Hello, friends! The printing issues that delayed The Swordmaster have delayed it further, and it’s now coming out in print on Nov. 3 or Nov. 5 (depending on where you are.) The ebook is already available, as is the audiobook read by Maria Nicola Johnson, and it looks like some UK bookstores already have it in stock (Blackwell’s, for example, which ships internationally.)

If you have pre-ordered, thank you, and thanks for your patience! I don’t have my author copies yet either, so we can watch the mail together.

This is one of two books (so far) in the Vampires of Dumas series, from Solaris. (Solaris was acquired by Profile recently, but The Swordmaster stayed with Rebellion although its editorial team has not.) The first is The Vengeance by Emma Newman, which is a very fun novel. It’s not related to mine except in that both books are interpretations of the storytelling tradition of Alexandre Dumas, with a little more of the supernatural than Dumas typically employed, and with female protagonists. Both books are standalones.

My novel is a riff on Dumas’s Valois novels, set during the time of Catherine de’ Medici, but there are also references and connections to The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Pale Lady and some of his other works.

Here are the first few pages of The Swordmaster. If you dig it, please do order it from your library or local bookstore, and spread the word. Thank you!

FOR TWO FULL days, nobody could wake Françoise de Montesquiou d’Artagnan. The eighteen-year-old lay in her bed, oblivious to her nurse banging pots and pans, to the prayers of the priest, to the complaints of her fiancé, to the lancet of the physician, and to the exhortations of her parents. The latter would have preferred to keep the fiancé in the dark, but the second day of their daughter’s long nap happened to be her wedding day.

Françoise’s mother was convinced that this was no coincidence, that the girl had somehow contrived to get out of it. Had she ingested some sort of potion? Dabbled in black magic? The physician could only shake his head sadly, touch the girl’s lips with theriac—a greasy panacea that was, he explained, made with sixty-seven exotic ingredients and cost more than gold—and fill another pan with the girl’s blood. Drip, drip, drip.

By sunset on the day of the cancelled nuptials, the news had spread through the village and even to other parts of Armagnac, running along as quickly as the clouds scudding over the foothills of the Pyrenees. The manservant was pleased every time another anxious visitor came by, giving him a reason to open the door to fresh air. What a relief to let out a little of the smoke from burning rue and partridge feathers. The smoke was meant to calm the patient’s womb—the source of all mystifying feminine behaviour—and the stink of it, the doorman privately thought, could have woken the dead.

Through it all, Françoise slept on. Her body was perfectly still. No fever, no apparent pain. She was just asleep, so deeply that the doctor had to put a mirror to her snub nose to be sure she was breathing.

As far as Françoise was concerned, she was not lying in the bed at all. She was loping over the hills, in the form of a brown hare.

She’d always had vivid dreams, but this was something new: she felt entirely awake, but in borrowed form. This small furry body was hers, just as much as the body lying in the bed was hers. She smelled, not burning feathers, but wild cowslips and sun-baked grass.

Her back legs beat a rhythm as they followed her front legs, and her heart beat a strange new rhythm, too. Underneath her gallop, there was a pulse like the beating of a giant drum that seemed to come from the earth but at a great distance, speaking directly to her. It drew her onwards. If she could find the source of that drumbeat, she would be released. Released from what? She could not have said, in that wordless animal awareness, but she felt it more strongly than she had ever felt anything in her young life.

She ran through a field of yarrow, their pale flowers like umbrellas overhead, forming a canopy.

Then she emerged onto shorter grass, cropped by goats. Up, up, a long hill, with the sun now winking behind it. The air was cooling at the end of the day. Thud thud thud. The drum beat, calling her forward. With these eyes, she could see so much of the world. She could see a small fox loping over to her right, in the same direction. She could see an eagle gliding overhead.

Strangely, she did not fear either of them.

And she could see a jumbled black shape up on the top of the hill, lit from the sun setting behind it. A collection of stone ruins. Later, with her human mind, she wondered whether it might, at one time, have been a church, or perhaps something even older. A temple.

As the animals approached the ruins, their pace slowed. They approached as if they were expected: the fox, the eagle, the hare, and many others. Next to Françoise, a small lizard slithered between two blades of grass, and then transformed, silently stretching upward into a tall, thin shape, something like a woman, but not a woman. This giant wore a cloak and bowed her head to the others, as they transformed from their animal shapes into something like people. As tall as church doors, thin and stretched as shadows, they nodded to each other.

But not everyone transformed. Françoise did not know how to be anything but a hare, in that moment. The deer stared back at her, companionably, also unchanging. A brown sparrow hopped on the stone table around which they had all gathered.

The drum stopped.

There was a voice, and it came from a greyhound, although its muzzle did not move. A voice from its mind, to the minds of all those assembled. A man’s voice.

It has been long since we were summoned. It is not safe.