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Fantasy author Patricia A. McKillip, the 21st century's response to Hans Christian Andersen, has mastered the art of writing fairy tales -- as evidenced by previous works like The Tower at Stony Wood, Ombria in Shadow, and In the Forests of Serre. Alphabet of Thorn is yet another timeless fable suitable for children and adults alike.

In the kingdom of Raine, a vast realm at the edge of the world, an orphaned baby girl is found by a palace librarian and raised to become a translator. Years later, the girl -- named Nepenthe -- comes in contact with a mysterious book written in a language of thorns that no one, not even the wizards at Raine's famous Floating School for mages, can decipher. The book calls out to Nepenthe's very soul, and she is soon privately translating its contents. As she works tirelessly transcribing the book -- which turns out to be about the historical figures of Axis, the Emperor of Night, and Kane, his masked sorcerer -- the kingdom of Raine is teetering on the brink of chaos. The newly crowned queen, a mousy 14-year old girl named Tessera who wants nothing to do with matters of state, hides in the woods as regents plot revolution. The queen's destiny, however, is intertwined with Nepenthe's ability to unravel the mystery of the thorns.

Bestselling author Patricia A. McKillip (The Riddle-Master of Hed) is one of the most lyrical writers gracing the fantasy genre. With the debut of three brand-new stories, Dreams of Distant Shores is a true ode to her many talents.

Within these pages you will find a youthful artist possessed by both his painting and his muse and seductive travelers from the sea enrapturing distant lovers. The statue of a mermaid comes suddenly to life and two friends are transfixed by a haunted estate.

Fans of McKillip's ethereal fiction will delight in these previously-uncollected tales; those new to her work will find much to enchant them.

Terra Viridian is a young woman who obeyed a vision, took a laser assault rifle, and turned fifteen hundred innocents into light. She was captured, convicted, and sentenced to the orbital prison called the Underworld. Forever.

Seven years later: a bar-band pianist named The Magician suddenly plays Bach, while a riot burns around him. The Queen of Hearts, a drifter who hides her life beneath a golden mask, steps enigmatically from the shadows. Underworld administrator Jase Klyos unexpectedly lets a concert bring sound to his silent, sterile hell. And behind her mad eyes, the vision of a psychotic killer... changes. The thing that Terra Viridian saw is coming. Growing. Watching.

And it must be set free.

A fantasist without equal, Patricia A. McKillip has created worlds of intricate beauty and unforgettably nuanced characters. For 25 years, she's drawn readers into her spell, spinning modern-day fables with a grace rarely seen. Now she presents a book of previously uncollected short stories, full of beautiful dragons, rueful princesses, and handsome bards, and written in the gorgeous - and often surprisingly funny - prose she's known for. This is her world, wrapped up in the finery of fairy tales.

In the tales of World Fantasy Award-winning author Patricia McKillip, nothing is ever as it seems. A mirror is never just a mirror; a forest is never just a forest. Here, it is a place where a witch can hide in her house of bones and a prince can bargain with his heart...where good and evil entwine and wear each others' faces... and where a bird with feathers of fire can quench the fiercest longing...

In the new fantasy from the award-winning author of the Riddle-Master Trilogy, a young man comes of age amid family secrets and revelations, and transformative magic.

Hidden away from the world by his mother, the powerful sorceress Heloise Oliver, Pierce has grown up working in her restaurant in Desolation Point. One day, unexpectedly, strangers pass through town on the way to the legendary capital city. "Look for us," they tell Pierce, "if you come to Severluna. You might find a place for yourself in King Arden's court."

Lured by a future far away from the bleak northern coast, Pierce makes his choice. Heloise, bereft and furious, tells her son the truth: about his father, a knight in King Arden's court; about an older brother he never knew existed; about his father's destructive love for King Arden's queen, and Heloise's decision to raise her younger son alone.

As Pierce journeys to Severluna, his path twists and turns through other lives and mysteries: an inn where ancient rites are celebrated, though no one will speak of them; a legendary local chef whose delicacies leave diners slowly withering from hunger; his mysterious wife, who steals Pierce's heart; a young woman whose need to escape is even greater than Pierce's; and finally, in Severluna, King Arden's youngest son, who is urged by strange and lovely forces to sacrifice his father's kingdom.

