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Exit Pursued

April 6, 2022April 9, 2024a cat

Max Gladstone’s Last Exit is the winding tale of a labyrinthian web of alternate realities, the poisonous rot that corrupts so many of them, and of a woman who once set off with her friends to find something better, or make it. But the writing of Last Exit held just as many twists as the resulting plot! Here, Max presents his story behind the story, and it’s an exciting one: Robbery, rumination, writing, and a shoutout to Bob Seger await. Check it out!

By Max Gladstone

I came home one hot Tuesday night in the fall of 2015 to notice that my notecards were out of order. And then, that my laptop was gone.

I’d left the house that afternoon after hours of sweating through a high-level revision. I knew something was off about the book I was writing, but I didn’t know what, and I was trying to figure it out through wishful thinking and office supplies. There were pacing problems that might be structure problems, or character problems that might be pacing problems, or…. Hard to say. So I tried something new: I wrote every major beat in the book on a notecard, spread the notecards on our dining room table with every leaf extended, and spent hours pacing around the table, moving scenes, tearing them up. Sometimes writing looks like correspondence chess with index cards, and sometimes it smells like huffing markers.

I left the cards in their careful grid on the table, and left—for a walk, for the gym. When I came home I found the cards jumbled together, half on the floor. Cat? We don’t own a cat. Did my wife come home early, read my notecard outline, and express extreme and uncharacteristically violent objections to a proposed reordering of the third act?

Oh wait, never mind. We’ve been robbed.

In 2011, a friend told me something terrifying. We were two writers—this is not the terrifying part, this is the context part—and our debut novels were both due out the next year. We’d met through mutual friends, and it was a relief to find someone else who was on more or less the same road, more or less by accident. I asked her, after we’d known each other long enough and had enough wine to talk about this sort of thing, about her book, about how she’d come to write it.

She said, well, it took me ten years to write this one. I wrote it the first time. That took five years. Then I realized I’d written it in the wrong voice. The wrong register. So I went back to the beginning, and wrote it again.
I don’t think I have ever respected a person more and understood them less than I did at that moment. The respect hasn’t changed. The understanding has.

Manuscripts, Bulgakov wrote, don’t burn. Contrariwise, I’m positive that novels can and do get stolen, but in my experience, thieves haven’t been all that interested. In 2017, while I was on tour for the release of The Ruin of Angels, my suitcase was stolen out of a parked car. “Don’t worry,” my host had said when I asked if I should bring it into the restaurant with us, “this is a very safe neighborhood.” The thief made off with clothes, a Kindle, my toothbrush, etc. They left my mass market paperback of Stephen King’s It, covered in broken glass.

(They kept my signed copy of Fonda Lee’s Exo, though, so maybe this just speaks to their individual taste. Or they’d already read the King.)

It was eerie, in 2015, how fast I got back to work after being robbed. The notecards weren’t even all that out of order. All seven drafts of the book were “safely” in “the cloud.” We had renter’s insurance, and renter’s insurance paid out. I’m typing this now on the computer the insurance bought. After a few hours spent changing passwords, I clicked, clicked again, and there was the manuscript. Same as it ever was.

In 2013, staring out the window at the highway at night on tour and feeling a bit like a Bob Seger song, I had an idea: roads as a kind of magical network, driving as a way to cast a spell. Highways that led to other worlds, that led off the map into the dark, into places where the world was different. The country as a kind of spell, casting itself. All of us working the magic, without understanding—driving the world into being, to ends we did not know and could barely guess. The road as a story.

I felt danger, out there in the dark. There was something wrong with the sky. It did not sit on top of the earth the way it used to. We were pretending everything was okay, when it wasn’t. There were oceans on maps that didn’t exist anymore. We were supposed to be doing things, changing things, and yet—where, and how? What, really, was being done? What now? What next?

I tried to write that book. I tried to write about some kids who wanted to change the world, and went out into the dark to try, only it didn’t work out like they hoped. And now they were older and had to try again.

And I did write that book. More or less. That was the one the thieves didn’t steal.

A road is a choice. A highway is a choice. A bridge is a choice. You might not be able to decide what towns will exist, but you can decide which ones will thrive. You cannot banish neighborhoods but you can cast them in shadow, blight them, drive their people out.

What is a story but a series of choices? For the characters, certainly, but for the writer as well: each word a choice in the context of every other word.

Sometimes you have to make different choices.

In the summer of 2019, I opened a notebook.

The book I had written, the one that was not stolen, was still there on the computer. But I felt so many things differently, and more deeply, than I had when the concepts and characters first met, years before. The threat remained, but nobody was pretending anymore. This wasn’t okay. We weren’t sure what this was. And it wasn’t even 2020 yet.

I wasn’t honest with myself even then. I thought, the book is good, the bones are good, the characters. I’ve written it so many times and revised it. All it needs is a new opening. I can get it right this time. A few tweaks through to smooth it in.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door,” the man says. “You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no telling where you’ll be swept off to.”

I started to write. I was a new parent. I had minutes snatched between naps and feeding sessions. I had a nice pen and good paper. A line is like a road, or a trail. It circles, switchbacks, it does not take the crow’s route from point to point, and yet—if you’re walking, that’s the way to go.

I sent the chapter to my agent. I didn’t understand what was going on even then. I must have hoped they would say, “Great, just copy this over the first chapter and send it in.” I cannot, looking back, imagine how they would have said that.

What they said—well, they laid out a bunch of options. But the one I took was, keep going.

You do the thing once. It doesn’t quite work. Something’s still broken, something’s lost. Maybe even stolen. You’re older now, and the world looks darker.

So you set off on the road.

And maybe this time you can make better choices.

That’s my story. That’s our story. And that’s the story of Last Exit.

Purchase Last Exit Here:

Events / What's New

On the Road: Tor Author Events in April 2022

April 5, 2022April 6, 2022a cat8 Comments

Spring is a time of renewal! And speaking of new, we’ve got a new roster of virtual and in-person events for the month 🌸🌷🌼

Check it out!

In-Person Events

Jenn Lyons, The Discord of Gods

Tuesday, April 26
Eagle Eye Book Shop
2076 N Decatur Road
Decatur, GA 30033
7:00 PM – 8:00 PM ET

Digital Events

T. L. Huchu, Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments

Tuesday, April 5
An Unlikely Story
Virtual Event
6:00 PM ET

Jenn Lyons, The Discord of Gods

Wednesday, April 27
Mysterious Galaxy
Virtual Event
7:00 PM ET

Author Features / What's New

Characters Who Think With Mythology

April 1, 2022April 5, 2022a cat1 Comment

Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series is an epic saga of political science fiction, strongly influenced by her background as a historian. As the series draws to a close with the recently released volume, Perhaps the Stars, Ada has taken the time to share her thoughts on how mythos impacts the lives and thoughts of characters, but also people.

Check it out!

By Ada Palmer

Which Greek god governs voyages? The answer is more complicated than just Poseidon, and an example of how, separate from having gods and mythological figures actually appear, another way to use mythology in fiction is depicting human characters who view the world through myths, offering new lenses on familiar concepts.

The ship voyage example is a useful one, and one I use a lot in my Terra Ignota. We are all familiar with Poseidon as the sea god, the one who raises storms and gives Odysseus such a hard time getting home, but sailing was extremely important to ancient Mediterranean cultures, and the Greek polytheism didn’t see sailing as one simple act, but a complex one with separate facets overseen by separate divine patrons. Who else might one pray to when setting out on a ship? (Or a spaceship?) To the winds perhaps, the Anemoi: Boreas, Notus, Eurus, and Zephyrus. To Hermes for some types of voyages, fundamentally a god of circulation, of people and information moving from town to town like coins from purse to purse, appropriate for merchant voyages, news-carriers, and travel among known and connected places, within the human world (including the afterlife, where all human roads ultimately lead). To Athena, who as goddess of crafts and craftsmanship is goddess of the craft of shipbuilding (those ropes, those woven sails), a patron of technology and vehicles, and sometimes known as Αἴθυια (Aithuia) i.e. “the diver” referring to the kinds of diving birds that skim along the water like a ship. And to Apollo, who is not well known as a travel god, but as god of archery is god of aiming, departure, inspiration, and discovery, connected with distance and seeing or aiming far, and whose titles include Έπιβατήριos (Epibaterios), god of embarkations, or god who leads people onto ships, as well as Θεοξένιos (Theoxenios) a protector god of foreigners or strangers traveling or staying in lands other than their own.

