Plumage

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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF NANCY SPRINGER

“Wonderful.” —
Fantasy & Science Fiction

“The finest fantasy writer of this or any decade.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

“Ms. Springer's work is outstanding in the field.” —Andre Norton

“Nancy Springer writes like a dream.” —
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Nancy Springer's kind of writing is the kind that makes you want to run out, grab people on the street, and tell them to go find her books immediately and read them, all of them.” —
Arkansas News

“[Nancy Springer is] someone special in the fantasy field.” —Anne McCaffrey

Larque on the Wing

Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award

“Satisfying and illuminating … uproariously funny … an off-the-wall contemporary fantasy that refuses to fit any of the normal boxes.” —
Asimov's Science Fiction

“Irresistible … charming, eccentric … a winning, precisely rendered foray into magic realism.” —
Kirkus Reviews

“Best known for her traditional fantasy novels, Springer here offers an offbeat contemporary tale that owes much to magical realism.… An engrossing novel about gender and self-formation that should appeal to readers both in and outside the SF/fantasy audience.” —
Publishers Weekly

“Springer's best book yet … A beautiful/rough/raunchy dose of magic.” —
Locus

Fair Peril

“Rollicking, outrageous … eccentric, charming … Springer has created a hilarious blend of feminism and fantasy in this heartfelt story of the power of a mother's love.” —
Publishers Weekly

“Witty, whimsical, and enormously appealing.” —
Kirkus Reviews

“A delightful romp of a book … an exuberant and funny feminist fairy tale.” —
Lambda Book Report

“Moving, eloquent … often hilarious, but … beneath the laughter, Springer has utterly serious insights into life, and her own art …
Fair Peril
is modern/timeless storytelling at its best, both enchanting and very down-to-earth. Once again, brava!” —
Locus

Chains of Gold

“Fantasy as its finest.” —
Romantic Times

“[Springer's] fantastic images are telling, sharp and impressive; her poetic imagination unparalleled.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

“Nancy Springer is a writer possessed of a uniquely individual vision. The story in
Chains of Gold
is borrowed from no one. It has a small, neat scope rare in a book of this genre, and it is a little jewel.” —
Mansfield News Journal

“Springer writes with depth and subtlety; her characters have failings as well as strengths, and the topography is as vivid as the lands of dreams and nightmares. Cerilla is a worthy heroine, her story richly mythic.” —
Publishers Weekly

The Hex Witch of Seldom

“Springer has turned her considerable talents to contemporary fantasy with a large degree of success.” —
Booklist

“Nimble and quite charming … with lots of appeal.” —
Kirkus Reviews

“I'm not usually a witchcraft and fantasy fan, but I met the author at a convention and started her book to see how she writes. Next thing I knew, it was morning.” —Jerry Pournelle, coauthor of
Footfall

Apocalypse

“This offbeat fantasy's mixture of liberating eccentricity and small-town prejudice makes for some lively passages.” —
Publishers Weekly

Plumage

“With a touch of Alice Hoffmanesque magic, a colorfully painted avian world and a winning heroine, this is pure fun.” —
Publishers Weekly

“A writer's writer, an extraordinarily gifted craftsman.” —Jennifer Roberson

Godbond

“A cast of well-drawn characters, a solidly realized imaginary world, and graceful writing.” —
Booklist

Plumage

Nancy Springer

ONE

Sassy Hummel knew she should get over it, but how? Twenty-seven years of her life she'd given to that man. Twenty-eight years if you counted the courtship. Twenty-eight years and seven months if you added up the odds and ends. Or maybe eight months. Twenty-eight years and seven or maybe eight months of dependably smiling, mediating between him and his clients or the kids or his parents, listening to him brag/bluster/bleat, calming him down, building him up, fetching the hammer and holding the light, cleaning up after him, making him go to the dentist/doctor/in-laws, trying to figure out what he wanted for supper, getting lost because he wouldn't ask for directions, faking orgasm because he couldn't find her clitoris either—twenty-too-many years of coupons rebates Monday Night Football phone messages grocery lists Mount Saint Laundry

and off he went.

With another woman.

Younger. Had not yet started to look like her own mother.

Skinnier.

Bitty little ass. Chickie-yellow wispie-poo hair.

Damn him. Damn everything.

