She grew vegetables, flowers, tiny fruit trees, and strange vines that climbed all over the walls and windows. She could grow absolutely anything, and that was how she made our living.
You’d expect a place like that to smell terrible, but my mother was a genius when it came to making anywhere feel like home. Our house was not much more than a tiny shack made of old recycled wood, and it only had one room. This was their act of charity towards us. Maldobar didn’t have to take us in, much less provide us somewhere to live. If you broke any of the rules, it was an immediate sentence to the prison camps, which I always heard was a fate worse than death. We had to follow a strict set of rules about where we could go, what we could do, when we got food, and what we could own. We lived like all the other gray elves in Maldobar-separated from the rest of society in the heavily guarded wartime ghettos. Up until then, my mother had raised me all by herself in the royal city of Halfax. I had never seen my father before my twelfth birthday. To Keith, who first taught me how to fly. See the full color version on the back of the book, and more of Sonia’s beautiful artwork on this webpage: Congratulations to Sonia of Anatnem Mentana Studios, South Africa, on the winning entry of the pre-release coloring contest.
0 kommentar(er)
