The Ikessar Falcon Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by K. S. Villoso

  Excerpt from Chronicles of the Bitch Queen: Book 3 copyright © 2020 by K. S. Villoso

  Excerpt from The Bone Ships copyright © 2019 by RJ Barker

  Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

  Cover illustration by Simon Goinard

  Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Map by Tim Paul

  Author photograph by Mikhail Villoso

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  First Orbit Edition: September 2020

  Originally published by Liam’s Vigil Publishing Co. in 2018

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Villoso, K. S., 1986– author.

  Title: The Ikessar falcon / K.S. Villoso.

  Description: First Orbit edition. | New York, NY : Orbit, 2020. | Series: Chronicles of the bitch queen; book 2

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019056344 | ISBN 9780316532716 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780316532709 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR9199.4.V555 I39 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056344

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-53271-6 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-53269-3 (ebook)

  E3-20200825-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  The Story So Far…

  Act One: The Road to Jin-Sayeng Chapter One: The Price of Innocence

  Chapter Two: The Massacre at Dar Aso

  Chapter Three: Rivers of Blood

  Chapter Four: The Governor’s Grave

  Chapter Five: The Shadows

  Chapter Six: The Ruby Grove

  Chapter Seven: The Featherstone Mines

  Chapter Eight: Village of the Damned

  Chapter Nine: Slaves of Shimesu

  Chapter Ten: Son of the Ikessars

  Chapter Eleven: The Holy Bluffs

  Chapter Twelve: Folly of a Fifth Son

  Chapter Thirteen: The Forgotten

  Act Two: The Rubrics of Rule Chapter One: An Mozhi of the Cliffs

  Chapter Two: Sightseeing

  Chapter Three: The Den of Snakes

  Chapter Four: Lo Bahn’s Conquest

  Chapter Five: The Legacy of Shang Azi

  Chapter Six: The Western Crawl

  Chapter Seven: Ni’in

  Chapter Eight: The Map’s Edge

  Chapter Nine: The Binding Darkness

  Chapter Ten: Bargaining with Demons

  Chapter Eleven: The Rice Merchant

  Chapter Twelve: The Sougen Royals

  Chapter Thirteen: The Dragon-Tower

  Chapter Fourteen: The Yu-Yan Ridge

  Chapter Fifteen: Dragon Queen

  Chapter Sixteen: The Belly of the Beast

  Chapter Seventeen: The Prevailing Symphony

  Chapter Eighteen: The Drums of War

  Chapter Nineteen: Caught Between Tides

  Chapter Twenty: The Man with Two Souls

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Streets of Fuyyu

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Warlord of Kyo-Orashi

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Kyo-Orashi Arena

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Price of Loyalty

  Chapter Twenty-Five: The Price of Love

  Act Three: The Price of a Crown Chapter One: Picking Up the Pieces

  Chapter Two: The Bowels of Osahindo

  Chapter Three: The Jin-Sayeng Dragonlords

  Chapter Four: The Commoner’s Hand

  Chapter Five: River Agos

  Chapter Six: The Wolves of Oren-Yaro

  Chapter Seven: By the Nameless Maker

  Chapter Eight: Four Brothers and a City

  Chapter Nine: The Lone Wolf

  Chapter Ten: The Coin of Sorrow

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Extras Meet the Author

  A Preview of Chronicles of the Bitch Queen: Book Three

  A Preview of The Bone Ships

  Also by K. S. Villoso

  Praise for K. S. Villoso and "The Wolf of Oren-Yaro

  To Conrad and Eirene,

  this faint attempt

  at piecing together these stories

  to a world that will never

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  THE STORY SO FAR…

  They called me the Bitch Queen, the she-wolf, because I murdered a man and exiled my king the night before they crowned me.

  So begins the story of Queen Talyien, daughter of Warlord Yeshin, a man who declared civil war on the ruling clan years before her birth, and who only accepted a truce on the condition that his daughter be betrothed to their heir and be crowned queen.

  Or so the books might say. She herself is convinced of it; that her moment of failure began at the point when she could not hold her marriage together. Five years of unstable rule followed Prince Rayyel’s departure, until the land could no longer utter the queen’s name without a hint of sarcasm and more than a shred of anger. She fought back, retreating behind an armour of barbed words and threats. To them, Warlord Yeshin, the mass murderer, and Talyien, Yeshin’s bitch pup, are one and the same; with Yeshin dead, Talyien took the brunt of their hatred.

  But Queen Talyien and Tali are different edges of the same sword—one a mask, the other a woman. Tali, who grew up motherless in Oka Shto, whose only family was a frail old man who could be both terrible and kind at once, tried to seek solace in her betrothal to the indifferent Prince Rayyel. Initially rebuffed, later gradually accepted, she found her world shattered when she learned of her betrothed’s relationship with another warlord’s daughter. She, in turn, found comfort in the arms of her oldest friend. Afterwards, she resolved to put everything behind her and embrace her responsibilities, rendered bitter by reality.

