The Flame in the Maze (32 page)
She blinked. The images wavered but stayed, like a reflection of moon or sun on shifting water. She slid off Timo's back.
“Will it be . . .” Alexios began, hoarsely, his one hand still cradling her head, “will we beâwill you . . .”
Sotiria looked up at the skyâat the blue that was showing, between the thinning clouds. Then she looked back at Manasses, who was smiling, and at Alexios, who was starting to.
“Yes,” she said.
When
The Door in the Mountain
was published in 2013, ChiZine Publications put out a call to readers, in its final pages, to name the sequel. Readers responded. Two of the responses were particularly entrancing:
Charlene Challenger's
The Godmarked
John Sebastian Rohrer's
The Dark Below
And one was perfect: Kelly Robson's
The Flame in the Maze.
Thank you, Charlene, John, and Kelly. Thanks to all who entered. You read my words and gave me yours, and I'm so grateful.
Caitlin Sweet is the author of three adult fantasy novels:
A Telling of Stars
(Penguin Canada, 2003),
The Silences of Home
(Penguin Canada, 2005), and
The Pattern Scars
(ChiZine Publications, 2011).
The Door in the Mountain
(ChiZine Publications, 2014) was her first young adult book; its sequel is
The Flame in the Maze
. Her books have been nominated for the Locus Best First Novel, Aurora, and Sunburst Awards;
The Pattern Scars
won the CBC Bookie Award in the Science Fiction, Fantasy or Speculative Fiction category.
When not working on her own books (which, sadly, is most of the time), Caitlin is a writer at the Ontario Government and a genre writing workshop instructor at the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies. She lives in Toronto with her family, which includes a science fiction-writing husband, two teenagers, four cats, a lop-eared rabbit, a hamster, a bunch of fish, and a passel of itinerant raccoons.
