Raven's Ruin (The Keeper Origins Book 2) Read online

  Raven’s Ruin

  The Keeper Origins Book 2

  JA Andrews

  For Jason

  Contents

  Printable Maps

  Author’s Note

  Nudges

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part II

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part III

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Part IV

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Part V

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Epilogue

  From the Author

  Afterword

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Printable Maps

  To download printable maps from jaandrews.com, click here

  Author’s Note

  About a fun, little bonus

  Hello, Most Favored Among Readers!

  Before we dive back into Sable’s story, I wanted to let you know about something I think is very fun.

  ‘Round about chapter 49ish, Sable is given a book. It’s a thin little volume called Ghost of the White Wood, and the contents of that story have ripples in Sable’s story.

  Now, Sable and company do discuss the tale, but I wanted you to know that the story itself is written, in its entirety, if you’re interested in reading it.

  It’s short, only a few chapters, but it introduces you to some really great characters.

  You can pick up a copy for free from my website, jaandrews.com/ghost, and the story can be read at any time:

  before Raven’s Ruin

  as a little intermission when you reach the mention of it in the Raven’s Ruin

  or once you’re done with Raven’s Ruin and hopefully wallowing in that hangover we get from a book we enjoyed.

  Anyway, the little story does exist, and it told me it would love to be a part of your library.

  Happy Reading!

  Janice

  And now, on to the real reason you’re here: Sable’s story…

  Nudges

  —Except from chapter 1 of Interesting Beginnings by Flibbet the Peddler

  History moves along its path, relatively straight, pointing in a certain direction with seeming inexorability until it is nudged.

  These nudges can be strong—the invasion of a powerful army, for instance—or, as you will see, they can be so small they are only felt by a handful of people.

  The way Issable of Shadowfall changed the course of history was filled with both kinds, but at the beginning, at least, the important nudges were intimately her own.

  The First Ravens

  Issable wasn’t ever from Shadowfall. She went by Sable and lived contentedly with her parents and two sisters in the small town of Pelrock on the Eastern Reaches. In those early days, her unique ability to feel the truth when others spoke it was still just an interesting trick instead of a skill that her life depended on.

  The first nudge came when raiders razed her town to the ground.

  Through the door of the root cellar where she hid with her younger sisters, Talia and Ryah, Sable watched her father stand against the encroaching flames and the enemy, whose guttural, foreign words he inexplicably understood. She watched her mother hold her bow—the mysterious elven bow they’d never been allowed to touch—and defy the demands for surrender.

  But the monsters cut them down and would have killed Sable and her sisters too, if not for the elves who emerged from the woods, their own elven bows loosing arrows like rain, destroying the enemy.

  Whether the elves came of their own accord or for Sable’s mother, Amelia, they disappeared into the night without saying. But their presence lent power to the nudge.

  When dawn came and the nudge had faded, Sable held her sisters and stared into her new path, filled with nothing but ashes and the ravens that came to feed off the dead.

  The Dragon’s Reach

  The second nudge came after Sable had fled with her sisters to the city of Immusmala. For years, she was trapped under the gang boss Kiva, until she finally escaped by joining Atticus, the famous playwright. Ryah made the escape as well, while Talia, deceived by Kiva, chose instead to stay and work for him.

  You might suspect the nudge was when the troupe found the town of Ebenmoor burned to the ground on the Eastern Reaches, just like Sable’s own home. Or when she met Andreese and discovered that all these raiders were actually soldiers of the Kalesh Empire.

  Or when Sable earned the role of the beloved Dragon Prioress Vivaine in a play—a woman Atticus had known and loved early in his life. Or when Sable discovered that her ability to feel the truth had another aspect: She could fill her words with truth and make people want to believe them.

  It wasn’t when the play won her the chance to stand before the most powerful people in the land and convince them of the coming Kalesh threat.

  Or when that attempt failed.

  The second nudge wasn’t even the knife that Andreese threw at that moment—the assassination of the Kalesh ambassador.

  No, the second nudge, the pivotal moment, came in a small, private chapel, deep inside the Dragon Priory where the High Prioress Vivaine and her dragon cornered Sable.