If you think about your last few trips somewhere, you can probably break down the different hopes and aspects of the trip governed by each: hoping the car/train/plane doesn’t malfunction (Athena), that the weather is alright (Poseidon, winds), that the business aspect of a work trip is successful (Hermes), that the ambitions of a more distant voyage find their aim (Apollo). It’s a very fine-grained subdivision, one which shows us how important and vexed travel was for such a culture, much like how Egypt’s many separate gods of different aspects of the Nile river show how complex its role was in Egyptian culture. And when writing a character who thinks in such terms—who considers Apollo-type journey and a Hermes-type journey very different, or who connects the creation of ships and vehicles with the arts of weaving and wisdom more than with those of fire and industry i.e. Hephaestus—you have not only the seed of an interesting character but a perspective which can give the reader new and mind-opening ways to think about what it means to climb on that spaceship, or set out on that quest.

This is exactly the kind of thinking-through-mythology that you can use in writing, either on a culture-wide level for world building—a world where Hermetic and Apollonian travel are regulated by different branches of government, or where shipbuilding is a women’s art—or for a single character. In Terra Ignota, one of my main narrators is Greek, and has an idiosyncratic understanding of the Greek gods which colors the narration throughout, the narration’s analysis of what it means to be waiting for transport, or his feelings about the impact of space elevators on humanity’s space access lensed through his understandings of Hermes, Poseidon, and Apollo. One of the early turning-points of the text is a moment when the narrator, declares “I have misunderstood Poseidon, reader, all this while!”, elaborating how, in a world with flying cars, orbital cities, a lunar capital, and Martian terraforming underway, “We mistake, we foolish moderns, when we seek the sea god in the sea. He is not H2O, not surface tension, tides and shorelines known and knowable,” concluding, “the god who rings the earth, Poseidon, is Old Enemy Distance.” (You can read the full excerpt here). In some sense it’s a strange moment to call a turning point since there is no event, nothing blows up, no tower falls or tide of battle turns, but in a global crisis in the Terra Ignota future, a world built around its easy transit and the commixing of all peoples around a globe, realizing that Poseidon—the part of voyaging which is the dangerous, disruptive distance in between—is still a major force shaping this trial of humanity, is an essential realization, enabling the next stages in which the characters can grapple with and shape the crisis in ways impossible without this understanding.

Similar moments happen in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun (1980-3)—one of my major influences in writing Terra Ignota. Readers can sometimes get frustrated as the narrator Severian’s introspective tangents about ethics and metaphysics constantly interrupt the action, until we realize that in this far-distant future the most advanced technologies, space travel, time, even the growth and death of stars and planets, can all be wielded by those who attain clear understanding the moral and providential structures of the cosmos, thus that Severian’s insights into ethics or theodicy are more important than the battles, breakthroughs as world-saving as when a scientist progresses toward the long-sought formula. Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of the Mist (1986) and its sequels have similar-yet-different mythological lenses at their cores, in which the protagonist Latro and others he encounters in his ancient Greek/Mediterranean setting think through Greek myth and epic, but in different ways, as Latro encounters a world saturated with mythic beings he does not recognize (but we do), while others around him sometimes recognize his epic-hero nature and act on it in different ways. In one telling moment, a ship’s captain sees Latro knocked overboard in a storm, then sees other waves carry him safely back onto the deck, landing him on his feet just where he stood—nothing provably supernatural occurred, but the captain, thinking through his culture, understands this as the action of the gods, and, taking the fates of Odysseus’s companions in the Odyssey as a warning, decides it is not a safe thing to spend time around someone beloved of the gods.

There are a number of other examples of great fiction which uses mythological character lenses, some of them with and some without the mythic figures actually acting or existing. In Mary Renault’s historical novel The Mask of Apollo (1966) the protagonist understands the events he experiences lensed through his ancient culture and especially through Greek drama, his actions constantly shaped by his understanding of himself as a servant of Dionysius, and while the book contains a couple moments which the reader can interpret either as real divine portents or as all in the character’s head, the question of whether the gods are or are not real and acting in many ways has less impact on the events than the character’s period worldview. Eleanor Arnason’s Woman of the Iron People (1991) is anthropological science fiction, depicting aliens who see the world through their distinct mythology, without gods or metaphysics ever directly appearing—worldview is the key. Dan Simmons’ Hyperion (1989) does comparable things in its alien travel stories, as do his Ilium/Olympos cycle (2003, 2005). Poul Anderson’s novelette Goat Song (1972) is a future science fiction retelling of Orpheus, but one which doesn’t only keep the events and character relationships, but also transplants into a future context key parts of the ancient characters’ worldviews and ideas of ethics and justice. And Anderson’s brilliant The Broken Sword (1954), drawing on Norse mythology, does even more. In other media, mythological/theological thinking saturates the new Battlestar Galactica TV series (2004-9), in which characters on different sides of the key conflict hold a range of polytheistic, monotheistic, and skeptical worldviews, and their understandings of fate, providence, prophecies, free will etc. both shape the conflict and help us understand it. And in the anthropological direction, Larry Marder’s innovative comic series Beanworld (1985-ongoing) depicts a stylized primitive society gradually inventing elements of culture (music, art, story-teaching) and understanding their world through archetypes such as the Big Fish in the Sky.

People often ask if I think it’s odd to be a historian writing science fiction, since we think of past and future as opposites. But really there is nothing more similar to the future than the past: it’s a long period of time in which societies and beliefs develop, and new technologies spread causing disruption and innovation. And with different mindsets and worldviews. To me, the appeal of both history and genre fiction is first contact, encountering people who have a very different understanding of the cosmos they/we live in, putting things in different categories, analyzing them in different ways. Back in college, my favorite history professor Alan Charles Kors once said in class that, if you had a time machine and were stranded in the past, you could pick up the language with time, you could learn how to wear the clothing, and with good fortune find a way to make a living enough to eat, but that the difference which would still feel alien and constantly challenging even after years would be the mindsets, learning how to make persuasive arguments when what kinds of evidence people find most persuasive is so different, or learning how to guess how people will react to things you say or do when their ideas of what’s acceptable or unacceptable, a small thing or a big deal, are rooted in the completely different universes people from different historical cultures (or planets) believe they’re living in.

I often tell my own students in class that no alien in any episode of Star Trek has as unexpected a worldview as what they’re about to meet reading the first-person letters and opinions of people from centuries ago. That’s why so much of my favorite SF is SF shaped by history, especially the worldviews of history, the mythologies and cosmologies shaped the actions of people so fascinatingly different from our present. And it’s why I think one of the most powerful tools genre fiction can use to help us to step outside ourselves and question our own worldviews is by presenting characters who think in the robust yet alien worldviews of real historical belief systems, or invented belief systems modeled on them, whether the setting is past or far future, on Earth or far beyond.

Read the beginning of Perhaps the Stars on the Tor/Forge Blog.
Read the beginning of book 1 of Terra Ignota, Too Like the Lightning.
Read two short, stand-alone excerpts from Perhaps the Stars reflecting on Poseidon and the Greek mythological understanding of travel at the New Decameron Project.

Ada Palmer (she/her) is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas.

Purchase Perhaps the Stars Here:

Lists / What's New

Revisit the Dream-Hunters!

March 30, 2022May 1, 2024a cat1 Comment

#1 New York Times bestselling author Sherrilyn Kenyon is BACK with a NEW entry in her Dream-Hunters Series: Shadow Fallen! This epic paranormal romance saga concerns the ethereal world of dreams, where demonic creatures prey on dreamers and menace the champions that would protect them. It’s been a few years since the release of the last book, so we compiled a helpful rundown on all the books you’ll need to brush up on to prepare for Shadow Fallen‘s release on Tuesday, April 12, 2022!

Check it out!

The Dream-Hunter

Condemned by the gods to live an eternity without emotions, Arik can only feel when he delves within the dreams of others. Now he has found a singular dreamer whose vivid mind can fill his emptiness: Dr. Megeara Kafieri. She’s searching for Atlantis, and Arik might be able to help. But the deal he cut with the god Hades that would allow him to reattain mortality would require the sacrifice of everything he’d hope to gain by doing so: Megeara’s soul.