Things are changing in that kingdom. Oldmagic is on the rise. The immensely powerful artifact of an ancient god has come to light, and the king is gathering his knights to quest for this profound mystery, which may restore the kingdom to its former glory--or destroy it...

Brenden Vetch's unique gift for connecting with the agricultural environment has brought him to the attention of the enigmatic wizard Od. Recruited as a gardener, Brenden suddenly finds himself at the wizard's school in Kelior, where every potential mage is required by law to serve the Kingdom of Numis.

But unknown to the rulers of Numis, Brenden is far more than he seems-and his presence just may tip the balance of power back into the hands of the wizard community.

Ombria. It is a city that echoes with the footfalls of sapphire-heeled shoes that holds its breath as a straw-haired apparition glides through its streets that sees its dreams and nightmares take shape in the drawings of a bastard-heir. It is an enchanted time and place envisioned by World Fantasy Award winner Patricia A. McKillip, acclaimed author of The Tower at Stony Wood.

When Ombria's prince, Royce Greve, breathes his last in palace rooms high above the city he leaves his young son at the mercy of his ancient great-aunt, Domina Pearl a woman who has plotted her rise to power in Ombria for far too many years to allow a little boy to stand in her way. Already she has thrown Greve's pretty mistress out into the streets, where no one would expect her to live an hour. The boy will take her a little longer. Meanwhile, in a dreamlike underworld peopled by Ombria's ghosts, a sorceress weaves her spells and brews her potions, never revealing her real face or true heart. And somewhere in between, the struggle to rule the whole of Ombria both its light and shadows will rest in the hands of those whose fractured lives align like the lost pieces of a magical puzzle.

When her beloved grandfather dies, bookstore owner Sylvia Lynn knows she must finally return to her childhood home in upstate New York and face the grandmother who raised her and the woods which so beguiled- and frightened-her. But it's not until she meets the Fiber Guild-a group of local women who meet to knit, embroider, and sew-that Sylvia learns why her grandmother watches her so. A primitive power exists in the forest, a force the Fiber Guild seeks to bind in its stitches and weavings. And Sylvia is no stranger to the woods.

As a child, Rook had been taken in by the bards of Luly, and raised as one of their own. Of his past he knew nothing--except faint memories of fire and death that he'd do anything to forget. But nightmares, and a new threat to the island that had become his own, would not let him escape the dreaded fate of his true family. Haunted by the music of the bards, he left the only home he knew to wander the land of the power-hungry basilisk who had destroyed his family. And perhaps, finally, to find a future in the fulfillment of his forgotten destiny.

The newest novel from the World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Bell at Sealey Head.

With "her exquisite grasp of the fantasist's craft"* (Publishers Weekly) Patricia A. McKillip now invites readers to discover a place that may only exist in the mystical wisdom of poetry and music.

Scholar Phelan Cle is researching Bone Plain-which has been studied for the last 500 years, though no one has been able to locate it as a real place. Archaeologist Jonah Cle, Phelan's father, is also hunting through time, piecing history together from forgotten trinkets. His most eager disciple is Princess Beatrice, the king's youngest daughter. When they unearth a disk marked with ancient runes, Beatrice pursues the secrets of a lost language that she suddenly notices all around her, hidden in plain sight.

Sealey Head is a small town on the edge of the ocean, a sleepy place where everyone hears the ringing of a bell no one can see. On the outskirts of town is an impressive estate, Aislinn House, where the aged Lady Eglantyne lies dying, and where the doors sometimes open not to its own dusty rooms, but to the wild majesty of a castle full of knights and princesses...

Twenty years ago, the powerful mage Atrix Wolfe unleashed an uncontrollable force that killed his beloved king. Now, the Queen of the Wood has offered him one last chance for redemption. She asks him to find her daughter, who vanished into the human world during the massacre he caused. No one has seen the princess-but deep in the kitchens of the Castle of Pelucir, there is a scullery maid who appeared out of nowhere one night long ago. She cannot speak and her eyes are full of sadness. But there are those who call her beautiful.