  It came the moment everything Sable believed about the woman shattered.

  Gone was the prioress’s benevolent mask. Before Sable stood a woman of cold, calculated choices. A woman who knew everything about the Kalesh attacks in the east and the coming army and had chosen to sacrifice those many lives in the hopes of securing peace for her own city.

  Her facade of gentleness was gone, and only fury remained. Fury at Sable for being connected to the murder of the ambassador. Fury for destroying the treaty Vivaine had been working on with him—the safety of Immusmala in exchange for her hand in marriage.

  Vivaine flicked her fingers at the hall outside the chapel and bent the very light, shifting their view until Sable could see deep below the priory to cold, stone cells where Andreese and the traveling troupe, including Ryah, were imprisoned, the troupe held as conspirators to the assassination and Andreese set to be executed at dawn.

  The final push of that second nudge was Atticus’s betrayal.

  In a secret meeting with Vivaine, he had told her of Sable’s powers to feel and convey the truth.

  Sable’s path turned, and to win freedom for the troupe and to save Andreese from the gallows, she pledged her loyalty to Vivaine, agreeing to gauge the truth of anyone the High Prioress negotiated with.

  The next morning, Andreese stood on the gallows, and Sable performed one last role. As he watched with a look of rage and betrayal, she threw herself at Vivaine’s feet, vowing her loyalty, declaring her abhorrence of what Andreese had done, and thanking Vivaine for carrying out such swift justice.

  The High Prioress accepted Sable’s pledge and, in an apparent act of mercy, stayed Andreese’s execution, banishing him from the city instead.

  And so, with that second nudge, that push from Vivaine in the small chapel, unseen by most of the world, Sable was forced into servitude to the priories, and the course of history shifted ever so slightly toward a new path.

  The troupe was sent away. Andreese, after one last, seething look, was dragged out of the city. Ryah was confined to serve the odious Prioress Eugessa. Talia was still firmly under Kiva’s grasp, working for him, spying as the secretary of the wealthy Lady Ingred.

  Sable was utterly alone. Despite her continued determination to unite the land against the Kalesh, every bit of hope and freedom she’d tasted
had been stripped away.

  And yet…there had been a nudge.

  Part I

  It has been said that I claim history moves merely by nudges. Let it be known that sometimes those nudges are on the magnitude of a rockslide nudging a tree in its path.

  -Flibbet the Peddler

  Chapter One

  The warm hues of light from the stained-glass windows did nothing to soften the cold isolation surrounding Sable as she stood inside the Dragon Priory. Past the rippled pane of glass, the gallows stood empty. The dark smudge of the crowd trickled away, taking with it the troupe and Reese.

  Next to Sable, the High Prioress Vivaine stretched her fingers, and a bit of the light slipped off the glass and slid around the prioress, brightening her white robe and turning her long, straight hair to strands of silver and smoothing the irritation and small wrinkles out of her face.

  What Sable had always imagined to be the blessing of Amah now looked like nothing more than thin, twisted light.

  Vivaine stood with her back to the abbesses and Sanctus guards who waited for her down the hall.

  “This afternoon, when you come to the council with the Kalesh,” she said with a derisive look at the dirty white dress Sable had worn all night, “do attempt to look presentable.”

  “And you’ll demand the Kalesh stop attacking towns to the east?” Sable asked.

  Vivaine let out an amused breath. “Your naivety is almost refreshing. I will do what needs to be done, and you will remain silent. This is not your stage, dear. Here—in my priory—you have no voice. Your only purpose is to help me ferret out the truth so I can keep my people safe. Remember that, Issable. Or things will go badly for you and those you love.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Vivaine turned and called to a Sanctus guard stationed by the front door. “Please see that Issable gets to Prioress Narine.”

  The man bowed. “Yes, Holy Mother.”

  Vivaine swept away down the hall, followed by a trail of abbesses.

  Sable glared after her, as though she could strip away the woman’s power just by sheer fury.

  The guard motioned Sable down a different hall, lined with stained-glass windows and brilliantly colored tapestries. The windows faced away from the rising sun, but the stained glass still caught enough light to glow with vibrant depictions of white-robed prioresses feeding the poor and healing the sick.

