Soldier at the Door (75 page)

Torturous. Insane.

Mahrree would say he was being overly dramatic, equating Full School with torture.

His daughter would roll her eyes at him, as she was so skilled in doing, and his son would tell him something new he and his friends got away with while the teacher was preoccupied in trying to control a few other of the thirty students crammed into the same classroom.

Then his wife would invariably shake her head to top that story by telling the family of yet another attempt by one of her ‘special cases’ to light another student on fire, and she’d spend the next ten minutes going on about how if she was allowed to actually teach something
interesting
to the teens, they might stop trying to burn down the block building.

And then he’d look at her lovingly and say, “And you think
I’m
being overly dramatic?”

Full School was progressive and that progressiveness was rui
ning Edge, among many other things, Perrin considered bleakly as he turned his mount towards the village green.

But his children weren’t being ruined. He and Mahrree made sure of that. She started them on the “What color is the sky?” debate when they were just six and five.

“Debate” wasn’t exactly the right term.

“Fight” would be more like it.

And the two of them hadn’t stopped “debating” ever since . . .

Acknowledgements . . .

This will read identical to Book One, because the first two books in the series
were
combined until my dear friends who read the entire thing begged me to split this massive blob.

First, thank
you
for reading this, and for being charitable with the niggling errors that I fear still remain, hiding like crabgrass despite my continuous weeding. (Mahrree and I both have gardening issues.)

My thanks next to my daughters:
Tess (who’s read the entire series—several versions of it—and realized we needed someone named Sonoforen), Alex, and Madison Pearce, who each gave me responses that ranged from, “I loved this part!” to “I hated this part!” (Can’t beat children for honesty; it’s against the law.)

Thanks also to my friends and neighbors who willingly read drafts
—sometimes more than once—and weren’t afraid to tell me what they really thought (and they’re still counted as friends, mostly): Marci Bingham, Stephanie Carver, David Jensen, Robbie Marquez, Cheryl Passey, Kim Pearce, Liz Reid, Liz Riding, Paula Snyder, Alison Wuthrich, and my sister Barbara Goff, whose constant nagging to “get this finished already!” has been motivating as only an older sister can motivate.

Also thanks to Dr. Daniel Ames, who taught me track changes and that revising the same passage fifty times is perfectly acceptable, and to our neighborhood cop, Cory Thomas, for reviewing some of the fighting sequences to make sure they sounded  plausible.

I also appreciate the rest of my children for coping with my neglect (but I almost always remembered to make dinner). And thanks to my husband David who—after a cursory reading of the first book realized I wasn’t spending hours each day writing something vampy, and that Perrin Shin born a remarkable resemblance to him in both face and spirit—just shrugged when the house looked like nine tornados touched down, because he knew writing this made me oh so happy.

About the author . . .

Trish Strebel Mercer has been teaching writing, or editing graduate papers, or revising web content, or changing diapers since the early 1990’s. She earned a BA in English from Brigham Young University and an MA in Composition Theory and Rhetoric from Utah State University. She and her husband David have nine children and have raised them in Utah, Idaho, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. Currently they live in the rural west and dream of the day they will be old enough to be campground managers in Yellowstone National Park.

(One of my friends suggested I use this photo,

because there’s
“mystery on my face.”

But I think it’s
pollen.)