Yoke of Stars

2025 World Fantasy Award Finalist

An apprentice assassin and an inquisitive linguist trade interwoven tales in order to enact revenge. Ukrainian author R. B. Lemberg (The Four Profound Weaves) returns to their legendary Birdverse in an ode to the transformative power of storytelling.

“Haunting, nuanced, and hopeful, Yoke of Stars is essential reading.”
―Izzy Wasserstein, author of These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart

In the School of Assassins, Stone Orphan waits for a first assignment. After their first kill, they will graduate and attain the coveted cloth of bone. But instead of a commission, Stone Orphan gets an inquisitive linguist, Ulín. Ulín has heard the Orphan Star’s song of despair, mirroring her own, and drawing her to the School of Assassins. But Ulín is far more interested in learning Stone Orphan’s language than deciding whom she wishes to kill.

Unable to contain their curiosity, Stone Orphan offers to exchange stories with Ulín to help her decide the fate of three men. By turns, Stone Orphan and Ulín narrate tales of love, suffering, exile, and self-determination, and two wounded souls find hope in each other through the radical act of listening.

Le Guin Feminist Science-Fiction Fellowship recipient R. B. Lemberg is a queer, bigender fantasist, poet, and professor. Lemberg’s Birdverse novella The Four Profound Weaves was a finalist for the Nebula, Ignyte, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Their stories and poems have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, We Are Here: Best Queer Speculative Fiction, Sisters of the Revolution, and many other publications. Lemberg was born in L’viv, Ukraine, and currently lives and teaches in Kansas with their family.