Dangerous Women 2, the second part of the paperback adaptation of George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois's fantastic 2013 anthology is now out (a third volume comes out later this month).
To celebrate, Tor.com has published an excerpt from "The Girl in the Mirror," a short story set in his Magicians world.
You could say it all started out as an innocent prank, but that wouldn't strictly be true. It wasn't that innocent. It was just that Wharton was behaving badly, and in the judgment of the League he had to be punished for it. Then maybe he would cut it out, or behave a little less badly, or at the very least the League would have the satisfaction of having caused Wharton to suffer, and that counted for something. A lot really.
You couldn't call it innocent. But you had to admit it was pretty understandable. And anyway, is there really any such thing as an innocent prank?
Plum was president of the League—unelected but undisputed—and also its founder. In enlisting the others she had presented the League as a glorious old Brakebills tradition, which it actually wasn't, probably, though since the college had been around for something like four hundred years it seemed very likely to Plum that there must have been, at some point in the past, another League or at any rate something along the same lines, which you could count as a historical precedent. You couldn't rule out the possibility. Though in fact she'd gotten the idea from a P. G. Wodehouse story.
They met after hours in a funny little trapezoidal study off the West Tower that as far as they could tell had fallen off the faculty's magical security grid, so it was safe to break curfew there. Plum was lying full length on the floor, which was the position from which she usually conducted League business. The rest of the girls were scattered limply around the room on couches and chairs, like confetti from a successful but rather exhausting party that was thankfully now all but over.
Dangerous Women: "The Girl in the Mirror" (Excerpt) [Tor.com]
Dangerous Women 2 [Mass market paperback]
Dangerous Women 1 [Mass market paperback]
Dangerous Women 3 [Pre-order, trade paperback]