  Rayyel, however, abandons her three years later. And she doesn’t hear from him again until five years into her rule as queen, when a message comes asking her to meet with him across the sea, in Anzhao City in the Empire of Ziri-nar-Orxiaro. Her eagerness to reconcile is mixed with her anger. Her general suggests she use the opportunity to declare war against her husband’s clan, as he has been urging her to do for years; against his will, she travels with a handful of guards and her adviser, relying on political goodwill to carry them the rest
of the way.

  She is sorely disappointed when she realizes that the power of a queen of a small nation is hardly recognized by officials of the mighty empire. A deputy, Ino Qun, shelters her and insults her almost in the same breath; Qun’s wife drops cryptic words. On the way to the meeting, chaos breaks out in the streets, and Tali finds herself separated—whether by accident or on purpose—from her guards. She wanders the streets and meets a con artist, Khine Lamang, whom she assists in swindling a shopkeeper. In exchange, he takes her to the restaurant where Prince Rayyel is waiting. Prince Rayyel is accompanied by a priestess and the governor of Anzhao City, Gon Zheshan.

  The meeting goes nowhere; Prince Rayyel wants Queen Talyien to cede half of Jin-Sayeng to him. The treaty that put them both on the throne required that they rule together, but never laid out the circumstances. Before the meeting can conclude, they are attacked by assassins. Tali finds herself alone and without her guards in the slums, where her position matters even less. She finds one of her own guards in prison; before he is beaten to death by the city watch, he tells her that her own guards have been acting suspiciously and she would have been better served if she had kept her old captain, Agos. She encounters a gambling lord, Lo Bahn, and barely escapes being made into his whore; the only sympathetic soul she meets is Khine, whom she runs into again. She initially distrusts him—everyone she has met has only been looking out for themselves.

  But Khine is persistent, and she slowly grows to enjoy his company, sharing what she can of her life, or at least what she feels she is allowed to. With him, she finds it easy to be herself, to drop the queen’s act and be seen as she is, unjudged, with no expectations.

  Lo Bahn catches up to her while she is recuperating in Khine’s abode. She escapes and learns from her maidservant that Gon Zheshan is holding her husband captive. She also confirms the deaths of her adviser, Arro, and what appears to be half her guardsmen. The other half, including her captain, Nor, are missing.

  Talyien finds herself trying to seek aid from the emperor’s Fifth Son, Prince Yuebek, to save Rayyel. She is separated from Khine on the road, but is picked up by Governor Radi Ong—Prince Yuebek’s father-in-law—and taken to Zorheng City, a fortress on the riverbank seemingly built by mages. It doesn’t take long for Tali to surmise that Prince Yuebek is a madman. He offers to marry Talyien and kills his own wife as a show of solidarity. And because Talyien continues to refuse, he throws her in prison.

  Months later, Tali wakes up in a strange room, where she encounters the ghosts of her brother and her father. Yeshin berates her, telling her she has failed because she fell in love with Rayyel. This confuses her, because she thinks her duty was to love him—her zealousness came from both her own feelings and her loyalty to her father. She realizes she is still being chased by an assassin and narrowly escapes. She finds a note on the dead assassin telling her that her husband was behind the attempt on her life.

  She returns to Khine, but the comfort of his company is short-lived as she finds herself reunited with not just her guards but also her old friend Agos. She also learns there is an embargo preventing travel from the empire to Jin-Sayeng.

  With Khine and the gambling lord, Lo Bahn, she sets in motion a plan to infiltrate Governor Zheshan’s office and confront Rayyel. But here she comes face-to-face not with her husband but with Prince Yuebek, who reveals to her two things: that he is a mage with a strong connection to the agan, and that he planned everything, including the assassin, in order to convince her to fall for him and discard her husband. Because none of his tricks worked, Yuebek threatens her son, telling Talyien he knows the truth—that the boy could be a bastard whose life is forfeit if the rest of the nation finds out. He also tells her that it was Talyien’s own father, Yeshin, who promised her to him first, in exchange for his power and his army; her betrothal to Rayyel was a sham. Warlord Yeshin’s desire to win his war was too strong, and he undermined his own treaty in order to claim victory once and for all. Talyien’s own men had betrayed her to deliver her to Yuebek.

  Refusing to believe Yuebek’s claims, Talyien delivers him a killing blow and watches as he runs into a burning room. She returns to Lo Bahn’s, where Governor Zheshan commits suicide after confirming how Yuebek has attempted to blackmail him into betraying Rayyel.

  Still reeling from everything she has learned, she receives a note from Rayyel asking for another meeting. Even though Tali is aware it might be another trap, Khine convinces her to go, as she is still holding on to the hope that somehow she can salvage her marriage.

