The Star Shard

Cymbril feels like a bird in a cage. Her task is to sing, to draw crowds to the markets offered by Master Rombol, lord of the Thunder Rake, the only home Cymbril has known. The Rake is a city on wheels, a vast wagon that rolls over the land, its interior a labyrinth of stairways, corridors, chambers, and secret doors.

When Cymbril befriends a fellow slave, a boy named Loric, one of the mysterious Fey, she dreams of a life beyond the Rake, and the two begin to plan their escape. But dangers haunt the shadows—the ominous Eye women, the perilous Night Market, the terrors of the Groag Swamp, and something that stalks the night’s dark byways, hunting . . .

Survival will depend upon courage, loyalty, and perhaps upon a gift from Cymbril’s long-departed parents—the glowing and magical fragment of a star.

Frederic S. Durbin grew up in rural central Illinois, where his parents opened the town’s first bookstore and his mother built libraries for the four public elementary schools. He studied classical languages, mythology, and English literature at Concordia College, River Forest (now Concordia University Chicago). After graduating summa cum laude, he served as a volunteer missionary teacher in Japan and taught ESL and writing at Niigata University for two decades. In 2011, he returned to the U.S. and lives with his wife in the wooded hills of western Pennsylvania. A community college writing coach, he is the author of the novels Dragonfly and A Green and Ancient Light, which won the Realm Award and was named a Best Fantasy of the Year by Publishers Weekly and a Reading List Honor Book by the American Library Association. His short fiction has appeared frequently in Cricket and Cicada, as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Black Gate. Most recently, he co-edited the fiction anthologies Paradigm Shifts and Escapements (June 2019).