Since the day her father's fishing boat returned without him, Peri and her mother have mourned his loss. Her mother sinks into a deep depression and spends her days gazing out at the sea. Unable to control her anger and sadness any longer, Peri uses the small magic she knows to hex the sea. And suddenly into her drab life come the King's sons-changelings with strange ties to the underwater kingdom-a young magician, and, finally, love.

Sixteen when a baby is brought to her to raise, Sybel has grown up on Eld Mountain. Her only playmates are the creatures of a fantastic menagerie called there by wizardry. Sybel has cared nothing for humans, until the baby awakens emotions previously unknown to her. And when Coren--the man who brought this child--returns, Sybel's world is again turned upside down.

This novella originally appeared in the anthology To Weave a Web of Magic (2004) by Claire Delacroix, Lynn Kurland, Patricia A. McKillip and Sharon Shinn, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, August 2013. It can also be found in the anthology Best Short Novels: 2005, edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection Dreams of Distant Shores (2016).

Damsen longs for the warm light beyond the castle walls. Brave Cnite Caerles seeks her hand, but her father the King has set a price: You want Damsen. I want the Throme of Sherill. Find it for me and I will give you anything you want.

And so begins a quest that will wind from the Mirk Well of Morg to the borebel pits to the Floral Wold to the Dolorous House of a dead Dolerman and, finally, to the Western Wellsprings, where the answer to the Everything lies.

Invited to the wedding of his king, Cyan Dag, a loyal knight, is warned by a mysterious old woman about the true nature of the king's beautiful new bride and embarks on a perilous quest into the unknown in order to discover if the new queen is the king's true love, or a dangerous, sorcerous imposter.

When Corbet Lynn returns home to rebuild his family's estate, his grandfather's curse is rekindled-and lures a free spirited woman from the woods that border Lynn Hall.

Pass through fairy tales into the magic of invisible worlds in these opulent stories by a beloved fantasy icon and author of the classic Riddlemaster trilogy. Patricia McKillip has inspired generations of dedicated readers with enchanting tales that are as romantic as they are unexpected. Her lush, mesmerizing narratives are as deliciously bittersweet as the finest chocolate and as intoxicating as the finest wine.

The bewitching wonders offered here include princesses dancing with dead suitors, a knight in love with an official of exotic lineage, and fortune's fool stealing into the present instead of the future. You'll discover a ravishing undine and her mortal bridegroom who is more infatuated with politics than pleasure, a time-traveling angel forbidden to intervene in Cotton Mather's religious ravings, a wizard seduced in his youth by the Faerie Queen returning with a treasure that is rightfully hers, and an overachieving teenage mage tricked into discovering her true name very close to home.

Table of Contents

• Introduction - essay by Charles de Lint
• Wonders of the Invisible World - (1995) - short story
• Out of the Woods - (2004) - short story
• The Kelpie - (2005) - novelette
• Hunter's Moon - (2002) - short story
• Oak Hill - (1998) - short story
• The Fortune-Teller - (2007) - short story
• Jack O'Lantern - (2006) - novelette
• Knight of the Well - (2008) - novella
• Naming Day - (2007) - short story
• Byndley - (2003) - short story
• The Twelve Dancing Princesses - (2000) - short story
• Undine - (2004) - short story
• Xmas Cruise - (1993) - short story
• A Gift to Be Simple - (1999) - short story
• The Old Woman and the Storm - (1985) - short story
• The Doorkeeper of Khaat - (1989) - short story
• What Inspires Me: Guest of Honor Speech at WisCon 28, 2004 - essay

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Full Spectrum 5 (1995), edited by Tom Dupree, Jennifer Hershey and Janna Silverstein. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF (1995), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection Wonders of the Invisible World (2012).

Enter the realm of Faerie: compelling, enchanting, and filled with perilous beauty. It is a world most of us visit only in dreams. Now it is brought to vivid reality by acclaimed fantasy artist Brian Froud, co-author of the bestselling Faeries and designer for the films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. They have lived among us for centuries - distant, separate, just out of sight. They fill our myths, our legends, and the stories we tell our children in the dark of night. They come from air, from water, from earth, and from fire. Faeries.

