Return to the Five Queendoms in the sequel to Scorpica , a sweeping epic fantasy that Rebecca Roanhorse called “ambitious and engaging,” in which a centuries-long peace is shattered in a matriarchal society when a decade passes without a single girl being born. The Drought of Girls has ended, but the rift it broke open between the Queendoms is not so easily healed. Political tensions roil the senate of Paxim, where Queen Heliane vows to make her son Paulus the nation’s first ruling King or die trying. Scorpican troops amass on the border of Arca, ready to attack. And within Arca itself, its young, unready queen finds her court a nest of vipers and her dreams besieged by a mysterious figure with unknown intentions. As iron and magic clash on the battlefield and powerful women scheme behind the scenes, danger and violence abound. Can anyone stop the chaos from ripping the Queendoms apart? G.R. Macallister, author of the Five Queendoms series, beginning with Scorpica , and also writes bestselling historical fiction under the name Greer Macallister. Her novels have been optioned for film and television. A regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and the Chicago Review of Books , she lives with her family in Washington, DC. Chapter 1: The Senator CHAPTER 1 THE SENATOR The fourth day of the fourth month of the All-Mother’s Year 502 Ursu, capital of Paxim Stellari There was nothing Stellari of Calladocia could not imagine, and once she had imagined something, achieving it was just a matter of time. Politically, this nimble imagination was her greatest gift. From a single choice, Stellari could visualize dozens, even hundreds, of possible consequences, all of which she held arrayed in her mind’s eye like the stars. Then she’d choose. If she wanted a law passed, she’d quickly puzzle out who was most likely to support it, then unspool a complex chain of favors wherein she’d persuade three or four fellow senators, no more than five, who would go on to persuade all the rest for her. She never planted a seed without envisioning the eventual tree. Her imagination hadn’t served her nearly as well outside the Senate, she supposed. Potential friends quickly tired of hearing her test out unending scenarios, breathlessly recount her victories, torture herself over the rare losses. Lovers bristled at being treated like tally marks. But for Stellari, the difference between the personal and the political grew more faint until it vanished entirely. Let strangers stay strangers, let lovers turn their backs and go. She was extremely happy with what her imagination had done for her, all told. She was, after all, the unlikeliest of senators. First off, she was not a landholder, or at least she hadn’t been. She’d come up through the Assembly. All the best families of Paxim were represented in the Senate, their wisest and strongest women handing down laws from the comfort of the capital. It had been that way as long as there had been a Paxim. The Assembly was a newer experiment, two centuries old, including members of the poorer classes. Stellari had made a name for herself initially as the Assembly’s representative from Calladocia, a remote southwestern district, a position she’d gotten mostly because no one else wanted it. But that put her on the pathway to power. When Calladocia’s most important landholders fell on hard times, their female line dying out and the senatorship under threat of dissolution, the head of their household summoned Assemblywoman Stellari. The matron Panagiota offered Stellari the chance to marry her last remaining son, lay claim to their family lands, and take on the vacant senatorship. Immediately seeing the ways in which it would put greater strength in her hands, Stellari had readily agreed. She’d met Evander of Calladocia twice and he’d seemed perfectly lovely, if a bit timid. At their second meeting, the marriage contracts were signed. There-after, Evander remained at home in their district, leaving Stellari free to live as she chose in the capital. And Stellari’s climb had not stopped there. In only a few short years in the Senate, she’d already ascended to the role of magistrate. She was not yet even thirty years old. Gossips whispered that she seemed likely, if Decima stepped down, to rise to the position of consul. Once Stellari overheard a fellow senator call her consulship inevitable . She liked that whisper best of all. But today Stellari was just another citizen of Paxim, kept in the dark. She hated the dark. All her cleverness and vision couldn’t get her the one bit of knowledge she most needed: Would the widowed queen’s coming child, almost certainly her last, be a girl or a boy? Stellari had already determined what action to take in either case, but the wait was interminable. She was better off than most, knowing what only a handful of high-ranking officials now knew: the queen’s labor had begun. The rest of the truth would come when the child did. The augury had bee