Embark on another “nerve-biting and explosive” (Tor.com) adventure between worlds in this refreshingly intersectional portal fantasy for adult readers.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from A Tyranny of Queens by Foz Meadows, which is out January 28th 2025.
Saffron Coulter has returned from the fantasy kingdom of Kena. Threatened with a stay in psychiatric care, Saffron has to make a choice: to forget about Kena and fit back into the life she’s outgrown—or pit herself against everything she’s ever known and everyone she loves.
Meanwhile, in Kena, Gwen is increasingly troubled by the absence of Leoden—the cruel ruler of the kingdom—and his plans for the captive worldwalkers. Elsewhere, Yena must confront the deposed Kadeja in Veksh. What is their endgame? Who can they trust? And what will happen when Leoden returns?
“Jesus,” someone whispered, in a voice just loud enough to carry. Saffron jerked out of her reverie, belatedly noticing her classmates. They were clumped in a line outside the unopened door to their classroom, either staring openly or doing a pisspoor job of pretending otherwise. She swallowed, hating the blush that crept up her neck, and moved to the back of the line. She’d forgotten that the doors weren’t always unlocked by the start of first period, especially on Mondays; that the teachers sometimes had to hunt for the key. She set her back to the sunwarmed bricks and stared at her new black shoes, as shiny and unscuffed as the rest of her wasn’t. Maybe if she kicked around in the gravel through recess, they’d start to look halfway normal.
“So, is it true?”
The voice was familiar, loud and leering: Jared Blake, who showed up to this particular class so rarely that Saffron hadn’t thought to anticipate his presence. She lifted her head slowly, cold dread in her stomach. Except for Jared, her classmates were quiet; she knew he was talking to her.
She looked at him, her face as blank as she could make it. Jared Blake was rangy and rawboned, his brown hair gelled into spikes. He was white-skinned in a way that left him permanently sunburned, pink circles flaking across the bridge of his nose, his sharp cheeks layered with freckles over acne scars, his neck scored with lines where he’d scratched at it with jagged, bitten fingernails. He wore a seemingly permanent smirk, and it was utterly unfair that a boy so full of malice should have the longest, thickest lashes she’d ever seen, fanning lazily over pale blue eyes.
“Is what true?” Saffron asked, boldly.
“Jared, dude,” mumbled one of his friends, shifting uncomfortably beside him, “c’mon–”
“That some freak made you his bitch.” He grinned sharply, running his fingers across his head in imitation of her triptych scars. “You fuck Edward Scissorhands, Saffy?”
Only one boy laughed, and then barely – a scared, gulping bark, like he’d tried to keep it in – while someone else whispered, “Oh, shit.” Everyone else was deathly silent, eyes as wide as their tongues were bitten.
In that moment, Saffron was swept by a rage both colder and hotter than anything she’d ever felt in her life. To have survived the impossible and still be forced to contend with the mundane abuse of Jared Blake was beyond insulting; it was insupportable. She opened her mouth to say or scream she didn’t know what, only that it needed to be said–
“Ah, good morning, everyone! Sorry to keep you all waiting – couldn’t find the key, I swear it hides from me – there we go, in, in!”
The teacher, Mr Lane, had arrived, as brightly oblivious to the scene he’d interrupted as a toddler wandering into parliament. With the collective, sullen sluggishness of cats being shooed from a sunbeam, the students moved into the classroom, the stunned silence of moments earlier transmuting into a susurrus of gossiping whispers, all eyes flicking from Saffron to Jared and back again as they took their seats.
Inside, a horseshoe of desks and chairs bracketed an extra two rows, forcing a brief traffic jam as students chose where to sit. Numb with unspent fury, Saffron beelined for a seat in the middle row, hands shaking as she pulled her books out of her bag. Up front, Mr Lane was rattling around in his desk drawers for a whiteboard marker, muttering a semi-happy narration as he did so. Mr Lane was something of an odd fish in Lawson High’s PE department, in that he bore no obvious signs of ever having voluntarily gone outside. He was short, bearded and bookish, his side part a neat white line in his dark brown hair, and Saffron had a vague notion that he’d been shunted over from HSIE as a staffing stopgap without yet managing to be shunted back. Even so, he wasn’t a bad teacher; just visually incongruous, and slightly more inclined than his departmental colleagues to look things up in the textbook.
Saffron flinched only slightly as the adjacent seats were taken: the room was too small for her to be given a wide berth, no matter her classmates’ preferences. She risked a glance to either side, hackles lowering slightly at the people she saw there. Glitter James-Michaels, on her right, was more likely to spend the class covertly texting than giving grief, while Alfie Gowan, on her left, was a meticulous, silent note-taker. Saffron exhaled shakily, clicking open one of her brand new pens. I can do this. Normal day.
