The Claw and the Crowned

Book : The Book of All Things

by Sarah M. Cradit

Genres: Epic Fantasy; Sword & Sorcery; Fantasy Romance; Enemies to Lovers

Synopsis

Freedom is her desire. Vengeance is his price.

Slip into this scintillating tale of a young royal whose loyalty is torn between the prince she was sold to and the tempestuous knight determined to ruin her.

Imryll is unfit to be a princess. Everyone has always told her so. So when the king stuns everyone by crowning her the prince’s consort, her life is completely upended, crushing any lingering dreams of a future away from the suffocating Rhiagain court.

Still reeling from the news, she meets Drazhan, the formidable, mercurial knight who wins the right to be her personal guard. But when he defiantly refuses any show of respect, a dangerous spark ignites between them, one she doesn’t know how to extinguish. Worse, she’s not sure she wants to.

The dark knight’s licentious midnight whispers linger over her, commands she feels inexplicably called to obey. His dangerous promises spread their tendrils over her desperate, failed attempts to embrace life with the prince, her childhood best friend. They take her apart and put her back together, piece by agonizing piece.

Yet she can’t shake the sense Drazhan is hiding something important. He refuses to explain why he surrendered a life of privilege to become her guard. The roaring vengeance burning in his heart, scorching him from the inside out, is a painful mystery Imryll can’t solve.

But she will.

Because Drazhan’s revenge doesn’t just start with Imryll.

It ends with her.

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The Book of All Things is a series of standalone fantasy romance tales set in the vibrant, epic world first introduced by USA Today Bestselling Author Sarah M. Cradit in the Kingdom of the White Sea trilogy.

The Claw and the Crownedis the first story in the Sceptre Cycle of The Book of All Things.

The Sceptre Cycle:
Stolen thrones, love triangles, arranged marriages, and fractured duty from the descendants of Ilynglass (high heat)
The Claw and the Crowned
The Duke and the Disciple

 

Read more

Release date: January 3, 2023

Publisher: Storyville Press

Print pages: 550

Sample

Chapter 1

Imryll hastily stuffed the contraband vellum into her leather satchel when Torian came striding her way down the rocky path from the courtyard. When his bright eyes stopped drinking in her face, they went straight to the bag.

Not quick enough then.

Torian wouldn’t punish her for writing. But she couldn’t afford to be careless, even with him. He was terrible with a secret, because he wore his thoughts in the very last place a future king should: on the outside.

But then, he hadn’t spent his life mastering the subtleties of the precarious world around him like Imryll of Glaisgain had.

“Writing your memoirs?” he asked, with the lopsided smile he reserved just for her.

“They’re not memoirs,” Imryll said, biting back annoyance he didn’t deserve. Even the question recalled the way others turned their nose up at her desire to be educated. Women should be lucky they’re even taught their letters at all, with how much work we have ahead of us if we’re going to rebuild our bloodlines.

Woman or not, unsanctioned writing of any kind was forbidden on Duncarrow. If anyone found out Duke Rahn had slipped her the vellum and ink in secret, his punishment would be more than she could live with.

“You’re really not going to tell me, Ryl?” he asked as he chose the rock next to hers, his knee about an inch too close to be mistaken as innocuous. She almost slid onto another rock, but she didn’t care about impropriety. Quite the opposite. She welcomed the reputation that accompanied such a discovery if it kept her name out of the mouths of those desperately planning and plotting the unions within Duncarrow. A dozen marriages by wintertide was the rumor, a rush to ensure future generations were not as decimated as the present ones.

“No,” Imryll said without elaborating. She closed her eyes and tilted her face back to invite a fine mist of sea spray from the crashing tide. It ran into her eyes and down the sides of her face, the brine scorching the inside of her nose. Her dress was already half-soaked, but she liked it that way, clinging to her warm flesh, reminding her of the cage she still lived in... would always live in if she couldn’t find the courage to leave. All she had to do was slip onto one of the weekly provision ships that traveled to and from the mainland, but even thinking about it was a dauntless prospect.

She wondered if the White Sea was anything like the sea of her parents’ world—the one everyone refused to talk about because Torian’s father had forbidden mention of Ilynglass.

Imryll felt his gaze traveling her exposed neck.

“Are you embarrassed to show me?” he asked. A wounded lilt touched the end of his words. “You think I’d tease you?”

