Format: Paperback, 416 pages
Release Date: June 9, 2020
Publisher: Ace
Source: Publisher
Genre: Fantasy / Romance
A dragon shapeshifter and a healer with power over the earth fight a corrupt empire in this thrilling and deeply emotional romantic fantasy from the USA Today bestselling author of Radiance.
Magic is outlawed in the Krael Empire and punishable by death. Born with the gift of earth magic, the free trader Halani keeps her dangerous secret closely guarded. When her uncle buys a mysterious artifact, a piece of bone belonging to a long-dead draga, Halani knows it’s far more than what it seems.
Dragas haven’t been seen for more than a century, and most believe them extinct. They’re wrong. Dragas still walk among the denizens of the Empire, disguised as humans. Malachus is a draga living on borrowed time. The magic that has protected him will soon turn on him—unless he finds a key part of his heritage. He has tracked it to a group of free traders, among them a grave-robbing earth witch who fascinates him as much as she frustrates him with her many secrets.
Unbeknownst to both, the Empire’s twisted empress searches for a draga of her own, to capture and kill as a trophy. As Malachus the hunter becomes the hunted, Halani must risk herself and all she loves to save him from the Empire’s machinations and his own lethal birthright.
Dragon Unleashed, by author Grace Draven, is the second installment in the authors Fallen Empire series. As this is the second installment in the Fallen Empire series, you would be best served if you have some semblance of knowledge as to the world that this story takes place in. I say that because the main characters from Phoenix Unbound (Gilene and Valden) show up in this story briefly.
The
Empress lost her consort and an arm in the last battle she faced
against Valden. She truly believes that if she drinks the blood of a draga
she will be restored to her former glory. Gharek has been tasked to
find the mother-bond rumored to be in her land and bring it to her in
order to trap the dragon and take its life to fuel her own.
The basic reason for my rating are pretty simplistic. The first 3/4 of the book is a grind of slow action and tension as to what is going to happen next. Secrets between Mal and Hali could have been revealed sooner, but thankfully it didn't destroy their relationship. Halani warns her uncle against buying a strange yet enigmatic artifact could cause trouble for the caravan. But, her uncle is as hard headed and unmovable as they come which leads to even more trouble. The pacing was quite literally different from Phoenix Unbound. The action in Phoenix was way more intense and suspenseful.
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If
there was one thing Malachus had learned about humans during his long
life span, it was that they were first and foremost thieves. They stole
anything and everything, nailed down or not, from jewels and livestock
to women and children. And if battlefields and graves were any true
indicators, the dead were no more safe from their larceny than the
living.
The
Sovatin monks who’d fostered him as a child never truly prepared him
for the scope of humanity’s predation upon itself. Though human as well,
the monks lived isolated from the depredations of the so-called
civilized. Malachus never forgot the grief on their faces-the horror-at
discovering their sacred necropolis destroyed beyond repair by treasure
seekers. It was his first real taste of humanity as a whole, and he
found it revolting. It was also the impetus for him to become a
sought-after bounty hunter with a reputation feared throughout Winosia’s
prefectures.
His
martial training combined with his true nature gave him an edge, one
that made grave robbers and slavers question whether pursuing their
professions was worth the risk of becoming the quarry in his hunt.
This
hunt was different, more personal, and his prey far wilier than he’d
anticipated, slipping through his fingers countless times over numerous
leagues and a treacherous sea. Either they possessed extraordinary luck
or they knew what he was and how to outmaneuver him. Now, far away in an
unfamiliar country, Malachus’s luck had run dry.
The
pair possessed a treasure he would move mountains to regain, and they
had fled across the Raglun Sea to these lands. The ship Malachus had
sailed on to follow them had almost caught up to theirs, the mother-bond
calling to his soul with a war drum’s beat. But fickle gods had churned
the waters into a raging cauldron and flung his ship far off course. An
experienced captain and crew had saved the ship and those on board,
sailing the beaten vessel into harbor with broken masts and ripped
sails. Malachus’s quarry had long since vanished into the interior,
moving westward.
He’d
managed to track them from the coast to this forest, guided by the
internal beacon connecting him to the artifact he hunted. His
mother-bond, which was all that remained of his mother, his birthright,
and his ability to reclaim his true heritage.
Malachus
stood at the tree line and gazed upon the fields before him that
stretched to the base of the distant black-striped mountains. A wide
road snaked toward a miasma of dust in the distance, a steady stream of
wagon and foot traffic traveling its length. According to those he’d
spoken with when he first came ashore, a great market, promising all
manner of goods available for sale, had sprung up where once a Kraelian
garrison had stood. He suspected his prey was there. He stabbed the damp
earth in front of him with the point of his sword, wishing it was the
belly of one, or both, of the thieves. He needed that mother-bond.
