The Witch’s Lens. She’s lucky enough to live in Colorado at the base of the beautiful Rocky Mountains, where she enjoys reading, gardening, hiking, a glass of wine at the end of the day, and finding the magic in everyday life.
Smith applied the Page 69 Test to The Witch’s Lens and reported the following:
If you open The Witch’s Lens, the first book in The Order of the Seven Stars series, to page sixty-nine, you will land on a short scene very indicative of the main character’s journey in the beginning of the novel. Petra is a witch who’s been recruited for a supernatural mission, and is just getting a lesson on how to drive a stake through the second heart of an upír. These vampire-like revenants are reanimating among the ranks of the Austrian-Hungarian army on the eastern front of WWI, and she and her companions are tasked with ridding the battlefield of the cursed beings. Her instructor, whom some readers of The Vine Witch series might recognize from book three, has filled grain sacks with sticks, rocks, and pig manure to recreate the experience of forcing a wooden stake through bone and muscle. The upír are undead, so they often smell badly because of their rotting bodies, something the untrained witch needs to get used to when confronting the fiends. After her instructor explains all the rather violent techniques for killing an upír, Petra takes a moment to assess the man.Visit Luanne G. Smith's website.
From page 69:This sorcerer had an easy way about him. Not like Bako and Josef, who seemed to relish the physical part of being soldiers, with their sabers and pistols proudly hanging from their belts. The priest of the Order of the Seven Stars instead carried his confidence as his weapon, and yet there was humility on display too, from his modest wool robe lined with fox fur to the bashlyk on his head trimmed in goat hide. His wooden leg would seem to disqualify him from such a dangerous occupation, but she’d yet to see his affliction slow him down.Unfortunately, the upír are not shy creatures and they are not acting of their own volition. The team goes on to discover who’s behind the rise of the cursed beings, and in the effort to stop the villain learn his motives aren’t as clear as once thought.
“Have you faced a great many monsters?” she asked, wanting to know more about him.
The man laughed in a way that told her he had been in many scrapes already. “A few,” he said. “But killing them isn’t always the objective. Not outside of the war, anyway. Sometimes we just need them to go back to being the shy creatures they normally are.”
Q&A with Luanne G. Smith.
The Page 69 Test: The Raven Spell.
The Page 69 Test: The Raven Song.
--Marshal Zeringue
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