Warrior:. Zoe Archer
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“I’M WITH YOU UNTIL THE END.”
As he said this, he felt the oddest surge of happiness—a feeling with which he hadn’t much experience, not since he’d resigned from the army. At that point, Huntley had settled on his makeshift plan to return to England, get an ordinary job, find a sweet wife, and install her in some snug home while they made armfuls of babies, but, strangely, the plan hadn’t raised his spirits as he thought it would. But throwing himself headlong into a cause he hadn’t known about a week earlier, a cause in which he’d face unknown, supernatural dangers…somehow that had done the trick. Huntley felt the blood moving in him, the old excitement of a campaign.
It was made all the better knowing that Thalia Burgess would be by his side.
Hearing his vow, she let out a breath she probably hadn’t known she was holding and smiled at him again. Seeing her smile, something hot and animal slid through him. But this wasn’t the time, and it wasn’t the place; he had his cause and his duty, so he tried to push that roused beast aside. It was a fight, though.
Instead of reaching for her, as he wanted to do, he asked, “And what are these paragons called, who safeguard the world, and save England from herself?”
Before she even spoke, he knew everything was about to change. And change forever.
“The Blades of the Rose.”
The Blades of the Rose
Coming Soon
SCOUNDREL
REBEL
STRANGER
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
WARRIOR
The Blades of the Rose
Zoë Archer
ZEBRA BOOKS
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
For Zack:
my warrior,
my hero
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Kevan Lyon, Megan Records, and the late, great Kate Duffy. The road to the Blades of the Rose has been an amazing adventure because of these daring women.
Thanks to Kent Madin of Boojum Expeditions for his insight on Mongolia, and thank you to Yu-Huei Layton for help with key Chinese words.
And to everyone else who has provided encouragement and support for this eccentric, wonderful series—thank you.
Contents
Chapter 1: Trouble at the Docks
Chapter 2: A Mysterious Message Delivered
Chapter 3: Followed
Chapter 4: Captain Huntley’s Mysterious Disappearance
Chapter 5: The True Hammer of Thor
Chapter 6: Karakorum
Chapter 7: The Tortoise Speaks
Chapter 8: A Curious Means of Seeing
Chapter 9: The Lion and Lamb
Chapter 10: Another Form of Magic
Chapter 11: Nadaam
Chapter 12: Surprising Outcomes
Chapter 13: An Expanding Knowledge
Chapter 14: Within the Clouds
Chapter 15: Allies or Enemies?
Chapter 16: Oasis
Chapter 17: A Good Place to Stand and Fight
Chapter 18: The Siege Begins
Chapter 19: The Walls Are Breached
Epilogue: Winter’s Benefit
Chapter 1
Trouble at the Docks
Southampton, England. 1874.
Gabriel Huntley hated an unfair fight. He had hated it as a boy in school, he had hated it during his service in Her Majesty’s army, and he hated it now.
Huntley ducked as a fist sailed toward his head, then landed his own punches on his attacker in quick succession. As his would-be assailant crumpled, unconscious, to the ground, Huntley swung around to face another assault. Three men coming toward him, and quick, cold murder in their eyes. Their numbers were thinning, but not by much. Huntley couldn’t keep a smile from curving in the corners of his mouth. Less than an hour in England, and already brawling. Maybe coming home wouldn’t be so bad.
“Who the hell is this bloke?” someone yelped.
“Dunno,” came the learned reply.
“Captain Gabriel Huntley,” he growled, blocking another punch. He rammed his elbow into someone’s gut. “Of the Thirty-third Regiment of Foot.”
His ship had docked that night in Southampton, bringing him back to British shores after fifteen years away. As he had stood at the bottom of the gangplank, his gear and guns strapped to his back, he’d found himself strangely and uncharacteristically reticent. He couldn’t seem to get his feet to move forward. After years of moving from one end of the British Empire to the other, following orders sent down through the chain of command, he was finally able to decide on his fortune for himself. It was a prospect that he had been looking forward to for a long while. After resigning from his captaincy, he had booked passage on the next ship to England.
However, that idea had already begun to pale on the voyage back, with days and weeks of shipbound idleness leaving his mind to pick and gnaw at whatever fancy struck him. Yes, he’d been born in England and lived there for his first seventeen years—in a dismal Yorkshire coal mining village, more specifically. But nearly the other half of his life had been spent on distant shores: the Crimea, Turkey, India, Abyssinia. England had become no more than a far away ideal of a place recreated again and again in company barracks and officers’ clubs. He had barely any family and few friends in England besides Sergeant Alan Inwood. The two men had fought side-by-side for years, and when a bullet had taken Inwood’s leg, the trusty sergeant returned to England. But he’d written Huntley steadily over the years.
In Huntley’s pocket was Inwood’s latest missive. He’d memorized it, having read the letter over and over again on the voyage to England. It promised a job working with Inwood as a textile agent in Leeds. An ordinary, steady life. The prospect of marriage. Leeds, Inwood claimed, had an abundance of nice, respectable girls, daughters of mill owners, looking for husbands. Huntley could have a job and a wife in a trice—if he wanted.
Huntley knew how to fight in the worst conditions nature and man could create. Monsoons, blizzards, scorching heat. Bayonets, sabers, revolvers, and rifles. He’d eaten hardtack crawling with maggots. He’d swallowed the most fetid and foul water when there had been nothing else to drink. None of it had broken him. He had nothing left to fear. Yet the idea of truly settling down, finding, good Lord, a wife, it turned a soldier’s blood to sleet.
After the ship had docked, Huntley had lingered at the foot of the gangplank, jostled on all sides by the shoving and cursing mass of the crowded dock. He had tried to make himself take the first step toward his new life, an ordinary life, and found that he couldn’t.
Not yet, at any rate. Instead of rushing toward the inn where mail coaches waited to take passengers to English towns and cities near and far, Huntley had begun to walk in the opposite direction. Though he’d been at sea for months, he needed more time. Time to think.