It’s less than a month until The Sorceress and her Lovers comes out, so it’s time to start talking about it.  As with the other Senta and the Steel Dragon books, this one rotates between several characters and tells the story from their viewpoints.

Senta Bly: Taking place just after the events in the epilog of The Two Dragons (about three years after the events in the bulk of that book), now a 21-year-old sorceress, traveling Freedonia and Brechalon with her new companion Kieran Baxter.  For her, this is a story of going home, both in the sense of rediscovering where she comes from in Brechalon and the journey back to where she has grown up in Birmisia.  Baxter is her constant companion and these chapters tell his story as much as hers.

Hsrandtuss: Hsrandtuss is a lizard man chief, last seen in The Young Sorceress.  Like Senta, Hsrandtuss is making a journey from his old home to a new land in the east, taking along with him the entire population of his village as well as many other lizzies from nearby.  Hsrandtuss’s story is one of dealing with a society in flux, as the lizardmen must deal with ideas seeping in from the human colony.

Iolana Dechantagne Staff: Now eleven years old, Iolana has grown up living in a house at the center of colonial politics.  She is extremely intelligent and precocious in some regards, but still a little girl in other ways.  Like many preteens, she has to deal with peers who alternately ignore her or try to make her life hell.  All this while living wrapped up in the Dechantagne family secrets.

Saba Colbshallow: Saba has his job as Chief Inspector of Police to keep him busy, but he’s cut off from one woman in his life and becoming more an more annoyed at the other. Of course there are many things to keep him busy– crime and terror plots being only the beginning.