Kushiel's Chosen
Chapter One
No one would deny that I have known hardship in my time, brief though it has
been for all that I have done in it. This, I think, I may say without
boastfulness. If I answer now to the title of Comtesse de Montrève and my name
is listed in the peerage of Terre d'Ange, still I have known what it is to have
all that I possess torn from me; once, when I was but four years of age and my
birth-mother sold me into servitude to the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers, and
twice, when my lord and mentor Anafiel Delaunay was slain, and Melisande
Shahrizai betrayed me into the hands of the Skaldi.
I have crossed the wilds of Skaldia in the dead of winder, and faced the wrath
of the Master of the Straits on the teeming waters. I have been the plaything
of a barbarian warlord, and I have lost my dearest friend to an eternity of
lonely isolation. I have seen the horrors of war and the deaths of my
companions. I have walked, alone and by night, into the vast darkness of an
enemy encampment, knowing that I gave myself up to torture and nigh-certain
death.
None of it was as difficult as t ... read full excerpt from Kushiel's Chosen ebook
