“The Sword has spoken.”
The Bard cleared a way through the riot that was the Kalliopean Assizes and hustled them to their room, shutting the door securely behind them and setting his back to it.
Sharryn looked at Crow. “I didn’t know we could do that. Did you know we could do that?”
“Sit in judgment on an entire province?” Crow said. She worked her shoulders, which were beginning to stiffen from the fight. “No. We’re going to have a few words with Loukas, not to mention the Magi Guild, when we get back to Hestia. If we live long enough to get back to Hestia, that is.” She looked at Sharryn. “I understand it, though. Don’t you see? All the cases that came before us in this Assizes, they were all in some way connected to the trouble at the root of the society itself. For centuries Kalliope has ignored, sequestered, subjugated fully half of its population, and as a result it is dying.”
“And you think forcing its first woman ruler upon it will make it live?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Crow said. “The Sword has rendered judgment. The rest is up to the Kalliopeans.”
Unbelievably, the Bard laughed. “What a song this Assizes will make,” he said. He reached for Crow’s hand and brought it to his lips. “Truly, King Loukas chose well when he chose you to bear his Sword.”
“So that’s where you’ve been every night,” Sharryn said to Crow accusingly.
Crow sighed. “Sharryn, meet Basil the Bard, son of Baruch, of the Isle of Lateum in the Hesperides, King’s Singer.” She met Basil’s eyes with a rueful smile, and added, “And my husband.”
Sharryn’s jaw dropped. “Husband! Husband? Since when?”
Crow’s answer was forestalled by a knock at the door. The Bard opened it a crack, then far enough to admit Naiche.
“Do you realize what you have done?” she said without preamble, strung as taut as one of the Bard’s lutina strings. “Have you any idea? Kalliope has never been ruled by a woman, never in its history.”
“Then it’s time it was,” Sharryn said.
“It is the Sword’s judgment, which may not be gainsaid,” Crow said more gently. “And the men of Kalliope have only to look in a mirror to remind them of what will happen if they fail to obey.”
Naiche paced, her prowling stride long enough to test the width of her skirts. “Can you possibly imagine the task you have set before me? Naming me heir offends every Kalliopean custom and tradition going back a thousand years. It calls our very society into question. Every man’s hand will be against me. I will be all alone. I will have no help—”
“You will have Sergeus,” Sharryn said.
Naiche paused, arrested. “But he is not of royal blood.”
“Then I rather think your first order of business will be to coax a title for Sergeus out of the King,” Sharryn said.
“And you will have your father,” Crow said. “No, think. He did not protest the judgment of the Sword. And,” she added, “you will have us, at least for the first year. King’s Seer and King’s Sword and King’s Singer at your shoulder, should Kalliope’s memories of this day fail too soon.”
Naiche turned and spread beseeching hands. “How do I begin? Where?”
Crow looked at Sharryn and smiled. “Do you have any women friends?”
About The Authors
Like Meg Langslow, the ornamental-blacksmith heroine of her series from St. Martin’s Press, Donna Andrews was born and raised in Yorktown, Virginia. These days she spends almost as much time in cyberspace as Turing Hopper, the Artificial Intelligence Personality who appears in her technocozy series from Berkley Prime Crime. Although she has loved fantasy and science fiction since childhood, Andrews developed a taste for murder in college (particularly at exam time). After graduation, she moved to the Washington, D.C., area and joined the communications staff of a large financial organization where she developed a profound understanding of the criminal mind through her observation of interdepartmental politics. Her first mystery, Murder with Peacocks, won the Agatha, Anthony, Barry, and Romantic Times awards for best first novel and the Lefty Award for funniest mystery of 1999. The Penguin Who Knew Too Much (St. Martin’s) was #1 on the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association bestseller list for August 2007.
Michael Armstrong was born in Virginia, raised in Florida, and moved to Alaska half a lifetime ago. He now lives in Homer, Alaska, a town the New York Times describes as “too rough and too weird to be a tourist trap.” His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Powers of Detection, The Mysterious North, and other anthologies. His latest novel is Truck Stop Earth, now in search of a publisher that can decide if it’s truth or just science fiction. He covers cops, courts, science, arts, and wayward marine mammals at the Homer News.
Mike Doogan is a retired journalist who writes mystery novels and serves in the Alaska State legislature. He and his wife of thirty-seven years, Kathy, live in Anchorage.
