#Review - Raven Unveiled by Grace Draven #Fantasy #Romance

Series: The Fallen Empire (#3)
Format: Paperback, 352 pages
Release Date: November 8, 2022
Publisher: Ace
Source: Publisher
Genre: Fantasy / Romance

A woman with the gift to speak to the dead—and the assassin pursuing her—may be the only chance a crumbling empire has of holding back true evil, in this electrifying fantasy romance from the USA Today bestselling author of Radiance.

Siora has been on the run for longer than she cares to remember, from her past and her gift. Born with the ability to see and speak to ghosts, she has heard their desperate pleas as an otherworldly predator stalks the dead amid the fertile killing fields of the collapsing Krael Empire. The creature’s power and reach are growing with every soul it consumes, but Siora is preoccupied with her own troubles: namely an assassin who has sworn an oath of vengeance against her.

Gharek of Cabast was once the right-hand man of the reviled empress but is now a wanted fugitive. Although his reasons for hunting Siora are viscerally personal, what Gharek can’t anticipate is that when he finally does find her, she will hold the key to saving his world, or what’s left of it. To make good on old debts and protect the vulnerable dead from a malevolent force, Gharek and Siora will both need to make an ally out of an enemy—and trust that will be enough to save each other.

Raven Unveiled, by author Grace Draven, is the third installment in the authors The Fallen Empires series. The fall of Domora and the death of evil Empress Dalvila by the draga Malachus in Dragon Unleashed has left the world leaderless and in the midst of revolution. This book features Gharek of Cabast, who was once Dalvila's feared cat paw/assassin who is now a wanted man, and Siora, a shade speaker who has the ability  to see and to communicate with ghosts. The woman who was once nursemaid to Gharek's disabled daughter.

Siora has been hearing desperate pleas of the departed, as well as her own father, as an otherworldly predator stalks the dead amid the fertile killing fields of the collapsing Krael Empire. The creature’s power and reach are growing with every soul it consumes and no one is safe. Not the departed, not the living. Siora betrayed her employer (Gharek) and the child (Estred) she had become nursemaid to. She helped save the Dragon in the previous book knowing what it would cost her and has been on the run ever since.

Gharek is prepared to hunt Siora to the end of the world and back again because she didn’t just leave him, but also left his child who mourned her leaving like a child losing a parent. He will make sure he bring Siora in front of his daughter to apologize. Gharek's plans are thwarted when he is captured by a General named Zaredis who demands that Gharek find a way into the palace he knows like the back of his hand. He wants Gharek to retrieve a powerful artifact called Windcry that the former Empress put under a powerful protection.

With the Windcry, Zaredis hopes to become the next Emperor.  Gharek and Siora are forced to team up which ends up with meeting characters from the second book in this series: Malachus, Asil, and Halani. Needless to say, the 3 are not exactly jumping for joy at meeting Gharek. Although his reasons for hunting Siora are viscerally personal, what Gharek can’t anticipate is that when he finally does find her, she will hold the key to saving his world, or what’s left of it. 

Once you read Gharek's backstory, he's not really the monster that most people think he is. His backstory also begs the question what would you do for your child? What horrible lengths would you go to to protect them? This book considers what an extreme answer to this question might look like. Meanwhile, Siora has to learn quickly that she's more than just a person who speaks and hears the departed. She's much, much more, and she will have to learn quickly so that both she and Gharek survive the dark taking over the land.

This book ends on a what happens next note. I am not sure who will be focus on any sequel to this story. This is an author who knows how to write interesting characters, twisted stories, and fantastic world building. I would encourage readers to read books in order as they were released so that you understand this world.

CHAPTER ONE

After two months of relentless tracking, the once feared empress's cat's-paw had finally run his prey to ground outside the haunted ruin of Midrigar. If Siora thought to hide from him here in the hopes the stories of the trapped and restless dead might scare him away, she knew him not at all.

He'd once been the lackey of a demon dressed in a beautiful woman's body and survived the employment. Nothing so insipid as a ghost would stop him from hunting down his treacherous servant.

