The Secret Texts trilogy is the story of the deadly fight of smaller and weaker opponents against the enormous forces that wield evil magic in the world of Matrin. Over the course of the three-book series, a magical war threatening the people of an entire world will challenge the ingenuity of our heroes. In 'Courage of Falcons', Danya, Luercas, and their horde move on Ibera. Destruction, devastation, and disaster ensue. When Hardin fails to destroy this new threat, the Calimekkans bring back the few surviving Wolves who know the magic of the dark path. They offer endless sacrifices from their own people in a vain attempt to ward off the approaching evil. Meanwhile Kait and Ry are on the run, trying to figure out a way to create a new Mirror of the Dead that will contain Luercas permanently. Luercas has figured out that Kait and Ry are his main obstacle and begins to search them out to destroy them. Their only hope is to lure Luercas in and trap him in another Mirror of the Dead before he destroys them along with all of Ibera.
Holly Lisle has been writing fiction professionally since 1991, when she sold FIRE IN THE MIST, the novel that won her the Compton Crook Award for best first novel. She has to date published more than thirty novels and several comprehensive writing courses. She has just published WARPAINT, the second stand-alone novel in her Cadence Drake series.
Holly had an ideal childhood for a writer…which is to say, it was filled with foreign countries and exotic terrains, alien cultures, new languages, the occasional earthquake, flood, or civil war, and one story about a bear, which follows:
“So. Back when I was ten years old, my father and I had finished hunting ducks for our dinner and were walking across the tundra in Alaska toward the spot on the river where we’d tied our boat. We had a couple miles to go by boat to get back to the Moravian Children’s Home, where we lived.
“My father was carrying the big bag of decoys and the shotgun; I was carrying the small bag of ducks.
“It was getting dark, we could hear the thud, thud, thud of the generator across the tundra, and suddenly he stopped, pointed down to a pie-pan sized indentation in the tundra that was rapidly filling with water, and said, in a calm and steady voice, “That’s a bear footprint. From the size of it, it’s a grizzly. The fact that the track is filling with water right now means the bear’s still around.”
“Which got my attention, but not as much as what he said next.
” ‘I don’t have the gun with me that will kill a bear,’ he told me. ‘I just have the one that will make him angry. So if we see the bear, I’m going to shoot him so he’ll attack me. I want you to run to the river, follow it to the boat, get the boat back home, and tell everyone what happened.’
“The rest of our walk was very quiet. He was, I’m sure, listening for the bear. I was doing my damnedest to make sure that I remembered where the boat was, how to get to it, how to start the pull-cord engine, and how to drive it back home, because I did not want to let him down.
“We were not eaten by a bear that night…but neither is that walk back from our hunt for supper a part of my life I’ll ever forget.
“I keep that story in mind as I write. If what I’m putting on paper isn’t at least as memorable as having a grizzly stalking my father and me across the tundra while I was carrying a bag of delicious-smelling ducks, it doesn’t make my cut.”
You can find Cadence Drake, Holly's currently in-progress series, on her site: CadenceDrake.com
You can find Holly's books, courses, writing workshops, and so on here: The HowToThinkSideways.com Shop, as well as on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and in a number of bookstores in the US and around the world.
Wow, another amazing series from Holly Lisle. I love the way all the story lines weave together even though they diverge. My favorite aspect of this series involved the the different types of magic and their consequences, particularly the racism facing the Scarred.