Nothing more than a bit of bone at first glance, its value lay far
beyond anything the pair might get from a buyer. After four hundred
years of imprisonment in a human body, kept quiet by magic, his true
form had grown restless, a dangerous prisoner, and a fatal one if he
didn’t set it loose in time. Even now, the force of his inevitable
transformation surged through his bones and muscles, making the veins in
his arms and neck bulge at times, and his head throb. It was certain
that he’d have to slough off his human guise and embrace the draga one.
Ignoring that imperative guaranteed death. He needed the mother-bond to
safely initiate that change.
At his patient mare’s inquiring whicker, he turned. She whuffled a second time when he stroked her neck.
“They’re close, Batraza,” he told the horse. “Likely trying to pawn what they pilfered.”
Finding
the thieves and the mother-bond would be easier in a contained market
than trying to track them across leagues of unknown, and likely hostile,
terrain. If he listened hard enough, he could hear hints of faraway
voices. They were about a full day’s ride from the dust cloud, and that
was if he and Batraza didn’t have to shelter from the summer storms that
periodically doused the area.
For
now the sky curved blue above him, and he eyed the clouds scudding by,
noting those that gathered into thunderheads to linger in the distance.
Malachus sighed, cleaning his blade before resheathing it. The ragged
tips of Batraza’s tail slapped against his arm as she swatted away the
pesky gnats that swarmed in clouds around their heads and tried to fly
up their noses. Unlike other horses, she didn’t lay her ears back in
warning or try to bolt when Malachus drew near her. That, as much as her
preternaturally long life span, made her as strange as her rider.
Malachus
offered her the treat of a withered apple he had fished from the depths
of one of the bags attached to the saddle, and swung nimbly onto her
back. The two turned away from the road toward an open space where the
tree line curved in a horseshoe shape around gently swaying grassland.
Time
and solitude allowed Malachus to plan his next move as he tracked the
mother-bond to the shores of the far-flung Krael Empire. Sometimes he
felt more hound than human or draga, his nose either to the ground or to
the wind as he searched for his legacy. The blue sky overhead rapidly
gave way to blackening thunderheads fissured with lightning. A few bolts
broke free to strike the ground, and Batraza pranced beneath him,
nervous at the storm’s approach. Malachus guided her deeper into the
trees before dismounting. She leaned against him as he cast a spell the
monks had taught him to calm her so she wouldn’t bolt when he left her
to return to the open curve of grassland on foot.
Rain
blew in with a howl and then a roar, slanting sideways as the storm
gusts drove it across the landscape like an overseer wielding a whip.
Malachus tilted his face to the sky and let the deluge pummel him,
washing away his frustration along with the layer of travel dirt he’d
acquired since his last bath.
A
shimmer of light illuminated the shield of his closed eyelids, followed
by a boom of thunder. Within the sheltering trees, Batraza whinnied her
fear. Malachus murmured, “It’s all right, girl. Just a little light and
noise, nothing more. You’re the safest you can be where you are.”
As
quickly as the storm blew in, it passed. Thunder rumbled in the
distance, chasing walls of rain that galloped across the forest before
bashing into the mountain range. Black clouds splintered by lightning
trailed behind, and Malachus crossed his fingers in the hope that his
height and singularity on the flat ground might lure one of those
crackling tongues of light toward him. Lightning always loved the draga,
even those disguised as humans.
A
bright bolt forked out of one of the clouds to strike him. He convulsed
with the shock wave of power that hammered through his muscles and
boiled the blood in his veins. For a moment, his heart seized before
restarting with a double-time beat. Every hair on his body stood up, and
the smell of charred cloth filled his nostrils. Still, he kept his feet
as the lightning anchored him to the earth and exploded images across
his mind’s eye.
A
market teeming with people against the backdrop of a ruined fortress,
his mother-bond haloed in shimmering light and resting on a square of
purple cloth. A woman’s pretty face and somber gray eyes. An older man
with similar features and the same gray eyes. And most important, the
two thieves he’d tracked this far. All those depictions flashed before
him in the time it took for the lightning to pin him to the ground, burn
bright, then burn out.
Released
from the lightning’s lethal hold, Malachus staggered before falling to
one knee. He breathed deep, fire in his lungs and agony in his bones.
Smoke wreathed him and the burnt grass around him. A wispy tendril
meandered from a thumbnail-size burn hole on the top of his right boot.
The wetness of rain-soaked ground seeped through his sole. The lightning
that exited his body had left a matching burn hole there.
Any
other man would be a smoking husk by now, but Malachus was not a normal
man any more than Batraza was a normal horse. His magic made the mare
unique just as Malachus’s mother’s heritage made him peculiar. Batraza
was a horse that wore the guise of magic. Malachus was magic who wore
the guise of a human.
He’d
need to repair his boot, but the damage had been worth it. The
lightning had revealed a great deal. The valuable piece of his mother’s
skeleton still moved westward, pausing briefly as if teasing him with
its nearness.
