2024 pair of romance/fantasy stories. Feora steals the king's gold and
uses it to buy books; Zenira tries to survive on piecework while
hiding her magic. Spoilers.
These stories originated as pieceworks on Mihalik's blog; in Hugo
categorisations they'd be a novelette and a novella, and this edition
adds epilogues to each. Each one is a romance between a human and a
dragon who can take on human form, though the human doesn't know that
at first.
Given the length, there's not much room for development of characters,
though they do get beyond the meet-cute and into some potential for a
long-term relationship. But there's an abiding sense of fun here which
suits the genre well, a light-hearted style with discoveries that make
sense of earlier puzzles in the manner of a good mystery story—I find
that more usual in SF, where the setting as puzzle is a recognised
idea, rather than fantasy which often tends to be relentlessly
conservative and as-expected.
I mean, if you don't want a pair of short romantic fantasies, fair
enough, but these are a decent example of what can be done in that
form.