Upon the Midnight Clear

Aidan O’Connor has been wronged, and he is FURIOUS. This is the anger that deposed Olympian goddess Leta could use to amplify her immortal powers. When a cold winter storm leaves them trapped, it’s not anger that might save them. The power they’ll have to turn to? Trust.

Dream Chaser

Renowned medical examiner Simone DuBois is pretty good at her job. Her psychic ability to converse with the wrongfully deceased helps. But when she meets Xypher, a wronged demigod with one month to walk the earth before Hades whisks him back to Tartarus, she’ll be doing a whole lot more than talking to spirits, but fighting insatiable demons through a portal to Atlantean hell? But here’s the real question: Who’s more dangerous? The demons or Xypher?

Dream Warrior

The son of Warcraft and Hate, Cratus spent eternity battling for the ancient gods who birthed him. He was death to any who crossed him. Until the day he laid down his arms and walked into self-imposed exile. As a Dream-Hunter, Delphine has spent eternity protecting mankind from the predators who prey on our unconscious state. Time is running out and if she can’t win him to her cause, mankind will be slaughtered and the world we know will soon cease to exist.

The Guardian

Dream-Hunter Lydia has been charged with the most sacred and dangerous of missions: To descend into the Nether Realm and find the missing god of dreams before he betrays the secrets that could kill her and her kind. Conversely, Seth’s time is running out. If he can’t hand over the entrance to Olympus, his own life and those of his people will be forfeit. No matter the torture, Seth hasn’t been able to break the god in his custody. If Lydia fails her mission, an ancient curse will haunt the earth once more and no one will be safe. But evil is always seductive…

Shadow Fallen

For centuries, Ariel has fought the forces of evil. Her task was to protect the souls of innocent mortals when they die. Captured by a powerful sorceress, she is transformed into a human who has no memory of her real life or calling. And is plunked into the middle of the Norman invasion of England. Valteri isn’t just a knight of William the Conqueror. He is the son of one of the deadliest powers in existence, and if he doesn’t restore Ariel to her place, she is not the only one who will be in peril. The world itself hangs in the balance, and he is the necessary key to hold back the powers of evil. But only if he can find a way to work with the woman who stands for everything in the universe he hates.

What's New

Queering Shakespeare: Tessa Gratton on Lady Hotspur

January 3, 2020May 3, 2024admin

Lady Hotspur author Tessa Gratton is no stranger to adapting Shakespeare. She took on King Lear in her 2018 novel The Queens of Innis Lear, and with Lady Hotspur, she’s taken on Henry IV, Part I. Tessa joined us to talk adaptations, queer reimaginings, and her unconventional favorite Shakespeare play.

By Tessa Gratton

I’ve been obsessed with Prince Hal and his mirror/foil Hotspur ever since I studied Henry IV, Part I in a college class called “Weird Shakespeare” during my freshman year in 2000. For the final, another young woman and I performed their confrontation—broadswords and all. I played Hal—playful, self-loathing, ambitious Hal—and he’s never left me.

I’ve gone through phases where my obsession shifted to the forthright, blustering warrior Hotspur, or Hotspur’s sharp, passionate wife Kate Percy, and have taken every opportunity to see performances of Part I in particular, though any of the Henriad will do it for me. I’ve liked to imagine different endings to the play, wondered what would have changed had Hal and Hotspur met before the battle that destroyed Hotspur, or how Lady Percy might’ve acted to shift the arc of the story. I imagined Hal and Hotspur childhood lovers, now made enemies for the sake of their kingmaker fathers. Over the years I sought out some fanfic to read, toyed with rewriting scenes myself, and assumed someday I’d make a novel of my obsessions.

After finishing The Queens of Innis Lear, my feminist fantasy adaptation of my least favorite Shakespeare play, I was finally ready to adapt my most favorite Shakespeare play, and one thing was immediately obvious: Hal and Hotspur would be women, and lovers, and maybe I could take everything that I loved in the play and, well, make it gayer.

When writing a queer adaptation, the first thing I do is dig into the source material to find the queer space and threads of queerness that are already present. As it turns out, a lot of analysis of Henry IV, Part I includes queer readings, though not always overtly, or even intentionally. When you look at queer space as liminal space, and how space itself can be queered, you don’t even have to consider sexual desire or gender to find a queer reading.

The play is the story of Prince Hal, a reluctant heir to the throne, dragging himself out of the gutter to take up his father’s mantle and defeat the rebellious Hotspur. Hal exists in three spaces: the court, the taverns, and the countryside, each ruled by another character. His father, the king, represents court and chivalry, familial duty, and secularism. Falstaff, the drunken, fat former knight, represents the taverns and debauchery, survival, brotherhood, and importantly, imagination and humor. Hotspur represents the old world where the lord and land are one, and the more ancient religious kinds of duty and the chivalry of nature.

Hal was born into the court, fled to the taverns, and must confront the old world before he can triumph as a prince and earn his eventual crown. As a character he exists between these spaces, in the shadows, a trickster who alone has the capacity to go from debauchery to chivalry and back, from play to duty and back, and combine the skills he learns in each space to better perform in the others. His success at learning to maneuver through different spaces is shown when he superimposes the worlds of court and tavern over each other in the scene where he and Falstaff act out Hal’s meeting with the king, trading roles and jokes, and in that moment of queered space Hal is able to tell Falstaff a single true thing about their future; later, just before fighting Hotspur, Hal says to his rival, “all the budding honors on thy crest I’ll crop to make a garland for my head.” He will take onto himself everything that Hotspur was, by confronting and killing him. He will become Hotspur, taking over his space and triumphant identity.

This is just one possible queer reading of Hal, but it’s one I like because I’m interested in carving queer space within existing power structures, and so I used this reading specifically in developing my adaptation. Additionally, since I was setting the story in the same world as The Queens of Innis Lear, I also knew I wanted to use themes I’d begun pulling apart in my King Lear adaptation to continue investigating connections between power, patriarchy, and rebellion, and nature, relationships, and magic.

Except this time, I was going to center queer narratives.

That became my foundational goal: to adapt Henry IV, Part I with an eye toward integrating queer lives into narratives of power.

First of all, I took the men in the play and made them women or pushed them a lot closer toward woman on the gender spectrum, and did the reverse for the few women in the source material. Second, I gave nearly all the main characters some variety of queer desire.

When it came to building my world and story so that I could focus on queering narratives and structures of power, I returned to the queer analysis of Prince Hal as a trickster moving between spaces. My Hal is a young cis lesbian desperately in love with the bright warrior woman Hotspur, but she doesn’t know how to be what her mother needs her to be for the stability of their new order, nor can she remain debauched in the shadows with her Falstaff—Oldcastle, in my version.

I kept two of the three spaces central to the play: court and taverns. The court is ruled by Hal’s mother the queen, who struggles to maintain a traditional, secular patriarchy when she herself has rebelled against it and has been betrayed by it, because she can’t imagine any other kind of power structure. The taverns are ruled by Lady Ianta Oldcastle, a lesbian and former-knight who has also been betrayed by those same power structures that harmed the queen. Ianta encourages debauchery and small playful rebellions because she no longer believes there is space for queer women in the halls of power, so queer women should focus on survival and find pleasure where and how they can.

But the third space is not merely the old world, the landscape, it is the island of Lear. For a hundred years power on Innis Lear has existed in direct opposition to Hal’s country Aremoria: on Innis Lear they do not rely on that old heteronormative institute of marriage for their lines of succession; their magic comes from a wilder, freer union between earth and wind and stars; genderfluid witches care for the forests; the dead are caught between life and heaven; the current rulers include a queen and her sister, an openly queer crown prince, and a transgender princess.

These are the landscapes Hal must map out for herself in my adaptation, must learn to commune with, finding ways to be herself, carving space for her friends and loved ones to claim identities outside the traditionally accepted without giving up any her/their power. It isn’t an option for her to burn everything down, but she is uniquely positioned to reframe the narrative of her entire country, if she can survive with her heart intact.

