Edie Roones’ fantasy Summer Sieges, ordinary people battling extraordinary odds and foul sorcery.
This book is Edie’s second publication, after her short story “A Matter of Trust”.
Chapter 1
Summer Sieges by Edie Roones
Her body jerked.
Beren muddled her way up. Slowly. Into the pain.
Another jerk.
Return was . . . sluggish. A great darkness. A lesser one. She wanted to retreat from waking, crawl back into the deep blackness, but pain pulsed in her head and throbbed along her arm, denying any escape.
Her body jerked again.
Hands were on her. At her hips. Metal clinking. A lift. She groaned.
The hands stilled then gave another jerk that peeled something from beneath her.
And then a growl, deep, predatory. As black as the darkness. Danger as old as time.
Whoever had pulled at her scrambled away. She tried to open her eyes then realized they were open, to night-black. The dancing lights weren’t in her throbbing head. They were torches bobbing, some bigger and brighter, others distant, like the will o’wisps that hovered over deepest springs and in magickal glades.
The first book in the alternate medieval fantasy by Edie Roones: Seasons in Sansward
Summer Sieges
Honor and death? Or cowardice and life? Stark choices, and not that easy.
Beren, a warder at Caldew Keep, swore an oath to defend her lord and lady. The
Summer Sieges by Edie Roones
arrival of the Watrani horde, allied with the Gitane Witches, changes the world she has known. The Witches are sorcerers who have been exiled from Sansward for generations.
Beren’s keep lady orders her to protect the Eye, a magical crystal that increases a wielder’s power.
Besides the magnification of power, the Eye has two other important purposes: 1) It can remove the curse that transformed the fighting Prica warriors into wolves. 2) It will free sorcerers who were trapped in stone at the end of the Great War between the mages and the witches.
And the Gitane Witches are searching for the Eye.
Lady Treasache intends to steal away with the Eye in a desperate bid to keep it from the Gitane. The Prica Storr thinks to use the Eye to shift back into man.
Will Beren sacrifice herself in a futile attempt to guard the Eye? With only a sword as defense against sorcery, can she survive a battle against the Gitane? Or will she discover that the road to death is littered with people who chose honor over life?
This August is a rare one at Writers Ink Books. All three Writers are celebrating book birthdays.
On the 1st ~ another Wild Sherwood short story, “A Twist of Faerie Magic”
Twist after twist reveals the true heart.
Dav spent months earning prizes for wrestling, all to raise enough coins to marry his love Edrys.
On his return to Nottingham, however, he discovers Edrys married another man during his absence. When he sees bruises on her, he threatens her husband.
Then the man is found dead, and Dav is accused.
How can a twist of Faerie magic reveal the true culprit?
~ ~ ~
“A Twist of Faerie Magic” is the sixth collaboration between Edie Roones and M.A. Lee for the Wild Sherwood series. The first five stories appear in the anthology Into Wild Sherwood, available now.
Publishing throughout August are for more stories about the Outlaws of Wild Sherwood, men driven to crime to fight crime and corruption:
Alan-a-Dale, “A Faerie Song for a Feast”
Arthur à Bland, “Mischief of a Faerie”
Jack Greenleaf, “The Green Man”
Gilbert Whitehand, “The Prize of a Golden Arrow.”
Novellas with Robin Hood, Will Scarlet, Little John, and Much the Miller’s son are coming soon.
On the 2nd ~ It’s Dark Fantasy with Weave a Wizardry Web.
In book 1 of the epic Fae Mark’d Wizard series, a wizard travels sharp-bladed roads.
Alstera is the greatest of the young Enclave wizards, granddaughter to the leader of the Enclave. Yet the wizard leaders thwart her wish to fight sorcery.
Desperate to do something, she explores ways to increase magical power. Her search leads to the Nexus, a forbidden spell once used to enslave wizards.
Shape-shifting wyre are in the Enclave and targeting wizards. A sorcerer controls them from inside Enclave walls.
And rumors of vile blood spells increase the danger.
*Weave a Wizardry Web* begins the dark fantasy saga of twisted magic against foul sorcery and the dark corruption that people can sink to.
When I published this book in 2017, I achieved my first one million words published and over one million fiction words published, with my three pen names Remi Black #dark fantasy, Edie Roones #fantasy, and M.A. Lee, historical #mysteries with a dash of romance.
On the 8th, a book bundle from M.A. Lee
A Trio of Keys brings together the third tritypch in the Hearts in Hazard series.
Book 7 in the series ~ The Key to Secrets ~ Debutantes should snare fiancés, not murder them. Constable Hector Evans must solve three murders. Is his former love guilty, of is she a convenient scapegoat?
Constable Hector Evans was introduced in The Danger to Hearts.
Book 8 ~ The Key for Spies ~ Spies and traitors. Lies and treachery. Unexpected love where bullets fly. One traitor destroys loyalty. What will two traitors destroy?
Book 9 ~ The Key with Hearts ~ A convenient marriage inconveniently causes murder. More like a vintage gothic by Victoria Holt or Dorothy Eden
The first book published under the Edie Roones name: Summer Sieges
All of her life, Beren has taken orders to the defend the castlekeep, first from her father and then from Lady Treasach. Then the Watrani Horde with their Gitane Witches came and broke the siege.
To save a magical crystal, Lady Treasach orders Beren to gather a small party and they flee through the under-veil to the mountains.
But the Gitane Witches continue to track them.
With the help of a disenchanted Prica, the warrior Storr, can Beren protect the lady and her magical crystal? Or will she fall to the Gitane and the Watrani?
I dared myself to enter self-publishing, and I did it with this book.
In 2013, I realized that I had lost touch with so much that I loved. I was crocheting at the time, and as much as I loved crochet, I loved something else more.
Writing. The spinning of stories.
In the autumn of 2012 I had purchased my first Kindle. At some point I realized that some of the writers in the Kindle Store were self-published. A few were unprofessional, but the majority of indies had published great manuscripts with few errors and excellent stories.
Then, late summer of 2013—yes, I know I’m slow—I realized that I wanted to return to writing. I would ignore traditional and pursue the indie route. I counted up manuscripts, picked one, and settled into a re-read to discover that I would need to do to bring it up to speed.
I also researched self-publishing. It couldn’t be as easy as it looked. It was AND it wasn’t. I would need a cover designer—that search took 18 months. I would need to learn formatting—easy peasy since I understood the ins and outs of MS Word, having grown with the program since the early 1990s.
Summer Sieges wasn’t the novel I picked to publish first; it became my first published novel because of the cover design search and needing to write the third book in a series, to have all three published at once.
Summer Sieges became my self-publishing test case. Could I do it? Would it work? I did, and it did—on this day in 2015.
This #fantasy is still one of my favorites. Hard to believe this is the 6th anniversary of my writing business.
This August is a rare one at Writers Ink Books. All three Writers are celebrating book birthdays.