While
most of the images the lightning had shown him were obvious location
markers and hints, the one of the woman with the solemn features puzzled
him. She might well be a buyer interested in possessing the
mother-bond-and woe betide her if she was-or she might be traveling with
the thieves he tracked, unknowing that they carried a lodestone that
put a relentless hunter on their trail. The man she resembled was a
mystery as well, though Malachus had no doubt that he, too, was somehow
tied to the mother-bond. The lightning wouldn’t have shown them
otherwise.
He
stood, soaked to the skin, and shook off the last remnants of the sky’s
blistering kiss before returning to Batraza. She snorted and rolled her
eyes when Malachus drew closer, stamping a hoof as if to admonish him
for leaving her alone among the trees.
“Peace,
Bat,” he said in his most soothing tone and gathered the reins before
swinging into the wet saddle. The storm’s power had fizzled. To the
west, the clearing sky took on a golden hue, overpainting the blue as
the sun regained dominion over the clouds.
Malachus
guided the mare out of the forest. If they traveled without stopping
and avoided the road’s heavier traffic, they’d reach the market by the
following nightfall. A new moon meant a blacker-than-usual night. He
could enter the market without much notice, just one of many travelers
journeying toward the temporary city. Though he wasn’t human, he wore
the form of one no different from all of those who trekked toward the
ruins.
They
reached the market after the vendors closed shop and the encampment
surrounding it settled down for the night. That suited him fine. He
found it far easier to navigate new surroundings without throngs of
people milling about to trade, socialize, or steal.
The
sickle moon hung midway in the night sky as he circled the camp
perimeter, ringed by hundreds of tents and wagons as well as livestock
pens guarded by a few people and a fair number of dogs. The air was
redolent with the scent of humans and animals, mud and wet
felt-unpleasant except for the drifting scents of cooking spices and
herbal teas simmering over fires. Those teased his nostrils, and his
empty stomach rumbled in response. Malachus nodded briefly to the watch
who silently observed him as he rode past pens and clusters of tents,
inciting the dogs into frantic barking or frightened yelps if his gaze
lingered too long on them. The mother-bond’s draw hummed along his
senses like silver thread stitched into fabric. He guided Batraza along
the market’s edge and farther out still, where the grass grew
undisturbed and untrampled and the light of torches no longer chased
away the thick darkness. He brought the mare to a halt and breathed
deep, allowing his senses to open wide, feel even more the hard draw of
draga magic as he sharpened his focus on the thing that had driven him
to cross deep seas and foreign lands to find it.
He’d
camp for the night and renew his search in the morning. Reconnoitering
in darkness had its benefits, but this was a large tent city populated
with enough watchmen that someone would interpret his investigating as
nefarious and try either to shoot him or to knife him. Confrontations
never went unnoticed, and he didn’t want to give any warning to his prey
of his presence here. For all they knew, his ship had gone down in an
angry sea and he along with it. He didn’t want to disabuse them of the
notion in case they’d made such a fortuitous assumption.
The
spot where he chose to camp was no more than a patch of wet ground away
from the meandering patterns of flattened grass that marked a
well-traveled trek made by campers who wished to relieve themselves away
from their living spaces.
The
night sky stayed clear, and he counted the stars salting its expanse
from his supine view on Batraza’s saddle blanket. The mare grazed
nearby, her lead rope staked within easy reach. Malachus listened to the
sounds around him-the call of a night bird, the distant ululation of
wolves, the rustle of some rodent hiding from predators looking to catch
their dinner. Above those, the murmur and flow of voices, their words
indistinct. Friendly conversations and hot arguments, the intense
sensuality of moans during lovemaking, a woman’s sweet lullaby to a
fretful baby.
These
were the things that reminded him there was more to humanity than its
larceny, its petty cruelties. His understanding, and the empathy that
came with it, was a fragile thing, even after decades of living among
humans outside the monastery. He looked like them, but they possessed
dark depths he’d never fully comprehend, nor did he want to. The sounds
he listened to now, of mundane lives lived in peaceful hours, softened
his attitude a small bit. It wouldn’t last. It never did.
His
thoughts settled once more on the gray-eyed woman the lightning had
shown him earlier. Attractive, but he had known sublime. Dignified, but
he had met majestic. There was nothing about her appearance that strayed
from the conventional into the remarkable, yet her image remained
emblazoned in his mind. He saw it overlaid across a spectacle of
starlight and behind his lids when he closed them. It was more than a
suspected connection to his mother-bond. He wanted to know her name,
hear her voice, learn what lay behind those eyes the color of dove’s
wings. His fascination with her made no sense, but Malachus didn’t
question it. His spirit understood his instinct better than his mind
did, and he couldn’t shunt its message aside. The lightning had shown
her to him for a reason.
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