Godslayer

GODSLAYER
Children of the Stone, Book One

Voldar has buried four men in nine years of hired work, and none of them carelessly. Brallen has survived every job he's ever taken by seeing the way out before anyone else and taking it before anyone else moved. They have known each other five weeks.

The job was supposed to be bandits. Clear out the mill, take the silver, go down the river. Then the blind old seer in Harrow's Dale told them what was sleeping in the mountain above the village, and why the Dale had been loading carts for it for three hundred years, and the company went up the road anyway.

Six went into the dragon's hold. None came out.

A week later Voldar wakes in the inn's best room with wounds that should have killed him, knitting shut. A week after that, Brallen wakes screaming. Neither remembers surviving. Neither remembers who carried the other down the mountain, or who paid the innkeeper with a golden dragon from the hoard. And neither can explain the nightmares: a floor of ash, a sword that burns white at the core, a voice behind the eyes that says, with interest, that's new.

Something came back down the mountain in them. Something old enough to have brothers. The dragon is awake, the village has burned, the watch captain wants someone to hang, and the youngest daughter of the house has already decided who.

Voldar wants to go back up and find out what happened.

Brallen wants to run. He always has.

This time, something inside him won't let him.