October Drollerie Blog Tour

It's Drollerie Press blog tour time! Today I get to host the talented Angela Korra'ti, author of Faerie Blood, which is available here: http://drolleriepress.com/books/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=6&products_id=83. This post will make you want to go out and buy her book right now:

"October is of course best known for Halloween, but many of us authors at Drollerie Press only recently learned that it's also the month of a less well known holiday called Sweetest Day. The name might lead you to think that like October's more famous occasion, it could be candy-oriented; according to Wikipedia, there have certainly been criticisms that the holiday was made up mostly for an excuse to sell sweets and cards.
But despite the name, the general point of the holiday is to celebrate those who have been helpful, kind, or encouraging to us. And since we're making Sweetest Day the general theme of this month's blog tour, I did a vignette about a moment of encouragement in the life of my protagonist from _Faerie Blood_, Kendis Thompson. Hope you enjoy!

-----

Aggie Deveaux, Seattle, 1981

The scrape of a child-sized bow against the strings of a child-sized violin wasn't exactly the smoothest sound in the world. No--to be honest, Aggie had heard few more grating sounds in all of her born days, and that was saying a lot when she'd lived through volcanic eruptions and hurricanes. But she wasn't about to let on to her young niece that the noises she was making were only slightly more harmonious than the spitting of an angry cat; it was, after all, important to encourage a child to practice if she wanted to learn to play a musical instrument.
Kendis, though, had already caught on. The fumbling arpeggio cut off abruptly on a noise that could be only charitably described as B flat, only to be replaced by the girl's outraged wail. "I sound _stupid_!"
Even from the next room, that strident voice caught Aggie's ear the way the awkward practicing had not. She rose swiftly from her desk, leaving the half-balanced checkbook behind, and stepped down the hallway to the door of her niece's bedroom. "What was that you said, Kendie baby?"
At age six, Kendis wasn't a big child; there was hardly any meat at all on her little bones, and the smallest violin Aggie had been able to afford was almost too large for her. Yet there was nothing tiny about the rage brimming in her eyes, or about the tears threatening to flood down her cheeks. "I can't get it right!" she howled. "I sound STUPID!"
Violin and bow alike shook in Kendis' small hands, and Aggie blew out a breath as she stepped forward into the room. "Honey, you just go and put that fiddle down before you drop it," she said sternly. "We're paying good money to rent that, and you don't want us to have to take it back to the store broken, do you?"
Her lower lip trembling, Kendis did as Aggie bade her, and laid the instrument more or less neatly down in its case at her feet. But self-disgust still roiled across her face as she muttered towards the floor, "Maybe we oughtta take it back. 'Cause I sound stupid!"
Gentling now, Aggie scooped up the little girl and set her down upon her bed, then took a seat beside her and curled an arm around her shoulders. "You do," she admitted. Before a louder howl could erupt from Kendis, though, Aggie laid a finger across her mouth. "But it's _all right_. Do you know why, Kendie baby? Because you're just a little bitty thing with her very first violin and you're only just starting to learn. It's all right for you to not sound good yet."
Kendis scrubbed a hand across her face and then grabbed hold of one of her own pigtails, twisting it about nervously. "It's not supposed to sound like that," she countered. "All creaky and stuff! It's supposed to be pretty!"
"It will be, baby," Aggie promised. "But only if you keep practicing."
"But how do you _know_?"
At that, Aggie had to suppress a chuckle. There were many answers she could have offered--that she'd known it the instant Kendis' face had lit up the first time she heard a violin concerto over the radio, or how the music teacher at Kendis' elementary school had been startled to find a first-grader peeking into the room where the fifth-grade orchestra was playing. Then there were the answers she couldn't give, not yet--how Kendis' mother, strange and beautiful Elanna of the Sidhe, had drunk down music as though it were the very air she breathed. Or how, just over five years ago when they'd first come into the city and an old Warder woman had welcomed them in, infant Kendis had seized hold of Millicent Merriweather's tin whistle and tried to stick it in her mouth so she could play it too.
There was no other sign of Seelie blood emerging in the girl, not yet. The good Lord willing, there wouldn't be for a while. Aggie had plenty to handle just trying to be a black woman on her own with a child to raise, without that child up and turning fey on her. She wasn't at all sure what she would do when the blood the girl's mother had given her would wake up.
Until then, though, she was sure she could help Kendis find her music.
"Because I'm your auntie," she said, dropping a kiss on the youngster's pigtailed head, "and I just know."

-----

For the next stop in the Drollerie Blog Tour, swing over to Meredith Holmes' site and check out Heather Parker's post on Sweetest Day!"

Thanks, Angela!