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  The Finest in Fantasy from MICHELLE WEST

  The House War:

  THE HIDDEN CITY (Book One)

  CITY OF NIGHT (Book Two)

  HOUSE NAME (Book Three)

  SKIRMISH (Book Four)

  BATTLE (Book Five)

  ORACLE (Book Six)

  FIRSTBORN (Book Seven)

  WAR (Book Eight)

  The Sun Sword:

  THE BROKEN CROWN (Book One)

  THE UNCROWNED KING (Book Two)

  THE SHINING COURT (Book Three)

  SEA OF SORROWS (Book Four)

  THE RIVEN SHIELD (Book Five)

  THE SUN SWORD (Book Six)

  The Sacred Hunt:

  HUNTER’S OATH (Book One)

  HUNTER’S DEATH (Book Two)

  Copyright © 2019 by Michelle Sagara.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Jacket art by Jody Lee.

  Jacket design by G-Force Design.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1826.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780698161788

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  Version_1

  For Thomas, the heart of my household

  And Terry, the heart of my books

  Contents

  Also by Michelle West

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  I have a large, extended household. There is no single person at the helm, but Thomas is the glue that holds it all together when things get tough. When I am mired in deadline stress and horrible anxiety, to the point that things like, oh, eating seem entirely irrelevant to life, there is nonetheless food on the table at roughly dinner time. It’s a blessing.

  My mother has continued to be a godsend. She is constant as clockwork, to the benefit of my sons, their godfather, and their godfather’s family—all of whom join us twice a week for two of the aforementioned meals. Also: Kristen Chew answers my infrequent queries about grammar and usage of things like punctuation.

  Terry Pearson not only read this in its initial draft, but in every successive draft that followed, including the one you have in your hands. I am constantly reminded of how, over the years, he has become a necessary part of the writing process—not so much the words on the page/screen, but . . . the joy with which he reads them. When I am terrified that nothing works, his becomes the voice of reason.

  Joshua Starr answered all of my emails practically the minute I sent them and carved out extra time for me with the copy-edits of War. He didn’t even complain when I fell sick, and lost much of that time in the process.

  Sheila Gilbert is an island in the ocean of publishing.

  And thank you to the readers who, throughout the long period of writing this book—and all the rest—encouraged me by telling me, time and again, that they would wait, and could wait, until the book was done.

  Prologue

  ‘‘THE MAN IS AT the service entrance. Again. Shall I send him away?”

  Muriel A’Scavonne rose from her writing desk. Her hand was almost cramping; she’d been at her letters all morning, in a state of banked panic. It was not the panic caused by consideration of the recipient of this particular letter, although Healer Levec could be an unpleasant, suspicious man on the best of days.

  “No. Please have him escorted to the parlor.”

  “And shall I make certain the young mistress is not informed of his presence?”

  That was the question, wasn’t it? Muriel was certain that the old, scarred man was not good for her daughter; certainly her daughter’s manners disintegrated completely when she faced him. But it was more than that.

  “Yes.” This was, in some fashion, a test. Not of her servants, whom she trusted, and not of her daughter, whom she understood well, but of the very strange, inexplicable interaction between Stacia and the old soldier.

  “Shall I send for the guards?”

  “No. Perhaps you might send a page. Barryl, if he’s free.” Barryl was a handful of years older than Stacia; although he was a servant, he was also one of the few people to whom Stacia looked for social cues. He did not mother her—he couldn’t; she had a mother. But Stacia had not been blessed with siblings, and Barryl was as close, social strata aside, as she could come to having one. It was Muriel’s hope that Barryl would, with decades of experience, become steward of Stacia’s home in some distant future.

  The future, Muriel thought bleakly, that might never arrive.

  She rose, straightened her skirts, and headed toward the parlor.

  * * *

  • • •

  Stacia was not the first to be struck with the sleeping sickness; nor was she the first to be ensconced in the Houses of Healing—and that had been a terrifying, bitter blow to her mother and father, the latter of whom refused to discuss it at all with his wife. But he refused to discuss anything of import, or anything emotional, and Muriel could not deny that she had been emotional.

  When Healer Levec had announced that the victims laid low by that illness had fully recovered, she had been ebullient in her quiet joy. She had come to the Houses of Healing in her carriage with clothing appropriate for her daughter and had discovered that there were very few suitable rooms in which to change. They had managed. Her daughter had lost weight—all of the sleepers had—but she had become her old self, and Muriel fully intended to spoil her rotten, at least where food was concerned, until that weight returned.

