Maine-based writers Sharon Lee and Steve Miller first teamed up in the late 1980s. Since then, the husband and wife have written dozens of short stories and twenty plus novels, most set in their star-spanning Liaden Universe®. Sharon and Steve passionately believe that reading fiction ought to be fun, and that stories are entertainment. They maintain a web presence at korval.com.
Sinit Caylon, delm-elect of Clan Mizel, gazed across the table at Peers dea'Gauss.
Peers gazed back, face non-committal. Neither looked at the third member of their party, Sinit's mother, Birin Caylon, who was Mizel-in-Truth . . .
. . . for another four years. Then, by the terms of the agreement signed with Clan Korval, Sinit would take up Mizel's Ring, clan administration, management of its assets, fiscal, physical, and corporeal. Mizel had signed because her hand had been forced two Standards ago, but she was not reconciled.
The same agreement placed Peers dea'Gauss into Mizel as a consultant, taking up what would, in a less emperilled clan, be the duties of the nadelm. In the proper order of things, Sinit would be nadelm—but, no. Sinit Caylon would never have been nadelm, if Mizel had been in proper order. And, she realized, Peers was waiting for her answer.
"I reviewed the precis you gave me," she said, placing her hand on that document where it rested on the table before her. "In addition, I went back through the accounts to the beginning of my great-grandmother's term of service—"
Her mother tapped her fingers on the table, impatient, meaning, perhaps to distract. However, Sinit had been taking lessons in maintaining one's countenance under provocation from a master, and did not allow herself so much as a pause.
"—in order to identify the moment of error."
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