Dragon's Teeth Read online

  Table of Contents

  PART *I*FIDDLER FAIRHow I Spent My Summer Vacation And every other free minute for five straight years

  Aliens Ate My Pickup

  Small Print

  Last Rights

  Dumb Feast

  Dance Truck

  Jihad

  Balance

  Dragon’s Teeth

  The Cup and the Caldron

  Once and Future

  Fiddler Fair

  The Enemy of My Enemy

  Bibliography

  WEREHUNTERIntroduction

  Werehunter

  SKitty

  A Tail of Two SKittys

  SCat

  A Better Mousetrap

  The Last of the Season

  Satanic, Versus . . .

  Nightside

  Wet Wings

  Stolen Silver

  Roadkill

  Operation Desert Fox

  Gray

  Gray's Ghost

  For Those About To Rock

  PART *II*Haunt You

  Valse Triste

  White Bird

  Sgian Dubh

  Baen Books by Mercedes Lackey

  BARDIC VOICES

  The Lark and the Wren

  The Robin and the Kestrel

  The Eagle and the Nightingales

  The Free Bards

  Four & Twenty Blackbirds

  Bardic Choices: A Cast of Corbies (with Josepha Sherman)

  The Fire Rose

  The Wizard of Karres (with Eric Flint & Dave Freer)

  Werehunter

  Fiddler Fair

  Dragon's Teeth (omnibus)

  Brain Ships (with Anne McCaffrey & Margaret Ball)

  The Sword of Knowledge (with C.J. Cherryh, Leslie Fish & Nancy Asire)

  The Ship Who Searched 20th Anniversary Edition (with Anne McCaffrey)

  Bedlam's Bard (with Ellen Guon)

  Beyond World's End (with Rosemary Edghill)

  Spirits White as Lightning (with Rosemary Edghill)

  A Host of Furious Fancies (omnibus, with Rosemary Edghill)

  Mad Maudlin (with Rosemary Edghill)

  Music to my Sorrow (with Rosemary Edghill)

  Bedlam's Edge (ed. with Rosemary Edghill)

  THE SERRATED EDGE

  Chrome Circle (with Larry Dixon)

  The Chrome Borne (with Larry Dixon)

  The Otherworld (with Larry Dixon & Mark Shepherd)

  HISTORICAL FANTASIES WITH ROBERTA GELLIS

  This Scepter'd Isle

  Ill Met by Moonlight

  By Slanderous Tongues

  And Less Than Kind

  HEIRS OF ALEXANDRIA SERIES

  by Mercedes Lackey,

  Eric Flint & Dave Freer

  The Shadow of the Lion

  This Rough Magic

  Much Fall of Blood

  Burdens of the Dead

  THE SECRET WORLD CHRONICLE

  Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle (with Steve Libbey, Cody Martin & Dennis Lee)

  World Divided: Book Two of the Secret World Chronicle (with Cody Martin, Dennis Lee & Veronica Giguere)

  Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle (with Cody Martin, Dennis Lee & Veronica Giguere, forthcoming)

  DRAGON’S TEETH

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Fiddler Fair copyright © 1998 by Mercedes Lackey. “Fiddler Fair,” in Magic in Ithkar 3 (Tor 1989); “Balance” and “Dragon’s Teeth,” in Bardic Voices One (Hypatia Press 1988) (HC), in Spellsingers (DAW 1988) (PB); “Dance Track,” in Alternate Heroes, Mike Resnick, ed. (Bantam Spectra 1989); “Last Rights,” in Dinosaur Fantastic, Martin Greenberg, ed. (DAW 1993); “Jihad,” in Alternate Warriors, Mike Resnick, ed. (Tor 1993); “Dumb Feast,” in Christmas Ghosts, Mike Resnick, ed. (DAW 1993); “Small Print” in Deals with the Devil, Mike Resnick, ed. (DAW 1994); “The Cup and the Caldron,” in Grails of Light (DAW); “Once and Future,” in Excalibur!, Martin Greenberg, ed. (Warner Aspect 1995); “Enemy of My Enemy,” Friends of the Horseclans, Robert Adams, ed. (NAL 1989)

  Werehunter copyright © 1999 by Mercedes Lackey. “Werehunter” copyright © 1989 (Tales of the Witch World); “SKitty” copyright © 1991 (Catfantastic, Andre Norton, ed.); “A Tail of Two SKitties” copyright © 1994 (Catfantastic 3, Andre Norton & Martin Greenberg, eds.); “SCat” copyright © 1996 (Catfantastic 4, Andre Norton & Martin Greenberg, eds.); “A Better Mousetrap” copyright © 1999 (Werehunter, Baen Books); “The Last of the Season” copyright © American Fantasy Magazine; “Satanic, Versus . . .” copyright © 1990 (Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Fall 1990); “Nightside” copyright © 1990 (Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Spring 1990); “Wet Wings” copyright © 1995 (Sisters of Fantasy 2, Susan Shwartz & Martin Greenberg, ed.); “Stolen Silver” copyright © 1991 (Horse Fantastic); “Roadkill” copyright © 1990 (Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Summer 1990); “Operation Desert Fox” copyright © 1993 (Honor of the Regiment: Bolos, Book I, eds. Keith Laumer & Bill Fawcett); “Grey” copyright © 1997 (Sally Blanchard’s Pet Bird Report October 1997); “Grey’s Ghost” copyright © 1999 (Werehunter, Baen Books)