  She had been happy to put the fear of that sickness as far behind them both as she could. She did not speak of it. She did not ask questions. She did not allow questions to be asked by anyone. Her husband approved of this, of course; it was, to him, a sign of necessary maturity in a wife of her stature. Which, she thought, with a trace of bitterness, was a wife of his stature, or rather, the stature that he desired.

  But in the past week, Stacia had begu
n to fall asleep without warning, often in the middle of the day. The first time, she had been mounted for the riding lessons she loved and demanded. Those lessons had been canceled for the foreseeable future. So, too, hope, although she tried, the first time, to keep it bright and untarnished.

  She had been sleeping for days when Muriel began to write to Healer Levec.

  And the old man—Colm Sanders, she thought, although she had heard his name only once—had appeared at the service entrance of the manse, with no business that would generally allow him entry. No business but Stacia.

  He was weathered, sun-dark, lines etched into the parts of his face that weren’t scarred; his hands were the callused, hard hands of a laborer. His hair was gray, with more white now than dark, although both persisted. His eyes were brown. He carried himself as a man who was accustomed to a certain kind of authority; she thought him a primus, or a former primus, of the Kings’ armies. He had no business at all with her daughter.

  But he, too, had been felled by the sleeping sickness. He, too, had lain abed in the Houses of Healing. And he, too, had awakened on that final day in which Levec had proclaimed the sleepers cured.

  The only thing that connected her child with a man she would never otherwise have met was disaster. Had he not known—had he not come to her with a warning—Stacia might have been out on that horse. If a fall would not kill her, it would have injured her, and he had prevented that.

  He had come that day to tell her that Stacia would sleep. He could not be certain when, but he wanted to give her mother enough warning that Stacia would not be engaged in activities that would actively harm her if she lost consciousness.

  And had she believed him when he first started to speak, her daughter would not have been on the horse’s back at all. As it was, the old man had caught her, racing to the stables and the corral at breakneck speed the moment he had discovered that that was where she was. The moment Muriel herself had, in growing panic, let it slip.

  He had caught her. He had stopped her from hitting the ground. He had carried her to her room, a place he had no right to approach. And he had, at Muriel’s stiff, frightened direction, laid her in her bed and retreated.

  * * *

  • • •

  This afternoon, Stacia had woken. She was, she said, hungry, and the kitchen went instantly to work. But the waking itself, while a great comfort to Muriel, could no longer dim her fears; her daughter had slept for far too long, and it was a familiar, dreaded sleep: she would not wake, no matter what was done.

  Even her presence at the table, when it came, was duller, dimmer; her usual effervescent cheer and almost puckish demands were absent. She had looked across the dining table, to her mother, and said, “What do you do to make someone happy again?”

  “It would depend on why they are sad. And it would depend, as well, on how you know. If you know because you are listening to gossip, you should do nothing. They have not shared their sadness with you. It is theirs, not yours, until they do.”

  “What if I know, but I didn’t listen to gossip?” Stacia demanded, with a little more of her regular fire.

  “Then it would depend on why they are sad,” Muriel answered. A place had been set for her, although she had already eaten. She did not touch the food.

  “She had to abandon someone she loved. He’s like a brother. He’s as important as Barryl.”

  Stacia was, at heart, a kind child. She could be; she did not have the hard choices that life sometimes forced upon others. That she would, in future, Muriel had no doubt—but she desperately wanted to protect her child from having to make any of them.

  “Sometimes,” Muriel said, after a longer pause, “there’s nothing you can do to make someone happy. What you are describing is grief. If a mother lost her child,” she added, reaching for the nearest, the truest, of her many examples, “she would be devastated. There would be nothing you could do that would make her happy again. There are some sadnesses that are, at their very heart, part of life.”

  “But—then she’ll never be happy again.”

  “She will, Stacia. But not immediately, and never in the same way that she was before the loss. Think, though: the grief comes because the love existed. Without that love, she would feel nothing because it would mean nothing.” Muriel swallowed. “I think grief is natural, and I think—I think, even grieving, that grief is better than not loving at all.”

  Stacia, at that precocious age, nodded, but she was not satisfied with the answer. She was, and had always been, a child who would stick her own hand into the fire to see if it burned because fire burning other people did not serve as an adequate lesson.

