The Last Mercy

For thirty years the realm sang the name of Eira Brennick—Brennick of the clean mercy, the dragon-knight who never once let one of the great wyrms suffer. They hung bog-myrtle on her bridle and drank her legend in with their mothers' milk. They never asked what it cost her to put the last of them in the ground.

Now she is forty-seven and forgotten. Broke, half-lamed, drinking out her days in an upland village where the young no longer know her face and the old wish she would finish dying somewhere they cannot watch over a garden wall. So when a purse she cannot refuse is nailed to the ale-house post—forty marks to slay the Beast of Brae Fell—she takes up the oiled canvas she hasn't opened in years and goes the only way she knows: with cold steel and an old, practiced heart.

But the beast is no monster. It is a wounded, half-starved fledgling, the last living wyrm, fleeing a poison welling up from beneath the mountains—an ancient ruin that only a dragon's fire was ever meant to mend. To kill it would doom the land. To save it, the woman who slew its whole kind must cross the grieving length of the realm, hunted by the men who need the old glory kept bright and the older, uglier truth buried in ash.

The Last Mercy is a fantasy of hard roads and harder reckonings, told in prose as spare and weathered as the moors it walks. Here is a heroine worn down to bone and grief, a debt that can only be paid in fire, and a question that will not let her rest: whether the courage to end a life was ever the same as the courage to spare one.

Some songs remember you both ways. Some debts outlast the fame that made them.

Begin the journey down the Dragon-Roads today.