Wings of Flame

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT
FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS

NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF NANCY SPRINGER

“Wonderful.” —
Fantasy & Science Fiction

“The finest fantasy writer of this or any decade.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

“Ms. Springer's work is outstanding in the field.” —Andre Norton

“Nancy Springer writes like a dream.” —
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Nancy Springer's kind of writing is the kind that makes you want to run out, grab people on the street, and tell them to go find her books immediately and read them, all of them.” —
Arkansas News

“[Nancy Springer is] someone special in the fantasy field.” —Anne McCaffrey

Larque on the Wing

Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award

“Satisfying and illuminating … uproariously funny … an off-the-wall contemporary fantasy that refuses to fit any of the normal boxes.” —
Asimov's Science Fiction

“Irresistible … charming, eccentric … a winning, precisely rendered foray into magic realism.” —
Kirkus Reviews

“Best known for her traditional fantasy novels, Springer here offers an offbeat contemporary tale that owes much to magical realism.… An engrossing novel about gender and self-formation that should appeal to readers both in and outside the SF/fantasy audience.” —
Publishers Weekly

“Springer's best book yet … A beautiful/rough/raunchy dose of magic.” —
Locus

Fair Peril

“Rollicking, outrageous … eccentric, charming … Springer has created a hilarious blend of feminism and fantasy in this heartfelt story of the power of a mother's love.” —
Publishers Weekly

“Witty, whimsical, and enormously appealing.” —
Kirkus Reviews

“A delightful romp of a book … an exuberant and funny feminist fairy tale.” —
Lambda Book Report

“Moving, eloquent … often hilarious, but … beneath the laughter, Springer has utterly serious insights into life, and her own art …
Fair Peril
is modern/timeless storytelling at its best, both enchanting and very down-to-earth. Once again, brava!” —
Locus

Chains of Gold

“Fantasy as its finest.” —
Romantic Times

“[Springer's] fantastic images are telling, sharp and impressive; her poetic imagination unparalleled.” —Marion Zimmer Bradley

“Nancy Springer is a writer possessed of a uniquely individual vision. The story in
Chains of Gold
is borrowed from no one. It has a small, neat scope rare in a book of this genre, and it is a little jewel.” —
Mansfield News Journal

“Springer writes with depth and subtlety; her characters have failings as well as strengths, and the topography is as vivid as the lands of dreams and nightmares. Cerilla is a worthy heroine, her story richly mythic.” —
Publishers Weekly

The Hex Witch of Seldom

“Springer has turned her considerable talents to contemporary fantasy with a large degree of success.” —
Booklist

“Nimble and quite charming … with lots of appeal.” —
Kirkus Reviews

“I'm not usually a witchcraft and fantasy fan, but I met the author at a convention and started her book to see how she writes. Next thing I knew, it was morning.” —Jerry Pournelle, coauthor of
Footfall

Apocalypse

“This offbeat fantasy's mixture of liberating eccentricity and small-town prejudice makes for some lively passages.” —
Publishers Weekly

Plumage

“With a touch of Alice Hoffmanesque magic, a colorfully painted avian world and a winning heroine, this is pure fun.” —
Publishers Weekly

“A writer's writer, an extraordinarily gifted craftsman.” —Jennifer Roberson

Godbond

“A cast of well-drawn characters, a solidly realized imaginary world, and graceful writing.” —
Booklist

Wings of Flame

Nancy Springer

The yellow dun treads on the topaz of the sun;

The hooves of the white have left his mark

on the pearl of the mottled moon.

Black runs the charger in the clouds of the thunder,

The blood bay gallops in the hot sere wind.

Blue stallion of soft rain rears in the high lapis sky.

Mighty lies she, the great mare of earth,

under the mountains brown.

Gray walks the steed of mist and the mysteries

over the sundering river.

All are in Him,

the firstborn of the mistral,

numen most puissant and wise:

The spotted horse with the jewel between his eyes,

On wings of flame he flies,

On wings of flame.

Chapter One

“Shuntali!”

