Damar

The Blue Sword introduces the desert kingdom of Damar, where magic weaves through the blood and weaves together destinies. New York Times–bestselling and award-winning author Robin McKinley sets the standard for epic fantasy and compelling, complex heroines. Fans of Sarah J. Maas, Leigh Bardugo, and Rae Carson will delight in discovering the rich world of Damar. Harry Crewe is a Homelander orphan girl, come to live in Damar from over the seas. She is drawn to the bleak landscape, so unlike the green hills of her Homeland. She wishes she might cross the sands and climb the dark mountains where no Homelander has ever set foot, where the last of the old Damarians, the Free Hillfolk, live. Corlath is the golden-eyed king of the Free Hillfolk, son of the sons of the legendary Lady Aerin. When he arrives in Harry's town to ally with the Homelanders against a common enemy, he never expects to set Harry's destiny in motion: She will ride into battle as a King's Rider, bearing the Blue Sword, the great mythical treasure, which no one has wielded since Lady Aerin herself. Legends and myths, no matter how epic, no matter how magical, all begin somewhere.

In Robin McKinley's Newbery Medal–winning novel, an outcast princess must earn her birthright as a hero of the realm Aerin is an outcast in her own father's court, daughter of the foreign woman who, it was rumored, was a witch, and enchanted the king to marry her. She makes friends with her father's lame, retired warhorse, Talat, and discovers an old, overlooked, and dangerously imprecise recipe for dragon-fire-proof ointment in a dusty corner of her father's library. Two years, many canter circles to the left to strengthen Talat's weak leg, and many burnt twigs (and a few fingers) secretly experimenting with the ointment recipe later, Aerin is present when someone comes from an outlying village to report a marauding dragon to the king. Aerin slips off alone to fetch her horse, her sword, and her fireproof ointment . . . But modern dragons, while formidable opponents fully capable of killing a human being, are small and accounted vermin. There is no honor in killing dragons. The great dragons are a tale out of ancient history. That is, until the day that the king is riding out at the head of an army. A weary man on an exhausted horse staggers into the courtyard where the king's troop is assembled: "The Black Dragon has come . . . Maur, who has not been seen for generations, the last of the great dragons, great as a mountain. Maur has awakened."

Magical stories set in alternate universes... tales of curses and gifts of healing... a wizard who has lost his powers... and a princess, a troll, and a teenage girl are featured in this diverse collection from Newbery Medalist Robin McKinley In "The Healer," Lily was born mute, but she has so great a natural gift for healing that the local midwife and healer takes her as an apprentice. One evening, riding home, she meets a stranger on the road who can speak to her silently, mind to mind. Overjoyed, she takes him home to Jolin - but Jolin can read the mage-mark on him and fears for Lily's safety, for mages are not to be trusted. In "The Stagman," Ruen is a princess and will become queen on her name day - if her uncle, the Regent, greedy for the power that should belong to his niece, cannot think of a way to prevent it. And so he invents portents and a purifying ritual that involves chaining Ruen to a rock in an old place of sacrifice, not used since her great-grandfather's day, and leaving her there alone. Night falls on her despair and in the flickering torchlight she sees the shadow of a man - or of a man with a stag's antlers - or perhaps of a great stag. In "Touk's House," a witch adopts a woodcutter's baby daughter and raises her along with her own son, whose father was a troll. Erana grows up knowing she is loved, and loving in return - but on her seventeenth birthday she realizes she must leave her foster mother and her best friend and find where in the world she belongs. In "Buttercups," an old man marries a young wife and takes her home, but he feels unworthy of her vivid youth and risks all for a tremendous prize, in an act of what in his heart he knows is a betrayal of the wild magic that lives on his farm. In "A Knot in the Grain," Annabelle has no choice when her parents decide they will move to a small town upstate, the summer before Annabelle's junior year of high school. She spends the summer reclaiming the neglected garden of their new house and reading books from the local library. She also finds a mysterious wooden box in a tiny hidden study above her attic bedroom: a box containing smallish, roundish, nobbly things Annabelle can't identify, but which are faintly warm to the touch - and which seem to be curiously aware of Annabelle, her loneliness, and her longings.