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A Bloody Crown: Chapter 02

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You can find Chapter 01 here.

Chapter 2: The Month of the Sparrow, Ferisday the Twenty-Second.

Kaessekros on the Red Isles in Kellalh

Working cover for the novel A Bloody Crown: a castle wall in darkness

Rhona Trevean pinched the bridge of her nose. They had buried her father that day in a secret ceremony. He had long stood against Surraev, claiming to fight for a Kellei crown which no longer existed. She sat watching the Small Sea, to the west. The last rays of the sinking sun reached out, rising from the horizon, touching the sea over which lay Taulmeer and Kadetera. That was where most of the smugglers that sheltered in Kaessekros sold their goods.

The smugglers sheltered in Kaessekros because no crown could touch it. Fifteen years after the rest of Kellalh fell to it, Surraev still could not conquer the barony. In her heart, she knew that was because they had not tried. Not really. The Old Baron, her father—Argus Trevean—had a fleet of fast ships manned by fearless crews who knew how to fight on the water. Surraev had knights and cannons, and could crush most forces on land. At sea? That, they had not mastered. Her galleys protected the Red Isles on the sea, and on land, Selcost nestled in the Shieldlands—rocky hills and mountains cut through with rivers and glens but no real roads or open fields on which to array one’s cavalry or set up one’s cannons.

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A Bloody Crown: Chapter 01

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The following is the first chapter in the novel The Cyclops Banner: A Bloody Crown. New chapters will be posted every second week. An ebook of the novel will be available in the near future.

Chapter 1: The Month of the Sparrow, Moransday the Eleventh.

Aneros in the Kingdom of Taulmeer

Deshan Caerral could not say what he should have expected when he opened that door, but the man before him was not it. Tall, his voluminous cloak—a bluish-green trimmed in gold and with gold embroidery of frolicking unicorns in a forest on its high collar—all but hid his fashionable doublet—this a lighter shade of blue, also high-collared, topped with a necklace from which hung a gold unicorn pendant with a ruby horn. From what Deshan could see of his gray-blue pants, they were unfashionably loose but almost certainly silk instead of linen and with gold piping. He had heard of this man and had expected someone heavily armed and perhaps even in armour, and while the man certainly could have hidden multiple weapons on his person, who would have the hubris to bear weapons into the royal offices and into the office of the Marshal of Taulmeer himself?

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Sharing is Caring

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I write fiction because I am compelled to write fiction. There is so much I have written that no one will ever see. I’ve completed a couple of novels and a couple of screenplays that will never get published and never get shared. I have untold pieces of short fiction that no one else will ever see. I don’t write to publish. I write because I must.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to share it. And this coming year, I will share it. I have completed the first novel of a planned trilogy. I’m calling the series The Cyclops Banner, and the first novel is A Bloody Crown. I’ll be sharing that online here and will also publish it as an ebook. Each two weeks, I’ll publish a new chapter. There are 34 chapters, so that’s about a year and a half of content.

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