Books by Catherine Mintz

There was a shrill, savage hooting. I leaped and looked around, as everyone surged away from it, staring and pointing-at me? I hadn't been doing anything strange. At something above me? I looked up to find a com floating-out of my reach-overhead, its suspensory field drawing my hair crackling up and sideways. I'd never taken a message on one and couldn't imagine who would be calling me, or why. Straining up on my toes, trying to reach while looking nonchalant, I felt my pulse hammer in my ears. It was just too high. I settled back with a thump, flat-footed in my new, stiff boots. The three books of The Companionates-River of Night, Tide of Day, and Ocean of Dawn-in one volume.

A vortex of flecks of fire, a fuego fantasma, forms in the street beyond me and drifts toward the noise of the plaza, trailing glittering debris. Through the cloth of my dress, I touch the copper sun hanging at my breast and stand, shivering, shoulders against the quinta wall, one cheek pressed against the fine shuck-work of the basket on my shoulder. The sweet scent of death-fragrant oils, wine, spices, and precious woods-eddies up our street. I shiver, and draw my veil over my face with my free hand. Tonight a fortune will be burned so it may go to the dead lands with the alcalde, Leon Ildefonso, the ruler of our town. In the distance, I can hear the funeral crowd roar, then roar again. They have lighted the pyre, its smoke and sparks turn the sky into glowing lizard skin. Drifting against the wind, a cloud of fantasmas, brighter than the dull red moons, speckles everything below them with lurid light.... No one is interested in me: time to go.