Something cold scraped the back of her neck. She whirled around, startled, and found herself staring at Jared Blake, a metal ruler lolling between his outstretched fingers.
“Scissorhands,” he grinned, and twitched his knuckles, making the ruler jump. “Look familiar?”
“All right!” Mr Lane said, clapping for attention. Saffron didn’t know whether to hate or thank him; she turned back, clicking the pen in impromptu stress relief, jaw clenched painfully tight. “Did everyone have a good weekend? Yes? No? Maybe? Excellent! Well, now that I’ve managed to find a marker, let’s try to get off to a good start by reviewing–”
“Sir, Saffron’s back!” yelled Jared.
“–the chapter on… What? Saffron –? Oh! Oh. Um. So she is, yes.” Mr Lane blinked at her, mouth hanging open only a little. He shook his head, as if to clear it of unwanted cobwebs, and ventured a tentative, “Welcome back, Miss Coulter.”
Saffron nodded, not trusting her voice.
Mr Lane returned the gesture, a brief smile on his lips, and launched back into his teaching spiel with a heartfelt, “Now, as I was saying…”
Saffron let the words wash over her, for once grateful for her total lack of interest in the subject. She focused on breathing, trying to calm her racing pulse, hands moving on autopilot as she turned to the relevant page in her textbook.
The ruler rasped across her neck, accompanied by a singsong whisper: “Scissorhands.”
Saffron had a sudden, visceral flashback to age nine, when her primary school teacher had taken to seating disruptive students beside her. Saffron’s chief virtue, as Ms Carradine had seen it, was her non-responsiveness. The troublemaker – and it was always a boy, she realised now; not because the girls never misbehaved, but because this particular punishment was never used on them – would try to rile her up. Saffron would ignore him, and eventually, the boy would get bored and find some other, less vocal way to amuse himself. Saffron, meanwhile, had to concentrate twice as hard to get her normal work done, and was denied the pleasure of sitting with whatever friend the boy had displaced. Not that Ms Carradine ever seemed to realise that she was punishing both of them: so long as the overt disruption ended, the matter was considered closed.
But one day, Saffron had snapped. Having exhausted his verbal taunts, her neighbour, a boy called Alex, had defaulted instead to pinching her under the desk, starting just above her knee and moving steadily up her outer thigh. Unable to move out of range and with Ms Carradine preoccupied with helping someone else, Saffron had endured it for as long as she could before finally, in a fit of helpless anger, thumping him in the chest.
She didn’t remember Alex’s last name now, but she did recall, with shocking clarity, the delighted-wicked look on his face as he told her, sotto voce, “You’re going to get in trouble.” He’d started howling, clutching his chest and crying crocodile tears, his tale of woe supported by another boy to his right, who’d missed both the preceding pinches and subsequent vow of revenge while catching Saffron’s blow. Ms Carradine hadn’t asked for Saffron’s side of things, but had sent her straight to the principal’s office. It was the only time she’d ever incurred such a punishment, and by the time she’d walked to the admin building, she was crying, too.
Fortunately, if you could call it that, Alex had pinched her hard enough to bruise, the purpling marks all the proof necessary to see him summoned to penance in her place. She’d still been rebuked for hitting, of course – You should’ve told the teacher, the headmaster said, as though Ms Carradine’s entire strategy wasn’t contingent on Saffron’s silence – but was spared detention. Alex, for his part, spent two consecutive lunchtimes copying lines inside, then took to sneering at Saffron from the other side of the playground, occasionally calling her names. When he changed schools the following year, Saffron had breathed a quiet sigh of relief and put him firmly out of mind.
Until now, when Jared Blake’s taunting brought the memories back in technicolour. It was the same thing all over again: no matter how tightly Saffron tucked her chair to the desk, its wooden edge biting into her stomach, she couldn’t get out of range of the ruler, which never seemed to land in the same place twice. Unlike the file he’d last tried to jam beneath her skirt in metalworking – an incident that felt years old, instead of just weeks – the ruler was sharp, and as the lesson dragged on Jared alternated tapping her shoulders with the flat, dragging the edge across her nape, or digging the corner-point into the side of her neck, and always with that accompanying whisper: “Scissorhands!”
Saffron gripped her pen so hard, the plastic creaked. You’re not nine any more. If you hit him, they won’t care who started it. They’ll call the social worker. They’ll call your parents. Don’t give them a reason to send you home.
But another, angrier part of her thought, If the school won’t stop him, why shouldn’t I? My being quiet doesn’t make him go away; it makes him think he’s winning.
