Victory of the Hawk

by Angela Highland

  Victory of the Hawk

  By Angela Highland

  As war rages across Adalonia, their only hope is a sword named Moonshadow, the weapon that first saved the elves from the Anreulag.

  Julian

  Julian yearns to confess his love to Faanshi, the elven healer who captivated him since their first chance encounter. Though he fears she and Kestar share a deep connection, he must thrust such worry aside as danger descends upon them and their uneasy elven allies…

  Faanshi

  Faanshi’s connection to Kestar is inexplicable, born of her magic and their shared elven blood. She knows his every thought and desire, but her heart lies with Julian. She’ll have to find a way to tell him soon, even in the midst of rebellion…

  Kestar

  Though he knows not why—only that it involves his own recently discovered elven heritage—Kestar has risked the lives of everyone around him. For the Anreulag, the Voice of the Gods, has been freed of Her magical prison and will kill all in Her path until he is found.

  Book three of Rebels of Adalonia

  95,000 words

  Dear Reader,

  Social media can be dangerous, fun and inspiring. While I was writing this month’s letter, I mentioned on Twitter that I was a bit stuck in my opening. Who can blame me after writing over forty letters? So author and reader @AudraNorth challenged me to make this one different by creating a Carina Press April Fools fill-in-the-blank letter (there’s a name for it but it’s trademarked so…fill-in-the-blank letter it is!). Challenge accepted and the game is afoot. We’ll go back to your normally written letters in May. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy our bit of fun and please visit our @CarinaPress Twitter account in April for a contest associated with this month’s letter. We’re offering up free books and a gift card from Carina Press!

  April is a __________(adjective) month for Carina Press since we have four new debut authors in our lineup! First up, I’m pleased to _______ (verb) debut author Sharon Calvin with her romantic suspense title, A Dangerous Leap. USCG rescue swimmer Kelly Bishop is used to dangerous situations, but when Ian Razzamenti demands she risk her _______(noun), she’s not sure she has the courage. Then disaster strikes and they both must face their worst fear—_______ (verb) each other.

  Katherine Locke debuts in the contemporary romance new adult category with Second Position. Four years after a career-ending car accident, ballet dancers Aly and Zed risk their _______ (adjective) recoveries for the _______ (noun) they thought they’d lost. Don’t miss the prequel to Aly and Zed’s story, Turning Pointe, available as a free read on CarinaPress.com.

  If you’re a fan of the male/male genre, be sure to pick up j. leigh bailey’s debut new-adult romance, Nobody’s Hero. Bradley Greene’s family rejected him for being gay, leaving him financially and emotionally adrift—until he meets Danny Ortega. Brad becomes Danny’s _______ (noun), but can Brad handle being responsible for someone else’s _______ (noun)?

  Also debuting with us in April is mystery author Brenda Buchanan. In Quick Pivot, the first of the Joe Gale Mysteries, a newspaper reporter’s dogged investigation of a 1968 murder threatens to expose a Maine mill town’s _______ (adjective) secrets, making him the _________ (noun) of a killer who once thought himself too clever to be caught.

  Joining Brenda in the mystery category is Daryl Anderson with Death at China Rose. The search for a long-missing woman brings PI Addie Gorsky to China Rose Fish Camp, a _______ (adjective) resort in a hidden corner of north Florida. Addie begins a _______ (adjective) hunt through the wilds of China Rose, surrounded by _______ (adjective) gators, killer _______ (noun) and a _______ (adjective) two-legged killer.

  In the historical romance category, Caroline Kimberly brings another fun historical adventure with An Inconvenient Mistress. In a desperate attempt to flee her_______ (noun), Isabella North hijacks captain Phillip Ashford from a Jamaican prison and tricks him into _______ (verb) home to England. But will she be able to keep herself from _______(verb) him even if she despises the handsome, arrogant privateer?

  Last this month, we wind up Angela Highland’s _______ (adjective) fantasy romance trilogy. When the Voice of the Gods breaks free of magical enslavement and rampages through Adalonia, the lost sword Moonshadow is the only hope of stopping Her—and Faanshi, Julian and Kestar must join _______ (noun) to find it and _______ (verb) the realm in Victory of the Hawk.

  Coming May 2015: Marie Force’s Fatal series is available in mass-market print in retail stores, Stephanie Tyler (aka SE Jakes) delivers a new Defiance romance and Joely Sue Burkhart brings _______ (adjective) fantasies to life in her erotic thriller—is he a serial killer or the man who will meet all her deepest needs?

  I hope your month is full of _______ (adjective) books that make you _______ (verb). Please visit the blog at CarinaPress.com/blog to participate in our fill-in-the-blank contest and win free books and prizes!

  Happy Reading!

  Angela James

  _______ (job title), Carina Press

  Dedication

  For Éric, because music does indeed heal all,

  and because citterns are awesome.

  Acknowledgments

  With Victory of the Hawk, I bring the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy to a close. Many thanks first and foremost to my editor Deb Nemeth, for her tireless work and patience in helping me make this entire trilogy as strong as it can be, and to the rest of the Carina team for working with me to get the tale of Faanshi, Julian and Kestar out to you all.