Corleu, child of the Wayfolk, tries to rescue his people when they become lost. But his endeavours lead him into another world - home of the Blind Lady, the Blood Fox and the Dancer. A world where his search for knowledge leads to riddles, until he discovers the destiny of the Guardian of the Maze.

When a pair of mysterious firebirds appear in their world, the first transforming random objects and the second altering time in order to steal, the sorceress Nyx and her cousin Meguet are forced to investigate a dark mystery.

Kyreol, daughter of a Healer, knew that beyond the dangerously swirling rapids of Fourteen Falls lay nothing but darkness...

Newly betrothed, Kyreol still burned with the old, haunting questions. Where had her mother disappeared to so long ago? What lay beyond the edge of the world? And what was the meaning of the Moon-Flash, sign of life and hope to her people?

Then one day the Hunter came to her, a mysterious and powerful stranger who entered her dreams. Suddenly she knew what she must do. She must leave home, following the River to the place where the world ends - and then beyond.

She did not yet know that when you leave the world behind, it is forever.

Riverworld was a planet of Eden whose people possessed the power of dreaming the future. Kyreol, daughter of a healer, pierced the vision veil to discover the ultimate truth- that her home world unknowingly hosted the way station of a vast interstellar civilization.

An evil star shone on Kyreol's first mission as an interplanetary agent. Her ship fell out of space, crashing on a lonely, mysterious moon. Rising from its endless plains was the white city - awesome, abandoned, eons-dead - a silent world of secret wonders.

Only her prophetic dreams linked kyreol to Riverworld, but she was hopelessly marooned lightyears away. And she was not alone...

Morgon, Prince of Hed, wants only to rule and work the land of his birth as best he can, but he is faced by a very different challenge from that of his ancestors. The stars have marked him out and he must wander strange, foreign lands full of untamed magic, and confront riddling wraiths and mysterious harpists at the behest of the all-knowing High One. But his is a perilous quest, involving grave danger, to himself, his promised bride, his land and his people. This volume contains The Riddle-Master of Hed, Heir of Sea and Fire and Harpist in the Wind, the complete Riddle-Master trilogy, which is among the most respected and popular fantasies of recent years.

This omnibus edition contains the entire Riddle-Master Trilogy.

Morgon, Prince of Hed, wants only to rule and work the land of his birth as best he can, but he is faced by a very different challenge from that of his ancestors. The stars have marked him out and he must wander strange, foreign lands full of untamed magic, and confront riddling wraiths and mysterious harpists at the behest of the all-knowing High One. But his is a perilous quest, involving grave danger, to himself, his promised bride, his land and his people.

By the vow of her father and her own desire, Raederle was pledged to Morgon, Riddle-Master of Hed. But a year had passed since Morgon disappeared on his search for the High One at Erlenstar Mountain, and rumors claimed he was dead.

Raederle set out to learn the truth for herself, though her small gift of magic seemed too slight for the perils she must face. The quest led through strange lands and dangerous adventures. Only her growing powers enabled her at last to reach Erlenstar Mountain. And there she discovered what she could not bear to accept.

Accompanied by Deth, the High One's Harper, she fled. And behind them came a pursuer whose name was Morgon, bent on executing a grim destiny upon Raederle and Deth.

Her only hope lay in summoning the Hosts of the Dead, led by the King whose skull she bore...

Though Morgon the Riddle-Master was reunited with his beloved Raederle, his purpose in life and the reason for the stars on his forehead remained a mystery. All around him, the realm shook with war and disaster as mysterious shape-changers battled against mankind. Without the missing High One, Morgon must assume responsibility for all his world.

After leading an army of the dead to protect his island of Hed, he and Raederle set out for Lungold, where the wizards were assembling against the evil Ghisteslwchlohm. And behind them came Deth, the crippled harpist, Morgon's friend and betrayer.

But Lungold was only the beginning of the quest that would lead him to the truth of ancient struggle and the fate of the High One, until at last he could solve all mysteries and know his own awesome destiny!