“Beggars in Satin” and “The Knot Garden” are two novelettes first published in Mary Gentle’s Scholars and Soldiers (1989) and reissued in the Gollancz White Crow omnibus. In publication chronology, I believe they’re the first works to star the swordswoman Valentine (a Scholar-Soldier) and the architect Baltazar Casaubon. In internal chronology, one may say that “Beggars in Satin” precedes “The Knot Garden,” but as Valentine and Baltazar hop universes and timelines with gleeful abandon in the three full-length novels which feature them, it is impossible to relate these two novelettes to their further adventures.
[At least, not chronologically.]