Book search

[WarmasterCain55]

I am looking for a book/series I used to read.

It was of the fantasy genre. It started out with a boy and his mother living on their own. I think that the mother is either a witch of very skilled in the magical arts (i'm trying not to confuse it with another series I know) The sword itself was special. There are intelligent dragons in the setting and they had a rite of passage that involved a stone that resonates. The rite was that they had to fly a stone up to the mountain without dropping it.

There are also wizards but these wizards, I believe, are small. Not sure on the reasoning for that.

The main story focused on the boy and the sword. I recall one scene with him and his party coming across a pack of dragons. he remembered something his mother taught him and that with dragons, you need to be the one to act first instead of them and be polite.

And have a plan to kill everyone you meet

Remembering that also made me remember something else, not sure if it's part of the same story. Dragons and their 'maids', i.e. captured maidens, are commenplace as well as knights who try to rescue them. This one woman, a princess I think, went to them willingly and preferred the life of a dragon's maid. I remember she and another maid came up with a fire proof potion that involved, after the inital set up, just throwing a something something dust above her head and they will be fireproof for however many minutes.

There's also pots involved somehow.

 

[spooky316]

Tickles my memory. I think that's the Enchanted Forest series by Patricia C. Wrede:

-Dealing with Dragons
-Searching for Dragons
-Calling on Dragons
-Talking to Dragons

I think the book you're mainly talking about is the last. It's after a timeskip from the first three. The mom is the main character from the first three books.

 

[WarmasterCain55]

Wow, I did not expect anyone to actually remember that. I was racking my brain trying to remember that.

 

[spooky316]

I looked on my bookshelf last night and I actually still have them all. ^_^

 

[seitora]

Huh, make that two people who knew the answer off-hand. As soon as I got to the part about intelligent dragons with a stone that resonates I knew instantly it was the Enchanted Forest series as well.

That said, I don't think I've read the series in 10 years now, not since I was in middle school.

Also, the actual 'boy living with his mother' is the (chronologically) last book, talking to Dragons.

 

[da_fox2279]

There was a collection of short sci-fi stories that I read last year. There were two stories that I recall:

1: A man who underwent an alien abduction (ala Peter Quill) is now the leader of a group of space pirates (the same crew who abducted him, maybe?). Now the group is ready to depose him and go off on their own, so they stage a coup and kick him out, letting him take his private ship and some crew still loyal to him back to Earth.

2: A man recollects how the destruction of civilization was accomplished: aliens who received Earth transmissions decided to send back some of their own. Since it's the age of the internet, many of those transmissions were put on the web by private citizens who had their own listening devices.

Try as the governments of the world might, they can't stop this from happening, so the various transmissions get translated. The problem is, it's a hodge-podge of information - an intergalactic Encyclopaedia Britannica, covering alien flora and fauna one moment, high level math and science the next, and then high level tech... So on and so on. It's mentioned that school attendance levels are dropping, due to this, as well as suicide rates amonst intellectuals rising.

They may have been in separate anthologies. Anyone got an idea as to the collections they were in? Or what the titles of these stories are/the authors?

Thank you for your time. Sorry about the necro.