Burning Stone

KATE ELLIOTT is the author of many novels, including BLACK WOLVES, COURT OF FIVES, the Spiritwalker trilogy, the Novels of the Jaran, and the Crossroads trilogy. KING'S DRAGON, the first novel in the Crown of Stars series, was a Nebula Award finalist, and THE GOLDEN KEY (with Melanie Rawn and Jennifer Roberson) was a World Fantasy Award finalist. Kate was born in Iowa, raised in Oregon, and now lives in Hawaii. She invites you to visit her website at kateelliott.com or follow her on Twitter @KateElliottSFF.

There is nothing more tragic than legitimate ambition comprehensively thwarted and Kate Elliott's fantasy sequence has a bleak sadness even in its moments of triumph, simply because her heroes and heroines seem as if they are never going to get the chance to be all they could be. Alan, suddenly adopted heir to the local noble, is obliged to marry an anorexic princess whose hobby of heresy extends to fake stigmata; royal courier Liath and more than slightly deranged royal bastard Sanglant find that their love stands in the way of the King's dynastic plans; the prattish monk Ivar runs away from heresy proceedings and hides among a young prince's boon companions and catamites. And while the nobility juggle marriages and churchmen bicker about doctrine, invaders mass on the borders and the world seems booked for cataclysms political and metaphysical. Elliott has not yet become as popular as she probably deserves--she has a real sense of what even an imaginary mediaeval world should be like, in its pompous scholarship and simple piety, and her characters are interestingly fluid; place Ivar in a cavalry charge and he does quite well. This third volume sustains the pace and grim tone of its predecessors in the Crown of Stars sequence.