Lady Hotspur is a big, sprawling fantasy that delves in to the relationships and humor and politics of Henry IV, Part I that obsessed me for nearly twenty years. But throughout every round of writing and revision I tried to keep that core tension present: Hal and Hotspur loving and hating and loving and fighting each other. In the original text, Hal says to Hotspur that he will take everything Hotspur was and make it part of himself through necessary violence; in my adaptation, Hal says to her Hotspur, “What if I love you so well it changes the very landscape of our world?”

Both of these positions have a different relationship with power: one is patriarchal and consuming and violent; the other is queer and creative and playful. It’s that difference in approaches to power and the tension of possibility created in their clashing that is at the heart of what I was trying to do by centering queerness in my adaptation.

I hope I at least succeeded in writing a dramatic, wild, and passionate story that engages with the source material in new ways. It’s amazing to me that after twenty years of thinking about a four-hundred-year-old play I can still find so many threads and spaces to pull or inhabit, but I’m happy to be part of the long story of Shakespeare’s plays and what keeps them alive through new interpretations.

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Extras / What's New

Your Lady Hotspur Character Guide

December 27, 2019May 13, 2024admin

We are so incredibly, over-the-top, crazy-in-love with Lady Hotspur, Tessa Gratton’s next book. It’s set in the same magical, mysterious world as her most recent book, The Queens of Innis Lear, but this one takes place one hundred years later.

Noticed something about the titles? Yep, both The Queens of Innis Lear and Lady Hotspur are adaptations of Shakespeare plays. We’ve already seen what Tessa Gratton can do to the wild and vicious world of King Lear―now it’s time to step into her beautiful, powerful, gender-swapped, and queer Henry IV Part I. That’s right: gender-swapped *and* queer. We could not get any more hyped for these fierce warrior women falling in love with each other.

Like every epic fantasy and Shakespeare play, keeping all those characters straight can be a lot. Here’s a breakdown of how the major characters of Henry IV Part I have been reimagined: who they were in the original play, and who they’ve been turned into at the beginning of Lady Hotspur. Don’t worry, it’s spoiler-free. We’re not monsters.

Character Transformations: King Henry IV Part I → Lady Hotspur

The current king who deposed his cousin Richard II with the help of the Percy family, after being banished for flimsy reasons is turned into Queen Celedrix of Aremoria, an exiled noble who returned from unjust banishment to depose King Rovassos, with the help of the Persy family

Henry IV’s heir who hangs out with drunks and thieves, but says it’s part of a plan to stun people with how kingly and capable he is later is turned into Hal Bolinbroke, a lady knight known for playing tricks and causing scandals, who is suddenly made heir to the kingdom when the mother she has not seen since childhood wins the crown.

The famous knight, and leader of the English rebel forces against King Henry, with very poor impulse control is turned into Lady Hotspur, a famous knight with a hot temper, and part of Celeda’s rebellion. She is heir to the earldom of Perseria.

The man who was heir to the deposed Richard II is turned into Banna Mora, a young woman who was heir to the overthrown King Rovassos, and the former leader of the Lady Knights. Her mother was Innis Lear nobility, and her father was Aremoria nobility. Banna Mora and Hal have been close friends since childhood.

Prince Hal’s surrogate father in the tavern world, a big-time drunk, cheat, thief, and scoundrel is turned into Lady Ianta Oldcastle, the mentor to the Lady Knights and best friend of the former King Rovassos. Ianta is widely known to enjoy partying a bit too much.

The Earl of Worcester, Hotspur’s uncle and fellow rebel leader is turned into Duke Vindomata of Mercia, Lady Hotspur’s aunt and a part of Celeda’s rebellion. Vindomata is known as the King-Killer.

The leader of Welsh rebels, father of Lady Mortimer is turned into the Earl Glennadoer, Innis Lear nobility. It is said that he can transform into a bear.

Owyn Glyndwr’s daughter is turned into Prince Rowan, nephew and heir to Queen Solas of Innis Lear, and Owyn Glennadoer’s son. Rowan is known as the Poison Prince.

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Lists / What's New

Classic Tales, Modern Tellers: 5 Retellings to Check Out

December 7, 2019January 23, 2024admin

By Alison Bunis

Everybody’s got their favorite classic novel. And these days, everybody’s got their favorite retelling of a classic novel, too. Personally, if we’re talking movies, I stand by Clueless until the end of time. If we’re talking books, though, there are so many incredible options that it’s pretty much impossible to choose just one. To help you out, here are five of my favorites! I tried to pick a wide range, but I’m not gonna lie, you guys, I like what I like. So let’s kick things off with my current favorite…

Lady Hotspur by Tessa Gratton

Gather ye round, my fellow Shakespeare nerds: Tessa Gratton has given us an incredible gift. She’s already reimagined King Lear as an entrancing fantasy novel with The Queens of Innis Lear.

Now she’s turned Henry IV Part I into a heart-stopping novel of betrayal, battlefields, and destiny, Lady Hotspur. Here’s a glimpse at the characters to give you a quick taste of what it’s about:

Hal Bolinbroke: A lady knight known for playing tricks and causing scandals, Hal is suddenly made heir to the kingdom when the mother she has not seen since childhood wins the crown. She loathes being a Prince but yearns to live up to the wishes of everyone she loves best—even if that means sacrificing her own heart.

Banna Mora: Heir to the overthrown king, Banna Mora is faced with an agonizing choice: give up everything she’s been raised to love and allow a king-killer to be rewarded—or retake the throne and take up arms against Prince Hal, her childhood best friend.

Lady Hotspur: The fiery and bold knight who stands between these two fierce Princes, and whose support may turn the tides of the coming war and decide everyone’s fates.

Tessa Gratton’s lush, lyrical fantasy world is the perfect setting for this gender-swapped retelling. Mark your calendars, Shakespeare-loving friends: Lady Hotspur hits shelves in January!

Black Leviathan by Bernd Perplies

Buckle up, everybody, because Black Leviathan is the Herman Melville classic Moby Dick—but with dragons. You heard me. Moby Dick. Except instead of whales, it’s dragons, instead of “Call me Ishmael,” dragons, and instead of chapters on whaling technique, more dragons. And don’t worry, the revenge stuff is still in there. Seriously, what more do you need?

In the coastal city Skargakar, dragon-hunting powers the economy. Dragons are used in everything from clothing to food, while airborne ships hunt them in the white expanse of a cloud sea, the Cloudmere. Lian does his part carving the kyrillian crystals that power the ships through the Cloudmere, but when he makes an enemy of a dangerous man, Lian ships out on the next vessel available. But he chooses the wrong ship. The fanatic captain, Adaron, hunts the Firstborn Gargantuan—and he is prepared to sacrifice everything for revenge.

You know what they say… revenge is a dish best served with dragons. (This particular dish comes out February 25th, 2020.)

Nottingham by Nathan Makaryk

Most authors retelling a classic start with their favorite book, story, legend, myth…Not Nathan Makaryk. He saw all the things he hated about the Robin Hood legend, and he just had to rewrite the whole thing into an epic novel that examines who’s really the hero or villain of a story. Think less Men-In-Tights and more historically-accurate Game of Thrones.

The setup is a political nightmare: King Richard is half a world away, fighting for God and his own ambition. Back home, his country languishes, bankrupt and on the verge of anarchy. People with power are running unchecked. People without are growing angry. And in Nottingham, one of the largest shires in England, the sheriff seems intent on doing nothing about it. But don’t worry, Robin Hood and his Merry Men are here to save the day! Steal from the greedy rich and give to the poor! …Not really. Nothing is that simple in this world. Instead, the lives of six people—Arable, a servant girl with a secret, Robin and William, soldiers running from their pasts, Marion, a noblewoman working for change, Guy of Gisbourne, Nottingham’s beleaguered guard captain, and Elena Gamwell, a brash, ambitious thief—become intertwined. And a strange story begins to spread…

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

No list about retellings is complete without including a fairy tale reimagining. It’s kind of a rule. And Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose, a historically sensitive retelling of Sleeping Beauty set amid forests patrolled by the German army during World War II, is a terrifically moving, graceful entry into the fairy tale retelling genre.

