This Knight Topples Empires

Book 2: The Minor Character Chronicles

by Ry Herman

Genres: Fantasy; Humorous Fantasy; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; General Fiction; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

In this raucous, tongue-in-cheek spin on the Eastern European fairy tale “The Girl Who Pretended to Be a Boy,” a knight attempts to thwart an invasion, save the most beautiful woman in the world, and finally get away from their sisters.

“An utterly captivating adventure full of genius wordplay, laugh-out-loud shenanigans, and a meaningful, heartfelt exploration of queer identity, love, and self-discovery.”—Emily Krempholtz, USA Today bestselling author of Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore

Jules is tired of running low-stakes errands with their five magically mismatched sisters, whose skills include killing plants, inducing sneezing, and making smaller windows . . . slightly larger. Blessed with a poorly controlled ability to make flowers bloom, Jules longs for a mission where they can actually prove themself. And when the siblings stumble upon a rival kingdom’s plot to overthrow their royal family, Jules sees an opportunity.

What follows is a whirlwind of botched disguises, accidental heroics, talking animals with surprisingly strong opinions, and one very inconvenient crush on the most sought-after princess in the land. And through all this, Jules learns that happy endings are indeed possible, even if you’re not quite Prince Charming. A cozy yet epic retelling of a Romanian fairy-tale, This Knight Topples Empires proves that the greatest victories of all are love and self-acceptance.

Release date: November 3, 2026

Publisher: The Dial Press

Print pages: 352

Sample

Chapter One

The Keep Nowhere Near the Borderlands

I'd been crouched behind the log for so long that it had begun to grow a carpet of spreading pellitory. The tiny pink and white blossoms were sprouting from every fissure in the wood. Another bud opened as I watched, the petals unfurling like it was having a good stretch and yawn as it came awake. Not many flowers want to colonize a dead tree, but pellitory is an opportunistic little bastard. I've seen it pop out of cracks in a granite cliff face at my touch.

My older sister Yudit stepped up next to me just as I was about to motion her over, and the pellitory withered and died. The flowers blackened and crumpled in on themselves, the leaves and stems rotting into a mass of green-brown goo. Our powers tended to cancel each other out; she killed off my flowers before they spread out of control, and I revived everything that would otherwise have withered in her wake.

I gave her a grudging nod of thanks for reining in the plant growth, then immediately felt bad about how grudging it was. Our dependence on each other wasn't Yudit's fault. Arguably, it was mine.

In any event, Yudit didn't appear to notice a single one of the complex emotions crossing my face. Which was just as well. "Any sign of them yet, Jules?" she asked.

I shook my head. "Nothing."

The abandoned keep up the hill was a brooding lump of dark, heavy stone, topped by the wide barrel of a single tower. It stood guard over a border that was no longer there, the notional line on the map swept dozens of leagues away by the tides of war and politics. Seventy years had passed since the last time a garrison had manned the battlements.

So it wasn't especially surprising that the building was silent and empty. And had been so the entire night. No lights shone through the slim arrow-slit windows; no one approached the gates. Keeping watch on it was, perhaps, the most boring job we'd ever undertaken on behalf of the Kingdom of Tailliz.

I wasn't the only one who thought so. Yudit shifted around, nearly bouncing with impatience.

"No one's there, and no one's coming. This is a waste of time." She spat a bright green frog next to my boot. It gave a surprisingly loud croak, its throat puffing out to a grotesque rotundity. "Want to hear my latest love poem? It could use a critique."

I absolutely did not. "What, right now?"

"We've got nothing better to do. Nicki, are you in?" Yudit glanced back at the youngest of my sisters. Nicki nodded and came closer, giving an attentive-sounding sniffle. She was still feeling the effects of the pellitory, which is also known as asthma weed.

I could never decide if her allergies were somehow related to her supernatural ability to make people sneeze, or merely an ironic coincidence. Our powers had been granted by a magic fairy, and I've long suspected the fairy was out of ideas by the time she got to Nicki, then heard her sneeze and said, "Snot powers, perfect, done and done. Time for lunch."

"Roses are red," Yudit began, "unless they're white or yellow or pink. / Violets are violet, or sometimes, rather surprisingly, white. / Your ass makes me think / Of taking a bite."

"The beginning might be overdetailed," I told her.

"Accuracy is important."

"Then your roses need about ten more colors." I was, I thought, showing admirable restraint in my criticism. There'd been no end of these poems over the years. I wondered if this one was intended for the guardsman. Or the kitchen maid. Or someone entirely new. Yudit fell passionately in love every few weeks or so.

"Hm," she said. "What other colors do they come in?"

"Orange, cream, lavender, green—"

"Green? Seriously?" Yudit pondered. "I could add those later on. They'll fit in somewhere, it's got forty verses. Ready for the next thirty-nine?"

