Pre-release date: August 29, 2016
Wide release date: December 5, 2016
Subgenre: Historical fantasy, Greek mythology
About Poseidon and Cleito:
He became a god. Her story was forgotten.
From the shore of a frozen steppe, an outcast hunter embarks for the otherworld to ask his ancestors how to bring the mammoth back to the fields of sedge.
In a shining, island kingdom of wonders, the daughter of a high priest fights for her claim to wealth and power after her father is assassinated by the king.
Together they will build an empire recalled as an ancient legend and a cautionary tale. But how did he become a god while she became a mere footnote in history?
Poseidon & Cleito is the engrossing first book of a
fantasy trilogy of myth and legend exploring the rise of the lost
civilization of Atlantis. In the best traditions of an epic journey, one
man's struggle to discover his place in the world takes him across
perilous seas into the epicenter of political strife in a foreign land.
But a legend is not made of deeds alone. Fans of Guy Gavriel Kay's
historical fantasy and David Gemmell's Troy series will enjoy this
fantasy novel as it sets out to reimagine the inception of a Greek myth.
Excerpt:
Cleito sat up at
the head of her pallet, with her knees drawn to her chest, while the boy lay
sleeping. At night, the shadows in her room seemed to collapse around her,
threatening to swallow her whole. It was the reason she had taken to sharing
her bed with the beekeeper's son from the farm beyond the weedy bluffs that
bordered her father's land. Having the boy around made the home feel less
empty. It made the night pass quicker. Most nights, after two or three of the
boy’s eager routs, she had been able to sleep, forgetting.
Moonlight from
the room’s unshuttered window traced the slumbering body beside her. He took up
three-quarters of her straw mattress, and he had not bothered to draw the bed
sheet over his rangy body, which was ropey from his labors and browned by the
sun. The fresh breeze from the sea did not travel as far inland as the crusty
plot where her father had built his three-room farmhouse. At least the room’s
listless fug kept the boy from throwing an arm around her while he slept.
Cleito tried to
make out the tin ring he had given her. She twisted it off her finger, turned
it this way and that, and weighed its lightness in her hand.
She had never
received a gift of a romantic sort. It had been briefly cheerful until she had
realized how pitiful it was. The boy was poor. He must have saved a season’s
wage to purchase the ring.
Because he
thought she was a pathetic, orphaned gosling.
Cleito knew what
people had been thinking while they had stolen glances at her during her
father’s funerary services. She was just a girl. Seventeen years old. Abandoned
by her mother. Without her father, how was she to live?
A swoon rocked
her. The dizzy rush compacted with sharp edges, and she was all at once awake
for the first time in days. She looked at the sleeping boy. A voice as cold as
stone rose from her throat.
“Get out.”
Her bedmate
stirred slightly.
She shrieked at
him. “Get out.” She beat her fists against his chest. He cowered away, sliding
naked across the dirt floor, and she stood and screamed again and again, “Get
out.”
He backed into
the curtain at the doorway and stumbled to his feet. She threw the ring at him.
It bounced back from the boy’s chest and fell to the floor with a paltry clink.
His eyes disbelieving. Her eyes stabbing. Did he think she could be bought with
a cheap scrap of metal? Did he think she was a peasant’s wife? She, whose
mother had been a queen. She, whose father had been chosen by the unnamed
martyr to preach the ancient mysteries.
He shoved aside
the curtain and fled into the living space. In a breath, the door to the
outside of the house slammed behind him.
Amazon Exclusive
Available everywhere on December 5, 2016
About Andrew J. Peters:
Andrew J. Peters
writes fantasy for readers of all ages. Poseidon
and Cleito is his fifth book. His young adult début The Seventh Pleiade garnered an honorable mention in the 2014
Rainbow Book Awards, and its follow up Banished
Sons of Poseidon was a Best of 2015 Editors Pick by All Our Worlds Diverse
Fantastic Fiction. His Werecat series
was a finalist in The Romance Reviews 2016 Readers’ Choice Awards. He was
recently featured in Loop Magazine’s: “Four Must-Read Authors with Buffalo
Ties.” (That’s Buffalo the city; he doesn’t wear ties with buffaloes).
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