Mosaic Garden: Stories from Aspermonde

By Wendy Palmer

Collection of six short stories set in Aspermonde, the world of Bastard's Grace and Six Feet of Ridiculous (the Mosaic Virus Duology). Features some new points of view, and both new and recurring characters. They can work as standalone as a taste of the world, or they can be read in conjunction with the books.

The Mosaic Auction: Augusta goes to buy her family a Mosaic. Things take a turn.
The Prince's Run (also appears in Bastard's Grace): Simon takes on a challenge to save his brothers.
Count the Failures: Hal muses on the past in a dying man's sickroom.
The Eastern Trade Mission: Alia deals with a traitor and the world's most blatant assassin.
The Button Game: It's a quiet camp and the soldiers are entertaining themselves.
Tactical Error: Hal makes several increasingly poor decisions in regards to his nemesis Prince Tristan.

Content warning: the last story contains explicit m/m sex scenes with forced/dubious consent. Easy to skip if not to your taste.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Winterbourne Publishing
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215794234

Wendy Palmer

Wendy Palmer lives in Bridgetown, Western Australia with her partner, son, dogs, goats, alpacas, bees and chickens. She's patted tigers, ridden elephants, dog-sledded across glaciers, faced down lions in the Serengeti, swum with whale sharks, and camped in the Sahara, but she not-so-secretly prefers curling up with a good book.She writes fantasy fiction with entertaining characters, enjoyably perilous adventures, romantic entanglements, some dark undertones, but always happy, hopeful endings.

Book preview

Mosaic Garden

Stories from Aspermonde

Wendy Palmer

A blue and black logo Description automatically generated

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Mosaic Garden: Stories from Aspermonde. Copyright © 2021 by Wendy Palmer. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Please support the author by purchasing only authorised electronic editions and not participating in or encouraging electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

ISBN 123-0-0065898-1-3. First published in 2021 by Winterbourne Publishing.

The Fell Types are digitally reproduced by Igino Marini. www.iginomarini.com

The Mosaic Auction

Three months before Bastard’s Grace

Death was a tedious business. Augusta sat and waited for her father to give up the last breath he hoarded. Her sister sat on his other side, holding his dry hand, stroking his dry forehead.

‘We could buy him an orange.’ Lily’s voice was low and she did not look at Augusta. ‘He might eat that.’

‘We can’t spare it.’ They’d already spent too much on the charlotte-candy to make his nights bearable. They could not afford to also make his days bearable.

Lily took on the sallow tightness of the dying man but she did not answer. Augusta turned her face away from the accusation tainting her sister’s luminous eyes.

The silence weighed on her. Her father could not speak, her sister refused to. She rose and crossed into the other room. She slipped the sockful of money out of its drawer and into the pocket of her starched apron.

‘Are you going?’ Lily stood in the doorway, clasping her elbows. ‘Now?’

Augusta glanced around their bare home. The scarred-topped table, the dresser displaying her meagre pottery collection, the threadbare couch, the cot by the fire in easy reach of the reeking sickroom, the odds and ends of their small lives.

It was all very clean. They had that. She went to the front door.

‘What if he dies while you’re gone?’ Lily’s voice had risen towards shrillness, though they had both promised they would no longer argue. The decision had been made. ‘Have you even thought about that?’

‘I can’t miss the registration,’ Augusta said. Lily took a step towards her and she jerked back, fearing a snatch at the sock. ‘You know I have to do this, Lily, we agreed!’

‘I never agreed,’ said Lily, as if she would cry.

It was dishonest of her to deny it, and just as dishonest for Augusta to insist it was true. So she let the silence be a barrier once again, and turned to go.

Lily was crying now, bitterly. ‘It’s a god-chewed trade, Augusta.’

‘I know,’ she said, and opened the front door. Cold air gusted in and took her words away.

Lily used the wind to fly across the room and catch her sun-browned wrist. ‘Please. Don’t go, Augusta. Let’s use the money to buy him oranges before he dies.’

And then he will still be dead, and we will have less than nothing. She could not speak such harshness to her sister’s soft and frightened face. ‘How will we eat, once he’s gone?’

