This could be the story of a Victorian woman naturalist struggling to be taken seriously in a male dominated world but this is a fantasy novel and Isabella lives in a land called Scirling and longs to study dragons, otherwise the situations are very similar. Isabella's journey towards achieving h...
Warrior was absolutely amazing.Miryo is in an unusual predicament, as a witch, to gain control of her powers, she must kill someone who looks just like her, who is her. Someone who should have died when she was very young. Miryo has to kill her doppelganger, the other part of herself.Mirage is on...
We stand upon the brink of a new century, and I feel—I know—that it will not be the end of discovery, an age wherein the best to which we can aspire is to perfect the knowledge already within our grasp. There are new mountains we have not climbed, and the vistas that we shall see from their peaks...
He smiles, eyes closed, and lets his thoughts drift on the breeze. Insects sing a gentle chorus, with birds supplying the melody. He can hear leaves rustling, and over the crest of the hill, her laughter, light and sweet as bells. The damp soil yields softly beneath his ba...
Where the latter is concerned, I must single out the late C. V. Wedgwood, who did more than any other historian I read to bring this period to life. Any historian will mention, for example, the attempted arrest of the Five Members, perhaps quoting one or two of the famous lines from the incident;...
Mirei, frustrated by the interminable disagreements, had left to take care of Urishin, though she promised to return later. Satomi dearly wished the young witch could take a force of people straight to Kalistyi; it would be the most effective solution. It just wasn’t possible, though. Any attacki...
“We can stay,” he said, putting that first because he knew nothing else he said would leave a mark on my brain until that part had been laid to rest. “Lord Ferdigan was very keen to send you home, on the grounds that it’s all well and good for me to risk my neck, but not so acceptable for you.” “...
For once Galen came in without pausing for a bow, brandishing the folded letter Wilhas had given him. “Johann Palitzsch, in Saxony. A gentleman farmer, if you can believe it; he practices astronomy as a pastime.” The people assembled to hear him were a motley sort of war c...
Benjamin Talbot’s brief notice, published in the 28 Seminis issue of your magazine, detailing his acquisition of a preserved specimen from a heretofore undocumented draconic species. As we all know, legends of the cockatrice date back many centuries, but I am unaware of any reputable examples col...
This was the last of the stories to be written, for a mix of aesthetic and pragmatic reasons. Aesthetically, my brain had stopped producing these kinds of ideas on a regular basis; I would have had to consciously work at it to come up with more. Pragmatically, it was not easy to sell them; editor...
Plain grey wool, held taut by the stone weights tied at the ends, awaiting her hand. She can feel the potential in the threads, the resonance. She has that much of the gift, at least. But it is madness to think she can do more. It is hubris. It is desperation. Her maid stands ready with the bone ...
A month and a half into the quarter, that number had dropped sharply. We might not be as dangerous as the pyros, but we weren’t as exciting, either. At least, to anybody who wasn’t a hard-core divination geek. People still showed to the occasional meeting, and Akila told m...
It was nearly noon, and I was lying in bed, as if nothing had happened. Never mind that it wasn’t exactly my choice: I’d made it back to Wolfstone last night by dint of sheer refusal to pass out in the mud, but barely stayed awake long enough to give Liesel what I suspected was a horrifically con...
I should have asked Julian to look before I went to my appointment . . . but I preferred to risk an official interrogation rather than remind him about what had happened the previous day. Deactivating the shield was no big ceremony at all. One minute I had a giant hole in ...
"Yes. She's so single-minded it's unbelievable. There's the problem, which she knows; there's the solution, which she's looking for, and there's the Goddess, who will make it all okay.""When you put it that way, she doesn't sound all that different from us. But somehow… I don't know. I think it's...