Carole Nelson Douglas’s Good Night, Mr. Holmes was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and “ushered in a 1990s explosion of women-centered history-mystery reschooling us about the ornery presence of women in both social and literary history,” said The Drood Review of Mystery. Douglas’s Irene Adler Sherlockian suspense novels and her Midnight Louie feline PI contemporary mystery series comprise half of her fifty novels, but she’s also written high fantasy and science fiction. Her short fiction has been reprinted in seven Year’s Best collections, and her work has been short-listed for or won more than fifty awards. Her latest novels are Delilah Street’s Dancing with Werewolves and Brimstone Kiss, and Midnight Louie’s Cat in a Sapphire Slipper. A former daily newspaper reporter covering women’s and social issues, Douglas has written fiction full-time since 1984 and lives in Texas.
Laura Anne Gilman is the author of the popular Retrievers series from Luna Books, which includes Staying Dead, Curse the Dark, Bring It On, Burning Bridges, and Free Fall. She is also the author of the Grail Quest trilogy and more than thirty short stories published in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including the magazines Realms of Fantasy, ChiZine, and Flesh & Blood, and the anthologies ReVisions, Murder by Magic, and Polyphony 6, among many others. Readers who like Bonnie in this story will be able to follow her adventures in novel form, coming soon from Luna Books.
Simon R. Green was born in 1955 in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, England. He has an MA in modern English and American literature from Leicester University and has also studied history and has a combined humanities degree. After several years of publishers’ rejection letters, he sold seven novels in 1988, just two days after he started working at Bilbo’s bookshop in Bath. This was followed by a commission to write the novelization of the Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. He is a British Fantasy Society (BFS) member and still finds time to do some Shakespearean acting.
Charlaine Harris is the Anthony Award-winning author of several series, both mystery and paranormal. Her books are published in twenty countries. Charlaine lives in southern Arkansas, on six acres out in the country, with two other humans and three dogs. She loves to read.
Laurie R. King is the New York Times bestselling author of eighteen novels and a number of short stories, from the Edgar® and Creasey award-winning A Grave Talent to the ninth Mary Russell story, The Language of Bees (2009). Her work has also won the Nero (A Monstrous Regiment of Women) and the Macavity (Folly), and been nominated for the Agatha, the Orange, the Barry, and two more Edgar® awards. “The House” began as a writer’s improv project in 2006 to celebrate Santa Cruz County naming Laurie its artist of the year. In what was billed as “Performance Art with a (Plot) Twist,” she was handed a set of prompts—from Aileen Vance, Cassie Shea, Katie Fox, and Kerry Kilburn—and built her story around them in a public event that was also streamed online. The writing process is described at www.LaurieRKing.com.
Sharon Shinn is the author of Archangel and five other books in the Samaria world, as well as thirteen other adult and YA
science fiction/ fantasy novels. She won the William L. Crawford Award for outstanding new fantasy writer for her first book. A graduate of North-western University, she has lived in the Midwest most of her life.
Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage and raised on a seventy-five-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and found it in writing. Her first science fiction novel, Second Star, sank without a trace; her first crime fiction novel, A Cold Day for Murder, won an Edgar® Award; her first thriller, Blindfold Game, hit the New York Times bestseller list; and her twenty-fifth novel and sixteenth Kate Shugak novel, Whisper to the Blood, comes out in February 2009.
Michael A. Stackpole is an award-winning author, game and computer-game designer, and poet whose first novel, Warrior: En Garde, was published in 1988. Since then, he has written forty other novels, including eight New York Times bestselling novels in the Star Wars® line, of which X-wing: Rogue Squadron and I, Jedi are the best known. Mike lives in Arizona and in his spare time spends early mornings at Starbucks, collects toy soldiers and old radio shows, plays indoor soccer, rides his bike, and listens to Irish music in the finer pubs in the Phoenix area. His website is www.stormwolf.com.
John Straley is a novelist and private investigator from Sitka, Alaska. He is the author of the Cecil Younger mysteries, as well as his newest historical novel, The Big Both Ways. His first book of poetry, The Rising and the Rain, was published in October of 2008. Straley is the twelfth Alaskan writer laureate.
Unusual Suspects: Stories of Mystery & Fantasy Page 27
