Tis the season—to binge read! This month we’re celebrating the galaxy-spanning tales in Sharon Lee & Steve Miller’s nationally best-selling Liaden Universe® series with discounts on all of the books in this landmark series. For the entire month of December, take $1 off all Baen Liaden Universe® novels and story collections

Jane Lindskold is the award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of more than twenty-five novels, including the six-volume Firekeeper Saga (aka “The Wolf Books”), the two athanor novels (Changer and Changer’s Daughter), the three volumes of the Breaking the Wall series, the Artemis Awakening series, and many more. Lindskold has also written in collaboration with David Weber (Fire Season and Treecat Wars) and Roger Zelazny (Donnerjack and Lord Demon). When she’s not writing or reading, she’s likely being ordered around by a variety of small animals. Lindskold lives in New Mexico.

“Fire-Bright Rain” serves as a prequel story to her upcoming novel Library of the Sapphire Wind, which, along with Aurora Borealis Bridge, makes up the Other Where series.

“Leeya-toh, should the egg whites keep shaking after I stop beating them?” asked Pippea. Whisk suspended in her upraised right hand, the young apprentice turned her elegant antilopine head toward the senior cook. Pippea’s enormous, long-lashed brown eyes—set within snow white hair accented by a dark stripe that ran from eyes to mouth—were creased with worry as she stared into her mixing bowl. She ran her free hand over the tips of her newly budding horns in a habitual nervous gesture.

Leeya slowed her own steady assault on the bowl of egg whites she was frothing into meringue. As she did, she became aware that the floor was trembling under her feet. Her rounded ursine ears twitched, catching the groan of the cottage’s beams as they complained beneath some uncommon stress.

And I was just getting the first peaks, Leeya thought, dropping bowl and whisk on the counter, grabbing Pippea around her trim waist, then swinging them both out the kitchen door into the early evening grey-light. Once out on the gravel walkway, Leeya dragged Pippea around the cottage as fast as she could, not stopping until they both were clear of anything that could fall on them from overhead.

Earthquakes weren’t precisely common in the vicinity of the Library of the Sapphire Wind, but when one worked for a library dedicated to the magical arts, one learned to take precautions first, ask questions later. Thankfully, when Meadow Village had been designed, the buildings had been spaced comfortably apart, oriented on a rounded green from which radiated six streets, each of which were crossed at intervals by another street, so that the village was designed around a series of concentric circles.

Each year, Baen Books and The National Space Society present the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award, which honors short fiction that looks to the near future to ask what might be when humankind uses technology to create a brighter world. Now in its sixteenth year, the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award conest is open to submissions until February 1, 2022. So send us your stories of a better tomorrow!

Contest rules and submssion guidelines can be found here.