The title was not a name. It designated an outcast, an unperson, a member of the class that beggars could look down on, could shout at if they chose. The shouter in this instance was the master of the hut that served as hostelry, and the shuntali was a girl who did the unclean work. For this she was allowed scraps and a degree of tolerance, because no one knew she was a girl—she appeared to be a lad of about twelve years of age. She had been a boy for most of those years, so long that she herself had almost forgotten her own secret femininity. If it had been known that she was a female, she would have been driven from the shanty of an inn and put to prostitution.

“Shuntali!”

Far up in the red-budding blackthorn forest of the mountaintop, gathering kindling, she heard him shouting and came running.

The innkeeper was a member of the third class, the caste of merchants, farmers and laborers. One of his several names placed him in that class according to his vocation, which had been his father's also. Another name described the order of his birth in his family, his sex and his rank in his clan, and another invoked his totems as determined by the date of his birth. He wore his lucky color, brown, and the hems of his clothing were edged with protective borders and tassels, and the shoulders crudely embroidered with the emblem of his totem animal, the onager. Being prosperous enough to have purchased it, he wore a pendant of jasper, his lucky stone, carved with the glyph of his planet, Jupiter.

The shuntali, on the other hand, had no names, no birthdate, no emblems, and her faded and colorless clothing served merely to cover her nakedness. Though most Vashtins were fair of face and red or russet of hair, she seemed nearly as colorless as her clothing, earth-dun, hair and eyes and skin, and her face was expressionless, silent. Barefoot, crop-headed, in coarse shirt and hemp trousers, she pattered up to her master and awaited his command.

But before he could speak, she gasped aloud in surprise. “By the old man,” she breathed, “Devans!”

The innkeeper cuffed her, but she scarcely felt the blow. She stood rapt. Riders on horseback were filing into the inn yard. Horses! All the bright and solid colors of horses, barley red and golden brown and a splendid blue roan in the lead; the rider sat it in the royal fashion, legs straight, feet pointing past the steed's shoulders. The girl briefly noted him, his own shoulders nearly as broad and muscular as the stallion's, his jet-black hair all in curls under a tall red cap; then her gaze returned to the horses. Travelers from Deva were not so uncommon, for the hostelry lay near a pass of the Kansban Mountains that divided that kingdom from Vashti. That was why the innkeeper needed his shuntali. No proper Vashtin would ride or even touch a horse. The animals were sacred to the supreme god, the horse-god Suth. But the Devans used horses in their own arrogant fashion; they said the steeds were the gift of Suth to men, to make men victorious in war. Their most recent war with Vashti had ended a mere month before.

There might be trouble. But oh, such beautiful horses! “By the old man!” the shuntali whispered again, and the innkeeper cuffed her again, harder.

“Take that wood in,” he ordered harshly.

She had forgotten the bundle of kindling, still in her arms. She hurried with it into the single room of the hostelry. Some few men loitered there, as always, and she could hear them grumbling as she stacked her sticks by the hearth.

“Devan devils!” someone quipped.

“Pompous horse-sitting infidels!” another voice joined in with more spleen than seemed usual. “Blasphemers! How dare they show their bodies here so boldly? Has their precious King Kyrillos even signed treaty?”

The shuntali stole a glance at the speaker. He was a weasel-faced man in gray clothing, no one she knew, certainly not one of the villagers from the few huts that huddled along the mountain track by the inn. In fact, there were several strange men in the hostelry, though they all wore the clothing of Vashtins, yellow or red or whatever color their day of birth decreed, with the customary magical stitchings and talismans. Devans wore no such talismans.

“Kyrillos and our good King Auron have come to spoken promise, I understand.” The voice was that of an older man of the village. The stranger scoffed.

“Good as the vellum it's written on, is it not? Damned Devan horsebeaters, I wonder what they want here! Likely they're spies.”

“Shuntali!” her master roared from the yard. She hurried out.

The care of the horses would fall to her, she knew. It was a task forbidden to all but priests in the service of Suth. She was liable to hell ice for doing it, but a shuntali deserved no more, the reasoning went. She approached the job with guilty pleasure. To rub the silky flanks, all of the seven horse colors and many of the seven times seven horse colors.… So many horses, and no merchant goods in sight. What, indeed, might be the business of these strangers?