She probably thought he meant to kill her. He'd been an assassin after all, and his fury over her betrayal had nearly consumed him once. The anger still simmered inside him, but he hunted her not to kill her but to make her apologize-on her knees if necessary-to a small child. That, more than vengeance meted out through death, was what drove him across the Empire.

The moon played coy behind tattered clouds and spilled argent light over the shattered city, casting the broken bones of its towers in stark relief against a star-salted sky. An unquiet tomb under an indifferent heaven.

Gharek growled, the sound making his horse's ears swivel back. He patted her neck, wishing he was comfortably ensconced in one of the better inns' finer rooms, with a sweet-smelling whore to keep him company. Or better yet, out of Kraelian territory altogether, safe with his daughter and the people he'd paid a fortune to see to her care while he roamed a collapsing empire in search of the beggar bitch who'd turned on him and ruined his and his daughter's lives.

Instead of a posh room shared with an accommodating woman, he rode through a woodland devoid of sound, its silence absolute, as if it dared not flutter a leaf or creak a branch for fear of attracting the attention of what might lay behind Midrigar's tumbled walls. Despite the strangeness that sent a crawling feeling over his skin, Gharek didn't waver in his tracking.

A trek through the forest was as good as any for avoiding Kraelian troops on patrol. Despite the raids from Nunari clans, the main trade route remained a busy one, serving Guild and free traders as well as battalions of Kraelian soldiers sent to fight the rebellious Nunari. He stayed off the road for those reasons and others, as much a fugitive as his quarry, as fiercely hunted by those he'd once wronged.

Gharek's search for Siora had finally proven fruitful in the last week. The right questions asked of the right people in the villages where he'd stopped had yielded reliable information. A woman, not much bigger than a child but with the knowing gaze of a crone, had offered to act as liaison between the grieving living and their beloved dead for the fee of a belsha or two. She'd managed to swindle coin out of their families before others drove her away. Shade speakers were barely tolerated even when many believed in their talent.

He'd set off for Wellspring Holt, a bustling trader's town that had so far managed to escape the worst of the raids. Siora would find it easier to hide there than in the smaller towns and villages. Hiring a tracker might prove a faster method for finding her, but Gharek preferred working alone, especially since he had his own secrets to keep. As the empress's cat's-paw, experience had taught him that his skills weren't suited for teamwork. The mad empress might be draga spittle splattered on Domora's battlements now, but it didn't change the way he hunted quarry-always alone.

While he'd altered his appearance with a new beard and shorter hair to avoid being recognized, he wasn't taking any chances by keeping company with anyone for any length of time. Bounties for the cat's-paw, alive or dead, were generous, and those hoping to claim such rewards numerous.

He'd crossed a sea of fields-some plowed and seeded, waiting for harvest, others left fallow-and came upon a stone circle in the middle of a pasture. No sheep or cattle grazed nearby, and Gharek's mare balked when he tried to steer her closer. He gave in to her protest and rode past the monument erected to some long-forgotten deity. These ancient places held on to their power long after their supplicants had turned to dust. Whatever lingered here, his mare wanted nothing to do with it.

If anything hid within the circle, he'd have seen it already, but nothing disturbed the wild flowers growing there, and he disregarded it, turning his attention toward a ramshackle barn nearby. The horse offered no resistance when they stopped in front of the structure. Gharek tied her to one of the few posts still standing from the remnants of a fence and went inside, his instincts practically making his veins hum with the certainty his target had stopped there or was still there.

Sunlight had cascaded through holes in the roof, illuminating a half dozen empty stalls. Mice fled in every direction on a chorus of tiny squeals when he entered, their feet leaving patterns in the powdery dust coating every surface.

But it wasn't their tracks that held his attention. He'd crouched to examine a set of much larger prints-human, those of a woman or child with flat feet who walked lightly. The shoe tread pattern was unique and Gharek instantly recognized Siora's distinctive footprints. Nothing else in the barn so far gave him a clue to her presence, and the prints might well belong to someone else, but his gut had yet to fail him. This was Siora's marker.

The prints tracked in two directions, and he'd followed the pair leading farther into the barn's depths to what was once a provender room. He paused in the doorway, letting his eyes adjust to the greater darkness there. Patterns on the floor's disturbed dirt told him she'd slept here, at least for a short time, likely taking what shelter she could find during the night away from other predators, besides himself, that hunted during the small hours.