Thinking about it, Sassy pushed the carpet sweeper as if she were pumping iron and tried not to contemplate what it was going to be like to spend the rest of her life alone and poor. Alone, because she knew what she was: a dowdy middle-aged housewife; who could possibly want her or love her? And poor, because take him for all he's worth her friends kept saying but it turned out he wasn't worth that much and now there were lawyers to pay.

Twenty-eight years. Twenty-nine, if you added the year of hard angry grieving she'd put in since Frederick had left, worse than if he had died. Now the divorce was final, congratulations! friends said. Time for fun.

Yeah, right.

Sassy slammed the carpet sweeper against the baseboard hard enough to jar her molars, trying not to think about Frederick anymore. It was bad enough to think about herself. Bad enough to think about what she was doing, which was immaculatizing the Sylvan Tower Hotel's already immaculate green-and-burgundy mezzanine carpet.

Bad enough to think about what she
was
, wearing a truly loathsome green poplin shirtwaist uniform dress and a frilled white apron.

A maid.

Twenty-eight years in a development house fulfilling every apple-pie requirement of the wife mythos, and the only job she could get was currying carpets and scrubbing potties at the Tower.

A hotel maid.

Not for the first time in her life, Sassy grew aware of the irony inherent in her own name. Calling her Sassy was like calling a midget Hercules. Damn, what a doormat she had been.

Still was.

“Damn” did not provide sufficient vent for her feelings, but it was the strongest expletive she permitted herself. Having been raised by a mother who scrubbed out her mouth with Lava Soap for taking the name of the Lord in vain, she could not help being a bit inhibited. She was not a shouter, for instance. When Frederick had gone away, she had not thrown any crockery into his earnest face, she had not screamed at him, and because it would have been childish, she had not said any of the things she now thought night and day. Puerile things, most of them. Juvenile. Being dumped puts a person in a childish mood. Tired of damning everything, “Poop,” Sassy whispered the way she used to when she was ten, scowling at the carpet, giving the sweeper a truly vehement shove—and she felt something lightweight but ominous land on the top of her head.

She stopped sweeping and began to lift a hand to her head but stopped herself. She looked around.

From where she stood, on the third wedding-cake layer of the lobby, Sassy gazed up at the plumy tops of subtropical trees, their seventy-foot height no more impressive than petunias in the context of the Tower atrium soaring eighty-five glassy-sparkle fairy-tale stories above. The Sylvan Tower Hotel claimed, with some justification, to be the world's most spectacular luxury hotel, with a six-story lacework lobby blooming with kiosks and specialty shops, boutiques, bodegas, discotheques, ethnic eateries, bistros, cafés, promenades and terraces and fountains and gardens full of braided quince and gazebos and fishpools—koi-starred waterholes out of which arose, like technogods arising from the primordial brine, the twelve neon-limned glass elevators which rocketed up the central supporting tower, the arbor vitae of the place, to eighty-five catwalks leading to eighty-five vine-edged balconies and several thousand guest rooms—too many of which Sassy was tired of cleaning. She understood that the maids up top, where the locked floors and the suites surrounded a rotating haute-cuisine restaurant, wore different uniforms and were responsible for only a few luxurious rooms.

Maybe that should be her ambition in life now. To be a maid up top.

“Poop,” Sassy muttered again.

Exertion and emotion had humidified her face, fogging her glasses. Sassy took them off, wiped them on her apron and put them on again. Squinting against the glare of too much decorator lighting as she flexed her tired shoulders, all she could see above her was darkly silhouetted tree fronds—she didn't know what the hothouse trees were called, but they looked like ficus on steroids. Something that felt faintly wet had disturbed her meek cap of mouse-colored hair; what was it? Once again she lifted a hand, but stopped the gesture in midair, because in the crown of one of the trees she saw a flitter of movement, like a leaf stirring—but there was no breeze in the atrium, or at least there shouldn't be, and some gloomy gut instinct told her what had happened.

No.

Yes.

Maybe.

Oh, for gosh sake—

“Racquel,” she called to a tall woman loitering in the doorway of a nearby boutique, “could you come here a minute, please?”

“Sure thing, honey.” Racquel roused, erected, and ambled toward Sassy, as lithe as a black rawhide whip even on four-inch heels.