It starts off with a tale being passed down through the generations: Since childhood, Rebecca has been enchanted by her grandmother Gemma’s stories of Briar Rose, a young girl who arrived at a castle controlled by an evil army in the Polish forest during the summer of 1942. As Gemma tells it, Briar Rose was corrupted by dark deeds and choked by poisonous mist, and plunged into a deep sleep in the castle that soon came to be known as Chełmno extermination camp. Becca would have sworn the stories were made up, but on her deathbed Gemma extracts from Becca a promise to fulfill three impossible requests: find the castle, find the prince, and find the spell-maker. Her vow sends Becca on a remarkable journey to uncover the truth of Gemma’s astonishing claim: She is Briar Rose.

Miranda and Caliban by Jacqueline Carey

Another Shakespeare retelling? Yes. Let’s go there with Jacqueline Carey’s gorgeous retelling of The Tempest. We all know the tale of Prospero’s quest for revenge, but what about Miranda? Or Caliban, the so-called savage? In Miranda and Caliban, Jacqueline Carey gives us their side of the story: the dutiful and tenderhearted Miranda, who loves her father but is terribly lonely. And Caliban, the strange and feral boy Prospero has bewitched to serve him. The two find solace and companionship in each other as Prospero weaves his magic and dreams of revenge. Always under Prospero’s jealous eye, Miranda and Caliban battle the dark, unknowable forces that bind them to the island even as the pangs of adolescence create a new awareness of each other and their doomed relationship.

New Releases

New Releases: 8/23/16

August 23, 2016May 10, 2024torforge

Here’s what went on sale today!

The Kind Folk by Ramsey Campbell

Luke Arnold is a successful stage comedian who, with his partner Sophie Drew, is about to have their first child. Their life seems ideal and Luke feels that true happiness is finally within his grasp. This wasn’t always the case. Growing up in a loving but dysfunctional family, Luke was a lonely little boy who never felt that he belonged. While his parents adored him, the whole family knew that due to a mix-up at the hospital, Luke wasn’t their biological child. His parents did the best they could to make the lad feel special. But it was his beloved uncle Terence who Luke felt most close to, a man who enchanted (and frightened) the lad with tales of the “Other”–eldritch beings, hedge folks, and other fables of Celtic myth. When Terence dies in a freak accident, Luke suddenly begins to learn how little he really knew his uncle. How serious was Terence about the magic in his tales? Why did he travel so widely by himself after Luke was born, and what was he looking for? Soon Luke will have to confront forces that may be older than the world in order to save his unborn child.

Mirror Image by Michael Scott and Melanie Ruth Rose

In an auction house in London, there is a mirror no one will buy. Standing seven feet tall and reaching four feet across, its size makes it unusual. Its horrific powers make it extraordinary. For centuries, the mirror has fed off of the lives of humans, giving them agonizing deaths and sucking their souls into its hellish world. When Jonathan Frazer, the wealthy owner of a furniture and antiques shop in Los Angeles, buys the mirror at an auction, he believes he is getting the bargain of a lifetime. At this point, the mirror has sat dormant for years. But within days of Jonathan’s purchase, the deaths begin again. One employee is crushed when the mirror falls on top of him. A few days later, the corpse of another is found in front of the mirror, brutally stabbed. A third is burned beyond all recognition. All the while, an enormous man with a scarred face is following Jonathan, demanding that he give him the mirror and killing any police officer that gets in his way. The police are becoming desperate. As the death toll rises, Jonathan himself becomes a suspect. He knows there is something wrong with the mirror. He knows it’s dangerous. But he cannot bring himself to get rid of it. Everyday he becomes more captivated by the mirror. For the mirror is awakening, and its powers are resurfacing.

Spellbreaker by Blake Charlton

Leandra Weal has a bad habit of getting herself in dangerous situations. While hunting neodemons in her role as Warden of Ixos, Leandra obtains a prophetic spell that provides a glimpse one day into her future. She discovers that she is doomed to murder someone she loves, soon, but not who. That’s a pretty big problem for a woman who has a shark god for a lover, a hostile empress for an aunt, a rogue misspelling wizard for a father, and a mother who–especially when arguing with her daughter–can be a real dragon. Leandra’s quest to unravel the mystery of the murder-she-will-commit becomes more urgent when her chronic disease flares up and the Ixonian Archipelago is plagued by natural disasters, demon worshiping cults, and fierce political infighting. Everywhere she turns, Leandra finds herself amid intrigue and conflict. As chaos spreads across Ixos, Leandra and her troubled family must race to uncover the shocking truth about a prophesied demonic invasion, human language, and their own identities–if they don’t kill each other first.

Repo Madness by W. Bruce Cameron

Ruddy McCann, former college football star, now Kalkaska, Michigan repo man, is finally getting his life back on track. He has a beautiful fiancé, Katie Lottner, a somewhat stable job stealing cars, and a lazy, lovable basset hound. With his job suddenly in jeopardy, his fiancé wanting a break, and a new court-ordered psychiatrist insisting he take his medication or violate the terms of his probation, Ruddy finds himself missing the one thing he thought he would be happy to be rid of–the voice of Alan Lottner, dead realtor and Ruddy’s future father-in-law. When a woman tells Ruddy that the tragedy that defines his life may, in fact, be a lie, Ruddy starts to investigate the disappearances of women in the area and soon discovers that his own redemption may be within reach. Alan’s voice returns, and Ruddy and Alan work together to bring down a corrupt banker, win back Katie’s love, and stop a serial killer before he can strike again.

NEW IN PAPERBACK:

24: Trial by Fire by Dayton Ward

1994: Tateos Gadjoyan, an Armenian arms merchant, has been a target of the Central Intelligence Agency for years. Efforts to thwart his selling of American military weapons to terrorists and other enemies of the United States have been unsuccessful. Now, after months of careful planning, two undercover agents have infiltrated Gadjoyan’s inner circle. Soon, they will have sufficient evidence to seize the arms dealer and remove a clear and present danger to the United States. On the small Japanese island of Okinawa, Gadjoyan’s representatives are concluding a deal with Miroji Jimura. Jimura’s hatred of Americans is absolute, and he’s only too happy to profit from sales of their own weapons to be used against them. When a rival of Jimura’s sabotages the arms deal, one of the CIA’s undercover assets is killed, threatening the case against Gadjoyan and revealing a far greater menace to American security. The only thing standing against this new, immediate danger is a single, junior CIA agent named Jack Bauer.

NEW IN MANGA:

Hour of the Zombie Vol. 2 by Tsukasa Saimura

Merman In My Tub Vol. 4 by Itokichi

Not Lives Vol. 3 by Wataru Karasuma

See upcoming releases.

Excerpts

Sneak Peek: The Empty Ones by Robert Brockway

July 20, 2016May 13, 2024torforge

Following on the heels of Robert Brockway’s comedic horror novel The Unnoticeables, The Empty Ones reveals the next chapter in the lives of a few misfits attempting to fight back against the mysterious Unnoticeables. The Empty Ones follows Carey and Randall to London where they go to rescue Gus and fight more of these mysterious angel-like creatures, and stumble on a powerful and unexpected ally. Meanwhile, Kaitlyn, who was very nearly beat when last we saw her, continues her fight into the desert of Mexico and the Southwest US, seeking the mysterious gear cult. Once there, she discovers what the gear cult is really up to: trying to ‘pin’ the angels to Earth, focus their attention here, and get as much of humanity as possible “solved”–which, in their minds, is akin to being saved–and in the process discovers something incredible about herself.

With a snarled lip, The Empty Ones incorporates everything that made The Unnoticeables incredible, but like any good punk band, when you don’t think they can get any louder, they somehow turn it up a notch. It’s terrifying and hilarious, visceral and insane, chaotic and beautiful.

The Empty Ones will be available August 30th. Please enjoy this excerpt.

ONE

1984. Lima, Peru. Meryll.

I messed up this poor girl’s code, and now she’s got teeth where her eyes should be.

I looked inside of her, and I saw hunger. Simple as that. You look inside some folks and you see this dense web of needs, desires, secrets, and regrets. It’s all laid out like neurons. Maybe train stations is a better analogy. There’s always a Grand Central. You just gotta find it.

You take a strand of somebody’s personality—like, the way they always say “naturally” instead of “of course.” And you start feeding it back, through moments, through years, through whole lifetimes even, and you’ll eventually find the source. They were watching The Avengers as a little kid, they saw Emma Peel say that, and they thought it was so sophisticated.

