Excerpt from The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She managed to collect dinner from the mess boat without getting dragged into conversation with any of the Excalibur's crew. She brought the food back to her boat and ate with her bear: stewed hock, baked potatoes, a cup of milk. Neither of them had drunk milk for weeks, so the crowd must have paid well. North hoped there would be eggs for the morning. Their bowls were not quite full enough for their bellies, but it took the edge off their gnaw of hunger.

After they had licked their bowls clean, North drained the water from the filter into a washbucket. She ensured that her bear was watching, then put the gold chains in a box and tucked them under her berth. He grumbled a roar, but it seemed involuntary, like indigestion, and he settled to his grooming without fuss. It took a long time: many of the women landlockers seemed to have taken a fancy to him, and had thrown perfumed leaves that caught in his fur. The perfume was waxy and ratted the fur into clumps, resisting North's damp fingers. She was probably supposed to do something noble with the leaves, like burn them or bury them, but she didn't care about the landlockers' superstitions. She pulled back the coracle's canvas top and threw the leaves into the water. She hoped that their waxy coating would make them float back to shore, so those fancy ladies could see what she thought of their gifts.

By the time she was finished, she could barely muster the energy to comb her own hair. All circus folk kept their hair long, dyed bright with whatever colored things they could scavenge. It helped with the illusion of their performance; their tightrope-walk between the genders. Once a preacher from a revival boat had picketed the circus show with signs proclaiming THE SINS OF GLAMOUR, shouting about how the words glamour and grammar meant the same, and every word spoken by a beautiful woman was a spell cast over the god-fearing man. Red Gold loved the publicity; the performance that night was packed. And ever since, the three crewmembers on the beauty boat had been called the glamours.
North's hair was currently dark, except for her scatter of gold braids. She combed it through with her fingers, then retied the braids. The dyed hair felt rougher than the rest, but still sturdy enough. She hadn't asked the glamours how they'd made the golden color; once they had made silver-blue dye from eels, and it damaged everyone's hair so much that it crumbled in their hands.

She went to close the canvas, then pushed it back instead, let¬ting the night's chill soothe her tired eyes. The wind was strong enough to cover all other sounds: the chatter from the coracles, the lazy slap of waves on hulls, the distant whisper of leaves from the center of the island.

Above her, the stars outshone the meager lights on the land. All the answers lay up there, to those who could see. Without knowledge of the sky, no one would know where to find safe port, when to sail hard and when to seek anchor. North gave her prayers to the stars and the tides, just as she did every night. They deserved worship for being the only reliable things in the world. Except, perhaps, for one other.

North fastened the canvas and slid under her bear's warm frontpaw. His heart beat a thud-a-thud against her back as she let the waves rock them both to sleep. She was good at looking after her bear, and she clung to that thought. Soon there would be another person on their boat, but it would be okay, because North already knew how to care for a creature that needed her. She could still be the bear-girl. In time, her child could earn its own place in the circus. She could look after them both, baby and bear. She could keep them safe from the world—and from each other.
***
North was awoken by the sound of knuckles on metal. Dreams were still caught on the insides of her eyelids—birthing a demon, an eight-tentacled monster that strangled her while still inside her—and she had to choke back a scream. Her lungs vibrated with the roar that was beginning in her bear's chest, and she twisted round in his arms to tap on his nose.

Reprinted from The Gracekeepers Copyright © 2015 by Kirsty Logan. To be published by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, on May 19, 2015.