The Innkeeper's Song
Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel 1994, World Fantasy Award nominee 1994.
In this extraordinary fantasy novel of love and death, young Tikat enters a shadow world of magic and mystery as he searches for the lover whose death and resurrection he witnessed. It is a wild ride that sets him on the trail of three cloaked women who are blessed – or cursed – to undertake an impossible mission of their own.
All their fates will be irrevocably linked in a far distant inn, but it is not until the arrival of the once-powerful mentor who has sumoned the three women that the true quest will begin. For he, who has been the greatest of wizards, lingers at the edge of death. And only they can save him from this doom brought on by an enemy who is heir to all the wizard's magic.
Peter S. Beagle
Peter Soyer Beagle (born 1939) is an American fantasist and author of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays. He is also a talented guitarist and folk singer. He wrote his first novel, urban fantasy A Fine and Private Place (1960), when he was only 19 years old. Travel book I See By My Outfit (1965) is a nonfiction classic. Today he is best known as the author of The Last Unicorn (1968), a modern fantasy classic.
Beagle's work as a screenwriter interrupted his early career direction as a fiction author, but in the 1990s he returned to prose fiction. Beagle's own favourite is a literary fantasy novel The Innkeeper's Song (1993). Four years later Beagle returned to the land that was the novels setting for a collection of short stories The Magician of Karakosk and Other Stories (1997, known as Giant Bones).
In 2005 Beagle finally published a coda to The Last Unicorn, a novelette entitled ”Two Hearts,” and began work on a full-novel sequel. In 2006, ”Two Hearts” won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette and in 2007 it won the Nebula Award in the same category. The story was also nominated as a short fiction finalist for the World Fantasy Award. In 2006, Beagle won the Inkpot Award for Outstanding Achievement in Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Peter S. Beagle lives today in Oakland, California.