“Naturally,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. And she laughed.

This person tried it on for themselves, and they liked it. It stuck. So much hinges on that moment. So many experiences, so many connecting points where if they’d said “yes,” instead of “naturally,” the ensuing sequence of events would’ve gone in a totally different direction. Because they start using this silly, meaningless little word, they develop an affection for what they perceive to be sophistication. They listen to classical music, not because they like it, but because they want to be perceived as the type of person who likes it. They go to the ballet when they’re seventeen. They stay up all night reading about it first, so they can tell their mother “that’s a pas de deux,” and she would nudge her husband as if to say “see? See how refined our child is?” All of these little strings, hanging on other strings, wrapped around hubs, providing supports for the whole network. So you find them there, cross-legged on the orange shag in their living room, biscuits all over their face, watching The Avengers with eyes like glass, and you pull that out.

You show them that moment. They see that so much of who they thought they were was arbitrary—it all comes from here. And half their lifetime just goes away. You find another hub, getting felt up by Jaime in the locker room, and another, the spider crawling across their ear as a baby. You pluck out a few more of those, and pretty soon there’s not much left to a person at all. They just … go away. And all that energy they were wasting by existing, it becomes yours. You can do whatever you want with it.

You can use it to knock an asteroid out of orbit. You can use it to blow up a city. You can shove it deep down inside of you and store it, like a battery. It decays some over time, but there’s so much, and it’s so easy to get.

But we’re talking about a different girl: this girl here, in the wind-blown shack with the corrugated metal roof just outside of Lima.

Some folks need dozens of hubs plucked out of them before they’re solved. Most just need three of four. This girl has only one main concern: hunger. She’s always been hungry, and she’s never had enough to eat. There were other elements to her personality, other things that made her who she was, but in one way or another, all of those strings led back to hunger. You can’t pull just a single moment. You wouldn’t even get any energy that way—there’d be nothing left to simplify.

So I plucked out all the other, smaller hubs around hunger. Getting beaten by the policeman behind the supermarket. Kissing her little brother on the head before a soccer game in an overgrown lot. And here she is, teeth where her eyes should be. Belly twice the size of her body. Huge hands, fingers curling into canines. Her tongue is six feet long and flailing about like a live wire.

Dang it. Three years, and I’m still making these mistakes.

Ah, well. I’ll find a use for her.

Hi, my name is Meryll. And this is the story of how I became God.

Buy The Empty Ones here:

Excerpts

Sneak Peek: Spellbreaker by Blake Charlton

July 19, 2016May 13, 2024torforge

Leandra Weal has a bad habit of getting herself in dangerous situations.

While hunting neodemons in her role as Warden of Ixos, Leandra obtains a prophetic spell that provides a glimpse one day into her future. She discovers that she is doomed to murder someone she loves, soon, but not who. That’s a pretty big problem for a woman who has a shark god for a lover, a hostile empress for an aunt, a rogue misspelling wizard for a father, and a mother who–especially when arguing with her daughter–can be a real dragon.

Leandra’s quest to unravel the mystery of the murder-she-will-commit becomes more urgent when her chronic disease flares up and the Ixonian Archipelago is plagued by natural disasters, demon worshiping cults, and fierce political infighting. Everywhere she turns, Leandra finds herself amid intrigue and conflict. It seems her bad habit for getting into dangerous situations is turning into a full blown addiction.

As chaos spreads across Ixos, Leandra and her troubled family must race to uncover the shocking truth about a prophesied demonic invasion, human language, and their own identities–if they don’t kill each other first.

Spellbreaker, the long awaited sequel to Blake Charlton’s Spellbound, will be available August 23rd. Please enjoy this excerpt.

CHAPTER

One

To test a spell that predicts the future, try to murder the man selling it; if you can, it can’t. That, at least, was Leandra’s rationale for poisoning the smuggler’s blackrice liqueur.

On a secluded beach, they knelt and faced each other across a seaworn bamboo table. Above, a clear night sky crowded with stars and two half-moons. To Leandra’s left, a grove of slender palms, crosshatched moonshadows, short green grass. To her right, an expanse of dark seawater and lush limestone formations known as the Bay of Standing Islands.

Leandra’s catamaran rocked between two such limestone formations that rose narrow from the bay but widened into craggy rock, vines, and ferny cycads. “Mountains on stilts,” her illustrious father had once called the standing islands.

Across the table, the smuggler cleared his throat. Leandra, using several intermediaries, had agreed to meet him on this beach east of Chandralu. Both parties had asked that names not be used; however, as was the way of such meetings, neither party had asked that homicidal duplicity not be used. So Leandra picked up the smuggler’s porcelain bottle of blackrice liqueur. Calmly she poured the ambercolored spirit into his wooden cup.

He was watching her every action, but it was too late. She had already drawn a needle from her sleeve and held it against the bottle’s neck so the liqueur poured over its poisoned point. Then she filled her own cup, knowing the toxin had washed off.

The smuggler was a handsome man of middle years—flawless black skin, black goatee chased with silver, wide nose, large eyes. He wore a blue lungi and loose white blouse as if he were of the Lotus People, but his posture was laxer, his speech quicker than was polite in Lotus culture.

Also notable, the smuggler had wrapped a cloth around his head to conceal the spell he was selling. In places, a crimson glow shone through the headwrap. Because Leandra perceived some divine languages as red light, the glow suggested that the man was what he claimed to be—which is to say the kind of man that filled Leandra with hatred so molten hot that it would transform any sensible woman into an eye-gouging, throat-biting whirl of violence. Fortunately, Leandra was not a sensible woman.

She lifted her cup with one hand and flicked the needle away with the other. The smuggler did not hear it strike sand. “To your future,” she said.

“To your future,” he echoed. Blank expression.

With one draft, Leandra downed her blackrice liqueur. It was a fragrant, gratuitously alcoholic substance. The Lotus People called it mandana and drank it when conducting religious ceremonies or business transactions. Having lived in the Ixonian Archipelago for thirteen years, Leandra had drunk gallons of the stuff without becoming accustomed to it. She wondered if anyone ever did.

The mandana traveled down her throat as liquid and up her sinuses as harsh, flavored vapor. Every inch from her stomach to nosetip burned as if scrubbed with astringent. Taste came last and started sweet like chewed sugarcane but then curdled into something that approximated honeyed monkey vomit.

Throughout the miniature alcoholic ordeal, Leandra kept her expression pleasant. Fortunate that she did; the smuggler was studying her. She wasn’t much to see, short and frail, wearing a long-sleeved dress of pale yellow. A black silk headdress tied below her chin hid her dark hair and pale neck.

Leandra was unaccustomed to the gaze of strangers; in daylight, she wore a veil that concealed all but her eyes. Her disease required that she avoid sunlight.

A lover had once remarked that, in certain circumstances, her wide brown eyes seemed misleadingly innocent and vulnerable. Given the smuggler’s scrutiny, Leandra hoped that these “certain circumstances” included those in which she was plotting murder.

The smuggler raised his cup to drink, but then his face tensed. He paused and looked past Leandra. Maybe ten feet away stood four-armed Dhrun—Leandra’s divine protector, brawler, erstwhile confidant.

“Oh, don’t mind my bodyguard,” she said while turning to regard Dhrun, who presently was manifesting his youngest incarnation. “He couldn’t harm a soul unless he’s got something sharp to jam through … oh … well … he does seem to have two rather long swords, doesn’t he?”

The smuggler stared at her flatly.

What Leandra had said wasn’t strictly true; Dhrun was deadliest barehanded, but she had liked the way the quip sounded. So she broadened her smile and asked the smuggler, “Not one for levity?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Pity. But truly, don’t mind my bodyguard. Your men hiding in the grove could reach us before he could.” She looked at the silhouettes scattered among the palms. An untrained eye would mistake them for stumps or rocks, but Leandra could see at least six figures. The closest crouched not six feet away and carried all the implements necessary to poke distressingly large holes in a body. She gave the camouflaged assassin a slight nod.

Leandra made sure that she had no bad habits, only full-blown addictions—flirting with danger being one of her favorites.

The smuggler was still studying Dhrun. “He isn’t human, is he?”

“What was your first clue, his third or fourth arm?”

