Nowhere was safe.
A speck in the sky far out to sea caught her eye. Another dragon. She reached out her thoughts to greet it. Perhaps they would hunt together, digging these little ones out of their holes . . .
She stopped her circling and almost fell out of the sky in surprise. The dragon had a rider.
Fly! it said. Just Fly!
Snow saw what was in the dragon’s mind, what was coming out of the storm-dark, and fled.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Simon Spanton, devourer of unnecessary prologues, who asked for dragons and got more than he bargained for. To Marcus Gipps and Robert Dinsdale for their editorial work. To Hugh Davis for copy-editing all my dragons and to the proofreaders whose names I’ve rarely known. To Stephen Youll for his gorgeous covers. To Sea Lord Jon Weir, even though he’s gone to other things.
With thanks to all the people who read A Memory of Flames and talked about it and weren’t afraid to be honest. Dragon Queen and The Splintered Gods are different books from the ones they might have been because of you.
It’s still very true that none of this would have happened without the trust and faith of the same special few as always. Thank you again. Thank you to lovers of dragons everywhere. Thank you to all the alchemists and enchantresses out there. Thank you, for reading this.
To any who want to explore the world of the dragons for its own sake, you can do so at the online gazetteer at www.stephendeas.com. There are other goodies there from time to time too.
If you liked this book and want there to be more, please say so. Loudly and to lots of people.
Also by Stephen Deas from Gollancz:
The Adamantine Palace
The King of the Crags
The Order of the Scales
Dragon Queen
The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice
The Warlock’s Shadow
The King’s Assassin
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Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Stephen Deas 2014
All rights reserved.
The right of Stephen Deas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2014 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10059 6
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.stephendeas.com
www.orionbooks.co.uk
www.gollancz.co.uk