THE DARKEST RED, coming soon. AEMOND TARGARYEN KNEW SOMETHING ABOUT DIVINITY. Dragons, crowns and thousand-year-old dynasties flowed through his veins, his hair of silver a symbol of this lineage. He wielded the blood of the conqueror, the blood of ancients; no soul able to dispute this. Naught for the title of ‘second-born.’ Oh, how that weight bore down on him. How he wished he could scorn it, as his ancestors had done, as he was raised to do. Yet, all these webs of intangibility stood in his way, things he could not strike down with his sword or burn to ashes: loyalty, kinship, honour. How had those words served him? How did honour serve him when his eye was struck from its socket? Honour is farce, a thing bent into shape and nobody could see it. Lorne Vakarian, however, understood this her entire life: breaker and broken. Her house held no loyalties, not even to their own. Respect was born in actions, not in the blood of a woman’s womb. And little Lorne, a feeble girl all her infant life, sat with this truth and made something terrible with it. The cuts, bruises, demeaning words, fell away and forged a woman of brutally hardened skin, of blood and magic uncouth. For all she could hear was that of her own house words: Our Wounds Grow Teeth. And together, they did what all lovers do; falling hand in hand into darkness.