  * * *

  • • •

  Colm Sanders bowed to her when he entered the room. It was a precise, almost regimental bow that lacked subtlety or finesse.

  “Stacia is awake,” Muriel said.

  He nodded as if this was not news to him.

  “She asked me a very strange question shortly after she woke.”

  He nodded again, but this nod was more wary.

  “She wanted to know what she might do to make someone happy again.”

  Muriel felt the chill of winter on this summer day when Colm Sanders closed his eyes. She saw a twitch of muscle at the right side of his jaw.

  “You know why she asked.”

  He opened his eyes but did not speak.

  “Tell me. I am her mother, I have the right to know. Is that not why you came?” Her hands had balled into inappropriate fists; she unclenched them with difficulty.

  The man opened his mouth, but the answer he might have offered did not come.

  Instead, Stacia did, careening into the parlor, her skirts flapping at the width of her stride. The fists Muriel had denied herself, Stacia adopted.

  “Why are you here?” she demanded. “You’re scaring my mother!”

  “Stacia,” Muriel said.

  “He is! What do you want?”

  “I wished to speak with your mother. I have spoken with her. I will take my leave.”

  “Oh no, you don’t!” She stepped forward and caught his arm, to Muriel’s distress.

  But if the man looked dangerous, his glare, when transferred to her daughter, was not frightening. “You listen to your mother. Now.”

  “She’s not talking. You are.”

  Barryl unobtrusively entered the parlor, saw what was taking place, and visibly winced. If he was older than Stacia, he was not yet fully adult.

  The old man’s glare intensified. But so did her daughter’s. Muriel felt a moment of pride, although for the most part, she was embarrassed.

  “I came,” the old man finally said, “to see if you were awake.”

  Stacia did not deflate. “Of course I’m awake. You wanted to know if I remembered the dream.”

  He nodded.

  “Well, I do. And you do, obviously.” Although she continued to grip his sleeve, her free hand was no longer a fist. “Do the others?”

  “No one was dreaming for as long as you were. Not even me.”

  “You cheated.”

  His brows rose.

  “You woke yourself up.”

  “You didn’t try.”

  To Muriel’s surprise, Stacy looked at her feet. “. . . You wouldn’t talk to him.”

  Him?

  “And he’s going to be alone now.”

  “He won’t, Stacy. He’ll have the—” He stopped.

  “It doesn’t understand people,” Stacia insisted, oblivious to the presence of her mother. “It doesn’t understand us.” And Stacia, of course, felt she did. As if all people were the same, everywhere, as if being a person was a universal truth.

  Muriel could not remember being so young, and maybe that was the kindness of memory. She doubted it.

  The old man exhaled, and to Muriel’s surprise, he patted
Stacia on the head. And her daughter, who famously disliked being touched by strangers, seemed to draw strength from this. Something was happening. Something that she had no part in. And her daughter was a child.

  “Stacia,” she said, with an emphasis on the last syllable, “I’d like you to go with Barryl now. I haven’t finished speaking with Mr. Sanders.”

  Stacia was mutinous. “Why do you want me to leave? He can’t have anything to say to you that I don’t already know—and better.”

  “Stacia.”

  Barryl interceded. Muriel didn’t hear what he said, but she wasn’t paying attention; Barryl led Stacia—or perhaps, regrettably, dragged her—out of the parlor. She turned to her visitor. “Please,” she said, “be seated.”

  “I’m not dressed for your fancy chairs,” he replied, placing both of his hands behind his back. As if he were a soldier, and not a guest.

  “You know something of my daughter’s illness.”

  “I suffer from it myself.” He obeyed a request that was not a request and took his place in a chair. It was farthest from the chair she occupied.

  “I believe I saw you when I visited Stacia at the Houses of Healing. You were present on the final day, when I was told I could finally bring her—bring her home.”

  He nodded. She remembered: no one had come for him. She had asked Healer Levec—boldly—if perhaps they might take those without family to collect them to their homes; he had winced.

  “Why did you come?”

  “I was asked, specifically, to keep an eye out on Stacy. Stacia.”

  “By who?”

  “By a friend of both hers and mine.”

  “This is not a person she knows when awake, is it?”

  Silence. A beat. Colm Sanders was measuring her. Fair enough; she had been measuring herself—and her worth as a mother—for months. Years. It had been far, far worse when her daughter had succumbed to the illness. There had been so many questions about what she could have done differently, what she’d done wrong.