Blind Speed Dating #20 (YA)

Title: PINK FORTUNE

Genre: YA Historical Fantasy

Word Count: 60,000

Query:

Sixteen-year-old Fortunée, an adopted daughter of fairies, can wield a sword like a musketeer and heal a weary traveler with herbs, but she can’t do magic like the rest of her family. Yet when Louis XIV’s dragoons arrest her father for using magic, neither her sword nor her father’s magic can save him.



Fortunée, her mother, and brother go into hiding, but even then, they are not safe. She thinks her only hope for finding her father—and protecting her family—lies with Henri, the Dauphin, a fairy himself. But just as Fortunée realizes her feelings for Henri, he is turned into a flower, a pot of pinks, by the man who arrested her father.

Fortunée sets off for Versailles to unmask the man behind her father’s arrest and Henri’s curse. But the King is not inclined to listen to peasant girls, especially when they speak against his most favored minister. Fortunée will have to find her gift—though it be unmagical—to free those she loves and save the kingdom of France.

First 250:

I was with Papa, picking lavender, tying it in bundles for Maman’s tinctures when the dragoons came. My frock clung to my chest from the heat and Papa’s ring hung like a stone against my neck. Only yesterday he gave it to me, slipping it off his thumb where he always wore it.

He was nearby, singing his fée song to the flowers, the barley and the wheat. He sang in their language, saying goodbye. Adieu songs.

Tomorrow he’d ride to Versailles to petition the King about the edict.

He held up a perfect stalk of lavender. “I will miss this place.” He nudged the bees back with his hands.

“You will return,” I said.

“If the King is merciful.”

I stared at his face, making a picture in my mind: his eyes bright from being among the plants, his arms red and shiny with sweat, his tunic and breeches caked with dust.

It’d been a fortnight since Maman and Papa had told my brother, Bertrand, and me, but still I could not quite believe he was going to leave us.

“I will not be gone long,” he said. “I am sure of it.”

I said nothing. I was thinking of the trip Maman, Bertrand, and I had ahead of us while Papa traveled to Versailles. How the three of us would stay in a cottage near Paris while Maman attended a Baroness until Papa could join us. It was not a post she could turn down, not in these hard times, but I wished I was going to the palace with him.