  Thanks as well to my team at my day job at Big Fish Games, who have all been excellent in letting me arrange what time off I’ve needed to get this trilogy finished, and juggling the writing work with my day job obligations.

  To Kathryn, Roger, Pauline, Dee, Ellen and Amy, thank you very much for the invaluable feedback about how to make Yselde a more believable four-year-old. Likewise to Doranna, Christine, Daniel, Kestrel, Joi and again Pauline, for the help in how to portray a wounded horse.

  To all my backers of my 2012 Kickstarter, thank you for your ongoing patience as I’ve worked with Carina Press. I’m excited to finish this trilogy not only so that I can bring the story to a close, but also so that I can return to the stories you all are due.

  And to all of my readers, this will not be the last tale set in this world. There’ll be more to come in Adalonia, Nirrivy, Tantiulo and Vreyland, and I invite you all to join me as I explore the tales to come.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter One

  Dareli, Karthald Province, the Night of Fire, Jeuchar 4, AC 1876

  For a
measureless eternity—or so it had always seemed—blood magic had defined her existence. It had locked her into servitude, compelling her to wield her power, to think, to exist only as a single voice willed. Now the blood magic was gone, and in its absence, her consciousness erupted with the unfettered glory of fire. Flame leaped to her hands as easily as breath itself. With its strength she tore through walls of wood and granite, out of the bowels of the sprawling human edifice that had confined her and into the summer night.

  The open freedom of the nighttime air almost stopped her. The lights of the human palace and the city it overlooked stung her sensitive eyes, and the lack of confining walls made a portion of her mind want to cringe in craven fear. Yet even as she snarled to drive away that fright, she saw the stars shining down upon her from the boundless vault of the sky overhead, and the first glimmer of memory kindled within her: a song, or a perhaps a legend, of people like her awakening beneath the light of the stars.

  She could not remember who those people were. But she recognized the starlight, pure and precious and eternal, and her spirit surged at the sight of it. Like those unknown people before her, the stars would see her reborn.

  Beneath their light, she tested the limits of what she knew. She was a slave no longer. Her enslavers were human—round-eared and small-eyed, obsessed with the gods in whose names she’d been ordered to fight and kill in their wars. And she remembered a different kind of people, with pointed ears and larger eyes—the people who’d been born beneath the stars. People like her. Elves.

  She was an elf, and she had fire at her command, fire to turn against those who’d locked her away in darkness. Those two concepts were brand new suns in the firmament of her darkened mind, and she welcomed them with a fierce and rising joy.

  Distant voices shouted as the round-eared ones scrambled to respond to her emergence. Bells tolled a warning, from both the humans’ palace behind her and the city stretched out before her, and one set of bells in particular seized her ear. The cathedral’s. She remembered how the song of its bells drew the hordes of humans to come and revere their gods. They’d commanded her to appear there many times, to speak to the people. And though the blood magic stole away the words so that she never recalled them afterward, the cathedral itself rose up clear and sharp in her mind.

  With it came another realization—if she could picture a place in her thoughts, her magic would take her there. Her enslavers had driven her to appear in many places, ever to return to her pit of a cell when her orders were fulfilled. Now she had no orders but her own. And it came to her, as the stinging pops of gunfire began to punctuate the cries coming out of the palace, that she could go to the cathedral that honored the humans’ gods.

  She could destroy it.

  Memory became wrath. Wrath stoked her magic into roaring life. The world changed around her from a broad grassy lawn to a vast nave filled with polished pews, where windows of intricate stained glass turned the light of the moon and stars into a hundred different colors—changing the starlight, the way her enslavers had fought to change her. Offended to her core, she sent bursts of power into every one of the windows. Fragments of glass and twisted lead rained down on her as she stalked the entire length of the nave. She’d almost reached the end when the bells rang again, far louder now in her hearing. Doors on all sides flew open, and men and women in garments of russet, white and black rushed into her line of sight.

  Humans was her first thought. Threads of magic tugged at the edges of her mind. The amulets each human wore, trinkets of silver, blazed with fire that tried to rival her own. Another word roiled across her awareness, identifying the humans as they shouted in surprise and dread to her. Hawks.

  What words they shouted were irrelevant, save that they called her Anreulag. All her being revolted against that name, for it was what her enslavers called her. Worse yet, the Hawks’ amulets were tied to her—were part of the blood magic—and her wrath surged anew at the sight and sound of them all.

  They will not ensnare me again.

  She hurled cleansing flame toward each of those silver trinkets, and in feral satisfaction saw them ignite at the throats of the Hawks. Nor was that fire enough. She kept the fire roaring till the humans stumbled back, collapsing in writhing heaps of burning, smoking flesh. Other humans in the robes of priests and priestesses ran into the nave in their wake, but these too she burned, smothering their pleas to their gods with the might of her power.

  More of the Hawks appeared, and this time they carried the long guns called rifles. They fired these at her, and though she was able to deflect some of the hot leaden rounds, she could not shield herself against them all. And so she willed herself away, back to the palace where the queen of her enslavers lived.

