The Headmasters

How do you learn from the past if there isn't one?

Sixty years ago, something awful happened. Something that killed everyone except the people at Blue Ring. Something that caused the Headmasters to appear. But Maple doesn't know what it was. Because talking about the past is forbidden.

Everyone at Blue Ring has a Headmaster. They sink their sinewy coils into your skull and control you, using your body for backbreaking toil and your mind to communicate with each other. When someone dies, their Headmaster transfers to someone new. But so do the dead person's memories, and if one of those memories surfaces in the new host's mind, their brain breaks. That's why talking about the past is forbidden.

Maple hates this world where the past can't exist and the future promises only more suffering. And she hates the Headmasters for making it that way. But she doesn't know how to fight them - until memories start to surface in her mind from someone who long ago came close to defeating the Headmasters.

But whose memories are they? Why aren't they harming her? And how can she use them to defeat the Headmasters? Maple has to find the answers herself, unable to tell anyone what she's experiencing or planning--not even Thorn, the young man she's falling in love with. Thorn, who has some forbidden secrets of his own . . .

Mark Morton is also the author of Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities (nominated for a Julia Child Award), The End: Closing Words for a Millennium (winner of the Alexander Isbister Award for nonfiction); The Lover’s Tongue: A Merry Romp Through the Language of Love and Sex (republished in the UK as Dirty Words), and Cooking with Shakespeare. He’s written more than fifty columns for Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture (University of California Press) and has written and broadcast more than a hundred columns about language and culture for CBC Radio. Mark has a PhD in sixteenth-century literature from the University of Toronto and has taught at several universities in France and Canada. He currently works at the University of Waterloo. He and his wife, Melanie Cameron (also an author), have four children, three dogs, one rabbit, and no time.

Shadowpaw Press is a traditional publisher based in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, founded by award-winning science fiction and fantasy author Edward Willett.