Dawn of Legends Read online

  AS HUMANS AND MONSTERS CLASH AND ROYAL BLOOD FLOWS, A NEW AGE WILL DAWN...

  Prince Alexander of Macedon has battled both men and monsters, but his final war will determine his fate...and the future of all mankind. While Macedon’s enemies close in from all corners of the earth, Alexander must fulfill one last prophecy that dictates only he—and he alone—can ensure humanity’s survival against the age of the deadly Spirit Eaters.

  As the threads of fate draw Alexander closer to his destiny, an exiled queen will meet a runaway princess, a young sorceress will set the final path of her heart and generals will choose their final battles. Before the light of victory can shine, enemies must become allies, Death must be tamed and hearts must break.

  Who will rise and who will die? All is revealed in the epic finale to New York Times bestselling author Eleanor Herman’s rich and fantastical Blood of Gods and Royals series.

  Books by Eleanor Herman available from Harlequin TEEN

  Blood of Gods and Royals series

  Full-length novels in reading order:

  Legacy of Kings

  Empire of Dust

  Reign of Serpents

  Dawn of Legends

  Ebook novellas:

  Voice of Gods*

  Queen of Ashes**

  *Can be read at any time without spoilers

  **Recommended to read after Empire of Dust

  ELEANOR HERMAN

  Dawn of Legends

  To Starr Thompson and Pam Gilbert, for their frustration and fury when each of the books in this series ended!

  Contents

  ACT ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  ACT TWO

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ACT THREE

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ACT FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  ACT FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  ONE YEAR LATER

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  TWO YEARS LATER

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  EXCERPT FROM REIGN OF SERPENTS BY ELEANOR HERMAN

  ACT ONE

  CATACLYSM

  Great things are won by great dangers.

  —Herodotus

  CHAPTER ONE

  JACOB

  Jacob runs.

  A hot pain radiates through his skull, blurring his vision—a nameless, wordless pain, the pain of a loss so great he cannot even think it.

  Once, not so long ago, Jacob ran across the fields of Erissa in pursuit of a girl who raced gazelles. In pursuit of Kat. The vast sky loomed above him as large as his dreams.

  Now his boots pound the labyrinth-like corridors of the Byzantine palace, three hundred miles from Macedon’s countryside. Now he’s the one being hunted.

  As he races down the wide marble corridor on the second floor of the palace, strains of discordant music from the open windows wrap their eerie tendrils around him. He inhales the salt smell of the sea. Catches a glimpse of crowds on the docks below celebrating the royal wedding, and fishing boats bobbing in the crowded harbor just steps away from the palace.

  He crashes through a small door at the end of the corridor into a winding servants’ staircase, almost too narrow for his broad shoulders, and takes the steps down three at a time. He hears a loud, rhythmic pounding, but he’s not sure if it’s a wedding drummer or the pumping of his own heart. He explodes onto a wide marble hallway, hoping it will lead him to an exit—but it doesn’t. Just more doors, more chances to make the wrong choice.

  The queen.

  Bright red blood. Silver-blond hair turning dark and matted.

  He didn’t mean to do it.

  He didn’t mean to kill her.

  One of the many doors flings open directly in Jacob’s path, nearly causing him to collide with it. A man and woman lurch out of the chamber behind, the man’s mouth smeared with the woman’s lip stain. The woman wears the sheer dress of the dancing girls he’d seen earlier; the man reeks of sandalwood cologne and wealth.

  Something wild and angry lurches inside him—the carelessness of these people. The obliviousness. He should be grateful for it—for their distraction—but all he feels is a dizzying disgust. Shoving past them, Jacob finally spots an open door leading outside. He can make out the trill of a flute, the low hum of men’s voices, and high lilting notes of ladies’ laughter. There are smells, too: spiced wine, wood smoke, and the pungent tang of urine.

  He may still have time to escape. It will be dark soon. If he can slip into the anonymous crowd of drunken revelers, he could find safety. He runs for the door, this time racing through the wedding guests, passing a man vomiting in the corridor and a boy playing the flute, and then—he’s out.

  A chilly wind off the nearby harbor ruffles his stolen red cape and snakes across his face with cold fingers. He turns around, disoriented; he has careened into a square central courtyard—four sides of turrets, balconies, and columns in green and pink and white marble. He curses. He’s not out. He’s wandered deeper into the palace complex.

  The flowers are gone now, the ornamental bushes bare of leaves. But on the cobblestone paths, wedding guests huddle for warmth around brightly burning braziers in the last rays of the afternoon sun, pulling cloaks around them. A plump gray-haired manservant picks up fallen wine cups and places them on a tray. An old man with a cane walks slowly through the crowd, leaning heavily on a younger man’s arm.

  “Wine, my lord?” asks a high-pitched male voice in the soft accent of Byzantium.