  “For Those About to Rock” copyright © 2013 by Mercedes Lackey & Dennis Lee. “John Murdock’s Journal” copyright © 2013 by Mercedes Lackey & Cody Martin. “Valse Triste” copyright © 2013 by Mercedes Lackey. “White Bird” copyright © 2013 by Mercedes Lackey. “Sgian Dubh” copyright © 2013 by Mercedes Lackey.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4516-3943-8

  Cover art by Eric Williams

  First Baen printing, December 2013

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lackey, Mercedes.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Dragon's teeth / Mercedes Lackey.

  pages cm

  Summary: "Fiddler Fair and Werehunter in one novel. Stories set in Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar universe, Bardic fantasy series, Diana Tregarde occult series and many others"-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4516-3943-8 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS3562.A246D83 2014

  813'.54--dc23

  2013035074

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PART

  *I*

  FIDDLER FAIR

  Mercedes Lackey

  How I Spent My

  Summer Vacation

  And every other free minute

  for five straight years

  After any number of requests to put all our short stories together in one place, the idea began to take on some merit.

  When Larry and I looked into the idea we discovered that we had a lot of other short fiction; about ten years’ worth.

  Ten years? Unbelievable as it seemed at the time, I found the very first story I ever had published (I had sold one story before that, but it wasn’t published until the following month). Fantasy Book magazine, September 1985. The story was “Turnabout” which was a Tarma and Kethry story, which is going into another collection. For the record, the first story I ever sold was for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Free Amazons of Darkover “Friends of Darkover” anthology, which was published in December of that year. The story was “A Different Ki
nd of Courage.”

  Some of these stories are a little gray around the edges, but I include them as a kind of object lesson in writing. Some of the things in them I winced at when I read again—I had no idea of how to write a well-viewpointed story, for instance, and someone should have locked my thesaurus away and not given it back to me for a while! And insofar as the march of technology goes—the earliest were written on my very first computer, which had no hard-drive, a whopping four kilobytes—(that’s kilobytes, not megabytes)—of RAM, and had two single sided single density disk drives. I wrote five whole books and many short stories on that machine, which did not have a spell-check function, either. On the other hand, if ewe sea watt effect modern spell-checkers halve on righting, perhaps it that was knot a bad thing. It’s just as well; if it had, it would have taken half a day to spell-check twenty pages. So for those of you who are wailing that you can’t possibly try to write because you only have an ancient 286 with a 40-meg hard-drive . . . forgive me if I raise a sardonic eyebrow. Feh, I say! Feh!

  I held down a job as a computer programmer for American Airlines during seven of those ten years, and every minute that I wasn’t working, I was writing. I gave up hobbies, I stopped going to movies, I didn’t watch television; I wrote. Not less than five hours every day, all day on Saturday and Sunday. I wanted to be able to write for a living, and the only way to get better at writing is to do it. I managed to slow down a bit after being able to quit that job, but I still generally write every day, not less than ten pages a day. And that is the answer to the often-asked question, “How do you become a writer?” You write. You write a great deal. You give up everything else so that you can concentrate on writing.

  There are many fine books out there (the title usually begins with “How to Write . . .”) to teach you the mechanics of writing. Ray Bradbury has also written an excellent book on the subject. You only learn the soul of writing with practice. Practice will make you better—or it will convince you that maybe what you really want to do is go into furniture restoration and get your own television show on The Learning Channel.

  Here are the answers to a few more frequently asked questions:

  How do you develop an idea?

  Mostly what we do is to look at what we have done in the past and try to do something different. As for finding ideas, I can only say that finding them is easy; they come all the time. Deciding which ones are worth developing is the difficult part. To find an idea, you simply never accept that there are absolute answers for anything, and as Theodore Sturgeon said, “You ask the next question” continuously. For example: one story evolved from seeing a piece of paper blowing across the highway in an uncannily lifelike manner, and asking myself, “What if that was a real, living creature disguised as a piece of paper?” The next questions were, “Why would it be in disguise?” and “What would it be?” and “What would happen if someone found out what it really was ?”

  Do you ever get “writer’s block” and what do you do about it?

