Total pages in book: 222
Estimated words: 210715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1054(@200wpm)___ 843(@250wpm)___ 702(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 210715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1054(@200wpm)___ 843(@250wpm)___ 702(@300wpm)
When Maggie wakes up cold, filthy, and naked in a gutter, it doesn't take her long to recognize Kair Toren, a city she knows intimately from the pages of the famously unfinished dark fantasy series she's been obsessively reading and re-reading while waiting years for the final novel.
Her only tools for navigating this gritty world of rival warlords, magic, and mayhem? Her encyclopedic knowledge of the plot, the setting, and the characters' ambitions and fates. But while she quickly discovers she cannot be killed (though many will try!), the same cannot be said for the living, breathing characters she's coming to love—a motley band that includes a former lady’s maid, a deadly assassin, various outrageous magical creatures, and a dangerously appealing soldier. Soon, instead of trying to get home, she finds herself enmeshed in the schemes—and attentions—of dueling princes, dukes, and villains, all while trying to save them and the kingdom of Rellas from the way she knows their stories will end: in a cataclysmic war
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PART 1
BAG OF MONEY
CHAPTER 1
MONTH OF PLANTER, DAY 6
Rain drenched the city, cold and relentless. It leached all color from the medieval-looking buildings, turning the world gray and soaking through the filthy rag in which I had swaddled myself. The sour stench rising from the grimy folds was truly epic. I couldn’t feel my toes, and my fingers were going numb.
The three-story buildings towered over the alley like the walls of a stone canyon, boxing me in. Sometime between yesterday evening and this morning, my stomach had turned into a painful bottomless pit. I hadn’t eaten in three days. I wasn’t even shivering anymore. My body didn’t have the energy.
I checked on my rock again. It lay in a puddle by my feet, a cream-colored chunk of building stone about the size of a large grapefruit. Any bigger, and it would be too hard to grip with one hand. I had found it this morning and carried it through the rain for two hours until I found the right bridge.
The rock was still there. I touched it with my foot to make sure. It felt solid and real.
I peeled myself from the wall and leaned a little to glance out of the alley. In front of me a narrow stone bridge spanned the width of a rain-swollen river. Another wall of medieval buildings loomed on the other side. Behind them, a tower soared, a spire rising at least six hundred feet, silhouetted against the storm-choked sky and topped by a huge flower of translucent, milky glass. The flower’s petals were shut into a bud, guarding the observation deck in its center from the storm. Every few seconds, bright gold sparks dashed through the enchanted glass.
A dozen dark shapes circled the flower, surfing the wild air currents. My brain expected them to be birds, but birds had only one pair of wings, not two. The feeling of wrongness was overwhelming.
Yep, the Mage Tower and the strange bird-things were still there, too.
I huddled against the wall.
I couldn’t touch the Mage Tower, but I knew it was real. For one, I had pictured it differently. In my head it was a flawless pale needle, elegant and almost dainty. If this had been a hallucination, what I saw would’ve matched the vision in my head, but the reality was nothing like that. This tower jutted up, defiant, its walls worn but strong, as if it had grown from bedrock. And it felt old. Like it had stood there for thousands of years and would stand just like that for another millennium, timeless and indifferent, while the city around it crumbled into dust, rebuilt, and crumbled again.
No, it was real, like this endless rain, like the pain in my freezing bare feet, and like the gnawing ache in my stomach.
In the distance, a bell tolled four times. Four pm.
It wouldn’t be too long now.
To say that this was not the way I envisioned spending my Sunday would be a criminal understatement. Today would’ve been my one day off. I should’ve spent it watching Netflix, nibbling on a pizza, and reading while lounging on my couch in my tiny apartment, in my soft sweatpants, warm and dry. Not wrapped in a dirty rag, shivering in a grimy alley, while the sky dumped gallons of cold rain on my head.
I wasn’t a big reader through most of my childhood, but when I was sixteen, my first serious boyfriend broke up with me, and it was hell. My brain kept rehashing every moment of the relationship in excruciating detail. One afternoon, as I lay on my bed, wallowing in self-pity, my mom handed me a thick fantasy book, and when I turned my nose up at it, she told me, “Maggie, you need to live in someone else’s head for a bit.”
I’d thought I would read a few pages. When I came up for air, five hours later, my breakup was an afterthought. Some seriously messed-up stuff happened on the first page, and I had to find out how it turned out. Somehow by the end of those five hours, the book had wrung me dry. I could deal with life again.
I’d tried every genre under the sun since, but fantasy was my vice of choice. There was something about blades and magic that did it for me. Deadly sword-masters, thieves prowling through moonlit streets, dark magicians, warrior princesses, ruthless nobles, majestic dragons, hideous monsters, I loved it all. Put a hot dude in armor with a sword on the cover, and my eyes glazed over while my hand crept to the buy button, budget be damned.
I had read enough fantasy books to fill a library, but that very first series was my special treasure. Set in the city of Kair Toren, capital of the kingdom of Rellas, the story revolved around the power struggles of eight noble families, and it was so full of fantasy tropes, it would be clichéd except that the superb writing moved it right past stereotypical into classic. The characters felt so real, they practically jumped off the page.