The smuggler scowled. “It’s hard to know what to expect in the league, especially on Ixos. Your islands are a menagerie of demigods or divinity complexes or whatever you call them. So, this … bodyguard … is a god?”

“No, he is the complex of three souls: a god of wrestling named Dhrun; his avatar, a young human wrestler who took the name of Dhrunarman after winning last year’s championship; and an ancient Cloud Culture goddess of victory named Nika. So a man, a god, and a goddess, not unusual for a divinity complex, some parts of him are divine, some parts are human; he just has to decide which parts.”

“What are his choices?”

“Male, female, some of the ports of call lying between the two, if you catch my drift.”

“I do not catch it.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”

The smuggler looked at her catamaran. Its twin hulls and the decks that stretched between them shone in the moonlight.

Leandra’s patience thinned. “As agreed, my crew remained aboard. You needn’t worry about an attack.”

“Something is wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked out at the Bay of Standing Islands. “No ship followed you here?”

“None.”

“You’re certain?”

“My captain and crew are Sea People; they know how to navigate the standing islands unseen.”

“But you’ve heard the rumors?”

“Rumors of what? That the Disjunction has come at last? That after thirty damn years of waiting around, Los and the demons of the Ancient Continent finally found their backsides with both hands and crossed the ocean?”

Thirty four years ago, Nicodemus Weal and his wife, Francesca DeVega, had defeated the demon Typhon; however, a dragon known as the Savanna Walker had escaped to the Ancient Continent, which should have allowed the demons to cross the ocean to destroy all human language in the War of Disjunction. But the demons had not come. No one knew why. Now after three decades of anticipation, some doubted that the demons would ever come.

The smuggler snorted. “No, no, nothing about the Disjunction. These are rumors of another human war. Reports of crop failures have come from Verdant. Seems the Silent Blight is worsening in the empire, and perhaps Empress Vivian is eying Ixos’s rice and taro fields. The shipyards of Abuja are frantic with construction. A new fleet of hierophantic airships flies above Trillinion.”

Leandra kept her face impassive.

He continued. “The league is reinforcing Lorn’s northern border and sending ships to Ixos. Seems the peace between the empire and the league might spring another of its little leaks. The next year could see the Blockade of Ogun all over again. Or perhaps a second round of the Goldensward War. But you might know more about that?”

Leandra only stared.

The smuggler’s full lips peeled back into a smile. White teeth, moonlight. “You’re not one to hand out information. Good, good. Then consider how another human war might make our trade … particularly lucrative.”

“You have a proposal?”

“In Abuja there’s talk of a new power in Chandralu. The Cult of the Undivided Society, it’s called. They don’t worship neodemons like the usual cults; they worship the ancient demons. The empire and the league claim to have hunted down all of the demon worshipers after Typhon’s defeat, but maybe they missed a few. The Undivided Society is tired of waiting for the Disjunction and aims to hurry it along a step or two. Have you heard of it?”

“Tall tales from sailors drunk on kava, nothing more. The tellers often follow it with an account of the Floating Island.”

“Floating island?”

“Stories of an island of ghosts or neodemons that isn’t fixed to the sea floor but floats around the archipelago. Those who make landfall are doomed to damnation or reincarnation as pubic lice or whatever. My point is that sailors are better known for creativity than reliability.”

“And you think this Cult of The Undivided Society is just another sea yarn, just another floating island?”

“There’s no proof the cult exists.”

“But the Empress Vivian is offering a heavy purse for such proof. And she is sure to offer more now that her half-brother is in Ixos.”

Leandra stiffened. Twenty days ago Nicodemus Weal, the empress’s half-brother, had arrived in Chandralu ostensibly to cast his metaspells, which allowed deities to thrive in the league kingdoms. But in truth, he had come to reinforce the archipelago against possible imperial attack. More distressing, upon arrival, Nicodemus had heard rumors of the Undivided Society and of two neodemons attacking caravans near Chandralu. Therefore, Nicodemus had launched efforts not only to support his daughter, the Lady Warden of Ixos, but also to investigate her competency.

Leandra found this distressing for two reasons. First, she feared the smuggler would flee if he learned that Nicodemus had doubled the ships patrolling the bay. Second, she was, after all, Nicodemus’s daughter.

Family isn’t a word; it’s a sentence.

For three decades Leandra’s family had served as the wardens of the league, tasked with converting or destroying neodemons. As the Warden of Ixos, she was responsible for suppressing neodemons in the archipelago. If Nicodemus thought that the two marauding neodemons and the rumors of the Undivided Society signified her incompetence, he might revoke her independence.

Fifteen days ago, Nicodemus and his followers had set out to hunt one of two neodemons. He might return any day. Although Leandra did not dislike her father, there was much she hoped to accomplish before he returned, including closing a deal with this disturbingly well-informed smuggler. She looked at the man. “Should I learn anything about the Undivided Society, you will be the first to know. But I am not inclined to enter into a new agreement until the present one is concluded to my satisfaction.”

“Ah, yes, your prophetic spell,” the smuggler said and raised his cup to his lips. But then he paused and looked out to the bay. “Your pardon, but … I think I might … I sense … some danger…”

Leandra turned and saw nothing but moonlit waves and towering limestone islands. “Look, there is no ship among the islands. No army hiding under the table. No Nicodemus bloody Weal about to fall out of a God-of-god’s damned coconut tree. I am here to purchase that prophetic spell, but that text seems to be giving you distressingly little information about the future. What is this danger? Shouldn’t your spell foresee what it will be?”

“This spell doesn’t work that way. It allows me to feel forward into time.”

She frowned. “That sounds … rather ungentlemanly.”

“I can sense the emotions of all the different men I might become in an hour.”

“And how many of these men are there?”

“A near infinite number. I’m not aware of them all, but when many of them experience anxiety, I grow wary.”

Leandra studied the smuggler’s face. “What could be frightening them?”

“You saw no ships amid the standing islands?”

“No dammed ships. And no other threats.”

“Very well…” He looked down at his mandana. “Perhaps it’s just apprehension.” He raised the cup to his lips.

Leandra put her head to one side. Even with a prophetic spell around his head, he was going to drink poison? Feeling forward in time, as wondrous as it sounded, seemed as useful as a boiling pot made of Lornish butter.

But then the smuggler froze. He peered into his liqueur and frowned. He lowered the cup, paused, raised it back toward his lips, lowered it again. He looked at her, eyes narrowed, put the cup down.

Leandra allowed herself a small laugh. “Is there a problem?”

“The closer I bring the mandana to my lips, the more of my future selves are writhing in terror. What in the Creator’s name did you put in here?”

She shrugged. “The extract of a puffer fish liver, just a few drops. The hydromancers call it tetrodotoxin; it’s an old recipe of the Sea People. Just a bit of local flavor.”

“And what flavor would that be?”

“The flavor of nothing,” she said airily. “But half an hour from now your mouth would tingle. Then your face and hands would go numb. All your muscles would slacken and you’d stop breathing. As a windfall, you would be perfectly aware as paralysis caused you to suffocate to death.”

“Antidote?”

“None.”

“You have a very trusting soul.”

“I do,” she admitted. “One day it’ll be the death of someone else. Likely several someone elses. But don’t be too upset; I now have evidence that your prophetic spell is genuine.”

“You could have tried the text.” He picked up a slim leather folio from the ground beside him.

She shook her head. “What’s to stop you from selling me a death sentence? I will purchase the text around your head or nothing at all.”

“Killing you would not be good business. There is more I would like to sell you and information I hope you will sell to me. On next trip I could have more substantial texts.”

“Then let me increase your profit. I’ll double your price if you tell me where you get these spells.”

The man studied her but said nothing.

She pointed to his head. “A text that powerful couldn’t be written; it had to be part of a deity. I’m guessing you chopped one of the empire’s gods into sellable pieces.”

“You forget that imperial spellwrights have revolutionized composition. With Vivian’s metaspells, they are changing the rules.” He nodded toward the folio. “Inscribing brief godspells onto paper for example.” Previously, godspells could be imbued only into a deity’s ark stone.

Leandra shook her head. “Perhaps you had an imperial spellwright to set that godspell on paper, but no human mind could have composed it. Tell me where and how you are deconstructing deities. In return, I will investigate your Undivided Society. That or I could pay a large sum of jade.”