The insinuation forced Imryll to pitch forward. She rolled her elbows back to her knees and aimed an irritated look at him. You sit like a common-born, she heard in her mother’s voice. “Really? All these years we’ve been friends and you think I’m embarrassed about my passions?” She pulled back. “Others might think less of me for them, but I don’t think less of myself.”

Torian sputtered an answer that made him shake his head before finishing. He breathed in with a quick flutter of his eyes, as he often did when preparing to weather her capricious moods. “There must be a reason then.”

There wasn’t. Not one he wouldn’t harp on anyway, with his enduring need for reasoning in all things. It wasn’t as if he’d glean the underlying truth. There was no risk of Torian leaning on magic to explain facts, despite that he’d been raised in the shadows of four formidable sorcerers.

Imryll didn’t need a reason not to show him her writing though. The words were her own, and she could say that about very little in her life. The “memories” prompting the words were not, but since she didn’t know why the visions of the Sceptre of Ilynglass—of the world they were forbidden from speaking of—were given to her, or where they’d come from, she hesitated to name them anything but dreams. Waking dreams that began and ended on their own schedule.

Whatever they were, no one could ever know.

Not even him.

“You used to tell me everything.” Torian lifted his chin and turned his eyes toward the sea.

“When we were children, you mean.”

“We’re closer to those days than the ones where we have children of our own.”

Imryll judged him from her peripheral. It took so little to shift his fair mood into a full-on sulk. He was a man now, not a boy. Nothing underscored that more than the responsibility awaiting him.

“I shouldn’t even be out here with you,” Imryll muttered. She picked at the fabric of her gown, soaked from sitting upon the wet rocks of Duncarrow in the cold season. Midwinter, the people of the kingdom called it. She didn’t know if her own people had another word for it. Maybe it would come to her in one of her visions. “You’ll be bound soon. Your chosen will have no tolerance for your female friendships, of that you can be certain. I’d like to not add angering our future queen to my grievously long list of sins.”

“Chosens.” Torian corrected her with a twitch of his nose. “And I don’t care what they think, Ryl. Everything else in my life has been decided for me. I won’t let others pick my friends. I’ll already be giving up enough. I won’t give that away too.”

They understood one another on the topic of unwelcome duty, but she resented that he could never grasp how different it was for her as a woman. “The king will select only the finest young women for his son.” And the man has made it clear it will not be me.

He sighed. “I’m already dreaming up ways to escape them.”

“When you’re bound, you’ll have too many eyes on you for that, Tor.” Imryll couldn’t help but snicker. “Though I suspect 

you’ll be too exhausted to care.”

Torian flushed at the insinuation. She wondered, not for the first time, how he was going to satisfy five concubines when he couldn’t even speak of sex without looking scandalized.

Imryll though... Imryll couldn’t wait to take lovers. Not on Duncarrow, of course. She’d always be a veritable hostage on the joyless, rocky isle, but when she left... Ahh, when she finally found a way to flee the damp, cursed place, she’d be a woman of her own means. With independence and confidence and power. They would whisper across the kingdom about the one who had chosen her own fate.

Soon.

“My father is announcing my chosen five to his minor council right now. He wanted me to be there, but I couldn’t bear to hear my future discussed in that way. To hear the future of five young women spoken of as if they were property to be sold. Young women who were once my friends and playmates.” Torian pulled his knees to his chest. He seemed so young compared to how Imryll felt, though he was a year older than her and being groomed to be king. “And do you know, sometimes...” He shook his head, with a heavy glance pointed at the sea. “Never mind.”

It was evident Torian wanted her to push, but she asked the question from her own curiosity. “Do I know what?”

Torian lowered his face to his knees and turned it toward her. His dark-red hair had grown a touch too long, and it fell over his eyes, dipping against the freckles on his golden-brown skin that became a dense forest on his cheeks.

Imryll’s heart lurched in her chest unexpectedly.

She loved him too.

But not enough to stay.

And soon, it wouldn’t matter.

“Sometimes,” he said through a weighty exhale, “I wish I was already king, so I could make my own choices.”

Imryll forced a laugh to quell her uneasiness. “You think the choices the king makes are always easy?”

“No, Ryl, I don’t. But I could be content with it if I could make the one choice that matters to me.”

“And what’s that?”