  The guards who defended the place had rallied to the alarm. When she appeared at the palace’s front gate, a gathered force of them hurled a barrage of rifle fire at her while hiding their own faces behind bulky shields of iron and silver. She had to hurl her attackers to either side to make them drop their shields before she could immolate them, and she killed half their number where they stood—but at the cost of half a dozen musket rounds scoring her flesh.

  With a howl of pain and rage, she vanished from their line of fire.

  The royal palace, Dareli, Jeuchar 5, AC 1876

  “Get out of my sight before I have you executed. Idiot girl! You’ve doomed us all!”

  Margaine Araeldes had always lived in awe and a little fear of Ealasaid, the Bhandreid of Adalonia. When she’d married Ealasaid’s grandson, that fear had grown sharper with regular proximity to the queen. But she’d never conceived of the possibility of her fear turning to outright loathing—or of wanting to murder her sovereign with her bare hands.

  It wouldn’t take much. They were alone in the private royal chamber near the palace infirmary, for Ealasaid had suffered a heart attack during the Anreulag’s escape. The Bhandreid was old as well as ailing, and Margaine, despite the knife wound that throbbed painfully beneath the bandages wrapped around her middle, was young and strong. She’d need nothing more than to step forward, seize a pillow, and smother the woman on the grand oaken bed before her. For a single, blinding instant, she could think of doing nothing else.

  This was the woman who’d ordered her High Priest to kill her own grandson—and who now glared at her with apparent disgust that she herself hadn’t joined him in death.

  All that kept her from lunging at the figure on the bed was the bitter knowledge that the Bhandreid never went anywhere in the palace without guards in range of a cry for help.

  “Executed for what?” Margaine hissed back at her instead. “For refusing to let your High Priest kill me, like he did my husband?”

  “He was trying to keep the Anreulag from incinerating everyone in this palace, you selfish little chit!” Ealasaid’s voice should have been a lash of fury, but even as she fought to sit up in the bed, her feeble color abandoned her face and she leaned over hard on one arm. The rest of her words escaped her in a breathless gasp. “And I said get out. How dare you disobey your queen?”

  Years of deference to this woman warred in Margaine with the rage she dared not express too loudly, lest Ealasaid summon guards who could and would shoot her on sight if their liege commanded it. But with that anger came a burst of comprehension, piercing and clear.

  Ealasaid hadn’t actually called the guards yet. Which meant she was not yet prepared to finish what the High Priest had started, and spill her blood as Prince Padraig’s had been spilled. She could escape. Perhaps, if the gods were willing, she might even survive the rest of the night.

  “I will fetch Her Majesty’s physician,” she said through gritted teeth, and spun to stalk out through the chamber door. And I hope he bleeds every last drop of your blood, you soulless old hag. Margaine had not been born to her royal station, but she was a princess nonetheless—and princesses did not bolt from a r
oom when they took their leave. Yet with her anger and revulsion still churning through her, it was all she could do to keep from fleeing the private infirmary chamber as swiftly as her feet could carry her.

  She had a reprieve, but surely it’d be brief at best—and she had not a single shred of proof of what High Priest Elirrides had done. It was her word against the queen’s, and Margaine had no illusions that Ealasaid would see her destroyed if she tried to level any accusations against her.

  She was still shaking with inexpressible rage when she made it into the corridor and almost collided with the young maid dutifully waiting for her, carrying her daughter Padraiga. The infant was fussing, while the maid looked up with wide and terrified eyes. No wonder, when two of the palace guards burst in the hall as well, bowing to her swiftly, with expressions almost as nervous as the maid’s. “My lady, thank the gods we’ve found you, the doctor wouldn’t let us report to the Bhandreid but it’s been hours now and we—”

  The first guard’s words fell over each other in his haste to utter them, and Margaine snapped up a hand, palm out, to cut him off. She wanted nothing more than to take her child from the maid’s arms and run, far and fast, to the safest refuge she could find. But there’d been something suspiciously like fear in Ealasaid’s eyes even as she’d hurled her invective, and the princess couldn’t remember ever seeing the Bhandreid scared in her entire life.

  If Ealasaid had told the truth—if the Voice of the Gods was indeed about to incinerate them all—then the part of her still afire with rage almost wanted to let it happen. Demanded it, in fact, for she’d always been taught to believe that the Anreulag was the instrument of the gods’ own vengeance.

  That is not my name!

  Yet the Anreulag Herself had rejected the High Priest—had slain him before Margaine’s eyes. And if the Voice was not what she’d been taught to believe, then she had to learn fast what or who She truly was.

  But first she allowed herself to kiss her baby’s forehead and whisper a prayer over her before she straightened again. “Take Padraiga to the nursery. Find her wet nurse as you go, and both of you are to stay with her there until I come for you. I will check on you in two hours.” Once the maid bobbed her head and scurried away, Margaine turned to the guards. “We will not violate the orders of Her Majesty’s personal physician. You may make your report to me.”