He studied her. “I wonder why you should want such information … and how much it is worth to you. Some information isn’t for sale to just anyone.”

“Then perhaps when our partnership is stronger?”

“Shall we meet again? Perhaps tomorrow … in the city?”

Leandra considered. “If this exchange proves satisfactory … tomorrow at dusk, my bodyguard will meet you by the Lesser Sacred Pool. You know where that is?”

He nodded.

“Come alone. If there is anyone else with you, you’ll never find us again. Understood?”

“Indeed. In the meantime, maybe you could tell me more about yourself?” he asked before seeing her blank expression and quickly adding, “Perhaps not your name or station, but—”

“If you discover my identity, then I will have to dispose of you in several large and bloody pieces deposited almost directly into a shark’s belly. I say ‘almost directly’ because the shark’s teeth would have to act as brief but effective intermediaries. And neither of us would want that.”

“Neither of us would.”

“Good, now for that godspell.” She gestured to her guard.

A moment later Dhrun placed two small chests next to the smuggler and opened them. One was filled with rough-cut jade and balls of opium. In the other chest lay plates of Lornish steel and lacquered Dralish wood, each imbued with black market magical language.

The smuggler sorted through the jade and then held his hands over the steel and wood, seemingly able to sense magical text. Only a spellwright using a synesthetic reaction could do so. That made him a rogue wizard perhaps? Or maybe a pyromancer? “It is good,” the smuggler said before holding out his folio.

“The godspell around your head,” Leandra said coldly.

“They’re identical, down to the last rune.”

She shook her head.

“How could I sell you this spell? I can’t remove this spell from my head.”

“My bodyguard will assist.”

The smuggler eyed Dhrun’s face, which presently was that of youthful Dhrunarman—light brown skin, aquiline nose, densely curled black hair, sparse beard. Dressed in a black lungi and a vest of scale armor, which showed to good advantage all four of his powerfully built arms, Dhrun looked every bit a young Ixonian divinity complex.

The smuggler looked back at Leandra. “Very well, but before I remove my headwrap, I will admit to being in disguise. I am not of the Lotus People.”

“You fill me with shock,” she said in deadpan before leaning forward. “What do most of your future selves feel an hour from now?”

“Some are satisfied … but some are agitated, a few very much so.”

“You still must smuggle your payments back into the city or out of the bay.”

He seemed to consider this and then removed his headwrap. His forehead was encircled by rubicund prose. Though Leandra was not fluent in the red language, her inheritance from her mother allowed her to visualize the divine text.

Then she realized that the smuggler’s hair consisted of silvering dreadlocks. “You’re Trillinonish,” she said and was struck by a sensation of familiarity. Had she seen this man before? No, it wasn’t possible. And yet … she couldn’t shake the feeling.

Dhrun put his upper hands to the back of the smuggler’s head. The radiant godspell slackened from his brow and then fell away. Holding the sentences as if they were a necklace, Dhrun carried the crimson language to Leandra and stood behind her.

As Leandra removed her headdress, she was aware of Dhrun’s lower hands resting on her shoulder and his upper hands moving near her ears. She caught glimpses of the godspell’s red glow, but she felt nothing press against her forehead or scalp. “Is the godspell around—” she started to ask, but then she perceived … what was it?

It was like nothing earthly.

Currents of emotion moved all around her but not through her. She felt them only partially, as if she were watching a poignant shadow play or listening to a touching song. But these sympathetic feelings were sparked not for actors or lyrics, but from the multiplicity of her future selves. There were thousands of her possible selves. Hundreds of thousands? No one could say how many.

Most of herselves felt variations on her present anxieties, but a few were filled with strange emotions changing too fast to identify. Concentrating on one of these improbable futures was like trying to barehandcatch an oiled gecko. And yet … Leandra couldn’t resist mentally chasing these bright futures.

Dhrun had walked back to the smuggler and was using his upper hands to pull rubicund sentences from the smuggler’s folio and tie them around the man’s head.

Leandra closed her eyes and concentrated on the alluring futures. Again they flitted away, but not before one gave her a glimpse into an hour hence in which she felt unabashed triumph. Leandra’s excitement grew. Perhaps she could learn the smuggler’s identity? Discover how he was eviscerating deities?

With even more vigor, Leandra mentally chased after this triumphant future. Within moments she lost it within a sea of banal hours.

Something more was needed.

Leandra peered through slit eyelids. Dhrun was adjusting the godspell tied around the smuggler’s head. Neither man was attending to her.

Because of her parentage, Leandra could give herself over to her disease and gain temporary fluency in magical language she was touching. In this state, she could perfectly understand and misspell any magical text. For a price, she became the universal spellbreaker.

If she used this ability now, she could alter her new godspell; however, this would undoubtedly cause the divine aspects of her body, which she had inherited from her mother, to attack the human aspects she had inherited from her father. The result would be a disease flare, possibly with dire consequences. And yet if she could catch that triumphant future, the rewards might justify the risks.

A change ran through her futures; more and more of them were filled with shock. Some also felt triumph, others raw horror. A different future had become probable, and the more she thought about that future, the more probable it became.

Leandra brought a hand up to her forehead and let her disease consume her. Soon her joints would ache and a rash would unfurl across the bridge of her nose, her forehead, her cheeks. Perhaps this flare would be so bad that Leandra would need to urinate frequently and her hands and face would swell. The God-of-god’s willing, the flare would not be so bad as to cause her perception to expand. But now, in this painless moment, she forgot the risks as her mind joined with the godspell.

For an instant, she became the text’s progenitor—a minor but ancient Trillinonish goddess of artistry, beauty, dance. The impoverished priests of her temple had sold her ark stone to the smugglers for thirty lengths of gold. The smugglers had bound her in a textual cage and cracked open her skull to pull the living language out of her mind. Her shrieks deafened two men.

In the next instant, Leandra returned to her own skull. Her hands were shaking as she thought of what the smuggler’s people had done.

Neither the smuggler nor Dhrun had noticed any change in Leandra. No doubt this was because of a side effect of Leandra’s current condition. When her disease flared, Leandra caused those nearby to better understand any language with which she was working. Fortunately an increased awareness of the red language had made the two men more preoccupied with the text around the smuggler’s brow.

Leandra wanted to know more about how the godspell around her head had been created. The imperial spellwright who had edited it had shaped the text so that it would project a human mind forward by one hour, but in the flare of her disease Leandra was less human, more textual.

Carefully she misspelled one word in the godspell’s first sentence and so increased her perception twenty-four times farther into the future. No other mortal creature but she could have made this misspelling, not even her illustrious father.

Normally Leandra would have been proud of such an achievement, but now she felt nothing but overwhelmed by the newly perceptible future selves. If she had thought the next hour contained a multiplicity of futures, the next day produced a million times as many, a hundred million times as many.

She swayed, struggling to retain her sanity amid the prismatic spray of herselves. In the past her hybrid-mind had been prone to dangerous expansions of perception, but nothing so dangerous as this had ever happened before. Now only one thing saved her from madness. Only one thing allowed her to grab the table with both hands as if she were drunk.

A little less than a third of her future selves were wracked by a specific guilt. Though Leandra had never felt it before, she recognized the dreadful emotion as that belonging to someone who had recently killed a dear friend, a family member, or a lover.

Another third of her future selves were filled with the anxieties of someone fleeing danger and wracked with a devastating guilt about the sudden death of everyone she loved.

But the last third of her future selves felt nothing. Nothing at all. And they felt nothing, because they were all dead.

With her godspell-laced mind working so hotly in the future, Leandra deduced the implications of these emotions into her own, personal prophecy: In one day’s time, she had to choose between dying or murdering someone she loved. If she tried to run or avoid the prophecy, everyone she loved would perish.

Leandra misspelled her godspell again so that she could feel only an hour forward. The prism of herselves collapsed enough so that it no longer drove her toward insanity. Her breathing slowed. Her heart calmed. But now she needed to hurry back to Chandralu and solve the mystery of her future murder.

She shuddered as she remembered the emotions of the women she would become. She could not run or everyone she knew would suffer. No way around it. In one day’s time, she would have to murder someone she loved or die.

She looked up at Dhrun. He looked back at her with curious, beautifully dark eyes.

Leandra was left with one question.

Who?

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