‘Our embroidery will feed us until I marry.’ Lily’s hand on her wrist twisted as she said it. ‘I can make a good marriage, dowry worth a queen or none at all.’

Her voice broke on the last word and she hid her eyes from Augusta. The spectre of Nolan, the man behind her intention, darkened the space between them as they stood together on their scrubbed granite stoop.

‘No.’ Augusta gently drew her wrist from her sister’s witch-like clasp. ‘I will attend the auction, I will win the best we can afford with my deposit, and then we will have dowry enough to convince Ton’s father that you are a match for his only son.’

She dangled the boy before her sister, to smooth the lines from her face and sweep away the shadow cast by Nolan.

The wind teased Lily’s soft blond hair from her braid and put colour into her pale cheeks. ‘We will make so much profit?’

‘No.’ Augusta was unwilling to lie outright but Lily did begin to demand it. ‘Not this time, not now prices have already risen so much.’

Fretson down the street had made his fortune with one trade. He had caught it on the cusp of its transformation from furtive dealings in the infected to a pastime in which most of the men she knew took part. But it was too late for her and Lily, Starving God chew their respectability to bits.

Augusta kept her voice steady. ‘Reselling, before we must settle but after its value has risen, will give us more leverage to buy better next time, and again. It will take time, but we must begin somewhere. We cannot wait any longer.’

Lily suspected her, she knew. Why else would she offer herself to Nolan, as unlike to Ton as she was to her own sister. ‘And yourself?’ she asked. ‘You will also earn a dowry for yourself?’

This is what it came to. ‘Yes,’ Augusta said, lying, and blew away down the icy street before Lily could capture her again.

Others caught at her, tugged at her attention. They stopped her as she forged through slushy snow and asked after her father. It had become extraneous to her. She moved at a diagonal to her erstwhile world. In a few hours, these same people would spit on her toes and curse her.

Augusta shredded herself from them all and left the streets she knew, hurrying down and along the corniche. She fetched up outside the walls of Kilton-on-Middledark, at the door of the tavern where the auctions took place. Warmth spilled out over her through the open door and she could not breathe.

She stepped in and crossed the crowded room under the frank eyes of drinking men. The door to the back rooms, the inner sanctum, was guarded.

This man, bearded and pouchy, held out one hand. ‘Decimal deposit.’

Bidders had to demonstrate at least ten per cent of the likely lowest sale price. Augusta tipped her coins out onto her palm and held it out to him.

He counted the coins with a single glance and shook his head. ‘Not enough.’

He barred the door from her almost paternally, as if he read more in her eyes than she intended him to know. She had not her sister’s face or softness to plead with him, to protest that it would have been enough at the last auction only a month ago, to slip her way past him. So she stood, her hand still held out.

‘You can’t come in.’ The guard was nonplussed by her, as so many were when they encountered the calm patience that was one of her weapons, since she lacked the sharper swords of charm and beauty that armed her sister.

Augusta did not move. She sensed the stir of air behind her and the guard’s gaze flicked past. She held still, blocking the other patrons of the auction. An angry voice demanded the cause of the delay. Augusta knew the voice and it made her flinch when she had thought that was no longer possible. She did not turn, and the doorman began to bend; she saw his imminent capitulation in the way his gaze fell to his boots.

At her side, a shadow, a hesitation, and a young man bowing with studied courtesy. ‘Augusta.’

If the father was here, chafing at the delay and cursing her and her mother and all her ancestors, then of course the son would be here, trying to smooth the way. Augusta did not return Ton’s bow or deign to look at him other than from the corner of her eyes.

‘Is there something?’ Ton had that manner about him—questioning, cautious—a legacy from his father. He chewed at all his words. ‘Can I? Help you in some way?’ She watched him look at her outstretched hand, the pitiful pile of coins in her palm.

‘She doesn’t have enough,’ the doorman announced, bolstered. ‘She can’t come in.’

Augusta remained unmoved. The man would have to lay hands on her to shift her, and even here outside the walls such contravention of corniche morality could not be condoned. She did not allow shame to touch her, even with Ton’s father looking on.

Ton rubbed his lips. Then, so fast she had no hope of stopping him,