Iron Blood: The Siege of Azari

They did not come to destroy Azari. They came to make it forget it was ever free.The last free kingdom has never knelt. For three hundred years its walls have held, its Iron Core has hummed beneath the plaza, and its warriors have turned refusal into an art. But the Syndicate has finished waiting. Two hundred and forty ships now hold beyond the ridge, under a single order: Total Suppression. They are sending everything.Kamau is three days a king and already drowning. To save his city he must become a war-king, not a wall-king - and his elders are demanding he take a queen and give a dimming people a future to believe in. The queen Azari expects is Njeri, captain of the Ironsong Guard, who has stood at his side for eleven years and loved him in silence for every one of them. But Kamau's heart has turned toward a stranger from the refugee columns - a woman with trained hands and an accent from nowhere, who is not what she seems.Her name is Wanjiru, and she was sent to map this city's death.Born in Azari and stolen as a child, raised by the Syndicate to feel nothing, Wanjiru came to betray the only home her body still remembers. But the city's stubborn goodness is undoing six years of conditioning one dying stranger at a time - and the enemy commander who made her, a man called Oti, is himself a child of Azari who chose the other road, and who is climbing toward the plaza to end the city he cannot admit he still loves.As the siege tightens and the Core begins to dim - burning the memory of every fallen kingdom to hold the wall one more night - three people who began on opposite sides of a war are drawn into a secret that could break Azari from within at the worst possible hour.Some kingdoms fall. This one remembers. And memory, it turns out, is the one thing an empire can never conquer.The Siege of Azari is Book Two of the Iron Blood: The Azari Saga - an Afrofuturist epic of sovereignty, sacrifice, and the children of the taken, inspired by the real African kingdoms that refused to be conquered.

Pagina's: 136, Paperback, Independently published