In 1985, Deborah J. Ross sold her first Darkover short story to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Free Amazons of Darkover. "Midwife" relates the adventures of a young woman who inadvertently becomes the surrogate mother of a banshee chick -- a smelly, sightless, carnivorous bird. Bradley featured Ross's short stories — dramatic, bittersweet, romantic, and humorous — in subsequent anthologies, and often cited Ross's turnabout-twist story, "The Death of Brendon Ensolare," as one of her favorites. Eventually the two collaborated on novel-length works set in the world of the Bloody Sun. Following Bradley's death in 1999, Ross has continued the series, including The Fall of Neskaya, The Children of Kings, and Thunderlord, as well as editing six more Darkover anthologies. For the first time, here are all of Ross's Darkover short stories, some of them previously unpublished, now collected in one volume. ...A pair of City Guards cadets invent an imaginary recruit in order to avoid their chores, and then must face the consequences... In the Ages of Chaos, a young wizard must rely on his uncertain powers to survive a haunted Tower... When the new lord of a captured castle is found murdered, the all-too-obvious suspect is an Aldaran assassin... Only the legendary Keeper could save her circle under the onslaught of forbidden weapons, but the results would cripple generations of women to come... ...and in the title story, written as a birthday gift, Ross sends Marion Zimmer Bradley herself to Darkover to solve a crisis in "A Heat Wave in the Hellers"...