An asylum patient named Audrey tells the story of the great nomadic kingdom of Scythia, at war with the might of the Persian army, mustered up to seven hundred thousand men strong and led by the powerful Darius the Great. Aboard the massive fleet of the army's vessels is Bronn, a mysterious man who wears red dragon armour and wields twin swords with deadly skill, his own painful past shrouded in a dark, impenetrable haze.
He comes to the Scythian lands expecting more blood and death to taint his life, but what he finds is the fierce Artimpaz, daughter of the chief of the legendary Getae tribe, who whisper the secrets to immortality to be paid at a great and terrible price...
Started writing Ravendown in: 2015 Last remembered edit of this excerpt: 2018
Artimpaz was born the night before the god’s stretched their hands and hid the moon from the eyes of mortals for an entire day.
She was named after the moon goddess for the paleness of her skin and the brightness of that celestial body on the night she was born. Hers was a nomad tribe part of the kingdom of Saka. They were called the Getae, and because they numbered three hundred, they were the smallest part of Saka.
The Getae tribe always had an Enaree priestess, from the clan of soothsayers. When a baby was born, one of the Enaree would go the child and look into one of the many possible futures, therefore blessing the child with that future that hopefully holds good fortune in it.
Artimpaz’s api told her that when she was born, the priestess who came to them, Nimera, looked into one of her futures and then left without another word. She told Artimpaz that her parents were confused as to why she didn’t tell them what her future held. Artimpaz’s parents did not go after the priestess, however, because they did not want to offend her by demanding answers.
The next day Nimera returned with her two sisters, Tisiphone and Megaera. The priestesses wanted to sacrifice Artimpaz as soon as possible because Nimera had seen nothing good in the child’s future. She saw that Artimpaz’s coming misfortunes would bring about the end of the entire Getae tribe.
“There will be death and destruction.” Nimera said. Her words rang with the clarity of truth.
The Opoin, Megaera, condoned the babe’s sacrifice. The High Priestess’ word is law, and nobody can oppose it, save one. If Artimpaz’s parents were not who they were, the priestesses would not have even gone seeking permission for her death; they would have simply snatched the little girl from her cradle and sacrificed her to the gods they wished to appease.
But her father, Otosyrus, was the Sko of the Getae. His word was the only one that can overrule anything commanded by the priestesses. When Megaera told Otosyrus that his daughter would grow up to be the death of the entire Getae tribe, he ordered one of the priestesses to look into Artimpaz’s future again.
When she did, he asked her what she had seen and reminded her that she was bound by something stronger than law to tell him the truth. Tisiphone, the priestess he’d commanded to look into his daughter’s future again, said that she had seen Artimpaz bringing peace between the Saka kingdom and another kingdom, Parthia, through a union stronger than marriage.
The only reason, api told Artimpaz, proud of being Getae and Saka, that the Parthians did not yet invade the Saka was because they were a powerful people, incapable of defeat at anyone’s hands, the entire Saka race a combination of the barbaric yet tactic war-tribes of the Mongolians mingled with the beauty and cunning of the Slavic. And, in a muttering voice, she would finish off by saying that another possible reason was that the Parthians had never yet discovered a way to cross the Danube River to reach Saka lands.
After Tisiphone told him what she had seen, Otosyrus asked Nimera to look in the child’s future again. Nimera obeyed. She saw another strand of the future that showed Artimpaz riding at the helm of an army of tens of thousands of men with a black bow in her hands, an arrow shimmering with silver starlight knocked into place, fierce and beautiful as she rode into the battle of victory.
Last of all, Artimpaz’s father asked Megaera to look into one of the child’s futures for herself. Megaera complied, and when it was over she said, “This child will grow to carry on the Getae legacy; she will live to see empires rise and fall, cities of stone and metal being built block by block. She will live to see the day when man takes to the skies and question the origin and the end of the gods. The beacon of the Getae lineage will forever be in her hands, long after we are ash.”
With those words, Otosyrus made it Getae law that at the birth of a child three individual priestesses would look into the child future instead of the one, so that never again would a child be unnecessarily killed because of something that could otherwise not occur. Megaera warned him that he was making a mistake; the first vision of the future to be seen by a priestess was the one most likely to come to pass.
Otosyrus replied with a few simple words.
“If the worst of her futures does come, we will have to be ready for it.”