A Gift from the Merlee

By Katherine Roberts

A short fantasy tale from the award winning author of Song Quest.

Meet the merlee whose songs have power over the sea in this original story set in the world of the Echorium Sequence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katherine Roberts
• Release date: Dec 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393255659

Katherine Roberts

Katherine Roberts grew up in the southwest of England, where her first fantasy stories were told to her little brother at bedtime. She graduated in mathematics from the University of Bath, after which she worked for the General Electric Company, and later for an American company developing business models for petrol stations. When redundancy struck in 1989, she fulfilled her childhood dream of working with horses in a National Hunt racing yard, writing in her spare time. After several years of writing short fantasy and horror stories for genre magazines, her first book Song Quest won the 2000 Branford Boase Award for best debut novel for young readers, kick-starting her career as an author. Her books have been published by HarperCollins, Chicken House and Scholastic US, and translated into 12 languages worldwide – one of them even hit the bestseller list in Taiwan. Her latest series for young readers, The Pendragon Legacy about King Arthur’s daughter, is published in the UK by Templar Books. Away from her computer, Katherine enjoys folk music, cycling, skiing, and horse riding holidays. She has flown a glider solo and scared herself silly doing aerobatics in a small plane. All of these experiences eventually find their way into her books – though sometimes the horse becomes a unicorn, and the plane becomes a dragon!

Book preview

This is essentially a story about mermaids, but I was determined to have male mer-creatures, as well as female ones, in my fantasy world. The half human merlee have the gift of singing silver out of the sea, and the deliberately mysterious arics are warriors trained to fight with both body and mind. When I wrote this story, I had no idea that the merlee would have such an important part to play in my debut novel Song Quest, nor that they would be joined in the Echorium trilogy by other half human creatures, such as the half bird quetzal, to raise the question of whether such creatures should be treated as human or animal (or, in this case, fish)... what do you think?

~ 1 ~

So where does a simple fisherman get a ring like this?

The whisper came unexpectedly out of the dusk, dragging buried dreams out of Ceri’s head before he had a chance to resist. Perhaps dreams were, after all, the only way of dealing with what the aric thrust so brutally under his nose – not only the ring Ceri had made for his beloved Iscalia but, curled in its silvery embrace still, a single small white finger...

Under Ceri’s feet, the wooden slats of the jetty creaked and swayed, slamming his boat against its neighbours. Lines strained, wind charms sang from the tops of masts, and something rolled across the deck behind him. Leaking float, said the dull, practical part of his mind. He had been about to mend it when the aric had interrupted him with that flash of enforced memory.

Iscalia. Running to meet him, as she had