He'd pivoted, noting the walls with their cracked plaster and bowed framing, the slope of the roof on the verge of collapse. A stiff wind would bring the place down in a rotting heap. Best not to linger and end up entombed beneath the wreckage.

The sight of one of the room's walls as he turned to leave had made him recoil.

As Dalvila's erstwhile cat's-paw, he'd witnessed levels of depravity and cruelty that defied description and decayed a part of his soul every time. The empress had more than earned her reputation as a mad and murderous ruler. Her subjects didn't know the half of it. Gharek remembered every person he'd dispatched on her orders, though unlike her, he meted out death in a manner efficient and quick. Time had made every memory sharper, made his spirit ever more numb to his actions, but even he sat up some nights and brought in the dawn with a flagon or two of wine, afraid to close his eyes and subject himself to the nightmares of remembrance and the empress's monstrous indulgences upon her victims.

He'd sometimes wondered if she was even human and had decided that in the end it didn't matter. She was vile, and he served her will, thus making him as vile as her. He was as beyond redemption as she was, holding on to his last scrap of humanity for his daughter's sake. Estred would never know the depths to which he had plunged in order to keep her safe and cared for. If she did, she'd hate him. Rightfully so.

People didn't turn the labor of their creativity toward provender rooms where the only witnesses to works of art were field mice and farmhands, and yet laid across one wall was a display of horror in shades of black and rust executed by a gleeful hand. Gharek had studied the repulsive mural. If Dalvila had seen it, she would have commissioned the artist to paint something similar on one of her bedchamber's walls or maybe the ceiling, a visual feast to look upon while she raped her latest plaything. The work half revealed in the room's shadow displayed pleasure in torture, a lust for another's fear. A multitude of faces crushed together, their mouths stretched wide in silent screams, their eyes bulging with terror as they stared at some horror he couldn't see. Why such an abomination was displayed on a derelict barn's wall was a mystery, one he had no desire to solve.

He hadn't gone closer for a better look, and the longer he had stared at the grotesque images, the more certain he became it wasn't paint that rendered them on the wall.

While he hadn't run from the room, his strides were long ones, and he'd released a grateful breath when he was outside once more under the sweltering blaze of a summer sun with the song of insects serenading him.

Had Siora seen the wall when she camped in the barn? A true shade speaker might not fear ghosts, but there was more to that hideous mural than a callous mockery of the dead. Surely even she would be horrified at the sight.

He'd ridden away, following more of Siora's tracks while doing his best to shrug off the feeling of being watched that skittered down his back on spider legs. No wonder the fields surrounding the barn were abandoned and the building left to decay.

Experience and weeks of fruitless searching had taught him that to rush toward Siora's latest hiding place did him no good and often worked against him. It was uncanny how she'd managed to outsmart and outmaneuver him without ever truly outrunning him.

Were she a wealthy noblewoman with numerous connections and friends, he'd assume she made use of a vast network of helpers who would render aid either in the service of friendship or for profit. But this was a beggar without a belsha to her name beyond what she might scrape together for a meal. She was also a shade speaker, a fact she'd failed to mention when he suffered a moment's weakness and offered her a place in his household as thanks for saving Estred from a stone-throwing mob. He'd paid a heavy price for that foolish kindness.

He'd tracked her through the day and into evening, not toward Wellspring Holt, but here to an eerie expanse of woodland whose perimeters stretched for leagues in a gentle curve that hugged the trade route and clung to the remains of Midrigar. The forest offered a possible hiding place for brigands and fugitives. And shade speakers on the run.

Moonlight lit the treetops but most of the woodland slumbered in full dark. It was slow going as his horse picked her way through the underbrush. Gharek held a small lamp aloft to illuminate the path ahead. He didn't worry that the fragile light might be seen in the distance and alert someone. His mount's hooves crushing sticks and brittle deadfall would accomplish the task long before the light did.