And not just Jared, she realised with a jolt: though Mr Lane remained oblivious, each tap and whisper timed to occur when the teacher’s back was turned, her classmates were more perceptive. A low murmur now accompanied each new provocation, hisses and huffed laughter undercutting the ambient classroom noise. Though Alfie Gowan, blessings on his commitment to note-taking, hadn’t looked up, Glitter James-Michaels had started casting her sympathetic looks, a minute shake of her head speaking volumes: He’s not worth it. Don’t give him what he wants.
But what about what I want? Saffron almost screamed. The ghost of that primary school headmaster appeared by her ear, enjoining her once more, in his grave, slow voice, to simply tell the teacher. Except that there was no way to explain why successive taps with a ruler and references to a decades-old Tim Burton movie were such felonious actions as to merit Jared’s removal without repeating what he’d said outside, which Saffron emphatically didn’t want to do, not least because there was no way to do so calmly – and she had to be calm, or Jared, who wanted to provoke an emotional reaction, would win anyway. She tried to imagine it: raising her hand, waiting for Mr Lane’s permission, her voice unwavering as she explained… what? That Jared thought the idea of her escaping from a violent rapist was funny enough to goad her about it in public?
Which was, she realised abruptly, exactly what he was doing. For all he knew, she really had been abused that way, and he was trying to give her flashbacks – to set her off in the middle of class like a goddamn IED.
Epiphany hit like a slap to the face: if Jared was going to think he’d won no matter if she endured his crap or reacted to it, then the only sensible thing to do was whatever made her feel best. She stifled a furious smile and put her pen down, waiting for her chance.
This time, the whisper preceded the ruler: “Scissorhands!”
After the bloody ambush on the Envas road, Matu had helped alleviate Saffron’s fear and helplessness by teaching her basic self-defence. Just a few moves, repeated over and over, until he felt sure she had the knack of them. It hadn’t transformed her into a warrior like Pix or Yasha, but it had done wonders to improve her reflexes, especially when responding to threats that came from behind.
As the ruler tapped her shoulder, Saffron shot her hand back and grabbed hold. Then, in a single, whip-fast motion, she yanked it out of Jared’s grasp and threw it forwards–
–where it struck Mr Lane in the back of the neck, the pointed edge digging in.
The teacher whirled with a startled yelp which, on any other occasion, would’ve earned a laugh at his expense. “Who –” he began, and then, his voice an uncustomary growl as he glanced up from the fallen ruler, “Jared.”
Because the ruler was, unquestionably, Jared’s: Mr Lane couldn’t possibly have missed him playing with it, even if he hadn’t noticed the provocative tapping. Following his angry stare, half the class had swivelled in their seats, too, and were now arrested by the damning sight of Jared Blake leaning halfway across his desk, one arm outstretched in a futile bid to reclaim what was already lost.
“I didn’t throw it!” Jared said, a note of genuine outrage in his voice. “Saffron did!”
“It’s your ruler,” Mr Lane countered, stooping to retrieve it. He smacked the flat of it into his palm, as though testing its heft. He raised a pointed eyebrow. “Isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Jared retorted, “but she threw it!”
Mr Lane looked at Saffron. His expression was mild, but his eyes were furious. “Is that true, Miss Coulter?”
It was an axial moment: the world – or hers, at least – turned on it. Except for Alfie Gowan, who was staring at the tableau in clear bewilderment, the whole class knew she’d thrown the ruler. Just as equally, they knew why she’d done it; or at least, why she’d done something. So far, no one had chimed in to support Jared’s story, but that might change if she lied outright. And if the whole class engaged in a lie of omission on her behalf, what would that prove except that Jared was an unlikeable dickhead and Mr Lane out of his depth? Both those things were already obvious. What Saffron wanted was less so, even to herself.
“He was scratching my neck with the edge,” she said. She felt weirdly serene, as if detached from consequence. “I tried to pull it away from him. I guess I pulled too hard.” Almost, she added a sorry, the habit of deference deeply ingrained, but stopped herself in time. It would’ve been a bigger lie, somehow, than claiming that the throw was unintentional.
Mr Lane’s gaze narrowed. “Really.”
“Really.’”
“Bullshit!” yelled Jared. “She did it on purpose!”
And then, in an utterly unexpected show of solidarity, Glitter James-Michaels said, “No, she didn’t. It was an accident.” She looked at Mr Lane, a perfectly contoured eyebrow raised in accusation. “He was hitting her with it for ages, sir. You should’ve noticed.”
Someone did laugh at that, and Mr Lane flushed, the rebuke all the sharper for coming from such an academically non- partisan student.
“Right,” said Mr Lane, after a moment. “Mr Blake, you keep your hands and utensils to yourself in future, please.”
“Whatever,” said Jared, slouching in his seat. “Sure.”
“And as for you, Miss Coulter,” said Mr Lane, inhaling in a clear bid for calmness, “I would like an apology.”
And Saffron, equally calm, said, “No.”
