QSFer Emmie Mears has a new queer fantasy book out in the Stonebreaker series (ace, bi, demi, gay, intersex, non-binary, pan, sapphic): Windtaker.
Time ticks down to the Reinvocation…
In Lahivar, Carin and Culy prepare to track down the remaining hearthstones even as in Haveranth, Lyari works to decimate the life that is finally returning to the Northlands.
More than life, magic itself returns in force—and that’s not the only invasion.
Carin’s narrow escape from Khardish rebels has left enemies in her wake, and they will stop at nothing to find her, even if it means following her to her homeland. As an army closes in on Lahivar from the west and the looming threat of the Reinvocation rises to the south, those fighting to restore balance to the world may be the only thing that stands between their people and annihilation.
Get It At Amazon | Publisher | B&N | Kobo | Waterstones
Excerpt
I thought I’d know. How to go on. How to make this world make sense.
I thought I’d see into the secret worlds. I thought they’d teach me what I wanted to know. How to fix it.
I thought there would be a quest, a task. Break the stones, free the earth, set it right.
I was wrong.
I know that now.
Nothing is ever so simple that one choice can right lifetimes of wrongs.
It’s never about one flaming sword, one halm arrow, one spell broken.
If there is anything I have learned in the cycles since my death, it is that the true quest is work. It’s work, and it’s work every day.
It’s work because it’s choices. It’s looking into every wrong and knowing that it will take blood and sweat and pain to make it right. It’s choosing to make my life harder today, more uncomfortable, more lost, to find something that never should have been lost in the first place.
When I was young, Merin told me that as we age, we reach a point where we are certain, and from that certainty, the only wisdom to be found is to take it apart stone by stone. Only fools rest in their conviction that they have nothing else to learn.
It is ironic that it was her to say it. I wonder if she thinks she lived long enough to reach a point where, having dismantled her certainty for three hundred cycles or more, she rebuilt it in her own image and proclaimed it a god.
I have no answer to that. I have no need of an answer to that.
I do not know much. I know how my body feels on the verge of starvation. I know the tingling numbness of frozen fingers and toes and the fear that blue will blacken and cease being my flesh. I know the kind of friendship that forms when you learn such things with another person at your side. It is perhaps for that I am most grateful.
I also know what it is like to betray, to leave behind the person you have loved the most. Or two of them.
To leave them to an uncertain future, one you are ringing with pain that will haunt them far more than it will haunt you.
But I also know what it is like to set foot on a piece of earth I have never touched and know it for home.
I know that the next new arms around me will be those of an old, old friend, one who has, like I have, surrounded herself with the stones of dismantled certainty.
There is so much more to learn.
Author Bio
Emmie Mears is a Scottish-American fantasy author based in Glasgow, where they write and edit the gamut of speculative fiction and collect names like the fae. A fluent Gaelic speaker and an award-winning Gaelic singer and songwriter, Emmie writes and publishes bilingually in both English and Gaelic.
With over twenty novels published, Emmie has been long-listed for a Hugo award for their short fiction as M. Evan MacGriogair, and as Emmie Mears has been a Rone award finalist for Look to the Sun. Their debut YA novel as Maya MacGregor, The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester, is a 2023 Andre Norton Nebula Award finalist and earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews.
They live in historically Gaelic Partick with their two purrfect cats.
Author Website: https://emmiemears.com/
Author Facebook: https://www.instagram.com/maigheach/
Author Twitter: https://twitter.com/Maigheach