Torian unwound one of his hands and trailed it across the rocks to her. She eyed it with suspicious reluctance but a glance up, into his solemn gaze, had her sliding her fingers to meet his.

“So I could choose you.”

Imryll withdrew her hand with a wounded gasp. Why his words had stung her was as much a mystery as why he’d said them at all. Lamenting was the business of fools. There could be no gain, no joy in speaking life into impossible potential.

She loaded a sound scolding but didn’t get the chance to unleash it on him.

Torian twisted his other hand behind her head, into her hair, and pulled her in for a kiss that stole her breath. He tightened his grip in her thick curls and kissed her the way she’d seen her brother kiss his wife, with fire and tongue and a moan that stirred something familiar and forbidden under her dress.

He lifted his other hand away from hers, and his fingers brushed across the curve of her bare ankle. A chill shuddered through her and settled between her shoulders.

She’d never kissed a man before, but a real kiss was less fluid, more messy and inelegant than the ones she’d received in her dreams. She was too distracted by the uneven strokes of a tongue that didn’t seem to know what it was doing to decide whether she were enjoying herself.

When Imryll didn’t object, he slid his hand higher, and she allowed that as well, curious how far he would go... wondering if

he had the courage to see through what he’d started.

If she did.

His kisses lessened when his palm cupped the inside of her thigh, dangerously close to her undergarment. Imryll could feel the debate raging within him.

“Light of Enivera, you are going to get us all expelled from Duncarrow!”

Imryll snapped her eyes and mouth closed, dragging her teeth over her bottom lip. Her forehead lingered against Torian’s for a final moment before she gathered the grit to face her mother.

“Duchess Melantha.” Torian cleared his throat. He dropped his hands to his groin, folding them there as though what he attempted to hide wasn’t already apparent.

“Mother... Duchess.” Imryll pushed to her feet and brushed the sea spray from her dress. She pursed her mouth into a tight line. “I—”

“Your Grace,” her mother said with a heavy bow, cutting Imryll off. “You’ll forgive my daughter for her lack of good sense. She’s always been a most exasperating girl, as you are well aware. Her indelicacy stems from her lack of fear of punishment and an unattractive candor she did not inherit from me, of that I am certain.”

Torian shot a helpless glance at Imryll, who shrugged. She’d heard her mother’s speech a thousand times. It no longer affected her.

“Duchess, it was I who acted untoward and should apologize,” Torian said, sounding like a proper prince and not the dreamy-eyed boy who’d almost convinced Imryll that giving away her maidenhood on the wet, jagged rocks wasn’t a half-bad idea. “I forgot myself for a moment, and it will not happen again.”

“To the contrary, Your Grace,” Melantha said with a roguish grin. Imryll caught the twinkle in her mother’s eye and held her breath. It never led anywhere good. “You should kiss my daughter, and often. Just not today.”

“Pardon?” Torian’s head cocked like he hadn’t heard her, though the rattled look on his face made it clear he had.

Melantha turned her gaze back on Imryll with a heavy, satisfied sigh. “Darling. Your dreams are about to come to life, in spite of your ill manners.”

“You’re sending me to the mainland to help build the reliquary?” Imryll quipped, knowing very well it wasn’t what her mother meant, and that whatever she was about to say would be the opposite of anything Imryll wanted.

“The king has just concluded with his minor council. He’s made his formal decree on the matter of the prince’s future queens,” Melantha replied, clutching her hands to her chest in anticipation of delight. “And my darling Imryll has been selected for the astonishing honor of being First Chosen to Prince Torian!”

Imryll took a heavy step back and lost her footing on the rocks. Torian reacted quickly, diving forward to catch her before she fell.

“But I’m not... no. No.” Imryll shook Torian off with a flurry of swats. It wasn’t right. She was supposed to leave Duncarrow. She wasn’t fit to be queen. Her mother had said so, the queen had said so, everyone had said so, enough times that Imryll had turned it into a deep-rooted personal belief.

Torian’s searching gaze burned her from the side.

“Darling?” Melantha asked.

Imryll flexed her hands, which had gone numb in the intervening moments between her mother’s terrible declaration and Imryll finding her voice. “No, that cannot... That cannot be, Mother, because the king himself already said I was unsuitable, that I was precocious and stubborn and willful and—”

“You are all those things, yes,” Melantha said with a disappointed breath out. “But in addition, you will also be Prince Torian’s First Chosen. His First Chosen, darling! Which means that one day, you will also be—”

Caged. Tethered. Yoked. Defeated.

