Acknowledgments

Any story this large and complex is not the work of a single mind—or even two, working together.

First and foremost, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the players of The Path to Power: Kyle Niedzwiecki, Emily Dare, Wendy Shaffer, and Adrienne Lipoma, who put up with us when a couple of character relationships in the game ran off to become their own little side soap opera, and then encouraged us when that side story grew into a novel trilogy. Particular thanks to Adrienne, who served as our alpha reader, and was very tolerant of us pestering her to live-blog her reactions to each chapter as we finished it. She’s also responsible for the lyrics to the creepy Fingers song. We’d also like to acknowledge the players from the original, short- lived incarnation of The Path to Power: Rachel Reader, Beth Dupke, Jesse Decker, and Alec Austin. The last of those is the ancestor of Sedge, by way of a character originally named Thorn, and we thank him for letting us borrow that for this story; Ren wouldn’t be the same without her brother.

After that, we have to thank all the people who assisted us in making this book a reality. This includes our beta readers Cory Skerry (whose own liveblog was highly entertaining), Carlie St. George, Daniel Starr, Emiko Ogasawara, Conna Condon, and the aforementioned Wendy Shaffer and Emily Dare, as well as Alyc’s supporters in the Clarion West Write.a.Thon, Heather Kalafut, Siobhan Carroll, Blythe Woolston, Georgina Kamsika, and Bob Angell. Additional thanks to Emiko, whose enthusiasm for the idea of crafting Ren’s dreamweaver mask was very encouraging to a pair of writers who want to make all the things from this novel.

Special thanks to every person who tried to help us name the pattern cards—a process that literally took almost two years to complete, with us wailing for assistance periodically. They are too many to list individually (and since we wailed for assistance in about eight different places, including ephemeral locations like Twitter, we don’t even know who all of them were), but we appreciated all the suggestions, including the ones we didn’t end up using; every bit of it helped prod our brains toward phrases we could be happy with. We also thank everyone on Codex who assisted with random research questions along the way, from perfume, to the mathematics of card game probability, to short-term cons, to Slavic-style music for Marie to listen to while writing.

And finally, we have to thank our agents, Eddie Schneider and Paul Stevens, and our editor Priyanka Krishnan for bringing this book into the world.