QSFer Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett have a new queer historical fantasy mystery book out, Astreiant book one: Point of Hopes.
The fate of the city hangs in the balance…
The city of Astreiant is full of magic, danger and bureaucracy, and never moreso than when something or someone is making guild apprentices disappear without a trace. Philip Eslingen has just been discharged from his mercenary company and as a Leaguer and a stranger, makes an ideal suspect.
Fortunately for him, Pointsman Nicolas Rathe from the Point of Hopes station doesn’t agree, but he knows the only way to prove that is to find the missing children and the real culprits. Together they must follow a twisted trail of deceit and magic in a city on the brink of exploding into violence.
If they can’t learn to work together, the results could be catastrophic, even fatal. And if they can’t trust each other, the price could be higher than either of them realize.
Get It At Amazon | Publisher | Smashwords
Excerpt
The main room was almost empty at midafternoon, only an ancient woman sitting beside the cold hearth, her face so wrinkled and shrunken beneath her neat cap that it was impossible to tell if she were asleep or simply staring into space. A couple of the waiters were playing tromps, the table between them strewn with cards and a handful of copper coins, and a tall man sat in the far corner reading a broadsheet prophecy, feet in good boots propped up on the table in front of him. Good soldier’s boots, Rathe amended, and his gaze sharpened. Devynck liked to hire out-of-work soldiers, and this just might be her new knife. The stranger looked up, as though he’d heard the thought or felt Rathe’s eyes on him, and lowered the broadsheet with a smile that did not quite reach his eyes. He was handsome, almost beautiful, Rathe thought, with the milk white Leaguer complexion that was so fashionable now, and long almost-black hair. In the light from the garden window, his eyes were very blue, the blue of ink, not sky, and he’d chosen the ribbons on his hat and hair to match the shade. And that, Rathe thought, recalling himself to the job at hand, bespoke a vanity that, while not surprising, was probably not attractive.
“I’m here to see Aagte,” he said, to the room at large, and the handsome man’s smile widened slightly. One of the waiters put his cards aside with palpable relief—he’d been losing, Rathe saw, by the piled coins—and scurried through the kitchen door. He reappeared a moment later, held the door open with a grimace that wasn’t quite a smile.
“She says to come on back,” he said, and Rathe nodded, and stepped through into the hall that led to the kitchen. The smell of food was much stronger here, onions and oil and garlic and the distinctive Leaguer scent of mutton and beer, not unpleasant but powerful; through the open arch he could see Devynck’s daughter Adriana helping to scour the pans for the night’s dinner. She saw him looking, and grinned cheerfully, her hands never pausing in their steady motion. Rathe smiled back, and a side door opened.
“So, Rathe, what brings you here?” Devynck’s eyes were wary, despite the pleasant voice. She beckoned him into the little room—another counting room, Rathe saw, though a good deal smaller than Mailet’s—and shut the door firmly behind him.
“A few things,” Rathe answered easily. “Nothing—complicated.”
“That would be a first.” Devynck leaned against the edge of her work table, which looked as though it had seen service in the kitchens, the top scarred with knife marks. There was only one chair, and Rathe appreciated the delicate balance of courtesy and status. She wouldn’t sit, and keep him standing, but neither would she stand when he sat.
“I understand you have a new knife,” he went on.
Devynck nodded. “You probably saw him when you came in. His name’s Philip, Philip Eslingen. Just paid off from Coindarel’s Dragons.”
“Is that a reference?” Rathe asked with exaggerated innocence, and Devynck gave a sour smile.
“To some of us, anyway. Coindarel’s no fool, and he doesn’t hire fools.”
Rathe’s eyebrows rose, in spite of himself. Coindarel was known to choose his junior officers for their looks, and the man in the main room was easily pretty enough to have caught the prince-marshal’s eye.
Devynck sighed. “Not for his sergeants—not for the men who do the real work, anyway. And Philip came up through the ranks.”
“It wasn’t his sleeping habits that worried me,” Rathe answered. “I hear you had a little trouble here the other night.”
“We did not,” Devynck answered promptly, “and that’s precisely why I hired the man. There could’ve been trouble, easy, but he nipped it in the bud.”
Author Bio
Melissa Scott is from Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University, where she earned her PhD in the Comparative History program. She is the author of more than thirty original science fiction and fantasy novels, most with queer themes and characters, as well as authorized tie-ins for Star Trek: DS9, Star Trek: Voyager, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Star Wars Rebels. She won Lambda Literary Awards for Trouble and Her Friends, Shadow Man, Point of Dreams (written with her late partner, Lisa A. Barnett), and Death By Silver, with Amy Griswold. She also won Spectrum Awards for Shadow Man, Fairs’ Point, Death By Silver, and for the short story “The Rocky Side of the Sky” (Periphery, Lethe Press) as well as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She was also shortlisted for the Otherwise (Tiptree) Award. Her latest short story, “Sirens,” appeared in the collection Retellings of the Inland Seas, and her text-based game for Choice of Games, A Player’s Heart, came out in 2020. Her most recent solo novels, The Master of Samar and Fallen, were published in 2023.
Lisa A. Barnett was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts, attended Girls’ Latin School, and received her BA from the University of Massachusetts/Boston. She began working in theatre publishing while she was still in college, beginning at Baker’s Plays in Boston, and then moving to Heinemann, where she developed her own line of theatre books. In that role, she edited plays, monologue collections, and books of practical theatre, as well as a second line of books on theatre in education, which included a string of award-winning titles. As a writer, she worked primarily in collaboration with her partner, Melissa Scott, and together they produced three novels: The Armor of Light, set in an alternate Elizabethan England, Point of Hopes, and Point of Dreams, the last a Lambda Literary Award Winner. They also produced a short story, “The Carmen Miranda Gambit,” which was published in the 1990 collection Carmen Miranda’s Ghost is Haunting Space Station Three. Outside of the collaboration, she had a pair of monologues published in the collection Monologues from the Road, and subsequently saw them produced as part of an evening of “theatre from the road.” She was exceedingly fond of both dogs and horses, and was an active member of the Piscataqua Obedience Club as well as being heavily involved in several equine rescue organizations. She was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer in 2003, and died of a metastatic brain tumor in 2006.
| Author Website | http://melissascottwrites.com/ |
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