  Jacob turns to see that a servant boy has come up behind him, a teenager, his face a mass of red pimples. He’s holding a tray of full wine cups.

  “No.” Jacob clears his throat. “No, thank you.”

  “But it’s to their majesties’ health,” the boy replies earnestly.

  Jacob hardly hears him. He needs to get down to the harbor and on the first ship out of here. But he can’t risk making a scene. He reaches for the offered cup. Before his fingers even graze the cool metal of the stem, the boy lurches back. The goblet topples off the tray and clangs loudly on the cobblestones, spilling dark red wine clotted with black lees.

  It takes Jacob a moment to realize what has startled the boy so badly. Then he notices his own hands—white-knuckled, caked in something dark and red. Blood.

  Before the boy can recover, Jacob whips around and loses himself in the crowd.

  How did he not notice before? How long has he run through the palace, h
is crime blazing on his hands for all to see? He is too overwhelmed to care. In the middle of the courtyard sits a marble fountain in the shape of a griffin, wings tucked against a lion’s body, water foaming out of its open eagle’s beak into a painted basin below.

  Jacob stumbles toward it through the crowd and plunges his arms up to the elbows into the water. He can hardly feel the harsh cold of it against his slashed flesh as he scrubs, scratching and rubbing until he’s sure the skin itself will peel away. Until the churning water has become cloudy and brown with his blood. He watches it swirl, overcome.

  Jacob meant only to kidnap Queen Olympias—not kill her.

  The plan was to hold her hostage. He had been planning to use her to lure out her lover, Riel the Snake. The last living god.

  But when he went to her chamber, she recognized him. And then, smiling, told him she had savagely murdered his entire family.

  She’d gone after his first love, Katerina, and when his family hadn’t known her whereabouts, the queen had set their home on fire, had personally watched Jacob’s mother and father and little brothers scream in agony as the soldiers butchered them and the flames devoured them. And from staring into her hard green eyes, Jacob had known she wasn’t lying.

  Now, as the water swirls before him, his dizziness returns; he replays in his head the moment he lunged for the queen and she swiveled on him, wielding her own two-pronged hairpin like the fangs of a snake, lashing out, and scratching open his arm. But she was too slow, too unprotected. He caught her slender wrist and snapped it like a twig. Then, without even thinking, he slammed her head hard against her cosmetics table. She slumped to the floor. He stared, stunned, at her limp, lifeless form, her blood draining into the cracks between mosaic tiles on the floor...before fleeing her private chambers.

  Bent over the fountain and blinking to try to clear his vision, Jacob takes stock of the fact that he has lost the god, that the queen is dead, that his family is gone forever. If Jacob is caught, he will be executed for murder. But that’s not even the worst of it. The plan he spent months pursuing—capturing Riel to satiate the Spirit Eaters with the flesh of the Last God—has been compromised by his own passion, his own rage.

  Riel walks free.

  And as for the Spirit Eaters—their evil and their hunger will only spread.

  Once, Jacob knows, Riel had been good. He had, in fact, been humanity’s savior in the battle between the gods and the Spirit Eaters, who fed on magic. Who fed on gods. But in that ancient war, Riel lost much of his power. He became a fallen god, trapped in this world while the others fled, desperate to return to the realm of divine beings. He grew hateful, and for centuries he devoted himself to murdering his own kin. He had become a terror, a force of evil.

  And yet, the Spirit Eaters were the far greater danger. Frightening, monstrous, they had been biding their time. That was all thanks to the Aesarian Lords, who had dedicated themselves to persecuting people with magic, capturing them...and feeding them to the Spirit Eaters.

  For hundreds of years, that had been enough to keep the monsters satiated, contained among their caves in the Eastern Mountains. But now magic is running out. The Spirit Eaters are growing restless again.

  And hungry.

  They have begun to consume and destroy entire villages in the central regions of Persia, leaving only collapsed homes and bones sucked dry of marrow. Soon, they will come for the great cities. Then the empires, one by one, will fall, until one day the monsters will devour the world itself.

  The long twin scratches on his left forearm from Olympias’s hairpin throb painfully now, as if to remind him of the present moment. Blood still oozes from the jagged tracks in his skin. A man never cries over a scratch, his little brother Calas used to say, proudly sticking out his chest.

  A fresh wave of nausea sickens him, and he leans over the basin, retching into the fountain. Cal is dead.

  Cal is ash.

  Because of the queen. She deserved to die.

  “Too much worship of Dionysus?” a wedding guest calls, and a group of men nearby guffaw loudly.

  Rage pounds Jacob’s head. His heart, he’s sure, is going to explode right out of his chest. He was the oldest son, the strongest. He should have been there to protect Cal, to protect all of them. He wants to vomit again but there is no way to purge the real sickness—the grief. The guilt. He’s gripping the rim of the fountain basin so hard he is shocked it doesn’t crumble. He looks at the tormented face in the soiled water, rippling in the wind, causing his reflection to warp and scatter, unfamiliar.

