author : Victoria Goddard

A impulsive action can start a war.
A timely word can end one.
One gesture of friendship can change history.

Cliopher Mdang knows all about consequences. He is the Secretary in Chief of the Offices of the Lords of State: the official head of the Imperial Bureaucratic Service of Zunidh, unofficial head of the government. He spends his days dealing with all the manifold results of enormously complicated systems.

He is also the personal secretary to his Radiancy Artorin Damara, Last Emperor of Astandalas, Lord of Zunidh: the Sun-on-Earth, the Lord of Rising Stars, worshipped as a god.

Cliopher has never touched his lord, never called him by name, never initiated a conversation. He would never say aloud that he loves him, but it is for his lord, and not his own power or prestige, that he has spent his life far from home and the family who have never quite forgiven him for leaving.

It is blasphemy to suggest that the Sun-on-Earth might need something as ordinary and human as a break. But one day Cliopher turns to his lord and invites him on a holiday to his homeland, the tropical paradise of the Vangavaye-ve, which is as far from the court as it is possible to be. It is a place where pretension is soundly discouraged and pretences are undone, and where the divine is never very far from the human.

It has been three years since he woke from a magical coma caused by the collapse of his empire, and he can barely acknowledge his own existence, let alone articulate what he needs from someone else.

Enter Cliopher sayo Mdang, Fifth Degree Secretary of the Imperial Bureaucratic Service, and to everyone’s surprise the apocalypse … ends.

Until the Emperor woke up. At which point Conju wondered whether he might conceivably want to consider the other options. Even if cataloguing storerooms is a bit of a pain when you don't actually know what anything is. Sadly, neither perfumery nor fashion are particularly useful skills after a magical apocalypse. Unless you can finesse your way into attending said Emperor, that is…

“Someone always leaves,” Tovo reminds them. “Kip will return when it’s time.”

He wonders, though. He wonders if his errant grand-nephew was really as bright and as promising as they all thought he was. He wonders if Kip has forgotten the Lays, forgotten what it means to be an Islander, forgotten everything that Tovo taught him.

Of course, the simplest solution to Tovo’s doubts is to go and see for himself.

Someone always leaves, after all, even to the other side of the world.

(Surely he used to have hobbies besides running the government?)

All he has to do is wait patiently for his lord’s return… until adventure quite literally hits him from behind, and what was once safely hypothetical becomes intensely real.

Cliopher has always followed the stars of his chosen course: the epic oral histories of his people, the poetry of the rebel poet Fitzroy Angursell, decades of devotion and service to his Radiancy…

They were enough to change the world. But are they enough to guide Cliopher home?

He is possibly the last person you would expect to find breaking into the tomb of the first Emperor of Astandalas. He could, after all, have entered it legitimately.

But Artorin Damara has a great secret, which he has kept hidden since before he ascended to the throne, and part of it is that he knows perfectly well how to set about on an adventure.

Another part of it is that his true name is not actually the one that everyone knows him by…

Pali Avramapul may not have gone under her own name since the dissolution of the Red Company, but she is no myth, and has certainly not faded. She fights folly and injustice as fiercely as ever—although, as a respected scholar of history at one of the Circle Schools of Alinor, she now tends to use her tongue and pent more than her sword.

She still keeps the sword sharp, of course. You never know when adventure will come calling.

She expects her sabbatical to be a decorous, respectable sort of adventure, the kind with which she can regale her colleagues in the Senior Common Room upon her return.

She’s not very upset when she finds one or two of her old friends and it turns out the adventure is much more likely to involve a plot to kidnap the Last Emperor of Astandalas.

There’s respectable, after all, and then there’s respectable…

Friends by chance—or is it fate?

Damian Raske and Jullanar Thistlethwaite are about as different as can be. Damian is a young swordsman, dreaming of being the best in the world, hardly aware of what lies beyond the outskirts of his city, let alone that there is a great empire on the other side of the horizon.

Jullanar is a gently-raised young woman from deep inside the Empire of Astandalas, aware that there are worlds beyond its sway but hardly daring to dream she’d ever see outside of her own country, let alone beyond the empire’s borders.

And yet they both dream of friendship, of adventure, of what else there might be. And it’s Jullanar whose exam results turn out to matter in a way no one could expect.

The first book of The Red Company, because even the greatest of folk heroes have to start somewhere.