I no longer regretted how grudging my thanks had been. In a few more verses, my admirable restraint was likely to be gone as well. But I'd never figured out how to ask her to stop without turning it into a screaming argument.

Happily, just then there was a rustle from the underbrush; my other three sisters had returned from their patrol around the keep's grounds. "Quiet doon, ye three," Drusilla said as she emerged, scowling. Which was rather unfair to Nicki, who hadn't done anything louder than blow her nose. "I worked mah bahookie off tae make sure we were nae spotted hiding here, and if ye gie us away—"

"Give us away to who?" Alexandra was following just behind her. She crossed her arms and scoffed. "We should call it a night. I'm hungry."

"Of course ye are," Drusilla muttered. Unlike the rest of us, her native accent had never softened during her time away from home. I think she considered it a point of pride.

"We should maintain mission readiness at all times," Winifred said as she slipped between the trees, the last of my sisters joining the pack. "This is a clandestine assignment."

If Yudit rolled her eyes any harder, she'd do them an injury. "You're not a master spy just because you know your way around a window, Winifred."

"I'm a master spy compared to you, frog breath!"

"If I hae tae say quiet doon one mair time—"

The five of them fell to squabbling. Or rather, four of them did, with Nicki adding the occasional phlegmy cough. On the bright side, the poetry had been forgotten.

I considered trying to intercede, but there didn't seem to be much point; no one was around to overhear them, anyway. So instead, I watched in silence and waited for the quarrel to subside-a dynamic that hadn't changed much since our childhood. They could somehow argue without hurting each other's feelings too badly. I never could, so I did my best to stay out of it.

To an outside observer, it would have looked like a single person yelling at a set of mirrors. All of my sisters were the exact same height and shared curls of the same bright red color. As well as freckled cheeks and eyes the pale blue of asters. I could spot the subtle differences beyond that, but someone less familiar with the family might be hard-pressed to do so. The only odd one out was me, solely because I still kept my hair cropped short while my sisters were letting theirs grow out.

The six of us served in the corps of magical knights that protected the Kingdom of Tailliz. We were sworn to the queen and had pledged to use our fairy-gifted powers in the service of our adopted homeland. Yudit, who withered plants and spat frogs and toads. Drusilla, who covered tracks so well that neither birds nor beasts were able to follow them. Alexandra, who could eat anything. Nicki, who had the ability to make anyone sneeze. Winifred, who was able to turn small windows into somewhat larger windows. And me, who made flowers spring up wherever I walked. Along with one other ability I very seldom used. Since it hurt. A lot.

It might be obvious that we were, shall we say, very much the second stringers in the corps of magical knights. We could not freeze an army to death in their tracks or toss them into the sky with a breath of gale-force wind. But the mightiest knights were all off doing other, more important tasks, leaving us with the less-than-spectacular job of keeping watch over a disused tower on the basis of a dubious tip.

I took a final glance at the keep as the argument, having achieved nothing in particular, wound its way to a conclusion. We'd be leaving soon enough. It was only an hour or so before dawn. We'd been waiting there all night long and were thoroughly exhausted.

"If we're all agreed that nothing's happening," Yudit was saying behind me, "then I'm going to—"

"I see something," I hissed, cutting her off. "Up there."

Without another word, the rest of them came to my side, six heads of red hair lined up in a row behind the log. Above us, a few figures on horseback had crested the hill.

I peered up at them. All I could make out were shadowy blurs.

"Does anyone recognize who they are?" Winifred whispered.

Alexandra squinted. "No."

"It's too dark," Yudit said. "I can't see their faces." Her eyes slid toward Drusilla. "You're sure they won't notice us?"

"I ken what I'm doing," Drusilla answered crossly. She'd picked the spot we were hiding in. The hollow at the base of the hill was screened by dense, close-set trees, and the moonlight cast the tower's shadow over it, obscuring us in deeper darkness. Drusilla's powers had erased any evidence of our arrival.

The silhouetted figures above us tethered their horses by the gate. If they were speaking to each other, we were too far away to hear what they said. At least that meant they probably couldn't hear us, either. As long as we didn't go back to yelling at each other.

"We need to get closer," I said. "Once they've gone inside, we should—"

The frog that Yudit had spat out released a ribbit as loud as a foghorn. The people up the hill went still.

I tensed, my fingers going white on the log. Surely they wouldn't make anything of it. A frog in the forest. Nothing so odd as to seem suspicious.

Was one of them turning in our direction?

Nicki frowned in concentration, and the horse behind the turning figure let fly an enormous sneeze.

As snot-based distractions go, a horse's nose can discharge a truly massive amount. The sneeze victim's companions stirred into motion like disturbed bees, brushing at his clothes until he pushed them off. After a moment, they opened the keep's great doors and went through, vanishing from our sight.