The music of insects and bird calls had been loud just before he crossed the tree line, a cacophony of whistles, rustles, and chirps. Those sounds died away the closer he rode to the ruins of the dead city until the silence itself held its breath and only the gloom shrouding the trees breathed. His amiable mare stopped suddenly then pranced backward, tossing her head and snorting. Gharek tapped his heels against her sides to coax her forward. She'd have none of it, fighting the bit in her mouth as she pivoted on her hooves to trot back the way they'd come.

Gharek reined her to a halt, considering whether it was wise to continue his scouting in another direction or make camp nearby and wait until morning to resume his hunt. He'd lose time with camping but trying to find anyone in this darkness while riding a spooked horse was an exercise in futility. Besides, he could make up the time in daylight. Siora was on foot, he on horseback. He'd cover far more ground in less time than she would, and the chance she'd outrun him if he spotted her was nonexistent.

He guided the mare to retrace her steps, and this time she readily obeyed the command, eager to put distance between them and the city that squatted like a pustule on the landscape. But she'd taken no more than a pair of steps when something wrapped icy fingers around Gharek's spine and wrenched him backward. He flew off the saddle as if lassoed from behind and landed on his back. The ground beneath him vibrated from the beat of his mare's hooves as she bolted past him into the labyrinth of trees.

He lay there for a moment, stunned and winded. The ice shard wedged against his backbone remained, though whatever had ripped him from horseback didn't press him into the dirt. A few more breaths and he lurched to his feet, unsettled by his unusual clumsiness, alarmed by the violence of an invisible force that had so thoroughly unhorsed him. There'd been no trip rope to clothesline him, nor had he been riding fast when he fell. The lamp he held had fallen when he did, lost somewhere in the underbrush when its flickering light had guttered. Darkness hung thick enough to scoop with a spoon.

His muttered curses sounded loud to his ears as he peered into the sepulchral black, hoping he might spot the mare standing nearby or at least find a partially cleared path that led back to open pasture. He took a step only to suffer a hard clamp on his backbone, as if the icicle there had suddenly transformed into a shackle locked around his middle. Invisible tethers seized his arms and legs and he was jerked to one side and then the other as if by a drunken puppeteer with their hands on the strings.

Gharek staggered, struggling to keep his feet, struggling to free himself from the bonds that held him in an unbreakable grip that both dragged and yanked him in the direction of Midrigar's walls. He careened through the dark, along a jagged path that propelled him into tree trunks before spinning him away to tear through the underbrush. He tried planting his feet in the dirt to no avail, his boots carving skid marks as he was pulled along like a cur on a leash. His palms left bloody smears on the bark of those trees he tried to grip for purchase and was wrenched away with little effort.

The iciness slithering down his spine spread in creeper tendrils throughout his body, wrapping around his lungs and heart, his liver, even his tongue so that his curses and snarls slowly ebbed away and his struggles waned. Speaking was an impossibility, breathing a challenge, and he was reduced to nothing more than a grunting, shambling mute driven inexorably toward an ancient city of the damned and a fate he could not know but feared with every part of his soul.

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#Review - Dragon Unleashed by Grace Draven #Fantasy / #Romance

Series: The Fallen Empire # 2
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. This story focuses on Halani, who is the free trader from Phoenix Unbound and Malachus, who we have not seen before. It is not a continuation of Gilene's story. 

Let's begin with Malachus. Mal has spent hundreds of years tacking down thieves that looted his mother-bond (valuable piece of his mothers skeleton) from the monastery from which he was raised. Mal's has lived a long and lonely life hunting down the artifact that was stolen from the Sovatin monks who raised him. Mal's travels take him to the Krael Empire where he meets Halani. Mal is shown a vision of Halani and the stolen mother-bond which he has been tracking. Mal is magic disguised as a human. Mal must retrieve the mother-bond in order for him to take on his true form as a draga (dragon). When Mal meets up with Halani's caravan, he is attacked by thieves, and saved by Halani. Long story short, the two work out feelings but it takes up nearly the entire story before Mal allows Halani to see who he really is. Mal also finds himself being Asil's friend and protector which I have to say is adorable.

