Sword of Truth: Queen of Skye and Shadow, #2

By Thea Atkinson

She beat back the threat once.

But now it isn't coming for her...

...It's coming for everyone.

Skye Shadow spent years on her own in the dangers of New Earth because she couldn't trust anyone. Now that the residents of New Denver have elected her their leader, she needs to find a way to navigate the treacherous landscape of faith. She has Excalibur. She has a sort-of magician named Marlin. And she has a budding romance with the blacksmith.

But safety is not assured.

And legends have a way of ending badly.

When a sudden fire threatens the entire town, gathers the troops to bring it under control, using the powers of her magician's allies to contain it. But it's no ordinary fire.

Hunter Wolfe has returned, and now he has an ally himself. One more powerful than she's ever seen. He has declared war and he intends to win.

Now Skye must find a way to gather those who agreed to follow her into an army that can defeat their foe for good. But it might cost her that budding romance and tax her magician too much, and she's not sure anymore if she can maintain her composure without losing her entire sense of humanity.

If you love retellings of King Arthur's legends but love dystopian fantasy as well, you should give this series a try.

Get it now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thea Atkinson
• Release date: May 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393532538

Thea Atkinson

Thea Atkinson writes character driven fiction to the left of mainstream; call it what you will: she prefers to describe her work as psychological dramas with a distinct literary flavour. Her characters often find themselves in the darker edges of their own spirits but manage to find the light they seek. She has been an editor, a freelancer, and a teacher, but fiction is her passion. She now blogs and writes and twitters. Not necessarily in that order. Please visit her blog for ramblings, guest posts, giveaways, and more http://theaatkinson.wordpress.com or follow her on twitter http://twitter.com/#!/theaatkinson or like her facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Theas-Writing-Page/122231651163413 a special thanks to Tiffany Atkinson for taking my author photo.

Book preview

-1-

IT WAS OFFICIAL; I had picked the absolute the worst place to bury a body. The ground was rocky and hard pan down to at least the two feet I'd already dug. The rocks were the size of my fist and as numerous as a clutch of spider's eggs. Several of them, actually. I was getting nowhere pretty damn fast.

I'd stooped to pick up and toss aside so many rocks already that my back had begun to ache. The clay that enshrouded them made for tough work for the little garden spade I'd brought along for the task.

Of course, I didn't know that when I'd begun to dig. The topsoil looked rich and fertile, sporting a crew cut of thick grass. Easy pickings, I'd thought. A few hours' work at best.

But twenty minutes and a mere scraping of the top couple of inches revealed the truth, and now it was too late to stop. At least, too late to reclaim the time I'd invested, and since it was already past noon, I wasn't about to give up or risk the time it would take to abandon the site and find another.

Call me stubborn like that.

Besides, the victim wasn't too big anyway: a feral pig that I might have decided to roast with savory herbs over an open pit if it hadn't been torn into by something that didn't seem the least bit interested in its meat.

Instead, it had dropped the shredded carcass on my doorstep sometime during the night. The stink of its rot woke me up just after dawn.

To be honest, it took me a few hours to realize the pig had been dragged and left a few feet from my door at all. I'd assumed something had gone off in my larder and spent way too much time trying to hunt it down inside the house.

Frustrated, I finally made a cup of wild mint tea and pushed open my door to take a breather on my step and suck in a draft of fresh air.

That's when the stink really hit me. But I didn't need a sense of smell to locate the carcass because it confronted me as soon as I opened the door. It lay stretched across the flat stones of my ground level patio, gathering flies. Several rats scuttled from beneath its stomach into the bushes when they heard me curse and gag loud enough to make the last of them squeal in terror.

I might not have bothered with burying the beast and left it to the rats and flies off somewhere in the woods if I hadn't heard a pack of wolves howling the night before. Dire wolves, no doubt, angry or lonely at the death of what must have been its alpha a few nights earlier.

I'd given one second's thought to the beast that had attacked me those nights ago, and made the decision.

I'd bury the damn pig far enough away that even if it got dug up, my own property wouldn't be at risk of invasion.

I had no interest in attracting any more beasts.

I leaned on my spade now with a heavy sigh and recalled the awful journey to this spot a couple hundred yards off from my property line, a place of deceptively spongy earth and moss and a grazing field of crab grass and buttercups.

I'd been tired. I wanted done with it. The thing stank to high heaven.

So I'd given in and dug, thinking it was as good a spot as any. Easy pickings, to be honest and I was feeling lazy after that hike with nothing in my stomach but mint tea.

