by Kathryn Antoinette
They told her she was sick.They lied.
Ebook out now · signed paperback $20 and hardcover $30 coming October 3
They told her she was sick. They lied.
The Astraean Empire ended famine, cured disease, and gave its citizens two hundred years of life.
Akari Hara has devoted her life to Princess Estelle since they were both just five years old.
But Akari is the Daughter of Rhea — a direct descendant of the Mad Queen who destroyed her own country and starved the continent. And just like her mother before her, Akari will die before she is thirty, while Estelle will go on living another century without her.
Every morning and every evening, Akari takes a compound her physician tells her will keep her stable for as long as possible.
Yasu Kharona planned to die. After fourteen years apart, he goes to the palace for one last look, to know she's okay.
But Akari isn't okay. And when he sees her, he changes his mind.
Within a day, the drug is out of her blood and a city district has rotted to the ground.
The medicine was never treatment. It was control, and the Empire has been doing this to her family for a thousand years.
Akari doesn't want revenge. She wants a quiet life with the people she loves.
And that's the one thing the Empire can never allow.
A dying handmaiden discovers the medicine she was told is keeping her alive was designed to suppress the power in her blood. Her freedom threatens the Empire.
In the frozen north, the survival of the resistance hinges on Akari's divine power to coax life from exhausted soil through a harsh mountain winter.
The next chapter of The Daughter of Rhea.
The print edition of Fallow Goddess debuts here. Copies for sale at both slots, so there's no need to bring your own, and an hour in between if you want coffee.
Come say hello. Booth locations once the festival posts the map.
Festival detailsReadings and presentations from the evening's authors, with Fallow Goddess in the lineup alongside H.W. Bernard's Five Days in June and Scott Eveloff's The Golem's Holocaust. Free to attend, dinner and drinks available if you want them, and a raffle nobody has to buy into.
A Novel Idea posts the full lineup closer to the date.
Showcase detailsFor review copies, event invitations, rights enquiries, or anything else — send a note here.
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