Hello and welcome to Weekend Writing Warriors, the blog hop where you can sample a great selection of stories in excerpts of ten sentences or less.

I’m sharing from my work-in-progress, a reimagined fairy tale. There’s a pretty big clue at the end of this excerpt as to which fairy tale it is. In this scene, Prince Gabriel and his man servant Webster are returning to Gabriel’s home through less travelled forest roads. You can read last week’s snippet here.

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Gabriel calmly observed as a buzzing bee distracted his servant. Webster waved one hand frantically in front of his face, angering the bee and confusing the horse, who turned in an agitated circle. Webster was twenty, the same age as Gabriel. Taller and thinner to the point of being gangly, he had dark brown hair, a peppering of hairs on his pointy chin that might one day knit themselves into a beard, and pale blue eyes that found fault with everything they shrewdly took in.

He’d only served Gabriel a short while.  Lord Craigmoor, Gabriel’s uncle, had assigned Webster to him because it wasn’t proper, nor safe, for a prince to travel the forest roads alone. Not that Webster was any protection, but he was company, and had learned to set up camp fairly well, though he complained endlessly about the bugs, the dirt, the thieving jackdaws and squirrels, his disobedient horse, the weather, trees that dripped pine sap, flowers that emitted irritating pollens, and rivers that ran too swift and were too cold.

Gabriel, in contrast, was never happier than when he was out in nature. He preferred to be by himself with only the woodland creatures for company, but he’d quickly become accustomed to Webster, whose constant stream of words merged into the background noises of the forest like the chatter of a chickadee. He made no demands on Gabriel’s attention and, knowing nothing of Gabriel’s history or family, didn’t judge, gossip or look sidelong at Gabriel’s near-white hair.

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Into the woods…

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Next week I’ll post a blurb and maybe even a title! For those of you wondering what happened to Jacqui the Cat, Book 4, well, I’m sooooo close. The story became longer and more complicated than I’d originally intended, as stories do, but I think I’m in the home stretch. Wish me luck!

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Weekend Writing Warriors is a blog hop where writers from a wide variety of genres share from their work in excerpts of ten sentences or less.  Click the link to check out the other writers participating today.  It’s a great way to discover your next favorite book!