It’s the first day of Tremontaine S1, with Ellen Kushner’s episode “Convocation.”

All eyes are on Duchess Diane Tremontaine at the Convocation, an annual soiree that opens the Council of Lords. With her mad husband exiled to the country, Diane is on the hunt for a new lover and better fortunes. But the path to power—and revenge—is never without obstacles.

Welcome to Tremontaine, where ambition, love affairs, and rivalries dance with deadly results. A Duchess whose beauty is matched only by her cunning; a handsome young scholar with more passion than sense; a foreigner in a playground of swordplay and secrets; and a mathematical genius whose discoveries herald revolution when games of politics begin, no one is safe. Keep your wit as sharp as your steel in this world where politics is everything and outcasts are the tastemakers.

As with last season, I’m producing and co-wrote an episode, this year with Paul Witcover.

Tremontaine is available in print and audio. It’s not a romance and not all the endings are happy (I describe this season as The Empire Strikes Back — it’s dark and we enjoyed hurting our characters), but it contains lots of romantic relationships of lots of varieties (M/F, F/F, M/M; also P.S. this season has a somewhat higher heat level than S1), and a diverse array of characters in terms of race, size, orientation, and disability.

Serial Box  | Amazon | B&N | Google Play

If you still need to catch up with season 1, it is still available at all those locations and will also be available in print in 2017 from Simon & Schuster’s SAGA Press.