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  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Rowenna Miller

  Excerpt from The Obsidian Tower copyright © 2020 by Melissa Caruso

  Excerpt from The Ranger of Marzanna copyright © 2020 by Jon Skovron

  Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

  Cover art by Carrie Violet

  Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Map by Tim Paul

  Author photograph by Heidi Hauck

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: May 2020

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Miller, Rowenna, author.

  Title: Rule / Rowenna Miller.

  Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : Orbit, 2020. | Series: The unraveled kingdom; book three

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019042374 | ISBN 9780316478694 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780316478687 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Magic—Fiction. | GSAFD: War stories. | Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.I55275 R85 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042374

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-47869-4 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-47867-0 (ebook)

  E3-20200410-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Extras

  Meet the Author

  A Preview of The Obsidian Tower

  A Preview of The Ranger of Marzanna

  Also by Rowenna Miller

  Praise for The Unraveled Kingdom

  For Eleanor and Marjorie, who are still small, a book about beginnings

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

  Tap here to learn more.

  1

  THE SUMMER SUN HAD RIPENED THE BERRIES IN THE HEDGEROWS of the Order of the Golden Sphere, dyeing them a rich ruddy purple. The juices, a red more brilliant than even the best scarlet silk, stained my fingers as I plucked them from the deep brambles. Within several yards in any direction, novices of the order filled baskets of their own. A wheat-haired girl with pale honey eyes had a smear of berry-red across the front of her pale gray gown. She sighed and adjusted her starched white veil, leaving another red streak.

  I stifled a laugh, then sobered. A war waged some hundreds of miles south of us, the sisters of the Golden Sphere were deep in study at the art of casting charms under my tutelage, Sastra-set Alba was making final arrangements for an alliance-cementing voyage to Fen.

  And I was picking berries.

  I snagged my thumb on a large, curved thorn; nature made needles as effective as any I had used in my atelier, and the point produced a bead of blood almost instantly. I drew my hand carefully away and wrapped the tiny wound in my apron, letting the red stain sink into the linen.

  Picking berries. As though that were an acceptable way to spend my afternoon, now of all times. I flicked the corner of the apron away with a frustrated sigh. My basket was already nearly full, but the bushes were still thick with purple. I knew what Alba would say—winter cared little for our war, and all the members of the community fortified the larder against that enemy. I wanted to rebel against that pragmatic logic. The ordered calm of the convent mocked me, the pristine birchwood and the gardens all carrying on an unconcerned life and inviting me to join in.

  It infuriated me. Probably, I acknowledged as I resumed plucking fruit for the basket, because the pacific quiet was so inviting. Here I could almost forget—had forgotten, in horrifying, brief instants—that my country was at war. That my friends in the city could be killed under bombardment, that Theodor and my brother in the south could be overrun on the battlefield.

  Letters were painfully delayed, coming weeks after they were sent, if at all, as the Royalist navy poached ships off the coast and the overland routes remained treacherous. I had learned to cope by pretending that nothing happened between receipt of one letter and the next, that the events Theodor and Kristos described unfolded in the instant I read them. The possibilities that a single day could bring—a crushing defeat, mass desertion, my brother captured, Theodor killed—overwhelmed me if I allowed myself to think about them.

  Which was especially difficult when the last letter had come weeks ago, sent weeks before that. Kristos wrote to both Alba and me, carefully penning his letter to avoid betraying any vital specifics should it come into the wrong hands. Still, the message was clear. Volunteers—mostly untrained agrarian workers and fishermen—gathered in Hazelwhite, and Sianh had to prepare them for future large-scale battles while engaging in skirmishes with the Royalists st
ill holding territory in the south. The ragtag army made up of both radical Red Caps and moderate Reformists had coalesced effectively enough to take several small fortifications, but I sensed from the letter that these were positions the Royalists were willing to give up.

  The real battles remained at a hazy distance in the future, just soon enough that the thought of them left a swirl of nausea in my stomach and a sour taste in my mouth. I wanted, desperately, to do something, but teaching the “light-touched” sisters of the convent how to manipulate charm magic was plodding, redundant work, removed from the immediacy of the war for Galitha.

  The novice with the berry-stained veil motioned me over. Many of the novices took temporary vows of silence, and though it was not required, there were some sisters who maintained the vow for life, on the premise that silence made communion with the Creator’s ever-present spirit easier. Despite long hours of silence, on account of having no one to speak with here, I was no closer to any such communion.

