To Janet Cathryn Stirling, 1950–2021, dearest of all.
Thanks to—
To Esther Friesner, good friend and talented author, for checking something out for me.
To Bill Fawcett, for numerous valuable suggestions in this series.
To Kier Salmon, longtime close friend and valued advisor, to whom I have always listened carefully. And for things like managing the beta-reader stuff. I owe her greatly for everything I’ve written since 1998.
To Markus Baur, for help with the German language and as a first reader, and for being my native guide to Pannonia Superior, which provided valuable help with To Turn the Tide and The Winds of Fate.
To Dr. Donald Ringe, author of many insightful volumes on linguistic history, for a single piece of advice on Proto-Germanic chronology. All mistakes are mine!
To my first readers: Pete Sartucci, Markus Baur, Steve Brady, Ara Sedaka, Mike Ralls, Diane Porter, Margaret Carter, Kier Salmon, Romaine Spence, Jade Cheung, Sandy Michaud, and Emily Sedaka.
To Patricia Finney (aka P.F. Chisholm), for friendship and her own wonderful books, starting with A Shadow of Gulls (which she wrote when she was in her teens, at which point I was still doing Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche fanfic) and going on from there. One of the best historical novelists of our generation!
And to Joe’s Dining (http://joesdining.com/), and its splendid proprietor, Roland Richter, for his help with German stuff, and the servers for running relays with my Diet Coke.
Also Tribes Coffee House, (https://www.tribescoffeehouse.net/) here in Santa Fe.
To both institutions and their staff for putting up with my interminable presence and my habit of making faces and muttering dialogue as I write.
Also, they don’t have attention-demanding cats walking on the keyboard. A cat sleeps more than fourteen hours a day, yet somehow manages to interrupt you continuously—feline magic.