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Enter the fray in this luminous new adventure from Christopher Buehlman, set during the war-torn, goblin-infested years just before The Blacktongue Thief.
The goblins have killed all of our horses and most of our men.
They have enslaved our cities, burned our fields, and still they wage war.
Now, our daughters take up arms.
Galva — Galvicha to her three brothers, two of whom the goblins will kill — has defied her family’s wishes and joined the army’s untested new unit, the Raven Knights. They march toward a once-beautiful city overrun by the goblin horde, accompanied by scores of giant war corvids. Made with the darkest magics, these fearsome black birds may hold the key to stopping the goblins in their war to make cattle of mankind.
The road to victory is bloody, and goblins are clever and merciless. The Raven Knights can take nothing for granted — not the bonds of family, nor the wisdom of their leaders, nor their own safety against the dangerous war birds at their side. But some hopes are worth any risk.
Please enjoy this free excerpt of The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman, on sale 6/25/24
CHAPTER ONE
I saw my first goblin the same day I saw my first shipwreck.
I was under sail, on my way to war.
On my way to fall in love with death, and with a queen.
On my way to lose all of my friends, and two of my brothers.
I would see a great city fall in blood and fire, betrayed by a
false god.
Later, I would be commanded to die on a high stone bridge,
but I would fail in this.
The rest of the First Lanza of His Majesty’s Corvid Knights
would not fail.
This is not a happy story, but it is a true one.
I have no time for lies, or for liars.
The name of the ship I sailed on was the Rain Queen’s Dagger, and it was a troopmule, packed with goblin-meat, which meant new soldiers like me. It leaked and rolled about during storms, and there was a smell you could not help but wrinkle your nose at. I tried never to wrinkle my nose because this was a haughty way to look, and it reminded me of my father’s first wife, Imelda, who is not my mother.
There had been a battle.
The sea was rough and littered with masts and beams and with sailcloth. Here and there firejelly burned below the waves as though small suns tried to shine in the deep. Here and there the body of a man or a dam, or clumps of them, or goblins, floated.
I had seen goblins dead before, we all had. They do not rot, they just shrink and dry and harden. Flies want nothing to do with them, and only birds with great hunger will peck at them. Sharks will eat them, of course, but a shark will eat a wooden oar, I have seen this. Because they do not rot, everyone was bringing home dead goblins from the last two wars. They were popular exhibits in circuses. We have used many dead goblins in training, especially to make the war corvids hate them.
And they hate them much.
But on this day, I saw my first one living.
It clung to an island of wreckage that was sinking.
One thing I can say for goblins, they look as awful as theyare. They look like they want to eat the meat from your thighs,and they do. Kynd are not always so easy to read—many of us hide cruel natures behind fair faces, or have our kindnesses over-looked because our flesh is twisted.
Goblins are honest killers.
And they are fucked-ugly.
This one looked to be perhaps four feet tall, on the larger side for them; it was a sailor, so it wore a simple hemp jerkin and leggings of kyndwool, or human hair, from the manfarms. I did not know what any of that was at the time. Its tough flesh was pink and gray, and this one was too far away for me to see its teeth, though I knew these were triangular and sharp enough for shaving; nor could I see its tongue, which was shelled. These articulated tongues help them make the buzzes and rasps that serve them for consonants.
This biter was badly injured and trapped, its larger arm caught between two sections of a ship’s hull. And it was not alone. A kynd woman clung to the same wreckage that was grinding the biter’s arm to meat. Her hair was bound in a mariner’s braid, her leather pants puffed at the thighs after the naval fashion, and she came into sight as the wreckage slowly spun. She was injured, too, her linen shirt red at one side, but she did not care about her injury.
She was watching the goblin.
“Help her,” a woman yelled at our ship’s captain. The captain was a whitehair of sixty years with a pipe full of fastleaf and a shapeless red hat; he was like an old sailor from a joke. The dam who shouted had the look of a knight, finely dressed in fine armor, and, if she did not step away from the railing on this rough sea, would soon make a fine ornament on the seabed.
“Turn this fucked thing and save her!” she said again, pointing.
The captain shook his head and puffed, letting smoke out with his words. “We cannot linger. If it was a biter juggernaut that wrecked this ship, as I have heard rumor there’s one in these waters, we’ll be the next ones they pound to kindling.”
The knightly dam saw that the captain was right and said no more about it. Three archers near the ship’s rear, however, began loosing arrows at the goblin. The first shafts missed, thanks to the distance, the motion of the troopmule, and also the spin of the wreckage the sailor and goblin clung to. At last, one arrow struck the biter in its hip, and it rasped like they do, not a sound for forgetting. The shipwrecked woman crawled over to it now. She nearly slipped off the wreckage but caught herself. It tried to bite at her but had neither speed nor strength. She held it down by its neck. She ripped the arrow from its hip and plunged this into its eye, then she stirred the arrow to be sure.
I gasped.
I knew the violence of the sword-yard well—the chipped tooth, the bloodied head, the broken finger. I was also familiar with the blood-business of a country estate—the hanging of pigs and deer, the putting down of sick livestock, the whipping of thieves, and the hanging of poachers and deserters. But this of the arrow and the eye, and the scrambling of the goblin’s brain in its skull, was so sudden and brutal that I was struck with fright.
This was no academy sparring match I went to; this was no bout of footboxing.
We were sailing for a killing field.
The soldiers on our ship cheered, and those on the ship next to us. We were many troopmules, I do not know the number, but too few warships, and only small ones. We had lost our best escort, a royal dreadnought called the Brawling Bear, when it hit a goblin seatrap and had to put in for repairs.
Only with the cheering did the woman realize we were near. To her great credit, she did not beg to be saved. Instead, she waved at us, her hand dark with the creature’s greenish blood.
The kynd on the ships cheered again, some saying “Gods bless you!” or “Mithrenor keep you.” One of the few young men on these ships filled with women yelled “Marry me!”
“I will!” she yelled back, though weakly.
A third cheer rose up, greater than the first, because we could all see that she was a woman of spirit and a good Ispanthian.
And then the little island of ruined wood and rope bobbed up once and sank below the surface of the water with great finality, taking the sailor and the goblin down with it.
The cheer died.
Everyone went silent.
I had now seen a goblin and a human die in this war, and within moments of each other; I have since thought how apt this was.
Our two species are wed in death.
━━━━━━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━━━━━━━
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