This collection gathers ten short stories and novellas written across both pen names of a single author, Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden, who publishes as Megan Lindholm and Robin Hobb. The first seven pieces appear under the Lindholm name and lean toward contemporary, urban, and science-fictional fantasy that is often edgier and more uncomfortable in tone. They include A Touch of Lavender, a Hugo and Nebula nominee about a boy, his mother, and an addiction-prone alien refugee in the slums; Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man, in which a department-store worker meets a man calling himself Merlin; Cut, a near-future piece confronting bodily mutilation and consent; The Fifth Squashed Cat, a gritty roadside urban fantasy; Strays, set among runaways in modern America; and the previously unpublished Finis, a response to cliched vampire fiction, and Drum Machine, a strange tale of music and procreation. The final three stories, written as Robin Hobb, sit within the secondary world of the Realm of the Elderlings. Homecoming is an epistolary novella of an exiled Jamaillian noblewoman marooned in the Rain Wilds; the title novelette The Inheritance follows a Bingtown woman and a wizardwood pendant; and Cat's Meat, previously unpublished, sees a single mother reclaim her life with help from a ruthless cat. The book deliberately showcases the contrast between the two authorial voices, spanning urban fantasy, science fiction, and epic fantasy.