FREE this week. Don’t miss out on sorcerer-duke Vane Unsten’s coming of age story.
Coming of age is never easy. Especially when you’re an orphaned duke. And a sorcerer. And the king, your surrogate father, finds his children kidnapped….
Book two in the Herezoth trilogy, The Magic Council, is FREE today through Friday! (Book one, The Crimson League, is on sale for 99 cents.) To celebrate, here’s a snippet from the free read: young sorcerer Vane and the king’s men approach the mansion where the kidnapped princes are being held.
“Which village is this?” barked Gratton. “Carphead?”
“Snapperville,” said Zacry.
“And we’re approaching from?”
“The north.”
“Then we want to go south,” announced the guardsman, and gestured for the others to follow. He had spent the previous afternoon poring over maps.
After an hour of trekking through weeds and brush with hardly a sight of even a dirt road, Vane spied Ursa’s mansion, a building stylistically plain except for its large upper windows. Wooden planks painted a cool shade of blue covered the exterior. As the mansion grew larger, the vigilantes reached the border of Ursa’s land. Waist-high hedges with a tended lawn and flower garden on the opposite side marked her property. The morning had progressed, and the sun dispelled the worst of the mist that had earlier obscured Vane’s vision. This was where the king’s party would split up.
Gratton took Rexson and Zacry and circled right. Their goal was to sneak to the window of a vacant room on the lower floor, from which spot the sorcerer could infiltrate the mansion, invisible, and do reconnaissance. Ideally, Zacry would run across the princes and get them out without alerting a soul. Otherwise, he might at least ascertain whether Ursa was home and get to the boys through her coerced cooperation.
Vane, Bendelof, and Hayden had the task of taking down the bear, which was roaming around somewhere and could threaten the entire operation. A shame they had to kill the thing, but there was no way around it. Vane wanted to freeze it magically, to do it no permanent damage, but Gratton ruthlessly revealed the flaws of that suggestion. “Use your head, boy. Suppose Dorane or Arbora shows up and unfreezes the thing? What do you care about Ursa’s animal for? It’s got to die, and quietly. That’s why we’ve got Hayden’s bow.” In the meantime, Zacry would freeze the bear if he came across it first, so that Vane and Hayden could finish the job. If the cursed thing found the king and soldier after Zacry were inside, well, the pair had arrows of their own, but Vane hoped they wouldn’t have to use them. Gratton would not be pleased if he had to shoot the bear himself, not pleased at all.
Hayden led the second trio in the opposite direction. Vane ran their plan over and over in his head.
Kill the bear. Look in the windows, because Zacry’s on the other side, and go in if you see Ursa or the boys. A black flash for the enemy, red one for the hostages. Get in and get out. But first the bear, kill the bear….
The bear found Vane’s party almost straightaway, charging from a clump of oak trees near the mansion, where it was sitting with no restraints. Hayden acted in a flash; before the beast gave two great bounds he loosed an arrow, which lodged in the animal’s snout as it made a third massive stride. With an angry roar—one Vane used a muting spell to silence, but some seconds too late—Ursa’s pet reared up, exposing its chest, and took two more projectiles. Eyes red, claws exposed, yelling in a voiceless rage, the creature careened toward the building when the fourth arrow struck. Then the bear collapsed against the mansion’s blue wooden wall.
Vane threw himself to the earth, and dew soaked his clothing. Hayden followed suit, pulling Bennie with him. Hearts racing, they crept toward the building ten yards away. The sorcerer got there first and found a line of narrow, barred windows hidden by a bush row the bear had crushed. He turned invisible before he jumped the hedge and sprinted to the nearest pane, next to the animal’s corpse. He peered into a basement, a basement Zacry could not have seen because it covered only half the building’s length. An identical room must exist on the other side.
His voice shaking, Vane uttered two spells. The first sent up a soundless spray of ink-colored flashing lights. The second sent up red ones.
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