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Welcome to our second collection of short stories for our Reign of the Eagle series. As you probably know if you’ve been reading our books for a while, most of these stories were originally sent out to our email list and posted to our website as “teasers” for the second book in the series, Siege of Kings (which is on sale now, wherever ebooks are sold). The stories were designed to introduce readers to each of the major POV characters in the novel, so each story presents a character at a crucial moment in his or her life—a moment that turned them into the person we see later in the story.
Siege of Kings was a late addition to the series. Originally, the first book in the series was written in April of 2017. The third book, Unspeakably Wooed, was written in May of that same year. Back then, we had only vague notions of ever trying to publish anything, and the books were for our amusement, alone. We both knew the general timeline of the war that is taking place in the series, and it didn’t matter if the novels skipped over major battles or important treaties. All that mattered was writing stories that we personally found interesting, following characters we happened to like.
As you might imagine, that changed when we started publishing. Now we had to worry about whether our readers could follow the “history” of our imaginary war. We couldn’t just skip five or six years and say, “Oh, there was this huge siege, and one side lost and was driven into foreign exile, and so-and-so was supposed to get married, but her prospective husband died in the battle.” Readers might be put out to discover they hadn’t “seen” those events. They might feel as if they had missed an episode of their favorite TV series.
So, that’s why we wrote Siege of Kings five years after we wrote the book before it and the book after it. We think it fits nicely into the chronology. Plus, we actually learned a lot about our characters by writing it. And a lot of what we learned, we distilled into these stories, which we hope you enjoy.
As always, we have some bonus material for this collection. “The Day of Rath” is a new story about Muriel Gramiren doing a good deed for a friend. Or at least as good a deed as Muriel is capable of doing. The friend in question is Volker Rath, whom you might remember from several previous books. He’s been Muriel’s husband’s loyal ADC and henchman for many years, and he shows back up again in Siege of Kings to play a small but vital role.
We also have a map of “Leornian and Environs.” It’s the map we made to help plot out the movement of armies and spies in the countryside around the city, but we didn’t actually put it in Siege of Kings. So, here it is, and we hope you enjoy it. Now, when you read about someone leading an attack on Redlingham through the Bishop’s Forest, you’ll know exactly where that is.
If you enjoy the stories, be sure to check out Siege of Kings and the first book in the series, Black Eagle Rising, assuming you haven’t already. And keep an eye out for the release of Unspeakably Wooed, the next book in the series, due in the fall of 2022.
J.S. Mawdsley, August 2022