  When I get stalled on something, I do one of two things. I either work on another project (I always have one book in the outline stage and two in the writing stage, and I will also work on short stories at the same time) or I discuss the situation with Larry. Working with another person—sometimes even simply verbalizing a snag—always gets the book unstuck. There is a perfectly good reason for this: when you speak about something you actually move it from one side of the brain to the other, and often that alone shakes creativity loose.

  How do you do revisions?

  I may revise the ending of the book between outlining and actual writing, but that is only because a more logical and satisfying conclusion presents itself. I am really not thinking of anything other than that. The only other revisions are at the request of the publisher, and may vary from none to clarifying minor points or further elaborating a minor point. In the case of clarification, this amounts to less than 1,000 words in a book of 120,000 or more. In the case of elaboration this usually amounts to the addition of 5,000 words to 10,000 words, generally less.

  Would you call your books “character driven?”

  I think that is quite correct, my books are character-driven. To me, how people react to a given situation is what makes a story interesting. History is nothing more than a series of people’s reactions, after all, and many “alternate history” stories have been written about “what would have happened if.” The idea—the situation—is only half the story. What the characters do about it is the other.

  Do you base your characters on people you know?

  With very rare exceptions I don’t base my characters on anyone I know—those exceptions are minor ones, where I’ll ask permission to write a friend into a walk-on role. They do come out of my observation of people in general.

  When did you know you wanted to write?

  I knew I wanted to tell stories from a very early age—in fact, I told them to the kids I babysat for, then wrote them in letters to friends and pen-pals. It was only when I “graduated” from amateur fiction to being paid for what I wrote that I realized I did have a talent for writing—and I had the will to pursue it. That was some thirty years later.

  Where do you start?

  Plotting is usually done with Larry, and one of the first things we do is determine what the characters will be like, then what the major conflict of the book will be. Then we figure out the minor conflicts, the ways that those characters will deal with those conflicts, and ways we can make their lives even more complicated. The resolution generally comes at that point, but not always; sometimes it doesn’t come to us until we are actually writing the book, and we change the way it ended in the outline.

  When did you start reading science fiction?

  I started reading sf/f when I was about eight or nine. As I recall, it was the “Space Cat” books, followed by something called The City Under the Back Steps, a kind of ant-version of “Honey, I Shrank The Kids,” followed immediately by a leap into Andre Norton, Heinlein, and my father’s adult sf. Daybreak 2250 AD by Norton was one of the first things I read, James Schmidt’s Agent of Vega was another. Mostly I read Norton, all the Norton I could get my hands on, saving my allowance to order them directly from Ace. Little did I guess I would one day be working for Andre’s editor (Donald A. Wollheim)!

  Who were your influences?

  In order of influence: Andre Norton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Thomas Burnett Swann, Anne McCaffrey, C.J. Cherryh, Marion Zimmer Bradley. As for editors, I learn something from every editor I have. My three main editors, Elizabeth Wollheim, Melissa Singer, and Jim Baen, have been incredibly helpful.

  What do you choose to write?

  I write what I would like to read, with a caveat—after thirteen years in the marketplace, I am beginning to get a feeling for things that will sell, so obviously I do tailor what I would like to write to the marketplace. I never wrote intentionally for any particular audience, but I seem to have hit on a number of things that are archetypal in nature, which may account for the appeal. The other possibility is that I tend to write about people who are misunderstood, outsiders . . . people who read tend to think of themselves that way, particularly sf/f readers, so they can identify with the characters.

  Do you answer fan-mail?

  When possible, we do. We always read it. When mail comes without a self-addressed stamped envelope for a reply, we assume the writer doesn’t want a reply; it is only courteous not to waste the time of someone you supposedly like by including a self-addressed, stamped envelope if you want an answer. We don’t answer abusive mail, but it does get filed in a special file for future reference. We return manuscripts unread; after some trouble Marion Zimmer Bradley had with a fan-writer, our agent has advised both of us that we can’t read unsolicited manuscripts anymore. This is an awful pity, but life is complicated enough without going out and finding ways to add trouble!

  How do you work with a collaborator?

  Working with col
laborators depends on the collaborator. If possible, we work on the outline together until we’re both happy with it, then one of us starts, passes it off to the other when s/he gets stuck, and gets it passed back under the same circumstances. It goes incredibly fast that way, and it is the way Larry and I always work, even though he is not always on the cover as a co-writer.

  Have you ever encountered any censorship?

  I haven’t encountered any censorship at the publisher/editor level on any of my books. I have heard rumors of fundamentalist groups causing problems with the Herald Mage series because of the gay characters, but I have never had any of those rumors substantiated. There are always going to be people who have trouble with characters who don’t fit their narrow ideas of what is appropriate: I have perfectly good advice for them. Don’t read the books. Nobody is forcing you to march into the bookstore and buy it. Actually, I have been considering borrowing the disclaimer from the game Stalking the Night Fantastic by Richard Tucholka—“If anything in this book offends you, please feel free to buy and burn as many copies as you like. Volume discounts are available.”