Now I wished I'd had just a few feet more fortitude in me. A couple hundred yards didn't seem nearly far enough and the ground was stubborn.

Looks like cremation's the ticket for you, Mr. Porker, I said to the carcass that lay on the other side of the hole.

It had drawn a second, moving skim of black wings and blue bodies. The hum of them made me nauseous.

I kicked a rock toward the pig, lifting the swarm of flies to the air.

I couldn't help grimacing in disgust.

Seriously, I said. It would have been easier if you had any bacon worth saving.

I stretched backward, arching the ache out of my spine before I stooped to grab a hoof, tugging it as I held my breath so that it would tumble into the hole I'd managed without too much of the oily and rancid smell coating my palate.

The hole wouldn't be deep enough to fully bury and cover the body. It wasn't but two feet deep even if I'd spent a bucket of sweat and put what I figured was a week's worth of crimp in my back.

I looked askance at the pile of earth and groaned. Since the hole wasn't big enough, there also wasn't nearly enough dirt to cover the creature when I dumped it in.

Too many damned rocks, I said, eyeing the inadequate amount of soil sitting next to the ridiculously large pile of stones.

Maybe burial was a foolish idea. Maybe there was something smarter. Something less back-breaking.

What do you say to a warrior's funeral, Mr. Porker?

I huffed as I realized I'd have to hike back to my house to retrieve something to start a good, roaring fire with while it was still light enough to cremate it and have the fire burn back down again without the aromatic fats seducing every feral beast within a mile.

I could make a cairn of the rocks, I supposed. It worked for the Celts, didn't it?

Sure it did. I had books that said so.

Maybe I just wanted to talk myself into it, but it took me far less time to cover the carcass over with the excavated stones than it did to dig everything up. It wasn't perfect by any stretch; I could see the hair on its snout through gaps in the rocks, but I figured it would work.

I was pretty pleased with myself to have thought of it, actually. There's a certain stupidity that comes from sheer exhaustion.

I really should have known better.

But now I was done and I was hungry.

I headed back home, walking toward the aged-brick house with a casual step, knowing all the booby-traps had been removed, filled in, or sprung days ago by Lance and me. That meant those things I'd set to keep prowlers away from the house and my vulnerable self weren't there anymore to worry about.

Indeed, it seemed a good idea to rid the property of them. They hadn't just kept me isolated. I simply couldn't be sure anymore that it wouldn't be some kid tripping across the yard or a young mother wanting me to proclaim judgment on some bit of townsfolk squabble that got caught in one of them.

I still wasn't used to the idea that people would be dropping by. Apparently, leadership didn't just mean I helped run Hunter Wolfe out of town. It meant they brought their arguments to me to settle or asked advice. I wasn't comfortable with either one, but the one saving grace was that it also often came with a bit of fruit or bread.

So it was sort of nice that I didn't have to watch where I was stepping or what tree branch I brushed aside. No one would anymore. Just the act of clearing the property had been one of trust and and it came from a newfound acceptance by the townsfolk after we'd worked together to reclaim the town from the threat of Hunter and his Ruby Skulls.

We were safe. But for how long, I wasn't sure.

He'd return, that was certain, but I wasn't ready to risk a kid or his mother coming to the house and getting hurt anymore on the traps I'd put in because I didn't trust anyone.

If Hunter wanted me, he could come for me.

I'd said as much to Lance when he'd suggested I move into town instead of staying at my mother's run-down ancestral home.

I recalled stealing more than one quick peek at Lance as he worked bare-chested and sweaty over the dozens of traps I'd set during the months I'd been back in New Denver. It had been a long while since I'd enjoyed a man's company and even longer since I'd voluntarily let anyone touch me.

Not that he did touch me. He kept a safe distance as he worked, humming as though he was alone, but boy did I want him to brush against me. I hated that I found ways to sidle closer to him in the hopes that he'd accidentally move against me as we worked, and then when he did get close, I'd scuttle off like a mouse terrified of the eagle's beak she'd tempted by poking out her hidey hole.

I was a mess over it and as I lay awake at night the way I usually did, what haunted my thoughts wasn't the memories of the awful things I'd done during my lifetime, but the feel of his touch as he'd embraced me after Hunter fled the town.

Thoughts of Lance were enough to make a gal thirsty as well as hungry and I picked up my pace, reasoning that if a gal couldn't sate herself with man-flesh she might as well have a gorge on some apple pie and tea.

I was a dozen yards from my stone porch when the sight of a rather large reddish shape at my doorstep stopped me in my tracks.

My spine tingled at the