The Ghost of the Wastes: Volume 7 - Arcane Mercenary (Ebook)

What readers say

"Read all of this plus basically all the rest of the author's stuff, highly recommended." (Keeghan, verified Amazon purchase)

"A gripping story that rushes you ahead at a furious pace. I look forward to the next installments." (Charlie, verified Amazon purchase)

About this volume

One night out. One kiss on a front porch. And the bill for both comes due in front of eighty-one thousand people.

Volume Six ended with the most dangerous person on Valecis Isle having, for once in his life, a good time in public. Volume Seven is the week after.

Siobhan Morrigan drove home from that date and lost her nerve for five straight days. The heir to the Dire Bear Guild, a woman who put a grown man in a healing ward for a week, is hiding behind pillars from a fourth-year with a nice haircut, and half the World Tree Lattice is watching her do it. Her father has run the boy's name through every registry, guild roll, and genealogy in the Western Bloc. What came back is fifteen years of residency and nothing before it. The Dire Bear does not like nothing.

Across the island, Deryn Cassar lies on a warm stone table with four practitioners working the week out of his meridians and starts counting the days. He has three hundred years of lineage, the finest duelist's record of his generation, and a scholarship nobody who put his hands on the wrong girl. His analyst is frightened of a spike on a graph. Deryn is not. Deryn is going to enjoy this more than anything in years.

Cale Arcanus woke up the morning after his first date with a hangover, a duel he does not remember agreeing to, and a message from Aiden Vanta that he should not have opened. He does not want the Iron Circuit. He does not want the autumn card, the Aether core, the sixty-two accredited lenses, or the four hundred and ten million people who will be watching the tenth and final bout. He wants to teach Foundation kids ring work in a training hall and go home.

The Nexus has other plans. A First Princess walks into that training hall, shakes his hand, and stops dead. A Knight-Captain signs fourteen pages of threat assessment on a sporting event and explains a plan to his King that his King does not like. A woman in travel leathers with salt on her hem comes off a ship and goes straight to the arch. The Ghost of the Wastes has been the most successfully absent thing in the Known Nexus for a hundred and thirty-eight years. He has just been printed on a running order.

Then the gate opens. A boy with no house, no healer, and no entourage walks out onto nine hundred years of sand, and a duke's son brings up a blade his family does not take out of its vault.

Told from twelve points of view, the people who had to stand next to it: a steward who has spent twenty years between a violent man and the rest of the Planes. A grandmother two tiers up who already knows what she is about to watch. A princess trying to make her brain accept what her eyes have already decided. The Scion, who did not sleep on the crossing. And the comic relief, who would like it noted that being the comic relief in a power fantasy sucks.

Cale came to Arclight to disappear. This is the volume where that stops being an option.

Volume Seven of Ghost of the Wastes. Chapters 150 through 169. A progression fantasy of hidden power, academy politics, and the women who have decided the Ghost of the Wastes is theirs.

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