  Tali finally meets Rai, who confesses he has always loved her. The reader learns that it is the knowledge of his wife’s affair, and that her son may not be his, that caused him to walk away; already damned by the politics that gave birth to their lives, their mistakes hastened the ruin. He swears to make things right, that he is seeking mages that will help reveal the truth, and that if the boy is not his, he will kill him himself.

  The novel ends with Tali trying to grasp on to the last shreds of her father’s rhetoric: A wolf of Oren-yaro does not beg. A wolf of Oren-yaro suffers in silence. But her downfall is just beginning…

  ACT ONE

  THE ROAD TO JIN-SAYENG

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE PRICE OF INNOCENCE

  A thousand hooves trampled the sky the night my father died.

  No words can describe what it feels like to gaze at the man you looked up to—a man you respected, and loved, and feared—and realize that somewhere along the way, he turned into a shadow of his former self. That he had, in fact, been fading for years, and was simply doing a remarkable job of pretending the world wasn’t falling apart. Where there was once power, presence, and might, now there was only sickness and the stench of death: not yet the sweet-stink of a rotting corpse, but a moldy, urine-tinged scent, one that seemed to crawl away from his stiffening body and up the walls to fill the entire room.

  The storm started with his last breath. I found myself sinking back into the chair, frozen in terror as the lightning flashed over his shadowed face, revealing the hollows under his eyes, spidered with black veins. Deep-green bruises, cracked lips, yellow-white skin, wrinkled as parchment. I had been instructed to inform Lord General Ozo first should my father succumb to his illness, but I couldn’t even find the courage to stand, let alone look away from the withered image of the man who used to be strong enough to lift me on his shoulders. You’re alone now, my thoughts whispered, a thin thread that sought to wrap itself around my heart. You will no longer be able to depend on him. From now on, everything falls on you.

  The sobs stopped at my throat, settling inside my chest and wrenching the breath out of me. My eyes burned, but I forced the tears not to fall. What if one of the soldiers walked in and saw Yeshin’s heir red-faced and bawling away like a child? The other warlords would think us weak, that they all made a mistake when they bequeathed the Dragonthrone to an Orenar. To an Oren-yaro. Would I let it all turn to dust after everything my father had sacrificed?

  I slowly let go of Yeshin’s hand, curling mine into a fist, before I reached up to plant a kiss on his wrinkled forehead. It was still covered in a layer of cold sweat. I wanted to say something, to utter a prayer or words of farewell for a man whose name carried a weight that could break the world. But silence seemed to be the only fitting poetry for someone who had lived as Warlord Yeshin had. So instead, I swallowed and murmured an oath that I would do everything it took to make his dreams become a reality. A united land, prosperous in the way the Ikessars couldn’t make it, with the discipline and the ideals that made the province and the people of Oren-yaro stand head and shoulders above the rest. And so even if it meant facing my fears, if it meant walking the road laid out for me…if it meant becoming someone I was not…

  He was dead and yet I still carried on in my head like he was listening. It started there; it never stopped. And there was never a time since that I didn’t find myself carrying out my duties to the echo of his voice—to that sharp, lightning
-like roar of it, the one that could crumple my very soul.

  It was that same voice that reached deep into me and forced me to consider my failures the day I lost my husband. My quest for Rayyel was a twisted reflection of the turbulence around me, a lighthouse in a stormy sea. I was accused of blindness, of obsession, of allowing my love for a man to become the center around which my life spun. I hardened myself to it. Embraced it. Call me what you want—irrational, careless, an idiot, even—every name you can think of. I know. I’ve told them to myself for years. When you internalize such thinking, allowing it to settle into your bones so deeply you know your own weaknesses to be a fact, it becomes a kind of foolhardy strength. Make of that what you will.

  So when the bitter truth came—when my husband declared that he had loved me after all, when I had long convinced myself that I was the one holding our marriage together—my world came crashing down. For the longest time, to hear those words was all I ever wanted. He loved me, but because three days before my wedding, I had fled from his ancestral city straight into another’s arms, he could no longer be certain if our son was his. There is nothing worse to wash down anger than the taste of your own mistakes.

  A just reaction, so many others will say. Rayyel deserved it after what he had done—after his own betrayal, his own languid affair with another warlord’s daughter. But they don’t understand. They don’t understand that it was the kind of emotional reaction my father used to warn me against, proof enough to remind me that I was not what my father needed me to be, that I did not deserve to be Warlord Yeshin’s daughter. What strength I thought I had was laughable—I needed to be more than this. Jin-Sayeng needed me to be more than this. Thousands had lost their lives to get me to where I was. If I faltered, thousands more would follow.

  It was as if I had taken a sharpened knife and stabbed my father’s dreams over and over. The worst part was that I didn’t do it to rebel. I didn’t do it out of spite. I did it because my position was an iron hand around my throat and I needed to catch a moment’s breath. The failures of youth; Yeshin could’ve done better than to pin all his hopes on someone like me. A brilliant mind, but he was wrong about the one thing he couldn’t afford to be wrong about.