“Queen,” Imryll whispered right before she passed out.

 

 

Drazhan massaged his ancestral blade over the whetstone, indulging his desire for mindless utility. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, necessary. Stormbringer had not dulled since the last sharpening. Stormbringer hadn’t dulled at all in the ten years it had belonged to him.

But there was naught else to do on the wretched ship, and it was preferable to needless conversation.

The other four knights watched him in the dim light of the cargo hold, each wearing looks that gave away more about themselves than they should ever allow another man to see. Judgment.

Envy. Curiosity. Pity. If Drazhan had worn his own emotions so clearly and brazenly, he’d never have been selected for the “privilege” of competing for the Queens’ Guard.

No, he’d be rotting in a cell somewhere.

“Aye,” the one who called himself Kav said. He’d been narrowing his eyes for hours, even through the hard rise and fall of the choppy swells, watching Drazhan work. Judgment. “I ken it’s sharp enough.”

“Sharp as his mother’s slit,” came the slithery one, Waters. Envy. Tarsten Waters’s awkward, desolate laugh died when no one joined in—not even Kav, who pretended to be enthralled by the water coursing through the boarded slats above as the storm knocked the ship about. “One would think you were going to Duncarrow to take a bloody life, not protect one.”

Waters being right didn’t make him perceptive. Most guesses paid off with time and luck.

“Thing’ll break, he keeps havin’ a go at it like that,” Kav said.

Waters didn’t resist the setup for another tasteless jest. “What do you know, just like his mother.”

That pulled a laugh from Kav, and the two passed more barbs, each less clever than the last. They eyed Drazhan in dark distrust, the man who would let others speak of his mother like that without drawing steel or raising fists.

Drazhan put no stock in the opinions of men who couldn’t hold their tongue long enough to listen, to read a situation.

The other two knights wisely kept their counsel, quietly observing from the shadows. Farradyn Blackfen was a Rush Rider from the Westerlands, a longbowman. Curiosity, his eyes indicated when they met Drazhan’s.

The other was a Southerland lad like Kav, but more solemn, focused. Pity rolled across Owen Strong’s stern face when he eyed Drazhan’s isolation. He had a broadsword, a left-hander, but also a mace for his right. Drazhan had watched him wield both in training, roaring like a mythical beast as he slammed the hilt of both weapons against his chest. Strong was one of the few he’d noted to keep an eye on.

Waters and Kav eventually grew tired of hearing themselves speak and returned to their silence.

Drazhan hardly noticed because the alternating high and low keen of the metallic ringing pacified him. He’d trained himself out of a requirement for sleep, but in its place, Drazhan medi

tated. That he could do while sharpening his sword. While practicing with it. While running a man through with it.

But it was with his fist weapons—his claws—when Drazhan was most in his element.

None of the other knights had seen the skill in action.

They would.

“Heard they all have red hair. All of ’em, not just the Rhiagains,” Waters was saying. “I don’t know where they washed up from, but sounds like a dream to me. Ever fuck a redhead, Kav?”

I haven’t, thought Drazhan. But I will. I don’t care about the others, but the prince’s First Chosen, his queen, is mine.

“Aye, aye,” Kav said, a little too insistent. It was unclear whether he was answering the question or acknowledging the potential. “Imagine there’ll be some for us?”

“If you think King Carrow will allow his knights anywhere near those pert little highborn maidens, you’re deluded. The only lass you’ll be spending time with is the one you’re guarding, and you touch her? You’re as dead as all those Rhiagains at the bottom of the White Sea.”

“We’re highborns too.”

Waters snorted. “Not like they are. My father says they’re looking for husbands from all over the kingdom. Husbands, not hardheads who swing their cocks like they swing their swords.”

“Aye, speak for yourself. I know my letters.”

“All two of them?”

Drazhan blinked to clear the men from his thoughts. They talked too much. Men who talked too much were a danger to themselves.

He reached down for a sip from his wineskin, his first in hours. When his eyes swept back up, they caught the gaze of Blackfen. The longbowman nodded once. Drazhan almost returned it but decided not to.

These men were not his friends.

They might be his enemies.

But only time would tell if any of them had the courage to stand against Drazhan when he went to collect the heads of King Carrow and his last surviving heir.