The Innkeeper's Song

by Peter S. Beagle

Overview

An epic fantasy series—now available as one volume—that follows three women of legendary skill on a quest to save the world’s most powerful wizard and the innkeeper’s assistant whose heartbreak will bear witness from the author of the bestselling The Last Unicorn.

On a night like any other, three mysterious women arrive to an inn separately, one with a fox that is more than it seems. Karsh, the innkeeper, has no choice but to let the tangled drama unfold beneath his roof. His stable boy, Rosseth, is so mesmerized by the three cloaked women, a warrior nun, a fabled adventurer, and a girl who was saved from drowning, that he soon uncovers a deep secret that was better off remaining hidden. And then there is Tikat, overwhelmed by tragedy, who continues his journey to the inn, refusing to let death bring an end his love.

Told in alternating points of view, fantasy master Peter S. Beagle has crafted an unforgettable novel of heartbreak and hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668025444
Publisher:	S&S/Saga Press
Publication date:	03/11/2025
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400

About the Author

Peter Beagle, noted author and screenwriter, is a recipient of the prestigious Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Mythopoeic Awards, and a World Fantasy and Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America 2018 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master, among other literary achievements. He has given generations of readers the magic of unicorns, haunted cemeteries, lascivious trees, and disgruntled gods. A beloved author, his best-known work is The Last Unicorn.

Editorial Reviews

In a multifaceted fantasy told from various points of view, Beagle ( The Last Unicorn ) plumbs the nature of life, death and love. When three strange women (one black, one brown, one white) arrive at a wayside inn called The Gaff and Slasher, the innkeeper Karsh takes them in much against his better judgment. Two of the women--Lal, a fabled adventurer, and Nyateneri--are searching for the powerful magician who was once their mentor and who has summoned the women to save him from destruction and worse at the hands of his most powerful pupil, Arshadin. The third, Lukassa, is a village girl whom Lal resurrected after she drowned and whose childhood love, Tikat, pursues the three, intent on regaining her. When these blighted souls converge on the inn, life there is forever changed as powerful forces wage ungodly battle for possession of the magician's soul. In elegant yet simple prose Beagle illuminates the shifting relationships among the various major and minor players (including an irascible shape-changing fox) who people this affecting tale. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Three powerful women (each with her own secret past), a stable boy, a weaver's son, and an innkeeper set in motion a series of events that brings each of them face to face with the forces of magic and the workings of fate. Beagle ( The Last Unicorn , LJ 5/15/68; The Folk of the Air , Ballantine, 1987) uses many voices to tell this tale of love and death and what lies beyond both. A finely crafted piece as well as a rich, evocative fantasy, this novel should have broad appeal.

Library Journal

Beagle, author of the esteemed "The Last Unicorn" (1968), adds this beautiful fantasy to his small body of work. The maiden Lukassa, who tells us that "death is a nowhere lined with lightning," drowns but nonetheless is abducted by an ethereal black woman with golden eyes. Lukassa's inconsolable sweetheart, Tikat, refuses to accept Lukassa's death and braves a long trek to find her; he is beset by savages and nearly starves. Lukassa is both corporeal and incorporeal; down beneath the riverbed where she drowned, down deeper still in a shadowy world Beagle draws so skillfully that Tolkein and C. S. Lewis come to mind, she is being pulled to her death by a powerful demon. Tikat and the women he has been pursuing gather at the inn, where another wizard--a mentor to the women and a force for good--lies near death. A fox--into whose feral, witty, magical mind Beagle takes us--rescues Lukassa, and, much changed, she joins the living and her faithful Tikat. Lukassa's haunting narrative--poised between life and death--hearkens back some 33 years to Beagle's "A Fine and Private Place", about a newly dead man and woman who fall in love and then fade away as they forget what life was. The innkeeper himself is an unsavory but recognizable sort who observes these otherworldly doings with a disapproving realism--a useful but limited point of view, Beagle seems to say. Realism is all very well, but odd things happen, and only magic will explain them. A gentle, romantic, lyrical tale.

John Mort