SELECTED PRAISE FOR
THE MOUNTAINâS CALL
âDefinitely a donât-put-this-down page-turner!â
âNew York Times bestselling author Mercedes Lackey
âA riveting plot, complex characters, beautiful descriptions, and heaps of magic.â
âRomance Reviews Today
âCaitlin Brennan has created a masterpiece of legend and lore with her first novel. Hauntingly beautiful and extremely powerfulâ¦Take Tolkien and Lackey and mix them together and you get this new magic that is Caitlinâs own. You will stay enthralled with each page turned.â
âThe Best Reviews
âCaitlin Brennan is a fantastic world builder who creates a world where magic is an everyday occurrenceâ¦. There is plenty of action and romance in this spellbinding romantic fantasy.â
âParanormal Romance Reviews
The sky was raining stars.
Euan Rohe lay in the frozen sedge. The river gleamed below, solid with ice from bank to bank. The brighter stars reflected in it as they fell, streaks of gold and white and pallid green.
He was dizzy with cold and hunger and long runningâand there were the damned imperials, yet again, between him and his hope of escape. Though winter had set in early and hard, the border was crawling with them. Every ford, every possible crossing was guarded.
For days Euan had been struggling along the river, while the hunting grew more and more scant, and the cold set in deep and hard. He was ready to swear that the emperorâs patrols were waiting for him, even herding him, driving him farther and farther downriver. His own country seemed to mock him, rising in steep slopes black with pine and white with snow, so near he could almost reach out and touch, but impossibly far.
He could appreciate irony. He had come out of the heart of the empire, a big redheaded man in a world of little dark people, with a price on his head and a cry of treason that echoed still, months after his stroke against the emperor had failedâand none of the emperorâs hounds had been able to find him. But then, why would they trouble themselves? All they had to do was close the border.
He was trapped like a bear in a pit. They would herd him all the way down to the sea, then corner him on the sandâor they would catch him much sooner, when cold and starvation and sheer snarling frustration made him drop his guard.
Maybe he would die and cheat them of their revenge. They could do what they liked with his corpseâhe would not be using it any longer. Even soft imperials might turn savage toward the man who had reduced their emperor to impotence, disrupted their holy Dance, and come near to destroying their herd of horse mages.
His lips drew back from his teeth when he thought of those stiff-necked fools with their overweening arrogance and their worship of fat white horses. At least six of them were dead, and good riddance, too.
One of them was still alive, and that might be good, or it might be very, very bad. If he closed his eyes, he could see her face. Its lines were burned in his memory, just as he had seen her in that last, desperate meeting. Black hair in tousled curls, smooth rounded cheeks and firm chin, and eyes neither brown nor green, flecked with gold. She was bruised, filthy, staggering, with one arm hanging limpâbut she held his life in her one good hand.
She could have killed him. He would have bared his throat for the knife. He could have killed herâand by the One God, truly he should have, because she had betrayed him and broken her word and brought down his plot against her empire.
She had let him go. And he had let her live. Because of her he had failed, but also because of her, he had escaped.
That might have been no mercy. He had won through to the border, but the border was closed. The emperorâs legionaries would do her killing for her.
Twenty of them camped now between him and the river. He was not getting across tonight.