THE LEOPARD'S BLOODY VEIL: FORGING OF VELDTSMAN - BOOK ONE

He was born at midnight in a storm, his mother dying as she marked him. The gift she left shows him what is coming. It cannot save him from the men who mean to cut it out of him.The high Winterberg, 1861. A smith's son grows up with a leopard's scars raked across his chest, a blade of his own making at his hip, and a Sight he never asked to carry. By the 1880s the Empire's reach is closing on his family's ground, and Baltazar Malan takes the open country: the diamond fields of Kimberley, the salt pans and the red Karoo, a San tracker at his side and a hunter on his trail.The man who follows wears a dead officer's name and means to keep his stolen life at any price. And somewhere on that same long road rides Elena Devereux - who crossed an ocean to escape a marriage she refused, carrying a wildfire in her blood that no man has yet learned to read. When their paths collide, neither the hunter nor the hunted is ready for what she truly is.What Balt was given, he never asked for. What the land demands, it takes from everyone.The Forging of the Veldtsman opens The Leopard's Bloody Veil - a sweeping three-book saga of love, blood, and covenant on the nineteenth-century African frontier, and the first chronicle of the Malan bloodline and the country that made it.For readers of Wilbur Smith and Bryce Courtenay.