Silver Dagger Tours – Insatiable Cover Reveal and Giveaway!

My brother Hamish
smirks. “I wish you could attend a boarding school, if one would have
you. You’d come crying home before the end of the first week and beg to marry the butcher. After the
first day!”

A growl of
thunder rattles the windowpanes.

I flinch.
“Hamish! You know you shouldn’t say—”

Mother erupts
into a coughing fit, distracting me from my brother’s thoughtless words. I
thump her on her back with growing concern for a long moment before she’s able to
regain her composure.

Hamish doesn’t
even acknowledge the interruption.

“You wouldn’t
survive an hour in one of my classes,” he says with a laugh. “Educate a girl? The headmaster would laugh you
right out of—”

Lightning fills
the room, and thunder shakes the windows again, matching the fury inside my
heart.

I scramble to my
feet. “Of all the ignorant, immature, mean-spirited things you’ve ever said—”

A knock shakes
our front door.

We all fall
silent, staring at one another. Who would be foolish enough to venture
out-of-doors in a storm this violent?

Actually… I cock
my head to listen. I can’t hear the rain anymore. The nails shivered in the
timber seconds ago, but suddenly, it’s so quiet that I would almost believe the
world outside these walls ceased to exist.

The knocking
sounds again, louder this time. A draft slithers under the door, carrying the
chill of damp earth.

“Don’t stand
there, Catriona.” Father makes an impatient shooing gesture. “Go answer the
door.”

Hamish leaps up
from his armchair and races to beat me to the entryway. He is the one to turn
the handle and fling open the door.

On the other side
stands a tall, thin stranger with dark skin and a dry cloak and black eyes
shadowed beneath the equally dry brim of a black top hat.

I glance over his
shoulder. The storm is gone. It looks like it never happened at all. The ground
is dry. No breeze rustles the leaves of the trees. Stars fill the cloudless
sky.

Something is wrong.

Hamish puffs up
his chest. “May I help you, Mr…?”

The stranger
looks bored, in as much as his half-visible expression can be read. “Ross.
Reporting to take Miss Catriona Cameron to school, as requested.”

I stare at him.
“What did you say?”

“School?” Hamish
repeats, flabbergasted. “No one requested that.”

“I’ve the papers
right here.” Mr. Ross lifts a black-gloved hand. A sheet of tri-folded
parchment pokes from his fingers.

Hamish snatches
the paper from the stranger’s hand.

“I’m so sorry,” I
tell Mr. Ross with embarrassment. “I’m Catriona Cameron. My brother—”

“It says you’re
to report to boarding school,” Hamish exclaims. “On the Isle of Skye!”

“What? Let me see.”
I pluck the paper from his fingers and scan the contents in confusion.
Floodbane Academy? Never heard of it. “It says… they approved my application.”

Hamish goggles at
me. “I didn’t know you’d applied.”

I didn’t.

Though as far as
mistakes go, this is the best one that has ever happened to me. I hate that I must
confess to Mr. Ross that I won’t be—

“Did it work?”
murmurs my mother’s voice behind my ear.

I spin to ask her
what on earth she’s talking about, but the urgency in her brown eyes gives me
the answer. It’s the same expression she wears when passing down tales from my
gran.

I wish you did attend a boarding school,
my brother had snarled at me.

Without
retracting his words.

Without begging
God for protection.

And tonight, the
fairies decided to grant a young boy his wish.

“It’s happening,”
I whisper back in shock.

The fairies are
trickster sprites. They love to grant wishes in the opposite way from how they
were meant. My brother’s intention had been to shame me. To assert that girls
neither deserved nor could qualify for the same advantages as boys.

Instead of
shaming me as well, the fairies are offering me what I’ve always wanted. A path
that didn’t even exist until Hamish opened his mouth.

But is this a
wish come true, or the start of a new nightmare?

Erica Ridley is a New York Times bestselling
author of witty, historical novels, including the critically acclaimed Wild
Wynchesters series, and her debut young adult novel, The
Protégée. When not reading or writing, Erica can be found eating
künefe in Turkiye, zip-lining through rainforests in Costa Rica, or getting
hopelessly lost in the middle of Budapest. 

 

Website * Facebook * X * Instagram * TikTok * Bookbub * Amazon
* Goodreads

Follow the reveal HERE for special content and a $10 giveaway!