David Drake

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

LORD OF THE ISLES
Copyright 1997 by David Drake
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Edited by David G. Hartwell

Endpaper map by Ed Gazsi

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
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New York, NY 10010

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Book design by Patrice Sheridan

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Drake, David.

Lord of the Isles / David Drake ; edited by David G. Hartwell. —
1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-85396-3 (acid-free paper)
I. Hartwell, David G. II. Title.

PS3554.R196L67 1997
813.54—dc2197-5761
CIP

First Edition: August 1997
Printed in the United States of America

David Drake has long been one of the foremost names in fantasy and science fiction adventure. For years a majority of his work has been in the popular military SF genre, but his origins lie in fantasy. He is widely respected for the detailed accuracy of his fiction: "He does homework intelligently; his books are marked by factual research, and then by insight into what those facts add up to," says The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Now, in Lord of the Isles, Drake returns to fantasy with a towering and complex epic of heroic adventure filled with passion and magic, set in an extraordinary and colorful world where the elemental forces that empower magic are rising to a thousand-year peak.

"David Drake's work here is original, engrossing, and instantly credible. After all the hackneyed, repetitive fantasy I've read recently, Lord of the Isles seems quite wonderful."—Stephen R. Donaldson

To Dan Breen

My first reader, and a striking example of how different very similar people can be.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sandra Miesel helped a great deal with the microstructure. Tom Doherty and Harriet McDougal made equally important suggestions regarding the macrostructure at the beginning and the end of the process respectively.

In a different fashion, the fact that I didn't have to revert to composing in longhand in the middle of the novel is due to the efforts of Mark L. Van Name and Allyn Vogel. People who know computers as intimately as Mark and Allyn do find my needs peculiar, but they expended enormous effort to satisfy me.