  

Halani has travelled with a trading caravan for most of her life along with her child minded mother Asil. She's a gifted healer with earth magic. Magic welding of any kind is outlawed in the Empire so Halani has hid the source of her potent healing powers for her entire life and is used to living with many secrets and lies. I dare say that Halani's mother is one of the bright spots of this story. Her past is incredibly painful, yet she never once shirked her responsibilities as a mother. Halani and Gilene became friends in the previous novel when Gilene was hiding out afraid of being captured along with Valden aka Azarion Ataman.

The other characters you should focus on are Gharek of Cabast aka cat's paws and Empress Dalvila who readers met in Phoenix Unbound. These two characters could be considered antagonist for our reluctant heroines as everything they do is in direct confrontation. 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.

 

 

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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#Review - Phoenix Unbound by Grace Draven #Fantasy #Romance

Series: The Fallen Empire (#1)
Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Release Date: September 25, 2018
Publisher: ACE
Source: Publisher
Genre: Fantasy / Romantic

A woman with power over fire and illusion and an enslaved son of a chieftain battle a corrupt empire in this powerful and deeply emotional romantic fantasy from the USA Today bestselling author of Radiance.

Every year, each village is required to send a young woman to the Empire’s capital—her fate to be burned alive for the entertainment of the masses. For the last five years, one small village’s tithe has been the same woman. Gilene’s sacrifice protects all the other young women of her village, and her secret to staying alive lies with the magic only she possesses.

But this year is different.

Azarion, the Empire’s most famous gladiator, has somehow seen through her illusion—and is set on blackmailing Gilene into using her abilities to help him escape his life of slavery. Unknown to Gilene, he also wants to reclaim the birthright of his clan.

To protect her family and village, she will abandon everything to return to the Empire—and burn once more.

Story Locale: Fantasy World

Series Overview: Women and men of power join together to fight against a corrupt, dying empire in this romantic fantasy series

 

Grace Draven's Phoenix Unbound is the first installment in the authors Fallen Empire series. The story alternates between Gilene of Beroe, and Azarion, a Savatar warrior who has spent 10 years as a slave and Gladiator. One could say that this is a story of enemies who become lovers, not unlike Amanda Bouche's A Promise of Fire. Every year, each village is required to send a woman to the Empire's capital to be used as prostitutes for the slave-gladiators fighting and to be burned alive as a sacrifice to the Gods in the Rites of Spring.  

For the past five years, Gilene, a fire witch with the ability to manipulate her appearance has been participating in this callous event to protect the women in her village. But this year is different. Things are different because Azarion, a famous gladiator who can see through her illusion, blackmails her to escape the clutches of slavery. For 10 years, Azarion he has been a slave and one of the Empire's top gladiators. He has been biding his time until the right moment to escape his tormentors, especially the Empress who uses him as entertainment and her personal sex toy.

It is fair to say that I had a Déjà Vu moment while reading the beginning of the story. It was eerily familiar to A Promise of Fire. Here you have a female protagonist who is kidnapped and used by the male protagonist. She is dragged far from her home and her brothers who are stunned when Azarion takes her and quickly disappears. Azarion really wants only one thing from Gilene. He needs a so called agacin (Fire Witch) to reclaim his birthright, and what's more impressive than someone who can use illusion and fire to survive?

I'm impressed by the author's world building. I am even OK with how dark and wicked this story was in the first part of the story. This is the first story that I have read by the author, but have heard that she is at the top of her game when it comes to fantasy/romance novels. They weren't wrong. I have so much respect for Gilene. Here is someone who has spent years protecting other young women of her village, sacrificing herself over and over again, and then expecting to continue until someone else can take her place. 

Over the course of the story, she grows leaps and bounds and makes herself undeniably the strongest character in this story. I also respected Azarion, even though I didn't think what he did was the right thing to do. But, he does understand something that Gilene doesn't. Her village and family doesn't really care about her, or her feelings, or her future. They only care that she makes sure that she is the tithe every year without failure. And, if she suddenly disappears without a trace thanks to being kidnapped, well, pox be upon her for allowing it to happen in the first place!

Recommendation: Yes, absolutely. I can honestly say that I would be perfectly fine were this to be a standalone. After all, you have a beginning, a middle, and a pretty clear ending. What else do you need? 

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