Bloodchild by Anna Stephens

Author:Anna Stephens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-07-22T17:00:00+00:00

RILLIRIN

Ninth moon, first year of the reign of King Corvus

Heir’s suite, the palace, Rilporin, Wheat Lands

If she’d been a slave, Rillirin would’ve known how to behave. If she’d been free, she could have dealt with that too, strange as it would have been in a city run by Mireces. But this … this was beyond anything she’d experienced or could understand.

They called her ‘Princess’ and ‘milady’. She ate more and better food than she’d ever had in her life, and slept in a clean, warm bed the size of a house in a suite of rooms big enough for a hundred – the queen’s wing, adjacent to Corvus’s, at his insistence, far better than the first night of her stay, which had been in a small room in the temple where the stench of hopelessness and dead blood made her nauseous.

She wore Corvus’s silver ceremonial slave collar, and while it didn’t have a chain attached to it, she still couldn’t remove it. Lighter and looser than the cold black iron of the previous collar, it told her two things: she was special; and she was nothing.

She spent her days forced to participate in rituals to the Red Gods, in the awful sacrifices that dedicated new converts to the Dark Path, for despite the Dark Lady’s destruction – or maybe because of it – every day slaves came to offer up their souls to Blood in exchange for freedom. The tired, the hungry, the hopeless. Feeling that moment of envy when the collars were taken from them, when they were given a house and food and weapons – still watched, of course, and would be for months – but free. Free.

She spent her evenings with Corvus in his chambers, listening to reports and orders while drinking exquisite wine and nibbling on oatcakes dipped in honey, the babe stretching and twisting in delight at the comfort and the food, all the food. Learning more about the state of the country and her brother’s plans than she’d ever expected to know. As if he wanted her involved. As if he trusted her.

She was royalty. She was a slave. She was a child of Light. She took part in Mireces rituals. She had the run of the palace. She was a captive.

If they were trying to keep her off balance, they were succeeding; she didn’t know what they wanted of her from one day to the next other than the babe and her conversion to the Red Joy. Both things she swore they’d never have.

And then there was Tara. Of all people, of all the places to discover such unexpected, such sudden flaring hope, there was Major Tara Carter, soldier, officer and killer of men. Now one of Valan’s slaves, so changed as to be almost unrecognisable, all her fire banked down to embers hidden beneath cold grey ash.

Tara Vaunt, not Carter, wife to Major Tomaz Vaunt. Both of who are strangers to me, Rillirin reminded herself for the fifth time that day. Betraying

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