  I dropped the last few berries from the hedge into my basket and joined her. I raised an eyebrow and pointed to her veil; she flushed pink as she noticed the stain, and pointed toward the narrow road that carved a furrow through the forest.

  Still too far away to see through the trees, travelers announced themselves with the rattle of wheels. She looked to me with baleful curiosity, as though I might know anything. As though I might be able to tell her in the stilted, limited Kvys I had picked up in the past weeks if I did. The other sisters along the hedgerow noted the sound and gave it little heed, turning back to their berries as though the outside world didn’t exist.

  To them, perhaps, it didn’t.

  Alba crested the little rise behind the convent and strode toward me. Her pale linen gown, a more traditional Kvys design than she had worn in West Serafe, more traditional even than most of the sisters, floated behind her on a light breeze. The yoke was decorated with symbols of the Order of the Golden Sphere embroidered in blackwork, circles and crosshatches and thin dotted lines I now understood to be references to charm magic.

  The berry-stained novice bowed her head, as did the other sisters, to a Sastra-set, but Alba wasn’t looking for them. “The hyvtha is gathering,” she said, using the Kvys word that usually referred to a band of threshers at harvest or a troupe of musicians. “Let’s see if anyone has made any progress since yesterday, shall we?”

  “Don’t tell me we’re disappointing you,” I said, deadpan. Trying to teach adults who had been suppressing any inclination toward casting since they were children was nearly impossible. Of our hyvtha of eighteen women and two men from the order’s brother monastery, only ten reliably saw the light, three could maintain enough focus to hold on to it, and one had managed a shaky, crude clay tablet. Tantia was proud of her accomplishment but had yet to repeat it.

  Alba expected a battalion of casters capable of the exquisitely fine work in the order’s basilica, and I had one caster who struggled with work a trained Pellian girl could churn out at eight.

  The travelers appeared on the road, a comfortable carriage drawn by a pair of gray Kvys draft horses. “And those are the Fenians.”

  “Which Fenians?” I asked, craning my neck as though I could see past the lead glass windows in the carriage.

  “The foundry owner. Well, his son who handles his negotiations, at any rate.” Her smile sparkled. “Your cannons are forthcoming.”

  “So we’ll go to Fen—when?”

  “I’m still working on the shipyard, and I’ve two mill owners on the string, each trying to underbid the other for the fabric.” She grinned—she enjoyed this game of gold and ink. It made me feel ill, betting with money that wasn’t mine. My business had been built carefully, brick by precisely planned brick, and these negotiations with Fen felt like a house of cards, ready to topple under the breath of a single wrong word.

  More, anxiety gnawed at the periphery of everything I thought, said, or did, fueled by the persistent fear that the war might be lost before I could even properly contribute. That I could lose everything, including everyone I loved, for want of quick, decisive action. Alba didn’t seem motivated to act quickly as I did, and there was nothing I could do to prod her from her insistence on the time-consuming propriety of negotiations.

  I bit back the argument I’d made many times, haste before all else, as she continued. “Given the meeting with the Fenians, then, I will not be joining the hyvtha this afternoon. See if Tantia can explain her methods to the others.”

  “I don’t think the problem is my Kvys,” I protested.

  Alba ignored my suggestion—that her plan for a small regiment of charm-casting sisters and brothers of the order was next to impossible—and strode toward the gates to greet our Fenian guests. I rinsed the berry juice from my hands at the pump in the courtyard of the convent. Stains remained on my fingertips and palms.

  2

  “PRA-SET,” I SAID IN POOR KVYS, THE WORDS STICKING TO THE roof of my mouth like taffy, hoping that my meaning, very good, was clear to the struggling initiate. Immell’s hand shook as she drew her stylus across a damp clay tablet, dragging ragged charm magic into the inscription.

  Tantia, who had managed to craft another charmed tablet, laid her hand on Immell’s arm, reassuring her in a stream of quiet, almost poetic Kvys. I couldn’t follow more than a few words, so I nodded dumbly, what I hoped was a comforting smile plastered on my face. Immell’s hand steadied, and the pale glow around her stylus grew stronger, brighter. “Pra-set!” I repeated.

