Chronicles of the Last Days (Dragonsfall, Book 3) by Amelia Smith

Release date: January 31, 2017

Subgenre: Epic fantasy

About Chronicles of the Last Days:

 

Myril doesn't need prophecy to see that her world is going to end – the city is sinking before her eyes. Foreign ships fill Anamat harbor, bringing traders bent on pillaging the city’s treasures – with help from the governor – as its people flee to hostile lands.

Her guildmaster calls on her to help save the Chronicles of Anamat from the pillagers. Meanwhile, her old friend Darna needs healing, Iola wants to go to her death in the dragons’ realm, and the Defenders are airing their secrets at just the wrong time.

How will any of them survive when the waters rise again?

Excerpt:

Darna looked out over the Anamat valley from a border shrine tucked high in the mountains. She’d just glimpsed a dragonlet of Anara, or rather, she thought she might have, but she wasn’t quite sure. With dragonlets, you could never be sure. The scene spread out ahead of her was a different matter. It had definitely changed since she’d last seen it, less than a moon-round before. The sea shone in the midday sun, just as it had then, but now it shone all the way up to its new, muddy banks, far inland from where they’d been before. The road into the city was mostly dry, but water encroached on it near the West Gate Market. An inlet ran up to one of the larger villages, where before there’d been only a stream. Boats moored on its banks in what had once been pasturelands, and a few tents stood nearby.

A quarter of the city was up to its ankles in water. “What have I done?” Darna thought aloud.

“You haven’t done anything,” Sunna scolded her. Darna hadn’t meant to speak aloud. “It’s the dragons, getting revenge on the Cereans. Look at them.” She waved her hand at the tents and boats. “Crawling all over us.”

“It looks more like revenge on us,” Raina said. “But Sunna’s right. This is Na’s work, and he answers to no priestess, nor princes either. Maybe the other dragons are all going wild. Even if you moved some bits of stone out of place, you didn’t shake the earth; only they can do that.”

Darna couldn’t explain to them why she’d felt her own hand in the shift of the land, even if it had been a dragon’s force behind it. She’d known where the power ran through the earth and she’d helped to do something that she’d known was not quite right. Then she’d called up the dragon, or at least given Salara strength on that last day, the strength to do this. Salara had given her strength, too, but it had a price. She was pretty sure that the cramps in her gut were only the start of it.

The shift of the earth and the rising of the sea were echoes of what had happened when she and her lover had given strength to a wild dragon, strength to shake off the invaders – and to destroy themselves, it seemed.

“We’d better go on, if we want to get to Raina’s place before dark,” Sunna said.

It seemed absurd to worry about how far they had to walk that day when the city was ruined, or at least well on its way to ruin.

“We won’t get there before dark, even if we could keep up a good pace,” Raina said. They’d been traveling slowly so far because of Darna’s cramps. “We could get in by midnight if we pushed through,” Raina said. She was probably eager to get back to her house and her mostly fosterling children.

The three women set out again, Sunna and Raina flanking Darna, guarding her. The view of the city slid behind the trees for a while. The change in the land had been different in Slaradun. Terrifying there, too, except that she’d been beyond terror in Salara’s embrace. Besides, the province had been so bleak and barren to begin with that it felt almost like a mercy to destroy it, like the death of her lover so soon after he had gone mad. He’d said that he didn’t want to live that way, but she wondered if death was what he’d really wanted in the end.

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The prequel Scrapplings is free throughout February.

About Amelia Smith:

Amelia Smith writes magazine articles about Martha's Vineyard, fantasy sagas about dragons, and blog posts about nothing in particular. To learn more about her, visit www.ameliasmith.net.

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The Turncoat Prince (Dragonsfall, Book 2) by Amelia Smith

Release date: September 27, 2016

Subgenre: Epic fantasy, dark fantasy

About The Turncoat Prince: 

 

Darna is just a guildswoman, or so she’d like to think, but her alleged father was the prince of a backwater province. Her uncle assassinated him to claim the throne, and now he's coming after her.

With assassins on her heels, Darna takes on a job in the remote province of Slaradun. The prince is irate to find that this limping woman has replaced the able-bodied man he hired, but according to the contract, he’s stuck with her for the season. Darna finds the prince arrogant and high-handed, but he’s also intelligent and well-read. As winter closes in on Slaradun keep, late night conversations turn from sea walls to more intimate territory, and the province’s lost dragon reappears.

This book is the second in the Dragonsfall trilogy. To enjoy it properly, read The Defenders' Apprentice first, and perhaps also the beginning of Darna’s story in the prequel novels, Scrapplings and Priestess.

Excerpt:

“This place isn’t safe for you,” he said. “I think you should go stay in the temple.”

“Don’t be ridiculous; I’ve lived here for years.” Darna looked over her shoulder and drew the curtains across that last gap. “Is it something to do with Tiadun?”

Thorat nodded. “Was the prince of Tiadun your father?”

“I don’t know.” He might have been. After all, her mother had been a priestess and might have lain with any number of men, including the prince of their province, but no man was supposed to claim a priestess’s child as his own, though they did when it suited them. The prince had tried to claim her. He’d sponsored her priestess training, possibly because she’d stood as proof that he could sire a child, although a girl child wouldn’t normally inherit the throne. He’d needed that, not that it had done him any good in the end.

“He’s dead now, so it doesn’t matter.”

Thorat shook his head. “That’s the trouble. It does matter. Calar, his brother, your uncle, he found out about you. He wants you dead. He’s offered a land grant, a rather large land grant, and a share of the Cerean trade in dragon stones to the man who kills you.”

“Kills me? Me?” Darna’s voice squeaked. “Why?”

“I don’t know all of it,” Thorat said, running his hand through his hair. His hand looked strong, competent. He had a good longsword which he knew how to use. Maybe he would protect her, not that she’d ever needed protection before.

“You don’t know all of what?” Darna asked. If she was going to be murdered, she’d like to know why.

“He had your father murdered.”

“I don’t know that he was my father.” The idea that Calar had killed his brother, the prince, was not at all surprising.

“The prince looks like you. Looked like you. He had the same expressions. I believe he was your father, even though you’re not like any other princess I’ve seen.”

“I wasn’t raised to be a princess.”

“You weren’t raised at all. You’re half-wild.”

“Exactly,” Darna said, “but now I’m also a full initiate of the Guild of Planners.”

“Congratulations. I didn’t know that.”

“They blessed my masterwork this past winter, just before Tiada was killed.” Tiada was the dragon and guardian deity of her home province. Dragons were supposed to live forever, as long as the land, so now her homeland was dead. The death of the dragon meant far more to her than the death of a man ever could, even if that man had sired her, and that was far from certain. Thorat had been there at Tiada’s death. That much she knew, though the details of why he’d been there were not entirely clear.

“You know about that?” Thorat asked.

“Iola thought I should know. She said that Tiada had joined the deepest stream, and that that was different from death, though it looks the same to us on the surface. She knew that I was Tiada’s child.” Darna had sensed the absence of the dragon before Iola had told her about it.

“And not the prince’s,” Thorat mused.

“I have no interest in being connected to the prince of Tiadun,” Darna said. “He had nothing that I wanted. Everyone knows that. Besides, it wouldn’t make any difference. Why would Calar want me dead?” She did know her alleged uncle’s name. She kept track of what was happening in Tiadun, just in case. “I’m no threat to him.”

“But he thinks you are, and he’s right,” Thorat said.

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About Amelia Smith:

Amelia Smith writes magazine articles about Martha's Vineyard, fantasy sagas about dragons, and blog posts about nothing in particular. To learn more about her, visit www.ameliasmith.net.

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