  Except it’s not wind that makes the water shake and foam. Earth magic, the hot shame of it, is shooting up through his body, roaring through his veins, bursting into his knuckles and fingertips. Jacob just realizes what’s happening before his mind shuts down, as the sickening fury—the raging pain of loss—goes still within him, and the power of soil and rock, of wave and wind, of the oneness of all earthly things courses through him, a scorching heat like the inside of the smith god Hephaestus’s mountain forges. It burns, corroding his insides, singeing away all his anger. It pours from his hands into the stone of the fountain, crashing into the water and down, down into the earth below. It is horrible in its intensity, beautiful in its raw power. And then—

  —it ends.

  Jacob feels empty, liberated. Gasping for breath, he stumbles back from the fountain.

  Slowly, he becomes aware of a silence in the courtyard around him. The performers’ flutes have stopped, their final notes lingering sourly in the air. The chatter and laughter of the wedding guests have ceased.

  The fountain trembles.

  Suddenly, the pink-and-green-painted basin cracks open, releasing its water in a torrential gush. The griffin on the pillar lurches forward and dives toward the earth, falling in a deafening clatter on the broken basin, as water shoots out of the center like a geyser, five times the height of a man.

  The ground, he realizes, is trembling. The world shifts suddenly and Jacob falls on one knee just as a jagged crack appears in the palace facade in front of him. The upper part of the wall collapses to the ground with a crash, revealing a dainty bedroom.

  Someone screams. A plume of water gushes out of the ground at the other end of the courtyard, and three, four, five more erupt, pumping water higher than the palace itself.

  All around him, water gathers on the ground, rising, rising to his ankles.

  To his knees.

  Somewhere in the distance, horses whinny in fear. All around him, people are screaming, tripping over one another to try to escape, some of them falling into the water and getting trampled. Braziers tip over, the burning logs and hot iron hissing when they hit the water, all the warm, flickering light becoming plumes of black smoke. The entire courtyard is plunged into the chaos of choking darkness and deafening noise.

  Jacob pushes through the many-limbed dark, water filling his boots and sloshing into his clothes, weighing down the ends of his cloak. Somehow, he manages to make his way back into the building, which shudders and groans. Because of him. All of this, because of him.

  He sent his rage into the earth.

  The earth has answered.

  He enters the rapidly filling main hall as people push their way toward the front door. He tumbles down the marble steps into the front courtyard and barely has time to register why everyone has frozen in place.

  Then he sees it. Roaring up the Bosporus Strait from the Sea of Marmara toward the harbor at their feet is a towering wave, higher even than the palace on the hill, like the mouth of the coming night opening its massive jaws to an ever greater and more depthless dark. The setting sun, low on the horizon, colors the foaming white crests on its apex bloodred. And Jacob knows that evil—a magic far greater than most could ever fathom—has found its way to him at last.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HEPHAESTION

  They ha
ve killed a god.

  But all Hephaestion can think, as Alexander brushes his thick light hair from his face, is that they have saved the god’s son. The prince lives—wounded but rapidly recovering as he lies on the bed in this private chamber, high above the royal wedding festivities in Byzantium. And Katerina lives, too.

  The prophecy has been fulfilled in ways Heph never imagined.

  For months he held the secret safe from both of them: that Kat was destined to kill Alexander. It came true, but not in the way anyone would have thought. She killed him in order to save him. The spirit of their father, the god Riel, has fled Alexander’s body, and if the prophecies are true, he is gone forever.

  Now he watches the way Kat tends to her twin brother’s wounds and knows that he was wrong to think she could ever really hurt him. Heph doesn’t know how to feel—relieved, overwhelmed, and something else—a pang of jealousy. The two people he loves most in this world have a bond that he will never fully understand...and will never share. He will always stand outside that circle of love and light, a stranger to it.

  But something else is bothering him, too.

  It had also been prophesied that Riel could be killed only by an Earth Blood.

  Heph once again picks up the ivory hairpin shaped like a snake, sticky with blood, that Kat used to stab Alexander, killing him—but only to release Riel’s possession over him. There had already been blood on the deadly sharp hairpin.

  Not just any blood. Earth Blood. Heph wonders whose it could be and where he or she is now. The needle on the Atlantean Mechanism in his hands swings wildly as if to echo his swirling thoughts.

  Propped against large tasseled pillows on the ornate four-poster bed, Alex hisses in pain as Kat washes the scratches on his neck with wine. “Sit still,” she commands, kneeling beside him. “I must clean it.”

  Pushing the ministrations of his sister aside, Alex slides off the high bed. He holds out a hand to steady himself, clearly dizzy.

  “I’m fine,” he says, as Kat tries to tug him back into bed. “Heph is right. We must discover who this Earth Blood possessor is.”