“Don’t be afraid, he told her silently, filling his eyes with the surety of all these things, the knowledge of the war to come. All of his disparate forces, the boats on the river, Tounot’s busy messengers, the small army concealed in Waterside.
Ophele would figure it out. He knew she could.”
Once upon a time, there was magic in Argence.
Stone Teeth in the hills of the Muras, chewing with mossy jaws. In the desert borderland of Ereguil, there were the callers, gu-aalu, who tempted men out into the sands, never to be seen again. In Berebet, it was the Long Man of the Marshes, with the head of a heron.
For more than eight hundred years, the Covenant of Stars has protected the Empire from its oldest terrors. And that Covenant rests upon a single sacred family: the House of Agnephus, scions of Ospret Far-Eyes, the children of the stars.
So long as they endure, the land will be spared the ravages of magic.
But what if one of those scions threatens the Covenant? Bastin Agnephus is a tyrant. A murderer. A madman who has already destroyed entire noble houses and has now imprisoned every living child of the stars within his city, including Ophele of Andelin and her unborn child.
As old alliances fracture and the Empire moves irrevocably toward war, Ophele has only one uncertain ally: her half-sister Selenne, who has far more to lose by digging up the past. Trapped within their sacred prison, Ophele and Selenne must unravel mysteries buried long before they were born if they hope to keep the Empire from destroying itself.
The secrets behind both their births. What lies beneath the Emperor’s Conspiracy. And the truth about an empire that devours its gods.
It begins with a love story.
It ends with a reckoning.
For fans of the sweeping romance of Outlander, the lush and deadly world of Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series, and the rich, character-driven storytelling of Robin Hobb. Beloved of Stars completes the first arc of the Empire of the Stars series.
