A stand-alone novel set in the world of the War for the Rose Throne, perfect for fans of Joe Abercrombie and Alex Marshall, featuring an incredible and unforgettable female anti-hero.
Eline is a mother, a wife, and a survivor. But her life is about to change dramatically. Following an act of horrific – if righteous – vengeance, Eline is blackmailed into the service of the Queen’s Men.
She knows it will be a hard life of violence and fear. But Eline will do what it takes to survive, and to protect her children . . . and if she’s lucky, she won’t die in the process.
But the Queen’s Men aren’t just asking her to risk herself. They’re asking her to risk everything she knows and loves.
And if she fails . . . civil war and the deaths of everyone she loves will be just the beginning.
Why hope to be happy? That’s a fool’s errand. Only hope to survive.
That’s all Our Lady offers, or so they say at temple.
‘Can you believe this horseshit?’ spat Caromir, brandishing the news sheet in his fist.
‘What is it this time?’ Eline asked with a weary sigh as she turned from the fire to face her husband. ‘Every day it’s something. Every morning you rage at the sheets, and more days than not it’s reason enough to drink when you could be working.’
Oh, he had been handsome once, had her Caromir. Handsome with his thick moustache and thicker muscles. Now his chest drooped with flab, and his moustache was grey and stiff with neglect and flaking skin, and ‘once’ was long, long ago.
‘That bastard of a councillor,’ Caromir continued. ‘He’s only gone and made himself the fucking Prince Regent! The whole country’s going to the whores, I tell you!’
Eline sighed again. She couldn’t care less who the Prince Regent was. She had never set eyes on the last one, nor the queen he had replaced. Someone was in charge, that was all that really mattered. Someone was always in charge, that was just how it worked. She had always been far too concerned about how to put food on the table for her children and herself and her excuse of a husband to care who it was.
Of course, she had married young. She’d been only fifteen when Caromir had come swaggering home from his turn in the army with thirty years to him, his corporal’s stripes gleaming on his sleeve and a medal on his chest. He had been so dashing, then. Now he was fifty to her thirty-five, and their children were grown and gone. Her precious boy was signed up in the army just like his father, and her daughter off in service to be some lady’s maid. The age of majority was thirteen, after all, and past that their mistakes were their own to make.
‘It’s a fucking disgrace,’ he snarled, still raging at the paper in his hand. Caromir had been enough to turn a young girl’s head and no mistake, then. He’d been young to have joined up, too young in truth with only ten years to him at the time, but then after victory at Krathzgrad a lot of lads had lied about their ages to join up and win their honour and earn the respect of their peers and a bit of coin. He had his twenty years’ service now, and his pension. All the same, it had taken all Eline’s wits and wiles to keep their heads above water on his meagre income. She was no fool, unlike her brutal oaf of a husband, but it could be done if you cultivated friendships with the right people. Just about, anyway. At least he’d mus- tered out before the carnage at Messia and Abingon, but that, too, had been long, long ago. ‘Oh well,’ she said.
That, as it turned out, as it so often turned out, was exactly the wrong thing to say. Caromir reared up to his feet from behind their roughly made kitchen table and raised his hand. He raised his hand to her as he had done so many times before, and something changed.
Something changed for Eline right then; Eline who had been knocked to the flagstones by that hand times beyond counting. That had been her married life.
Beaten. Battered. Bloodied.
But unbroken.
The dam that had held back the tide of rage for so, so long finally shat- tered. Eline screamed, but not in fear. She was done with fearing Caromir. She was done with him.
Her good kitchen knife was right there, right by her own hand, and as he swung for her she grabbed it up and shoved it through his neck.
Enough, she remembered thinking, long after it was over. She had little memory of the event itself, only the rush of hot wetness, and the sense of overwhelming relief.
Rid of him. She was rid of him at last.
Amid all the drama, the fear and the shock and the fury of it all, she had never noticed the little urchin girl staring in through the kitchen window.
The Guard caught up with her after a while, of course. Drathburg was not the capital, and it could have been worse, but there was still the City Guard and there were still Queen’s Men.
A Queen’s Man, anyway, and if perhaps he was the only one in the city then it wouldn’t have mattered. In Dannsburg she would probably already have been hanged, after Jottie next door ratted her out to the Guard, but here it was different. Jottie of all people, who she had used to babysit for and who had minded her own children in her turn. Eline had thought better of her than that. Friendships made out of mutual need, she was forced to admit, probably didn’t mean much when one of you didn’t need the other anymore. The Guard still had a gaol in Drathburg, of course, and the gallows, but she wasn’t there. Instead she was in the back room of a nondescript house talking to the fat man who had come and quietly taken her away.
Eline wondered why that was.
‘Killed your husband, then,’ the fat man said, and it wasn’t a question.
The latest War for the Rose Throne novel Paved with Good Intentions by Peter McClean is published by Arcadia on 19th June in hardback, audiobook and e-book.
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Peter McLean is one of the most acknowledged stars of the grimdark world. He was born near London and grew up in the Norwich alternative scene, alternating dingy nightclubs with studying martial arts and practical magic before settling to a career in corporate IT. His first novels, the Burned Man series, are noir urban fantasy.
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Author image, right justified
Featured Image – cropped cover (title featured)
Steve Davidson is the publisher of Amazing Stories.
Steve has been a passionate fan of science fiction since the mid-60s, before he even knew what it was called.