  Immell finished the inscription, a word in Kvys whose meaning, Creator’s mercy, stood in for luck. The charm magic receded from her hand as she lifted her stylus from the clay, but the charm remained embedded in the tablet. “Pra-set,” I said again, examining her work. It was uneven and one letter was barely legible even to my unschooled eye, but it was done.

  We were still a long way from what Alba hoped for, a phalanx of charm casters who had mastered what I could do. A complement to the Galatine army, she suggested. A safeguard for her house’s authority, I read between the lines. And a challenge to the laws prohibiting magic in Kvyset.

  A few simple actions, a few stones tossed into a pond infinitely larger than myself, and the ripples were still reaching outward, trembling and new, but intent on fomenting change wherever they went.

  Tantia and Immell were speaking in rapid Kvys, gesturing at the tablet. Another novice, Adola, joined them, and the three linked hands. “Da nin?” I wondered aloud. What now?

  Tantia slapped some fresh clay from the bowl on the table, forming a sloppy disk with her free hand. I was about to chide her—orderliness was supposed to cultivate the mind for casting, especially in new learners—but she picked up her stylus and pressed her lips together, squinting into the blank space in front of her.

  Light blazed around the stylus and all but drove itself into the clay, sparkling clean and pure in the gray slab. “Da bravdin-set! Pra bravdin olosc-ni varsi!” she exclaimed.

  “How did you make such a strong charm?” I asked, correcting myself swiftly to Kvys. “Da olosc bravdin-set?”

  “Is hands holding,” Tantia replied, bypassing attempting to explain to me in Kvys. “Hands. I put hand on Immell, she cast.”

  “And the three of you—you joined hands and your charm was much stronger.”

  She nodded, smiling. “Easy cast, too. Than before.” She thought a moment, then added, “Easy than alone.”

  “How have I never come across this before.” I sighed through my nose. Pellian charm casters worked by themselves, except when an older woman was teaching a novice. “You would think,” I began, but stopped myself. My time in the Galatine and Serafan archives had taught me that precious little had been recorded on the subject of casting at all. One would think something important had been written down, but that didn’t mean it had.

  The other sisters and the one brother who had joined us drew closer and Tantia explained what had happened. “We practice,” she announced.

>   I nodded, overwhelmed by their near-accidental discovery. Surely a mother held her daughter’s hand while teaching her to cast. But perhaps the process of learning was so different in adults that we noticed the effects more, realized that they were amplifying and not only teaching or steadying one another. More research. In the convent archives. In Kvys. I sighed.

  I fled to my room, the only place I was ever alone in the compound. It was clean and bright and spare, with pale wood furniture carved in woodland animals and starbursts on the posts and rails. White linen and cherry-red wool covered the bed. A Kvys prayer book and hymnal lay on a shelf over the window. I couldn’t read any of it.

  A light scratch on the door, and a dark gray paw shot under the slim crack. Its black claws searched for purchase.

  “Kyshi.” I laughed and opened the door. The dark gray squirrel scurried into the room. A thin circlet of hammered brass around his neck glinted as he clambered up my bedspread and began to nose around my pillow as though I might have hidden a trove of nuts under the coverlet.

  I opened my trunk and produced my secret larder—a handful of cracked chestnuts. “These are mine, little thief,” I chided him. He burrowed under my hand and swiped a nut. “Don’t take all my good chestnuts. They’re almost fresh.”

  His sharp teeth made quick work of what was left of the shell, his nimble paws turning the nut over and around as he chewed. He had been abandoned in his drey and hand raised by Sastra Dyrka, who worked in the kitchens, where he had developed an astute palate for nuts of all kinds, as well as pastries, sugared fruits, and ham. Now he was a communal pet and quite nearly a mascot for the order.

  He settled onto my lap after his snack. I stroked his fur, rich and warm as the finest wool. I wanted to bury my fingers in his thick tail, but he chattered disapprovingly every time I tried.

  I felt useless. I thought of a time that felt longer ago than a single year, when my brother was staying out late in the taverns and drumming up support for change, before Pyord solidified their plans with money and centralized violence. Before I had realized I couldn’t escape the questions that nagged my brother, before I understood that, for all I had built with long hours and tiring work, it was on a cracked and crumbling foundation. I had resisted participating then, had rebuked my brother for even asking. Now I craved action. Picking berries, petting the squirrel, teaching novice charm casters—it all felt unimportant, artificial, and distant.