A coup is over. A holy war is just beginning.
The second volume of the dark epic fantasy saga of love, ambition, eldritch horrors, and a continent at religious war.
Beatrice Feski no longer smiles at court and listens. The Scaligers are restored, the city is theirs, and the cupbearer who saw the old admiral murdered now carries a vow, a network, and a goddess at her shoulder — and the war the brothers have started cannot be won without her.
But the throne the brothers have taken is not the prize they thought it was.
A cathedral burns in a neighbouring city. Children sing inside the flames. Across the strait, mobs hunt strangers through the streets of her own city. Half a continent is choosing sides between an ancient three-faced devourer and twelve goddesses who slept three hundred years.
Mark sees the faces of his dead in every mirror — and tomorrow they will crown him in the name of goddesses no one has openly worshipped for three centuries.
Emile rides toward an island in the mist where the moon waits for him in human form, and beyond it, paths between worlds no living mortal has walked.
Sebastian rides with Beatrice — toward a city of masks and water, where the man who killed their father waits, and where the bond they share will be tested in ways neither can name.
And in a black-eyed child standing on a sunlit balcony, the oldest enemy of every goddess says a single sentence: one of your puppies will die soon.
Beneath the war of crowns, an older war is waking. The Twelve will strike first. The Three-Faced One is already rising to meet them.
The goddesses never give freely.
For readers of Joe Abercrombie, George R.R. Martin, and R.F. Kuang.
