book 3 of the epic fantasy We is here!
Sathriel has liberated the capital, but that leaves him sitting in the throne. Bayam has what he wanted all along — his ideal emperor ruling, fame accruing to their legend — but the job of the emperor’s right hand has its challenges. Hard to decide what’s more worrying: the fact that he still barely understands his own sorcery, or doubts about the trustworthiness of everyone else who suddenly wants a piece of Sathriel.
Necavos has been displaced and has to make a choice: trust her brother, start a civil war, or find out what lies behind door #3. It’s a lot to face for someone who never left the building where they were born until a week ago.
Ha’ere has finally caught sight of the threat her spirits warned her against, and that’s a bad time to find out her champions may not all be willing to play along. She hoped to unite them against an outside threat, but they can only see their feuds with one another.
Across the ocean, Koloeph must contend with a threat from abroad in addition to the traitors in her camp. Sesuniphar is going to have to make a choice: whose side is he on and what is he actually after? If he doesn’t decide, someone else will do so for him.
Time is running out for everyone, and they have to face the same decision, in Barracheh or abroad. Will they work together like the witch suggests? Or double down on yesterday’s animosities?
below, a sneak peak into We Shatter, out this Friday
She stepped into the stranger’s flesh as setting solidified around her: she stood beneath a leaden sky, low and menacing. She was amidst her women as usual, shawl raised to shelter her head from the lazily-falling snow. They were just one knot in a great ring of people, all of them blond with bold noses and rectangular jaws. Ha’ere recognized the large man across from her, she had met him in Sathriel’s memories. The woman whose body she was in had her eyes fixed on him.
The gathering had a funereal solemnity to it, and no wonder. In the circle’s center, a line of small bodies, rocks arranged around them in complex patterns. While the people watched, the shaman paced and talked, head high, eyes wide, pupils dilated, the rhythm of his words suggesting a chant. The bodies were those of foals, too small to have died by means other than miscarriage.
It was beginning.
“What the absolute fuck do you think you’re doing?”
With a wrenching sense of dislocation, the scene shattered. The grassland turned to jagged chunks of beige and gray, the grim horsemen reduced to whips and bows and scowling faces. Ha’ere couldn’t settle her gaze or steady her thoughts, and her gorge rose up her throat. She was weightless, drifting in the midst of chaos, a spangling of colors her only context.
Then she was somewhere else, so suddenly she staggered and sat down hard on her hip. She was on a hillside, a freakish landscape as familiar as it was impossible. Before she had placed it, she had recognized it, and the knowledge made her sick with fear, even if she couldn’t quite lay hands on the specifics. A small, green frog crouched in the black grass by her right hand, and her eyes fixed on it.
“Nasty little witch, I will teach you—”
“You talk to me, not my followers.”
A boy stepped past her, no more than sixteen, positioning himself between Ha’ere and the person who was shouting at her. He was smaller than the woman standing just downslope, a woman who looked at first as if she were Tanengola. When her head moved, though, her hair changed color, shifting from blond to black like the coloration were nothing more than a net draped across her. Ha’ere had seen her before, and her skin went cold when she remembered where.
Comments are closed