  Each one flashed a glimpse of the empty gallows. Each time she could see again Reese’s look of anger as she pledged herself to Vivaine.

  The fury and heartbreak of the morning seethed under the surface, and Sable forced herself to focus on the door at the end of the hall. The stones around her kept trying to form themselves into cell walls, but Sable straightened her shoulders.

  This was where leaders met to decide the fate of everyone she’d ever known, and countless people she would never meet. This was where the plans of the Empire would be revealed and where the leaders of the land might be convinced to unite against the Kalesh.

  No, this wasn’t Atticus’s stage. It wasn’t the stage she’d expected when she’d ridden into Immusmala only days ago, but it was a stage, nonetheless.

  The true problem looming in front of her was that the role she’d been given in this grand play was small and silent. She might as well be part of the scenery.

  She followed the guard down the long hallway and out into the garden tucked in the corner of the Sanctuary between the Dragon and the Phoenix Priories. The air was cooler here, fresher than the plaza had been with its crowd of people waiting to see Reese hanged. The tall Sanctuary Wall hedged in the back of the garden, almost blocking out the salty scent of the sea and the muffled crashes of waves far below. The garden itself was dotted with white-robed abbesses kneeling among neat lines of vegetables.

  A flash of movement under a nearby bush caught Sable’s attention. A blue face peered out at her, wide purple eyes set in a worried expression. Sable felt a tiny surge of relief. Purnicious couldn’t get inside the priories, but if Sable could get to the garden, she’d at least be able to talk to Purn. Sable gave her a small wave, and the kobold drew back into the shadows.

  The guard entered the Phoenix Priory through a side door into a plain stone hallway, devoid of tapestries and hollowly optimistic stained glass.

  When they reached the entrance hall, they passed an intricate stone column rising up to the high, arched ceiling. Sable trailed her fingers over the shape of rippling flames, so detailed they almost flickered. The carvings were free and wild, not consuming the stone as much as bringing it to life.

  The guard led her to a back hallway where a wide, wooden door was opened by an abbess. The wrinkles etched between her silver eyebrows deepened. “I suppose you must come in,” she said, her voice low, “but stay quiet. The prioress is resting.”

  The homey smell of wood fire and mint met Sable as she entered the room. Fruit trees in the garden were visible through the window at the far end, past a tall four-poster bed. The center of the room held a large desk piled with papers. The Phoenix Prioress lay on a high-backed couch pulled up close to the hearth. Despite the mildness of the summer morning, a crackling fire warmed the room. The fireplace was a marvel of stonework.

  But Sable barely glanced at the carvings, her eyes caught instead on the stunning sight next to it.

  Perched on a thick beam of wood darkened with age and scarred with scratches sat the phoenix, fixing Sable with blazing orange eyes. The top of its head was crowned a deep red, brightening to orange and golden-yellow at the crest of its breast before darkening again to a cascade of ember-red tail feathers.

  The bird shifted. The front edges of its wings glowed, and sparks showered down, leaving glittering trails of light.

  Sable waited for the wood to smolder, but the sparks disappeared without a trace.

  The abbess cleared her throat, and Sable turned back to meet the woman’s hard gaze.

  “So you’re Issable,” she said quietly, obviously unimpressed, “and even though you were part of a violent murder, the good prioress is stuck with you.”

  Sable opened her mouth to object, but Narine’s voice came from the couch.

  “Bring her over here please, Hetty.”

  Hetty’s mouth tightened in disapproval, but she hurried toward the prioress.

  Sable followed her to the front of the couch, where Phoenix Prioress arranged a thick blanket across her lap. She was dressed in the simplest robe Sable had ever seen on a holy woman, and her hair lay in a thick braid over her shoulder.

  Deep lines wrinkled Narine’s face, not like a woman weathered with years, but like one practiced in the art of joy. Next to Vivaine and Eugessa, Narine had always seemed like the quiet, meek prioress, but the woman’s gaze was anything but weak. Narine’s presence didn’t hold the crushing weight that Vivaine’s did, but it was more substantial than Sable had expected.