If I Pay Thee Not in Gold by Piers Anthony & Mercedes Lackey (1993)

Cleaning out boxes in the garage and found a box of science fiction/fantasy. (Plenty more in the basement.) Thought I would pull out a few for some quick reads. This is a collaboration between two authors I really liked back when I was reading lots of these genre books. Turns out that it was Piers Anthony's idea, but he didn't have time to write it himself, so his publisher talked Mercedes Lackey into writing it, though he was the copy editor and added some writing. The idea came from Arabian nights, where a woman is indebted to a man and he offers other options for paying the debt, thus part of the storyline and the title.

This is one of those alternate magical worlds, where women rule, because they have the power of conjuring things (though they last only a day), and men are their slaves, though there is a separate quarter of freedmen. A girl becomes a full fledged citizen when she passes her woman-trial and defeats a man in combat in the arena. Xylina has put off this moment as she has struggled for survival under a curse, since her mother died in an earthquake. She ends up defeating Faro with cleverness and some powerful conjuring, but keeps him alive, so he is now her slave. Turns out he is an educated scribe, who also happens to be large and good at combat. They form a team of sorts as her trials are far from over as she has a powerful enemy that wants to destroy her, though there are others that would help her.

I know that these science fiction/fantasy books, especially when written by women, often looked at alternative social structures, and this one with women treating their men as slaves seemed like an over the top role reversal, though as I think about it, very close to many historical periods where women were basically slaves to men. I was getting disgusted with the constant mishaps encountered by Xylina, but then a new character appeared and she was sent on a seemingly impossible quest through three totally different worlds beyond the borders of her own, where she grows in maturity, magical power and finds love. I could quibble about some aspects of the book, but basically a fun read and obviously read long enough ago, that I did not remember it - or it could be a book I never got around to reading too.