The Challenge
By Kim Iverson
Cover designer: Natasha Brown
Genre: Historical Fantasy
Arthur the High
King of Breatein has fallen captive of a longtime enemy, the Saxon
warrior-princess Camilla, who lusts to avenge the death of her betrothed at
Gyan’s hands and will stop at nothing, even the black arts, to achieve her
goal. Because Gyan and Arthur have grown estranged, she fears that Arthur may
side with Camilla to make her his new queen.
To meet Camilla’s
challenge, Gyan must face all her demons—public as well as private.
AS GYAN PACED the
riverbank, she glared at Caer Alclyd’s soaring granite walls as though by sheer
force of will she could force out its occupants to fight on her terms, army to
army. Her husband, Arthur the High King, was a prisoner of their longtime
enemy, the Sasunach warrior-princess Camilla. A decade ago Gyan had killed
Camilla’s betrothed in battle, and Camilla had sworn revenge.
The One God alone
knew what form that revenge would take. With a shudder Gyan recalled the rumor
she had heard about Camilla, that she had enlisted demonic aid…
Gyan banished those
thoughts, and their attendant fears, by pondering the irony that Camilla had
tried to strike at her through Arthur. It might have worked, once. The passion
that had colored the early years of their marriage was still celebrated in song
throughout Breatein and Caledon.
These days, she
wasn’t singing.
Kim Headlee lives
on a farm in southwestern Virginia with her family, cats, goats, Great Pyrenees
goat guards, and assorted wildlife. People and creatures come and go, but the cave
and the 250-year-old house ruins—the latter having been occupied as recently as
the mid-twentieth century—seem to be sticking around for a while yet.
Kim is a Seattle
native and a direct descendent of twentieth-century Russian nobility. Her
grandmother was a childhood friend of the doomed Grand Duchess Anastasia, and
the romantic yet tragic story of how Lydia escaped Communist Russia with the
aid of her American husband will most certainly one day fuel one of Kim’s
novels. Another novel in the queue will involve her husband’s ancestor, the
seventh-century proto-Viking king of the Swedish colony in Russia.
For the time being,
however, Kim has plenty of work to do in creating her projected 8-book
Arthurian series, The Dragon’s Dove Chronicles, and other novels. She has been
a published novelist since 1999, beginning with the original editions of Dawnflight (Sonnet
Books, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0671020412) and Liberty (writing
as Kimberly Iverson, HQN Books, Harlequin, ISBN 0373771347).
Thank you for hosting The Challenge on your blog, and its free download promo should be starting soon!!
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