Paperback release for The Valkyrie and upcoming events

Hi everyone! It’s been an incredibly busy month of promo, travel, and deadlines. I finished the first draft of Mercutio, but it needs revision, and I have other projects on the go. So I’ll keep this short!

I’m at the World Fantasy Convention and the Ottawa International Writers Festival later this month, and at Can*Con in early November. Details on my updated events page.

The smaller paperback edition of The Valkyrie is out in the UK as of Oct. 10, and will be out in North America on Oct. 22. Available wherever books are sold! To celebrate, I thought I’d excerpt the first few paragraphs, below.

Like all stories, I have more than one beginning.

Three hundred and twenty-seven years ago, I was born, in the days when Hadrian ruled the Empire that crumbles around us now. Eight years after that, my father gave me in tribute to his god: the one he called Wotan, the one I learned to call by many names. Seven years after that, I finished my training, took flight for the first time as a Valkyrie, learned to gather the slain.

The only beginning that matters came centuries later. My beginning was in you, Gudrun.

But you already know that story. You want to know what came before, what I was before you melted and reforged me. I’ll go back one beginning, then, to my exile and my fall. It seemed like an ending, then. My last sight of Valhalla, a shard of daylight that closed in a moment, as the weight of my mail and helmet pulled me down.

I was a long time falling.

Somehow, in that void between worlds, there was light enough to see. I thought I saw other women, though who can say which worlds they were falling from, or to. A pale, wry face framed by short red hair, and a hand searching the hilt. The golden hair of a girl, streaming as she floated, hands covering her face, her shoes kicking at nothing. We tumbled at different speeds, and sometimes they flickered out of existence while I watched. Perhaps I imagined them.

They were not Valkyries; I am the only Valkyrie Odin ever exiled.

The fall gave me time to think.

I imagined what would happen at the bottom. Perhaps I’d land on a pile of corpses, or skeletons; perhaps I’d add one more to the pile. All these fallen women must land somewhere.

(from The Valkyrie, by Kate Heartfield.)