbing.

Levana had not seen the bodies, but she had seen the bedrooms

the next morning, and her ﬁrst thought was that all that blood

would make for a very pretty rouge on her lips.

A huge thanks to Marissa for sharing some a teaser from Fairest! I’m hooked already! If you’d like to learn more about Marissa Meyer and check out her books, you can go to her website, at www.marissameyer.com.

Also, don’t forget to join Marissa and Colleen for a LIVE CHAT on GOODREADS on September 29th!

~Till next time,

Linda Louise

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Colleen Houck

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Modern Ink Society Featuring Marissa Meyer

September 23, 2015

“Don’t be afraid of being different,

be afraid of being the same

as everyone else.”

Introducing the lovely

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