In the run up to PEOPLE OF THE MORNING STAR we’ve just finished and delivered a 15,000 word novella entitled “Copper Falcon” to our publisher at Tor/Forge Books. The novella is set just months before the opening of PEOPLE OF THE MORNING STAR. Set in AD 1050, the story is about a young war chief and his father, leaders of Copper Falcon town, a Cahokian settlement on the Tennessee River. For Flint Knife, the arrival at Cahokia is mind-boggling. Raised as he was in the hinterlands, the sheer size and scope of Cahokia is beyond comprehension. His father, Red Mask, however, knows Cahokia all too well. His interest in another lord’s wife led to his divorce and banishment from the city over thirty years earlier–and returning in violation of an exile ordered by the Morning Star is a death offense.
The plan is simple: Get in, plead for a squadron of warriors to be dispatched by Red Mask’s relatives in Horned Serpent House, and get out before anyone is the wiser.
But in the seething stew of Cahokian politics, Horned Serpent House is vulnerable, and the Keeper of the Four Winds Clan sees not only an opportunity to put Horned Serpent House in its place, but a chance to pay back an old betrayal. Before Flint Knife can catch his breath, he and Red Mask are cast into a political maelstrom from which they will be lucky to escape with their lives, let alone with a precious sculpted copper falcon that would be worth a chief ransom in trade…
Copper Falcon is coming soon in e-format for most electronic readers.